Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Published in 1957.

So, in my 4th decade I finally read Atlas Shrugged and find a worldview I can embrace and characters I feel excessive kinship with. It is hard to overstate the extent to which I enjoyed this book. Rand's main character, Dagney Taggart, is the female scion of a powerful railroad family and the only person in the company with the ability to accomplish things. She has several 'brothers in arms' in other industrialists, but is constantly plagued by the slimy and manipulative 'chattering class' and government 'directives'. Click below for more SHRUGGED:

As Taggart saves her railroad time and again in spite of the meddling of the government and her namby pamby brother, her abilities as someone who can produce and do things (rather than just regulating things or talking about them) become apparent. The story goes through many permutations involving multiple great characters and includes many brilliant speeches about man, capitalism and objectivism. The main speech is by John Galt, the ideal man and Dagney Taggart's love and final interest.

Ayn Rand's gift to philosophy was objectivism, which she explained as "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." She rejects religion and "common good" rationales in favor of a worldview that is grounded in reality and reason. See below for a couple of my favorite speeches:

1. Francisco D'Anconia: "To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money-and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self made man - the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

2. John Galt: "For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the goodis self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Both sides agreed that morality demand the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason - that in reason there's no reason to be moral.

Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch - or build a cyclotron - without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think."

SNAP!