At last! No more Atlas!

Let's conclude this series about sci fi films that exaggerate human error, in order to make a polemical point. 

Exaggeration-of-error was understandable in the otherwise wonderful movie, Avatar. (Though it still should have been done even-better.)  Now let's sweep all the way to the opposite end of the quality spectrum -- from the sublime to the absurd.

== Okay, we had to == 

It was required and behooved. I had no choice. We rented… and watched… Who is John Galt? Part III of ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Oh, oh my, how did they manage?  This episode was spectacularly worse than the other two, proving that there are no limits to execrable. 

Oh sure, I took into account that this was the portion of the book wherein Ayn Rand launches into a 60 page speech, one that has helped lure two generations of angry, young-white underachievers away from any sensible (Smithian) version of libertarianism – (based on flat-open-fair creative competition and rooted in actual human nature) - toward a life hating rant-fest of ingrate solipsism.

In fact, though, the movie version of John Galt’s speech was the best part of this awful trudge, wherein dialogue, acting and even the sets sank below minimum standards for a high school film project. Distilled to a few minutes, at least the speech had a decent stab at doing what Vonnegut aimed for in the vastly more intelligent and effective libertarian-satire tale "Harrison Bergeron." 

Indeed, if we ever did make a society as deliberately debased and wretched as the strawman People's Republic of America portrayed in Rand's book and film, well, I might have said a few of the same things Galt growled, in this hyper digested version.

But that's the point, eh? As I said, in my earlier essay about Atlas Shrugged (one that's more carefully parsed and analytical, revealing parallels between Rand and her mentor, Karl Marx), the strawman notion that Ayn Rand and her followers erect in their minds – an oligarchic-socialist cesspool that punishes every innovator and steals everything from creators - is hallucinatory, bearing only slivers of glancing overlap with the USA of her time...

...and even less with today's era of Elon Musk and Google and Richard Branson and Whole Foods and Uber and university-spinoff startups and privately-invented self-driving cars.

Never once do Randians address the question: "compared to what?" Across 6000 years of awful rule by feudal lord-cheaters, can they point to a society that was friendlier to inventive entrepreneurs than this one? Or a society that ever engendered so many libertarians?  Oh, I am all for enhancing some pro-liberty-and-competitive-ingenuity trends. But to assume that this narrow renaissance should be hated, when the alternative attractor state of feudal repression looms from all sides? Oy, silly guys.

But I've shown all that, already.  Moreover, in the case of A.S. Part III, there's much worse – so much worse - than just piling up resentment based on (mostly) delusional grievances.

== Do these folks even pay attention? ==

For example, the makers of this film don’t even try to soft-pedal the volcanically blatant evil of Rand's top hero - John Galt - who demands that the outer civilization "get out of my way," and stop aggressing his ubermensch Nietzchean demigods... while he’s hypocritically cheating and aggressing like mad! Committing nearly all of the deadly destruction in the story, blowing up critical infrastructure, consigning millions to starvation and darkness with acts of sabotage on a scale that would make Al Qaeda and every terrorist group in history envious. All of them, combined.

Note, this isn’t soft-pedaled or disguised, but avowed openly, in the movie's very first scene! The elite of Galt’s Gulch cannot win on their virtues, so they murderously cheat.

(Indeed, if you know a thing about iron cantilever construction, the Taggert Bridge could have fallen - in the time allotted - in no other way.)

Then there is the blatant way that Ayn Rand imitates -- in the Passion of The Galt -- the dramatic arc of Jesus, from his betrayal by an apostle, to the Temptation, to the Torment and Crucifixion... followed by a kind of resurrection. Hey, copy and crib from the best.  That's what she did with Marx.

I just had to smile when the director and producer of this film version went out of their way to include a minor, one page scene from the book, during Dagny's tour of Galt's Gulch, when she speaks to a lower-caste baker woman who happens to have... (shudder)... procreated!  The only character to have or even mention children in Ayn Rand's entire, vast canon -- indeed across all of her works about the "life-oriented philosophy." 

I had to wonder, was this obscure scene included because for years I've rubbed Randian noses in the utterly impotent sterility of their uber-demigod role models? Several dozen archetype "ideal humans." Not one of whom, at any point or at any level, engages in the most basic human activity: bearing and raising children. 

Not even the somewhat admirable - or at least respect-worthy - architect, Howard Roark, from The Fountainhead, can spare a glance toward the future. How very un-darwinian, for social darwinists.

(Research call: can anyone cite a previous Rand critic who pointed this out? It is so glaring, there has to be! I just want to know.)

== Rise of the looter-manipulators ==

Oh, ironies abound! Like the cameo appearances of Sean Hannity and Glen Beck in this spew. Part and parcel of the central Fox narrative – they admit that libertarians have every reason to be disgusted with the Republican Party, which has never, ever, ever done a single thing to help small business, or innovators, or flat-open-fair capitalism.

But… but Goppers say libertarian-sounding things! And doesn’t that matter far more than substance or statistics or other sciencey things like facts? Or actual, actual outcomes?  So come on home, every election (you fools)! And ignore the plain truth: that markets and innovation, productivity and small business, deregulation and every other thing that libertarians should care about actually do far, far better under democrats. 

Indeed, democrats have deregulated ten times as many industries as republicans have ever even tried to do.

