Posted on July 17, 2009

Atlas Shrugged: Skewering Collectivists

This post continues my journal of impressions and thoughts as I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

I have to give Ayn Rand credit for knowing how to make a collectivist look foolish.  While her writing is generally pretty bland and her dialog stiff, the novel comes to life–in a peculiar, risen dead sort of way–when she portrays the upper class academics and hangers on of the collectivist variety: the college professors and politicians who claim everyone should live for the good of everyone else and all personal earnings are to be tolerated only insofar as they can be used to improve the lot of “society.”

The passages remind me of the scene in Cryptonomicon when Neal Stepenson so skillfully pokes fun at liberal arts scholars by comparing them to Tolkien’s hobbits.  I imagine that, if it weren’t for the give away of Ayn Rand’s name on the spine and cover, many of the intellectuals I’ve met would nod along with these characters, feeling right at home in their banter.  There’s clever pseudo-profundity in what they have to say.

So, while the discussions between her businessmen characters don’t do a lot for me–not because they’re outright wrong but because they just aren’t terribly interesting–the party scenes are a hoot.