Instead of repeating what I’ve said before, I’ll offer an example.

Let’s pretend that a man, Mr. Q. A. Author, decides to write a book about the dangers of smoking after seeing multiple family members die of lung cancer. But instead of writing another anti-smoking book filled with boring statistics and nasty pictures, he decides to write a fictional story that’s somewhat based on his life. His book has a gripping plot that shows multiple characters, all of whom are smokers, deal with the effects of their poor decisions. By the end of the book, they all die due to their smoking habit.

Now imagine someone reading this book and saying, “OH NO! Mr. Q. A. Author is saying that he thinks smokers should die! Just for smoking? He couldn’t have let even one smoker live? What glee he must have taken to write about the deaths of the smokers! He used his creative license to create characters just to kill them off! How horrible!”

That’s essentially the argument that I’m hearing against this chapter in Atlas Shrugged. Just like the author above wrote about the consequences of smoking, Ayn Rand wrote about the consequences that BAD philosophy can have on your life. I think you’re missing a lot by focusing on how the author stated his or her point instead of what the point actually was.

As for my galling statement about government meddling in the economy and who is responsible, I think you have to look at what the politicians actually did instead of what they said they’d do. Republicans do talk a big free-market game, but when they had power they increased the size of government fast enough to make even a Democrat envious. Despite whatever “deregulation” you say they did, there was still a *ton* of regulation in the economy, and it pushed us to this point.

She’s not, though. As the author, she’s caricatured that beliefs of her perceived enemies, and attributed these caricatures to a very broad swath of humanity, and then she invents the consequences from her imagination. This is exactly how you demonize an “out group” — by including a little bit of what appears to be recognizable truth and then making a straw man out of it, predicting dire consequences.

You’re an atheist, right? When I object to the doctrine of hell, Christians like to absolve their god of any responsibility, claiming that God doesn’t MAKE people go to hell — he tries to warn them away from the hell to which they will inevitably go when they refuse to shape up. There’s a big flaw with this argument though: their doctrine indicates that the god CREATED the hell to put them in. The “rescue” is from a consequence that he (they say) made up.

I see the train wreck chapter as similar. Rand is the author and takes a massive amount of creative license. She invented the people. She fleshed out their beliefs (intended to represent those she disagrees with, but largely failing). She invented the train situation, and she kills them.

Finally, you offered an interesting explanation for the current economic crisis:
“Just look at things like Social Security, Medicare, the bailouts, deficit spending, or our coming-soon government health care system. These are all things that everybody knows won’t work and can’t work, but nobody’s willing to be the messenger with the bad news.”

What’s remarkable about your claim is that the party which has been thoroughly in control of all branches of government for the great majority of the last eight years is the one that describes their position as anti-government (a la Reagan with his “most terrifying words” speech). There has been deregulation at every opportunity, and a lot of slackening of the laws and oversight which had previously restricted business in the housing and financial sector, and this is widely seen as the cause of the current market woes. It takes a lot of gall to claim that it happened because too much government meddling.

I don’t know what the reasons were for Germans not stopping the holocaust. Maybe they didn’t know about it. Maybe they did know about it and feared to stop, maybe some even approved. We’re still hunting down nazi warm criminals to this day. We’re still hunting down those directly responsible. Following one line of reasoning that has presented here in relation to the train, justice in this world would be served by tracking down all people (presuming they were of age, not children, not retarded, etc) alive in Germany at the time and doing the same to them as we do to the direct perpetrators.

Is that right? So if we were ordering the death penalty for Nazi war criminals, then ordinary complicit people should be executed also. That is equivalent to what happened in this train story. If you genuinely feel that ordinary Germans should face the same punishment then I can’t argue with that. We’ve clearly got very different views on morality.

Another thing I found odd, the attempt to justify murder by claiming the people were going to die anyways. So why not just let them die? Or in a real life case, SAVE THEM. You’ll never see it used as a valid defense in a court of law that someone comes across someone who had just been in a car accident and shot them. The judge would ask why and the guy would say, well I asked and the injured guy said he was a socialist. He didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain (the shock?) but I thought I’d shoot him just in case. You never know, he might have been right that he could go fast enough through the tunnel and no one would have died.

This novel is a morality play on the highest level; in this kind of story each word and each event of the story is chosen to convey the moral point. Nothing is in the story by accident. This is not realism–it is justice.

I just re-read Atlas last summer.
I do not think Rand was at all “gleeful” in her telling of the train story, nor was she “gleeful” at the destruction of the world that is chronicled in the novel.

That last line–that Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth is actually a very sad statement. They saw it, and did not understand what it meant–that their choices were the cause of the “draining of the brains” in the world, and it was the loss of those brains that made the disaster of the train wreck inevitable.

I think the story points to the reality that there are no “innocent” bystanders among adults in the world. And the opposite of innocent in this sense is not guilt, but the inability to make moral choices at a fundamental level. (A person who is a child, or who is mentally retarded or who is insane is innocent in this sense). But the people on the train were not innocent. This does not make them guilty of actually choosing to make that particular disaster happen.

The adults on that train were complicit in creating the circumstances that led directly to that train wreck, but they were not directly responsible for it. Just as the Germans who were silent in the face of the mass murders they knew were happening near their towns were complicit in the murder, although they were not directly responsible.

I think Rand is saying that there are no innocent bystanders aboard the train except the children mentioned at one point. All of the rest had the ability to make moral choices, but chose not to make them.

Right, except I don’t come to that conclusion from that story. You get to that conclusion logically from some of the key premises of Objectivism, Rand’s writings – for example the Tunnel scene, or the quote from the ITOE that I mentioned – are by and large consistent with that conclusion.

Anyway, as I said, I hardly can hope to persuade you of my point of view in an internet comment. All I can do is encourage you to treat her like any other writer or thinker and make sure the product beneath the compelling stylistic packaging really works as advertised.

kind regards
Daniel

PS Your wife’s version of the story was the one I was referring to.

From what I understand, you are treating this story as a case of “punishment” as if Ayn Rand picked out a handful of people and then killed them because they had bad ideas. Then from that you say that Objectivism and/or Ayn Rand holds that death is an appropriate punishment for holding the wrong ideas. I think I’ve made my case, so for now I’ll just say that I disagree with your “cruel” versus “just” argument setup.

But when it comes to the Three Little Pigs, you said that the “punishments fit the moral errors.” The pig was eaten by the wolf because he was lazy and built his house of straw. How is that just?