I probably could have written this conclusion last week. I kept moving ideas and sentences into this post because I thought that they were too broad for just analyzing the last three chapters. But, I wasn’t totally ready to move on so here we are.
It should be clear that I am a fan of Rand’s work and the Objectivist movement. This books is a short and concise version of the very same message in Atlas Shrugged. Even some of the same phrasing was used. I felt like I was reading an abridged version or even a chapter of Atlas Shrugged, some of those were pretty long.
What to say about this book? I think that I will use a series of comparisons to do that. I would say that if you have never read or don’t know Rand, read this book first. If it turns out that you like the message, then move on to Atlas Shrugged. I kind of feel like I invested so much time into Atlas Shrugged that this was just a re-run of that story and message.
If I look at Anthem versus We, both had their idiosyncrasies. I think that the Anthem story was easier to follow minus the third person, plural language. I know that was done deliberately but I definitely found myself having to re-read things multiple times because I got sucked into this ‘who else is in this conversation?’ mode. By contrast, We often had gaps in the story line that left me guessing at what is actually happening.
I suppose that the reader needs to employ suspended animation for any of these dystopian stories. For me, it is not the flying cars or talking animals but the little things. For instance the source of the energy for the lightbulb in this book or the perfectly furnished home that exists in the middle of the forest that the character stumbles on for happily ever after that bothers me. My mind can take a leap to the non-existent but I have a hard time with the unbelievable.
Ultimately, I have to rank this below Atlas Shrugged. But I suspect that if circumstances would have been different, it would have been the other way. If you recall that review, I felt that book was way too long. It is not the length of the book per se that I mark it down, just the fact that it is the same story and the little nuances that didn’t seem to be in Atlas Shrugged. Maybe Fountainhead will be just right?
End Your Programming Routine: Let me bottom line this. If you have read Atlas Shrugged, skip this book. If you had read nothing from Rand, definitely read this book for the Objectivist point of view. Looking ahead to next week the book is going to be “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. I have tentatively planned to cover two chapters a week. So get reading…
As I announced in the podcast Monday, I am no longer going to have an introductory post for my Friday reviews maybe I should do away with the conclusion post as well. Not today however. I am going to keep it this way for now, It is just that the last three chapters are only about 20 short pages.
We now that Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 have found an empty, yet inhabitable house in the middle of the woods. As a result of reading different books they decide to rename themselves “Prometheus” and “Gaea”. Furthermore, they go through more self-exploration and hatch a plan go back to the city and bring their friends back to the woods and start life over.
Those familiar with Rand would definitely identify the concepts in Part 12. It sounded like a carbon copy of the values espoused in Atlas Shrugged. Man should live for themselves, fight for what they have, collectivism is evil, etc. You know that I buy into all those things and I respect Rand for being so upfront with this as well. In fact, good on her for being consistent and deliberate in her beliefs.
The only thing that I really don’t necessarily agree with is the the last couple of sentences. (Spoiler Alert) “The word which can never die on this earth, for the heart of it, and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: Ego”. This is Prometheus’ belief as the key to humanity and happiness. I don’t agree with Rand on this.
Of course, I have had my own struggles with happiness but if I could have it my way it would be the ability to pursue your passion. I suppose that it may be whether you take the Freud position or the first definition. I cannot say. 1) The self, especially as distinct from the world and other selves. 2) In Psychoanalysis, the division of the psyche that is conscious, most immediately controls thought and behavior and is most in touch with external reality.
I am getting all kinds of curmudgeonly lately in my reviews. I like Prometheus’ spirit here but have you considered how difficult it is to persuade brainwashed people to take a leap of faith that is 180 degrees of their whole lives. Just like his naivete with the light bulb, to think he is going to march into the lion’s den and covert a bunch of his friends unscathed seems pretty far out.
I think another flag is the house itself. I am pretty sure whatever conflict that occurred was well before the lives of Gaea and Prometheus. Time and weather is not kind to structures and material goods. There is reference to cloth that disintegrated but most things were perfectly serviceable.
I have a thing for this, but have you seen picture of the Sarajevo Olympic grounds from the 1980s? There are trees growing through the venues. Granted the characters are only twenty at most, but I think it is fantasy to think that they are going to find perfectly preserved shelters and live happily ever after. I think it would be more like the tunnels from earlier in the book minus the active electrical power.
