Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency.

1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.

Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.

Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?

Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.

View on HN

The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.

Hmm, the book in its whole is basically a manifesto for Rand's Objectivism. I think I'm mostly correct in painting it as a "rich people good, poor people bad". As I understand it, the villains in her book are the hordes of "looters" (aka proletariat) that is too lazy to create their own wealth and instead just steals from our cool class of Übermensches, that is solely responsible for the entire world's productivity, through the government. I find Rand's worldview a bit silly, but it's an understandable reaction to where she came from.

The main antagonists are James Rearden who is running the railroad and Lillian Rearden the rich wife and a socialite. Then high ranking professors, lobbyists, and generally the military and religious institutions. She thinks that rich people who get rich by scheming and lying are the villains. The titular character is working as a poor railroad hand for most of the book and that is seen as heroic.

Atlas Shrugged, more charitably perhaps despite its manifest flaws, seemed to me to be about the dangers of putting “the needs of the many” over individual rights, and how it can ultimately be self defeating for the whole.

Ehhh, is this really what the world is suffering from though? Too much equality?

Too much social conflicts caused by uncritical pursuit of “equality” (really, privileges).

I don’t think, “too much equality” was one of the themes. Rather, it was about too much centralized power over the individual. And yes I do think that’s somewhat relevant to understanding issues of today, including mass surveillance the centralization of technological control behind crypto-nationalized zaibatsus, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com