Quote Of The Day
Warren from Coyote Blog, on Atlas Shrugged Part II:
The one failure of both movies is that, perhaps in my own unique interpretation of Atlas Shrugged, I have always viewed the world at large, and its pain and downfall, as the real protagonist of the book. We won’t get into the well-discussed flatness of Rand’s characters, but what she does really well — in fact the whole point of the book to me — is tracing socialism to its logical ends. For me, the climactic moment of the book is Jeff Allen’s story of the fate of 20th Century Motors.
I had never thought of it this way. I agree that she had some issues with character development, as so many of her characters seemed to be cardboard cutouts of political positions, and lacked any real humanity or depth. I always said I liked the philosophy of the book, but didn’t think much of Rand as a novelist.
That’s still true, but this is a new way to look at it. She really did do a very good job of world-building in the book. Even so many of her plot articles must have seemed far-fetched back in the 1950’s, yet seem like there’d be no shock to hear them announced tomorrow. And her thesis is clear:
Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
The message is simple. The world we have is the world we’ve wrought, by our failure to live according to consistent humanitarian* ideals. And viewed in that sense, her key objective is to show the world, and that her characters are only there to explain the ideals which have brought it to destruction.
* My use of the word “humanitarian”? Deliberate. I contend that Rand would have considered a life lived under the ideals of private propery rights and self-ownership, a life lived for its own sake, to be the only humanitarian way one could possibly live.
