How many copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, have been sold is hard to determine. It doesn’t appear on Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books, which ranges from 10 to 200 million copies. But surely it has sold in the millions, and its influence is clearly much stronger than many of the books on the Wikipedia list (Valley of the Dolls, God’s Little Acre, etc.).
Atlas Shrugged resembles a nineteenth century Russian novel (and Rand was born and educated in Russia): dozens and dozens of characters, a plot that sprawls over with epochal (albeit fictional) events, a long philosophical speech as its centrepiece.
But Atlas contains science fictional elements absent in its Russian predecessors: Rearden metal, a strong and reliable but mysterious alloy; Galt’s motor, which runs on static electricity; the government’s Project X.
However, the storyline of Rand’s book does not follow typical science fiction, which introduces mysterious beings or artifacts, and whose plot revolves around revealing the properties of these things. The typical science fiction story tantalizes the audience with some wondrous or horrific entity (a blob from outer space has come to earth, say), inducing audience curiosity about its properties (what can it do? how can we stop it?); and the storyline is largely a revelation of those properties. In Rand’s novel, Rearden metal and Galt’s motor mainly serve as McGuffins for the human conflicts that are the book’s principal subject.
Atlas Shrugged may not fit the formula of science fiction, though there is another pattern from mass art it does exemplify. This is a certain Christian end-of-times story, the best known of which is the “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins – 16 books published from 1995-2007.
Let me quote the Wikipedia plot summary: “Based on dispensationalist interpretation of prophecies in the Biblical books of Revelation, Daniel, Isaiah and Ezekiel, Left Behind tells the story of the end times, in which many have been ‘raptured,’ leaving the world shattered and chaotic. As people scramble for answers, a Romanian politician named Nicolae Jetty Carpathia rises to become secretary-general of the United Nations, promising to restore peace and stability to all nations. What most of the world does not realize is that Carpathia is actually the Antichrist foretold from the Bible. Coming to grips with the truth and becoming born-again Christians, Rayford Steele, his daughter Chloe, their pastor Bruce Barnes, and young journalist Cameron ‘Buck’ Williams begin their quest as the Tribulation Force to help save the lost and prepare for the coming Tribulation, in which God will rain down judgment on the world for seven years.”
And, also from Wikipedia, the plot summary of Atlas Shrugged: “The book explores a dystopian United States where leading innovators, ranging from industrialists to artists, refuse to be exploited by society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all industry (including Taggart Transcontinental, the once mighty transcontinental railroad for which she serves as the Vice President of Operations), while society’s most productive citizens, led by the mysterious John Galt, progressively disappear. Galt describes the strike as ‘stopping the motor of the world’ by withdrawing the ‘minds’ that drive society’s growth and productivity. In their efforts, these people ‘of the mind’ hope to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where people are slaves to society and government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society.”
In Left Behind, many (not all) true Christians are raptured into heaven, leaving a small number to form the “Tribulation Force” to oppose the unbelievers and especially the “Antichrist” (not the pope this time, but the secretary-general of the UN). Chaos reigns; and things blow up. In Atlas Shrugged, the best minds secretly migrate to “Galt’s Gulch,” leaving Dagney Taggart and some allies behind to fight the socialists. Chaos reigns; and things blow up. In both Left Behind and Atlas Shrugged the populace is divided along clearly-marked lines of good and bad – Christian versus nonchristian in the former, creative capitalists versus ”looters” and “moochers” in the latter.
Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind are not simply stories of good versus evil. They are stories in which armies of good face off against armies of evil. In this, they resemble Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and Paradise Lost.
But what makes me want to join Atlas Shrugged with Left Behind and to separate these two from other armies-of-good-face-armies-of-evil stories is the “rapture” elements in both works: the good simply disappear, with a few exceptions, leaving the evil to suffer in their own self-created messes.
The popularity of both Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind is partly explainable, I think, as an appeal to the believers’ desire for revenge on the unbelievers. However, the revenge in these books is a specific kind in which evil-doing unbelievers suffer from self-inflicted wounds: they became collectivists (wrong) or refused to accept Jesus as their saviour (really wrong). Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. And, boy, do these evil doers reap. As the Objectivist or Christian makes his way through these books, waves of self-justification wash over him. See how right I am! Randians, in fantasy, see themselves as the creative producers of society. The Left Behind crowd see themselves as true believers in Jesus. Both Atlas and Left Behind end in apocalypse.
This is not to deny that Objectivism and Christianity have an appeal on their own, as philosophies in their own right.
I suspect there is a Venn diagram intersection of readers of Atlas Shrugged and readers of Left Behind. I wonder if readers at the intersection know there is an inconsistency between Rand’s free-sex-and-atheism and Christian puritanism-and-theism. Possibly not; “such is the sweet influence which [mimetic art] by nature has” (Plato).
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