The Objectivist with the Dragon Tattoo
In the midst of all of this, Lisbeth Salander explodes like a grenade tossed into an ammunition dump. Ferociously individualist, incorruptible, disdainful, and suspicious of all forms of social organization, and dedicated to her own personal moral code, Salander often seems to have stepped into Larsson’s world from out of an Ayn Rand novel. She despises all institutions, whether they are business corporations, government agencies, or the Stockholm police. Rejecting all forms of ideology, she is dedicated only to her own individual sense of justice. Relentlessly cerebral, she trusts only what she can ascertain with her own mind and her own formidable talents. She considers Blomquist a naïve fool because of his belief that social conditions cause people to commit the horrible crimes he investigates. At one point, as Blomquist ponders the motivations of a brutal serial killer, Salander erupts, “He’s just a pig who hates women!” Salander believes there are no excuses, everyone is responsible for their own actions, including herself, and must answer for them accordingly.
In short, Salander is as close to an avenging angel libertarianism is ever likely to get, and her presence in the novels throws the books’ politics into a bizarre contradiction. Far from the left-wing bromide in favor of democratic socialism it appears to be, the Millennium trilogy, as Ian MacDougall has pointed out in the leftist journal n+1, often appears on second glance like a calculated and relentless evisceration of the Swedish welfare state. Indeed, not only is Salander a walking rebuke to the myths of Scandinavian socialism, but she is usually portrayed by Larsson as being absolutely correct in her attitude toward it. “In this Sweden,” MacDougall writes:
The country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked.
In Larsson’s world, it is only the individual — usually Salander — with their own personal sense of right and wrong and the courage to act on it, who can save the day.
It is, perhaps, telling that millions of readers around the world, whatever their political orientation, have become fans of the Millennium series and especially of Lisbeth Salander. Indeed, it appears that Steig Larsson, though he himself might have been horrified at the prospect, gave birth to one of the great literary ironies of our time: for reasons that will likely forever remain unknown, a Scandinavian leftist managed to create a libertarian parable for the ages.
like a marriage breaking up. One day you wake up and discover that the thing that they love is not at all what or who they thought they were.
Sounds like Salander is Larsson’s ideal (that he cannot live up to), but Blomquist is the reality.
The facet of the novel which most strikingly illustrates the point you’re making about Lisbeth is the situation with her guardian. Because she has this odd personality, and is so young, the state decides to provide her with a guardian, who will control her money and essentially run her life for her, on the rationale that she can’t be trusted to do it herself. Originally, the guardian is a kindly old man who looks after her and guards her interests, but he falls sick, and his replacement decides to try and blackmail Lisbeth into sexual slavery. The author carefully lays out how paternalistic and patronising the Swedish welfare state is, as it assumes it knows what’s best for this woman and takes away her rights. She devises her own solution to the problem (which is interesting in itself) but the whole point is that Larsson is making an interesting point that the welfare state being all-powerful is not always a good thing. This is (of course) true, but it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a liberal like Larsson.
By the way, I still think the guy was an idiot. Died intestate, and without the will his long-time live-in girlfriend gets nothing (or next to nothing) while family from whom he’s been estranged for years get the books’ royalties and are millionaires. Sometimes you have to plan for life to take an interesting turn…apparently Mr. Larsson didn’t know this, or forgot.
All this means is that the author was writing for a true voice in his story rather than forcing something that is propaganda. I noticed how this worked in my classes on Soviet writing and my own experimentation with creative writing. If you look for a true voice in your writing, it doesn’t matter what your personal politics may be. It has to do with setting up the situation and charaters at the start of the story and letting them react and change in a way that rings as true to the original setup. That can’t be forced without screwing up the story. Sounds to me like this author really loved his main character and let the chips fall where they will in how her story played out.
O.K., so what we have here is a dissertation on group dynamics (evil) versus the individual’s subjective opinion (good). I suppose that plays well to the leftists who abide no criticism whatsoever, but tend to slavishly lather others with it.
Ho hum. Leftists are so BORING.
I recently viewed all 3 films (courtesy of Netflix) back to back to back. I actually started with the 2nd and then viewed 1 and 3 (#2 is the strongest). Though they were not exceptional films, the Lisbeth Salander character was what kept me hooked. I understand that the actress portraying her is now crossing over into Hollywood productions, so good for her (actually, Hollywood stinks; foreign films are much better these days)>
It is amazing how whenever anyone tries to defend socialism, they invariably use Sweden as the model, ignoring Cuba, North Korea, Soviet Union, etc. ad nauseum. And as I watched the films I never realized that a committed leftist was skewering his own country – hah!
Actually, I would like to see this story line transposed to the Muslim world, where Lisbeth Salander’s character is like a cross between Ayan Hirsi Ali and Charles Bronson’s vigilante architect from “Deathwish.” Now THAT I would pay serious dollars to see.
Roger Simon or Andrew Klavan – if you are reading this – care to join forces with me on a screenplay?
