Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a huge, controversial book which tells the story of a group of creative people who go on strike to protest their treatment by the rest of society. Widely regarded as a right-wing screed, it’s spawned millions of college libertarians and inspired countless debates about the proper relationship between individuals, business, and government.

Those on the political left generally disdain it for the harsh attitude it takes toward the poor—that they are mostly lazy, easily manipulated, and not all that bright—and toward the intellectual elite, who Rand characterizes as bitterly hell-bent on bringing down any great achievements. And it’s true that Rand’s philosophy goes a bit far in many ways, especially in her descriptions of “the masses” and her idolization of industry. But there’s a great deal of truth and beauty in this book as well, and that’s what I’d like to explore.

In all of her books, Rand puts forward the idea that all true progress comes from a small number of exceptional individuals—mainly captains of industry—and that their achievements must not be fettered in any way by government regulation. Most discussions of her work focus on this facet of her philosophy. In essence, she is defending the modernist ideals of individualism, progress, rationality, and achievement from the postmodern ideas beginning to emerge at the time she was writing.

Postmodernity began largely as a reaction to the excesses of modernity—the way it marginalizes non-Western cultures, sees the rest of the world as resources to be tapped in the name of “progress”, and values material wealth above all else. In widening the circle of which stories are considered important in our culture, postmodernity has indeed brought many wonderful and important things into the world: environmentalism, the women’s movement, and Civil Rights. But at the same time, it has also trashed the real achievements of modernity, the same achievements upon which it stands. In her work, Rand is reacting, in her own historical milieu, to these postmodern pathologies.

Of course, we are more than 50 years on from her era now, and we can see the effects of unfettered, unregulated capitalism—environmentally, economically, and socially. From our vantage point, it’s obvious that dropping all governmental regulation is not the answer to what ails us.

But there’s another part of Rand’s philosophy that I think holds a lot of promise for human evolution, and that is her deep reverence for what it means to be a human being on Earth. I believe this is her major contribution to philosophy, and it’s what I love about her work.

She sees humankind not as a scourge upon the planet, but as life’s most beautiful expression. The human mind—our capacity to make decisions and act on them—sets us apart from other forms of life, and Rand recognizes and celebrates this fact.

In doing so, she also sees beyond the fundamental distinction our culture makes between spirit and matter. She rejects the idea that matter is dirty and crass, and that only selfless spiritual pursuits are pure. Instead, she says that one is indivisible from the other; that, indeed, matter is an expression of soul. And so the human ability to manipulate matter makes it both powerful and sacred.

In one of the best chapters in the book, Dagny Taggart, our protagonist, has managed to build a superfast railroad using a revolutionary new alloy developed by metals tycoon Hank Rearden. Public opinion is vehemently against her—What if it collapses? And, even if it doesn’t, what right does she have to do something in a completely new way? But, of course, the rail holds, even pulling a huge weight of freight cars across a slender bridge at unprecedented speeds. On the train’s first journey, Dagny goes into the engine room to marvel at the machines that can do so much, and the force of mind that created them:

The motors were are moral code cast in steel … They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power – of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form … Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should that soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going—not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again—not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages—the power of a living mind—the power of thought and choice and purpose.

As I recently re-read this passage, I realized that, at our own time in history, we absolutely must reconnect with this sense of confidence and reverence towards our own abilities as human beings. Oil isn’t the fuel of growth and progress – we are!

I also thought a bit differently about Rand’s economic ideas than I had in the past, when my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them out of hand. Of course I still don’t believe she has the whole answer, but the germ of something useful and real is there.

Rand’s characters live not to simply consume experiences or to amass wealth, but to create things of value. Value is what Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, and all the other strikers seek to create. They want to exchange the fruits of their labor with others who have created real value in their own ways. And it is through this free exchange of valuable works that true freedom and progress come into being.

Later in the book, Dagny stumbles upon the village established by John Galt, where all the strikers congregate for one month out of the year to live in accordance with their beliefs. After seeing her colleagues and rivals drop out of a cultural landscape that punishes their desire to create, she is now reunited with each of them, one-by-one, and they introduce her to their new ventures in the valley.

She’s stunned that they have given up so much—multi-million-dollar, world-wide enterprises—to start over again on the smallest possible scale, with nothing but their hands and the land around them, but they see it differently. One of them explains it to her this way: “Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your own life and spend it on growing?”

Atlas Shrugged reflects the tumultuous time in which Ayn Rand lived, as a new way of thinking about the world – postmodernism—began to question what came before it. Her prescience in identifying the postmodern worldview’s pathologies is remarkable. In her defense of modernism, she also reflects its highest values. And as we endeavor to recreate the world we live in, it can only help to revisit these values: to see the sacred preciousness of our own consciousness, and to believe in the possibility of genuine, evolutionary progress.