Bureaucrats great at stoking up emotions

Columnist Michael Gerson evaluated the film “Atlas Shrugged” as mediocre. He charged that the characters are ideological puppets without “a hint of sympathetic human emotion.” He went on to elaborate on Ayn Rand’s ideology, Objectivism, which he found infantile in that it concentrates on one idea, the imperative toward total selfishness.

The ideology further asserts that Reason is everything and that religion is a fraud, especially, the Christian religion, which promotes an ideal of altruism, of self-sacrifice, for others. Yet, Rand, even as an anti-Christ, has attracted the favorable attention of conservatives, which Gerson finds inconsistent and problematic.

Rand does not have a monopoly on atheism. The regnant economic theory, which now drives the U.S. economy to collapse, comes from atheists like Karl Marx and Meynard Keynes. Educated at Cambridge University, Keynes belonged to a group of atheists known as “Bloomsbury.” They took pride in their public rebellion against moral authority and called themselves “immoralists.” Keynes came up with a theory that gave moral cover to governments to debase their currency and thereby surreptitiously steal from their citizens. But, according to Gerson, Rand is the social and moral problem and not Keynes and the Democratic Party that follows him.

The film itself presents a strong visual story, with men forging steel, moving iron rails upon which sleek trains speed to their destinations. The dialogue is terse and indulges in little philosophizing. The venal, arrogant, willfully ignorant and mendacious government bureaucrats, who collude with our heroes’ business rivals to destroy them, churn up the blood and make the story work. There is nothing like a government bureaucrat to stoke up “sympathetic human emotions.’

George Kocan

Warrenville