Book Club discussion

Oof, that was weight. Was glad to have finished it, but put off writing about it for a while because I didn't know what to write. Took a bit of time to digest, but the ending of the book left a bad taste in my mouth.

Fiction is often a vehicle used to make arguments and cases for real world subjects, but Atlas Shrugged even more so is an argument in the form of a novel and is commonly talked about as a philosophic novel arguing for objectivism, or libertarianism. Fine,

The role of sex in the novel is very weird too. Everyone who is considered a good person in the book is attracted to Dagny. It appears that sexual attraction is based on reason for those who are "good" people as compared with the case of James who doesn't have the same motives and this reinforces his status as a bad person. This is a huge red flag and feels extemely unrealistic in the context of the novel. I think the causality here is backwards too, we often use our reason to justify why we are attracted to people rather than being attracted to the people we would reasonably want to be attracted to.

The thing that most surprised me about this book is that it advocates a path that would end up killing a lot of people. It advocates a revolution. It slow plays its way there too. First there is the example of the trainload of people who die due to negligance brought on by the strike. The book zooms-in in detail on some of the characters and tries to make them responsible for their own deaths. They were advocates who were complicit in the corrupt system.

And then Dagny straight up kills someone to complete their revolution. There's an attractive part of libertariansm, and that is it's pureity. No need for some corruptable bureaucracy. No need to try and find a moral justification for this bureaucracy either. But when you're advocating for violence and revolution of this form the end is that, once you've created your revolution things will fall back to where they started. Human nature doesn't change. Slowly the new world created by the Galtists will fall prey to the same grifters who they started their against, or they will become the grifters.

Anyways, I've been doing more reading and youtube in this general area, seems like the real solution is a land tax, but it wouldn't be so easy to write a novel on the topic.

The book does raise a lot of points, it is interesting, and it made me think a lot, but it's also dull to read and very overlong. I took away a star because I think this book, if properly edited, could have been much shorter.

Haven’t read the book but but I did hear about a town in the States where they fully embraced libertarianism and people straight up got attacked by a bear because they kept feeding the bear because “ain’t no rules gonna stop me from feeding this bear.”

Lol, found it :

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/poli...

Pretty good.

The common problem here is something like: if we set up a utopia, everyone will see how serious we are and how great it is and will change their behaviour in a way that people haven’t done in human history. Seems remarkably similar how proponents of communism expect things to work out after the revolution (though admittedly communism requires a much bigger buy-in from people for it’s project to be considered a success).

The issue is that even the small scale experiments run into problems because their is something in them that runs against human nature.

Yeah, “no rules” is pretty much a recipe for violence and hate run rampant, in my experience. Watching kids grow, I can see there’s something violent in all of them that needs to get trained out of them. Libertarian society in my mind is just a huge group of toddlers doing whatever they want, including smashing each other in the face every time they don’t get what they want.

Eugh. That's part of the conundrum of this book, and I think the philosphy more general.

Why is no rules a receipe for violene and hate? Does that mean that people are inherently violent and hateful?

I thinks this book is arguing that reason is the thing that trains people. Toddlers and kids can be unreasonable because they aren't forced to be self reliant. If we allow a society where people are made to be self-reliant (and are allowed to be looters).

What I meant was that "no rules" is a recipe for a society to become violent and hateful, not necessarily because every human is so violent and hateful that they can't have empathy, but that one or two bad actors can do so much damage that it would force society to become violent and hateful. Maybe not in caveman days, but when one person can kill dozens of people in seconds with an automatic weapon, the graph of "number of people x potential to do harm" changes dramatically.

I do also think that there is some measure of violence in everyone that we just have to learn to supress. Think of the last time someone acted cruelly/rudely/immaturely to you in a way that truly enflamed you. For me, the urge to punch them in the face has to get pushed down hard because I know there are consequences if I do that, even if I'm stronger than the other person. In a world with no consequences, I think there would be a lot more punched faces, creating victims who then feel a stronger desire to punch other peoples' faces in order to get their power back.

I do think there is some evolutionary merit to having that violence in us as well, since timidity and weakness in general isn't a trait that generally gets nurtured when we're in full survival mode. The side effect of that though is that we now need rules that provide consequences for violence because we're no longer in survival mode.