Atlas Shrugged: The Ultimate Fantasy of the Pathological Feminine

continued from How Woke is John Galt?

This wasn't the review I was planning to write about Atlas Shrugged. I was expecting to write a more nuanced headline for the post. But I have never in my life hated a book more than this. I'm writing this whole thing below as quickly as possible so I can move on from thinking about it.

Funny but for two-thirds of the book---the first 650 pages---I actually enjoyed it. I understood why people liked it. I thought it was a good yarn, albeit a bit raunchy in the way only a woman could dare to write (there's way more sex in the story than I anticipated). 

But I wanted to see where it was going. I particularly enjoyed the detective story of tracking down the fate of the automobile company in Wisconsin. There was legitimate suspense and good build up in those phases of the story.

Things started to go horribly wrong at the two-third mark when the main character---the female heroine Dagny Taggart---finds herself in the Atlantis-like terrestrial paradise in the Colorado mountains, and also meets the main hero character. At that point I felt horribly let down by what was supposed to be a utopia. It felt wrong. The story started to fall apart. I found myself repulsed and bored by the things I was supposed to like. I started to dislike the characters. 

Things got worse from there. I began to stop caring about the characters all together. They were never fleshed out enough for me to care. I stopped being on their side. But even with a hundred pages left, I kept thinking, "Wow, this could have been a great book, with a few changes in the story, and if it were edited down by at least a half." If you've ever tried to read Stephen King's own versions of his stories, which are filled in scatological madness and child pornography, you know the value of a good editor. No way would he have become famous if he had been left to his own devices.  But one can see that Rand was a no-compromise author, and boy does it show.

In the last three chapters I just gave up entirely on the main characters, and just plugged along to finish the book. I had come to hate it. The story had degenerated into triteness and garbage. Rand's skill as a storyteller failed her completely in her desire to emphasize her philosophic points.

At the climax of the story the main character---the most heroic and virtuous man who ever lived---gives a long-winded speech on the radio that supposedly grips the entire nation. It was fifty pages of some of the worst, most boringly rambling prose ever, as the character hectored the nation, insisting that he was the first man in the history of the world ever to discover the secret of life.

In the last two chapters the story fails entirely. The plot is all wrong in how it wraps up---way too abruptly for the length of the story. The supposedly sympathetic heroic characters are revealed in their wretchedness. I loathed all of them. I wanted to see them fail. I never got to understand them even after a thousand pages.

Ironically the supposed villains are never truly punished. Mostly they just fade away and we never learn what happens to them. The only truly sympathetic characters in the book---Eddie Willers and Cheryl Taggart---suffer the worst fates. The former has a mental breakdown trying to restart a broken locomotive by himself in the middle of the Arizona desert, his worst sin having been to love the heroine since childhood (see the fate of the man who does not live up to Rand's ideal of the masculine). The latter characters impulsively  commits suicide by jumping in the Hudson River when her husband tells her of his infidelity. Neither of those things needed to happen in the story. But these are imperfect people to Rand, not worthy of full consideration as human beings, and thus they must suffer. 

By the last third of the book, I had come to see the work as the product of the pathological feminine. The heroine is loved by the most heroic men who ever lived. She takes one after another as her lover, and as she leaves each one and moves up the ladder of heroes, each stays devoted to her, and they ultimately help her rescue the greatest man who ever lived, who is the only one worthy to copulate with her. At the end of the story they fly off together in an airplane, high-fiving each other for their victory in destroying the world, with the heroine surrounded by her collection of lovers.

In being the product of the pathological feminine imagination, the book reminded me a great deal of Fifty Shades of Grey. This latter book is the fable of a woman who yearns to escape the hellish path reserved for contemporary women, namely being urged by society (i.e. by other women) to sample the company of dozens of lovers, one after another, replicating the career of a prostitute and imitating porn actresses until every last shred of her innocence is gone, and the only men who can provoke desire in her are the worst sorts of malevolent men. 

