First 100 pages of Atlas Shrugged
Nov. 2nd, 2010 03:28 pmThere are many types of people in society. Intellectuals. Hard-workers. Manual labourers. The ruthless. Those who inherit monies and titles. The empathic. The driven. The organised. The small minded. The bureaucrats. In different situations, different sets of people may be most productive (for themselves and society) although obviously some are generally always positive and some generally always negative.
Often someone writes a book examining the contribution of one sort of person to society, often in the process focussing on those situations where theirs is the PRIMARY contribution and everyone else is dead weight and often actively harmful.
For instance, communism has a tendency to look at a situation where most of the contribution comes from labour, and correctly observe that if it's so, it's very unfair if someone else gets all of the benefits. In some situations this is very true, but in others it is far from the best approximation, and may be actively harmful if that conception is pushed as the mainstay of society.
Conversely, Ender's Game is mostly about how awesome it is that Ender is intelligent, empathic, and ruthless. People with some of those qualities identify with it very heavily, and in my opinion, it does a very good job of giving a plausible situation where Ender shines (many people point out this is rather contrived).
Much high fantasy is about how awesome scions of great families are. We experience some cognitive dissonance because we generally really like the story where that IS true, but we recognise that in the real world, children of great people are not necessarily great, and inherited absolute monarchies are not the best way to run the world.
Atlas Shrugged celebrates the contribution of driven, ambitious, well-organised and intelligent people, the sort of people who found their own companies and manage them in a very hands-on way. It does so, by setting them in a world where everyone else is small-minded and jealous and conspires to pull down anyone who shows any signs of personal achievement.
Unfortunately, this works quite well when the characters are under-managers who have to fight the scared-to-take-responsibility tradition-bound bigots upper-managers. You can get behind them and cheer. However, the majority of the book so far is set later on when they all own their own companies, and yet are constantly pulled down by the government and popular opinion. You can't help but feel this situation is unfairly artificial -- that although people scared of success is a real problem, it's artificial to imagine a world where this is everyone's prime motivation.
Like many other books/philosophies it takes a true insight, and then gets carried away and elevates it to a universal principle.
It's like, glorifying individual achievement is a very good thing to the extent that it leads us to take personal responsibility for stuff, and to strive to fulfil our great potential, but I'm not sure that the preeminent problem in society is that there's lots of people whose businesses would pull miracles out of their arses and save us all, but constricting government legislation prevents them. Conversely, more of a problem seem to be businesses engaged in perverse zero-sum games extracting money from the system without adding any value. And unfortunately, I don't think relaxing controls on capitalism is necessarily going to favour the value-adding people -- it's more likely to favour the parasites. I agree, free capitalism is better than banning any kind of progress and standing around with our hands over our ears chanting "we must all fail because it's fairer that way". But even if that message was vital at the time, I'm not convinced it's the most vital message we need to hear.
Often someone writes a book examining the contribution of one sort of person to society, often in the process focussing on those situations where theirs is the PRIMARY contribution and everyone else is dead weight and often actively harmful.
For instance, communism has a tendency to look at a situation where most of the contribution comes from labour, and correctly observe that if it's so, it's very unfair if someone else gets all of the benefits. In some situations this is very true, but in others it is far from the best approximation, and may be actively harmful if that conception is pushed as the mainstay of society.
Conversely, Ender's Game is mostly about how awesome it is that Ender is intelligent, empathic, and ruthless. People with some of those qualities identify with it very heavily, and in my opinion, it does a very good job of giving a plausible situation where Ender shines (many people point out this is rather contrived).
Much high fantasy is about how awesome scions of great families are. We experience some cognitive dissonance because we generally really like the story where that IS true, but we recognise that in the real world, children of great people are not necessarily great, and inherited absolute monarchies are not the best way to run the world.
Atlas Shrugged celebrates the contribution of driven, ambitious, well-organised and intelligent people, the sort of people who found their own companies and manage them in a very hands-on way. It does so, by setting them in a world where everyone else is small-minded and jealous and conspires to pull down anyone who shows any signs of personal achievement.
Unfortunately, this works quite well when the characters are under-managers who have to fight the scared-to-take-responsibility tradition-bound bigots upper-managers. You can get behind them and cheer. However, the majority of the book so far is set later on when they all own their own companies, and yet are constantly pulled down by the government and popular opinion. You can't help but feel this situation is unfairly artificial -- that although people scared of success is a real problem, it's artificial to imagine a world where this is everyone's prime motivation.
Like many other books/philosophies it takes a true insight, and then gets carried away and elevates it to a universal principle.
It's like, glorifying individual achievement is a very good thing to the extent that it leads us to take personal responsibility for stuff, and to strive to fulfil our great potential, but I'm not sure that the preeminent problem in society is that there's lots of people whose businesses would pull miracles out of their arses and save us all, but constricting government legislation prevents them. Conversely, more of a problem seem to be businesses engaged in perverse zero-sum games extracting money from the system without adding any value. And unfortunately, I don't think relaxing controls on capitalism is necessarily going to favour the value-adding people -- it's more likely to favour the parasites. I agree, free capitalism is better than banning any kind of progress and standing around with our hands over our ears chanting "we must all fail because it's fairer that way". But even if that message was vital at the time, I'm not convinced it's the most vital message we need to hear.