Please forgive me, ILP’s servers.
It’s not to punish you… please believe me.
On one hand, I find Amy Pollard’s deconstructive take on Plato’s Republic in Democracy is Sick (issue 101) worthy of consideration. It offers a reasonable counterargument to the general assertion that The Republic laid out the framework for the many despotic regimes that followed it. And the fact that it was written in dialogue form would seem to offer some juice to her ironist interpretation: that Plato was just acting as a kind of gadfly making insincere statements for the sake of discourse. But there are a couple of problems she’ll have to deal with sooner or later.
For one, we could easily apply her evidence (the lack of consistency in Plato’s arguments) to any writer we want to. I mean how do we know the lack of logical consistency in any writer is not on purpose as compared to the cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization that tends to show itself in the authoritarian mindset? For instance, an apologist could apply the same approach to Mein Kampf by arguing that Hitler was just asking us to reconsider our basic assumptions about what is right. Unless there is something in the text that explicitly states that the writer is being satirical or insincere, you have to consider taking it at face value –that is before those that commit atrocities do.
But the deeper problem lies in the metaphysical foundation Plato establishes for the Republic and that she hints at near the end of the article when she says “Plato outlines the ideal city state: now Athens must strive to emulate its virtues.” This suggests the aim high to hit the mark principle that has defined the dichotomy between the Apollonian classicist and the Dionysian break that started with Romanticism and Rousseau and haunts us to this day –such as the analytic tendency, in its more dogmatic forms, to smugly dismiss what Mikhail Epstein refers to as lyrical philosophy. If we look at Plato’s realm of Ideal Forms, that which we can tap into through effort (i.e. reason) and for which everything in reality are imperfect copies, and extract the ethical implication that virtue is a matter of immolating those ideal forms as close as we can, we can see the underlying justification for the Republic and the vertical hierarchy that Plato explicitly based on the relationship between the mind, heart, and body and correlated to the different social levels.
And it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand the sensibility that Plato might have been working under. At the time, civilization was young. It was just crawling out of the muck. Therefore, it would seem perfectly natural for people, out of a sense of generational confidence, to assume: civilization good; nature bad. It was assumed that the constructs of our minds must be given privilege over our natures (our hearts and bodies) to make civilization work. Likewise, it took hundreds of generations under despots, based on Plato’s model, to make the romantic break into democracy.
But the bigger issue was Rand’s well-known propensity towards the heroic and mythological coupled with her clear disgust for her antagonists. Her influence by Shakespeare made itself more and more apparent as it went along, especially in part two -which seems strange given Shakespeare’s clarity on the corruption of power. What resulted was a vacillation between a comic book dialogue and a classical propensity towards speechmaking. On one hand, there were lines of dialogue that sounded like something off a Lichtenstein painting such as when James Taggart, an antagonist by virtue of his wanting to serve “the public good”, advised his sister, Tagny:
“You can’t leave. It’s a violation of the directive.”
Or this line by Reardon (typical of the false dilemma the story presented) as he stomped away from an agent of the State Scientific Agency:
“One of these days, you’re going to have to decide which side your on.”
Even the repetition of the line “Who is John Galt?”, which threaded throughout the narrative and was passed about like some cultish inside joke, as well as the mystery character himself who went about collecting high achievers like a shepherd gathering his flock, took on a hokey comic book aura.
On the other hand, there were these Shakespearian dialogues that, for the too obvious purpose of effect, seemed delegated to the more heroic characters. Esai Morales, for instance, as Francisco d’Anconia, skulked about like some modern Iago, almost shaman-like, dispensing wisdom in resonant soliloquies on the folly of fools who do not know what they do and the unrecognized wisdom of Lassie Faire Capitalism:
“When money seizes to be the tool of men by which men deal with other men, then men become the tools of other men.”
And this might have seemed a poignant point if it wasn’t for the fact that no one I know of is trying to get rid of money and that, as anyone who is not self-employed would know, even with money men are the tools of other men.
But this Shakespearean element got even more vulgar in part two with the heroics of Hank Reardon as he stood before court accused of violating the “Fair Share Act”, that which imposed a limit on how much one company can sell to another –another act committed by petty bumbling bureaucrats that eluded me as to what the purpose would be.
“I do not recognize this court,” he stated in bold defiance, then proceeded to indict government policies that could not, in any dimension, exist. At one point, at the mention of “the public good”, he responded, yet again, with the same smug disregard he did earlier:
“I do not recognize the good of others as justification of my existence.”
And let’s be fair here. As Robert Reich convincingly points out in SuperCapitalism, we cannot expect corporations to act as moral agents. They exist solely to create profit for their shareholders. It is government that must serve as check and balance to corporate power. But then, it is government power, regardless of what function it serves, that Rand and the moviemakers wanted to undermine. At another point, Reardon proceeded to frame the “public good” in terms of being defined by:
“….those who would regulate and define us in our businesses and homes by stealing our liberty.”
Of course, at this point the crowd broke into the cheers of the converted. But then, who wouldn’t? Who isn’t concerned about their personal liberty? The problem is that Reardon’s point is a little hard to assimilate with the fact that, in our world (the real one), the primary agent of social control (under the encouragement of the health insurance industry) has pretty much been our employers through drug testing, smoking policies, and increasingly wellness programs. But then we’re not in that world are we? We’re in Rand’s world. Reardon then proceeded to describe the benefits provided by corporations, such as job creation and technological progress, while the crowd cheered and the court slammed their hammer and screamed:
“Silence! Or the court will be cleared!”
The cliché continued as the court, recognizing that they could not turn Reardon into a martyr, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison then, in light of his achievements, suspended his sentence. This was then punctuated by the following scene in which Dagny played cheer squad and told Reardon that he had provided a voice to the people. But what people exactly? The rich? Those who are ignorant enough to believe that their personal freedom is dependent on the freedom of the rich and powerful to do as they please?
Of course, you can get away with a lot in a movie if the comedic effects work. But this depends on wit that defines the character. Unfortunately, in Rand’s world, what results when defining characters meant to represent a questionable ideology is a lot of lame humor. To give you a sense of it, think of the kind you see on church billboards, the heavy handed attempts at cleverness that can only fall flat and roll the eyes of anyone but the true believer, but addressed to the same kind of dogmatic certainty that Capitalism displays throughout this love letter. At one point, Dagny Taggart, faced with an employee who drones “Who is John Galt?”, responds:
“Don’t ask that question if you can’t answer it.”
And it is these kinds of references to the mock heroics and above-the-fray nature of the main characters that are suppose to seduce us throughout it all. At another point, Taggart and a scientist played by Dietrich Bader plot to research a supposed super-battery that, as we are to understand it, only the private sphere is capable of making happen. When Taggart inquired as to where the plan would be carried out, the scientist assured her, in the conspiratorial way meant to suggest a couple of lovable rebel rascals, that he can use his state funded lab to study it and that she shouldn’t worry since they have the best night watch there is: him. What poetic justice: the state’s failures are what allow the private sphere to carry out its own more heroic efforts. But the most telling comes when a CEO and political candidate snarls when his train is stopped:
“I swear, if this train doesn’t make my campaign stop in San Francisco, I’ll make it my personal priority to nationalize this railroad.”
This is then followed by the drunken wit of a fellow traveler in a British accent for good effect:
“History shows that it is the only way to make the trains run on time.”
Get it? Nazi Germany? Trains running on time? Unfortunately, for the movie, the real humor lies in what those behind it wanted us to take seriously. At one point, CEOs are photographed walking, with expressions of serious intent, to a board meeting in (can you guess?) slow motion. The only thing missing was the hard beat and crunchy guitar from Kill Bill Volume One in the club scene with Lucy Lui’s crew. But the continuous joke throughout it all was the way plot line built not through suspense, but rather through of the heavy handed manner in which Rand’s message was being relayed through the escalation of the ludicrous. This tendency peaked, appropriately, at the very end of part one when Ellis Wyatt, before leaving with Galt, left his newly discovered natural gas field in flames and a note that said:
“I’m leaving it as I found it.”
Really? So now we know how he came into it. Apparently, he just wandered upon a burning field that no one else had noticed, put out the flames, and had his redneck self, with a southern accent added for appeal, a natural gas field. And doesn’t there seem to be an underlying whininess about it: the feel of a child throwing a fit?
Part two, in Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings style, was almost admirable in the way it maintained the thread of absurdity and kept it building to the most preposterous moment yet: the introduction of Directive 10-289. In a scene that was clearly meant to chill us out of our Priuses and drive us to the NRA, the President (played by Ray Wise) made a televised announcement of new policies that would make no sense in a purely communist regime, much less a democratic one. And in order to direct me as to how I was supposed to feel, there was everyone in the nation, rich and poor alike, watching with dropped jaws of shock and disgust. Among the policies were total bans on firing employees or employees quitting or changing their jobs, wage freezes, all companies surrendering their patents in the form of gift certificates, and a mandate on everyone to spend the same amount of money they had the year before. Of course, in a perfect world where the government wasn’t so far up corporate ass as to actually act in the behalf of people, this might, at best, seem like a legitimate slippery slope. But how would wage freezes and bans on quitting or changing a job serve that purpose? In fact, what purpose would it serve under any circumstance? Forcing people to give up their hard earned patents would be a disincentive to new discovery. Even a Social Democrat and looter like me knows that. And the government has nothing on the market when it comes to forced consumption as anyone would know who, due to a lack of public transportation, has to maintain a car in order to get to work, or finds themselves in need of healthcare, or paying more for basic services such as TV which, by the way, use to be free, or generally wants to function in contemporary society. The only thing missing from the whole scene was the low, eerie hum of a synthesizer and someone shrieking at the president:
“Oh my God! It’s a white Obama!”
From that pivotal point on, the denouement proceeded with a montage style breakdown that consisted of anti-corporation protesters, having been schooled in the principle of unintended consequences, turning anti-government, while Tagny pursued her scientific ally in a plane, having lost him to Galt, crashed, and, in the final scene, finally met the mystery man himself: John Galt.
However, the real money shot, at least in terms of the mentality behind the movie (and its desire to impose a kind of grim irony similar to the ending of Altman’s Nashville), came with a bum sitting on a curve in the midst of the chaos, a sort of Nietzschian madman, writing on a gravestone shaped piece of wood:
America:
Born: 1776
Died: Yesterday.
[b]Watching Atlas Shrugged: My Struggle (and Rise) as a Fascist Looter
How I Got My Start:[/b]
I tried to take the high road and give it a chance. I really did. But then I had tried as much with Rand and The Virtue of Selfishness, but got so nauseous by the third essay, I had to put it down. And nothing I further read or heard about her tempered my disgust. Certainly not the movie biopic, the Passion of Ayn Rand, in which she has an affair with an intern after telling her husband and the intern’s girlfriend what they were going to do. This only came across as some kind of psychopathic notion of enlightened honesty and the self indulgence of a narcissistic bitch: the kind of woman that would eat her babies as a peer once pointed out. And I had assumed my sentiment to be common among the creative community. So imagine my surprise when I read that Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie in an article that gave the misleading impression that Angelina Jolie was backing it. But then why not? God only knows what runs through that chick’s mind. One sometimes gleams a hint of the psychopathic in that icy glare: that narrowing of the eyes as they zero in on the kill. Still, it seemed odd that the alleged Hollywood liberal elite would even consider it.
My curiosity took root. And it only intensified upon seeing a clip where Hank Reardon declares his utter indifference to the poor. I got the impression that it would be one of those moody independent films like The Blue Rose Hotel. But in this case it was a sort of cyberpunk Trojan horse in which subtle critique is cleverly concealed within tribute. Plus that, there was always the possibility of being surprised. I had always been impressed when talent from the other side managed to present old school and Christian values in a way that was digestible and empathetic enough to temper my own extremes and revise my mental concepts. Such sensibilities, even if I didn’t share them, could clearly be presented in a dignified and non-sanctimonious manner as in the movie A River Runs Through It, Robert Duvall in such roles as Rambling Rose and Second Hand Lions, the work of Terrence Malick, and, hating on chairs aside, Clint Eastwood’s classicist/conservative approach to filmmaking. So when I kept coming across it on Netflix, it was only a matter of time before I would set aside my political leanings, push the play button, resolve to not tarnish my intellectual integrity with petty heckling, and give the woman, her story, and her position their day in court. But then authentic Christian/classical values are something quite different than Capitalist ones.
It was a matter of minutes before the hope dissipated and I found myself reeling in shock and astonishment at the second (if not third( rate production values. Many critics compared it to a TV mini-series. But I would equate it with the cheap B movies that are sometimes made for the ScyFy channel or shown on Fear Net. The only difference was that those films were generally innocuous enough to serve as mindless entertainment –something you stick with while rolling your eyes just to see if it ends in the way you predict. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, took the mean-spirited and paranoid route of conspiracy theory or holocaust denial: less the individual perspective that constitutes a work of art and more like war to anyone with a non-pathological sense of reality. I even began to suspect, perhaps out of denial, that what I was watching was not the theatrical release, but some made for TV knockoff much like the miniseries of Steven King’s The Shining, that which stuck closer to the book at the expense of the production values, creativity, and style of Kubrick’s version. Even when I recognized the clip where Reardon expresses his indifference to the poor, I wondered if it wasn’t just another version of a key moment in the book. It just seemed odd that something like it would even be released in theaters, that some marketer would not have recognized that it might have made a better debut (it basically flopped with critics and the box office) in a more appropriate medium such as TV or straight to DVD. However, the more I watched and learned about it, the harder the possibility pressed itself: that ideological forces overrode business sense and the agents behind it thought they had something more profound than they actually did.
But I hung on anyway because between the cheesy production, the second rate special effects, the one dimensional portrayals, and the talky ideology-laden dialogue, I had no choice but to focus on the message that was more or less being shoved down my throat. And while this approach seemed a little (maybe a lot( heavy-handed in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and while I can now sympathize with the offense that Catholics may have felt in the face of that film, it gets really heavy handed and unsympathetic when you’re facing the equivalent of a master expecting the sympathy of the slave. It was, for me, becoming less about aesthetics and more about ideology, and a challenge I couldn’t refuse.
My resolve continued to slip as a heavy handed contrast emerged between the protagonists and antagonists. In one corner of this mythical confrontation was the protagonists, Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, the respective heads of Reardon Steel and Taggart Transcontinental (a railway company), and champions of a miracle alloy that is lighter while being stronger; and in the other: the antagonists, those petty and bumbling government bureaucrats and rich quasi-socialists suffering from liberal guilt, the “looters” who skulked about plotting against the Promethean efforts of the supposed heroes, Reardon and Taggart. And as impressed as I was supposed to be by their heroics, I only found myself breaking into shrieks of mock whining:
“Why is everyone picking on me? Am I not the driver of progress? The job creator?”
