Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Most Famous Novel Explained | Hacker News Reader

Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Most Famous Novel Explained

thecollector.com

12 pointsTomte12 comments

It's immediately obvious to me that multiple paragraphs of this article are written by an LLM.

I've read (and enjoyed) this book. I especially like making chatgpt and other LLMs write about it in different perspectives. I'm sad to see foundational American novels reduced to summaries coaxed out by chatbots. I do hope that language model watermarking becomes more prevalent and easily detectable.

It’s difficult to understand why such a transparently facile book gets so much traction. “The rich beautiful people (who clearly are us, not Them) are responsible for everything good and if we stoped putting up with you losers well then you’d see!” In several thousand pages with odious monologues. Rand is an interesting I’m how her experience of life shaped her, but that doesn’t mean we should take her fiction seriously - let alone her “philosophy”

I read the book years ago. (I literally lost a bet.)

At first, I really found the characters to be hollow caricatures, and hated every minute reading it.

As the book went on, it grew on me. It's not about "rich beautiful people" at all, but more about something that resonates with people who build things (coders like us) and that feeling we get when we are dragged into a meeting filled with people who you sense do nothing but talk about talking about meeting about work.

Like many books of this nature, it has pieces that resonate and parts that fall flat. However, I found the parts that resonated to be powerful and useful.

Question:

Did you ever read the book?

I’ve read the book, although I think to be fair I gave up in the final monologue- which is just pages of excruciating exposition. The book just has one small flaw, Rand builds a world where her philosophy is true, and that world looks nothing like ours. It’s just absurd phantasy.

The beautiful thing is a funny jibe because it’s just so lazy to make your philosophically good characters physically superior too. It’s like if you put the slightest critical eye to the work it immediately creaks.

Nah. The book is a big metaphor used to explain the philosophy. Making the characters like that means they're harder to relate (I think to some degree, Rand thought she was Dagny) but easier to understand. Them being physically superior to me is a bridge between the abstract and the concrete of the philosophy, in that the characters embody their beliefs. As for the presumption that her philosophy is true as a premise for the book, I guess it depends on how you see objectivism, and let's not kid ourselves, where on the political spectrum you consider yourself to be. To me, it's about inspiring to be competent, self-sufficient, reliable, virtuous, and that the pursuit of that is what gives life meaning. To others, from what I've heard, it ranges from being a selfish asshole to a worse 50's version of Twilight. As for that world looking nothing like ours, I agree 3 times: 1 You and me probably live on different universes; 2 This world looks almost nothing like the gulch, and 3 our world is way worse than the one in the book :)

It's not a challenge to write a fiction book that paints a picture of a world that is better than ours. The problem isn't so much that the fiction is bad, it's that it's just entirely insufficient to be persuasive about real issues. It's like watching Star Trek and then deciding we should all live in a socialist utopia. Star Trek is very compelling, but there's a limit to how much it instructs us about the real world. Rand operates closer to a Peterson style self-help book than a real political philosophy.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”

"Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that “a flaw in the model ... that defines how the world works.”"

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27335454

Alan Greenspan was part of Rand's inner circle and a believer in her Philosophy of Rational Self-Interest.

Point of order. Models don't define squat. They describe. The world works as it pleases.

(Spoilers below).

As I got further through the book I liked it more and more, and the moment that stuck with me was Hank Rearden holding on, thinking he could "fix" things by keeping his steel mill open and working harder than ever before. He had extremely altruistic motives, and was literally putting his life on the line to do what he thought was right to help others.

A little while later when he finally gives in and sees things from the other side, he suddenly sees that he, in fact, was the problem, and not the solution at all. By prolonging the bad system he was making everything worse, despite giving his all to make things better. The harder he tried, the worse he made it.

I've spent many, many hours thinking about this lesson, and how it applies to my own life and actions.

Sometimes even when we try as hard as we can to do the right thing and make stuff better, we're actually making it worse.

Sometimes giving up is the best way to make something better.

Bob the Angry Flower's "Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later".

https://angryflower.com/348.html

I've read a fair few of her books (purely out of interest; I'm not inclined towards Objectivism). Atlas Shrugged seemed the least worthy. I found The Fountainhead to be both a better book and a saner text.

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