Such facts would matter to a Smithian libertarian, who might have the guts to face information-contrary-to-narrative. But Randians? They want the world of feudal oligarchs that Fox is striving to bring back. (Come on guys, admit it.)

== The core question ==

Oh, but here's the crux, guys.

Why have you not already built Galt's Gulch? 

Seriously, it’s been ages.  Republicans spent 6 years (2001-2007) controlling every branch of government including the courts, and have had a pretty strong lock since, especially in half the states, where the Randian rhetoric has risen ever-stronger. But... well... do you see any pro-competition measures from them?

All right, forget the GOP – they are in the pockets of oligarchic “looters” who Rand portrays as vastly worse than mere unionized-socialists. (Though you will always, always, always trudge back to vote republican, won’t you, dope?) 

No, even if you toss aside the undead were-elephant, we are left demanding of you why you haven’t built your paradise already, the way Ayn Rand's heroic John Galt insisted you should?  By yourselves?

There are plenty of places, all over the U.S., where some money and a bunch of inventive uber-guys could take over a county and start running it according to Randian principles. Maybe not quite as “liberated” as Galt’s Gulch - perhaps having to obey eco-laws, for example, and paying taxes (big deal), but still pretty far along the spectrum!  (Heck, wasn’t there an idea, years back, for libertarians to move to New Hampshire and take over? Idaho would seem a better bet, though….)

Seasteading Institute

Even more so in some capital-hungry small nation. I could name a dozen where, backed by real investment, a colony could set up to start doing what they please, unfettered by all those compromises made by the People’s Republic of America. So why haven’t you put your money and effort where your mouth is?

Only Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman and a few of their pals have done this with some tepid sincerity, slipping a tiny sliver of actual money into Seasteading, sketching grand images of what it might look like, if someone else were to create new principalities with sovereign rights somewhere out on the open ocean.  I offered some advice as to how to do it right… advice that was not appreciated, even though it was sincere and practical and covered bases that any non-hallucinatory seasteading project would have to, if it meant business. 

But never mind, I re-cycled the ideas and showed the way-to-do-it in Existence. Indeed, the only places where Randians have actually stood up to emulate Galt and openly out-compete those dreary mixed-economy compromisers are... in fiction.

== Which is beside the point ==

What is the point?

If fact, I do agree with these fellows on one crucial matter. The Randians are right to fear a particular failure mode: that “looters” – mostly established oligarchs but also socialists – might wreck the flat-open-fair civilization that brings creative miracles into the world, through the marvelous fecundity of flat-open-fair competition. 

Neither oligarchs nor socialists like competition (though the former lie, and claim that they do.) So yes, that kind of enemy is worth guarding against!  Indeed, that is one set of directions where-from a collapse of our enlightenment revolution might come.  

What they neglect is to notice there are others, indeed a myriad ways that cheaters could ruin our brilliant oasis in the bleak horror of human history. 

Others are right, too, in their own fixated notions of where Big Brother might come from! Our renaissance could fall to religious zealots, faceless corporations, manipulative media, dogmatic movements, Crichtonian science-gone-mad scenarios, Matrix-style machine gods… or ingrate-solipsist demigods who rationalize that sabotaging civilization is the best option, practically and morally.

If only we weren’t so all-fired eager to declare "only my side’s enemies are dangerous!" In fact, you paranoids out there… you’re all partly right!  And, by dismissing the notion that your own side’s elites might also be dangerous, you are also insanely wrong.

Me? I find appealing the much more nuanced and generous libertarianism of Adam Smith, who liberals and more subtle libertarians should both embrace for his incrementalist care to nurture the best of competition, while evading the relentless cheating that ruined competition for 60 centuries.

But this here screed of mine started out about an awful, awful movie, based on a tedious, life-hating book, written by a hysterical Russian émigré and acolyte of Karl Marx. And despite this cult’s rare glimmers of on-target criticism, its potential to change a damned thing was cauterized, long ago, by fanatic over-simplification.

Except perhaps for Peter Thiel, the correlation of Randianism with impotent under-achievement is just too blatant for us to ignore any longer, or to take seriously the preachings of its maniacal guru.

Recent Sci Fi films -- the okay and the meh!

Before diving into Science Fiction films, some news: the fabulous -- and alas late -- science fiction author Iain Banks just had an asteroid named after him. Part of a terrific tradition. The great planet hunter Elinor Helin named one for me (5748 DaveBrin), back in the 90s… and she graciously assented (after enduring my rude armtwisting) to name another pair after Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl.  I had been hoping that Iain would  be similarly honored, and am deeply gratified that he was.  Now let's go out there, mine them and reduce them to nothing, by turning them into wonderful things.

I'll give some impressions from recent sci fi films, like Star Trek: Into Darkness, below. But first some retro-looks.

== Successes and failures: older sci fi flicks ==

The always-brashly relevant site io9 has a run-down of the "12 Most Unfaithful Movie Versions of Science Fiction and Fantasy Books."  A fun romp and - as you might guess - a chance for shared misery with other authors who have seen "liberties" taken with their original material.

In fact, I am more forgiving of some of these films - even Kevin Costner's version of my novel The Postman - than many would expect.