In Rand’s world, apparently, no one understands them. The only surprise was that the antagonists didn’t have Hitleresque toothbrush mustaches that they could stroke as they contemplated their schemes and future victories. They were just short of it -and actually made the connection later in the series. But I hung on anyway. Then…
In hindsight, I’m not really sure what it was that set me off. I had seen the same kind of plot device in other movies: one to several people struggle for something until they come to a moment when their persistence pays off and it all comes together. It’s a common and still effective motif in movies. But when Taggart and Reardon were riding alone on that train, to make their point about the safety of the Reardon steel used for the rails, and that triumphant music was playing in the back while the viewer was treated with a panorama of grand vistas, I felt it welling up. But when they came to that bridge gleaming in the sun, the one that Reardon had promised he could build in 3 weeks… that was it. I had to throw down. It could have been how hokey it all seemed. It could have been the forced attempt to equate the beauty of nature with the beauty of Capitalism. It could have even been, as many RandHeads would have it: jealousy. But that neglects the many times I have found the approach effective in other movies where characters have done things beyond my capabilities -sometimes to the point of choking up or, if drunk enough, tears. Or it could have been my disgust at the sheer gall of thinking I could be manipulated into seeing the errors of my ways and prostrating myself before the glory of Capitalism. I could literally imagine a true believer (a Rand Head) standing behind me and shrieking triumphantly:
“You see it? Do you see it now?”
From that point to the end of part one (the story was divided, in Lord of the Rings fashion, into three parts with the third one pending), it was a self degrading frenzy of eye rolling and heckling my computer –when I’m not sure the poor thing deserved it. Meanwhile, the movie did everything it could to encourage my behavior. For instance, there was the heavy handed explanation that Rearden provided for the demise of the 20th Century Motor Company as he and Dagny were approaching it. Apparently, it was due to everyone getting pay raises based on need rather than merit. This was later reinforced by a loyal Taggart employee who explained to Dagny that new management had run it into the ground with new ideas about treating it like one big family. The question, though, was what factory (in reality that is) was it suppose to resemble? Granted, many companies will simplify things by granting raises through across the board percentages. But a percentage means that those who have been there longer will be gaining more. And, as far as I know, the way the more ambitious bypass that is by working their way up the ladder through promotion. But, once again: what profit seeking corporation would even consider such an approach? Of course, the preposterous nature of this slippery slope only foreshadowed the Kafkaesque labyrinth of bumbling and petty bureaucrats, and their policies, that grew more absurd as it went along.
But the bigger issue was Rand’s well-known propensity towards the heroic and mythological coupled with her clear disgust for her antagonists. Her influence by Shakespeare made itself more and more apparent as it went along, especially in part two -which seems strange given Shakespeare’s clarity on the corruption of power. What resulted was a vacillation between a comic book approach and a classical propensity towards speechmaking. On one hand, there were lines of dialogue that sounded like something off a Lichtenstein painting such as when James Taggart, an antagonist by virtue of his wanting to serve “the public good”, advised his sister, Tagny:
“You can’t leave. It’s a violation of the directive.”
Or this line by Reardon (typical of the false dilemma the story presented) as he stomped away from an agent of the State Scientific Agency:
“One of these days, you’re going to have to decide which side your on.”
Even the repetition of the line “Who is John Galt?”, which threaded throughout the narrative and was passed about like some cultish inside joke, as well as the mystery character himself who went about collecting high achievers like a shepherd gathering his flock, took on a hokey comic book aura.
On the other hand, there were these Shakespearian dialogues that, for the too obvious purpose of effect, seemed delegated to the more heroic characters. Esai Morales, for instance, as Francisco d’Anconia, skulked about like some modern Iago, shaman-like, dispensing wisdom in resonant soliloquies on the folly of fools who do not know what they do and the unrecognized wisdom of Lassie Faire Capitalism:
“When money seizes to be the tool of men by which men deal with other men, then men become the tools of other men.”
And this might have seemed a poignant point if it wasn’t for the fact that no one I know of is trying to get rid of money and that, as anyone who is not self-employed would know, even with money men are the tools of other men.
But this Shakespearean element got even more vulgar in Part Two with the heroics of Hank Reardon as he stood before court accused of violating the “Fair Share Act”, that which imposed a limit on how much one company can sell to another –another act committed by petty bumbling bureaucrats that eluded me as to what the purpose would be.
“I do not recognize this court,” he stated in bold defiance, then proceeded to indict government policies that could not, in any dimension, exist. At one point, at the mention of “the public good”, he responded, yet again, with the same smug disregard he did earlier:
“I do not recognize the good of others as justification of my existence.”
And let’s be fair here. Robert Reich makes a convincing point, in SuperCapitalism, that we cannot expect corporations to act as moral agents. They exist solely to create profit for their shareholders. It is government that must serve as check and balance to corporate power. But then, it is government, regardless of what function it serves, that Rand and the moviemakers wanted to undermine. At another point, Reardon proceeded to frame the “public good” in terms of being defined by:
“….those who would regulate and define us in our businesses and homes by stealing our liberty.”
Of course, at this point the crowd broke into the cheers of the converted. But then, who wouldn’t? Who isn’t concerned about their personal liberty? The problem is that Reardon’s point is a little hard to assimilate with the fact that, in our world (the real one), the primary agent of social control (under the encouragement of the health insurance industry) has pretty much been our employers through drug testing, smoking policies, and increasingly wellness programs. But then we’re not in that world are we? We’re in Rand’s world. Reardon then proceeded to describe the benefits provided by corporations, such as job creation and technological progress, while the crowd cheered and the court slammed their hammer and screamed:
“Silence! Or the court will be cleared!”
The cliché continued as the court, recognizing that they could not turn Reardon into a martyr, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison then, in light of his achievements, suspended his sentence. This was then punctuated by the following scene in which Dagny played cheer squad and told Reardon that he had provided a voice to the people. But what people exactly? The rich? Those who are ignorant enough to believe that their personal freedom is dependent on the freedom of the rich and powerful to do as they please?
Of course, you can get away with a lot in a movie if the comedic effects work. But this depends on wit that defines the character. Unfortunately, in Rand’s world, what results when defining characters meant to represent a questionable ideology is a lot of lame humor. To give you a sense of it, think of the kind you see on church billboards, the heavy handed attempts at cleverness that can only fall flat and roll the eyes of anyone but the true believer, but addressed to the same kind of dogmatic certainty that Capitalism displays throughout this love letter. At one point, Dagny Taggart, faced with an employee who drones “Who is John Galt?”, responds:
“Don’t ask that question if you can’t answer it.”
And it is these kinds of references to the mock heroics and above-the-fray nature of the main characters that are suppose to seduce us throughout it all. At another point, Taggart and a scientist played by Dietrich Bader plot to research a supposed super-battery that, as we are to understand it, only the private sphere is capable of making happen. When Taggart inquired as to where the plan would be carried out, the scientist assured her, in the conspiratorial way meant to suggest a couple of lovable rebel rascals, that he can use his state funded lab to study it and that she shouldn’t worry since they have the best night watch there is: him. What poetic justice: the state’s failures are what allow the private sphere to carry out its own more heroic efforts. But the most telling comes when a CEO and political candidate snarls when his train is stopped:
“I swear, if this train doesn’t make my campaign stop in San Francisco, I’ll make it my personal priority to nationalize this railroad.”
This is then followed by the drunken wit of a fellow traveler in a British accent:
“History shows that it is the only way to make the trains run on time.”
Get it? Nazi Germany? Trains running on time? Unfortunately, for the movie, the real humor lies in what those behind it wanted us to take seriously. At one point, CEOs are filmed walking, with expressions of serious intent, to a board meeting in (can you guess?) slow motion. The only thing missing was the hard beat and crunchy guitar from Kill Bill Volume One in the club scene with Lucy Lui’s crew. But the continuous joke throughout it all was the way plot line built not through suspense, but rather through of the heavy handed manner in which Rand’s message was being relayed through the escalation of the ludicrous. This tendency peaked, appropriately, at the very end of Part One when Ellis Wyatt, before leaving with Galt, left his newly discovered natural gas field in flames and a note that said:
“I’m leaving it as I found it.”
Really? So now we know how he came into it. Apparently, he just wandered upon a burning field that no one else had noticed, put out the flames, and had his redneck self, with a southern accent added for appeal, a natural gas field. And doesn’t there seem to be an underlying whininess about it: the feel of a child throwing a fit?
Part two, in Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings style, was almost admirable in the way it maintained the thread of absurdity and kept it building to the most preposterous moment yet: the introduction of Directive 10-289. In a scene that was clearly meant to chill us out of our Priuses and drive us to the NRA, the President (played by Ray Wise) made a televised announcement of new policies that would make no sense in a purely communist regime, much less a democratic one. And in order to direct me as to how I was supposed to feel, there was everyone in the nation, rich and poor alike, watching with dropped jaws of shock and disgust. Among the policies were total bans on firing employees or employees quitting or changing their jobs, wage freezes, all companies surrendering their patents in the form of gift certificates, and a mandate on everyone to spend the same amount of money they had the year before. Of course, in a perfect world where the government wasn’t so far up corporate ass as to actually act in the behalf of people, this might, at best, seem like a legitimate slippery slope. But how would wage freezes and bans on quitting or changing a job serve that purpose? In fact, what purpose would it serve under any circumstance? Forcing people to give up their hard earned patents would be a disincentive to new discovery. Even a Social Democrat and looter like me knows that. And the government has nothing on the market when it comes to forced consumption as anyone would know who, due to a lack of public transportation, has to maintain a car in order to get to work, or finds themselves in need of healthcare, or paying more for basic services such as TV which, by the way, use to be free, or generally wants to function in contemporary society. The only thing missing from the whole scene was the low, eerie hum of a synthesizer and someone shrieking at the president:
“Oh my God! It’s a white Obama!”
From that pivotal point on, the denouement proceeded with a montage style breakdown that consisted of anti-corporation protesters, having been schooled in the principle of unintended consequences, turning anti-government, while Tagny pursued her scientific ally in a plane, having lost him to Galt, crashed, and, in the final scene, finally met the mystery man himself: John Galt.
However, the real money shot, at least in terms of the mentality behind the movie (and its desire to impose a kind of grim irony similar to the ending of Altman’s Nashville), came with a bum sitting on a curve in the midst of the chaos, a sort of Nietzschian madman, writing on a piece of wood shaped like a gravestone:
America:
Born: 1776
Died: Yesterday.
How I Faltered and the Plot Thickened:
I had to wonder if it wasn’t some kind of joke. I mean: why? Why did they even go through with this? Who would push such a project? They had to have seen just how badly the whole project was developing. Wouldn’t the stilted dialogue have been a clue? Were the Koch brothers behind it? It just seemed a little self defeating to showcase Rand’s work and thought in such a blatantly hokey and ridiculous manner. I found myself going back to the theory I had toyed with when I saw the clip of the Reardon expressing his indifference to the poor: that what the producers were actually doing was offering up a combination of tribute and critique of the book. But that might have made a good movie. The only other possibility was that they were undermining it, in a backdoor kind of way, by presenting it in the most distasteful manner possible. But that seemed an incredible risk of money without marketing it and actually presenting it as some kind of satire. And, of course, there was the most obvious possibility of the project being pushed as propaganda by corporate interests or a right wing think tank.
By Part Two, I had calmed down and found myself playing the game of “why these actors would involve themselves?” And this was mainly because the cast from Part One had been completely replaced with what, as far I could tell, were more familiar faces. There was Richard T. Jones utilizing the same stoic loyalty as Dagny’s assistant that he did in Judging Amy and Paul McCrane portraying the same obnoxious worm, as a government official, that he did in ER. And the inclusion of these two suggested that they had been chosen, like character actors, for their perfect fit based on these previous roles. And further research showed that, unlike An American Carol where all the actors had some association with the Republican Party, there was nothing to indicate that any of them had any particular ideological affinity to the story itself. Nor was there any indication that they were lacking for work and participated out of desperation. The only conclusion I could come to is they were just minor actors who took whatever work was available to them and stood little to lose by it: the immunnity to career suicide that comes from being a minor actor. This especially seemed to be the case with Ray Wise, as Head of State Thompson, who, having gotten notice in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, seems to show up everywhere, regardless of the quality, and keeps showing up due to his unique physical characteristics. And given that possibility, I had to wonder if such character actors such as Danny Trejo and William Forsyth might show up in the third installment. That said, though, I can’t help but suspect that Esai Morales took the part to brush up on his Shakespearian chops, while Deidrich Bader took it to break from his more air headed roles and write complex mathematical formulas on glass, just like he saw Russell Crowe do on A Beautiful Mind.
Still, there was the question of what happened to the first cast. John Aglialoro, the driving force behind the series, implied that the cost of hiring the cast from Part One exceeded Part Two’s budget and added that Taylor Schilling, Dagny in Part One, had become a bona fide star. This, of course, was immediate cause for suspicion since I hadn’t heard of or seen much of her. However, as a little researched showed, she had since appeared in the movie The Lucky One and the Netflix Series, Orange is the New Black. But how did that make her anymore inaccessible or expensive than Esia Moralas, Ray Wise, or Diedrich Bader? And Aglialoro wouldn’t be the first executive to spin something. So there was still the possibility of what, in some deep, dark, and petty element of my psyche, would have given me the satisfaction of the sanctimoneous: that the first cast, having seen what a flop they had participated in, jumped ship, or the less pleasurable one of the producers abandoning them in the hopes of getting it right the next time. Or it could have been a combination of both.
Unfortunately, the story of how the movie came to be offered less leeway for self indulgence and sanctimony than I would have liked. After I got past my own expectations, and an initial propensity to read them into my research, I found the truth to be a little less odious. First of all, it was a project that took 30 plus years to be realized, starting in 1972 when Albert S. Ruddy approached Rand with the idea, which she agreed to on the condition that it focus on the love story between Reardon and Taggart and that she had final script approval. However, Ruddy rejected the offer and the deal fell through. It was then proposed as a 4 hour mini-series, but fell through again due to a CEO change. Rand even attempted a screenplay, but misfortune followed the project when she died 1/3 of the way through it. After yet another setback, concerning the option to her script, Aglialoro, an investor, obtained the rights in 1992 only to suffer several more setbacks until the movie went into production in 2010 and was released in 2011. The hope was that Part One would finance the making of Part Two. But that, due to bad critical and box office reception, didn’t happen. However, Aglialoro and conspirators would not be discouraged and they somehow managed to scrape together an even bigger budget for Part Two only to create an even bigger flop. And as would be expected, the criticism it received was contingent the individual’s ideological position. Most critics, being of a liberal or moderate lean, bludgeoned it with some caveats such as the look of the film and the casting choices in Part Two. But the most insightful criticism came from the A.V. Club:
"The irony of Part II’s mere existence is rich enough: The free market is a religion for Rand acolytes, and it emphatically rejected Part I.”
