Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

There is a 50/50 chance that Mitt Romney will be elected president this November which is a reflection of how divided our nation remains at this point in time.  In an attempt to increase his appeal with the so-called Conservative Base of the Republican Party and tip the scales away from President Obama, he selected Congressman Paul Ryan, a young, dynamic, Tea Party favorite to be his running mate.  Mitt Romney’s biggest problem with his fellow Republicans is that he governed the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the way a “Blue Dog” Democrat might, after all, Obamacare is Romneycare’s disowned child.  In order to prove that he now thinks his own highly successful program was a terrible mistake, Governor Romney invited a bona fide conservative to go on the Great American Road Trip with him.  Vice presidents, historically, have been akin to window display mannequins at urban department stores:  they are designed to entice voters who might otherwise sit an election out.  (A notable exception was Dick Cheney, but that’s a topic for another day.)  As a pre-emptive strike, Governor Romney stated that he, and not Congressman Ryan, will be setting the agenda;  and that, if elected, Vice President Ryan will do as he is told.  In other words, no worries about him “going rogue”.

By now, we pretty much know who Joe Biden is, so no surprises there, although he does sometimes surprise his boss.  Paul Ryan, on the other hand, while not the wild card that Sarah Palin was four years ago, is still somewhat unknown and therefore requires a closer look.  One of the best ways to gain insight into a person is to ask him or her what his or her favorite book is.  Required reading in Congressman Ryan’s office is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, an immensely popular novel (published in 1957) about a dystopian America where the big, mean, government has crushed the entrepreneurial spirit of the pioneering free market capitalists who made this country great.  Out of despair, these free market capitalists have gone into self-imposed exile in their own private state where they wait for the big, mean, government to beg them to come back and Save the Country.  Meanwhile, the earnest corporate executives who depended on these excellent entrepreneurs in order to keep their corporations running felt as if they were whipping dead horses (bureaucrats) and being forced to feed the lazy, unwashed masses.

Dagny Taggart, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, is woman way ahead of her time:  an unmarried, but extremely beautiful (in a no-nonsense way), executive whose sole goal is the economic success of her family’s railroad.  Unfortunately, her boss (who is also her brother) is an incompetent twit who makes bad economic decisions at every possible opportunity, leaving Dagny to swim upstream in her quest for profitability.  Even worse than her worthless brother is the blood-sucking and coercive government which takes the hard-earned profits of her hard work to support people who are too lazy to get jobs and feed themselves.  And then, suddenly, the men who do and make the things which create the profits that the government steals disappear, mysteriously.  No entrepreneurs, no profits, no internal revenue. 

 

With the economy in cardiac arrest, Dagny and a very attractive steel executive named Hank Reardon take to the roads to solve the mystery of the disappearing rain-makers.  During their travels, they fall in love and this allows Ayn Rand to discourse on her feelings about sex.  Reardon’s wife is a controlling shrew who prevents him from realizing his potential (in every way).  Before he and Dagny move beyond a platonic relationship, they both must come to recognize that their superior qualities as people will justify their physical union (which will be as amazing as they are).  Ms. Rand was no prude and neither was she religious, so the fact that Hank Reardon was married was not an issue because he went through an elaborate searching of his conscience which enabled him to see that being with Dagny was in his own self-interest and was therefore The Right Decision.  

Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution which destroyed her father’s business and caused the family to flee to Crimea.  One benefit of the Revolution was that women were allowed to attend university.  After returning from exile, Ms. Rand studied literature, philosophy, and cinema at Petrograd State University.  In 1925, she obtained a visa to travel to the United States and immediately fell in love with the Manhattan skyline.  In order to remain in the US, Ms. Rand traveled to Chicago to stay with relatives, who happened to own a movie theater.  Ms Rand passed many hours watching movies and, apparently, was bitten by the movie bug because she next traveled to Hollywood, California, to become a screenwriter.  

Ayn Rand enjoyed some success as a screenwriter but it was her novel The Fountainhead which catapulted her into the limelight.  It is in this book that her notion of “individualism” versus “collectivism” begins to take form.  Ayn Rand believed that the individual was much more important than the community, but that a community of fully realized individuals, operating out of the purest of motives, would make an ideal society.  If everyone feeds and takes care of himself, without taking from his neighbor, the role of government is simply to make sure that everyone is minding his own business while not being invaded by tyrants.

With Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s evolving political philosophy emerged with more clarity.  In 1962, she wrote:

 Objectivism  holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. (Copyright 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.)

Taking this at face value, I can only conclude that Ayn Rand believed that humans, if they put their minds to it, could be the excellent and moral individuals that Objectivism requires.  She wasn’t clear about how we would get there or what we would do with those who would not or could not evolve (which leaves me with an uneasy feeling).  As a political philosophy, it makes good fiction.  As the basis for a running a country, it is a house of cards which, when scattered by the prevailing winds, could easily serve the needs of those with the will to power and the means to seize it.  (Perhaps Congressman Ryan should read War and Peace or Generations of Winter?)

