When the state turns creative power into guilt, freedom into permission and responsibility into collective duty, it is not society that is saved. It is the parasite that receives a moral uniform.
Ayn Rand did not write primarily about selfishness. She wrote about what happens when a society makes creative power guilty, productivity suspect and mediocrity morally exalted. “Atlas Shrugged” is therefore not merely a novel about America, capitalism and individualism. It is a diagnosis of a West that today is in the process of being administered to death.
It is easy to caricature Rand. It is also comfortable. She can be dismissed as harsh, merciless, American, atheistic, capitalist, exaggerated. But the caricature is often a way of avoiding the question she posed: What happens when those who carry society finally discover that they are no longer carrying a civilisation, but an apparatus that lives off them?
It is this that makes “Atlas Shrugged” disturbingly relevant. Not because all of Rand’s answers are sufficient. They are not. Man is more than a producer, more than will, more than reason alone. But her eye for the parasitic state, for the moral blackmail of the creative, and for how freedom is slowly transformed into licensed obedience, is difficult to shake off. She understood something many would rather not understand: Collectivism rarely arrives marching with boots first. It arrives with forms, committees, good intentions, distribution models, directives and a language in which coercion is always called care.
In our time, this is often called the EU.
Not merely the EU as an institution, a body of treaties or a market co-operation. But the EU as a mentality. A system in which ever more of what previously belonged in national parliaments, local communities, families, business life and the citizens’ own choices is lifted into a supranational engine room. There, politics is transformed into process. Responsibility is dissolved into levels. Freedom becomes something one may have, provided it is pre-approved, reported, taxonomised and adapted to the correct objectives.
The modern West has not abolished private property. It has done something more sophisticated. It allows you to own, but increasingly determines what ownership is supposed to mean. You may run a business, but within a web of reporting obligations, climate requirements, labour-market regimes, financial standards, social criteria and administrative expectations that grow faster than the enterprise itself. You may hold whatever opinions you wish, but only so long as those opinions do not threaten the moral certificates that grant admission to respectable society. You may vote, but the major directions have already been moved into treaties, courts, directorates and “commitments” that no single election day is permitted to disturb.
This is not the abolition of freedom in a single stroke. It is the gradual reclassification of freedom.
Rand called the bearers of society creators, inventors, entrepreneurs and producers. One need not accept all of her hero worship to see the point. Every society lives off a minority that builds more than it consumes. Some create jobs. Some take risks. Some think anew. Some keep the machines running. Some carry responsibility while others merely carry opinions. But modern collectivism has developed a particular ability to describe these people as a problem. They must be regulated, taxed, corrected, transitioned, included, certified and morally brought into line.
Thus a new type of plunderer arises. Not the brutal robber, but the educated administrator. He comes not with a pistol, but with legal authority. He does not say “give me your money”, but “society expects your contribution”. He does not say “you must obey”, but “we must ensure common standards”. He does not say “you are not free”, but “freedom must be balanced against sustainability, security, equality, inclusion and European commitments”. And should you protest, it is precisely the protest that proves that you need regulation.
Rand’s genius was that she saw the moral mechanism behind politics. Collectivism survives not primarily on economics, but on guilt. It must make the productive person ashamed of his surplus, the independent person ashamed of his independence, the strong person ashamed of his strength, and the free person ashamed that he does not ask permission. Once this sense of guilt has been established, not so much coercion is needed any longer. Man begins to regulate himself. He becomes his own commissar.
It is here that “Atlas Shrugged” strikes our time with the greatest force. Rand’s world collapses because the creative finally refuse to allow themselves to be sacrificed for those who despise creative power. Our world does not collapse in the same dramatic way. It sags. It becomes more expensive, slower, more fearful, more saturated with rights and less vital. It produces ever more plans for value creation, but ever fewer conditions for those who actually create value. It speaks incessantly about innovation, yet treats the free entrepreneur as a potential lawbreaker with temporary permission to exist.
And while this is happening, we comfort ourselves with the thought that everything is humane. Everything is well-intentioned. Everything is necessary.
Ayn Rand lacked much. She had little appreciation for tradition, for inheritance, for the bound community that cannot be reduced to contract and self-interest. She did not fully understand that man also needs roots, faith, duty and an order that he himself has not invented. But for precisely that reason she should be read with both gratitude and resistance. Not as a prophet. Not as a saint. But as someone who saw the disease before it became widespread.
It is this point that the West is approaching.
When Atlas shrugs, it is not because he hates the world. It is because he finally understands that he is no longer carrying the world, but those who have made it their life’s task to chain him down.