Atlas Bored

to Tears

Book Cover

In My last post I made fun of a character in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Surely one of the worst written novels ever excreted by an author. Here I will just make a few points about the philosophical centre of the novel. John Galt’s truly horribly written speech.1

Lady Heather's Complaint

Lady Heather

(Melinda Clarke)

Lady Heather  was a character in the long running show CSI. She started out has a Dominatrix running a (legal) brothel in Nevada and ended up becoming a therapist. In the show she had various run ins with the regulars especially  head honcho Grissom.

John Galt is a character, Messiah, in that door stop of a novel Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand. The character is one of the ultimate Mary Sue creations aside from being one dimensional.

I thought it might be fun to have the two characters meet.1

Ayn Rand

Progress

and

Justifiable Atrocity



Ayn Rand

The late Ayn Rand, (1905—1982)1 said in response to this question.2

When you consider the cultural genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of blacks, and the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War Two, how can you have such a positive view of America?

Ayn Rand replied:

I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country.I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you are a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not.

Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights – they didn’t have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal ‘cultures’ – they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It’s wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you’re an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a ‘country’ does not protect rights – if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief – why should you respect the ‘rights’ that they don’t have or respect?

The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too – that is, you can’t claim one should respect the ‘rights’ of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights.

But let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages – which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their ‘right’ to keep a part of the earth untouched – to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen?

Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did.

...

As a principle, one should respect the sanctity of a contract among individuals. But I oppose applying contract law to American Indians. When a group of people or a nation does not respect individual rights, it cannot claim any rights whatsoever. The Indians were savages, with ghastly tribal rules and rituals, including the famous “Indian Torture.” Such tribes have no rights. Anyone had the right to come here and take whatever they could, because they would be dealing with savages as Indians dealt with each other – that is, by force. We owe nothing to Indians, except the memory of monstrous evils done by them.