Dissident Shrugged

Ayn Rand saw it coming; Jamie Franklin shines a light on its true nature

Ayn Rand published what she regarded as her most important work, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. It’s a fictional tale of American industrialists hamstrung by ever more onerous socialist edicts springing from Washington and leading to a complete breakdown of the once-functioning economy. It’s also a love story, with competing suitors vying for the heroine, Dagny Taggart, railroad heiress and the brains and competence behind the success, and survival, of Taggart Transcontinental.

I picked it up for something different to read, an escape, especially from the events since 2020. I knew it was famous, but I had no idea just how captivating a read it would be. Neither did I expect so many parallels to the disaster of the last 5 years.

About a week after I finished reading Atlas Shrugged, Jamie Franklin’s new book “The Great Return - Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilisation” was released. A week after that, I’d finished it, too.

The main characters in Atlas Shrugged strive for production, and productivity, and innovation, and improvement - they hold these values as Good, and find an irresistible urge within themselves to push on, in spite of obstacles and ridicule and criticism. Hank Reardon spends ten years experimenting to invent a new alloy, Reardon Metal. Dagny Taggart has the determination to build and run a new branch line, despite all the naysayers, with trains that run at twice the speed and twice the length of standard trains. John Galt designs a revolutionary engine, converting static energy to kinetic power. Francisco d’Anconia inherits a copper empire and expands its operations.

One by one, the characters in Atlas Shrugged come to realise how their own values are used against them by those who don’t have the same drive and determination, nor even the humility to accept that one must work one’s way through life, preferring instead to live off others’ generosity, like Hank’s brother Philip, or off others’ competence, like Dagny’s brother Jim. It’s as though there is a systemic blackmail operation in play, where the innovators are laden with guilt should they object to freeloaders taking their gains. There’s a false narrative pervading the social contract, and as the scales fall from the protaganists’ eyes, the plot gathers unstoppable momentum as the consequences play out.

For a book written 68 years ago, there are a surprising number of passages that resonate with the lunacy of the last 5 years. Here are just a few.

As the first of the socialist policies are rolled out, disbelief is the reaction from the industrialists. The ‘Anti-dog eat dog’ laws elicit this response from Hank:

All that lunacy is temporary. It can’t last. It’s demented, so it has to defeat itself. You and I will just have to work a little harder for a while, that’s all.”

That’s what I, and many others, thought when I was locked in my house in 2020. Then I was reminded of the censorship and denouncement of the unvaccinated by this line, spoken by an employee of Taggart Transcontinental, in reference to a smear campaign:

“Dagny,” he asked, his voice low, “what is happening to people? Why did that statement succeed? It’s such an obvious smear-job, so obvious and so rotten. You’d think a decent person would throw it in the gutter. How could”—his voice was breaking in gentle, desperate, rebellious anger—“how could they accept it? Didn’t they read it? Didn’t they see? Don’t they think? Dagny! What is it in people that lets them do this—and how can we live with it?”

The role of the press in 2020 was also presaged:

The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events.

Hank is one of the first to realise that the oppressive lawmakers depend on the sanction of the oppressed. Here he reflects on a visit from an official who came with a legal demand for the ‘purchase’ of some metal:

That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? I don’t know—public opinion was just his name for it, but it’s not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws—he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it—so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did. It was I who had to tell him that he wasn’t a looter, but my customer and friend. That’s what he needed from me. And that’s what Dr. Stadler needed from you—it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail and my Metal. I don’t know what it is that they think they accomplish—but they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don’t know the nature of that sanction—but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don’t give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don’t give it to them. Because I know this much: I know that that’s our only chance.”

The sanction of the oppressed was on full display during the Covid upheaval. How willingly the citizens of Melbourne obeyed a 9pm curfew! How eagerly they phoned the hotlines to dob in neighbours gathering in too large numbers.

Atlas Shrugged enters its end game as, (spoiler alert) a set of dissidents withholds their sanction - they refuse to participate and refuse to share the ideas and innovations that had hitherto driven them and their success. The consequences are devastating, and inspiring. As the world crumbles around them, the innovators decamp to a hidden valley and begin again, to imagine, create, innovate and build, eventually to return and rescue the remains of civilisation.

The idea of a false narrative is also central to Jamie Franklin’s book, The Great Return. Jamie delves deep into metaphysics to expose the limits of the materialist, atheist world view upon which today’s society is structured. This world view champions Reason and Freedom as the keys to a happy life, dishonestly setting them up against the supposed dogma and enslavement of faith, pushing religion into the background as, at best, a quaint hobby for lonely people.

On history: in the West we tell ourselves a self-congratulatory story about the origin of the modern world. This story has various permutations but is essentially a secularisation of the main historical idea of the Protestant Reformation: that the world was held in darkness until a great light emerged which brought illumination to humanity. In the Protestant Reformation story, that light was held to be the rediscovery of the gospel through a return to a faithful reading of the Bible. In the modern Western story, that light is the light of scientific discovery and political liberation from ecclesiastical domination. On this view, the modern world stands in almost total discontinuity from the Christian past. It is in antagonism to it and is its contrast. The modern Western story bears very little resemblance to the historical record, however, and is based upon a mythical view of the spontaneous emergence of the contemporary world. Something does not come from nothing, and the modern world did not invent itself but rather sprung directly out of the Christian medieval age that preceded it. Thus, we are not to be congratulated for inventing ideas which underpin our deepest political and intellectual convictions – such as the dignity of the individual or the basic presuppositions underlying the scientific worldview – because these came to us not from our intuitive faculty of reason but from Christianity.

Brick by brick, in a philosophical tour de force, Jamie dismantles this wall of deception. Reason wasn’t invented at the Enlightenment. Individual rights was not a product of it either. Both notions are implicit in the Christian understanding of man and woman made in the image of God. To the extent that Christianity declines in our society, the outworkings of those implicit notions are also at risk of collapse, which would be catastrophic for our present world and the things we value about it. Yet, we are told, Christianity is not important.

I think the end game for Atlas Shrugged matches closely with the remedy proposed by The Great Return - Christians and non-Christians alike need to withhold their sanction of the official narrative, and as Jamie suggests,

Orientate yourself to what is objectively good and true and beautiful. Reject the culture of death, lies and ugliness. Commit yourself to life, truth and beauty.

and

Beyond this, as the culture declines, it may be that the Christian Church finds itself in a position in which it must be much more intentional in creating a parallel culture to that of the world. This will be even more expedient if the mark of the beast is introduced in any form, as it could lock Christians out of the economic systems of the world. Therefore, schools, universities, hospitals, businesses, theatres, libraries and many other cultural institutions will need to be pioneered from a specifically Christian perspective. This will be necessary in order to allow the Christian Church to survive and the people within it to flourish. But it will also be necessary to preserve the treasures of Western civilisation itself. As the early medieval monasteries preserved the learning of ancient Greece and Rome after the fall of the great empire, so too it may be that the Christian Church must preserve all that has been so good, true and beautiful in our world before it fell to the vandal forces of secular materialism.

Just like the new community in Atlas Shrugged.