Reception in the Conservative press was, as we would expect, generally more positive while being more mixed than one might expect. Fox New’s Sean Hannity and Jon Stossel, along with critics from conservative journals, sang its praises , while others were a little more reserved in recognizing the bad production values while recommending it for the message. But a point needs to be made here, one I have neglected, in that not every conservative would necessarily advocate this series or the ideological extremes that Rand goes to. William F. Buckley Jr., for instance, rejected the book itself on the grounds of its underlying objectivism. It would serve us here to make an important distinction made by Thom Hartman in that between your everyday conservative and the Neo-Con, what he referred to as a Con. As I have learned, throughout my intellectual process, conservatism can mean any number of things depending on which conservative you’re talking to, and even if I disagree with it in general, it is far too complex to warrant the venom I have focused on this particular extreme.
As it stands now, Part Three is slated to appear in the summer of 2014. And it will be interesting to see if it does. I mean given the struggles and dramatic turns this project has gone through, the making of it has become a kind of narrative in itself –one that, like a cheap B movie, you can’t help but follow through with to see how it turns out. There will, of course, be the true believers that will try to pass these struggles off (much as Aglialoro tried to imply) as the result of a Hollywood leftist conspiracy. It was the critics that killed it; not the quality of the movie. And we have to attribute some credibility to this argument. Creative people, at least those in the arts, do tend to be a little more liberal. But this is because their chosen pursuit requires that they be a little sympathetic and sensitive to the complexity of a given character or personality type. And it has been a cornerstone of my creative process to recognize that, if I look deep enough into myself, there isn’t anyone I can’t at least empathize with, if not sympathize, no matter how despicable. And what exactly did they expect? No more than I could expect to get through to the true believers with this, how could they expect this series to get through to the very people they are, with an air of disgust, referring to as “Looters”? How well would that work if people on my side of the fence referred to rich people and the true believers as “Hoarders”? How much luck would I have trying to get corporate sponsorship?
In the end though, I had to eat a little crow in having to admit that it wasn’t pimped by corporations, or a right wing think tank, for the sake of propaganda. And the Koch brothers, as far as I know, were not involved. Eventually, I had to admit, as much as I didn’t want to, that it was a labor of love. With time, I found myself making further consolations as I went back through both parts in a more lucid and calm state of mind. I found myself, having gotten past the initial sting, a little more sympathetic with Jack Hunter, from The American Conservative, who noted:
“If you ask the average film critic about the new movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged they will tell you it is a horrible movie. If you ask the average conservative or libertarian they will tell you it is a great movie. Objectively, it is a mediocre movie at best. Subjectively, it is one of the best mediocre movies you’ll ever see.”
Once I got past my predispositions and expectations, I found it to be not totally lacking in cinematic quality. And it did seem a little more sophisticated than most B movies in that, between Rand and those who behind the series, there was a clear awareness of just about every plot device that Hollywood had to offer –even if they came off as clichés. And Rand certainly seemed to know how to put a story together, which gives some credibility to the achievements she managed with other books such as The Fountainhead. So I can easily see how someone who was a little more sympathetic to the ideology, or even indifferent, might be able to enjoy it in the same mindless manner I might with some low budget film on ScyFy or Fear Net.
And while I have yet to well up as the train crosses the bridge, I also found myself with an inkling of sympathy for Hank Reardon. In the beginning of Part One, he gave his wife, Lillian Reardon a bracelet made of Reardon Steel, a rather appealing piece of work and admittedly thoughtful gift that reflected Hank’s commitment to his work and his high hopes for her future. However, Lillian, a gold digging looter who spends much of the story skulking about and plotting against her husband, takes it as a symbol of his egoism, scoffs, and eventually trades it with Dagny for a pearl necklace. And we have to recognize the semiology at work in that achievement is given privilege over materialism, and in the suggestion that Dagny’s common understanding of this privilege is what underlies the chemistry between her and Reardon. Interestingly, though, it was Lillian that provided the one insightful line in the whole thing. In a confrontation between her and Hank, over the divorce he wanted but she wouldn’t consent to, she approached him, looked him straight in the eye, and said:
“I’m the one that knows you most. You’re an ordinary man who thinks he doesn’t owe anyone anything. But you do. You owe everyone.”
What was revealed, whether consciously or not on the part of those who produced this story (perhaps even Rand), is the natural force fallacy that haunted and compromised Reardon’s courtroom stand. What one needs to accept, that is in order to see his point as anything else than ludicrous, is the notion that it is perfectly natural for some to rise to the top even if it comes at the expense of others. And while we can agree with Reich that it is not the role of corporations to act as moral agents, we have to take pause when the question is asked:
“What do the rich owe us?”
The problem is the underlying assumption that the achiever acts in a vacuum, which is easy to do when Capitalism does such a effective job of mimicking a natural force and can be treated like an expression of nature (like the weather or death). But it’s not. It’s a human construct and, by virtue of that, an agreement. And as with any agreement, when it fails to work for all parties involved (or too few of them), it becomes a disagreement that warrants renegotiation. Second of all, in the real world, Reardon would not have created his wealth by himself. He would have built it on the productivity of labor and the purchases of consumers. So while he is not obligated to recognize the “public good” as justification for his existence (even though it actually is given that the “public good” was and is why we agree to Capitalism in the first place), he has every obligation to recognize it when it expresses itself through government policy –that is since his achievement was as dependent on that policy as anything. But then I’m speaking in terms of the real world where far less ludicrous forms of legislation are created and enforced. And doesn’t this interdependence between producer and consumer point to a major discrepancy between the real world and Rand’s. Throughout the story, we’re presented a scenario in which America is suffering from major economic distress, one that is unlikely to produce the consumer base necessary to support Reardon’s and Taggart’s activities. Where would the profits come from? It seems as if such a scenario actually existed, the only real struggle the main characters would have is avoiding bankruptcy.
And it gets more interesting, assuming this scene to be taken from the book, when we consider that Rand may have revealed an internal conflict that inadvertently gave the story a little depth. First of all, she clearly recognized that Capitalism was, in fact, not a natural force, but a human agreement that that was vulnerable to further choices made by future agents. Otherwise, what would be the point? Why would she even feel the need to write Atlas Shrugged in order to “warn us”? And this just goes to a general inconsistency at work in the argument that results in a back and forth between Capitalism as an agreement that must be protected from the non-believers at all costs, and Capitalism as a natural force immune to all arguments against it -that is: dependent on which take happens to be convenient at the time. Furthermore, we get the feeling from this that Lillian is Rand’s worst nightmare due to a truth revealed that Rand could not completely overcome. You have to wonder if Lillian did not serve as her evil alter-ego: a composite of common characteristics (ambition, materialism, and general narcissism) and Rand’s own doubts about herself.
But, in all fairness, we should consider the time in which Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged which was published in 1957. At the time, the cold war was heating up and there were Marxist elements that still bought into the egalitarian dream of Communism. Nor was she the only one concerned about this aspect of it as was demonstrated in Kirk Vonnegut’s short story, published in 1961, Harrison Bergeron. Plus that, she, like Smith and Marx, had no way of foreseeing the actual consequences of her push for deregulation much as we saw in the economic meltdown of 2007. However, this point fails to redeem those who started this series in 2010 and, in fact, strategically chose the release date of the first part for tax day and the second for the 2012 election thereby confirming the series’ status as little more than propaganda.
Finally, it’s not as if I’m completely unsympathetic with the ideology. I too recognize that “selfishness” is a term that tends to be bandied about by those who would selfishly insist that you focus on what it is they think you should be doing. Plus that, being a man of modest resources, I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people who either can’t do for themselves, or won’t, yet make demands that I’m expected to fulfill. Like Bill Maher, who expressed as much on Real Time, I too know what it’s like to feel like I’m the only one pulling the wagon while everyone else jumps in. But it’s always a little more complex than that. For one, there is the issue of those who can’t do for themselves. What do we do in that case? Help them? Or take the more fascistic route of letting them die off? And it’s not like those that won’t lack for incentive or motivation. I mean working still seems to be a much better option than the hand to mouth existence I’ve seen such people get by on -social programs or not. But the most odious aspect of this is that Rand’s version of Capitalism acts as if society shedding this burden would magically make it disappear. But what really happens, by not spreading the burden through social programs, is that it becomes more localized either through the crimes committed by the desperate, or the desperate that turn to those closest to them to survive. Take, for instance, the Tea Party justification for dismantling social security, the argument being that, in the old days, families took care of their elderly. Of course, the problem with this is that back then the elderly usually didn’t get so elderly because healthcare was less developed and effective (and life expectancy much lower) with the consolation of being less expensive. On top of that, a family could generally survive on one income, thereby leaving one parent, usually the wife, with the time to take care of the aged. And given that such a financial arrangement is no longer practical, I fail to see how such an approach could be conducive to “achievement”, which is supposedly the main issue here. And there is a big difference between deciding to balance one’s own needs with that of others and the plundering of taking what one wants regardless of who suffers. And let’s be clear on this: neither myself, nor anyone I can think of, want to strip the rich of all their assets and distribute BMWs in the ghettos. And had Rand, or the movie makers, taken such considerations into the balance, they might have achieved something more than propaganda. They might have created a decent story. But that, in a spectacular way, is not what happened.
The Comeback or how I Crossed My Bridge:
Of course, some true believers, those with the taste and the honesty to know bad cinema when they see it, would argue that it is unfair to judge Rand’s book, and the ideas behind it, on a badly made movie, that I should read the book. And outside of the most obvious objection, that the movie did little to inspire wading through a 1200 page book, there are a couple problems with this argument. For one, let’s imagine the movie made with top level talent. Let’s say George Clooney for Hank Reardon. I could see him play it with the mixture of drive, restraint, and civility that Rand seemed to want for this character. However, Clooney would play up the conflicts in more subtle ways, much as he did in Up in the Air. And this would have to include his stated indifference to the poor. He would have to find a way to smooth the vacillation between the likable Rearden and the smug, obtuse one. And that might include self doubt. For Dagny Taggart, any one of the actresses originally slated for the movie would work. Angelina Jolie could certainly play it hardnosed. As could Julia Roberts as was demonstrated in Charlie Wilson’s War where she played a right wing contributor to Senator Wilson’s agenda. But, for all the rough edges, Roberts had to play counter to Tom Hank’s humanity and make their compatibility seem realistic. Charlize Theron could certainly pull it off. And I don’t know enough about Anne Hathaway to comment. But they would also have to incorporate the Madonna –like character of Taggart. And it’s something we can be certain actresses of such a caliber would be more than willing to do. However, it would involve a little more than being nice to people who happen to serve their purposes. They might actually have to show a little reservation when witnessing the struggles of the poor. But regardless of who played what, it would require much better dialogue and a more rounded approach to the motivations of the main characters and those around them. And this would be especially true of the antagonists as no talented actor would choose to play the one dimensional villains portrayed. And this would likely require stepping outside of Rand’s original intent and message into a combination of tribute to those aspects of her thought that many can agree with, such as the value of achievement, and critique of those aspects many find repulsive. For instance, the main characters might have to be as fallible and prone to being wrong as they are heroic. And one thing good actors would not do, as Stallone has, and Costner back in his The Bodyguard days, is just tack those flaws onto their otherwise heroic behavior. Their flaws would have to be as intertwined in their character as their virtues.
And similar considerations would be at play concerning how the movie was made or by whom it was directed. Someone like Spielberg, for instance, would bring much better special effects into the mix and might approach it like he did War of the Worlds and jumble up time by setting the time in the near future of 1957 when Atlas Shrugged was written. And wouldn’t that serve as a critique as well as a tribute? That would insulate it from the present and what we know now, thereby, making Rand’s predictions a little more palatable since the causality at work would be that of an imaginary world remote from our own. Plus that, it would effectively deal with something that bothered a lot of critics: the discrepancy between the movies economy, built around the railway, and our own digital economy. But Spielberg, like the actors, would want to mix it up. He too would want to dig into the multiplicity of motivations and circumstances and the conflicting ethical considerations. And once again, the only way to do so would be a subtle mix of critique and tribute.
At the same time, it could be approached like the CGI remakes of graphic novels like Sin City or Sky Captain of Tomorrow. This would make it remote enough from our reality to preempt most comparisons between Rand’s slippery slope and the way things have actually turned out. But then purposely making it all seem like a cartoon would only seem like mocking the seriousness of Rand’s message –at least to some of the true believers.
If I had my choice, though, I would go with Neil Blomkamp. Given the point he made in the director’s comments for District 9, that anyone who wanted a look into the future only needed to go to Johannesburg where 5% of the population holds all the wealth while the other 95% lives in abject poverty, and given the portrayal of it he gave in the movie, he would seem qualified and willing enough to bring out something that was conspicuously missing in the first two parts of the series: the distressed environments and ghettos that would certainly surround the world of Reardon and Taggart.
But regardless of who participates or how the movie was made, such high level artists would insist that there be changes and additions to Rand’s original story in order to obtain the subtle complexity that distinguishes real art from propaganda. But then such a balanced perspective would not serve the tunnel vision and one sided perspective propping up the ideology. Such complexity would only raise the possibility that the only economic system that makes sense would be the one we’re already in, the hybrid economy, and that beyond that there is only the question of which aspects of its multiplicity should be either left where they are, or which should be moved closer to the command or market side of the spectrum.
And this points to the fundamental problem with the argument that it’s not Rand’s fault, but mine for not reading the book. While I may not be able to completely blame Rand for a badly made version of her story, what I can almost be certain of is that the message is explicitly hers. This would seem evident in the high praise given the series by true believers such as Hannity and Fossel. Plus that, this was a labor of love by true believers who would have little reason to alter the message. But, for me, it was most evident in the fact that I have heard the same arguments used a thousand times against any argument I have presented for anything less than a religious and dogmatic faith in the invisible hand of the market.