For example, Soylent Green may have veered a bit in plot focus, but nothing about the "soylent" part of the film was incompatible with Harry Harrison's world in the novel Make Room! Make Room! which was vividly portrayed pretty much as he wrote it. Above all, Soylent Green was excellent, vivid and beautiful cinema… and  also probably the most effective film in history at scaring folks into becoming  environmentalists. Which I cannot say for the earlier and relentlessly preachy Silent Running, which we recently watched again. Silent Running had some fine moments, but was far too heavy handed to be truly effective -- and Joan Baez makes my ears ring. (With apologies to fellow ex-hippies.)

I also forgive the silly Freejack flick, simply because it got more people to read Robert Sheckley (it was based upon Immortality, Inc.).  And now I will enrage some others by saying I bet Bob Heinlein would have chuckled at Verhoeven's approach to Starship Troopers.  All of Heinlein's preachings are there… all of them!  Veerhoven argues with RAH, using symbolism to rebuke and provoke. I found it a fascinating conversation and the subsequent arguments that raged among Heinlein fans would have pleased him.

== Successes and failures: Recent Movies ==

All right, I know I owe you that thoughtful essay on Avatar and other serious science fiction films.  I do hope to get to it.  Meanwhile, we've watched some other recent flicks and I'll give quick impressions.  (Warning: some spoilers below!)

(Note: some 2013 Science Fiction  offerings were clearly in the category of "wait for the DVD."  The Tom Cruise and the Will Smith offerings, for example. One could tell from afar that they are old, old, old and tired concepts, retreaded with nice effects. We have a big TV… and can wait.)

Star Trek: Into Darkness.  Folks wrote in, predicting I would hate this latest episode in the re-boot, because the core villainy originates within the Federation,. Aren't I the guy who most fervently celebrates Gene Roddenberry's optimistic vision of an improvable human and sapient civilization? (A very rare message indeed, these days.) Hence it may surprise folks to learn that none of my fears were realized.  J.J. Abrams delivered a fun and vivid -- if a little popcorny -- Trek adventure that I found entirely faithful to the wholesome and uplifting Roddenberry-Trek mythology.

Sure, there was a Starfleet villain. So?  That happened often enough in the older films and the varied TV series.  The key point is that the conspirators were acting in secret and in violation of the Federation's core principles.  Hence, the scenario was not an indictment of civilization as a whole, nor a proclamation of the hopelessness of democracy -- as you see perpetrated relentlessly in the Star Wars prequels -- but rather it's a tale about society's ethical immune system (manifested by Enterprise and crew) discovering and neutralizing a lethal and immoral aberration.

That is what good sci fi does: "Watch out for mistakes! Pay attention to potential failure modes! Then envision that citizens can cure them with courage, openness and belief in us."

(Indeed, with just five minutes of alteration, that's the message James Cameron might have delivered via Avatar.  Alas that, instead, he chose to spread a poison.)

On a less ethereal plane, I thought J.J. Abrams dealt pretty well with the rascally immaturity of the new version of James T. Kirk by giving us a tale of maturation.  Fine. Chris Pine is growing on me. I wasn't keen on this re-boot, but I think it could work out fine.  (I'd like to see a more thoughtful use of the old (Nimoy) Spock.  I believe he would be more nuanced in his "interference." Indeed, what's  blatantly called for is an intersection of the parallel worlds, giving Pine (conveying different Kirks) even more range. But that awaits my someday having beers with Mr. Abrams.)

Oh, but then there's the other villain in ST:ID. Yes… sigh… you-know-who.  Okay. I winced, for about three seconds. Then I got over it, decided to go along, and thoroughly enjoyed the performance.  Even the deliberate counter riff to the moving death scene in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Self-indulgent? Sure, but in a way that shared our fan-crush with a nod and many winks.  Hey, there are worse cinematic torts and (in real time) I talked myself into loving it.

Speaking of self-indulgence, did any of you notice the arrival of Dr. Carol "Can I cook?" Marcus? Oh gawd. Why do directors do that? Still, I told myself to "shut up and eat more popcorn." All told, it was fun. Refreshing. Even going so far as reprising the music from the Original Series.  The STII/TNG/Goldsmith musical themes were better, by far, but had grown exceedingly over-exposed and stale.

Want depth in your cinematic sci fi? Try Chistopher Nolan. Heck, these days, I'm delighted just to be able to watch something that contains some goodness, plot consistency and clean fun.  J.J. Abrams delivered those and I can wait for brain food.

And Other Films more briefly: Cloud Atlas (based on the novel by David Mitchell) was not as murky as I expected.  We could all follow the threads. The blatant homages to Blade Runner and Soylent Green and other classics got tiresome, after a while.  And the whole reincarnation point was thin.  Still, it was pretty. And I chuckled a few times over the makeup-makeovers.  Popcorn, requiring lots and lots of butter.

I left out Looper from my first draft.  Shouldn't have.  It was a meticulously thoughtful effort.  Time travel is truly hard to do well, but this one tried very hard and a careful analysis on paper reveals one of the two dozen or so causality models for time travel stories might, sort-of, work... or at least hold together well enough for a consistent story. The crime premise is dopey, but you have to overlook something and it drove a solid movie plot. SO much better than Surrogates!  Even forgot the popcorn on my lap.

Some things, however, no amount of can be saved by no amount of condiments. We recently rented Part II of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie. (I had to. I am a bit of an "Ayn Rand scholar" and felt behooved.) I had few hopes for an entertaining or enlightening evening… and all expectations were met. I do admit that the film-makers have striven hard to be faithful to the source material! That is always gratifying to an author… almost enough for me not to wish (fervently) that they hadn't.

