Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

or Who is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged has been considered a huge reference in libertarian literature since it's release in 1957. The ideas of Ayn Rand's novel resulted in some of the most memorable dialogues in literature - "What would you tell him?" "To shrug". It's the definitive reader-friendly approach to a capitalist morality.

And - before anyone asks or becomes suspicious - Capitalism does have an extended moral philosophy. When it lacks so, Capitalism fails - as it has failed in 2008, in the 90's hyperinflation in Brazil and world economy recession, in 80's Latin America debt crisis and so on (crisis will be another post's personal inquiry). The moral philosophy of Capitalism is often regarded as the child (or, according to some authors, the brother) of protestant theology and morality, as depicted in the book by Max Weber - Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The protestant ethics and the spirit of Capitalism). The detachment of working, producing and capital accumulation with the Sklavenmoral resolutions of catholic church (as Nietzche emphasized) was the main foundation, but yet taboo-ish themes of the capitalism morality.

The taboo nature of these themes is the main reason Ayn Rand wrote these pro-capitalist books. The guilt from being a capitalist accumulator must vanish if we want to progress as a society, according to her. This had large implications in the 20th century political debates, and is still a very actual book if we analyze current America's sociopolitical context - where wealth and accumulation are often denoted as results of greed. Greed, according to her, it's an anti-concept - a new nomenclature used to describe something which already has a name for it, causing a more comprehensive approximation about the real problem, but yet not the problem itself. It's a redundancy. The derivative of a constant. Zero.

"The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as self-evident."

These beautiful words, extracted from the book "Philosophy: Who Needs it", illustrate the problem with the greed denomination. It displays the problem of vice - the opposite of virtue, as a new problem, allocating blame of the unvirtuous behavior to the capital accumulation per se. Greed is an intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food, right? Isn't that what moves the world? The selfish actions of entrepreneurs? The selfish actions of workers? The selfish actions of corporations? The selfish actions of house painters? The selfish actions of bricklayers? It's because of these ideas that Ayn Rand it's still one of the most influential writers in the world.

We need to clarify something, though - Rand novels are very bad and superficial. There is never good in bad, or bad in good. It's just compilation of plain and biased opinions. She doesn't tackle the reasons for the seducive speech on global problems being so relatable for most people. Government officials are always bad and corrupt. Regular people are dumb with inexistant political opinons. Enterpreneurs and company owners are always good. But she had a point - as most influential intelectuals and philosophers had.

Here in South America, especially in Brazil, her books are getting a huge amount of attention lately. The disappointment and further disbelief on populist governments (Fernando Henrique Cardoso - Lula - Dilma - Bolsonaro), in parallel to the latest 20 corruption fulfilled years depicted in journals and television, thermionic emission of government debt and fiscal mismanagement germinated the latent seed of the laissez-faire ideology in many parts of Brazil. The New Party (Partido Novo), Free Brazil Movement (MBL) and other leader congressman as Marcel Van Hattem, Kim Kataguiri, Alexis Fonteyne, Adriana Ventura, Paulo Ganime, even the ministry of economy's chief Paulo Guedes (Chicago School of Economics) are the main protagonists of this relatively new movement in Brazil.

Brazilian zeroes from different bills (representing inflation) with all monetary currencies since 1933 - Section of the cover from Gustavo Franco's book "The currency and the law" (A moeda e a lei)

Ayn Rand's fundamental argument is that we should destroy the guilt of producing, the guilt of providing, the guilt of capital accumulation, the guilt of raising structures, the guilt of constructing cities and skyscrapers, trains and airplanes, cars and machinery, health and food. We should destroy the guilt of holding the world on our shoulders - as Atlas did.