Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part 1 In Theatres Today

Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part 1 website

Atlas Shrugged . com information site

Atlas Shrugged Spark Notes for those too lazy to read the book

Amity Shlaes: Why Atlas Shrugged is more relevant than ever

The film version being released to theatres today is updated to modern times, but the underlying theme is as timely as ever. It was produced on a tiny $20 million budget, and whether the other parts are completed most likely depends upon whether Part I can sell enough movie tickets and DVDs (and cable rights etc.) to keep the momentum going.

Leftist media outlets are using a mixture of ridicule and silence in order to minimise the impact of the film on the general public. Young minds (and superficial minds) in particular tend to be overly influenced by what is seen as "hot" or "the in thing."

The Washington DC premier of Atlas Shrugged Part 1

Word of mouth and new media are likely to draw more of a crowd to this film than mainstream reviews, to be sure.

Makers vs. Takers; Moochers vs. Producers

Makers are essential to life. Humans must exert effort to create the food, housing, clothing, and other things we need and want. Producers are the people who make that effort and deliver the goods.

Some think producers are limited to corporate moguls, but in fact, they include anyone on any level — from janitors to company presidents, in small or large organizations — who earn what they have and don’t steal from others.

Producers offer their goods through voluntary trade — capitalism. Whenever producers have been the freest, the result has been an explosion of wealth and prosperity and a high standard of living for everyone. Witness 19th-century America or today’s least-regulated fields, like technology.

The opposite type is the taker, who wants to forcibly live off others’ efforts. Looters are takers who jockey for positions in government in order to seize wealth and gain power over producers. Moochers vote the looters into power in order to receive government benefits like welfare, subsidies, grants, business advantages, or jobs.

Since its inception, America has been a land of producers. The world’s most can-do people cleared farms, opened shops, lived and traded with one another in harmony, and created the great middle class — the producer class. Now, many Americans take no responsibility for their lives. Instead, they line up for money that’s not theirs; it’s simply “Obama money.” _DC

From Madison, Wisconsin to Washington, DC, the battle of moochers vs. producers is being played out across the US. Interestingly, this contemporary battle was foreseen half a century ago by an author whose magnum opus is just now making it to the silver screen.

“Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” which opens April 15th, is a movie unlike any other. Based on Ayn Rand’s novel, it dramatizes the fundamental conflict gripping our world: the battle between those who create value and wealth through their own efforts (the producers) and those who seek them through force (the looters and moochers).

With eerie accuracy, Rand’s novel depicted — in 1957 — the very struggle between these diametrical opposites that we’re witnessing today. This battle couldn’t be more important because the fate of civilization rests on the outcome. Since this conflict inescapably affects everyone, it’s crucial to know which side you’re on.

In Atlas Shrugged, producers like railroad executive Dagny Taggart and self-made steel titan Hank Rearden create new products and services, offer them in free trade, and consequently become rich. They are exploited by looters and moochers like Dagny’s brother James Taggart and steel executive Orren Boyle, who seek government intervention that favors them and thwarts their competition. In the story, the producers are vilified and their property expropriated, until they disappear. Without them, the country collapses.

Sound familiar? Today, America is in decline. The Wall Street Journal reports that “the number of U.S. IPOs has plunged to an annual average of about 130 since 2001 from an average of 503 during the 1990s.” Our nation’s debt is skyrocketing. Government has seized unprecedented control over industries like healthcare and banking. Corruption, group warfare, and the sense of “entitlement” to other people’s money are rampant. As Steve Moore notes in “We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers,” public jobs, money, and power are burgeoning while the private sector is shrinking _DC

More on how the US became a "looter state."
Producers may either generate something of value, or they may trade items of value on the open market. Moochers tend to beg, borrow, and steal with no intention of reciprocating value for value. When governments and government employees become net moochers, citizens often have nowhere to turn for redress of grievances. That is how life has been for the governed since the inception of central governments above a certain size.

As the above article states, the US was set up to benefit producers -- either creators of value or merchants of value. But the moochers have creeped into control over time, portraying themselves as protectors of the disenfranchised -- much to their own benefit, and to the gradual but accelerating ruination of the entire nation's economy and productive base.

Consider reading Atlas Shrugged, or seeing the movie, just to get your subconscious working on solutions to the problem. It will not be easy, because things have degenerated much too far. Start with planning a competent community able to pick itself up and take off from there. Then consider how such communities might work together over time to build entire regions that are more producer friendly.

The idea is too important to leave to just one nation.