Atlas Shrugged: Part One had been pretty damned awful, tendentious, illogical, preachy, dreary and dumb... but there were moments of charm, as I describe here.   (Wherein I also demonstrate, decisively, that Rand was the greatest of all acolytes of Karl Marx, even if they disagreed over the teleologically ordained end point.) Alas, Part II had all of the dreary-awful traits of Part I... without any of the redeeming qualities.

I was reminded of Frank Herbert's Dune, in which you start rooting for the Atreides family only because their opponents are so vampiric and grotesquely-cartoonishly awful, and hence you are able to squint and not notice that the Atreides are - themselves - oppressive monsters.  Likewise, in Atlas Shrugged, a litany of inane and calamitously self-destructive "laws" (that bear no relationship with any real world politics) are passed by the U.S. government, serving as strawman excuses for the rise of what would otherwise be recognized as a lunatic cult, led by a man who (in the more detailed novel) deliberately sabotages all American industry and the nation's ability to feed itself, while crooning "followwwww meeeee" in hypnotic tones to one ubermensch "creator" after another.  A cult of uniform obedience to the Big Man that would make David Koresh and Jim Jones envious.

Mark this well... I consider myself to be a "libertarian" in the sense that Adam Smith was a genius - and a much more ethical man than anyone credits - who helped establish our positive sum Enlightenment and taught us how to harness human creative competition, unleashing a cascade of great things. I consider it to be one of the great tragedies of modern intellectual and political history that the American Libertarian movement has been hijacked away from those roots, down paths of solipsistic madness, enticed by a spite-propeled, child-hating, crypto-Marxist woman whose appeal should be limited to brief obsessional flings by nerdy-male college sophomore under-achievers. No greater proof can be seen than the overwhelming rejection at the polls by the American people in 2012, despite the Libertarian Party having its best candidate ever, and despite the apparently determined self destruction of the Republican Party.  Twin facts that have William F. Buckley spinning in his grave.

Never mind.  My previous essay said it all, exposing not only Rand's Marxist roots, but the stunning inability of her followers to explain the lack of children, procreation or the possibility of a future in her strange "utopia."

Rant-mode off!

== Sci fi films in a lesser mode ==

See a  terrific mini movie, six minutes long, about terraforming Mars… in French!(With English subtitles.)  C'est étonnant et merveilleux ouvrage de la science et aussi science fiction! Felicitations et bon chance!

Atlas Shrugged: The Hidden Context of the Book and Film

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. - Mark Twain

There was nothing else even remotely interesting in our queue -- so we rented ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Well, after all,  I often talk about Ayn Rand and her passionate followers, who have effectively taken over the U.S. Libertarian movement, influencing much of the rhetoric we hear from the American Right... (even though no libertarian policies have ever been actually enacted during Republican rule). I've published both scholarly papers and popular articles about Rand's fiction and philosophy.

So, I thought, why not give her acolytes one more shot at selling me on her biggest, most-central tale? An honest person does that. Whereupon, with a sigh, but opening my ears and mind, I slid the disk into the player....

== For the record ==

First a couple of honest disclaimers:  (1) It may seem that I am aiming most of my critical attention, lately, at "right-wing authors." (Recently, I dissected Frank Miller's travesty "300," showing how it tells outright historical lies in service of a deeply anti-American theme. ) But I do notice foibles of the left, as well.  For example, I promise soon to offer up that long-awaited piece about James Cameron's beautiful but misguided film, AVATAR.

(2) As one of the few sci fi authors who delivered a keynote at a political party convention - indeed it was the Libertarian Party - I may seem somewhat of a "heretic" to the Rand-followers who now dominate the LP. But no one can deny my ongoing campaign to get folks to read Adam Smith, the founding sage of both libertarianism and liberalism.

Like Smith, I believe in fair and open and vigorously creative competition - the greatest innovative force in the universe and the process that made us.  Encouraging vibrant, positive-sum rivalry - in markets, democracy, science, etc - is one reason to promote universal transparency (see The Transparent Society ), so that all participants may base their individual decisions on full knowledge. That positive aim - also preached by Friedrich Hayek - should be the goal of any sane libertarian movement... instead of fetishistically hating all government, all the time, which is like a poor workman blaming the tools. Anyway, a movement based on hopeful joy beats one anchored in rancorous scapegoating, any day.

(Adam Smith favored feeding and educating all children, for the pragmatic reason that this maximizes the number of skilled, adult competitors, a root motive of liberalism and a role for government that is wholly justifiable in libertarian terms.)

For my full, cantankerously different take on the plusses and minuses of contemporary libertarianism -- and other oversimplifying dogmas -- have a look at this essay: Models, Maps and Visions of Tomorrow.

Only now, with due diligence done, let's get back to ATLAS SHRUGGED: THE MOTION PICTURE.

== Rand's Books... and the Movie ==

Despite my low esteem of Ayn Rand's simplistic dogma, I do rate THE FOUNTAINHEAD as by far her best book. In its smaller and more personal scope, that novel offered a pretty effective (if melodramatic) portrayal of  uncompromising genius having to overcome the boneheaded doorkeepers of art and architecture -- two realms that are always beset by bullies and villainy.  In that tale, the hero's adversaries came across as multi-dimensional and even somewhat plausible, if also a bit cartoonish. Indeed, the 1950s Gary Cooper movie was pretty good, for a Rand story.

