Readers letters
I was intrigued to see (PE April 2012) that Professor Henry Petroski thinks that Ayn Rand wrote her book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ with an engineer as a hero. I believe that to be quite untrue. Her super-hero was John Galt who was a physicist who invented a superb motor but, while his engineering ability was no-doubt first class, was not an Engineer. Quentin Renolds was an engineer who tried to put back together the remains of the engine uncovered on a rubbish dump but he was a minor character – and he failed - until he met John Galt.
The engine had been uncovered by the joint efforts of two other heroes, Dagny Taggart, the heroine who eventually caught the hero, and Hank Reardon, her erstwhile lover. Dagny was Operating Director of a major railroad and Hank was an entrepreneur who made the best steel in the country – but neither were Engineers.
Another major hero was Francisco D’Anconia who was heir to a multi billion mining fortune who destroyed the fortune and the company by blowing it up on the day that it was nationalised. (The book was formulated and essentially set in the 1930s). The final hero was the banker Midas Mulligan who delighted in financing worthwhile industrial projects run by private individuals.
Many of the minor heroes owned and ran engineering, manufacturing and oil companies in that they produced the goods that make civilisation possible – but they were not what we mean by the restricted term Engineer.
I have heard Ayn Rand called everything from Communist to Fascist – terms she described as the obverse faces of the same rotten coin. In fact her philosophy – for that is what she was - a philosopher – demanded that the rights of the individual must be paramount in society: And to be contentious she chose as the title of one of her major works ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’. She therein demonstrated clearly that to look after one’s own life is a pre-requisite of civilisation and not the evil that all gratuitously oriented philosophies demand it to be.
She clearly predicted the growth of the mega corporations allied to governments in the enslavement of the masses but did not quite foresee their enormous success: But perhaps she did. I am indebted to Bill Bonner, publisher and editorial writer of the magazine ‘Money Week’ for the notion that when Ayn Rand sat next to her protégée, Alan Greenspan, at his inauguration as Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Ronald Reagan, she was perpetuating the plan of her hero John Galt to destroy the corrupt political system of America – which has now dominated the whole world through the World Bank, GATT and the International Development Association. Perhaps we owe the present meltdown of the corrupt financial system to Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged is one of the very few books which have equalled the Bible in a continuous growth of sales since its first edition in 1957. That is simply because it tells a superb story based on reality. I commend it to all engineers, and indeed to all, but you should be very careful how you interpret it. There is a multitude of ideas involved – many of which you will come to with pre-conceived prejudices that make the book very difficult to digest: But in my humble opinion we will live according to its tenets or we will die – or more likely simper into an ever afflicted socialist muck heap.
But none of the heroes were engineers – more’s the pity.
Colin Walker, Coventry
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