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Atlas Shrugged hits the Silver Screen on Friday In US Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957 and has sold vast copies, is released in a film version – or at least in a first instalment – this coming Friday in selected cinemas across the United States. I hope we can see it here in the UK. Interestingly enough, parts of the media are picking up on this. Here is an interview with an investment manager who is inspired by Rand’s “radicals for capitalism” philosophy and worldview. I am definitely going to make a point of seeing this film, whether it comes out at a UK cinema, or via DVD.
The reaction to the Financial Panic of 2008, with its massive bailouts, calls for “unregulated capitalism” (!) to be regulated, banker-bashing, etc, has certainly given Rand’s novel new resonance. I often heard it said that her villains are more convincing than her heroes, although Hank Rearden has always struck me as a well-drawn character. As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.
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How come there were no coloured heroes/heroines in the book? She had an Amerindian, as they are now called (the Judge), but no other ethnic types. And will the movie be set in the late 50s, to match the novel’s tone?
Sorry Jonathan but I’m feeling light headed and trivial this morning. I think you mean it has sold vast numbers of copies although, at almost 1,200 pages, perhaps you did mean it has sold vast copies?
MarkE… huh? Post after, not before, your morning coffee.
Completely off topic but too good not to share. I want one!
Somehow I will see this film.
In reply to MarkE’s question – the film (like the book) is set in the future (who knows what the ethnic make up of America might be in the future – those attracted by free ER treatment and foodstamps and….. might go home if things were no longer available, or they might not I DO NOT CARE EITHER WAY).
A central theme of the film (as in the book) is that fuel prices/shortages has made the railroads important again. This is not the 1950s (when roads were already king). Also the whole world (just about) has become “Peoples States” and is in advanced state of decay (in the 1950s, Germany, Italy and so on were in a free market revival).
As for the book – I read long ago, and it a great work.
When Ike was President and there were fairly free market governments all over the Western world (from Japan to Britain) it took great foresight to understand (as Rand did) that the central PHILOSOPHICAL mistakes taught in our culture (in the univesities and so on) meant that collectivism was not dead – only sleeping, and that it would return stronger than ever.
Interesting how, in the book, the collectivists use the fig leaf of being ‘people’s’ states. Not too many of those left, but the same people are in charge using the fig leaf of ‘social democracy.’
The more things change…
There are problems with the movie(Link) – the producers should have hired a director with a director’s eye, not some random actor off the set.
Having said that, it will be nice to see Rand’s abstractions brought to the realm of the concrete – the publicity will help the sales of the book and it is the book that will inspire the thinkers that the West needs more than any amount of gold or oil.
Naturally, Rand’s critics will dismiss both the movie and the book but Rand isn’t going to go away.
Like Marx, Engels Marcuse, Althusser, Benjamin and all the rest of that collectivist crew, she saw existence in terms of its fundamentals – identity, causality, free will, free thought and the free action of individuals.
The Marxists, like the Mohametans, explicitly deny those fundamentals, but the truth is – Rand’s affirmation of those principles is correct – and nothing the collectivists say or do will ever change that fact.
What a shame that Objectivism turns out to be wrong! Modern physics, with quantum entanglements, would have repulsed her. And if the many-worlds theory is true, then we don’t have free will- we end up splattered across many alternate versions of ourselves, trying out whatever scenario the universe inflicts on us, thinking we chose whichever path we are on!
It also makes some whoppers at the human scale. I am not an American, but I think that one of the most successful steel companies in America is called the Bethlehem steel company, is it not? Is it still run like a collective? Can any American up-date us on this issue, as I am basing my beliefs on a US Documentary I saw, which contrasted this company with another one founded by a man who resigned from the first one because he didn’t like these changes. Shades of Rand’s 20th Century Car company, but with totally different outcomes in the real world!
I might see the movie, but I won’t subscribe to Objectivism as the final philosophy, thank you.
Nuke, I thought along similar lines to you for a while on the physics angle and objectivism, but in fact I don’t think Rand’s ideas on causation, induction and so on are invalidated as a result.
Here is a long(ish) and useful essay by Peter Cresswell(Link), an objectivist who takes the issue head-on. I think he’s broadly correct.