Alas, in contrast, ATLAS SHRUGGED takes on civilization as a whole -- all of its institutions and enlightenment processes, top to bottom -- calling every last one of them corrupt, devoid of hope, intelligence or honor. Moreover it proclaims that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are braying, silly sheep.

(Consider this irony; a movement propounding that all people can and should think for themselves also teaches its adherents to openly despise their neighbors as thinking beings. A party that proclaims fealty to market forces also holds that the number of deciders and allocators can and should be very small. In other words, you can have Hayek or Rand. Not both.)

But pause a moment. How does the book hold up, strictly from the perspective of writing and art? Well... I won't mince words. ATLAS SHRUGGED royally sucks as a novel, with cardboard characters, rivers of contrived coincidence and dialogue made of macaroni. (Can you dig a 70 page SPEECH?) Of course, none of those things matter if your taste runs to an endless smorgasbord of indignant resentment. (A scientifically-verified drug high!)  In which case the speechifying is mother's milk.

Heck, the left produces plenty of polemics just as turgidly tendentious. In fact, the previous paragraph pretty much described Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Am I letting politics bias my judgment of Rand's literary qualities? The intellectual maven of conservatism, William F. Buckley, a founding light of modern libertarianism and also a noted novelist, called Atlas Shrugged "One thousand pages of ideological fabulism; I had to flog myself to read it."

Given such source material -- and universal boos from both critics and the viewing public -- was I surprised to find that the movie version of Atlas Shrugged bites, at the level of basic film 101 storytelling?  For example, it is only in the last five minutes that the director deigns to clarify a core villain. As for the "heroes"... well, their famously emotionless "I don't give a crap" mien may work for campus geeks. But not in cinema, where passion propels.

(A deeply ironic and smirk-worthy "oops" appeared on the cover of the DVD version, blurbing ATLAS SHRUGGED as a saga of "courage and self-sacrifice" -- which would be the ultimate Randian sin!)

== A High Point ==

One sequence of this film does stand out.  I'm a sucker for lyrical cinematography, especially when it involves beautiful scenery, or else a love-ode to fine technology.  And there's about ten minutes in ATLAS SHRUGGED when we get both, as the male and female leads ride their new super-train along shimmering rails made of miraculous metal, speeding across gorgeous Rockies and over a gasp-worthy bridge.

The emotional payoff -- two innovators triumphing over troglodyte naysayers by delivering an awesome product -- portrayed Rand's polemical point in its best conceivable light.  I am all for that aspect of the libertarian dream. Indeed, it is the core theme that makes THE FOUNTAINHEAD sympathetic and persuasive.  So, for ten minutes, we actually liked the characters and rooted for them.  Significantly, it is the portion when nobody speaks.

Alas, though. The film then resumed a level of simplistic lapel-grabbing that many of us recall from our Rand-obsessed college friends -- underachievers who kept grumbling from their sheltered, coddled lives, utterly convinced that they'd do much better in a world of dog-eat-dog.  (Using my sf'nal powers, I have checked-out all the nearby parallel worlds where that happened; in those realms, every Randian I know was quickly turned into a slave or dog food. Sorry fellows.)

Ah well. Let's  set aside the pathetic storytelling, crappy direction and limp drama to appraise the film on its own, intended merits. On what it tried to be. A work of polemical persuasion.

== The Core Polemical Purpose ==

ATLAS SHRUGGED is, after all, an indictment of modernist, enlightenment, Smithian-liberal civilization. To Rand, this "great experiment" has all been one big mistake, doomed to expire from its own internal contradictions.

I use that Marxian expression deliberately. For, in significant dialectical ways, Ayn Rand was deeply influenced by Karl Marx -- virtually an acolyte, in fact. She kept essentially intact Marx's scenario of bourgeois decadence, guild protection, capital formation, conspiratorial competition-suppression, class-narrowing business cycles and teleologically inevitable divergence between the worker and owner castes.*

The chief difference is that Rand - a Russian emigre - stops short at the penultimate phase of Karl's projection - the moment of pinnacle capitalist consolidation - freezes it and calls it good. Tearing out and throwing away all hints of the next and final stage prophesied by Marx.

That's it, actually. Rand, in a nutshell. You might grasp the stunning parallels at once... if anyone my age or younger had ever bothered to actually read and understand both Rand and Marx. Well enough to draw obvious conclusions. Alas, our grandparents were far, far better-read than we hyper-opinionated moderns. (See what happens - in an ingenious interpretation - when Rand and Marx recombine.)

Hence, Ayn Rand shows us society making one dismal choice after another -- an endless chain of socialist or bourgeois-oligarchic or meddlesome-statist outrages against individual initiative. Endearingly, Ayn Rand despised all three of those centers of villainy equally, portraying them uniting to pass laws that punish or seize companies who "compete too well."

Indeed, if I ever witnessed our nation enacting the kind of insane bills that are reported in this film (piled one-after-another, every five minutes), heck, I'd be looking for John Galt myself!

Yes, I'm enough of a libertarian to know that foolish things do happen! Witness Europe, mired in nanny-state entitlements, eight week vacations and a "right to retire" as young as 55.  Self-defeating regulations prevent companies from firing workers, with the consequence that they seldom hire new ones. As for the movie's heroine, Ayn Rand chose a railroad heiress for good reasons. The old Interstate Commerce Commission (dissolved by the democrats in the late 1970s, but still a horror when she wrote) was the classic exemplar of a government bureaucracy "captured" by lordly oligarchs and used as a tool to squelch competition.