Atlas Shrugged, Dumbed Down Electorate, and Idiocracy

Wikipedia Commons
Atlas Shrugged, The Movie Part I, is due to be released to theatres in one week. The book Atlas Shrugged was written by Russian emigre' Ayn Rand, in the 1950s, published in 1957. It is set in a society where people have forgotten how to think rationally, and are thus at the mercy of powerful groups who tell them how to think and what to do. It is a society very much like our society, and the book is a powerful cautionary tale for persons bold enough to think for themselves.

Modern society is breeding generations of persons incapable of rational thought, regardless of the amount of "education" they are forced to endure. In spite of everything, university students cannot think, cannot read or do maths, cannot write, cannot spell -- one could be easily forgiven for thinking that most college students do not actually belong in college.

Here is the problem with societies whose brightest lights are not so bright -- for whatever reason: The persons and groups that are chosen to lead these societies tend to exacerbate the "brain dimming problem," rather than to generate solutions to it. And so the process of "dumbing down" progresses along the path of least resistance until -- before you realise it -- a full-blown Idiocracy is in session.

From the point of view of schooling, when children typically enter first grade at about age 6 years, only one third are able to use any logical reasoning. That means that they are not ready for much of what is usually taught at that grade. This issue of readiness is a significant one for schooling and this table gives the first general information about readiness. Some teachers and principals have estimated for me that about one-third of the matters in junior high school require formal reasoning. Yet, at those ages (12-14 years) no more than 20% have reached that reasoning level.


That means that most of the children cannot understand the most significant matters being taught in junior high school. In essence they are being taught in a foreign language. The result is that such children begin to pay no attention and begin, as is now well known, to consider dropping out of school. When they arrive in senior high school and the lack of understanding continues, drop-out behavior becomes a real alternative.


Teachers surely know that there is a spectrum of ability levels of the children in their classes, but they don't know how to handle it. If teachers were really aware of the data in the table, they would know that significant modifications of their instructional level are needed for these non-ready children. That still wouldn't tell them what to do.


What is needed is what can be called cognitive level matching (CLM): matching the level of instruction to the expectations of the individual students. Now that we have the Shayer/Adey test (and others developed since then), teachers can discover the reasoning levels of their students and interact with them accordingly.


There is no question but that this is an enormous strain on the teachers, and requires that the teachers, too, be tested for their operating cognitive levels. The need for such testing is evident from the last line of the table which gives the data for adults. Adults remain at the highest percentage reached at the end of high school: only one-third can reason formally. So, acceptance of applicants to higher education schools should be based on testing of the cognitive levels of prospective teachers in addition to the information gathered from the usual SAT test taken at the end of high school for those preparing to go on to higher education. _The Fourth "R"

I think you see the problem with the all-too-reasonable recommendations given at the conclusion of the essay above: Teachers' unions would never accept the requirement that teachers actually be capable of rational thought in order to be employed as teachers. If ordinary members of government unions in Wisconsin were willing to skip work to demonstrate and occupy public buildings, faking medical excuses and abandoning their responsibilities just for the right to be forced to have union dues deducted from their paychecks, how do you think they will react if regulations come along that require them to be able to think like intelligent beings?

Modern dialogue at the highest levels is chocked full of logical fallacies. Even the more intelligent students are not typically taught basic reasoning skills -- nor are they given the ability to detect the common fallacies and illogical modes of reasoning. This lack of ability to reason is reflected in much "research" -- including research in sciences such as climatology and psychology. Naturally the problem extends down the bell curve (see graph at top) -- to the less intelligent. Overall, fuggiduhbowdit!

When faced with such a society of madly proliferating dimwits, John Galt chose to chuck it all and abandon society to its Idiocratic tendencies -- and he invited all rational and ethically ambitious persons to join him in safety. Society would eventually fall apart of its own inconsistencies and inadequacies, allowing Galt and his co-conspirators to return and help put the pieces together more rationally.

But fiction is fiction, and reality is fiction too er, reality, although often "stranger than fiction." If all the bright, competent, rational, and ethical persons dropped out of modern societies, it might be difficult to find enough working pieces in the aftermath to put together a functioning society. Difficult to say.

It is obvious that resources are flowing from the productive to the unproductive, and that the rapidly expanding government-dependent sector is on a determinedly kamikaze course.

You may not be willing to "go Galt," but you should have at least one fallback position. Preferably more. Optimally, a community of ethical, competent, and rational persons would stand ready to form a focus of competent recovery, should the situation warrant.

There is an ongoing counter-reaction to the Idiocracy, but the sheer numbers of Idiocrats and government-dependent persons argues against the success of the anti-Idiocratic forces. In modern societies, brain-rot tends to set in from the earliest ages and progress from there, unless the parents are truly exceptional.

It is likely to take a number of years for the parallel trends of societal breakdown to reach a climax -- if Obama is re-elected the derailment is apt to come a bit sooner.