This is done in the name of empowerment and in pursuit of self-fulfillment. Then one day, after she is bored with the parade of sexual adventures, and finding she is no longer at the peak of her attractiveness, she can find the perfect man of her dreams who accepts her and loves her despite her past, as she her were a tender virgin. Fifty Shades of Grey is the fantasy of finding the perfect alpha billionaire, who makes her undergo all of the prostitution and porn acting, but at his command, and for him exclusively, so that she can the perfect ending without ever having to undergo the hell-life hell of taking dozens of lovers in a serial fashion..

Likewise Atlas Shrugged is the pathological female fantasy of a mid-century woman trapped in the duty of having to participate the masculine world of work and achievement, all the while surrounded by inferior men who do not live up her ideal of what a man must be. So she fantasizes about the perfect hyper-masculine man who will take revenge on the world on her behalf, who will destroy everything and reduce civilization to a rubble all so that she can escape with him (and her other lovers) and become his devoted servant wife, obeying his commands and desires in a simple household setting.

What separates Ayn Rand from the most malevolent forms of contemporary woke feminism is Rand's belief that a few strong masculine men still exist somewhere in the world who are worthy of her and women like her. Without that belief one they both merge into the demonic fanatical desire to see all weak men of the world castrated and destroyed.

The heroine of Atlas Shrugged is a terrible human being. In the last chapter she shoots an innocent throwaway person in cold blood to save her lover. Her unrepentant murder of this unnamed inferior character is portrayed as heroic, the product of ultimate virtue, as is the outright deception of all the main characters at the end.

The book cleared up many things for me, among them why Ayn Rand is unable to see any precedent in her work besides Aristotle. This is just a cartoon fantasy on her part.  She presents nothing more than a cargo cult imitation of a philosophy. I finally understood this when she described the physics behind certain inventions in her book. The science is ludicrous in a way that it never needed to be. But clearly she didn't care. She knew better than every physicist alive, no doubt. The perfect engine invented by the hero character supposedly converts "static energy into kinetic energy." 

I almost choked with laughter reading this. Likewise the doomsday device (that literally wipes out half of the state of Iowa at the climax of the story) is a sonic weapon that is based on cosmic rays. Uh, sure, ok. Of course science fiction must bend the rules, but my gosh---this is worse than the worst parody of the most ridiculous low budget movies as depicted in a comedy skit. Just imagine the philosophy version of that, and you have "objectivism" in a nutshell.

It explains to me the fanaticism of the Randian cult members who use this book as a guide to life. Bill Still, who once ran for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, just released a great short Youtube video explaining what's wrong with (big L) Libertarians, and why they are actually Leftists rather than conservatives. I just watched it as finished this book and it really put the pieces of understanding together in my mind. 

I laugh at myself, at how for the first half of the book I was fascinated by the question of why Rand had changed U.S. history so drastically, making it so that the first transcontinental railroad was not built by instigation of Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. government, but by a private individual. 

I was convinced that somehow this was a clue to the alternate universe of Atlas Shrugged in some deep way. I was intrigued by a comparison of the fictional Taggart railroad with the real Union Pacific, the history of which I know more a great deal about For example the one-time chairman of Union Pacific, and the real-life heir to the UP fortune--as close as possible a person to the main character---was actually the Governor of New York at the time Rand published her novel. I wonder what he thought of this.

By the end of the book, I realized all of this was way too sophisticated an analysis of her book, just as was my earlier attempts in my youth to make logical sense of her philosophy. It feels like a parody, and excuse for her to hate the world, to hate all forms of religion, and to wish destruction on her enemies. Everything else feels like a window dressing around this.

Weirdly, I am glad I read it, even though I hated it when it was done. I have little patience with Leftists who might say, "I told you so." Unless you've read through all 1069 pages of this turkey, then I don't want to hear your opinion. It's just hearsay. I'd rather talk with people who read it and liked it, rather than those who would condemn it without having read it. At least I'll grant that respect to Ayn Rand. Like I said---I wanted to like it, and I liked the premise of the story as a whole. I just deeply hated the characters and the resolution of the plot.

I'm still willing to read the Fountainhead at some point as well. It's loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright, who is an important figure in the history of Scottsdale. Maybe it's a better story. Maybe I'll like it. At least it's shorter, and they made a decent Hollywood movie out of it (something that would be impossible for this book, I now understand).