And this leads me to question whether Rand’s sensibility, and her zealous embrace of it, excludes her from the possibility of writing a classic. Once again, art’s distinguishing asset, especially as concerns storytelling, is its ability to capture the complexity and often conflicting forces at work in reality. It, more than any other medium, is equipped to deal with the multiplicity of motives and the emergent subtleties that can come into play in any confrontation. But Rand only sees one side, that of Capitalism, and stubbornly maintains a blind spot for the other. At best, she only offers caveats such as her apparent respect for the railway service tech (which is the equivalent of the token black or gay friend for xenophobes) and her willingness to portray the rich surrounding the main protagonists as looters along with government and the needy masses. Consequently, I can’t help but feel that the main source of this deficit lays in a seething contempt, rooted in her experiences in communist Russia, for the other that she struggles to contain for the sake of integrity -or the expectations she found herself surrounded by as a Hollywood writer. Furthermore, we should consider the distinction between fancy and imagination made by Coleridge. In fancy, we indulge the fantasies that emerge from our baser impulses and thereby give into simplistic notions concerning the monsters that inhabit them. With imagination, we utilize the cognitive in an attempt to understand those monsters as having recognizable and sometimes sympathetic motivations. And Rand, given the one dimensional portrayal of her antagonists and heroes, clearly settles for the fanciful. And while you can entertain people with such, art, sooner or later, requires imagination -not the caveats she sprinkles throughout the story. Paul Krugman makes a humorous but observant point on this:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
This becomes especially evident when we consider the main thread that ties it all together: John Galt, the enigmatic but shadowy figure that goes about like a shepherd gathering his flock of overachievers to take them to their promise land, a place where their efforts will be fully appreciated and nourished. But appreciated by who? And how does insulating oneself from the world nourish the creative impulses that arise from dealing with the problems presented by the world? And who exactly will there be to reward those accomplishments with money or applause? Lack of reward, after all, was the issue in the first place. They would, of course, have the appreciation of their peers. But would that be enough? As Nietzsche, an apparent influence on Rand, well knew: mediocrity, for all the frustration it might present, is as necessary to greatness as greatness is to it. There exists an interdependence between the two. But this seems to be a complete blind spot to Rand. This is why she can entertain this rather vindictive fantasy of Galt’s ultimate revenge: to stop the motor of the world, to punish the looters and show them the error of their ways by depriving them of the benefits of greatness and excellence. And how does she know that this will necessarily lead to the downfall? She bases this on the assumption that excellence can only flourish within the context of Laissez Faire Capitalism. But how does she know the challenges presented by a world without Galt’s flock wouldn’t stimulate those left behind to rise to their full creative potential and assure the survival of their community? And wouldn’t it be poetic justice to see the strike fail and Galt and flock skulking back to society, hoping to partake of the fruits of its efforts, much as the scientist, who had tried to undermine Reardon Steel, did with Dagny after her success with the John Galt line? Perhaps then the looters could engage in the same heavy-handed nobility by deflecting the pathetic concessions of the once great. And in the end, doesn’t Galt’s strike feel like a child holding their breath until they either get their way, or everyone’s face turns blue?
And it is this vindictiveness, coupled with Rand’s zealousness for her beliefs and her propensity towards fancy that undermines the aesthetic of the work. It appeals to beauty, but succumbs to propaganda. It’s as if she is less concerned with convincing anyone of anything than rallying the true believers. She plays on the internal feedback loop of the cult dynamic. And in her Gecko-like world where greed, if not good, is acceptable for the sake of achievement, and altruistic notions such as the public good are spat out with snarls of disgust, a world where there are only the achievers and the looters, and in which we can assume most of us to be the latter, you have to wonder how much we are suppose care or feel for the main characters, to what extent we are suppose to share in the triumph of Reardon and Taggart as the train crosses the bridge. But then it wasn’t sympathy or care that Rand wanted us to feel, was it? It was, rather, awe: the very awe that subjects of the past were suppose feel for their monarch.
This is further evident in Dagny’s relationship with a service tech from Taggart Railway. Rand, like most who argue for Laissez Faire Capitalism, was prudent in including the common man in her vision. As Deleuze and Guattarri point out: no tyrranny could exist in a vacuum. They always have to insulate themselves from those they would exploit by creating a cushion of loyal and well compensated benefactors. This is what Malcolm X was talking about when he referred to the house slave -in terms a little harsher than mine. But what he pointed out was that in the days of slavery, the slave owner would keep one family of closer to the house and give them advantages the others would not have. That way, when one of the lesser slaves started to get uppity and talk about rebelling or escaping, the house slave would be right there arguing that such acts of dissent could only make things worse. And one could easily see the RandHead fawning over this particular employee: complacent to the point of easy going, dedicated to his job, and perfectly willing, as an ex-employee of Twentieth Century Company, to reiterate Reardon’s explanation of its demise –not to mention his casual awe at finding himself in the presence of Dagny. After he explains to her where the scientist who created the super battery was, she asks if she can take his truck to which he responds in yet another lame attempt at humor that plays on the ultimate truth of private property:
“Sure, it’s yours anyway.”
Of course, Dagny rewards this loyalty, as most employers do (or so we’re told) by telling her other loyal sidekick, Eddie, to get that employee another truck since (another stab at humor) she stole his and to triple his salary.
But we really need to look at the semiology at work here. What one might see in this employee is the one non-achiever that manages to avoid the tag of being a looter: someone perfectly willing to just do what their told and not question the forces at work in their life: the ideal producer/consumer. In other words, what is being praised here is conformity. And this seems a little strange and contradictory given that Rand, throughout her career, pushed her ideology under the banner of some radical form of freedom. She argued as if she were championing what was best for all. But the only vision that seems to be at work is a world in which the achievers, unobstructed, can enjoy the full fruits of their labors, while those that can’t complacently accept their position in life for the sake of the higher principle of Capitalism.
Despite all that, allow me to indulge in a cheap narrative device (that of the gratuitous plot twist) and actually plug the series and say that I look forward to Part Three, if for no other reason than to see how ludicrous it can get. And I would also confess that I do so, in part, in the pure Randian spirit of self interest. Why wouldn’t I? Those that do will understand and appreciate the preceding essay all that more? Furthermore, I would implore Netflix not to take my 1 star rating as an inducement to take the series off their catalogue. It was their user critiques that inspired this. With most films I didn’t like, I wouldn’t even bother. And I generally find negative criticism to be a little self indulgent in that it becomes more about the critic than the thing being criticized. But this case is special. And because of that, I would argue that it is Netflix’s social duty to keep it available as an ideological artifact, something to be approached in the same negative sense of Reefer Madness, the thought of John Calvin, and Mein Kampf. And while the series may not exactly represent Rand’s thought, story, and ideology, it clearly represents the mentality that has evolved from it. And in that sense, it is every bit as significant and culturally important as the book itself.
Furthermore, I would encourage everyone to see it –even at the risk of reinforcing the belief system behind it. While Roger Ebert expressed disappointment that the low quality of Part One preempted a healthy discussion around the work and ideas of Rand, I would respectfully disagree and reiterate that it may well be the ideology, itself, that preempted the possibility of a good movie. And that, in itself, is cause for discourse and contention.
Now for my fellow looters, my progressive and moderate peers, I would appeal to their forgiving nature and ask that they bear with it until they find themselves immune to the initial sting of insult and bad taste and find in it what I have: a sense of clarity about the other, the encouragement to set aside one’s self-questioning and open mindedness and recognize bad reasoning when one sees it, and the recognition that when even the boundaries of common sense have been transgressed, one can no longer afford the luxury of being a noble or beautiful soul. We can no longer afford the relativity of acting like it is just one opinion among others. This, via global warming and the empire of globalization, can actually end up destroying civilization as we know it.
As for the true believers, the Rand and Ditto-heads who have invaded, throughout much of my intellectual life, a large part of my audio and ideological space with droning repetitions of Randian scripture and the unquestioning praise of producer/consumer Capitalism, many of which I have found to be otherwise decent people (some to the point of dear friends), I can, on one hand, see it as a just form of therapy or deprogramming in that given the task, the best method would be to strap them to a chair and force them to watch this nonsense, repeatedly, with the added effect of interspersing it with ad-like spots, made by real talent, that describe the misery and devastation their perspective has caused. Maybe then, after enough of it, they’ll develop some taste, then a clue, then hopefully, just hopefully, a social conscience. One can only hope that it might lead to an epiphany and recognition of what is effectively a sickness and form of addiction to producer/consumer Capitalism, and that this break from denial will force them to see their belief system for what it is: not so much reason as reason in the service of baser impulses. Maybe then they’ll see that referring to someone as “looters” is as much as calling them “rats” or “cockroaches” and goes to the same effect of reducing the other to an undesirable which must be overcome to achieve some erroneous notion of perfection. But more important is the hope that they’ll see Rand’s thought and Atlas Shrugged for what it is: the propaganda of the self indulgent and sociopathic, and the hegemony that would blind us to the exploitation of those impulses, and the fancies that emerge from them, for the sake of advantage and power.
On the other hand, many of “those people” are dear friends who are far more than their ideologies. Therefore, in my more rational moments, I lean towards forgoing strapping them to a chair. Still: I would recommend the series to them in the remote hope that they’ll see how absurd and disturbing some of the reasoning is to their dear friend. Maybe then they’ll think less in terms of defending their corner at all costs and, rather than surrendering to it: my thought (recognize Atlas Shrugged for the dangerous extreme it is.
[b]Watching Atlas Shrugged: My Struggle (and Rise) as a Fascist Looter
How I Got My Start:[/b]
I tried to take the high road and give it a chance. I really did. But then I had tried as much with Rand and The Virtue of Selfishness, but got so nauseous by the third essay, I had to put it down. And nothing I further read or heard about her tempered my disgust. Certainly not the movie biopic, the Passion of Ayn Rand, in which she has an affair with an intern after telling her husband and the intern’s girlfriend what they were going to do. That only came across as some kind of psychopathic notion of enlightened honesty and the self indulgence of a narcissistic bitch: the kind of woman that would eat her babies as a peer once pointed out. And I had assumed my sentiment to be common among the creative community. So imagine my surprise when I read that Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie in an article that gave the misleading impression that Angelina Jolie was backing it. But then why not? God only knows what runs through that chick’s mind. One sometimes gleams a hint of the psychopathic in that icy glare: the poutty lips and that narrowing of the eyes as they zero in on the kill. Still, it seemed odd that the alleged Hollywood liberal elite would even consider it.
My curiosity took root and only intensified upon seeing a clip where Hank Reardon declares his utter indifference to the poor. For some reason, I got the impression that it would be one of those moody independent films like The Blue Rose Hotel. But in my scheme it was a sort of cyberpunk Trojan horse in which subtle critique is cleverly concealed within tribute. Plus that, there was always the possibility of being surprised. I had always been impressed when talent from the other side managed to present old school and Christian values in a way that was digestible and empathetic enough to temper my own extremes and revise my mental concepts. Such sensibilities, even if I didn’t share them, could clearly be presented in a dignified and non-sanctimonious manner as in the movie A River Runs Through It, Robert Duvall in such roles as Rambling Rose and Second Hand Lions, the work of Terrence Malick, and, hating on chairs aside, Clint Eastwood’s classicist/conservative approach to filmmaking. So when I kept coming across it on Netflix, it was only a matter of time before I would set aside my political leanings, push the play button, resolve to not tarnish my intellectual integrity with petty heckling, and give the woman, her story, and her position their day in court. But then authentic Christian/classical values are something quite different than Capitalist ones.
It was a matter of minutes before the hope dissipated and I found myself reeling in shock and astonishment at the second (if not third( rate production values. Many critics compared it to a TV mini-series. But I would equate it with the cheap B movies that are sometimes made for the ScyFy channel or shown on Fear Net. The only difference was that those films were generally innocuous enough to serve as mindless entertainment –something you stick with while rolling your eyes just to see if it ends in the way you predict. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, took the mean-spirited and paranoid route of conspiracy theory or holocaust denial: less the individual perspective that constitutes a work of art and more like war to anyone with a non-pathological sense of reality. I even began to suspect, perhaps out of denial, that what I was watching was not the theatrical release, but some made for TV knockoff much like the miniseries of Steven King’s The Shining, that which stuck closer to the book at the expense of the production values, creativity, and style of Kubrick’s version. Even when I recognized the clip where Reardon expresses his indifference to the poor, I wondered if it wasn’t just another version of a key moment in the book. It just seemed odd that something like it would even be released in theaters, that some marketer would not have recognized that it might have made a better debut (it basically flopped with critics and the box office) in a more appropriate medium such as TV or straight to DVD. However, the more I watched and learned about it, the harder the possibility pressed itself: that ideological forces overrode business sense and the agents behind it thought they had something more profound than they actually did.
But I hung on anyway because between the cheesy production, the second rate special effects, the one dimensional portrayals, and the talky ideology-laden dialogue, I had no choice but to focus on the message that was more or less being shoved down my throat. And while this approach seemed a little (maybe a lot( heavy-handed in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and while I can now sympathize with the offense that Catholics must have felt in the face of that film, it gets really heavy handed and unsympathetic when you’re facing the equivalent of a master expecting the sympathy of the slave. It was, for me, becoming less about aesthetics and more about ideology, and a challenge I couldn’t refuse.
My resolve continued to slip as a heavy handed contrast emerged between the protagonists and antagonists. In one corner of this mythical confrontation was the protagonists, Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, the respective heads of Reardon Steel and Taggart Transcontinental (a railway company), and champions of a miracle alloy that is lighter while being stronger; and in the other: the antagonists, those petty and bumbling government bureaucrats and rich quasi-socialists suffering from liberal guilt, the “looters” who skulked about plotting against the Promethean efforts of the supposed heroes, Reardon and Taggart. And as impressed as I was supposed to be by their heroics, I only found myself breaking into shrieks of mock whining:
“Why is everyone picking on me? Am I not the driver of progress? The job creator?”
In Rand’s world, apparently, no one understands them. The only surprise was that the antagonists didn’t have Hitleresque toothbrush mustaches that they could stroke as they contemplated their schemes and future victories. They were just short of it -and actually made the connection later in the series. But I hung on anyway. Then…
In hindsight, I’m not really sure what it was that set me off. I had seen the same kind of plot device in other movies: one to several people struggle for something until they come to a moment when their persistence pays off and it all comes together. It’s a common and still effective motif in movies. But when Taggart and Reardon were riding alone on that train, to make their point about the safety of the Reardon steel used for the rails, and that triumphant music was playing in the back while the viewer was treated with a panorama of grand vistas, I felt it welling up. But when they came to that bridge gleaming in the sun, the one that Reardon had promised he could build in 3 weeks… that was it. I had to throw down. It could have been how hokey it all seemed. It could have been the forced attempt to equate the beauty of nature with the beauty of Capitalism. It could have even been, as many RandHeads would have it: jealousy. But that neglects the many times I have found the approach effective in other movies where characters have done things beyond my capabilities -sometimes to the point of choking up or, if drunk enough, tears. Or it could have been my disgust at the sheer gall of thinking I could be manipulated into seeing the errors of my ways and prostrating myself before the glory of Capitalism. I could literally imagine a true believer (a Rand Head) standing behind me and shrieking triumphantly:
“You see it? Do you see it now?”
