Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder

Paul Ryan’s flirtations with Ayn Rand reminded me of this great parody. Atlas Shrugged was actually book one of a trilogy with Anthem as book 3. Anthem shows the aftermath of the Striker’s mass genocide after generations have passed. Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder would have filled in the gap.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We’re looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor’s village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers’ twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness.

See also: Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later.