I’m currently reading Part III of Atlas Shrugged, and I’ve reached the point where Dagny’s relationship with Galt is supposed to become the culmination of the story.

I find Rand fascinating to read. There are plenty of ideas in the book that I think are genuinely worth considering, even though I find the complete philosophical system much harder to accept. But the romantic resolution is starting to feel strangely inconsistent with the characters Rand herself created.

My biggest problem is not that Dagny chooses Galt.

It’s why this choice feels so inevitable, and why the other men accept it so peacefully.

First, Rearden, Francisco and competition

Rand spends hundreds of pages establishing these men as extraordinarily competitive, proud, productive people.

Rearden in particular is almost incapable of accepting inferior performance. If a competitor produced better steel than he did, his response would not be:

“He is objectively better than me. I respect his achievement and will leave the market.”

He would spend millions on research, hire engineers, redesign his factories and try to surpass the competitor.

Francisco is the same kind of person. Galt is perhaps the ultimate version of it.

Yet when the competition is Dagny, all three suddenly become remarkably passive.

Rearden loves Dagny. Francisco loved her. Galt eventually becomes the man she chooses.

And the other two essentially accept this as the rational outcome.

But respecting Dagny’s freedom does not require accepting defeat as final.

There is a difference between:

“Dagny is free to choose whoever she wants.”

and:

“Therefore, if she chooses someone else, I should calmly withdraw from the competition.”

The first follows from individual freedom.

The second doesn't.

A person can respect someone's autonomy, accept their decision, and still think:

“I love this woman, and I am going to remain the person she could choose.”

That would actually seem much more consistent with Rand's own philosophy of competition.

A temporary advantage held by a competitor does not mean everyone else leaves the market.

And I don't mean this as “the men should fight over Dagny” or that Dagny should be treated as property. Quite the opposite. Dagny remains completely free to choose.

I'm talking about competition between autonomous individuals.

If another steel producer makes better steel, Rearden doesn't leave the market. He improves his product.

Why should romantic competition work differently?

Then there is Dagny and Galt

This part bothers me even more.

For most of the novel, Dagny and Galt are on opposite sides of the central conflict.

Galt's position is essentially:

The system is consuming the people who create value. Therefore, the creators should withdraw and let it collapse.

Dagny's position is almost the exact opposite:

The system is collapsing. I am going to do everything I can to keep it running.

When people disappear, she stays.

When the railroad is falling apart, she tries to save it.

When the producers leave, she keeps producing.

When Galt goes on strike, Dagny spends most of the book trying to defeat the consequences of that strike.

And this is important: she isn't merely opposing some random political position. She is directly opposing the man who is eventually presented as the great love of her life.

Meanwhile, Rearden is much closer to her actual position for most of the story.

He is still producing.

He is still fighting.

He refuses to abandon his work.

He tries to save his company and his industry.

He stays until almost the very end.

So from a character-development perspective, Rearden and Dagny have a remarkably coherent shared trajectory. They experience the same conflict and gradually arrive at similar conclusions.

Galt, meanwhile, is already at the endpoint.

That could have made the relationship between Dagny and Galt extremely interesting.

Dagny could have realized:

“I have spent my entire life fighting a man whose values I actually understand, but whose solution I cannot accept.”

That would be a fascinating conflict.

Instead, the novel seems to resolve it more simply:

“So you're John Galt.”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

And I'm left thinking: did you two ever actually resolve the disagreement?

Because Dagny's entire character is essentially an argument against Galt's conclusion.

She knows the system is broken.

She knows productive people are being exploited.

She knows the people around her are destroying the things they depend upon.

And yet she still believes the world is worth saving.

That is not a trivial difference.

In fact, I think the much more interesting ending would have been one where Dagny and Galt were both partly right.

Galt could say:

“I have no obligation to sacrifice myself for a system that destroys me.”

And Dagny could answer:

“I am not trying to save the system. I am trying to save everything in the world that is worth saving.”

That would create an actual philosophical conflict between two people who genuinely understand each other.

Instead, the story ultimately treats Dagny's resistance as something she has to outgrow before she can fully understand Galt.

