The Emergence That Didn’t Emerge when Atlas Shrugged (or, If Atlas Shrugged, his job would get outsourced.)

Since people tend to think in labels, most of them are surprised that I, being labeled a liberal (meaning I put caring about others at a high priority) have read and enjoyed books by Ayn Rand, herself being labeled conservative (meaning she puts caring about oneself at a high priority.) This fact often makes my fellow labeled-liberals gag.

Yes, I've read and enjoyed Ms. Rand's books, including Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead. I think I may have even tried her book The Virtue of Selfishness, but I bailed before completion. Call me virtuous.

For those who don't know squat about Ayn Rand, she's the patron saint of free market, zero taxes, individualist philosophy. When I say she's the patron saint, I mean that in its fullest sense. She's just as extreme and just as wrong in many of her assessments of the world as the people that worship her.

There is some intelligence in her endless warnings against too much forced behavior on behalf of society. I know giving her one sliver of credit will make some of my fellow liberals have a stroke, but I've always felt it best to extract wisdom wherever you can.

As an example, her book The Fountainhead is moving to any struggling artist. It's about an architect who is visionary and uncompromising. As a result, he is blacklisted, having to fight his way into the profession with heroic determination. Leaving aside Rand's inaccurate formula that "the masses" are always wrong and the individual always right, I enjoyed this book as simply an underdog story. It's inspiring for an author in search of an agent with the vision to release the genius of his blockbuster novel. That author would be me, by the way, in case that analogy blew past ya.

So that's my analysis of Ayn Rand: as an artistic philosophy, somewhat inspiring. As a social-political-economic philosophy, I'm unmoved.

The Ayn Rand novel I want to talk about most is Atlas Shrugged because I think its misguided views are backing a lot of modern opinion. In the book, the richest, most powerful men in the world have had enough of being taxed so they shut down their companies and thereby shut down the world. The whole planet plunges into chaos until the titans return.

This explains the title. It's a spin on the myth. Atlas gets sick of carrying around the world, of people freeloading off his effort. So he dumps the planet and everyone suffers.

The plot is laughable. Why? Because what would happen today if a worker walked off the job and said "I'm not working for you anymore?" The instant this earth-bound Atlas mentioned he might "shrug," he'd be notified that his services were no longer required and he was being replaced (for one-tenth the price) by a desperate immigrant escaping some war-torn country.

Of course, if the exiting person was a CEO he would probably reap a huge bonus on his way out, but ultimately the world wouldn't stop, it wouldn't even blink.

In short, if Atlas shrugged, his job would get outsourced. He'd be lucky if he could find even an asteroid to carry around afterwards.

Well what if an Atlas-like CEO actually owned the company and decided to take it elsewhere? Sure that would damage a lot of people's financial lives, but that illustrates that the existence of all-powerful individuals makes the world unsafe for other individuals. Ultimately, people have no choice but to band together (via society, or unions, or taxes) to prevent simply living at the whim of the wealthy (reference the at-will employee.)

I never really gave much thought to the magnitude of Ms. Rand's wrongness until I was working at a place that desperately needed a union, which I voted for, and which was enacted. We could all have been the fiercest individuals in the world, but the very existence of those who control everything would have stopped us from pursuing our own individual goals. An individual cannot possibly make a reasonable request against a company that is treating them unfairly.

I'm tempted to call Ms. Rand naïve, but I will refrain because she does not have the benefit (as we do) of several decades of watching her ideas being applied.

The root of the error in Ms. Rand's worldview and its modern descendants is that they rely on a miracle of emergence. The core belief is that by encouraging everyone to grab everything they can with no regard for anyone else, somehow the world will become the best possible place for everyone. It's like the dying (dead?) idea of "trickle-down" economics: give to the rich as much as you possibly can and then somehow, this will result in more money for the poor.

The real tragedy of Ayn Rand is that she doesn't seem to notice that by pursuing a world where the rich are in full control and don't owe the society that enabled them to prosper a darn thing, an individual's rights end up stifled. By advocating boundless individualism, she denies opportunity to other individuals who may be born to poorer families.

So there is an emergent result from her philosophy, just not the kind she wanted.

Okay, this is all getting complex and grey, and that's where Ayn Rand's extreme philosophy (where any extreme philosophy) breaks down: when it leaves the realm of contrived fiction and enters the real world.

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Larry Nocella's novel Where Did This Come From? is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and Kindle eBook. It is also available for other eBook readers. For more info, visit LarryNocella.com.