So, I am already bordering on next weeks analysis of the book overall. It’s hard to believe that given all of the superstition and primitive technology, that there would be any risk of the former state coming after them or even find them let alone defeat or subjugate them.
End Your Programming Routine: There is a quote that I like from Jack Spirko. “Never attribute to malice that can be explained by incompetence”. I will let you noodle that out but it basically puts a dagger in a lot of conspiracy theories. I am not saying that the candlemakers are bumbling idiots, but they may not be the scholars that they proport.
These three chapters are the heart of the book. I suppose it is serendipitous that I chose to break the book up in this way. So, let’s get into it.
Chapter seven begins with Equality 7-2521 marching into the World Counsel of Scholars with his lightbulb. It went exactly how I expected that it would. In fear for his life, Equality escapes the city into the forest where he is sure no one will ever come after him. After surviving the night, he understands that he will never be able to return. The next day, who shows up in the woods out of the blue but the Golden One. Apparently, she has pretty good tracking ability.
It is pretty easy pickings to figure out what to talk about with this session. It is the sunk cost fallacy and the Council of Scholars. First of all, to be in the conversation you have to be part of the group. “A Street Sweeper! A Street Sweeper walking in upon the World Counsel of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the rules and all the laws!”. The first level of security is only having conversations with those initiated and approved.
There is now a closed feedback loop for any ideas. Once Equality connected the lightbulb, now there was sheer terror in the room. For some unknown reason, the light scared the scholars. But, then the next tool that is used is the power play. “How dare you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the mind of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater use to men than sweeping the street?”
Oh, but why? “Then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one man.” So, this is the real problem. I don’t know if they were shocked that someone found something that they were not supposed to or that they were scared of the technology, both are possible.
How many times have we seen something surpassed by better technology? Using the automobile, it is clear that the 2023 version is highly superior (in most aspects) to the 1963 version. I can state this empirically because looking at studies, the average age of a vehicle on the road is 12 years old. In 1963, vehicles were lucky to make it to 100,000 miles. In fact, some vehicles in the 1970s were lucky to survive more than a handful of years.
On the other hand, how many times have we seen government prevent innovation by doing things for our own good. Let us just use the minimum square footage building requirement. This is strictly to protect tax base. Look at old houses that are one bedroom and one bathroom. The way this is effecting innovation is that it is not rewarding good design. It is also wastes resources via utilities, heating, cooling and lighting unused space. I don’t think that we suffer from houses that are too small, we suffer from poorly designed houses. If there is limitless space, there is no incentive to build better structures from an ergonomics standpoint.
Finally, there are forces in the industrial military complex that desperately want to replace the A-10. But, then there are greater forces that do not see the need. Why replace something that does the job effectively. This is the final insight, money of course. If something perpetually did the job and did it well, it negatively impacts someone’s ability to profit on the change. But then again, there is always the opposite perspective of someone supporting the status quo.
End Your Programming Routine: I am resisting the urge to jump ahead since I have already finished the book at this point. But, I am controlling myself. I don’t really understand the fear of the woods outside of the city. I don’t rationalize how they travel or even have a network of other cities if they are so contained to the space. But, I guess those are questions that won’t get answered. For now, I will settle on fighting the status quo head to head is bound to be nearly impossible.
This was three quick chapters and in many ways not much has gone on. How could it, there are not many pages? If we try hard enough, then we can probably sift something out of this. That is what I am going to try and do.
I am not going to try and make something that it is not. Part 4 is and interaction between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000. She is now calling him the ‘Unconquerable’. Part 5 has him discovering how a lightbulb works and keeping a secret and Part 6 is about Equality 7-2521 getting punished for staying in his secret lair too long. Unwilling to divulge the reason, he is beat severely. This causes him to have a plan and reveal the lightbulb at the Counsel of the Scholars who will meet shortly.
Suspending disbelief for a minute, how is it that this society has no modern utilities and yet somehow there is live power available for Equality 7-2521 to power a light bulb? When I was first reading the book, I thought that maybe he found a flashlight or something. To my knowledge, power needs continuous generation capability as well as infrastructure to deliver. Maybe some hydro-electric dam is generating power being used by the elites somewhere. At this point, we just don’t know.
So it is dystopian science fiction… alright then the bigger concept in these chapters is the ignorant messiah. Equality 7-2521 really believes that he is going to change the world by showing the Scholars what he has rediscovered. I think that we can see the foreshadowing of trouble ahead.