You have to read all three books to really get into and understand the movies. My husband and I both read all three books very quickly as we were so involved in the story and characters. If you haven’t read the books first you would have no idea what you were missing or even what characters played a very important part in the entire story. It would be difficult to follow the movies stories without the background and one might think the film was not very good. We also enjoyed the movies and are looking forward to the American version but are hoping they haven’t altered the story line much.
We were sorry to read the author died just after finishing the trilogy as we would have loved to read more of his writings. You MUST read the books.
Hmm, these sound like some books I should read. And we shouldn’t be surprised by Leftists that manages to create books that have a penultimate conservative or left-wing message. Just ask George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
Haven’t read the series but you have tweaked my interest. However, my guess is that lisbeth Salander owes more to Nikolai Stavrogan then John Galt. We tend to call Sweden socialist but like all social democratic states Sweden gets more inspiration from Mussolini than Marx
Insightful article.
I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last week and then watched the movie. The movie did not do justice to the book.
Regardless his politics, the book was extremely readable and indeed Lisbeth Salander one of the most intriguing characters I’ve read in a very long time. I look forward to reading the rest of the series. Pity that so talented an author is gone so young.
Lisbeth has no new personality trait;
She is unique in living in a Hi-Tech
era which enables her to act against
her enemies.
Heroes and villains will in future attain
the powers of gods (lower case – not The One).
In truth, the Pournelle Axis wraps around. Neither Libertarians nor Socialists believe in any god but themselves.
In truth, the Pournelle Axis wraps around. Neither Libertarians nor Socialists believe in any god but themselves.
If it wraps around, it isn’t a spectrum, or “axis” — it’s a trap.
Fortunately, it isn’t all about God, as there’s no such entity — so your attempted equivalency between opposites collapses at the slightest breath of rational inquiry. As I explained to one of your thinkalikes in another thread, there is no mass murder that wasn’t justified in the name of “something greater”, be it a literal deity or some other non-entity similarly imbued with moral supremacy — such as race (Nazis) or society (the Socialists’ God), or economic class (the Marxist God).
Libertarians (though I am not one) at least grasp the antidote — the notion of inalienable individual rights, as the Founders approached. Or, to put it another way: there is nothing with any greater claim to a man’s life, than that one man. No group, no God.
Kerstein’s comparison of this novel to Ayn Rand only adds to the widespread misinterpretation of Objectivism, the philosophy based on reality, reason and egoism.
Rand promoted the importance delegating to government a monopoly on the use of force. An essential qualifier is that no one, neither an individual nor the government, may initiate force. Force must be limited to the protection of individual rights. Salander’s action are those of a vigilante who has steps beyond the borders of civil society, meting out justice by her own hands. She is not the savior of civil society, but the logical conclusion of its dissolution.
Salander’s tragic history of abuse garner’s the reader’s sympathy–but she is not a Randian hero. The world which Larssen builds for Salander is one of malevolence. Rather than being focused on identifying and achieving her values, Salander is reduced to living a life of hatred and revenge. The “inidiviudalism” portrayed is too steeped with isolationism be representative of Rand’s ideal for man.
Objectivism celebrates the individual and recognizes that each person has a right to live his or her life for its own sake. This recognition, however, is the foundation of benevolence and community, not the promoter of isolation and anarchy. Since no one can properly be made the involuntary means to another’s ends, other individuals are rich in potential value to one another, not threats or burdens.
This last fact is where people most frequently fail to understand Rand’s philosophy–a mistake that Kerstein makes as well.
Beth –
I appreciate the thoughtful critique. I’m not totally convinced, though, that your view of objectivism – which may be very well be accurate – squares with the portrayal of the hero in Rand’s novels. Most of them strike me as being very anti-social. Roark’s act of violence at the end of The Fountainhead, for example, strikes me as very much something Lisbeth Salander would do.
Benjamin, Beth is right. This girl is most definitely not anything Objectivist, and I am frankly put off by the comparison, because what you are trying to do is unjustly marginalize a superior, serious, formidable, practical 20th century intellectual development.
Rand was not at all “suspicious of all forms of social organization,” she most certainly did not “despise all institutions, whether they are business corporations, government agencies, or the Stockholm police,” and “rejecting all forms of ideology” is the very opposite of everything Rand stood for. Rand had a term for such self-defacing, anti-conceptual people: “counterfeit individualists.” Such beliefs ruin the credibility of anyone who holds them, and not simply because they are immature and emotional. Anyone who believed such things must necessarily remove herself from serious discourse, because such beliefs are antagonistic to the rational cooperation on which civilized existence depends. That is why Rand’s enemies deliberately and maliciously use this portrayal of her philosophy as a smear. No one can take anarcho-liberals seriously. They do not innovate and build. They just carp at the people trying to innovate and build.