In other words, the endless litany of "leveling" crimes against creative enterprise that roll across the page/screen in ATLAS SHRUGGED aren't entirely without real-world analogues. Her fictional betrayals of creative enterprise are based on a genuine complaint... that Randites regularly exaggerate more than 100-fold, alas, into caricatures and absurd over-generalizations.

To see this danger expressed far better - and more succinctly - than Rand ever managed, read the terrific Kurt Vonnegut story: Harrison Bergeron. Other expressions of legitimate libertarian worry can be seen in the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. They have a point.

Okay, the core concern is a valid one and somebody in society should keep warning us! Though ideally, someone with common sense and proportion, alas.

I mean, gee whiz. Ayn Rand railed against the ICC... and it was eliminated. Canceled, rubbed out, utterly erased - along with the grotesque Civil Aeronautics Board - by the very same democratic processes that she and her followers despised. Competition among railroads was restored and it was done by a mix of pressure from a savvy public and resolution by genuinely reform-minded politicians. If Ayn Rand were writing the book today, a railroad would not have been her chosen archetype.

I wonder: did anyone making the film ever ponder this? Did any Randians notice at all?

== A Remarkable Chain of Ironies ==

I guess I sound pretty harsh. Only now, let me do one of my famous contrary swerves and openly avow something that Ayn Rand gets right. Despite gross exaggeration, she pretty much nails the basic problem!

Almost every time the book or film depict some betrayal of human competitive ingenuity, it happens like this:

A conspiracy of "old money" oligarchs gathers in conniving secrecy, exerts undue political influence and misuses government power for their own, in-group self-aggrandizement. Except for a few, pathetic union stewards, the ruination of market forces is stage managed from the top. The squelching of entrepreneurial enterprise and the corruption of trade is always executed by villainous old-guard capitalists. Moguls who don't want any rivalry from rambunctious newcomers.

Now think about that. Socialists do come under derision from Rand, but mostly as ninnie, do-gooder tools of the scrooge-oligarchs!  In fact, this is where her followers get things right.  Anyone who considers the long, lamentable epic of human history will recognize this as the ancient pattern, pervasive across 99% of cultures -- with the most prevalent sub-version being feudalism.

What Randians never explain is how getting rid of constitutional-enlightenment government will prevent this ancient curse from recurring. (Were the oligarchs stymied in ancient China, Babylon or Rome, where liberal constitutions were absent?) Indeed, enlightenment governments are the only force that ever kept the feudal sickness partially in check. Exactly as prescribed by Adam Smith.

(Name another society that ever made more libertarians, hm?)

In other words, by her very own premise, the answer isn't for creative people to "go on strike." It is to fix the tool (government) by yanking it out of the hands of conspiratorial criminals who have improperly seized it.  You do that with transparency, with light (as Hayek prescribed). Not by blaming the tool and throwing it away.

== You Are Getting Very Sleeeeepy... ==

Oh, but more ironies abound! Here you have a polemic about individualism, that portrays one accomplished CEO after another "gone missing"... dropping out of sight after each one listens to a solitary pitchman from a utopian community, who croons "Come. Follow me and joiiiin usssss."

Um, let's see. When have we heard that before? Drop everything. All your past loyalties and the companies you've built. Stop fighting for your family or country. Listen to this incantation and follow our charismatic leader to the special society he has built, just for the exclusive elect, like you.

Good lord, does she have to make the hypnotism-cult thing quite so explicit? So very much like Jim Jones and David Koresh? Did you know that Rand-followers who recite her catechisms light up exactly the same parts of the brain as other true-believers pronouncing passages from the Bible or Koran or Hindu Sutras? And these are not the corners of cortex used by scientists while performing analytical or "objective" reasoning.

But you don't need any of that to conclude we're dealing with a cult. Just follow the recruitment process used by John Galt. Who surreptitiously sabotages successful companies in order to drive their owners into his arms! Who then deliberately vandalizes and cripples the nation's ability to feed itself or engage in commerce that he doesn't control, in order to wreck any possible competition with his elite enclave. Oh, criminy.

Yes, I'll admit that Ayn Rand at least portrays technology as good. That gives her points over the dismal Tea Partiers, or Fox, or the equally dismal (though less-numerous) science haters of a ditzy-fringe far left.  Alas though, she treats technology like something magical. Lone inventors weave a spell and suddenly there's a new metal or new motor. The vast intricacy of collaboration, development, supplier networks, and infrastructure is both a topic to Rand and an excuse for incantatory over-simplification.

But it is science that truly gets short shrift. Ayn Rand's lack of any reference to scientific research that might support or falsify her assertions about human nature should send alarm bells clanging. Her ignorance of Darwin or human biology, for example, is almost identical to Marx, but much less excusable, given when she lived.

Nowhere, either in Atlas Shrugged or subsequent libertarian cant, is there acknowledgment of the immense stimulative role of U.S. government financed R&D, especially in fields of pure science that would never have attracted investments from anyone looking to a "return horizon."  Indeed, I have long yearned for a second national debt clock to be set up, this one showing what the public debt would be now, if only the taxpayer had received normal levels of royalties from rockets, satellites, communications, fiber optics, computers, pharmaceuticals, and the internet. Well? Wouldn't that be fair and businesslike? Tellingly, while many scientists have a fiercely competitive libertarian streak, almost none who are in the top ranks ever hold any truck with Ayn Rand.

