Monday, February 21, 2011
Atlas Shrugged movie
Do we really need this? Ayn Rand's mammoth novel is being made into a trilogy of films, the Star Wars of the Libertarian\Tea Party crowd. Frankly, I've never understood the appeal of Rand's writings. I don't find her to be particularly individualistic, whatever the claims of her supporters. Certainly, socialist Jack London's Martin Eden stacks up quite well against Atlas Shrugged as a study of individualism. I do think that Anthem is a reasonably scary, well done dystopia, but again I don't think it measures up to the dystopias of Jack London or George Orwell. We all, of course, know why capitalist-friendly Hollywood is producing Ayn Rand, but not Jack London. It doesn't take massive intellectual skills to see John Galt and company call the rest of the world "phoney". It does take such reading skills to understand why Martin becomes the social pariah he does, even as a successful individualist. Oh well.
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I read Atlas Shrugged back when I was trying to figure out my politics. I knew at the time that mainstream American politics was BS so I checked out other approaches.
ReplyDeleteMy response to Atlas Shrugged in my gut was that it didn't ring true to reality in any sense. Objectivism applied to reality would lead to massive boom/bust cycles and I think eventually a re-ordering of society closer to feudalism with landlords evolving into a new form of kings.
I ran across the Anarchist FAQ and Noam Chomsky and they pretty much reflect the reality I see.