Atlas Shrugged
Article
Atlas Shrugged is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 10, 2023 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Catgirl Kulak reviews Atlas Shrugged”; “List of all books reviewed below. Atlas Shrugged”; “When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I felt a strong sense of deja vu”. It most often appears alongside Christianity, Elon Musk, Rand.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: March 10, 2023
- Last seen: August 08, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Christianity (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Rand (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- 10240 (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- @slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
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- A Canticle For Leibowitz (1 shared issues)
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- A Farewell to Alms (1 shared issues)
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- A Husband (1 shared issues)
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- A Practical Guide to Evil (1 shared issues)
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- A Thousand Ways to Please (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
28: Catgirl Kulak reviews Atlas Shrugged:
Inline links: Catgirl Kulak reviews Atlas Shrugged
...Thousand Ways to Please A Husband A Visit from the Goon Squad Against Democracy Age of Anger All Systems Red Alphabetical Diaries American Nations Armies of Sand Asquith Atlas Shrugged Babel Bad Therapy Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Biophilia Carpentaria Cat's Cradle Catkin Choosing Elites Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy Consequences of Language Defin...
Rand is not so different from USSR's morality. When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I felt a strong sense of deja vu that I couldn't quite place. Only after reading the whole thing I realized I was reading a very typical Soviet book of Rand's time. Yeah, really so. There was a whole sub-genre in Soviet science fiction that was quite like that. Basically, if you take any of these old Soviet books, and change the heroes' speeches from "Communism brings progress" to "I want to be selfish and bring progress", but leave the entire rest the same - you'd get Atlas Shrugged.
I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche. Not just because she originally planned to use a quotation from him as its epigraph, but because of its major conflict between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand. Wynand really is something of a Nietzschean overman: born in the slums, he educated himself, became a successful newspaper publisher, is hugely rich, and besides that, is a lethally skilled fighter and superb in bed. And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power. I see this as the debate between the Nietzschean Rand and the Aristotelian Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged. (If you read Aristotle's account of the megalopsychos or "great-souled man," it's almost a perfect fit to what Rand says about Roark.)