On Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged
The story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is about how a private business and its employees voluntarily decide to adopt a supposedly moral plan. What are the ideas, especially the moral ideas, that lead to the company’s destruction? How can we see these ideas at work in business, culture, or politics today? Explain how you think their consequences will be similar to, and/or different from those suffered by the Twentieth Century Motor Company.
Modern attitudes towards successful individuals, from the world’s greatest businessmen to the most influential politicians or artists creating works of the highest profundity, interpret success not as an objective good but as a variable commodity based on an emotional and subjectivist framework. The large majority of people who have not achieved success interpret the triumphs of successful individuals on the basis of self-assessment, largely invoking feelings of resentment, envy, or skepticism contained within the self, opposed to productive attitudes. In the case where public opinion kindly receives a successful individual’s productive output, from a musician’s new LP, a politician's agenda, to a businessman’s operation, this popular support typically stems from the wrong place. It stems from exterior image, associations with groups of other fans or supporters, and the charismatic ability of the successful individual rather than quantitative or tangible outputs of production, entirely removed from the actual practice of art, politics, or business.
People at the top who made it to the top did so from a combination of objective, successful outputs along with possessing necessary charisma and artifice needed to charm the masses. These masses consist of individuals who treat success as a personal statement of “I” first, rather than transcending the self to a higher form of practice. Dagny Taggart finds this transcendence above “I” in the railroads, John Galt finds this in innovation, and Richard Halley finds this in music. Unlike the leaders of today’s most successful enterprises, Rand’s characters find transcendence not just through their technical fields, but through their moral philosophy and dedication to reason, productivity, and individual rights.
However, this moral philosophy is disturbingly absent from many of today’s modern leaders, where instead a system of artifice and charisma is put in place to reach and maintain success. The masses enable those at the top to continue relaying their work back to identity driven politics, deteriorating modern day business, politics, and culture in this hypertechnolgized, post materialist, “God is Dead” era. Those who recognize the pursuit of success in a field as a means to produce output and achieve self-transcendence—removed from subjectivist individualistic concerns—are the ones who save society from itself. Effectively, these are the modern-day Atlases of the world.
The story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company reveals a fundamental paradox in how society treats achievement and moral responsibility: the more one succeeds, the more one should feel guilty. The company's downfall stemmed from adopting a moral framework that punished ability and rewarded need, but this same framework creates a more insidious effect. This prioritization drives achievement underground and forces capable individuals to operate in morally ambiguous ways to preserve their ability to produce, much like current society.
Modern society's evaluation of success—whether in business, politics, or art—has become fundamentally detached from objective measures of achievement. Instead of judging a businessman by their productive output, a politician by their policy effectiveness, or an artist by their technical and creative mastery, we increasingly evaluate them through the lens of emotional resonance and identity alignment.
The fatal flaw in the Twentieth Century Motor Company's plan similarly wasn't just in its economic policy, but in its underlying moral premises. First, there is the falsity of prioritizing need over ability. Workers were compensated based on their needs rather than their contributions, achievement became a liability rather than an asset, and ability was transformed from a virtue into a moral debt. Second, there is the doctrine of collective responsibility, where individual achievement was viewed as community property. Personal success created obligations to others, making merit subordinate to social necessity.
In our contemporary world, this moral framework created an unexpected response among capable individuals—what we might call “the Atlas paradox.” Just as Atlas holds up the world while remaining hidden from it, modern achievers often operate in morally ambiguous ways to preserve their ability to produce. Consider parallel cases drawn from our current society: in technology, figures like Mark Zuckerberg face criticism not primarily for their products' effectiveness but for their perceived moral character and social impact. In politics, leaders are increasingly evaluated based on their ability to emotionally connect rather than their capability to implement effective policies. In art—such as Richard Halley's Fifth Concerto—audiences often celebrate the artist's identity or struggle rather than their actual artistic achievement.
Ayn Rand constructs a compelling argument against this traditional mindset. The typical worker in America, in this country driven by what Weber deems the Protestant country, conducts both his work and familial relations out of a sense of mechanized sense of guilt and obligation rather than as a result of his ability.
“The modern man does not have the two great qualities of life, like a train, like how a living entity is supposed to live: a sense of motion and purpose” (1001).
