“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." -- John Rogers
...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals).
If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC
I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
The central mythical figure in the novel is John Galt, a great inventor. What more critical piece of machinery could Rand have him contribute than an engine, the driver of the industrial revolution? It doesn't work to simply remove it from the plot. It would need to be replaced by something else, like Taggart's railroads, Rearden's steel or Roark's buildings.
It didn't have to be a mythical engine that ignores the most basic laws of physics. Just like with Rearden's steel, a more optimized version is often sufficient to change the world.
Both Elon and Bezos have significantly decreased cost to orbit and are very close to full reusability. This is alongside their other feats like a global logistic network that gets pretty much any product in the world to your doorstep in 1-2 days, self-driving cars, neural implants that enable mind-controlled computing. If that were in the novel, no one would believe it.
See also Heinlein's Waldo (1942) where the hero invents a receiver for an inexhaustible ambient energy source. I wonder if Rand read Astounding. To me, a good hard scifi story is allowed up to one impossibility anyway, as long as taken seriously.
I think this quote is the kind of thing that sounds smart, but is actually devoid of meaningful criticism.
As you said, Atlas Shrugged touched a real conflicts that are rarely addressed. Is it kind of obtuse/allegorical? Yes. Would I like it to be a bit shorter? Yes. But it’s ideas seem generally right, the subject matter important, and under discussed.
Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad. Without even mostly unknown inventions like the Haber process, over half of humanity would be starving right now.
Industrialists and inventors are the great heroes of our time.
> Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad.
Those don't exist. Effectively nobody actually believes that, or is trying to convince anyone else of it.
And if you think that "we should make sure no one person or small group has too much power (with wealth being a form of power), because we've seen the bad outcomes that produces" equates to "human ingenuity and invention is bad", you have been swallowing propaganda whole.
Yes because all the teenagers reading Marxist works are well adjusted and based in reality.
It's humorous how debased from reality John roger's quote is. It doesn't challenge Rand's ideas it just insults it's readers.
There's this stigma among her work as if it's dangerous, just like any other right wing idea.
But reality is she only asks that one better themselves.
She doesn't tell her readers to make a tort against another to right some perceived systematic wrong.
Unlike many modernly accepted ideas her works have never been used to justify throwing people in the gulag, ethnic genocide,or insurrection. She tells one that you are not entitled to money, sleezy money grabs do not pay in the long run, and that being hardworking + innovative will payoff in the end.
Also Tokens works are now considered xenophobic and racist by many people as well because the orcs are portrayed as this dark evil race that invades this quent European landscape. so nothing really passes the purity test.
