Written 11/18/2008 before Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand focuses on the hero and and glosses over the everyday worker. Though occasionally the everyday worker can be the hero and the hero should have done the same kinds of jobs that he orders other people to do. The fact is if all the workers acted like the hero it would be so complex as to make the story telling difficult. The stories are very clean for the lack of other characters in them.
Also the characters are so pure in their aims, intentions, and methods. Very few people are this focused. They oscillate around. Changing their mind, doubting themselves, undoing previous work, making numerous mistakes.. Her characters have distilled the message that she wants to convey and they seem to understand it or understand it at the point in time. This is highly dubious. For most people as rational, studious action is the exception and understanding why you have behaved a certain why or made a certain decision may not come. The characters are quite fake in understanding so much about themselves and deciding accordingly. Rational lies sound much like rational truths.
Rand seems like the other end of the Action/Reaction to Soviet Communism of the early 20th century. Where Communism sought to bring equality by killing the heroes, level down the quality of man, Rand elevates the hero. In doing so, she anonymizes the common man much like the Communism she objects to. Her hero is focused on self and driven internally. Actions for the good of all are denigrated by the hero and the omniscient story teller though he may perform actions that assist others it is for the goals of self. She never faces the situation of a hero who is self-driven to destroy his fellow man. Some villains attack the hero, but this is more an attack on his personal truth and denunciation of anyone how feels such truth than an attract on other men or mankind.
There is an attractiveness to the hero’s position that can not be denied. He carries a personal truth that survives all attacks and creates beautiful works. This certainly seems right. Again her common man has no such creative motivation. Only the hero. The villains are so evil, because they recognize the quantity or personal truth in other men and respond to obscure, destroy, repudiate, or condemn the hero and anyone else who might also act from the self. Rand’s love of the hero comes through slowly. Driven by the amount of exposition about and by him. Everything is dry, rational, well thought out, and cool.
Her stories are of the captains of industry and associated retinue with an anonymous background of everyone else fighting it out to make and be prevent from making their internal self truth on the world.
My issues with here work are in the anonymization and concept of common man as uncreative motive force to be marshalled by other smarter men. There is a command and control aspect to her vision that repells me. All men are creative in uncountable ways. The organization of labor according to 19th and 20th century standards is not a requirement for society. The internal self drive of the hero is extremely rare and I suspect, looking at other cultures, that such drive turns religious or mystical at some point of development. It’s easy for her to confuse material ego desires with spiritual truth, because she denies the existence of anything that is not rational.