I don't know about the guy whose posts you're replying to, but I HAVE read "Atlas Shrugged," several times. It is indeed a work of fiction, but to say that her philosophical points are grounded in reality is nonsense, unless you accept her description of American life without question.
Which you really cannot do. When somebody describes the United States in a book that ran to over 1,000 paperback pages without mentioning that ten percent of its citizens were, during the so-called Golden Age she describes and right up to the time Atlas Shrugged was published, kept in virtual slavery because of institutionalized racism. How is this "grounded in reality?"
Can you name even ONE of the various inventions she describes that exists today? Rearden metal? Sound waves as a weapon of mass destruction? Power drawn from static electricity in the air? Even shale oil isn't profitable yet? And the passenger railroads of her heroine were sold to the government about fifty years ago because no private corporation has ever figured out how to run them profitably.
On the other hand, the government she so despises can claim credit for having developed atomic energy, putting men on the moon, inventing the Internet, and most of the communications developments which are based upon satellite technology. So exactly how is ANYTHING Rand wrote about in "Atlas Shrugged" grounded in reality? It's grounded in exactly what you said it was -- FICTION.
Even Galt's Gulch -- Rand's Nirvana on Earth where everyone was "moral" and therefore the system worked -- is a obvious fraud. You don't build a copper smelter in the mountains of Colorado by yourself, as Francisco D'Anconia is supposed to have done, and even if you could do this (without a labor force?), how long would a valley belching smoke -- as smelters do -- remain hidden? Galt's Gulch worked because Rand simply dispensed with the realities of industrial production and assumed that a small handful of people could create such materials out of thin air. She describes how Dagny Taggart would build a railroad up a mountainside in Galt's Gulch, but how could that ever have been done without the industrial infrastructure that railroads require? There is NO reality in what she writes.
Altas Shrugged works only if you submit to a massive suspension of belief. It is legitimate to ask one's readers to suspend belief in a work of fiction -- it's done all the time -- and I would be the last to deny that Atlas Shrugged is a well-written novel. What it is NOT is a model upon which to base anything REAL, and that is what two generations of rightists have tried to get people to do?
If Rand were only a novelist trying to sell a book, I'd have no argument with her. But in fact, she was intensely political. In the 1970s, she published a small magazine -- the Diode -- which served as a political primer for her followers. By a wild coincidence, I used to read it and was also reading the house organ of the Chinese Communist Party (Peking People's Review) at the same time (some left-wing friends, knowing my anti-Communist views, got me a subscription as a joke). They were strikingly similar -- not in their political views, of course, but in the slavish way in which the line promoted by the Leader (Rand and Mao) was adhered to by all the other articles in the publications -- even to the point of repeating the same catch phrases.
But Rand scrupulously avoided dealing with a critical contradiction in her political -- the fact that the leaders of the political party which she supported were NOTHING like the people in her novel. Richard Nixon used the police powers of government to do exactly what she feared Communism would do. The author whose heroine told a national radio audience, with pride, that she had committed adultery found herself supporting politicians whose religiosity was stifling. She called upon her followers to vote for the man who had instituted wage-and-price controls, "as the lesser of two evils." I'm not making this up, friend. It was in the Diode. So not only were her beliefs not grounded in reality, but when she DID confront the reality of American politics, she sold her beliefs down the river.
Finally, if you want to read a mirror image of Atlas Shrugged, try "The Iron Heel," by Jack London, which also posits an America that never existed (there are no blacks in his book, either, nor is the civil war mentioned at all). The book is supposed to be a description of the dark days of capitalism as seen from a prosperous socialist society of the future. Unlike Rand, London TRIED to ground his book in reality by using copious footnotes to demonstrate the evils of the capitalism of his day -- Rand, to the contrary, simply says that the capitalism of the post-Civil War period was good and moral and expects you to agree. The footnotes don't help, because the conclusions London draws are as fanciful as Galt's Gulch.
Look, if you want to have a SERIOUS discussion of Atlas Shrugged, I'm up for it, but I will not put up with the kind of thing you've done here, which is to state a point (that her philosophy is grounded in reality) that is crucial to your argument and is completely non-self-evident. I've been debating Randians since 1961, and with some of them I have had productive discussions -- the ones who don't try to tell me that Atlas Shrugged describes something real.
The rest, who try to tell me that anyone who opposes unfettered capitalism is a "bullshitting thief," bore me. Which are you?
And I haven't belonged to a union since 1963.