This reminds me of the famous historical figure Galileo Galilei. Today, he is a big name in science, particularly Astronomy, Physics and Math. We are probably all aware of his fate. Galileo promoted the idea of heliocentrism or better known as the planets revolve around the sun. This of course was labelled as anti-biblical and his ultimate fate was imprisonment until death.
I want to point out that many of these ideas were theories based on empirical observation. You see this is how science works. Perform an observation and then design an experiment to see if you can prove that your hypothesis is true or not. Galileo and other peers such as Brahe who worked to perform the mathematic supporting the observation. That was not quite good enough to keep him in the good graces of the church.
If you are going to play politics, then what side you are on is really more important than the truth. Galileo had a habit of backing the opposite side of who was in power. That really didn’t work out too well for him. Truth is not quite powerful enough when going against the state. The Catholic church has now changed it’s tune on on Galilei but who wants to be honored post-mortem, especially considering when a person was right all along?
I really don’t think that Equality 7-2521 is Ayn Rand’s Galilei but I suspect that his fate is going to end the same way. The establishment is going to come down on him like a house of cards and crush him. I suspect that some of these secrets like electricity are known by those that control society. Whether they use is or not is a different question, but don’t be surprised. Remember the mask mandates (you didnt think that was coming back did you).
End Your Programming Routine: It’s nice having a quick and short book to read. I am getting behind on my other reading and trying to catch up, this helps. Ignorance has its pluses and minuses and without it sometimes we don’t have heroes or huge scientific break throughs. WIth it, we often have martyrs.
I didn’t realize this when I picked this book up after “We”. But it almost feels like we are in the same universe. The characters have amorphous names and the language is strange (more on that later). Like We, the characters do not pick their career destinations and small talk is deemed subversive and deviant. There is no unstructured fraternizing and no individualism.
Maybe I am going to drag this out too long. Reading the first three parts puts us almost halfway through the book. I may speed up if it seems like there is nothing unique about my arbitrary divisions. That I will take as I go. There is some good nuggets in this book.
The story’s main character is named Equality 7-2521. Like all citizens, he is born into institutionalism. He is raised until the age of fifteen where he finds his ultimate assignment which is to be a street sweeper. This part seems a a lot like Brave New World. On the job, Equality 7-2521 finds an old tunnel, maybe a subway tunnel. This becomes a sacred space from which he writes his journal i.e. this story.
On the way to his job, Equality 7-2521 sees a girl, Liberty 5-3000 which he nicknamed the “Golden One” and falls in love with without meeting. Because his work is in the same area every day, he passes by her on his way to his job daily. Apparently, women of childbearing age are sent to reproduce at some point in their lives. We know how this civilization sustains itself by descriptions in chapter 2.
The big bang in this section is the dream that Equality 7-2521 has after seeing the Golden One. He dreams about the Unmentionable Times which sounds like some sort of revolution or pre-revolution. A character called the Transgressor is burned at the stake for using the word ‘I’ instead of all the plural pronouns that are used in the rest of the book. Apparently, that is the only crime that carries the death penalty.
Reading this book, it sometimes seems like I am reading a long soliloquy of Golem or Yoda or something. Maybe I got the analogy wrong, but anyway, all of the pronouns are plural. So, if I am not paying close attention to the words, I start to get confused about what is going on because the language is just too confusing.
Now, let us get to the heart of the matter, pronouns. How is it that a person writing 90 years ago understood that by undermining identity, undermines society? I guess maybe the better question is how is it that it is understood and it is still happening? It has to be either stupidity or ignorance.
I shouldn’t have to qualify that you should know that I have a live and let live attitude. But, I think that there is a problem that goes part and parcel with that is today’s pronoun fluidity. I will ignore what I consider normal. I can even kind of understand a he wanting to be called a she and vice versa. It is the they/them that makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I was listening to a podcast about gender identity in the “Art of Manliness” a few weeks ago. I don’t want to turn this into a review of that but the crux of it was that in the 1980s the ratio of males to females in college was roughly equal. Now is about 60% female to male. Corresponding to that, the number of people that identified as LBGQ etc was about 2% in the 1980s. Meanwhile, it is now more like 20%. The point was the feminization of the education system is corresponding to increasing gender turbidity.
