Atlas Hugged

In my experience, people who've read Ayn Rand's books either love them or hate them. I'm one of the few who fall somewhere in between. When I first read The Fountainhead  and Atlas Shrugged  in the 1980s, I was blown away. Those books portray the power of the free individual in ways I had never thought about before. Since then, I've grown more critical of Rand's outlook because it doesn't include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact. Yet I still believe firmly that her books deserve attention, and in that regard, Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made  provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rand's world view.

The Fountainhead   is a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society. Howard Roark is an architect who cares nothing about the world's approval; his only concerns are his integrity and the perfection of his designs. What strikes me as still relevant is its central insight—that it isn't "collective action" that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it's the initiative and creativity of the individual. The novel's "second-handers," as Rand called them—the opportunistic Peter Keating, who appropriates Roark's architectural talent for his own purposes, and Ellsworth Toohey, the journalist who doesn't know what to write until he knows what people want to hear—symbolize a mindset that's sadly familiar today.

The Fountainhead   makes that parasitic existence look contemptible. Near the end of the book, Roark is on trial for demolishing a building he had designed—he had insisted it be built exactly as drawn, but when some bureaucrats alter the structure, Roark feels he has no choice but to dynamite it. Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society." Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another's achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.

After finishing The Fountainhead, Rand spent 14 years building a movement around what she called "objectivism" and composing the massive novel that would become Atlas Shrugged  (1957). "Who is John Galt?" is the first line of Rand's 1,000-page book, and by the end it's clear she wants everyone to think, and act, as if they were him. Galt had been, as we discover only as the plot unfolds, head engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, which had produced a motor powered by static electricity. His superiors, however, had decided to restructure the company along Marxist or "collectivist" lines, and Galt had left the company. He leads an effort to get the nation's greatest business leaders to go on a kind of strike. One by one, they disappear, making their way to a hidden valley in Colorado and leaving the now increasingly collectivist U.S. government to try and preserve the country on its own, with no help from these giants of industry. What happens, of course, is that the government collapses, and Galt emerges to reorder society along strictly free-market lines. Granted, the plot is farfetched, but that doesn't mean it's not enormously influential. Another new book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right  by Jennifer Burns, examines Rand's natural attraction for conservatives—Alan Greenspan was a member of the Saturday-night salon she held in her New York apartment (though William F. Buckley called objectivism "stillborn" in a column he wrote when she died). All told, Atlas has sold more than 6 million copies since it was published just over 50 years ago.

Why? I think at a fundamental level many people recognize Rand's essential truth—government doesn't know best. Those in power in Washington—or indeed in Columbia, S.C.—often lead themselves to believe that our prosperity depends on their wisdom. It doesn't. The prosperity and opportunity we enjoy comes ultimately from the creative energies of the country's businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, and inventors. The longer it takes this country to reawaken to this reality, the worse we—and in turn, our children's standard of living—will be.

When the economy took a nosedive a year ago—a series of events that arguably began when the government-sponsored corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went broke—many Americans, myself included, watched in disbelief as members of Congress placed blame on everyone and everything but government. This wasn't new in 2008. It's an act we've seen over and over since the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. For that reason, I think, those passages in Atlas Shrugged  foreshadow what might happen to our country if there is no change in direction. As Rand shows in her book, when the government is deprived of the free market's best minds, it staggers toward collapse.