Atlas Shrugged - Review + Musings on Postmodernism

If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, I strongly recommend you read it. Treat it like any perspective: incomplete, flawed, and beautiful. Come in with a truly open mind and don’t try to pick fights.

A little while ago, I—taking inspiration from Tracingwoodgrains—asked if I should read Atlas Shrugged. I’ve obviously known about the book for years and even had the privilege(?) of watching both the 2011 and 2012 live-action movie adaptations with a conservative family friend¹. I grew up in an extremely literary family—both my parents were literature PhD students, after all—but Atlas Shrugged wasn’t the type of book I was likely to encounter as a child, simply because a diatribe in favor of human greed wasn’t part of my parents’ taste function.

The overwhelming majority of people who responded urged me to read the book—so I did. I had, years ago, tried to begin The Fountainhead and bounced off. But this isn’t the first time I’ve come back to a book, or author, after being recommended by people I trust. For example, a fellow PhD and close friend challenged my perspective on Nietzsche² and claimed it was, in fact, “life affirming.” On a second pass, where previously I had seen nothing but madness, I now saw imperfect hints of real profundity. I haven’t become a Nietzschean—anymore than I am a Christian—but I’m much more sympathetic to those who are.

So I read Atlas Shrugged. My biases going in were the a priori biases that just exist among all people of the social class that is expected to have some opinion, even if you are not expected to have read the material itself. One, Objectivism was not a real philosophy—aka it had huge holes. Two, Ayn Rand was a bad writer. And three, the villains would be cartoonishly evil and the heroes would be cartoonishly good. Having read the book, I’m not sure I think any of these actually hold water.

The headline is that I would give this book an 8/10. It is pretty good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a palate cleanser. You get the book’s point pretty early, and I think you could honestly set it down whenever and miss very little. “People, not systems, are the highest ethical judge”. The morality presented is odd and I would argue incomplete³, but it is sincere and honest.

But I also want to yap about modern society and postmodernism⁴—two of my favorite subjects. So I’ll do that. Basically, I think that postmodernism presented a very solid critique of society—morality is complicated and often leads to weird contradictions—but then got scared by the implications of it and so imposed a meta-meta-narrative on our cultural understanding of ourselves. This is totally arbitrary, and at any moment, as a society, we can just become 10% more honest. Hypocrisy is bad but inevitable, and it is a job for each batch of Americans to iteratively improve this collective project. So in that vein, I’m going to touch on each of the “prestige” criticisms of the book and reflect on why I think they exist, as well as share some further ponderings on postmodernism.