I don’t want to get bogged down in analysis of that conclusion. I think that there were some poignant theories and definitely worth a listen. I cannot tell if this is a chicken or an egg scenario and it may be some of both. But, the reality is that this change is effecting ‘maleness’. They are increasingly not exceling in school and in proxy, life. ‘He’, the single, 40 year old living in the parents basement playing video games is a product of failing to thrive in a ‘they/them’ world.
Just like all great, uniformity activities, you have to break the old to build the new. The military does it, politics and cults do it as well. And these are all organizations that put some kind of objective ahead of the individual. Removing individualism and blurred identity are sure tickets to extended manipulation.
End Your Programming Routine: This seems like a good place to end. It also seems like Rand has created another strong work that we have just flat out ignored. But that is OK because it is illegal to be unhappy. And we all want to be good citizens don’t we. As long as authority tells me the right path, then everything is going to be good and I will be happy.
And we are back to an old friend. We have now moved on to Anthem by Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged and Anthem cannot be more different from an outward appearance. Anthem is described as a novella. My copy is barely over 100 pages and I was planning on breaking it up into four groups. The first three chapters are going to be almost half the book (and about one chapter in Atlas Shrugged).
I got to thinking that it is interesting that both Rand and Zamyatin were Russian ex-pats writing at the same time on very similar subjects. Maybe, just maybe there is something to the similarities, just saying. It seems like people experiencing the same situation and writing their thoughts have come to very similar conclusions.
Sometimes I have read the book, sometimes I haven’t before I start writing the introduction. In this case I read the first chapter to get a sense of what is going on. I don’t like to be influenced by what others think it is about or concepts but it is also hard to introduce the book without having any prior knowledge.
I plan on breaking the book into four segments plus a conclusion. That means that we will finish this series in the beginning of December. Not to spill the beans but the next author will be a new one for me. I have a reserve of books that I have not yet read and I am trying to vary the authors a little bit even though there is more Rand in the future (already have the book).
This is another dystopian, science fiction story. We will talk all about what is in the book from a concept and a story line next week. I didn’t know this, but when I was reading the plot summary in Wikipedia, there is reference to We as the only related work. I suspect that it may be because the main character’s name is a number sequence. It also takes place in a dystopian future, etc.
The story was originally conceived as a play, then it was going to put in a periodical. Finally, it was published in the United States after the success of Fountainhead. Reading the history in Wikipedia, Rand tried to persuade Disney to make an animated film using stick figures. That would have been really interesting.
I am leaning more and more on moving away from the dystopian genre exclusively. Maybe, I will move from Friday book reviews even. I really enjoyed 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Atlas Shrugged. But, it started to slip with Lord of the Flies. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy checking these things off of my list but it is starting to feel like a chore trying to extract things week over week. I will leave it open for now. I do want to get through this one and the next one before I make the decision. For sure, I will continue to read and review books, it just may not be in one genre and chapter a week.
End Your Programming Routine: I am even struggling to get through the introduction. It has taken me three days to write this. But what do you write about a book that you don’t know anything about? Maybe I shouldn’t do these series before I have actually read the book? You get the point. Next week I will have more substance.
It doesn’t look too worse for wear. On the right is what the book looks like now. The original wrinkles in the cover were from when I packed it with me to Spain, in my luggage. I try really hard not to mash up paperbacks. I know… this is kind of their intended purpose but I like nice looking books. I am sure that is not why you tuned in though. So, let’s get into it.
What did we learn from all of this? Ayn Rand, who fled communist Russia in 1925 was an illegal alien. Meaning she got a visa to visit the United States and never left. But, that wasn’t in the book. The part of it that was important was that she had already observed the societal destructiveness of collectivism in just seven years. I think that is why the book was keenly insightful on the ilk living for others.
The one thing that I took away was an interest in Philosophy. I am not exactly sure of what I am going to do with it yet, but to look into it some more. It is not going to supersede my current reading plans, but once I get to a place where I am thinking about what is next.
So, what did I think? That is a complicated question. I was marveled by the parallels of what happened in the book. I was strongly concerned that we are following many aspects of the story page for page. I was annoyed at how long the book was; there was a lot of extraneous details that really didn’t lead to the core of the story. I enjoyed my time reading the book, in general.
