Both Rand and Tolkien, then, passionately tell their tales about freedom, but they resort to completely different aesthetics, and, in consequence, paint two entirely different pictures of the world, with different heroes and different challenges. Are those differences important? How do they affect the “moral” of the respective tales? Given that it is of utmost importance just what kind of story one tells, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect upon the different world images depicted in Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings, comparing the characters of both narratives along with the predicaments they face, and asking the fundamental question, which of the two novels constitutes a better context, a better literary frame of reference for freedom and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s idea of natural order?
[...]
Given the breadth and length of both novels, the comparison of Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings could go on much longer, revealing many new themes and interpretations. It seems, however, that even the few differences sketched above allow for a tentative answer to the questions raised in the introduction. As much as Ayn Rand’s novel, with its strictly modernist message, could have been at some point in the past an effective remedy against the plagues of socialism and collectivism, the world described in it does not fit today’s reality and does not help in introducing the idea of natural order. Today, it is no longer necessary to protect big business from people. On the contrary, it is people who need protection from big business, which now goes hand in hand with Leviathan in trying to create a homogenous and completely atomized society.

The Lord of the Rings shows not only the great danger associated with all attempts to defeat evil power by power, but it also teaches that collectives do not really exist, that every one of us is the hero of his own individual story, and that law and order can easily exist without the state. Despite its egoistic message, Atlas Shrugged is full of imperatives to act, to fight, to bring salvation. Rand’s characters suffer not only because the state reaches into their wallets, but because the society rejected their rational, “enlightened” vision of what is good and right.

Tolkien, on the other hand, disliked such imperatives. He hated the outlook that if something can be done, it has to be done, and once even admitted that the greatest deeds of mind and spirit are born in abnegation.[16] That is most likely the reason his characters do not look for great challenges, nor wish to change the world, and instead live quietly, fulfilling Voltaire’s dictum Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

This is what makes The Lord of the Rings a much better means for conceptualizing the ideas of freedom than Atlas Shrugged. Reading Tolkien helps realize that, even after the “end of history,” the world and society can move in the direction of Merry Old England rather than a soulless homogenized mass of atoms. Moreover, The Lord of the Rings conveys an extremely important and optimistic message, namely that a plurality of many different cultures, languages, societies and visions, all existing together, yet separate and independent of each other, is still viable — not in a democratic regime, but in the new world of Hoppean natural order.¹

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My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ monarchy . . . Anyway, the proper study of man is anything but man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The medievals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that — after all only the fatal weakness of all good things in a bad corrupt unnatural world — is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way.

~ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

1. Juliusz Jablecki – Tales of Titans and Hobbits [↩]