Effectively, most men are nothing more than mechanized animals, stuck by guilt and emotions, stuck in his birthplace, the profession of his parents, and lacking a direction outside of the fulfillment of his immediate needs.
Characters in Atlas Shrugged transcend this mindset and move forward while simultaneously recognizing the fundamental impossibility of pure material fulfillment despite arguments for objective productivity. Accordingly, as Ayn Rand writes, “All business is dirty politics and all politics is dirty business” (432). But this need not be the occasion for weeping.
Despite this corruption present in various fields, it is those who are decisive and work with conviction who effect change. Man can even garner success off ideas that are not entirely his.
“A man’s brain is a social product. He merely reflects what is floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual hoarder of the ideas that rightfully belong to society from which he stole them. All thought is theft.” (499)
Accordingly, great artists steal. When Beethoven studied under Haydn, he wasn't stealing musical forms; he was recognizing their fundamental value and building upon them. This concept similarly applies to Caravaggio and Titian or Picasso and African art.
Just because Beethoven was trained by Haydn does not mean he was incapable of originality; similarly, Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of taking inspiration from social networking projects developed by Harvard classmates—the Winklevoss twins—to create Facebook. The Samwer brothers gained notoriety for creating near-identical copies of successful American tech companies like eBay and launching them in Germany; they often sold these copies back to original companies for large sums.
Even those who rule often steal or blatantly plagiarize. For instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin faced accusations from researchers at the Brookings Institute for plagiarizing his economics dissertation, stealing 16 out of 20 pages from a paper published by the University of Pittsburgh 20 years earlier. Similarly, Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from his presidential race after Maureen Dowd exposed his plagiarized speech. Allegations followed that he lifted parts from speeches made by Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, and JFK.
This crookedness is indicative of our current world: reality is a product where lifting ideas becomes acceptable as individuals think about others while self-creating. The Zuckerberg case illustrates this principle. While social networking existed before Facebook's emergence, its success came from fundamentally transforming that concept into something new. True creative borrowing requires deep understanding of an original idea's essence; this understanding allows for genuine innovation rather than mere replication.
In politics, Biden's speech plagiarism and Putin's dissertation incident represent symptoms of a system that demands both achievement and moral penance for it. Like hidden producers in Atlas Shrugged, leaders feel compelled to obscure methods of achievement due to pressure to appear both exceptional and common—a situation leading to intellectual undergrounds.
The world creates a system where those in power feel compelled to lie to meet demands for moral righteousness. Rand writes: “a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies” (100). The modern consequences mirror those seen during the company’s collapse but with crucial differences. While achievement remains punished through moral condemnation—where ability creates obligations instead of rewards—the system now allows capable individuals to find ways to produce while obscuring methods rather than facing total destruction.
This situation creates fundamental moral problems: producers must choose between obvious achievement or moral subordination, forcing capable individuals into compromised positions while creating moral ambiguity that condemns them even as they strive for success. Society loses transparency regarding ability, and ability becomes associated with moral compromise within systems undermining values they profess to protect. Unlike during the Twentieth Century Motor Company era—which faced potential collapse—modern society creates something potentially worse: systems requiring hidden or morally compromised achievements for existence.
The solution lies not in condemning those operating within gray areas but changing how our moral frameworks create these paradoxes. The true parallel isn't economic collapse but moral destruction resulting when society punishes achievement yet demands its benefits. Until we resolve this moral contradiction between societal expectations and individual capabilities, we will continue creating systems where capable individuals must choose between obvious virtue opposed to hidden achievements. The key difference remains that the Motor Company policies led directly toward destruction, while our modern version fosters sustainable yet morally corrupt systems allowing achievements masked by compromise and concealment. However, this may more dangerous outcome than simple collapse, since it institutionalizes moral ambiguity as production's price.
Works Cited
Gaddy, Clifford G. "Putin's Plan: The Future of Russia in the World." Brookings Institution, Sept. 2012, www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Putin-Dissertation-Event-remarks-with-slides.pdf.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
"Trump Campaign Press Release - Copy That: Joe Biden's Long Record of Plagiarism." The American Presidency Project, edited by John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, University of California, Santa Barbara, 17 July 2020, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/trump-campaign-press-release-copy-that-joe-bidens-long-record-plagiarism.
