CEOs Flocking to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Sept 26, 2002

      IRVINE, CA--On Tuesday USA Today ran a front-page story on how executives are turning to Atlas Shrugged for aid and comfort against attacks from "prosecutors, regulators, Congress, employees, investors, a Republican president, even terrorists."

      Why Atlas Shrugged?

      Because, as USA Today points out, Atlas Shrugged depicts CEOs not as "the greedy crooks they are portrayed to be in today's business headlines" but as heroes, who do "far more to lift the world's standard of living, cure disease and end starvation than Mother Teresa and altruists who believe that a full life requires self-sacrifice and serving the needs of others."

      "CEOs," said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "are indeed heroes, but not because their achievements benefit others. They are heroes because they are exceptionally productive individuals pursuing their own goals and happiness. CEOs are the Atlases carrying the whole world on their shoulders, and it should come as no surprise that at a time when they are under such vicious attack, they are turning to Atlas Shrugged to find a sense of their own moral worth and the moral defense they desperately need."

      "Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism," explained Dr. Brook, "are the natural solution to the moral doubts CEOs suffer over the righteousness of their money-making and profit-seeking activities."

      According to Ayn Rand's morality, values must be earned--not appropriated: "Neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud," she wrote. By condemning fraud and extolling the virtues of honesty and productivity exhibited by all great wealth-creators, Ayn Rand offered us in Atlas Shrugged the ultimate solution to the recent string of corporate scandals and fraud: a morality of rational self-interest that sanctions the crucial but often unappreciated role of business men and women in a free society.

      "Atlas Shrugged" is good reading not only for CEOs," concluded Dr. Brook, "but for all Americans interested in understanding the value for human life of reason, egoism, freedom and capitalism."
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Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews. To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please e-mail media@aynrandcenter.org

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