I have been asked if this is a must read. I would say that if you like reading, you are into dystopian fiction or classical literature and you either like to validate your own values or you are open to changing your opinions then yes. I don’t give this a must read because I just feel that it is way too long. Something like 1984 that is a couple hundred pages has a lot more impact much quicker. Think of it this way, you could read 1984 easily three times in the same time as Atlas Shrugged.
Since this series has gone on so long, I feel like I have little to say about the overall work remaining. I felt like the ending was a little anticlimactic. The readers are left with little justice as most of the bad guys drive away or are abandoned at the end of the story. Two minor characters blew themselves up in a Mexican standoff and the Galt gang just flies off to Colorado ostensibly to live their best life while the rest of the country is left.
Maybe it is because I am a man, not a woman that I have a hard time identifying with Dabny, the primary character. She is in a three way love square (not triangle). She loves the one she cant have, she has the one she doesn’t fully love but respects and admires and she can’t move beyond the first love. She is portrayed as this very logical person yet cannot make binary commitments required for a proper relationship. If I am being honest, that indecisive love theme of the story irritated me.
One aspect that didn’t play as well was the labor situation. It seems like in the story, every time someone quit a job there was a replacement available. I think that if we have learned anything post-pandemic that is just not true. If people were really dropping out of society at such rates as written, those jobs would not immediately be filled in the real world. And even as low skilled as building or running a railroad might be, people are not going to immediately pick-up where someone left off.
Outside of the agonizingly long story arc, I do believe that Atlas Shrugged was well written. The book itself could almost be timeless because there is very little reference to technology. There is a record player mentioned a couple of times, cars trains and airplanes. What there is not is science fiction gizmos that never came to fruition nor is there science fiction/fantasy tendencies to come up with out of this world names or races or any other thing that is difficult to understand. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that it was written in plain language.
I have read that Atlas Shrugged was supposedly set in the 1990s. Outside of the technology changes that weren’t that different than the 1950s, the timeline is actually pretty spot on. The book supposedly took place over something like a ten year period.
I think that if we look at our history compared to Atlas Shrugged, our collectivism journey really got into gear in the early 2000s. I know we had the war on poverty of the 1960s which largely started the welfare state but it was the combination of the police state with the Patriot Act that has the two interests accelerating the transition.
Really, the pace of Atlas Shrugged was much quicker that what we are seeing in real life. We are now twenty plus years from the Patriot Acts and fifty years of entitlements and we still have not seen the implosion as a result of bad policy. Although we are getting there. I wouldn’t be surprised if another Covid type event split the country.
There are now three books in my liberty series. I am going to rank them 1984 > Atlas Shrugged > A Brave New World. I have already started the next one and I bet that you can guess what it will be. So stay tuned to next week for a new review starting on Friday.
End Your Programming Routine: Despite my criticisms, I am glad that I read this book. It entertained and stimulated me for seven months. That being said, its not one that I will likely ever read again. If I play my cards right, I will have all of these posts to refer back to if the subject comes up again. The next two books are going to be re-reads for me. But, there is something kind of exciting about going on the journey into the unknown like Atlas Shrugged was. This will not be the last we hear from Ayn Rand either, just not in the near future. It’s time for something different.
And here we are my friends, the end. It has been seven long months of mostly Fridays analyzing this very long book. I should say, I am going to have one more and that will be my total book summary next week. I will stop looking at each chapter and themes but consider the book as a whole.
I don’t want to completely ruin the ending so I am not going to talk about what exactly happened, even in summary. But, what I will say is that the ending didn’t fully fit into the flow of the rest of the book (to me). That is all I am going to say about that.
The thing that I am going to talk about today is the symbolism of the Taggert Transcontinental bridge across the Mississippi. This bridge has been mentioned in many chapters throughout the book. I want to talk about what it means and what it doesn’t.
As the story goes, the bridge was built in 1885. It was originally forbidden by the barge companies running up and down the Mississippi river. Nathaniel Taggert was even sued and lost in his ability to build it. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled on the matter that he eventually won the ability to build the bridge. And so he did “with his bare hands’ as the story goes.
Apparently, there are very few crossings of the Mississippi river and this bridge is one of them. Throughout the book as things progressively got worse, there was always hope because the bridge still stood and was functional. Most of the track problems seemed to happen in the mountain west or southwest. The fact that the bridge was still available allowed the possibility of transcontinental service by rerouting around the problem areas.