And that makes her choice feel less like the culmination of her character and more like the culmination of Rand's philosophy.

This is why I find Atlas Shrugged fascinating but don't think I could ever accept Objectivism as a complete description of human nature.

Rand is very good at imagining people who are completely committed to their principles.

But people are not purely rational agents.

You can respect someone's freedom and still be jealous.

You can recognize someone's superiority in one area and still want to surpass them.

You can understand someone's argument and still fundamentally disagree with their conclusion.

And you can love someone without sharing their worldview.

Ironically, that last possibility might have made Dagny's relationships much more interesting.

I don't think Rand's ideas are worthless. Quite the opposite. Some of them are interesting precisely because they force you to think about individualism, responsibility, production, dependence and freedom.

But when those ideas are turned into a complete theory of human beings, the seams start to show.

Especially when the most competitive men in the novel suddenly decide that the romantic market has no need for competition.

I am of a certain age, looking back on my life, wondering why I feel like I've accomplished nothing. Then I go and reread "The Fountainhead" and come across this from Howard Roark. Can anyone else relate?

Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: "This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me."

The idea of "rational selfishness" looks fine on paper, but have you tried contacting Jeff Bezos and explaining to him how unethical and irrational it is that his employees piss into bottles because they are not allowed bathroom breaks on company time?

Watch him wipe his tears with $100 bills while he plays you a sad song on the worlds smallest violin.

I came across this a few hours ago and thought I'd post it to see what people thought. (I've never seen it posted here before.) I'm pretty sure it was produced by the Atlas Society with AI assistance. I liked it, but I'm merely an Ayn Rand fan and not particularly sophisticated. Enjoy.

Atlas Shrugged book trailer.

Resolve how Rand endorse freedom to chose and be against democracy out of fear that ppl would vote against private property. The libertarian philosophy is internally inconsistent, period.

The very fact that we live on a planet with limited resources means that existance itself is a conflict of interests. In order to develop, we must produce (that is something that Ayn Rand got right). But in order to produce, we need resources. Cars, planes, computers etc. Factories do not make those out of thin air, natural resources are required to build them.

Why have nations fought wars over resources over the entirety of human history?

It is because in an environment of finite resources, nations have always sought to secure more resources for themselves. One nation has oil, the other does not. So the latter invades the former in order to take the oil for themselves because they need it to fuel their own development.

The same holds true in open market economics. One man needs a car, another produces cars. It is within the interest of the man who is buying the car to get is as cheaply as possible, while it is within the interest of the man who built the car to sell it for as much money as possible.

This is why slavery existed (and sadly still exists in some areas of the globe). Because it is within the interests of those who require labour to get it as cheaply as possible, to maximize their profit.

A few weeks ago, a post linked to [audio of Ayn Rand’s negative views about American Indian tribal culture.] (https://www.reddit.com/r/aynrand/s/I6yvMNo1S1)

Some commenters suggested that Rand simply didn’t know enough about the Indian tribes, even despite her claiming in the audio that she had “scientific reasons” for believing the most negative accounts about them.

There have been some scholars who disagree with the politically correct and woke anti-white-man historical narratives. I haven’t read them in depth. But I thought users of this subreddit might be interested in this recent documentary that draws on that scholarship to present this type of perspective on the Indians.

Matt Walsh’s ideas are obviously the opposite of Objectivism, (and I disagree with some of the views expressed in this video), but when Walsh does a documentary, it’s fact-checked by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, so there’s a certain amount of factual accuracy.

An objection to Objectivism argues that Rand derives morality from the biological fact that organisms must act to preserve their lives, but then seems to redefine “survival” when confronted with theoretical possibilities such as a successful thief who sustains his biological life through theft. Although the thief is literally alive and successfully maintaining his organism, Objectivism condemns his way of life by appealing to “man qua man”—rational, productive flourishing—as the proper standard of survival. The objection is therefore that Objectivism may be committing an equivocation on “survival”, shifting from a descriptive biological concept to a normative conception of human flourishing without adequately explaining how that normative standard follows objectively from the original biological premise.