As for the steel company, I have no idea. Rand, by the way, did not have a problem with how a firm was owned so long as the ownership was voluntary and had not come about by the use of force. That’s really the underlying issue here. When, for example, a large firm is broken up by a state, using some pretext such as anti-trust doctrines, etc, then we have a problem.
For ‘Nuke’ Gray, inspired by his writings of April 15, 2011 02:57 AM.
I read that the Bethlehem steel company went bankrupt in 2001 and it assets were purchased by others in 2003.
I read that there is more than one meaning of the philosophical term Objectivism. The simplest is the view that the universe exists independently of (human) thought and perception. IIRC, a great guy (who had no time for the pretentious) is reported to have said, in support of Objectivism:
Then he kicked a stone.
Now, of course this great guy lived before Gottlob Frege, which just goes to show that philosophies exist before someone invents them. Or something like that.
Best regards
I have a lot of residual affection for Rand’s books, but I’ve never been able to convince myself (for longer than a day or two) that she was an especially deep philosophical thinker or a great writer.
I think she _could_ have been a great writer, she certainly had the talent, and she had an absolute command of plot and lots of descriptive skills when she chose to use them… but her works grow weaker rather than stronger as they become weighed down by angry didactic ramblings. As literature, We the living is better than Fountainhead is better than Atlas.
Also …. she didn’t really understand human nature (or like the Marxists she so justly hated thought it could be shaped and altered to her preferences given the right inducements). Time after time in her books I try to imagine the characters as human beings instead of wish fulfillment figures and I fail. IIRC she also didn’t really enjoy the company of real businessmen and industrialists she met and who didn’t resembler her hunky young and phc (philosophically correct) dynamos.
Still I’ll see it somehow (I kind of doubt it’ll make it to Polish movie theaters and/or dvd…)
I have also read Rand’s books and somehow i see relevance in real life situation and i did learn things from her books.
Good work Rand.
Ella Faith Harriz
Design Courses Sydney
It really does not mean that at all. Indeed if you cannot make free will choices, all parallels of you would do the same thing at the same moment across the multiverse given the same ‘back story’ and yet many-worlds theory indicates that will not be the case.
This will get me lynched here, but anyway:
I felt the problem with objectivism, as expressed in Atlas Shrugged, is that it requires an unlikely number of incorruptably perfect “good guys”. In the real world Hank Reardon would have been tempted to enjoy the benefits (to him) of a state licenced monopoly; Dagny Taggart would have taken the poisoned chalice of state aid. People simply do not take the hard road when there is an easy option, even when that easy option offends their principles (I am open for examples to prove me wrong here – I would like to think better of mankind).
In this way one could argue that Objectivism is similar to Marxism; it can work perfectly as soon as we evolve a new breed of humans. Unlike Marxism however, we can aspire to imperfect Objectivism without having to murder millions and, in doing so, we might make matters better (or at least, less bad).
Re. Rand’s goodies and their perfectness, she was the first to admit that they were ideals, deliberately so, rather than reality-based characters. This is one of the senses in which, and again she was quite open about this, she was a Romantic.
Not really; I think what it requires is people who, by and large, are honest about how they make decisions and act on them. “Perfection” is not the idea, willingness to constantly improve, and applaud those who make the effort, is.
But if that is not perfections, what is?
OMG, they use Google translation for their junk now…
I do not blame the universe for inflicting that paragraph on me – I blame you!
As for the rest, Ayn Rand never claimed to be the last word in science or philosophy – indeed she even explicitly denounced such claims, see “the fallacy of arrested knowledge,” ITOE.
Jonathan, I have to take issue with you: perfectiontrong>is, according to Rand, the idea of these characters. She was often challenged about their goodness in her Q&A sessions. It wasn’t that she expected people necessarily to measure up, but that they should try, and here, in character like Reardon, Roark, Galt and others were benchmarks for that aspiration … although I think that ties in with your point about “willingness constantly to improve”.
“As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.”
That’s because she wrote that character a half-century before Obama appeared on the scene. I recognized him instantly. He is Mr. Thompson.
Many worlds, as it stands currently, is ultimately unsatisfying. It provides no further answers (which is why it’s unprovable) and just pushes all the questions that count back another layer.