From that point to the end of part one (the story was divided, in Lord of the Rings fashion, into three parts with the third one pending), it was a self degrading frenzy of eye rolling and heckling my computer –when I’m not sure the poor thing deserved it. Meanwhile, the movie did everything it could to encourage my behavior. For instance, there was the heavy handed explanation that Rearden provided for the demise of the 20th Century Motor Company. Apparently, it was due to everyone getting pay raises based on need rather than merit. This was later reinforced by a loyal Taggart employee who explained to Dagny that new management had run it into the ground with new ideas about treating it like one big family. The question, though, was what factory (in reality that is) was it suppose to resemble? Granted, many companies will simplify things by granting raises through across the board percentages. But a percentage means that those who have been there longer will be gaining more. And, as far as I know, the way the more ambitious bypass that is by working their way up the ladder through promotion. But, once again: what profit seeking corporation would even consider such an approach? Of course, the preposterous nature of this slippery slope only foreshadowed the Kafkaesque labyrinth of bumbling and petty bureaucrats, and their policies, that grew more absurd as it went along.
But the bigger issue was Rand’s well-known propensity towards the heroic and mythological coupled with her clear disgust for her antagonists. Her influence by Shakespeare made itself more and more apparent as it went along, especially in part two -which seems strange given Shakespeare’s clarity on the corruption of power. What resulted was a vacillation between a comic book approach and a classical propensity towards speechmaking. On one hand, there were lines of dialogue that sounded like something off a Lichtenstein painting such as when James Taggart, an antagonist by virtue of his wanting to serve “the public good”, advised his sister, Tagny:
“You can’t leave. It’s a violation of the directive.”
Or this line by Reardon (typical of the false dilemma the story presented) as he stomped away from an agent of the State Scientific Agency:
“One of these days, you’re going to have to decide which side your on.”
Even the repetition of the line “Who is John Galt?”, which threaded throughout the narrative and was passed about like some cultish inside joke, as well as the mystery character himself who went about collecting high achievers like a shepherd gathering his flock, took on a hokey comic book aura.
On the other hand, there were these Shakespearian dialogues that, for the too obvious purpose of effect, seemed delegated to the more heroic characters. Esai Morales, for instance, as Francisco d’Anconia, skulked about like some modern Iago, shaman-like, dispensing wisdom in resonant soliloquies on the folly of fools who do not know what they do and the unrecognized wisdom of Lassie Faire Capitalism:
“When money seizes to be the tool of men by which men deal with other men, then men become the tools of other men.”
And this might have seemed a poignant point if it wasn’t for the fact that no one I know of is trying to get rid of money and that, as anyone who is not self-employed would know, even with money men are the tools of other men. This Shakespearean element got even more vulgar in Part Two with the heroics of Hank Reardon as he stood before court accused of violating the “Fair Share Act”, that which imposed a limit on how much one company can sell to another –another act committed by petty, bumbling bureaucrats that eluded me as to what the purpose would be.
“I do not recognize this court,” he stated in bold defiance, then proceeded to indict government policies that could not, in any dimension, exist. At one point, at the mention of “the public good”, he responded, yet again, with the same smug disregard he did earlier:
“I do not recognize the good of others as justification of my existence.”
And let’s be fair here. Robert Reich makes a convincing point, in SuperCapitalism, that we cannot expect corporations to act as moral agents. They exist solely to create profit for their shareholders. It is government that must serve as check and balance to corporate power. But then, it is government, regardless of what function it serves, that Rand and the moviemakers wanted to undermine. At another point, Reardon proceeded to frame the “public good” in terms of being defined by:
“….those who would regulate and define us in our businesses and homes by stealing our liberty.”
Of course, at this point the crowd broke into the cheers of the converted. But then, who wouldn’t? Who isn’t concerned about their personal liberty? The problem is that Reardon’s point is a little hard to assimilate with the fact that, in our world (the real one), the primary agent of social control (under the encouragement of the health insurance industry) has pretty much been our employers through drug testing, smoking policies, and increasingly wellness programs. But then I wasn’t in that world, was I? I was in Rand’s world. Reardon then proceeded to describe the benefits provided by corporations, such as job creation and technological progress, while the crowd cheered and the court slammed their hammer and screamed:
“Silence! Or the court will be cleared!”
The cliché continued as the court, recognizing that they could not turn Reardon into a martyr, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison then, in light of his achievements, suspended his sentence. This was then punctuated by the following scene in which Dagny played cheer squad and told Reardon that he had provided a voice to the people. But what people exactly? The rich? Those who are ignorant enough to believe that their personal freedom is dependent on the freedom of the rich and powerful to do as they please?
Of course, you can get away with a lot in a movie if the comedic effects work. But this depends on wit that defines the character. Unfortunately, in Rand’s world, what results when defining characters meant to represent a questionable ideology is a lot of lame humor. To give you a sense of it, think of the kind you see on church billboards, the heavy handed attempts at cleverness that can only fall flat and roll the eyes of anyone but the true believer, but addressed to the same kind of dogmatic certainty displayed throughout this love letter to Capitalism. At one point, Dagny Taggart, faced with an employee who drones “Who is John Galt?”, responds:
“Don’t ask that question if you can’t answer it.”
And it is these kinds of references to the mock heroics and above-the-fray nature of the main characters that are suppose to seduce us throughout it all. At another point, Taggart and a scientist played by Dietrich Bader plot to research a supposed super-battery that, as we are to understand it, only the private sphere is capable of making happen. When Taggart inquired as to where the plan would be carried out, the scientist assured her, in the conspiratorial way meant to suggest a couple of lovable rebel rascals, that he can use his state funded lab to study it and that she shouldn’t worry since they have the best night watch there is: him. What poetic justice: the state’s failures are what allow the private sphere to carry out its own more heroic efforts. But the most telling comes when a CEO and political candidate snarls when his train is stopped:
“I swear, if this train doesn’t make my campaign stop in San Francisco, I’ll make it my personal priority to nationalize this railroad.”
This is then followed by the drunken wit of a fellow traveler in a British accent:
“History shows that it is the only way to make the trains run on time.”
Get it? Nazi Germany? Trains running on time? Unfortunately, for the movie, the real humor lies in what those behind it wanted us to take seriously. At one point, CEOs and government officials are filmed walking, with expressions of serious intent, to a board meeting in (can you guess?) slow motion. The only thing missing was the hard beat and crunchy guitar from Kill Bill Volume One in the club scene with Lucy Lui’s crew. But the continuous joke throughout it all was the way plot line built not through suspense, but rather through of the heavy handed manner in which Rand’s message was being relayed through the escalation of the ludicrous. This tendency peaked, appropriately, at the very end of Part One when Ellis Wyatt, before leaving with Galt, left his newly discovered natural gas field in flames and a note that said:
“I’m leaving it as I found it.”
Really? So now we know how he came into it. Apparently, he just wandered upon a burning field that no one else had noticed, put out the flames, and had his redneck self, with a southern accent for added appeal, a natural gas field. And doesn’t there seem to be an underlying whininess about it: the feel of a child throwing a fit?
Part two, in Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings style, was almost admirable in the way it maintained the thread of absurdity and kept it building to the most preposterous moment yet: the introduction of Directive 10-289. In a scene that was clearly meant to chill us out of our Priuses and drive us to the NRA, the President (played by Ray Wise) made a televised announcement of new policies that would make no sense in a purely communist regime, much less a democratic one. And in order to direct me as to how I was supposed to feel, there was everyone in the nation, rich and poor alike, watching with dropped jaws of shock and disgust. Among the policies were total bans on firing employees or employees quitting or changing their jobs, wage freezes, all companies surrendering their patents in the form of gift certificates, and a mandate on everyone to spend the same amount of money they had the year before. Of course, in a perfect world where the government wasn’t so far up corporate ass as to actually act in the behalf of people, this might, at best, seem like a legitimate slippery slope. But how would wage freezes and bans on quitting or changing a job serve that purpose? In fact, what purpose would it serve under any circumstance? Forcing people to give up their hard earned patents would be a disincentive to new discovery. Even a Social Democrat and looter like me knows that. And the government has nothing on the market when it comes to forced consumption as anyone would know who, due to a lack of public transportation, has to maintain a car in order to get to work, or finds themselves in need of healthcare, or paying more for basic services such as TV which, by the way, use to be free, or generally wants to function in contemporary society. The only thing missing from the whole scene was the low, eerie hum of a synthesizer and someone shrieking at the president:
“Oh my God! It’s a white Obama!”
From that pivotal point on, the denouement proceeded with a montage style breakdown that consisted of anti-corporation protesters, having been schooled in the principle of unintended consequences, turning anti-government, while Tagny pursued her scientific ally in a plane, having lost him to Galt, crashed, and, in the final scene, finally met the mystery man himself: John Galt.
However, the real money shot, at least in terms of the mentality behind the movie (and its desire to impose a kind of grim irony similar to the ending of Altman’s Nashville), came with a bum sitting on a curve in the midst of the chaos, a sort of Nietzschian madman, writing on a piece of wood shaped like a gravestone:
America:
Born: 1776
Died: Yesterday.
How I Faltered and the Plot Thickened:
I had to wonder if it wasn’t some kind of joke. I mean: why? Why did they even go through with this? Who would push such a project? They had to have seen just how badly the whole project was developing. Wouldn’t the stilted dialogue have been a clue? Were the Koch brothers behind it? It just seemed a little self defeating to showcase Rand’s work and thought in such a blatantly hokey and ridiculous manner. I found myself going back to the theory that what the producers were actually doing was offering up a combination of tribute and critique of the book. But that might have made a good movie. The only other possibility was that they were undermining it, in a backdoor kind of way, by presenting it in the most distasteful manner possible. But that seemed an incredible risk of money without marketing it and actually presenting it as satire. And, of course, there was the most obvious possibility of the project being pushed as propaganda by corporate interests or a right wing think tank.
By Part Two, I had calmed down and found myself playing the game of “why these actors would involve themselves?” And this was mainly because the cast from Part One had been completely replaced with what, as far I could tell, were more familiar faces. There was Richard T. Jones utilizing the same stoic loyalty as Dagny’s assistant that he did in Judging Amy and Paul McCrane portraying the same obnoxious worm, as a government official, that he did in ER. And the inclusion of these two suggested that they had been chosen, like character actors, for their perfect fit based on these previous roles. And further research showed that, unlike An American Carol where all the actors had some association with the Republican Party, there was nothing to indicate that any of these had any ideological affinity to the story itself. Nor was there any indication that they were lacking for work and participated out of desperation. The only conclusion I could come to is that they were just minor actors who took whatever work was available to them and stood little to lose by it: the immunity to career suicide that comes from being a minor actor. This especially seemed the case with Ray Wise, as Head of State Thompson, who, having gotten notice in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, seems to show up everywhere, regardless of quality, and keeps showing up due to his unique physical characteristics. He’s hardly a precious diva when it comes to his art. And given that possibility, I had to wonder if such character actors such as Danny Trejo and William Forsyth might show up in the third installment. That said, though, I couldn’t help but suspect that Esai Morales took the part to brush up on his Shakespearian chops, while Deidrich Bader took it to break from his more air headed roles and write complex mathematical formulas on glass, just like he saw Russell Crowe do on A Beautiful Mind.
Still, there was the question of what happened to the first cast. John Aglialoro, the driving force behind the series, implied that the cost of hiring the cast from Part One exceeded Part Two’s budget and added that Taylor Schilling, Dagny in Part One, had become a bona fide star. This was immediate cause for suspicion since I hadn’t heard of or seen much of her. However, as a little researched showed, she had since appeared in the movie The Lucky One and the Netflix Series, Orange is the New Black. But how did that make her anymore inaccessible or expensive than Esia Moralas, Ray Wise, or Diedrich Bader? And Aglialoro wouldn’t be the first executive to spin something. So there was still the possibility of what, in some deep, dark, and petty element of my psyche, would have given me the satisfaction of the sanctimonious: that the first cast, having seen what a flop they had participated in, jumped ship, or the less pleasurable one of the producers abandoning them in the hopes of getting it right the next time. Or it could have been a combination of both.
Unfortunately, the story of how the movie came to be offered less leeway for self indulgence and sanctimony than I would have liked. After I got past my own expectations, and an initial propensity to read them into my research, I found the truth to be a little less odious. First of all, it was a project that took 30 plus years to be realized, starting in 1972 when Albert S. Ruddy approached Rand with the idea, which she agreed to on the condition that it focus on the love story between Reardon and Taggart and that she had final script approval. However, Ruddy rejected the offer and the deal fell through. It was then proposed as a 8 hour mini-series, but fell through again due to a CEO change. Rand even attempted a screenplay, but misfortune followed the project when she died 1/3 of the way through it. After yet several more setbacks, Aglialoro, an investor and co-writer to the script that finally got used, obtained the rights in 1992 only to suffer several more setbacks (including losing the commitment of Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, and Anne Hathaway to play Dagny) until the movie went into production in 2010 and was released in 2011. The hope was that Part One would finance the making of Part Two. But that, due to bad critical and box office reception, didn’t happen. However, Aglialoro and conspirators would not be discouraged and they somehow managed to scrape together an even bigger budget for Part Two only to create an even bigger flop. And as would be expected, the criticism it received was contingent on the individual’s ideological position. Most critics, being of a liberal or moderate lean, bludgeoned it with some caveats such as the look of the film and the casting choices in Part Two. But the most insightful criticism came from the A.V. Club:
"The irony of Part II’s mere existence is rich enough: The free market is a religion for Rand acolytes, and it emphatically rejected Part I.”
Reception in the Conservative press was, as we would expect, generally more positive while being more mixed than one might expect. Fox New’s Sean Hannity and Jon Stossel, along with critics from conservative journals, sang its praises , while others were a little more reserved in recognizing the bad production values while recommending it for the message. But a point needs to be made here, one I have neglected, in that not every conservative would necessarily advocate this series or the ideological extremes that Rand goes to. William F. Buckley Jr., for instance, rejected the book itself on the grounds of its underlying objectivism. It would serve us here to make an important distinction made by Thom Hartman between your everyday conservative and the Neo-Con, or what he referred to as a Con. As I have learned, throughout my intellectual process, conservatism can mean any number of things depending on which conservative you’re talking to, and even if I disagree with it in general, it is far too complex to warrant, across the board, the venom I have focused on this particular extreme.
