Atlas Falls

I read some of Atlas Shrugged these past few days. The idealogy is all messed up. I think Ayn Rand was (rightly) disgusted at the parasitic socialist ideas she saw. Great. But she denies the spiritual realm, and is left to come up with her own definition of good and evil. That definition (from what I read in the book itself and in writings about the book) seems to be that Unrestricted Capitalists are morally "good" and everyone else is some varying degree of moral "evil." Interestingly enough, she smirks at the idea of "all things in moderation," which is a bummer, because she's obviously a powerful intellect. Church Teaching condemns both extremes of unrestricted Capitalism and total Communism, as both degrade the humanity of the person.

Also, the way that Rand seperates her protagonists and antagonists (I don't think they earn the title of hero or villain) is irritating. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to her idealogy if she showed that human beings are a mix of various values and drives, and that there are a lot of people out there trying to do good (or evil) the best they know how. Instead she seems to split the world down between two types of people: the workaholic, misunderstood, passionate-about-gain individualistic materialists, and the whining, conniving, parasitic, deceptive, unmotivated slugs who pretend they care about "society" and "people" and "morals" but really just want to destroy all those shining examples of excellence who call themselves Objectivists.

In all fairness, I got sick of the novel after about 50 pages, skimmed until about page 80, and gave up and wrote Sparknotes. The book was really well written, but even going into it intending to like it (I had heard good things and wanted to see Ayn Rand's world in action), I soon got depressed and tired of trying to sympathize with her totally unsympathetic antagonists. I liked them only slightly more than her heartless cardboard-cutout antagonists.

A lot of Christian stories out there get written with the intention of being a beliefs-soapbox, and end up just being a lame story. I am a Christian, and I'll admit this. It's morbidly comforting to know that when Objectivist Athiests write from the same soapbox, the result is even lamer.

~GJD