Atlas has shrugged
How Ayn Rand predicted the disintegration of our infrastructure
Inspired by Mike Solana’s Tweet I thought I’d write a short article about Atlas Shrugged and how it applies to 2023. This isn’t intended to be a review, so much as an exploration of Rand’s predictive power and a gentle push to read this book if you haven’t done so already.
Bring on the B team
Here’s the sunburnt Capitalist on the cusp of adulthood, spending his 18th birthday with the Captain on a sailing trip down to the Dry Tortugas. The vast turquoise horizon and invigorating sea air, a fine setting for indulging in Atlas Shrugged. Two years later I read the entire book again, and I’ve been meditating on the key themes ever since.
While I could write a 5,000 word essay on Atlas Shrugged no problemo, today I only want to focus on a single idea: the foresight with which Ayn Rand predicted the collapse of our country’s infrastructure.
In Atlas Shrugged Rand envisions a society that rewards political obedience and ideological conformity over competence. The commissioner of a power plant, president of a corporation and chief engineer of an ironworks concern are selected because of their political leanings rather than industry knowledge. Does any of this sound familiar?
The natural outcome of having a bunch of politically correct idiots in charge is that the country begins to fall apart. Technical skills keeps a forge lit and a train on its tracks, not doctrine and rightthink. While it’s unfair to blame our current calamities entirely on politics, one does have to wonder to what extent cultural tyranny has played a role in these disasters. Are we putting people in charge because they’re the most qualified technicians, or because they say the right things and haven’t been cancelled (yet)? That’s an open ended question, answer as you see fit.
Here’s the plan for this article. I’m going to share five passages from Atlas Shrugged, each quote followed by a real-life event from the past couple of weeks. Let’s start with the elephant in the room, East Palestine…
She saw a tangle of rails, wheels, beams and sparks, slanting down like a gigantic staircase, going down into the earth, with an occasional axle, thrown out of it, bouncing back to the surface as if to say that it had reached the bottom, that the fall was over, that it was time to start climbing up again.
The plane gave a sudden dip and a lurch, as if it had been struck. Dagny heard a loud explosion and the tearing of metal. The world spun around her. She felt as if she were falling headlong through space, with a roar in her ears. The crash came like the shattering of a pane of glass. There was a sound of cracking and breaking, a rush of wind and snow, a grinding of metal, a shock that shook them to the bones, and then a silence.
The Associated Steel plant was gone. It had been torn out of the ground as if it had never existed, except for the chunks of metal and concrete that lay scattered in the distance. It was a great, gaping hole in the earth, with twisted girders and shattered walls protruding from its rim, as if the ground had opened up and swallowed a section of the world.
She saw the glow of flames against the sky and the molten-red of the metal melting in the heat; she saw the blackened ruins of the mill, twisted and buckled like the victims of an unspeakable torture, while the fire raged on, spreading to the shacks of the workers, who had fled, leaving everything they owned behind.
The lights went out in the city of New York. It was a Saturday night in November, 10:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The blackout was so sudden, so complete and so silent that for a few seconds he sat motionless, wondering if he had gone blind.
Modern crisis
I was on the fence about writing this article until I saw the headline of the environmental scientists dying in a plane crash. That pushed me over the edge because that is exactly the type of story you’ll find in the book, and it’s why people are saying: “Atlas Shrugged, now in the non-fiction section.”
I’ll conclude by asserting that while Atlas Shrugged is a great story it’s only that: a story. I believe that if you attempted to enforce Rand’s worldview on a country its society would fall apart. Who fixes the sewer in Galt’s gulch? That being said, I still find Atlas Shrugged to be immensely interesting and as you saw with these quotes; a prescient foreshadowing of our modern plight.
These are good analogies as to what happens when society ceases to value meritocracy. I will disagree with you on the book being just a story. As someone who also fled the USSR, I saw Rand’s fiction as direct commentary on collectivism and censorship which became extreme in the Soviet Union and resulted in total ineptitude in all levels of commerce. We’re now in a situation where the elite class in the US is creating a Revolution from Above - imposing the values of equity (critical theory has a lot in common with communist theory) through media sources, educational institutions, and corporate culture, at the expense of individual rights, freedom of speech and meritocracy - values which are still supported by the majority of Americans. This is indeed reminiscent of a band of Communists taking over and imposing a form of government that the majority of the people in Russia did not support by silencing and terrorizing.
“The commissioner of a power planet”
*plant
Great essay!
I’ve been wondering for years what’s going to happen when all the “old guys” (and women) start to retire and/or die. I guess we’re finding out.
With the power outages, I wonder whether competent staff being pushed out because they refused the novel injection could have anything to do with it.