As it stands now, Part Three is slated to appear in the summer of 2014. And given the struggles and dramatic turns this project has gone through, it will be interesting to see if it does. The making of it has become a kind of narrative in itself –one that, like a cheap B movie, you can’t help but follow through with to see how it turns out. There will, of course, be the true believers that will try (much as Aglialoro did) to pass these struggles off as the result of a Hollywood leftist conspiracy. It was the critics that killed it; not the quality of the movie. And we have to attribute some credibility to this argument. Creative people, at least those in the arts, do tend to be more liberal. But this is because their chosen pursuit requires that they be a little sympathetic and sensitive to the complexity of a given character or personality type. I, myself, have long felt it to be cornerstone of my creative process to recognize that, if I look deep enough into myself, there isn’t anyone I can’t at least empathize with, if not sympathize, no matter how despicable. Which makes me even more curious as to what it was they expected. No more than I could hope to get through to the true believers with this, how could they think this series would get through to the very people they are, with an air of disgust, referring to as “Looters”? How well would that work if people on my side of the fence referred to rich people and the true believers as “Hoarders”? How much corporate sponsorship could they hope to solicit?
In the end though, I had to eat a little crow in having to admit that it wasn’t pimped by corporations, or a right wing think tank, for the sake of propaganda. And the Koch brothers, as far as I know, were not involved. Eventually, I had to admit, as much as I didn’t want to, that it was a labor of love. With time, I found myself making further concessions as I went back through both parts in a more lucid and calm state of mind. I found myself, having gotten past the initial sting, a little more sympathetic with Jack Hunter, from The American Conservative, who noted:
“If you ask the average film critic about the new movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged they will tell you it is a horrible movie. If you ask the average conservative or libertarian they will tell you it is a great movie. Objectively, it is a mediocre movie at best. Subjectively, it is one of the best mediocre movies you’ll ever see.”
Once I got past my predispositions and expectations, I found it to be not totally lacking in cinematic quality. And it did seem a little more sophisticated than most B movies in that, between Rand and those who behind the series, there was a clear awareness of just about every plot device that Hollywood had to offer –even if they came off as clichés. And Rand certainly seemed to know how to put a story together, which gives some credibility to the achievements she managed with other books such as The Fountainhead. So I can easily see how someone who was a little more sympathetic to the ideology, or even indifferent, might be able to enjoy it in the same mindless manner I might with some low budget film on ScyFy or Fear Net.
And while I have yet to well up as the train crosses the bridge, I also found myself with an inkling of sympathy for Hank Reardon. In the beginning of Part One, he gave his wife, Lillian Reardon a bracelet made of Reardon Steel, a rather appealing piece of work and admittedly thoughtful gift that reflected Hank’s commitment to his work and his high hopes for her future. However, Lillian, a gold digging looter who spends much of the story skulking about and plotting against her husband, takes it as a symbol of his egoism, scoffs, and eventually trades it with Dagny for a pearl necklace. And we have to recognize the semiology at work in that achievement is given privilege over materialism, and in the suggestion that Dagny’s common understanding of this privilege is what underlies the chemistry between her and Reardon. Interestingly, though, it was Lillian that provided the one insightful line in the whole thing. In a confrontation between her and Hank, over the divorce he wanted but she wouldn’t consent to, she approached him, looked him straight in the eye, and said:
“I’m the one that knows you most. You’re an ordinary man who thinks he doesn’t owe anyone anything. But you do. You owe everyone.”
What was revealed, whether consciously or not on the part of those who produced this story (perhaps even Rand), is the natural force fallacy that haunted and compromised Reardon’s courtroom stand. What one needs to accept, that is in order to see his point as anything else than ludicrous, is the notion that it is perfectly natural for some to rise to the top even if it comes at the expense of others. And while we can agree with Reich that it is not the role of corporations to act as moral agents, we have to take pause when the question is asked:
“What do the rich owe us?”
The problem is the underlying assumption that the achiever acts in a vacuum, which is easy to do when Capitalism does such a effective job of mimicking a natural force and can be treated like an expression of nature (like the weather or death). But it’s not. It’s a human construct and, by virtue of that, an agreement. And as with any agreement, when it fails to work for all parties involved (or too few of them), it becomes a disagreement that warrants renegotiation. Second of all, in the real world, Reardon would not have created his wealth by himself. He would have built it on the productivity of labor and the purchases of consumers. So while he is not obligated to recognize the “public good” as justification for his existence (even though it actually is given that the “public good” was and is why we agree to Capitalism in the first place), he has every obligation to recognize it when it expresses itself through government policy –that is since his achievement was as dependent on that policy, via infrastructure, as anything. But then I’m speaking in terms of the real world where far less ludicrous forms of legislation are created and enforced. And doesn’t this interdependence between producer and consumer point to a major discrepancy between the real world and Rand’s? Throughout the story, we’re presented a scenario in which America is suffering from major economic distress, one that is unlikely to produce the consumer base necessary to support Reardon’s and Taggart’s activities. Where would the profits come from? It seems that if such a scenario actually did exist, the only real struggle the main characters would have is avoiding bankruptcy.
And it gets more interesting, assuming this scene to be taken from the book, when we consider that Rand may have revealed an internal conflict that inadvertently gave the story a little depth. First of all, she clearly recognized that Capitalism was, in fact, not a natural force, but a human agreement that that was vulnerable to further choices made by future agents. Otherwise, what would be the point? Why would she even feel the need to write Atlas Shrugged in order to “warn us”? And this just goes to a general inconsistency at work in the argument that results in a back and forth between Capitalism as an agreement that must be protected from the non-believers at all costs, and Capitalism as a natural force immune to all arguments against it -that is: dependent on which take happens to be convenient at the time. Furthermore, we get the feeling from this that Lillian, having broken through Hank’s denial concerning his dependency on others, is Rand’s worst nightmare due to a truth that Rand could not completely overcome. You have to wonder if Lillian did not serve as her evil alter-ego: a composite of common characteristics (ambition, materialism, and general narcissism) and Rand’s own doubts about herself.
But, in all fairness, we should consider the time in which Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged which was published in 1957. At the time, the cold war was heating up and there were Marxist elements that still bought into the egalitarian dream of Communism. Nor was she the only one concerned about this aspect of it as was demonstrated in Kirk Vonnegut’s short story, published in 1961, Harrison Bergeron. Plus that, she, like Smith and Marx, had no way of foreseeing the actual consequences of her push for deregulation much as we saw in the economic meltdown of 2007. However, this point fails to redeem those who started this series in 2010 and, in fact, strategically chose the release date of the first part for tax day and the second for the 2012 election thereby confirming the series’ status as propaganda.
And it’s not as if I’m completely unsympathetic with the ideology. I too recognize that “selfishness” is a term that tends to be bandied about by those who would selfishly insist that you focus on what it is they think you should be doing. Plus that, being a man of modest resources, I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people who either can’t do for themselves, or won’t, yet make demands that I’m expected to fulfill. Like Bill Maher, who expressed as much on Real Time, I too know what it’s like to feel like I’m the only one pulling the wagon while everyone else jumps in. But it’s always a little more complex than that. There is a big difference between deciding to balance one’s own needs with that of others and the plundering of taking what one wants regardless of who suffers. For one, what do we do with those who can’t do for themselves? Help them? Or do we take the more fascistic route of letting them die off? And it’s not like those that won’t lack for incentive or motivation. Working still seems to be a much better option than the hand to mouth existence I’ve seen such people get by on -social programs or not. But the most odious aspect of this is that Rand’s version of Capitalism acts as if society shedding this burden would magically make it disappear. What really happens, by not spreading the burden through social programs, is that it becomes more localized either through the crimes committed by the desperate, or the desperate that turn to those closest to them to survive. Take, for instance, the Tea Party justification for dismantling social security that refers back to the good old days when families took care of their elderly. Of course, the problem with this is that back then the elderly usually didn’t get so elderly because healthcare was less developed and effective (and life expectancy much lower) with the consolation of being less expensive. A stroke, heart attack, or cancer generally meant imminent death, not a lot of lingering around in a decrepit state. In other words, you were generally either healthy enough to take care of yourself, or dead. On top of that, a family could generally survive on one income, thereby leaving one parent, usually the wife, with the time to take care of the aged. And given that such a financial arrangement is no longer practical, I fail to see how such an approach could be conducive to “achievement”, which is supposedly the main issue here. But if we follow the reasoning through, we find that only real achievement at stake is that of the Rand Head or Tea Bagger, since the possibility of achievement in their world would be contingent on either being fortunate enough to not have any relationships with those who cannot do for themselves, or even won’t, or being cruel enough to abandon them -that is unless you have the good fortune of having excess resources in the first place.
And it is the repeatedly proven failure, poverty, and outright cruelty of their policies that forces them to the misdirection that Atlas Shrugged represents. Such self-indulgence simply cannot be propped up through reason -that is since reason, a cooperative venture, must inherently involve a consideration of all interests involved. Instead it must work purely in the mode of rationalization, an inherently competitive venture that seeks to dominate the discourse by any means available. Hence the false dilemma that neglects to get across how Liaise Faire Capitalism serves all our interests, the downplaying of its failures (the people dying due to lack of access to healthcare, food, or shelter, or ghettos and distressed environments that invariably exist under it), and the heavy emphasis on the evils of the looters who, we’re suppose to believe, want it all -which now strikes me as a kind of transference in that the greed and megalomania of the Capitalist is magically imposed upon the reformer. But let’s be clear on this: neither myself, nor anyone I can think of, want to strip the rich of all their assets and distribute BMWs in the ghettos. The notion that they do is utter nonsense. And had Rand, or the movie makers, taken such considerations into the balance, they might have achieved something more than propaganda. They might have created a decent story. But that, in a spectacular way, is not what happened.
The Comeback or how I Crossed My Bridge:
Of course, some true believers, those with the taste and the honesty to know bad cinema when they see it, would argue that it is unfair to judge Rand’s book, and the ideas behind it, on a badly made movie, that I should read the book. And outside of the most obvious objection, that the movie did little to inspire wading through a 1200 page book, there are a couple problems with this argument. For one, let’s imagine the movie made with top level talent. Let’s say George Clooney for Hank Reardon. I could see him play it with the mixture of drive, restraint, and civility that Rand seemed to want for this character. However, Clooney would play up the conflicts in more subtle ways, much as he did in Up in the Air. And this would have to include his stated indifference to the poor. He would have to find a way to smooth the vacillation between the likable Rearden and the smug, obtuse one. And that might include self doubt. For Dagny Taggart, any one of the actresses originally slated for the movie would work. Angelina Jolie could certainly play it hardnosed. As could Julia Roberts as was demonstrated in Charlie Wilson’s War where she played a right wing contributor to Senator Wilson’s agenda. But, for all the rough edges, Roberts had to play counter to Tom Hank’s humanity and make their compatibility seem realistic. Charlize Theron could certainly pull it off. And I don’t know enough about Anne Hathaway to comment. But they would also have to incorporate the Madonna –like character of Taggart. And it’s something we can be certain actresses of such a caliber would be more than willing to do. However, it would involve a little more than being nice to people who happen to serve their purposes. They might actually have to show a little reservation when witnessing the struggles of the poor. But regardless of who played what, it would require much better dialogue and a more rounded approach to the motivations of the main characters and those around them. And this would be especially true of the antagonists as no talented actor would choose to play the one dimensional villains portrayed. And this would likely require stepping outside of Rand’s original intent and message into a combination of tribute to those aspects of her thought that many can agree with, such as the value of achievement, and critique of those aspects many find repulsive. For instance, the main characters might have to be as fallible and prone to being wrong as they are heroic. And one thing good actors would not do, as Stallone has, and Costner back in his The Bodyguard days, is just tack those flaws onto their otherwise heroic behavior. Their flaws would have to be as intertwined in their character as their virtues. In other words, the greed and self indulgence would have to rear its ugly face.
And similar considerations would be at play concerning how the movie was made or by whom it was directed. Someone like Spielberg, for instance, would bring much better special effects into the mix and might approach it like he did War of the Worlds and jumble up time by setting the time in the near future of 1957 when Atlas Shrugged was written. And wouldn’t that serve as a critique as well as a tribute? That would insulate it from the present and what we know now, thereby, making Rand’s predictions a little more palatable since the causality at work would be that of an imaginary world remote from our own. Plus that, it would effectively deal with something that bothered a lot of critics: the discrepancy between the movies economy, built around the railway, and our own digital economy. But Spielberg, like the actors, would want to mix it up. He too would want to dig into the multiplicity of motivations and circumstances and the conflicting ethical considerations. And once again, the only way to do so would be a subtle mix of tribute and critique.
Or it could be approached like a CGI remake of a graphic novel like Sin City or Sky Captain of Tomorrow. This would make it remote enough from our reality to preempt most comparisons between Rand’s slippery slope and the way things have actually turned out. But then purposely making it all seem like a cartoon would only seem like mocking the seriousness of Rand’s message –at least to the true believers. But if I had my choice, I would go with Neil Blomkamp. Given the point he made in the director’s comments for District 9 (and continued in Elysium), that anyone who wanted a look into the future only needed to go to Johannesburg where 5% of the population holds all the wealth while the other 95% lives in abject poverty, and given the portrayal of it he gave in the movie, he would seem qualified and willing enough to bring out something that was conspicuously missing in the first two parts of the series: the distressed environments and ghettos that would certainly surround the world of Reardon and Taggart.
But regardless of who participates or how the movie was made, such high level artists would insist that there be changes and additions to Rand’s original story in order to obtain the subtle complexity that distinguishes real art from propaganda. But then such a balanced perspective would not serve the tunnel vision and one sided perspective propping up the ideology. Such complexity would only raise the possibility that the only economic system that makes sense would be the one we’re already in, the hybrid economy, and that beyond that there is only the question of which aspects of its multiplicity should be either left where they are, and which should be moved closer to the command or market side of the spectrum.
Therein lies the core problem with the argument that it’s not Rand’s fault, but mine for not reading the book. While I may not be able to completely blame Rand for a badly made version of her story, what I can almost be certain of is that the message is explicitly hers. This would seem evident in the high praise given the series by true believers such as Hannity and Fossel. Plus that, this was a labor of love by true believers who would have little reason to alter the message. But, for me, it was most evident in the fact that I have heard the same arguments used a thousand times against any argument I have presented for anything less than a religious and dogmatic faith in the invisible hand of the market.
