What For?

So I'm about 400 pages into Atlas Shrugged - waiting to read the other 800 pages of it, plus the 500 of Green Centuries, plus the other 1200 of another book for AP Gov. Fantastic.

Anyway, about a third into the book Ayn Rand's premise is reasonably obvious: there those that produce, and there are those that endanger productivity for the sake of equlity. In other words, money, representing individual self-interest, makes the world go 'round, and that is how it should be. As a reader there are points in the novel where one laughs good-heartedly at the victories and achievements of Dagny Taggart and Hank Readen, and at other times, one would give the world to have the ability to dive into the book's pages and slap some sense into the likes of Jim Taggart, and really, society in general.

Rand steers the reader to absolutely despise anyone that does not conform, at least in some respects, to Dagny's own philosophy of rational self-interest. The initial impression, naturally, is that Rand has managed to make a powerful, convincing argument - after all, based solely on the novel, there is no possible interpretation other that the nature of capitalism is positive, productive, and even necessary. The next one is, has she really?

Rand has conconted an impossible set of characters, ones that could not reasonably exist in real life. Anyone not on Dagny's ''side'' is either unbearably stupid, painstakingly naive, or quite simply, in Rand's own description, pure evil. Considering the context of the novel's publication - 1950s, with the domestic fear of communism probably at its Cold War peak - it is not a stretch to say that part of Rand's intentions was to make a defence of the American economic ''way of life'' (or at least its ideal); and while I can personally agree, to a certain extent, with the overarching point that she makes, I cannnot overlook the way in which she has decided to present her argument: she has intentionally reduced the opponent's philosophy to the absurd, making to attempt to refute the actual ''communistic'' argument as it is, but to form her own flawed viez of it and mercilessly attack that. Her tactic is effective, I suppose, just as every other form of logical fallacy if not carefully analyzed. But Jim Tagggart et al. cannot possibly be used to justly represent that which she is against - it is a ridiculous strawman, and regardless of the merit of the story, plot, literary ability, etc. of Atlas Shrugged, it is imopssible to use Rand's novel as any sort of valid evidence to make any kind of argument or thesis in the realm of the social sciences.

I can nimagine the critical lens a question that would be attatched to this book already: ''greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Based on your reading, analyze the validity of this statement.'' Any logical conclusion from Rand's novel would in some manner support the above quotation, but really, any argument that does base itself on any novel is useless: it is based on incorrect, or unexamined; or assumed-to-be-correct premises. The author of a novel is free to create a world to her own personal liking in her novel, and can shape the human nature and motivations of her characters with absolute liberty; a writer can present a capitalistic dystopia where the greed of the novel's antagonists corrode society itself, just as Rand has done in the opposite manner - and neither of then necessarily say anything true about what is, or what could be, of any particular human community. Analyzing the hypothetical, imaginary world of a fiction novel to make a sociological conclusion about the real world, thus, seems either illogical, if the objective is to arrive at some sort of truth, or purposeless.

Imagine if modern psychology worked in the same way as English Literature critical lenses. Do humans tend to be altruistic? Well, let's not bother with any empirical study of actual humans, let's pick up any random number of literary novels and draw out whatever conclusions that their respective authors intended us to draw.