Atlas Shrugged Is a Terrible Book: A Response (And An Introduction To Bioshock(Again))

I usually don't do this, but there seemed to have been a controversy sparked in r/books on reddit where someone said that Atlas Shrugged is a Terrible Book. I would have replied there, but the comments were locked for obvious reasons. However, the poster had a terrible reason why they thought the book was terrible, and I would like to address the issues within. Here is the

Their reasoning is because:

It's a long winded love letter to capitalism, with engineers and CEOs being by far the smartest, purest and best beings on our Earth, basically Disney princesses in suits, with doves landing on their lapels and everything.

This alone is highly incorrect, as a person who's read the book and played Bioshock, and read the Bioshock book. To start, the book isn't about why capitalism is good, and Bioshock is not about why capitalism is bad. This is a meme based on something an Indian made on 9gag back when College Humor was a thing. In other words, very outdated and very ill-informed. Bioshock and Atlas Shrugged are about Objectivism, which connects to capitalism but combined with ethical egoism, skepticism, and secularism.

At that point, that's not capitalism being the problem, but rather more like atheism without a government is the problem. When people try to debunk Rand, they fail to realize what Bioshock's religious themes even meant in the game, as well as why there were religious themes to begin with. The major flaw with objectivism is that it promotes existentialism without theism or spirituality, which is what causes the great point of the chaos that is Rapture in Bioshock.

To make matters worse, nobody in Atlas Shrugged is a praised CEO. This is to say corporatism is part of objectivism, which actual objectivists reject. This is because a corporation requires a state to exist and objectivists reject statism. It's really simple, once you understand what the words mean. Engineers? Maybe they are seen as smart, but not at all the smartest according to the book.

The people who are praised in the book are anti-statists. That's it. In the game Bioshock, they don't even make an argument about if the state is good or bad(that's sort of in Infinite). Their main satire of the book is about objectivism and how it contradicts itself one put into action, no differently than if we took a book like Das Kapital and then showed it with a narrative about how bad its philosophy is.

Hell, Ayn Rand kind of already did that with We The Living, which was so powerful that it helped jumpstart the meme of "that wasn't real communism" since the 30s and then again in the 50s.

What really bugs me though is how... communist the subreddit appears at the glance of many comments responding to it. We get some that are awarded like one from a user that says:

Yeah, a pretty fundamental rule of a perfectly efficient free market is that you can't have monopolies or collusion—in fact, a perfect free market really shouldn't have much (if any) profit because if everyone were highly rational and there were full access to information and ease of entry and exit, supply would perfectly meet demand such that the price of commodities would be as low as possible.

A perfect free market shouldn't have much(if any) profit? That is literally saying communism is the way to a perfect free market. It's just saying "marxism good, capitalism bad" without actually giving a reason why. It's even praising the idea of high rationality, which is another way of saying "if we just limit everything possible that can be known, so that everyone follows a straight line at all times that correlates with everyone else's thought, then we can have this communism thing I say is best."

Sorry, but, no. That's not how things work.

They even create the worst strawman every with:

They produce efficiency. If you think efficiency is goodness, then that's excellent, but Rand CLEARLY DOESN'T if we are to take The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as examples

So... Rand's argument is that people (demand) don't actually know what they really want and need to be told by smart, good, better people (but not smart-yet-lying bad jealous people) to want the right things. And if they don't listen, then they are being irrational and should be punished for their stupidity/evil.

This entire misunderstanding of what both Rand and Bioshock are saying is totally cartoony. Rand is saying efficiency is best when directed to the individual, which is correct. The problem is that efficiency doesn't equal goodness when it's for a collective or the individual separately. It has to be for both to be good and efficiency has to then allow innovation and progress, with progress also allowing life to circulate.

To just say efficiency is good, that's not enough. We can be incredibly efficient at killing people and nuking people, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

The other misunderstanding is where they demonize the idea of people (demand) not knowing what they want. There are two very clear problems with this.

1. That's not Ayn Rand's philosophy

2. Why would it be the opposite?

We have to really think of this question here. Why would we expect people to know what's best for them? What's the point of school then? The person commenting is saying "we don't need school or to be taught how to be better people. We are born, basically, perfect." I don't know about you, but that doesn't convince me when we have little kids requiring firm teachings and hard lessons to learn how to function in society and socially, and even then we still don't know what we want. It's as if the person says indecisive people don't exist.

Congratulations, the next time you don't know what to order at the drive-thru, you stopped existing. Over 500 people upvoted this nonsensical baby argument that has nothing to do with Rand and has nothing to do with reality, which is pretty damn hard to do if someone has read her books.

Rand is not correct on everything. She's right on very few things, and Bioshock was a great look at what she got wrong. They are perhaps the most crucial elements to get wrong when it comes to making a philosophical system into a political system.

With that said, it's amazing how her "critics" are even more wrong while getting upvoted for being extra wrong.

I really like the cute moments where people realize the connections that exist, like how why a character is named Atlas. That is harmless and is a good thing. I'd rather someone be late to the party than to throw themselves headfirst into a dumpster.

This "communism in the book subreddit" is a concern for me. It's like the mask slipped for a second in that place. I know that it has millions of followers and there's passion behind Marxist rhetoric, but this is the kind of crack in the dam that lets in a flood. It starts with positive reinforcement from people agreeing with things that make them “feel good” and results in everyone downvoting when the truth is said. Remember, this is in a subreddit that’s supposed to be about books, and their hot posts are about how a book, that is well received in general because of how positively influential it was, is somehow terrible because of things that weren’t even about the book.

There’s plenty more lulz in the comment section of that dumpster fire, just look for the top-rated ones to find the most incorrect ones. This entire thing has made me want to do a redo on a Bioshock analysis I did a few years back because this means there’s at least a good amount of people still passionate about the subject, even if most of them are filthy commies. Hell, the best thing to come from me throwing the analysis around is if many of those Marxists have to face the realization that the game they are praising is actually pro-religion. They are so awestruck by the concept of no free will that lets egoists masturbate with glee that they can’t even understand that the game is about greek philosophy and Greek religions.

This goes to show, never forget about the bigger picture. Never claim you see the whole picture either. As we can see, people are able to read an entire book(assumingly) and literally come out of it knowing nothing about the book, because all they read was what they wanted to see. Not what was written on the pages. And this leads to another post I’m going to do about writing: how to read and the types of persuasion.

I can’t believe I have to now teach people how to understand words, but looking back at how many times I used to misunderstand what a book ways saying in my youth, I think I would have to do this before I can explain anything else and before I can even come out with my novel.

It’s logos, ethos, and pathos coming at you after the power of Matriarchy gets posted. Stay tuned!