At best, it’s approximately equivalent to the Copenhagen interpretation at explaining things and, I suspect, they are likely to turn out to be different ways of stating the same thing.
http://www.atlasshruggedpart1.com/atlas-shrugged-movie-scene-henry-rearden-comes-home
I’m not a big movie-goer, but I am going to see this one simply because there arent many movies which explicitly criticize collectivism. Fight anti-capitalism with – what else? – monetary support!
I just got back from seeing it in Tempe, AZ this morning. I’ve read the book two or three times by now and I was a bit concerned going in that the movie wouldn’t do it justice. I needn’t have worried. I thought Kaslow and co actually did a pretty good job of taking something that can be some hard work to read in parts and getting the points across fairly well.
One of the things which concerns me is that this is only Part 1. Did this movie end in a satisfactory place? I.e., does it tell a reasonably self-contained story, while still leaving viewers (who aren’t rabid Objectivists) wanting more and likely to watch Parts 2 and 3?
Perry, In the many-worlds set-up, when there is a moment of choice, the universe doubles up, and explores both possibilities, with both versions valid options, and both people believing they are the original! The universe is supposed to keep doing this infinitely, all the time- because unstable atoms, like uranium upwards, are always ready to split for no reason that physics knows!
Indeed… and so what? But there is no ‘original’, just a branching version.
Moreover some versions of the theory suggest the universe *can* double up, not necessarily *will*.
My point is that this seems to exclude free will- if true, nobody chooses to be a statist, or an anarchist, or a libertarian! I like to think that I have free will, but physics seems to say nobody has!
Even if true, so what? The entire debate is sterile, an intellectual cul-de-sac. One can never visit those hypothetical “other universes”; they can’t affect us in any way; we can’t even know if they exist. The only sensible approach is to act as if there is free will. Or just slit your wrists and be done with it.
I have no idea whether the many words view is correct or not.
However (as Perry and JP have pointed out) if agency (“free will”) does not exist – then all these many worlds would be the same.
By the way the words “we do not have free will” are a bit of a mess.
For if there is no agency (no free will) there are no agents – hence “we” do not exist.
The determinist literally denies their own existence – for example by constructing a “determinist argument”.
An argument is a line of reasoning – but if there is no agent, there is no reason (no reasoning) and hence there can be no “argument” (about anything).
It is very basic stuff – but some very clever people manage to tie themselves into knots by ignoring the obvious.
For example, by saying “free will is an illusion” – who is having the illusion? If there is no free will (no agency) there is no agent – no one to have the illusion.
Remember “agency” and “mind” are really different ways of saying the same thing.
As for QM
Ayn Rand never stated what the exact nature of the universe was – only that our opinions did not effect what it was (that it was objective, not subject to our whims).
Oddly enough some of the same people who attack agency (for example denying that a thought means there is a thinker) also attack the objective nature of the universe. They both deny the existance of mind – and then deny there is anything outside the mind.
David Hume does both – although he may just have been playing games (attacking the obviously true – in order to see how people react).
“But the cat……”
“Observing” something can effect it PHYSICALLY – as “observing” is hitting something with photons (if there is no light you can not see it).
Very small things (on a quotum level) are indeed effected by being hit by photons (and even Newton undertand that light was made up of particles, he called them “corpuscles”, – although in a wave form). And you need to shine a light (or some such) on something in order to see it.
However, you are very unlikely to kill a cat by looking at it – by “observing” it. Because a cat is very big – in comparison to a stream of photons.
So the cat is indeed alive or dead in the box (not in some neither of the above states) BEFORE anyone takes the lid off.
The particle (that sets of the kill switch) was emitted or it was not emitted BEFORE anyone opened the box – so the cat is alive or dead BEFORE anyone opens the box.
This does NOT deny that the emission of the particle was random, it does not deny a RATIONAL understanding of QM.
All it does is rule out “quotum mysticism” – which is no loss.
Remember there are three (not two) things in play here.
Determinism – the clockwork universe NOT the same thing as a objective universe (a non deterministic universe is also objective – it is just different).
Randomness (such as QM) – and randomness does NOT have to mean “mystical” “the cat is neither alive or dead”…..
And CHOICE – agency (free will – mind). Which is NEITHER of the above.
By the way – “is there a dramatic and fitting ending to this part of Atlas Shrugged”?
Yes there is – the film ends dramatically, and at a natural point in the story for it to end.