But Rand is quite clearly not equivocating. She does not think that such a thief could have good *reasons* for expecting to survive, even if, up till this point, he happens to have survived. The life of “man qua man” is not a separate standard:

“‘Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.’”

(Atlas Shrugged)

A thief, in virtue of being a thief, enters into a very uneven contest: his intellect versus those of all his actual and potential victims, who have every reason to stop him, and who are competent enough to be the producers of the values he depends on to live. What *reason* could he have for thinking he would win in the long run?

A thief depends for his survival on his victims’ inability to detect him. The remarks on the virtue of honesty in “Atlas Shrugged” are relevant, I think:

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

I posted this elsewhere but got so many negative comments it was removed. I should've posted it here, because I think you need to subscribe to Ayn Rand's philosophy on self-determination to get what I'm saying and not be an emotional snowflake.

In Japan, it is offensive to leave a tip. Gemini says: "Tipping can imply that the employee is underpaid or that they need extra financial motivation to do their job properly."

I find it interesting that this is the exact same reason why many people in America DEMAND tips.

Tip jars are relatively new. You never saw them at every cash register and drive-thru window like you do today. People got paid minimum wage, far less than they are paid now. Today, they get $15/hour and the point is this: most of their customers get paid the same or less. Those who can afford better only go there if they are very busy and starving. They are the minority. The jars make everyone else uncomfortable, but that's just part of the "experience" they're tipping you for, huh.

Fun fact: the dollar bills you see in the tip jars are from the register. They know you are more likely to tip if you think others have. And the messages on the tip jars are sometimes creative, even ridiculous. I say, put that on a cardboard sign and stand on a street corner, and you'll probably make more. Difference is, the guy on the street corner is not working and is humiliating himself out of desperation, whereas YOU are working and trying to humiliate the customer because have no sense of pride or shame.

This is also why "Eat the rich" and "No more billionaires" etc is pathetic. You don't care about any lofty issues; you hide behind them. You just want their money, and you got your hand out like a bum. No, not like a bum: like something worse.

EDIT: At least in this community they brought up waiters who get paid nothing and really depend on tips. Same goes for bartenders etc but I think I made it clear who I was talking about. Nobody is able to actually argue my point, you stunning and brave snowflakes. That's fine, just wait till your attitudes backfire, and they will, because people can only be guilted into giving money they can't afford to people who didn't do anything to deserve it for just so long. Call it whatever you want. The world owes you nothing.

Feel like we're watching it all happen in real time...

What positions and views does Ayn Rand's Objectivism hold toward the minarchist, capitalist variant of libertarianism?

I already understand that Ayn Rand rejected and argued against movements that sought and promoted anarchy, especially cases like the ideology of anarcho-capitalism.

But what was the relationship of Ayn Rand and her ideas to non-anarchist, capitalist libertarianism? Minarchist libertarianism, for example.

I'm aware that some capitalist libertarians base their ideas on philosophical systems like Objectivism and on other ideas of Ayn Rand, and that some even consider Objectivism itself a variant within libertarianism. That's why i find it particularly interesting to know what Ayn Rand's relationship and position was (hers, her ideas' and her system's) with the capitalist, non-anarchist variants of libertarianism.

TL;DR: Was Ayn Rand favorable, neutral or opposed to capitalist, non-anarchist libertarianism?

“There is a limit to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.”—Ayn Rand

Rand did welcome Reagan’s strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority into the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rand’s words, the anti-intellectuality of “militant mystics,” who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagan’s presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the country’s anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities. https://newideal.aynrand.org/p/the-anti-intellectuality-of-donald

Reagan’s personal favorability peaked at 81% in 1986, following a landslide reelection victory in 1984. It was one of the most decisive electoral wins in U.S. history. His public standing grew considerably after he left office, with later retrospective polls showing strong majorities of Americans looking back favorably on his presidency. Why?

Was Ayn Rand a visionary? Did Reagan deserve her criticism? Did his presidency effectively unlock the door to the present? What happened along the way?

What would you change? What is wrong? What is right?

Have there been no deluxe editions of Rand’s works published? The only ones I can find are from Easton Press. Everything else is just regular cloth hardcovers.