And this leads me to question whether Rand’s sensibility, and her zealous embrace of it, excludes her from the possibility of writing a classic. Once again, art’s distinguishing asset, especially as concerns storytelling, is its ability to capture the complexity and often conflicting forces at work in reality. It, more than any other medium, is equipped to deal with the multiplicity of motives and the emergent subtleties that can come into play in any confrontation. But Rand only sees one side, that of Capitalism, and stubbornly maintains a blind spot for the other. At best, she only offers caveats such as her apparent respect for the railway service tech (which is the equivalent of the token black or gay friend for xenophobes) and her willingness to portray the rich surrounding the main protagonists as looters along with government and the needy masses. Consequently, I can’t help but feel that the main source of this deficit lays in a seething contempt, rooted in her experiences in communist Russia, for the other that she struggles to contain for the sake of integrity -or the expectations she found herself surrounded by as a Hollywood writer. Furthermore, we should consider the distinction between fancy and imagination made by Coleridge. In fancy, we indulge the fantasies that emerge from our baser impulses and thereby give into simplistic notions concerning the monsters that inhabit them. With imagination, we utilize the cognitive in an attempt to understand those monsters as having recognizable and sometimes sympathetic motivations. And Rand, given the one dimensional portrayal of her antagonists and heroes, clearly settles for the fanciful. And while you can entertain people with such, art, sooner or later, requires imagination -not the caveats she sprinkles throughout the story. Paul Krugman makes a humorous but observant point on this:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
This becomes especially evident when we consider the main thread that ties it all together: John Galt, the enigmatic but shadowy figure that goes about like a shepherd gathering his flock of overachievers to take them to their promise land, a place where their efforts will be fully appreciated and nourished. But appreciated by who? And how does insulating oneself from the world nourish the creative impulses that arise from dealing with the problems presented by the world? And who exactly will there be to reward those accomplishments with money or applause? Lack of reward, after all, was the issue in the first place. They would, of course, have the appreciation of their peers. But would that be enough? As Nietzsche, an apparent influence on Rand, well knew: mediocrity, for all the frustration it might present, is as necessary to greatness as greatness is to it. There exists an interdependence between the two. But this seems to be a complete blind spot to Rand. This is why she can entertain this rather vindictive fantasy of Galt’s ultimate revenge: to stop the motor of the world, to punish the looters and show them the error of their ways by depriving them of the benefits of greatness and excellence. And how does she know that this will necessarily lead to the downfall? She bases this on the assumption that excellence can only flourish within the context of Laissez Faire Capitalism. But how does she know the challenges presented by a world without Galt’s flock wouldn’t stimulate those left behind to rise to their full creative potential and assure the survival of their community? And wouldn’t it be poetic justice to see the strike fail and Galt and flock skulking back to society, hoping to partake of the fruits of its efforts, much as the scientist, who had tried to undermine Reardon Steel, did with Dagny after her success with the John Galt line? Perhaps then the looters could engage in the same heavy-handed nobility by deflecting the pathetic concessions of the once great. And in the end, doesn’t Galt’s strike feel like the child-like fancy of holding one’s breath until they either get their way, or everyone’s face turns blue?
And it is this vindictiveness, coupled with Rand’s zealousness for her beliefs and her propensity towards fancy that undermines the aesthetic of the work. It appeals to beauty, but succumbs to propaganda. It’s as if she is less concerned with convincing anyone of anything than rallying the true believers. She plays on the internal feedback loop of the cult dynamic. And in her Gecko-like world where greed, if not good, is acceptable for the sake of achievement, and altruistic notions such as the public good are spat out with snarls of disgust, a world where there are only the achievers and the looters, and in which we can assume most of us to be the latter, you have to wonder how much we are suppose care or feel for the main characters, to what extent we are suppose to share in the triumph of Reardon and Taggart as the train crosses the bridge. But then it wasn’t sympathy or care that Rand wanted us to feel, was it? It was, rather, awe: the very awe that subjects of the past were suppose feel for their monarch.
This is further evident in Dagny’s relationship with a service tech from Taggart Railway. Rand, like most who argue for Laissez Faire Capitalism, was prudent in including the common man in her vision. As Deleuze and Guattarri point out: no tyrranny could exist in a vacuum. They always have to insulate themselves from those they would exploit by creating a cushion of loyal and well compensated benefactors. This is what Malcolm X was talking about when he referred to the house slave -in terms a little harsher than mine. But what he pointed out was that in the days of slavery, the slave owner would keep one family of closer to the house and give them advantages the others would not have. That way, when one of the lesser slaves started to get uppity and talk about rebelling or escaping, the house slave would be right there arguing that such acts of dissent could only make things worse. And one could easily see the RandHead fawning over this particular employee: complacent to the point of easy going, dedicated to his job, and perfectly willing, as an ex-employee of Twentieth Century Company, to reiterate Reardon’s explanation of its demise –not to mention his casual awe at finding himself in the presence of Dagny. After he explains to her where the scientist who created the super battery was, she asks if she can take his truck to which he responds in yet another lame attempt at humor that plays on the ultimate truth of private property:
“Sure, it’s yours anyway.”
Of course, Dagny rewards this loyalty, as most employers do (?), by telling her other loyal sidekick, Eddie, to get that employee another truck since (another stab at humor) she stole his and to triple his salary. But we really need to look at the semiology at work here. What one might see in this employee is the one non-achiever that manages to avoid the tag of being a looter: someone perfectly willing to just do what their told and not question the forces at work in their life: the ideal producer/consumer. In other words, what is being praised here is conformity. And this seems a little strange and contradictory given that Rand, throughout her career, pushed her ideology under the banner of some radical form of freedom. She argued as if she were championing what was best for all. But the only vision that seems to be at work is a world in which the achievers, unobstructed, can enjoy the full fruits of their labors, while those that can’t complacently accept their position in life for the sake of the higher principle of Capitalism.
Despite all that, allow me to indulge in a cheap narrative device (that of the gratuitous plot twist) and actually plug the series and say that I look forward to Part Three, if for no other reason than to see how ludicrous it can get. And I would also confess that I do so, in part, in the pure Randian spirit of self interest. Why wouldn’t I? Those that do will understand and appreciate the preceding essay all that more? Furthermore, I would implore Netflix not to take my 1 star rating as an inducement to take the series off their catalogue. It was their user critiques that inspired this. With most films I didn’t like, I wouldn’t even bother. And I generally find negative criticism to be a little self indulgent in that it becomes more about the critic than the thing being criticized. But this case is special. And because of that, I would argue that it is Netflix’s social duty to keep it available as an ideological artifact, something to be approached in the same negative sense of Reefer Madness, the thought of John Calvin, and Mein Kampf. And while the series may not exactly represent Rand’s thought, story, and ideology, it clearly represents the mentality that has evolved from it. And in that sense, it is every bit as significant and culturally important as the book itself.
Furthermore, I would encourage everyone to see it –even at the risk of reinforcing the belief system behind it. While Roger Ebert expressed disappointment that the low quality of Part One preempted a healthy discussion around the work and ideas of Rand, I would respectfully disagree and reiterate that it may well be the ideology, itself, that preempted the possibility of a good movie. And that, in itself, is cause for discourse and contention.
Now for my fellow looters, my progressive and moderate peers, I would appeal to their forgiving nature and ask that they bear with it until they find themselves immune to the initial sting of insult and bad taste and find in it what I have: a sense of clarity about the other, the encouragement to set aside one’s self-questioning and open mindedness and recognize bad reasoning when one sees it, and the recognition that when even the boundaries of common sense have been transgressed, one can no longer afford the luxury of being a noble or beautiful soul. We can no longer afford the relativity of acting like it is just one opinion among others. This, via global warming and the empire of globalization, can actually end up destroying civilization as we know it.
As for the true believers, the Rand and Ditto-heads who have invaded, throughout much of my intellectual life, a large part of my audio and ideological space with droning repetitions of Randian scripture and the unquestioning praise of producer/consumer Capitalism, many of which I have found to be otherwise decent people (some to the point of dear friends), I can, on one hand, see it as a just form of therapy or deprogramming in that given the task, the best method would be to strap them to a chair and force them to watch this nonsense, repeatedly, with the added effect of interspersing it with ad-like spots, made by real talent, that describe the misery and devastation their perspective has caused. Maybe then, after enough of it, they’ll develop some taste, then a clue, then hopefully, just hopefully, a social conscience. One can only hope that it might lead to an epiphany and recognition of what is effectively a sickness and form of addiction to producer/consumer Capitalism, and that this break from denial will force them to see their belief system for what it is: not so much reason as reason in the service of baser impulses. Maybe then they’ll see that referring to someone as “looters” is as much as calling them “rats” or “cockroaches” and goes to the same effect of reducing the other to an undesirable which must be overcome to achieve some erroneous notion of perfection. But more important is the hope that they’ll see Rand’s thought and Atlas Shrugged for what it is: the propaganda of the self indulgent and sociopathic, and the hegemony that would blind us to the exploitation of those impulses, and the fancies that emerge from them, for the sake of advantage and power. On the other hand, many of “those people” are dear friends who are far more than their ideologies. Therefore, in my more rational moments, I lean towards forgoing strapping them to a chair. Still: I would recommend the series in the remote hope that they’ll see how absurd and disturbing some of the reasoning is to their dear friend. Maybe then they’ll think less in terms of defending their corner at all costs and, while not surrendering to my position on it (that would just be scary), recognize Atlas Shrugged for the dangerous extreme it is.
Dear Editor: Arnold Zuboff’s article, Theories that Refute Themselves (issue 106), stays true to the classicist tradition of acting as if it is the only approach that could possibly be in touch with reality while twisting that reality to its own hierarchical ends. Case in point: his assertion that pragmatism seeks to dispel correspondence. This likely refers to the dialectic between the correspondence and coherence truth tests that dominated philosophy up until the pragmatic synthesis came along, incorporated both, and added a democratic dimension. And there is a big difference between dismissing something and calling it what it is: a tool, one among many, that may or may not work for a given task. If there is an issue, it is with all the fussing and browbeating around the right method when these tools are a natural part of our evolutionary makeup. It’s how we do things. For Pragmatism, all that really has, does, and will count is discourse and what works.
l also noticed the irony in Zuboff’s dismissal of Wittgenstein’s Language Game when the first half of his article pretty much serves the point. He offers us a survey of various reincarnations of the skeptic’s paradox, a classic language game that has been thrown at many non-classicist isms (relativism, skepticism, existentialism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, pragmatism, etc.) and the nihilistic perspective that underwrites them: that which is tapped into the underlying nothingness and sees all assertions breaking down to assumptions that float on thin air. The problem is that the tactic falls short of the Classicist fantasy of an argument so undeniable that the opposition can only submit. It can only preach to the choir. Say someone was to approach the skeptic and the nihilistic perspective and huff with indignation:
“You cannot say there are no absolutes since to do so is to offer an absolute.”
The skeptic would do as they naturally do, scrutinize, and inevitably realize that there is a big difference between saying we live in a world in which there are no absolutes and actually living in one, then go right on being a skeptic. The nihilistic perspective would just cross its arms, glare, and snort:
“Right! Nothing is engraved in stone; not even that nothing is engraved in stone. So what’s your point?”
The skeptic’s response goes to the weakness of the tactic: its failure to make the jump from semantic justification (the language game) into an existential justification that jives with the skeptic’s reality. The nihilistic perspective’s response goes to an assumption that pretty much floats on thin air. While Zuboff is describing self refuting theories, he assumes (as many neo-classicists do) that there is no room for them in philosophical inquiry - that is in the face of a reality that can often be contradictory with splashes of irony and paradox sprinkled in. And, existentially, isn’t Neo-Classicism just as self refuting in its insistence on an absolute truth it has yet to produce within the reality it supposedly has dominion over?
This revision has the buzzworks in it.
Dear Editor: Arnold Zuboff’s article, Theories that Refute Themselves (issue 106), holds to the classicist tradition of acting as if it is the only approach that could possibly be in touch with reality while twisting that reality to its own ends. For instance: his assertion that pragmatism seeks to dispel correspondence. This likely refers to the dialectic between the correspondence and coherence truth tests that traditionally dominated philosophy -that is up until the pragmatic synthesis came along, incorporated both, and added a democratic dimension. But this escapes Zuboff. And there is a big difference between dispelling something and calling it what it is: a tool, one among many, that may or may not work for a given task. And if Pragmatism has an issue, it is with all the fussing and browbeating around the right method when these tools are a natural part of our evolutionary makeup. It’s how we think. Beyond that, for Pragmatism at least, all that has ever, does, and will count is discourse and what works.
l also noticed the irony in Zuboff’s dismissal of Wittgenstein’s Language Game when the first half of his article pretty much proves the point. He offers a survey of various reincarnations of the skeptic’s paradox, a classic language game, and gotcha moment, that has been thrown at many non-classicist isms (relativism, skepticism, existentialism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, pragmatism, etc.), all of which ride on the nihilistic perspective: that which taps into the underlying nothingness and sees all assertions breaking down to assumptions that float on thin air. The problem is that the tactic falls short of the Classicist fantasy of an argument so undeniable that the opposition can only submit. It only preaches to the choir. Say, for example, one was to approach the skeptic and the nihilistic perspective and huff, indignantly:
“You cannot say there are no absolutes since to do so is to offer an absolute.”
The skeptic would do what they’re wired to do, scrutinize, and inevitably realize that there is a big difference between saying we live in a world in which there are no absolutes and actually living in one, then go right on being a skeptic. The nihilistic perspective would just cross its arms, glare, and snort:
“Right! Nothing is engraved in stone; not even that nothing is engraved in stone. So what’s your point?”
The skeptic’s response reflects on the weakness of the tactic: the failed leap from semantic justification (the language game) to an existential justification that works with the skeptic’s reality. The nihilistic perspective’s response goes to an assumption that pretty much floats on thin air. Zuboff is describing self refuting theories. But he assumes (as many neo-classicists do) that there is no room for them in philosophical inquiry - that is in the face of a reality that can often be contradictory, ironic, and paradoxical. And, existentially, isn’t Neo-Classicism just as self refuting in its claim to exclusive dominion over reality while insisting on some absolute truth it has yet to produce?
This is it, guy’s! This is the way it goes in. I need tomorrow to respond to an old friend.
What does the failure of the leap consit of? The lack of an ontological foundation? Does Ayin Rand reflect this featured weakness, and would an ontological certainty guarantee a logical tie in in absolute terms? Would that finally out to rest of any doubt especially as it is mirrored in the Lacanian sense? The insanity going on within the circles of national and international politics reflects a very monumental desire to nihilize insanity in terms of logical certainty.Godard had an interesting film about 2p years ago, where a crazy man kept asking him if he was really crazy. To which Godard replied, that if you keep asking the question long enough, then the answer will be yes. I am afraid Capitalism is a nihilization of even entertaining that question, and this is why language games is seen as a way out of the logical dilemma. We will never ever know, because we do not even understand the meaning of the question.