The analog to Rand is not the scientist Darwin, but the rhetorician Plato. Sure, she claims to prefer Aristotle. But in both verbal process and incantatory reasoning style, she is Plato's truest heir.

==Ayn Rand on Privacy==

All right, veering briefly aside from Atlas Shrugged, let's see what Rand says about privacy, a topic I happen to know a lot about:

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." 

Of course, there is a level at which Rand is simply stating the obvious. That autonomy and long lives arose as our technology and civilized complexity improved. When food surpluses were meager, only a tiny aristocracy could be subsidized and unchained from the land. But a mixture of science and continental peace mixed with our ability to trade goods and services till even science fiction authors can now pretend we are producers of a primary product, worthy of being fed by farmers.

As for the quote itself: as usual, Ayn Rand mixes some core truths of the Enlightenment with mystical teleology.  The rise of the individual - never steady or even - has been a core theme of the West, ever since the Renaissance, and especially the Enlightenment. But this progression isn't fated, ordained or even natural.

Rand looks at a couple of hundred years and one quarter of the planet, and assumes the trend is unstoppable. But Huxley and Orwell - backed up by Malthus and Darwin - showed us what's "natural."  The diamond-shaped social structure that we take for granted can all-too easily slump back into the oligarch-dominated pyramid.

Only Enlightenment methods ever offered an alternative hope. Rand followers take it for granted. Indeed, they assume that we can dismantle the processes and structures that Adam Smith prescribed, that made the Enlightenment work in the first place.

They bear a burden of proof that we would not just slump back into the condition that prevailed, for thousands of years, before Smith and his colleagues came along.  In America, that slump is already well underway.

== The Posterity Problem ==

I saved the best for last, hoping that at least a few libertarians - those most-favored with our greatest human trait - curiosity - have hung with us to this point.

(Are any of you still present?)

Elsewhere, I've revealed the biggest and most telling red flag about Ayn Rand - one that I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. It is that none of her uber role-model characters, at any level or in any way, ever indulge in the most basic human project --

--  bearing and raising and loving and teaching children.

Out of 1000 pages, just one of them glances briefly at a mother - a baker, an enlightened and awakened proletarian who is not a member of the elite caste. She gives a short riff about preferring Randite education methods in Galt's Gulch over public schools. That is it for procreation. As for the New Lords - several dozen of them, all dynamic Rand-heroes of the future - not even one of them bothers to pass his or her genes forward in time. Nor do any of them take responsibility for, or even mention, this essential investment in time. And this from the "life-centered" philosophy.

There is a reason that Rand consistently avoided any mention of procreation among her new-lord caste -- because writing-in even one member of a next-generation would shine searing light upon the biggest flaw of her hypnotic spell, revealing that her "fresh" tale is actually the oldest one in the human saga.

Let me explain.  It is glaringly simple.

We all know this about aristocracy -- that it seldom breeds true. In the past, royal or aristocratic houses would grow fat, lazy and decadent. England's Plantagenets managed to stay virile for 400 years but most lines devolved much quicker. Oligarchs had to make inheritance-of-privilege state policy. They gave top priority to quashing open markets, science, democracy or equal justice - because any of these liberal processes might engender new competitors to rise, afresh, from below, exposing the spoiled grandkids to dangerous rivals.

Yet, even so, there was some churn! A violent form of social mobility.  Inevitably those decadent houses got toppled by new, fresh blood. By vibrant competitors who grew lean and tough in exile. Who trained and gathered their forces in the woods, then swooped in to storm the castle.  And thereupon established a new lordly line.


Deep below her superficial adherence to Marxist teleology lies this ancient cycle, far older than the enlightenment, or even writing. It is the very essence of what Ayn Rand stands for.  Her characters are the brash, virile, sturdy, innovative barbarians, born free and ready to seize destiny in their own two hands, ripping fortune out of the clutches of pathetic old-fart lords who are spent and bereft of cleverness or might. It's the oldest story, writ-new and draped with modernist garments. Even in her portrayals of sex, the closest parallel is a godlike Viking who kicks down the door and takes what he desires. Because he is the grandest thing in all directions. And because he can.

It is an ancient mythos that resonates deeply in our bones and especially within pasty-skinned, pencil-necked nerds, who picture themselves as Achilles, as John Wayne, as Ender Wiggin, as Harry Potter or some other demigod. An old, old formula that was mined by A. E. Van Vogt and L. Ron Hubbard and Orson Scott Card and so many others.

But therein lies a problem!  It's the romantic Phase One of this old cycle that Rand admires - the rise of a self-made buccaneer who seizes lordship from decadent, inbred fools.

Phase Two - what happens next - she never talks about. She averts her eyes and the reader's attention.

Why do none of Rand's characters ever have kids? Because theose kids'll inherit the olympian status wrested by Howard Roark or by Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Sons and daughters of demigods, they will assume privileges and power that they never earned through fair competition. They will take lordship for granted as a right of blood, and use it to squelch new competitors from rising to face them on a level playing field. Until their own decadent line has to be toppled, amid war and waste and pain.

It's what happened in 99% of human societies. Ayn Rand faces a steep burden of proof that "this time it'll be different." A burden she never picks up. Rather, she shrugs it off.

