Atlas throws off the world
Atlas throws off the world or Who is John Galt? ( English original title Atlas Shrugged ) is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand . In Germany, the book was reissued in 2012 under the title Der Strik .
The novel tells the story of Dagny Taggart, heiress of a transcontinental railway line that tries to prevent the decline of the American economy, which is caused by the mysterious disappearance of successful large industrialists. Based on this story develops edge their philosophy of objectivism , which explains the reason for the measure of all things, selfishness sees as a virtue and for strict -faire laissez - capitalism begins. The question “Who is John Galt?” Runs through the novel as a leitmotif and is always asked by the characters in the novel when there seem to be no answers to other questions and the situation is hopeless. The title, literally translated as "Atlas shrugged his shoulders", is an allusion to the mythical titan Atlas , who carries the vault of heaven on his shoulders - Rand asks what would happen if the "carrying" people of society suddenly disappeared would.
Rand's novel is considered one of the most influential political books of the 20th century in the United States.
content
The novel is set in the United States in the 1950s, but is increasingly set apart from reality by fictional political developments and elements of science fiction . The main character of the novel is Dagny Taggart, heiress and vice president of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad company . To save the financially troubled railroad, Dagny builds the new John Galt Line to the Ellis Wyatt oil fields from the futuristic Rearden metal and begins an affair with the soulmate steel industrialist Hank Rearden. Shortly afterwards, a visit from an unknown force Wyatt to burn down his oil fields and disappear without a trace. Dagny then develops the theory of a “destroyer” who persuades entrepreneurs to give up and wants to hunt down what they consider to be the worst enemy of mankind.
Meanwhile, Dagny's brother and adversary James Taggart is working under the guise of social responsibility to expropriate entrepreneurs and introduce a socialist people's state. When the political situation becomes unbearable, Dagny goes in search of the inventor of an ingenious atmospheric engine, the experimental prototype of which she found in the overgrown factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company . Through this search she uncovered a puzzling triumvirate, consisting of her childhood sweetheart, the copper industrialist Francisco d'Anconia, the pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld and an unknown third party, all of whom were former students of the philosopher Hugh Akston, who are connected to the disappearance of the entrepreneurs .
meaning
On the basis of the fictional plot, Rand unfolds her philosophy of objectivism in the novel . Rand draws a sharp contrast between the constructive “creators” and the destructive “looters”. Clever, honest, beautiful and successful representatives of objectivism like Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia and finally John Galt contrast with weak, mendacious, ugly and unsuccessful representatives of other convictions like James Taggart, Rearden's wife Lillian and the "boys in Washington". Using the character of Dagny, Rand tries to show that the path of an undecided but self-confident personality inevitably leads to objectivism.
According to objectivism , egoism , inventiveness, and efficiency are the highest virtues . Self-interested industrialists who combine these virtues to the highest degree are therefore the "engine of the world", and Rand explains that stopping this engine will lead to the end of civilization. From an objectivist point of view, all state interventions are immoral, because they not only hinder the free development of people, but they also worsen the supply of the population with resources, goods and services (including education and medical care), therefore strict laissez-faire - capitalism the only legitimate economic system.
Selflessness , traditionally considered a virtue, is, according to Rand's analysis, one of the core causes of the failure of other systems such as socialism and communism . Every act of selfless help rewards need rather than ability, according to Rand, and educates people to be lazy and demand for no reason, instead of solving their problems through work. She demonstrates this using the example of the Twentieth Century Motor Company , in which employees are paid according to need instead of ability, and which then develops into a “real horror” in which the workers toil to death for the lazy and all hate each other . The objectivist solution is summed up in an oath towards the end of the novel: "I swear that I will never live for the good of another and that I will never ask another to live for my good."
According to Rand, even love is anything but selfless, but rationally based self-interest. The lover “buys” not only sexual but also spiritual satisfaction by always looking for a partner who is worthy of himself. So Dagny Taggart's heart always flies to the man whose mind she values most at the moment. The climax of the argument is the suicide of Cherryl Taggarts, who cannot understand that her husband James does not want to be loved "for" something, but "simply because of himself." The ambitious Cherryl can not understand what for James' self to be, if not his body, mind, success, words and deeds.
A recurring motif is compliance through guilt or pity . Hank Rearden's family and wife constantly make him feel guilty because of his soulless egoism and total devotion to his steel factory, but at the same time they greedily reap the fruits of these alleged bad habits; It is only when Rearden accepts his egoism as a virtue that he escapes this guilt trap and sees in it the reason why he was not happy. In Rand's novel, the able control the code of business conduct, but the incapable control the moral - but since one cannot leave the clever to choose the way and the stupid to choose the goal, she demands that moral concepts should also be subjected to objectivism.
She portrays weak decision-making as the fundamental mistake that prevents success when she worries the management of Taggart Transcontinental paralyzed and lets hope that Dagny Taggart will sort things out. It is immoral to pass a decision that you have to make yourself on someone else by letting the same management pass the decision on whether to stop or continue a train from one hierarchical level to the next, until finally an unqualified track worker is forced to make a decision and suffocate all passengers in a tunnel. Towards the end, Dagny gets the advice to consider the reasons why the others are so sure of their cause, but not the fact that they are safe. And in the face of inherited wealth, Francisco d'Anconia states that money does not do people good; on the contrary, it is a burden that one must prove worthy.
Film adaptations
Entitled The Atlas Trilogy - Who Is John Galt? Paul Johansson filmed the first part of the book in 2010 with Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart) and Grant Bowler (Hank Rearden) in the lead roles, where he himself took on the role of John Galt. The film was shown publicly for the first time on February 12, 2011 in Washington at the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), and was shown in US theaters on April 15, 2011. The film was published in German translated at the end of October 2012 on DVD and Blu-Ray under the title Die Atlas Trilogie: Wer ist John Galt? .
On October 12, 2012, a second part was released in the US with Atlas Shrugged: Part II , Atlas Shrugged: Part III was limited to US cinemas in September 2014.
Trivia
The book is mentioned several times in the popular series Mad Men . The advertising agency owner Bertram Cooper strongly recommends the book to Don Drapper , who uses ideas from it in a pitch to a client.
expenditure
- Ayn Rand: Atlas throws off the world. Holle Verlag, Baden-Baden 1959
- Ayn Rand: Atlas throws off the world. Blanvalet, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7645-5443-6 .
- Ayn Rand: Who is John Galt? GEWIS, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-932564-03-0 .
- Ayn Rand: The strike. Verlag Kai M. John, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-037094-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Books That Made a Difference in Readers' Lives ( Memento of April 5, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- ↑ Harald Martenstein: Harald Martenstein on the most objective mediator on earth . In: The time . April 4, 2017, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed March 17, 2019]).
- ↑ Atlas Shrugged: Part I in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Ginia Bellafante: 'Mad Men' and the 1960s as Wild Republican Times . In: The New York Times . May 15, 2015, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed August 24, 2020]).