In Atlas Shrugged, a popular phrase, “Who is John Galt?” is another way of saying “who cares?”  John Galt, it turns out, is the brilliant engineer who discovered a way to create a motor using static electricity in the air to produce electric current.  His employer, representing the Communist or collectivist mentality, decided that everyone in the company should benefit from Galt’s innovation, so Galt quit in disgust, leaving his prototype behind him, with no instructions.  John Galt, recognizing that the country’s ills stemmed from a government that espoused Karl Marx’s famous slogan: “ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” organized a strike on the part of the makers and doers in society, leaving the mooching masses and bureaucrats to fend for themselves.  Feds with Big Guns wanted to put a stop to this and they almost succeeded in making a martyr of John Galt, but Dagny Taggart saved the day.  Apparently, Ayn Rand viewed the government of her adopted country as two steps away from Bolshevik-style communism, but given her personal history, this is completely understandable.

So here we are, 55 years after Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged, with a troubled nation still leading an even more troubled world.  Sea levels are rising, deserts are expanding, populations are exploding, and rogue nations are working overtime to develop their own arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.  Meanwhile, our own fragile government is crippled by partisan warfare which serves only the needs of the political power brokers (i.e., the political party organizations, corporate lobbyists, and the richest one percent of the population who will be damned if they will pay another dollar in taxes).  Nobody in Washington wants to say the dreaded “T-word” lest he or she be branded a “Tax-and-Spend Liberal”; instead, a frightening number of our esteemed representatives in Congress and the Senate are busy planning the funeral of the United States of America which they believe will be killed by malignant budget deficits (not to mention our huge debt to China for funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).  It all sounds pretty hopeless.  Except it isn’t.  Unless we allow political forces to divide and conquer us by discouraging us.  

Political parties do their best to create simple and appealing messages so that we don’t have to think too hard, and this is the real problem facing our nation.  If we love our country, then our duty is to become informed:  to read everything, especially the writings of people who challenge us; to question what candidates tell us; to hold them accountable for the impacts of their agendas and belief systems.  Lots of people are going to tell you what to think and believe across the next many weeks, but only you can decide whom to vote for.  Decide carefully because, believe it or not, as long as enough of us show up at the polls, every vote counts.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

"Chinese Lessons"

Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret

Book Review by Teresa Friedlander (copyright 2008)

For two weeks this Summer, all the world focused on China where the 2008 Olympic Games took place. The opening ceremony with its perfectly choreographed cast of thousands and lip-synching baby-doll was China’s way of showing the world just how far that nation has come. A mere 30 years ago, China was locked up by Chairman Mao’s brand of Communism; very few foreigners were allowed in and those lucky few were closely watched. In 1981, John Pomfret, a twenty-two-year-old student, found a way in and matriculated at Nanjing University. Mr. Pomfret’s memoir, Chinese Lessons, documents his almost thirty-year relationship with China as a student and a journalist: the friends he made, the history he observed as it happened, and the evolution he witnessed as Communist China learned to compete in the global marketplace.

We Americans know very little about China. Most of us enjoy Chinese restaurants and attempting to use chopsticks, and some of us appreciate Chinese art and antiques. If we paid attention in high school history, we learned about the silk and spice trade routes, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, and that Japan attempted to conquer China during World War II. We also knew that China was a Communist country, and therefore an enemy until that nation discovered the benefits of capitalism and US corporations began hiring Chinese laborers for pennies on the dollar. Recently I have seen a number of bumper-stickers encouraging Americans not to buy things that are made in China. This speaks to a deep level of distrust we Americans continue to have toward that ancient, vast, densely populated, and mysterious nation.

Chinese Lessons is a moving and compelling description of modern China: the nation which emerged from the brutal repression of Maoist Communism to become an economic powerhouse. At twenty-two, John Pomfret had completed his junior year at Stanford University, majoring in East Asian Studies. Through university connections he secured a place in an exchange program and obtained the visa required to study in China. Upon arriving, Mr. Pomfret enrolled in a language school where he quickly learned how important a keen ear is. Spoken Chinese is a tonal language, in other words the same word can have different meanings depending on how it is “sung”. On his first night out, Mr. Pomfret meant to call himself “rice bucket” (big eater), but instead called himself “dummy” to the amusement of his dinner companions.

Mr. Pomfret made many friends and acquaintances while studying in China. A photograph at the beginning of the book shows the sixty-three history majors in Nanjing University’s class of 1982. A few fellow students became close friends and stayed in touch over the ensuing years. Through these friends, Mr. Pomfret learned of the brutality of Communist China, the effects of which continue to shape national attitudes. Under Chairman Mao, the country was ruled by fear causing friends and family to betray each other as a self-serving means of avoiding starvation, exile, or death. Even now, Chinese don’t tend to go out of their way to help each other.