If there are offspring, then the reader might become consciously aware of this inevitable outcome. and realize: "Hey, I've seen this before. It's the same old boring-human pattern, and nothing new, after all."

== The Problem Is People... ==

Oh, but maybe I am reading too much into this aversion toward kids. After all, as the recent film reminds us, Ayn Rand was pretty much an equal opportunity hater of people, in general. (As evidenced by her passionately-admiring defense of the horrific murderer William Edward Hickman.)

Just look at how brothers are portrayed in ATLAS SHRUGGED.  Always treacherous, small-minded, parasitical and craven. Clearly, Rand is no Nazi, no believer in the paramountcy of blood. Sons, daughters, brothers and sisters? Neighbors? Strangers? Spouses? Co-workers? Civilization? Bah, who needs em. Who needs anybody?

Well? I said she ignores Darwin and this is consistent! Reproductive success? Fie and feh!

Her ubermensch demigods are less like "lords" - obsessed with establishing an inherited clan of privilege - than they are pirates - superior in boldness and in mind, going wherever they like, taking what they deserve by the very essence of what they are.

And hey, doesn't everybody love a pirate?

Yoho. That's the life for me.

==================================

*Followup notes:

1) Someone pointed out a more powerful example of de-regulatory goodwill on the part of the US government, which was, till around 1990, the principal owner, developer and subsidizer of the Internet. Picture the moment when a few dozen government guys - and advisor/consultant outsiders - sat down and decided to BACK OFF... to simply give the Internet to the world, instead of clutching-close this potential source of vast power. It was one of the greatest episodes of voluntary de-regulation in the history of the world. (I was living in France, using the French "minitel" alternative to the Internet, so I know how that might have gone.)

And yes, re-coalescence of top-down control over the Internet remains constantly a danger, from malignant efforts like SOPA. But the key lesson of the Internet - plus the dissolving of the ICC & CAB and Barack Obama's recent commercialization of the US space launch system - is that freedom-oriented policies can be negotiated within the institutions of a vast and overwhelmingly successful continental democracy. (And generally, the ones most willing to negotiate are democrats.) The demonization of those institutions, first by Rand and now by Culture War, portraying them as inherently incapable of reason or pro-freedom redesign, is illogical and a churlish example of flat-out ingratitude. 

Worse, from a Randian perspective, it is refusal to pay legitimate debts.

2) Hold the presses! I just thought of another major deviance that Rand took, separating her from Marx in a quirky ironic way...beyond her belief in Nietzschian ubermenscen and her denial of Marx's final teleological phase. There's also her approach to the Labor Theory of Value (LTV). Oh, she bought into LTV, hook, line and sinker! But in ways the Master would find utterly heretical. 

Now, here I am going to give Ayn Rand some cred, because clearly, she recognized what Marx did not, that LTV is complete crap when it comes to all labor hours being equally valuable. That's baloney and one of Marx's most glaring mistakes. Only then, like many converted heretics, she plunged to the opposite extreme, while staying on the same axis! Positing that some peoples' time and labor must be deemed almost infinitely more valuable, not just in a market scarcity sense but in pure, platonic essence. It is a third major departure from Marx... 

...but let's not get carried away. Because her scenario is still entirely based on LTV! Think about it. The great crime of the dire-enemies who are called "looters" is to steal labor value from the good guys in order to maintain society's capital base - precisely the same situation described by Marx! Only in her story, the theft is not from proletariat workers but from geniuses, necessitating their own revolution to reclaim that value! Sure, she turned 180 degrees the cast of characters who are the heroes. But the underlying principle and scenario - LTV theft from the productive caste, followed by revolution against the thieves and their recovery of stolen capital - is utterly the same. That is utterly pure Karl Marx.

It is the master's tale... with an M. Night Shamalayan twist! Oh, my.

3) Yes I gave short shrift to one aspect of Atlas Shrugged that Rand probably considered paramount, That is the book's keynote role as a philosophical and psychological polemic. She blames wrong action on wrong thinking, attributing to all of Galt's enemies an addiction to "death-loving" drives. All those who disagree with Galt (and Rand) are, in effect, dismissed as psychopaths who are fixated on achieving death. Note how this makes them inherently evil and unworthy of negotiation, by virtue of of their core platonic essence. (There's Plato again!) There's nothing human about such people.

What's fascinating is where this take us in regards Ayn Rand the Marxist. I describe how her chief departure from her mentor is where she excises what comes next. After portraying Marx's ultimate capitalist consolidation and finalization of capital formation with great fidelity, she omits entirely his final step - revolution of the skilled proletariat.  But how? Now vastly outnumbering the owners, with no middle class left to sap dissent, and with both state and church neutered, what's to stop them?

Well, replace the old church with a new one! Rand posits that the New Lords will not only be brilliant inventors and terrific managers, but also vastly enlightening priests. They will correct wrong thinking and replace it with right-thinking. With a philosophy that encourages life (even though there are no kids.) At which point the prols will not rebel, because their faith is now pure. Yes, it is a Randian faith - in themselves and in a system that challenges them to 'strive for life!' Nevertheless, it truly is awesome to see that her rejection of her mentor, Karl Marx, consists entirely of thwarting his final stage by enthralling the masses with a stunningly-persuasive incantation... or opiate... of uniform thought. A catechism of pure, unchanging and permanent Truth. 

Wow.

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