It is said that Rand developed a psychological discipline called Objectivism. In a nutshell, it is the use of reason and logic as a basis for belief. I suppose that this is different than the Freudian school which are the three personalities or the Frankl school of experiential development. From a logical basis, I can understand that bridge functioning = potential hope. But I really see the error in that line of thinking is really too simple of an analysis.
Just think using a simple example. I am still alive so therefore I have a chance at becoming an millionaire. What I didn’t say is that I haver terminal cancer and that I am on life support. Yes, there is a chance that someone could hand me a lottery ticket and I could become an instant millionaire in the next drawing. It is possible. What isn’t said is the probability is almost zero. Even if that did happen, so what. I wouldn’t live long enough to cash it in. I wouldn’t live long enough to spend it or possibly write it into my will to give it away.
I don’t have a problem with Objectivism per se. It seems like a perfectly fine way to run as railroad as they say. But, it does seem to be a fatal character flaw with Dabny and it is certainly no proof that this is a valid discipline; the very idea that Ojectivism is based. Now, I don’t want to get all philosophical, this is an area that I have little education or training. But, I believe that logic only exists on facts and facts only exist on what is, not what could be.
So as in life, decisions have to be made. Facts forecast probable outcomes and those are the basis of decision, not facts themselves. Each decision is a gamble based on probability, risk and potential reward. Logic by it’s nature cannot be involved with uncertainty. That would mean that A may not result in A and because A might eventually equal B or A might equal C.
Just like I could win the lottery on my deathbed, so could a catastrophic event happen in business or government. Near certainty is not certain, it is almost likely. This is where the saying ‘barring uncertain circumstances’ comes from. On one hand, I admire the never give up mindset. But, I will say this is the attitude of running an empire, not creating one. Because I believe that you have to quit things that don’t work or won’t work.
End Your Programming Routine: As we wrap up our time here with this book, I have to say it has been an amazing journey for me. My eyes were already open, but it is so strange to read events of fiction written over seventy years ago coming alive in real or near real time. I think if you asked people fifty years ago, this was a playbook of what not to do. Now, it seems like a playbook of what is happening. That is sad. What you do about it is be informed on the issues, but live your life for yourself and not others, just like John Galt.
This is the second to last chapter and we are heading to the big bang. Last chapter we had Galt’s refusal to cooperate, so where does that leave us? Well in true government fashion, we need to double down on failed efforts. Because more of the same will eventually work, right?
I keep saying that things are not going well but truly they are failing at this point. I think that our own experiences have proven that failing is often hard to recognize when you are in the middle of the collapse. You need a point of reference in order to establish how much change has actually occurred.
I am going to skip the chapter synopsis but to say that Dr Stadler and Cuffy Meigs blow themselves up at Project X trying to take over a portion of the country. Numerous high level government officials quit because of hopelessness and others just go straight strongman.
I want to go back to the idea of collapse. I have heard it describe as slow collapse because it doesn’t happen overnight. I suppose that there are those immediate changes like in the case of a coup. But, I actually think that this is normal. If we think about near history collapses like the Soviet Union it was fairly quick as over the course of a couple months. It probably seems fast because we condense history but I am pretty sure that three months of hell doesn’t seem fast at the time, especially if you are in it.
The course of Atlas Shrugged seems to run over multiple years. If there were concrete date references, I missed them. But I do distinctly recall descriptions of different seasons and we went through multiple winters and falls in the book. My point with this is that this would be termed a slow collapse.
There are so many things that we are born into that we never knew any different. Recently, I have heard many comparisons to the speculation of 2023 and 2008. For those that don’t study or remember history, 2008 was when the US government had a policy of “Too Big to Fail”. Different pundits are predicting that 2023 is going to be worse than 2008. Let’s take a look.
Yesterday, I was reading a headline “223,000 non-farming jobs added in December 2022”. The subtext of the headline was that this number blew expectations out of the water. And the implications from that is that things are so much better than expected and you should feel good about this too. I say this in context that also released in the Twitter files the FBI paid Twitter $3.5million for the ability to influence who and what was allowed to be posted on twitter.
