Did Atlas Really Shrug?
Who is Atlas anyway? We know, if we’ve been to Rockefeller Center, that he has the world on his shoulders. In mythology, he is a mere Titan, not a god, but a Titan, and he is tasked with holding up the sky and the heavens after he and his gang of Titans tried to overthrow the Olympians and failed. Failed coups are a bitch and there are consequences. Atlas must have been a Titan heavyweight to get punished by having to hold up the heavens in eternity. He was not as unfortunate as his grandfather, Uranus, who got castrated for having sired such unruly children and grandchildren as the Titans (there were twelve kids and who knows how many grandkids). But the story is a little more complex because Atlas was quite an accomplished dude who had studied mathematics and astronomy, enough so that he is credited with having invented the celestial sphere to sort of describe and contain the heavens (infinity is an even bigger bitch than failed coups). Zeus banished him to the far Western part of the known world, the frontier so-to-speak, which turns out to have been on the far western hump of Africa, where Morocco now sits. That would explain why the mountains there are called….the Atlas Mountains. It is also why that great expanse of water heading off to the unknowns to the west is called the Atlantic Ocean. Good to know.
Atlas had one encounter with Perseus, the son of Zeus and the hereditary feud got enhanced by Atlas telling Perseus to pound sand rather than offer him hospitality. That caused Perseus to turn Atlas to stone….I guess as part of the Atlas Mountain range, to live out his days with the Berbers letting their cows shit all over him. He also ran afoul of none other than Hercules, who got assigned a series of twelve famous labors (things like cleaning out the Aegean Stables…shoveling shit being a particularly necessary but punishing task in those days). One of those labors was to fetch some of the golden apples that good old Atlas was supposed to guard. Well, we can imagine how that ended for a mere Titan like Atlas, who had probably already been turned to stone (maybe that was the ancient description of a bum ligament or a touch of arthritis). It seems Atlas was successful in retrieving the three golden apples that Hercules stole from him, but when he put them down to lift the celestial sphere of the heavens back onto his shoulders, Hercules stole them back (Duh!).
Atlas is sometimes confused with the son of Poseidon, who was also called Atlas and for whom the fabled land of Atlantis was named, since he was the king thereof. That all sounds too intertwined to me and I’ll bet we are talking about the same guy, who was known to occasionally set down that celestial sphere and run around causing trouble like knocking up Poseidon’s daughter or something. Then what’s a guy like Poseidon to do to save face, but make his son-in-law king and stick him out on a sinking island in the middle of the ocean bearing his name, Atlantis. That all makes sense to me. I will also add that over the millennia there has been some confusion about what exactly Atlas has hoisted up on his shoulders. There are many statues of him holding the terrestrial globe rather than the celestial sphere on his shoulders. Maybe he kept forgetting exactly what his punishment was and one big round thing looked like another. I’m gonna guess that when challenged about what that was on his shoulders, he might have dumbly just shrugged and said, “I dunno.”
The word “shrug” has been with us from Middle English in the Fourteenth Century, which means it sprang more from the latter parts of the Dark Ages or Middle Ages and before the Quattrocento or Fifteenth Century, which was the early Renaissance. It comes, apparently, from the Germanic-sounding word Shruggen and implies a hunching or gathering of the shoulders to indicate or express aloofness, indifference, or uncertainty. It sounds just like the sort of thing a somewhat illiterate person might do often when questioned about something he doesn’t want to respond to. I sort of think of it as the old-world version of “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’”.
Rockefeller Center was built out in midtown Manhattan between 1929 and 1940, so it is fair to say that it is a product of the Great Depression, the greatest failing of the free market system. It represents how one family scion chose to spend some of his questionably-gotten gains from his oil empire amidst all the bread lines and selling of apples (the non-golden type) on the sidewalk. John D. had come a long way from his youth in Richford, New York, a town that is nothing more than a wide spot in the road to Ithaca. Coincidentally enough, in 1937, the same year as John D. Rockefeller died at the age of 97, sculptor Lee Lawrie unveiled his famous Art Deco statue of a well-muscled Atlas with his Celestial Sphere held up over his head. I can’t swear it is true, but I suspect that Ayn Rand may have first thought about the Titan Atlas when she moved from Hollywood to New York City in the 1940’s after her acclaim as the author of The Fountainhead. So, in 1957, when she released her magnum opus about the evils of collectivism (remember, those years were the heyday of anti-communist sentiment as embodied most notoriously in the McCarthy Hearings), she probably walked past Atlas on Fifth Avenue and did what we all do, wonder why the hell he got stuck holding that monstrous ball on his shoulders.
Ayn Rand had been born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in 1905 in Russia and her years of suffering under the communist system soured her indelibly to the ways of collectivism. Such is the origin of one of the great megaphones of capitalism, or perhaps more accurately, extreme capitalism. One of the books I am recommending to my business ethics students this semester is Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. In it, the authors explain that the basis of capitalism is the existence of free markets and it is the tension between what I choose to characterize as the haves and have-nots. The obvious thrust of the haves is to maintain their dominance by skewing markets to allow them to maintain the status quo. The less obvious thrust of the have-nots is to engage in the creative destruction necessary to uproot the status quo and allow them access to the capital to prosper with their entrepreneurial ideas. The cartilage that cushions the two is the government and its regulation of the markets.
Ayn Rand was traumatized by the Soviet government and its version of regulation. She really had no basis for understanding the American free market system. I mean, what did Cecil B. De Mille, her mentor in Hollywood, know of the free market system? That would be the system that allowed a man from Richford, New York to access the markets in such a way as to create an amazing multi-generational trove of wealth that could build something as spectacular as Rockefeller Center and the Atlas statue that epitomizes it. Indeed, it is the critically important and balanced hand of the United States government that gets pushed towards corruption by the haves and equally pushed towards liberalization by the forces of destruction from the have-nots. It is not unlike the Titans going up against the Olympians and I assure you, the last thing Atlas would ever do with all of that at risk is to shrug about it.