After thousands of years of being peasants serving emperors, “the people” took power in the form of Mao Zedong who became a de facto emperor. What Mao did not have that previous emperors did, was the ability to run a country. Mao, with his Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, succeeded in starving the population and ridding the country of the people who knew how to read, write, make, grow, and build things. He was a political genius who distracted China’s people with empty slogans and created a paranoid society where distrust ran thicker than blood. Any deviation from the Communist party line could ruin a life or a family. After Mao died in 1976, his successor Hua Guofeng arrested Mao’s widow and three others, referred to as the “Gang of Four.” This purge did not spell the end of Communist Party rule, it merely changed the players.

What is particularly interesting is how Mao maintained his power in spite of dissention among the Party and the military. He did this by creating a propaganda machine which taught young people to chant slogans and see things in very simple, black and white, terms. Chinese youth who followed Chairman Mao became the Red Guard, a highly disciplined para-military movement aimed at smashing “class enemies”, in other words, those who did not agree with Mao. Deng Xiaopeng, was one of the early dissenters and for this was twice purged by Mao’s red guard, but somehow avoided being killed. After Mao’s death, Deng returned and succeeded in wresting power from Hua Guofeng.

Deng Xiaopeng was a strong leader who understood that China could become extremely powerful in global trade by becoming “capitalist with Chinese characteristics”, or allowing businesses to create wealth under the auspices of the Party. As China began to develop its new identity, students in Beijing with a pent up yearning for “freedom” began demonstrating in Tiananmen Square in 1989. For a little while this was tolerated, but within days tens of thousands of protestors had arrived. At that time, John Pomfret was a reporter for AP News and using his Chinese connections was able to witness the events as they unfolded. What started as a peaceful protest became a standoff between thousands of unarmed civilians and army troops. According to Mr. Pomfret, the student leaders were too young to know the horrors the Party was capable of and did not believe that the “People’s Army” would fire on “the people” in the square. However, the Chinese government declared martial law and the stakes became deadly. In an attempt to block the soldiers from storming them, the protestors swarmed to create defensive lines. The soldiers were under orders to end the occupation of Tiananmen Square and began shooting into the crowds. The two-month-long standoff was over and the Party had won.

Almost thirty years later, the students who organized the protests think it was a mistake and now go along with the mainstream in China. As an American, I find this complacency difficult to understand. We are trained from birth to be individuals and use our creativity. Our relatively young nation is one of expanding horizons and opportunities. We hold our rights to speech and assembly higher than political power. China’s story is much different.

In terms of land area, only Russia is larger. With a population of 1.4 billion China is four times larger than the United States. Across the millennia, China’s boundaries ebbed and flowed until the Qing (pronounced “cheen”) Dynasty which expanded China to its current size – 3.7 million square miles. The Qings ruled from 1644 – 1912. During the late 1800s, Britain and other European nations began exploiting the Orient. The Qings enjoyed many benefits from British engagement, but feared and resented the Europeans at the same time. British-controlled India produced vast quantities of opium which ended up in China’s black markets. China tried to enforce its strict drug laws, sparking a war with Great Britain, but lost. The Emperor became a puppet of the British and signed numerous treaties which served to enrich Britain by ceding control of Chinese ports, raw materials, cheap labor, and markets. This was a time of great humiliation for China – an ancient and highly sophisticated culture.

As one of the opening salvos of World War II, the Japanese attacked and occupied the province of Manchuria in an attempt to secure access to food sources and raw materials. Japan eventually lost the war and retreated; and China emerged free for the first time from the rule of emperors and colonists. Communism filled the power vacuum and the uneducated population, accustomed to being told what to do, followed along. The Communists destroyed traditions and broke apart family ties. China lost its heart and soul and for a long time suffered from poverty, widespread hunger, and illiteracy. The Communists were not stupid and wanted to become a world power. This required scientists and scientists needed education. A world power also needed a sense of itself and historians could tell the nation’s story. And so the ignorance-loving Communists allowed education as long as it served the Party.

Mr. Pomfret’s friends and acquaintances from his years as a student in China form a microcosm of Chinese society with their collective amnesia about the Communist Party. A few of his friends, however, questioned the social norms and were forced into exile. One family challenged the one child rule and one classmate became almost as brutal as Mao’s Red Guard in his quest for wealth and power. When we think of China, we often do not stop to consider that the Chinese people are cut from the same cloth that we are. John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons reveals that given the opportunity, they want what we want: housing, food, education, and consumer goods. What took the United States 100 years to achieve, the Chinese achieved in a couple of decades. The story is not over, however. China will be devastated by industrial pollution, traffic congestion, and over-population for a long time. Meanwhile, Chinese workers are becoming more demanding and so the days of cheap Chinese labor are numbered. To paraphrase a sentence from Chinese Lessons: China, warmly we welcome you to the dog-eat-dog capitalist world.