Christ, Orb!!! Brother!!! You read like a drunk version of Nietzsche’s Mad Man. I like it. When I came to the end, I heard the lantern clank against the ground.
d63
Thank you for that and I feel the above was meant as a compliment. When I started my correspondence with you years ago,malt high carried rather infrequently, I got the impression we have things to work on, albeit as vague as the French philosophers make that possible. that is the reason for my arbitrary and irregularly spaced correspondence. however, there is a Germaine process going on here, subliminally at least, trying to get out of its shell, and. By God there is so much to try to untangle within no this seemingly obscure and really continental way of,looking at reality, vs reality as a theoretical base to start with. I do appreciate working with You,mans look forward to our continuing associations.
Note: this is an excerpt from a work in progress:
There has lately, in America, been a major push by Democrats to increase the minimum wage. And while some of us can applaud the effort and see the short term benefits, and even support it in that capacity, we can’t help but look at the long term deficiencies. While it may well create demand in the short run, thereby, economic expansion, the inherent dynamic of our market economy will only over-ride the effects through inflation, via wage push and wage pull and the greed of investors until we’re right back where we started. We could easily see a day, for instance, when janitors are making six figure salaries but are no better off (if not worse) than they are now. This is because, as well intended as the Democrats are in this matter, they’re merely perpetuating more of the same by failing to get outside of the expansionary model of producer/consumer Capitalism and, consequently, may be inadvertently contributing to an ever increasing appetite for consumption that could result in our self destruction through economically motivated wars, environmental destruction, and the depletion of our natural resources.
Nor should we see the egalitarian model as practical or effective. First of all, if we can agree with anything the conservatives or the right have to say, we can agree that Marx’s assumption that people will naturally find their calling in such a system, that doctors will choose to be doctors, or engineers to be engineers, just because they love a certain activity was perhaps a little over optimistic. We have to admit that while a calling or passion is a powerful incentive, there have to be incentives as well that inherently involve inequalities. And the problem was never that some people happen to have more than others. The problem has always been having more at the expense of others. Secondly, it still works within the Capitalist values of more and its covert sibling “less”: give a little more to some while giving a little less to others. And while we can never truly escape the dynamic of more and less, we all have to think outside of it to escape our current predicament. It is not just a matter of changing policies. It is equally a matter of changing sensibilities if it is to truly work.
Sooner or later, whether through choice or force of circumstance, we have to step outside of the market paradigm that works strictly in terms of more and less. We simply cannot, for instance, rest on the old adage that workers want more compensation for less work, while their employers pose, against these demands, their own requirement for minimal investment at maximum return. It might seem common sense. But with a closer look, we might see that the two positions are not so deeply entrenched. If they were, the workplace would hardly be worth any amount of compensation, a perpetual battle with management while struggling to stay afoot in the mass competition toward better paying and easier jobs. And how can one be so happy at 10 an hour and another so miserable at 20? The janitor whistles, easily, while mopping his floor. He seems entranced, content, as if in meditation. Another man, sleek and muscular from hauling furniture, makes enough to go to the bar, nightly, and wakes each morning to sweat it off. At quitting time, the cycle repeats. And no random piss tests. Vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients continue to scrimp through their hand to mouth lives. Meanwhile, a white collar manager slumps over their computer, grumbles often, and when they can, steals a moment on Monster.com. He’s hardly afraid he’ll get caught and, sometimes, even hopes.
And then there are the intellectually and creatively curious, strange creatures that, in their ass-backwardness, approach the hierarchy of needs from the top down. They neglect basic creature comforts while clinging, often self destructively, to the drug-like addiction of self actualization. And what are they working toward? That is when so many of their heroes, the successful and famous, live public lives of misery, and sometimes kill themselves.
Clearly, we need to break it down to individual needs, demands, and desires. We need to penetrate the multiplicity and interrogate the interactions. Furthermore, we need to recognize that it is primarily about expectations and their satisfaction, and that satisfaction only seems binary and digital by virtue of a molar perspective on the issue. We need to consider the molecular multiplicity of efficiencies: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the resources put in to a thing and the resources gotten out of it.
Intro:
Of course, the word “efficiency” alone is enough to unsettle many. For some it will provoke visions of Ford-like assembly lines that reduce humans to mere automatons or Orwellian police states. For others, it may bring back memories of so-called efficiency experts that disrupted so many work environments or the tyrannical business practices of CEOs like Jack Welch. In Western European societies it may form associations with austerity measures. But this is the result of a use based approach, or abuse, of the word by the dominant ideology of producer/consumer Capitalism and its profit driven motives. For me, on the other hand, it has taken hold in a more ecological sense –as in the study of systems and their interactions. Whereas the use based approach would define it as squeezing as much as possible out of as little as possible; the ecological would define it as I do here: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between input and output.
For me, it started with a consideration of my personal and social situation, and the very real intrusions that producer/consumer Capitalism can make in our lives -much like the negative connotations described above. But as I looked around me and became more familiar with philosophical doctrines I began to see the wider applications such as our relationship with our natural environment and its resources. And I should note that I have spent a large part of my working life as a maintenance tech which proved philosophically useful in this context. Hence the term “Efficiency”.
But it wasn’t until writing this, that I realized that the model acts as an alternative to the Metaphaphysics of Power and the Culture of More that comes from it. We’re all, of course, familiar with the Will to Power embraced by Nietzsche. We can hardly read postmodern theory without feeling its residual effect. And we need not even mention its grip on mainstream Hollywood –at least for anyone who has seen an action film- and, thereby, the popular imagination. This why Nietzsche is so often cited in the movies. And note the ironically quoted to death “What doesn’t kill me makes me strong”. And we can trace the lineage at work back to Hobbes on through Nietzsche and on to the thought of Ayn Rand.
We can also see it in more subtle forms such as Spinoza’s (the Christ of philosophers) ethical system based on the interactions of joyful affects (in which a body has the power to affect other bodies) and sad affects (in which the body is subject to the affects of other bodies). Nor do our more progressive and cooperative attempts seem to escape it. Take Utilitarianism. While we can sympathize with the notion of maximizing happiness, we have to ask “at whose or what’s expense?” Are we not still talking about more power? Or empowerment?
At the same time, I still consider Efficiency a continuation of the progressive and cooperative spirit of Utilitarianism, as well as Marxism, opposed to the same competitive and individualistic approach of the Hobbes/Nietzsche legacy. It is more complimentary than dismissive. And in the process of writing this, I have found it more efficient (excuse the pun) to follow the same path by which I have arrived at this: starting with the social and psychological implications and working towards the more philosophical ones such as the ethical and, hopefully, even the metaphysical. (I mean by posing it in opposition to the Metaphysics of Power, couldn’t I consider this a Metaphysics of Efficiency?) And, hopefully, in the process, I will be able to establish that those concerns involved with the term “efficiency” are the result of the perfectly inefficient working under the false banner of efficiency.
But before I do, I would ask the reader to consider the happier moments in their lives. Were they a matter of simply having more? Or were they, rather, a matter of having all availible resources distributed in such a way that the various expectations at work, and their various levels, had what they needed to satisfactorily acheive a desired result?
The Why of Efficiency and the Efficiency of Why:
There has lately, in America, been a major push by Democrats to increase the minimum wage. And while some of us can applaud the effort and see the short term benefits, and even support it in that capacity, we can’t help but look at the long term deficiencies. While it may well create demand in the short run, thereby, economic expansion, the inherent dynamic of our market economy will only over-ride the effects through inflation, via wage push and wage pull and the greed of investors until we’re right back where we started. We could easily see a day, for instance, when janitors are making six figure salaries but are no better off (if not worse) than they are now. This is because, as well intended as the Democrats are in this matter, they’re merely perpetuating more of the same by failing to get outside of the expansionary model of producer/consumer Capitalism and, consequently, may be inadvertently contributing to an ever increasing appetite for consumption that could result in our self destruction through economically motivated wars, environmental destruction, and the depletion of our natural resources.
Nor does the egalitarian model seem practical or effective. First of all, if we can agree with anything the conservatives or the right have to say, we can agree that Marx’s assumption that people will naturally find their calling in such a system, that doctors will choose to be doctors, or engineers to be engineers, just because they love a certain activity was a little over optimistic. We have to admit that while a calling or passion is a powerful incentive, there have to be incentives as well that inherently involve inequalities. And the problem was never that some people happen to have more than others. The problem has always been having more at the expense of others. Secondly, it still works within the Capitalist values of more and its covert sibling “less”: give a little more to some while giving a little less to others -that is with no real consideration of what is actually required. And while we can never truly escape the dynamic of more and less, we all have to think outside of it to escape our current predicament. It is not just a matter of changing policies. It is equally a matter of changing sensibilities if it is to truly work.
Sooner or later, whether through choice or force of circumstance, we will have to step outside of the market paradigm that buttresses itself on the Metaphysics of Power and the Culture of More. We simply cannot, for instance, rest on the old adage that workers want more compensation for less work, while their employers pose, against these demands, their own requirement for minimal investment at maximum return. It might seem common sense. But with a closer look, we might see that the two positions are not so deeply entrenched. If they were, the workplace would hardly be worth any amount of compensation, a perpetual battle with management while struggling to stay afoot in the mass competition toward better paying and easier jobs. And how can one be so happy at 10 an hour and another so miserable at 20? The janitor whistles, easily, while mopping his floor. He seems entranced, content, as if in meditation. Another man, sleek and muscular from hauling furniture, makes enough to go to the bar, nightly, and wakes each morning to sweat it off. At quitting time, the cycle repeats. And no random drug tests. Vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients continue to scrimp through their hand to mouth lives. Meanwhile, a white collar manager slumps over their computer, grumbles often, and when they can, steals a moment on Monster.com. He’s hardly afraid he’ll get caught and, sometimes, even hopes.
And then there are us, the intellectually and creatively curious: strange creatures that, in their backwardness, approach the hierarchy of needs from the top down. They neglect basic creature comforts while clinging, often self destructively, to the drug-like addiction of self actualization. And what are they working toward? That is when so many of their heroes, the successful and famous, live public lives of misery, and sometimes kill themselves?
And, finally, at the deeper level of the Metaphysics of Power, you have to ask if, much as the workplace under the Culture of More, any system or the system in general could survive a model in which every component and system was merely seeking more power. It just seems like such a system would be a chaotic process of individual components systems seeking power at the expense of other components and systems until all that was left was one.
Clearly, we need to break it down to individual needs, demands, and desires. We need to penetrate the multiplicity and interrogate the interactions. Furthermore, we might recognize that it is primarily about expectations and their satisfaction, and that satisfaction only seems binary and digital by virtue of a superficial perspective on the issue. We might consider the role of Efficiency: that, once again, which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the resources put in to a thing and the resources gotten out.
The Macro-Mechanics of Efficiency:
Efficiency, a mechanical term used for equipment such as pumps, boilers, HVACs, etc., concerns the actual output of a system as compared to its theoretical rating and is a product of the differential between what the designer’s mathematics tell them (what something should be able to do) and what actually occurs in practice. But at a more fundamental level, it can also be the differential between the energy or resources put in to a thing (the input) and energy or resource gotten out (the output). And the best place to start to understand the complex interactions involved would be the environment I got it from: the boiler room.
A boiler room consists of individual components, instances of efficiency that, in turn, consist of other components. The pump motor (an instance of efficiency in itself) consists of various sub-efficiencies (the armature and windings) that, in turn, consist of various sub-efficiencies in their selves: the grooves on the armature or the wires of the windings. And should any of these elements be compromised, it will force other elements to work harder to achieve the same effect or output. the pump, of course, is a vital component of the heating system the boiler is providing steam for. Now we have two instances of efficiency working together as sub efficiencies for the supra-efficiency of the building they are supplying environmental controls for. By providing comfort for that corporate environment they serve as sub-efficiencies to the supra-efficiency of the building and, thereby, serve the very reason the building exists in the first place: productivity. That comfort, in turn, allows an ambitious individual, since they don’t have to expend resources on discomfort, to achieve maximum productivity.
But most important to the point out here is that, threading throughout it all, there is the always supra-efficiency of the coexistence of efficiencies: from this point on to be referred to as Coexistence. The main thing to understand here is that there is no ultimate instance of coexistence (no set of all sets), but various instances of interactions among systems. It emerges at all levels through the various instances of interaction among systems and must be addressed and maximized if the system formed by the local sub-systems is to succeed.
The Micro-Mechanics of Efficiency:
But in order to truly appreciate it and how it stands against the Metaphysics of Power, I would ask you to consider an equation I have developed in order to explain the main driving force behind it: Efficiency potential = Resources/expectations –or what I have previously written as Epot: R/e. But do not be intimidated. I am no more (if not less than) a mathematician than you are and there is no need to get technical about it. All it really means is that efficiency can generally be maximized by either increasing the resources available to a given act or system of acts, or decreasing the expectation involved. Conversely, nothing could minimize efficiency like decreasing resources available to a given act or system of acts or raising expectations to an unreasonable level. It is here that we see how ultimately inefficient the so-called efficiency experts actually were since their primary role, under the culture of more and a use based understanding of efficiency, was to squeeze as much as possible out of as little as possible via the power of the corporation to do so. It was always about meeting the needs of those who profit most, not those who had to carry the load.
(And I would also note here how the increases and decreases are not proportional –hence the R/e rather than R-e. If one were to do the math, they would find that as expectations increase, the amount of resources required to maintain the same Efficiency potential increases disproportionately more.)
And we’ve all seen it in the workplace. The company you are working for sees profits going down, or see them staying at a steady level, and suddenly implement a lot of new policies meant to micro-manage productivity. And many of these will involve matters that have nothing to do with productivity such as crackdowns on clocking in a minute late. Your manager, for instance, and due to pressure from higher management, piles more responsibility (increases expectation) on you while cutting overtime (decreases resources). The assumption, of course, based on the metaphysics of power, as well as the power of your employer, is that you will rise to the occasion. But what you will generally do, that is to get your efficiency potential back to where it was, is lower your expectations in other areas such as your desire to do your job as well as you can and with full integrity. You might, for instance, cheat or lie about your efforts in those matters and duties that you previously fulfilled so that you can focus your resources on the matters that your manager is focusing on, thereby addressing the corporate simulacrum of appearances. You might even feel guilty about it -that is by compromising your desire (your expectation) to be good at your job -and carry that home to your family and, thereby, compromise your desire to be a good family man or woman.
Conclusion: