Atlas Shrugged (Centennial Ed.)

And at that point, just I got caught up on you're special. That was enough, you know? So I think I started kind of just using it as the one way in that environment I could feel special.

I was so overwhelmed by the diagnosis that it provided on our society.

And from that perspective, I would agree with her, but I would not say that like, I would not align myself with, I would definitely not at the age of 34, align myself now with where I believed that I was when I was like 22, right?

It is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Have you read Atlas Shrugged? ... It's my favorite book. No book's a perfect answer, and there's a lot about the book I don't like. But basically, the root principle is the ability for people to vote away their own agency over time.

No.

I like it more than Atlas Shrugged.

I really liked Atlas Shrugged. I was a big Ayn Rand teenager.

One book is one form of economy. The other book is another form of economy. So they're debating Atlas Shrugged and Communist Manifesto, which Jay, it's kind of like the complete opposite of religions in economy.

Whitaker Chambers has the nerve to call her a fascist in his review for National Review.

I started reading iron Rand

I've just been rereading out the shrug which I do oddly enough about every 15 years and I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine it might be the core problem so she assumes that self-interest is the appropriate governing principle but she never really defines what constitutes self-interest and that's a big problem so because you can have narrowly hedonic self-interest and Rand actually wanders into that territory because her protagonists, Rourke and Dagnitaggart and so forth do have and express quite continually their right to do whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want to and that they should be guided by no other principle in some sense than the gratification of their own desires but that's exactly what the hedonists on the left say and so this begs the question of what constitutes the individual whose self-interest is its stake and where Rand makes a mistake is she doesn't understand that there's a set of constraints that operate on what constitutes individual self-interest

I think that enlightened self-interest and social interest are exactly the same thing and I don't think that Rand understood that right is that she seems to believe that there's this internal self which is the part that's self-interested that's almost like the internal self, the radical leftists insist upon being able to establish such things as gender self identification right that's 100% autonomous and unmoored that can operate itself as an autonomous governing principle it's almost like a deity and it's the same it's the conservative version of the same mistake that the radicals on the progressive side are making

You talked about you yourself rereading Atlas Schrogg I do that with about the same frequency and the last time I did three or four or five years ago it's because I had a junior colleague at the policy organization I was leading prior to being adhered to as a capital O objectivist and I thought well let me reread Rand and see if I'm missing anything and be a good colleague a good mentor and I realized this actually the sort of come full circle rereading Atlas Schrogg four or five years ago ironically is what made me realize my own deficiencies in thought about the free market and a couple of other shibbleness of the right which is to say that so many very thoughtful men and women who are devotees of Rand make the mistake that she's making and they haven't thought through the consequences of that as it relates for example to regulatory capture

The way that Rand maneuvers around the complexity of those questions say with regards to Reagan's her capture is that she attributes to her protagonists a kind of a vague nobility of character right so that it's distasteful for Rorke and Taggart for example to engage in any plaintive negotiations with government agencies right it's beneath them to ask for favors from government but she never establishes why it's beneath them right it's vaguely associated in principle with their self-interest and their implicit heroism but it's very difficult to derive that heroism from that narrow self-interest and I think the reason it's difficult to do that is because it doesn't thrive from that narrow self-interest it derives from the necessity of a higher order self-interest that has the community as an intrinsic part of itself and she's very weak on that front right because her characters Taggart's a good example and so is Rorke works in a very unhappy marriage and Dagny Taggart is single those people aren't bound by like they're all noble individual heroes who stand alone they're not well situated in happy marriages they're not as couples well situated in functional families but she's almost Rousseau she's almost Rousseauian in that regard she seems to regard any form of higher order social involvement as an impediment to the noble nobles striving of the disaggregated individual and so it's very strange to see that dovetail with the more radical ideas of the progressive left and it's definitely a flaw in her thinking right both both from the perspective of characterization but also from the perspective of ethics that narrow self-interest that's not the that's not the highest self that's not the true self it's just the immature and impulsive self and she tries to make that noble and it's not noble it's just immature

So that's exactly why I think that's why her work never hits it's like Rand is not Dostoevsky right there's a shallowness about her work that's I like reading it it's exciting it's adventurous it's a romantic adventure you know and it's got a strong hero narrative element but it's definitely not literature and I think the reason for that is that her characterizations are too they're too simplified you won't be expecting this reference I'm sure but I grew up reading Louis Lemur books you know written in the 20th century but they were 20th century versions of the western dime novels of the late 1800s who read them as a boy and every time I guess I've read Atlas Shug three or four or five times I don't mean to be too offensive toward Rand followers but we've established that feelings are okay to hurt their her characters are just as flat as the great heroes and Louis Lemur novels who showed up in these western towns and they were rugged individuals right in there as a as a 10 or 11 year old boy those were good things to read in the same way that there's a certain value to reading Rand's work but it's not literature yeah certainly not Dostoevsky and in the in the great book schools that I've led Rand had no part of the curriculum and and I'll just make this final point if I may on on this thread the way this plays out in conservative politics and by that I mean not elected officials but to some extent the donor class but these are these are thoughtful men and women most of whom have made their their own wealth themselves is that they think that those characters from Atlas Shug are the model but in reality I mean almost without exception as I think about these men and women in their own lives they are living out that higher order thinking or set of values far better than Rand's own characters in other words they themselves these devotees of Rand personify the limitations of the book it can be hard to explain that to them because they're they're so committed to this mode of thought but the point is the more of those devotees of Rand who come to grips with those limitations the quicker the American political right will be able to resolve this conundrum we have about the community and about the free market