Now I ask you, even if the numbers are truly accurate can we even trust any source at this point? Even if we believe that to be true, how many jobs were lost. I saw a lot of sizable numbers between Meta, ABC, Twitter and Amazon. You see, when you add 200 but lose 500 there is a lot to be desired. The headlines I was reading to support this writing was saying the ‘hot economy is starting to cool’. I am thinking to myself ‘what hot economy’? It’s hard to say that seven interest rate increases and 50% inflation equals a hot economy,
Anyway, I am probably going to get out of my lane if I keep going because I am not going to provide proper source citing for this. My point here is that we are in collapse and we have people telling us how lucky we are going to get. At the risk of mixing politics and economics, I ask are we more free today than we were in 1980 or less? Since there is no evidence that anyone can provide that we are more free, we have failed liberty. And that is a collapse in my book.
End Your Programming Routine: This topic could warrant an entire series. I also think that there is very little that be done about all of this, especially as an individual. I suppose the good news is that it is not a violent collapse. Smart money recognizes the situation and takes advantage of it. Don’t be afraid to study the rules and find the loopholes, there is still profits to be made in my lifetime. And that is all we need to be successful and by proxy happy.
We are getting close now, I can almost taste it. After this chapter, there are approximately 40 pages and two chapters remaining. I have to say, I didn’t anticipate completely what happens in this chapter and I am still noodling how this is going to end. So let’s get into it.
This is the chapter that follows the 60 page statement by John Galt. Immediately, the government representatives that were hijacked are stunned. The entire country is in a tailspin, of course and government continues to put up a false front. This is where the plan to coopt John Galt starts to happen.
Dabny looks up Galt’s address despite being warned not to. Her finding him draws the government to him as well. They capture John Galt and he is then held in an attempt to give the appearance that he has joined sides with the status quo.
The entire book has been this chess match of proxy conflicts between the group saying they represent ‘the people’ and the group of people that say that they represent ‘the individual’. In this chapter, we have direct interaction between the two groups. Surprisingly, Galt gets captured and is held prisoner in the attempt to win him over to the side of the people.
I suppose, this is where the rubber meets the road in this chapter. It is sometimes a good strategy to emulate what is successful for your own purposes. For instance, I have heard the advice that if something is working in a particular genre, then that means that there is a market and the possibility for it to work for you. In more plain language, I will use an example.
In today’s day and age, there is a kind of career as what is called ‘an influencer’. The nearest way I can figure is that people get money for being a celebrity of sorts. It is enough money to be a full time job and sometimes significant amount of money. So, because that is a career, that means that there is room for others to do the same thing even in the same space. The same can be said for contractors or widget makers too.
What isn’t said or known is the formula on how to make it actually work. Certainly, there are attributes like appearance, use of popular platforms, consistency of interaction but there are also intangibles; one of them that I would call luck. My point with all of that is that emulating success is a way to obtain it. I think we have quite the opposite in Atlas Shrugged.
One of the characteristics of obtaining success is authenticity. Politicians are in a way influencers as well. Recently, a former pope just died. During his time at the head of the Catholic church, he was seen as a traditionalist or conservative. This direction of the church was really seen as a shift from the populist direction of his predecessor.
I am not a Catholic, but a Christian so I am adjacent. There is no doubt that the Pope is an important figure to people in that religion. My sense is that even though there was strife over policy, there was no doubt that he was a man of faith and genuine in his beliefs. What I am trying to say is that whether we agree with the direction I don’t think that we can disagree on the intent.
That is the thing that any organization which tries to coopt a movement or attach itself to a rising star could possibly make it work. Of course Atlas Shrugged was not going to work because the government really didn’t believe in the same things as John Galt. They wanted to use his popularity and be seen as associated with him rather than embrace his beliefs. The reason that I say this is because they truly don’t need Galt to fix the problem, they need to change their beliefs and therefore the policies.
I sometimes think that a parliamentary style government would be better than our government. But, then I think that Parliaments are so much more subject to opinion with the ‘no confidence’ card that can be played that I am left with no good government options. You might think that makes a government more responsive to the people but my observation is that it is an entity that is more manic.
End Your Programming Routine: Just like Lord of the Rings and a score of other fiction works, you cannot control the power if you are not worthy. Simply attaching your name to a rising star doesn’t work without being genuine with your convictions. Even at the point of a gun, John Galt refused to cooperate. Because after all, are you going to murder someone on a national broadcast? Before completely chancing it, know your environment and risks. If you stand for your convictions, you can’t be swayed, even by force.
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