I was wrong about Atlas Shrugged

"I don't think I can finish reading Atlas Shrugged," Larry told me. "I got to the part where they're trying to convince people that Rearden Metal is unsafe, and I just couldn't stand it anymore. It's anti-science."

"But the scientists in this case are lying," I said. "We're not supposed to like them."

"I don't mean anti-scientists," Larry said. "I mean that she presents this idea that Rearden Metal is safe as something that's true simply because Hank Rearden knows it's true, and anyone who wants to test the metal has some kind of ulterior motive."

"Well, why shouldn't Hank know whether his metal is safe?"

"Because," Larry said –

and I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of this before –

"that's not how you know things."

We talked a bit more about the book, and I read Larry a few sections from John Galt's speech, and he agreed that the excerpts I selected were similar to what he and I had discovered when we came up with what we call what-it-is-ism, but as for the rest of Atlas Shrugged –

"She presents the complex as if it's simple," Larry said, "and it isn't."

I had already discovered that, in my own way, when I found myself too bored with the book to get through it a second time. It's not a quality text, by my definition of quality – and, by the way, the only good thing I've come up with in my seven months of near-daily blogging is a functional definition of quality, nearly everything else has turned out to be incorrect or in need of revision – and yet I was excited after I read it the first time because it seemed like an idea I hadn't considered before, and now I've thoroughly considered it.

Of course then Larry and I had to talk about whether it was in fact possible to solve the complex, and we discussed Croly and his statement that a man with intelligence could never fairly compete with a man who had both intelligence and money, and we talked about what that implied for people who might be left out of both sides of that equation and how we didn't want to live in a world that ignored them (or ignored us, since we can't presume anything about our own intelligence except that it is improving), we wanted to live in a world in which everyone could get a little bit better at what they did, incrementally, and we talked about Croly's plan to give everyone a living wage, and how that hinged on the idea of everyone having either full employment for their entire lives or the skill/capacity/desire to save for a future period of unemployment, and I said that I'd love to live in Croly's world if the math worked, and then we talked about universal basic income, and Larry proposed tying UBI to some kind of positive social value indicator, and since we had just finished watching Do the Right Thing I asked whether he meant for those characters to have their UBI taken away, and he said of course not, and then we agreed that it was complex and perhaps the best thing we could in fact do was our own work, as best we can, and share what we learn.

So I am sharing this with you.

I am also sharing one more thought, which has to do with what I wrote about The Grapes of Wrath and Steinbeck's dream of an America that combined individualism and collectivism.

I am no longer sure that these two elements cannot coexist – which is to say that I believe they may be able to coexist, because I believe I've experienced a place in which the individual and the collective work together, and it's such a powerful experience that most people who discover this particular place never want to leave.

I am referring, of course, to the theater.