Atlas shrugged the boys who challenged Hitler the Da Vinci code and unbroken

and I really enjoy there's a book by by Ein Rand called the new left the anti-industrial revolution and it was written at the time that this was happening and one of the analyses is basically there's a transition between the old left and the new left where the old left claimed to be for industry for productivity for prosperity and what happened is that was clearly not achieved by their policies communism led to the devastation of industry the malfunction of industry widespread poverty and Rand said well you know the left basically had a choice are you going to stay with your anti-capitalism or are you going to embrace capitalism because you really care about industry and productivity right right and actually what they did was they they kept their anti-capitalism and they looked for new reasons to support anti-capitalism and in the 60s they decided on this issue of environment and it was a convenient issue in a number of ways one is the pro-capitalism side didn't do a very good job with it particularly rhetorically they didn't make the point that well good environments are made possible by prosperity so the idea of a good environment in a humanistic way was co-opted by the anti-capitalist who had no right to it whatsoever I mean look at the Soviet Union and an environment but they they they owned that value issue but then they packaged it with this hostility toward human impact as such and what they really did brilliantly was they took over the schools so they put in the schools this idea that human impact is bad and especially the idea that it's inevitably self-destructive because the planet is this delicate nurture that our impact ruins and that has permeated the whole educational system where people think that we inherently are destroyers of the planet and it has permeated the scientific community

the Ayn Rand answer where in, you know, Atlas Shrugged, the bad people are all the people who imitate. They're the second handers. They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else.

The Daily Wire has acquired exclusive rights to adapt Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged into a television series.

Atlas Shrugged is famously the least filmable thing of all time.

I hope they do shot for shot that one like 70 page speech that What's-His-Name goes on.

When he reads Atlas Shrugged and falls in love with objectivism, he describes himself as like a capitalist insurgent terrorist.

They bought exclusive TV rights to one of the books. I forget if it was Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

And then Bezos, it'll just be a pile of money. He'll just be sitting on a pile of money, right? I think just to freak everyone out behind the back of their head, they'll have just Atlas shrugged and like mind comfort or something. Just totally freaked everybody out.

someone said he was arguing Atlas Shrug while I was doing a sophisticated analysis of the tech and economic landscape around tech

I read Atlas Shrugged? Yes. James Galt. What is it? Galt. Galt. Yeah. I read it and then I went.

All right, I was obsessed with this book called Atlas Shrugged. And my favorite character was Francisco DankoDian. Why not John Galt? That's too hard for us.

There was a book by Anne Rand called Atlas Shrugged. And I read that book, which is where did they go into hiding? And so I already bought my hiding place.

Iran makes this distinction in Atlas shrugged.

Iran makes this distinction in Atlas shrugged.

I'm thrilled to announce that Daily Wire Plus has optioned the exclusive rights to one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Atlas Shrugged. There's never been a definitive series adaptation of Atlas. There will be now and it will be on Daily Wire Plus.

We buy the book Atlas Shrugged and tell everyone that we read it, even though we never even glanced at the first page. These are the follies of youth.

with the exception of the kind of people who still think that Atlas shrugged was a literary masterpiece.

they all read Ayn Rand's novel and like The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and then they stopped reading after that

It's all in Ayn Rand's famous book, Atlas Puttage.

Really?

That's...

That's my literate crowd.

I read that in college, actually.

It's all in Ein Rein's famous book, Atlas Puttage.

It's corruption. Really? That's that's my literate crowd.

I read that in college, actually. This is corruption in plain sight.

He said because you're Dagny. You're the heroine. You're Dagny in The Atlas Shrugged. And you have finally come here. And I knew you were coming. He said, you're my Dagny. And I'm the book's hero, John Galt.

She was Keith's girlfriend for eight of the nine years she was in NXIVM. She was the woman who Keith seduced by lending her his copy of Atlas Shrugged.

He said because you're Dagny. You're the heroine. You're Dagny in The Atlas Shrugged. And you have finally come here. And I knew you were coming. He said, you're my Dagny. And I'm the book's hero, John Galt.

I will say Atlas Shrugged is an extraordinary book.

60 years ago, Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged.

The book is set in a dystopian United States on the brink of economic collapse.

Ayn Rand's message, government is rigged, America is broken and you should quit.

She eventually became a conservative icon, and Atlas Shrugged the quitters' Bible.