When I was in my late teens—high school and
early college—I remember having the persistent suspicion that I was different
than everybody else. Better, really. I saw things more clearly then they did, I
had a richer inner life. I was the only person I knew who saw
everything there was to see. Everybody else had stuffing for brains.I know now that I was just being a schmuck. Pretty much every teenager thinks these things, and most of them grow out of it and become functioning adults who can see their own flaws and recognize the good qualities (along with the flaws) in other people. Meaningful human society is built on the understanding of adults, not on the delusions of teenagers.
I made almost every mistake that an arrogant, mediocre teenage boy can make except for one: I did not read Atlas Shrugged. I bought it and displayed it proudly on my shelf. I even told people that I had read it. But it was 1200 pages, and I was far too important at the time to go in for reading long books.
I did not, in fact, read Atlas Shrugged until last month. As a 46 year-old well entrenched in my own left-of-center political beliefs, I did not fall under the spell that has entranced so many of Ayn Rand’s readers. But I understood it. More to the point, I recognized it. And I knew without a doubt that, had I read the novel as an 18-year old boy (when one is supposed to read Atlas Shrugged) it would have confirmed and given voice to all of my adolescent delusions of grandeur. And it would have taught me that thinking like an 18 year old boy was the only way to create utopia.
This aggressive utopian thinking was the only thing that really surprised me when I actually read Atlas Shrugged. I expected it to be a harsh-but-plausible critique of liberal utopian thinking. And the first two-thirds of the book are exactly that. In these first two sections, the novel’s heroine, railroad tycoon Dagny Taggart, struggles mightily to keep her trains running as the government slips further and further into motivation-destroying socialism. At the beginning of the novel, she is surrounded by other captains of industry fighting the same fight. But her equals disappear one by one, leaving Dagny and her lover, Hank Reardon, to fight an entire nation bent on getting something for nothing.
I found much of this critique to be admirable. I agree with Mario Vargas Llosa that “we must mistrust Utopias; they usually end up in holocausts.” Utopian thinking does not map well onto human nature, as human beings are not well suited to all thinking alike, which is what all utopias ultimately require. As Stalin and Mao discovered, the only way to get everybody thinking the same is to kill the people who think differently. This is one of the great lessons of the 20th century. Bravo, Ms. Rand (I thought), for turning it into a reasonably compelling story.
But then Part III happened.
Utopia exists after all, we discover—what Rand describes as the “Utopia of Greed.” Dagny finds this utopia when her plane crashes deep in the Colorado mountains, where she meets all of the people who have been disappearing for the last 12 years. She also meets John Galt, the übermencsh über alles who has been convincing all of the superior, productive people of the world to go on strike.
The thing is, though, that these immensely talented artists, inventors, scientists, and industrialists have created a pastoral utopia right out of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. Brilliant scientists are happily raising pigs and planting small corn crops. World-moving industrialists have set up blacksmith shops. And great composers sweep floors by day and write their best symphonies by night. Everybody is happy because people are working for only for themselves and consuming the full value of their labor. It turns out that this is all that the ultra-rich really want. Money was never an end in itself--it way a way for one productive human being to produce the best he can and exchange the value he creates for the best of someone else.
Yeah, that’s just how it would work out. I’m sure that, if we could somehow convince Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Stephen Hawking, Anthony Hopkins, and Bob Dylan into a hidden valley they would produce a pastoral utopia in a matter of weeks. What does Trump need casinos for when he can milk goats and exchange the milk for indestructible suspenders? Or we could (and this is Rand’s real point) just do away with all taxes and government regulations, and these avatars of excellence would enrich themselves beyond anybody’s wildest dreams and somehow, in the process, save us from our sorry, mediocre selves.
And I (the younger version) would be right there with them. For that is what utopia looks like to a cocky, self-righteous teenage boy.