As for Roark, his act was a single event in a specific context. He did not go around spending his life on social justice. He was a creator, and he dedicated his life to creating ground-breaking architecture. Reality, not other people and their doings, was the primary focus of his life, as it should be for everyone’s.
If it was not your intention to undermine Rand, then no hard feelings. But I hope you can understand why I would be suspicious. If you are serious about philosophical accuracy, I would point you to her essay “Counterfeit Individualism” in The Virtue of Selfishness (published under Nathaniel Branden’s name).
I’m not arguing for or against Ayn Rand, I was simply trying to point out the contradictions inherent in Larsson’s work and maybe shed some light on why Lisbeth Salander is such a popular character. Personally, I have no great affection for Rand’s work, but I do think there are some interesting parallels between her heroes and Larsson’s heroine.
Benjamin, what brings down your analysis is not merely a less-than-deep understanding of Rand, but a similar lack of understanding of the Left.
Leftists the world over have always had to deal with the fact, now obvious through several historical examples, that tyranny is the end of their road. Far from overthrowing thugs like Larsson’s stereotype of the racist, misogynistic “right wing”, it actually enables and liberates them while morally disarming the populace at large. The bloated government their policies necessitate, eventually become an indispensable building block to be seized and utilized by the very thugs he hates.
As a result, Leftists have devised many defense mechanisms, which they deploy regularly to reassure themselves that they are not repeating history. Ever heard someone say that the Soviet Union was “not really Marxist”, that the Revolution was betrayed, etc.?
This is one of the most common dodges the average Leftist deploys in the face of history: no, there’s nothing wrong with socialism/communism in principle, it’s just this particular implementation that went wrong, was betrayed, or got co-opted by the “enemy”. So, every time a socialist “experiment” reaches its logical end-of-road, Leftists just say “that’s not what we intended, so obviously the revolution was betrayed” and then go right on saying that someone, somewhere should try again. In this, they are not unlike the purported inventor of a perpetual motion machine, who responds to each failure by blaming himself (or some scapegoat) for botching/sabotaging this particular attempt, instead of entertaining the possibility that perpetual motion machines, like socialism, are wrong in principle.
Lisbeth Salander, far from being a Randian heroine, is in fact Stieg Larsson’s version of every Leftist’s fantasy of a strong-willed individual, complete with what (to non-computer people) amounts to quasi-magical powers, who is able to cut through the BS and “repair” the welfare state — without ever questioning it, or considering its role in creating the problem.
Note that original name in Swedish of the first book was “Men Who Hate Women”. Women’s issues were a big deal for Larsson, and so it makes sense that the “strong man” he imagines should be a woman.
But make no mistake about it, here. Larsson is not postulating individualism as the antidote to the overweening state, here; as a Leftist, such individuals have no reality to him. (This is why such people don’t “get” Rand’s novels, or her characters.) Rather, he is postulating a Leftist’s idea of a superhero; an embodiment of strong will — political will.
As strong a figure as Salander is, she does not question any of the basic premises that inform the State. She is not fighting the State, nor the idea of the State; if anything, she is its avenger, against those who have “taken it over”, betrayed it and its principles — the thugs who beat her mother and raped her. The subtext of Salander’s actions is that the system is a given and not to be questioned — if it’s failing, it’s because it’s been taken over by thugs, and simply needs to be cleaned up and whipped into shape a bit.
Compare and contrast this with Rand’s heroes. Realizing the connection between the State and the thugs running it, they simply stand aside and leave those thugs and their system to meet their inevitable fate.
The idea that thugs must inevitably arise in the socialist system, that such a system necessarily enables such men even as it morally and physically disarms the populace at large, is dominant in Atlas Shrugged — but simply doesn’t enter into Larssons’ mind, let alone Salander’s. (If it had, Larsson would have ceased to be left wing, and TGWTDT would have been a radically different novel.)
Instead, Larsson is a European Leftist at the Weimar stage of his ideology. Living under a well-established welfare state and seeing its consequences, he insists that the latter must be due to an external corrupting force, not the system or its underlying ideas, and pines for someone strong to come in and make the trains run on time.
Well said. I could tell that the comparison was superficial, but didn’t know enough about Lisbeth Salander from just this article to explain why.
Also, I think Rand specified that government should be restricted to initiate only the “retaliatory” use of force. There is disagreement regarding how realistic that is considering how taxes are collected by force, while maintain a modern military and judicial system is expensive, but that’s another discussion.
I am a 63 year old conservative male, and I was in rapt fascination while reading the Millennium Trilogy Series… and found myself rooting for Lisbeth Salander all the way through. I was not aware of the authors communist background, but I must say it did not come through in his work. Perhaps he was a libertarian, deep within, and just was not aware of it. Either way… an excellent read.
I suspect many modern liberals are libertarian to a point, just extremely deluded or flat out naive on some issues. Take abortion for example. The modern liberal argument in favor of it states (correctly) that the state should have no say on what one can do with one’s own body, yet ignores the rights of the unborn (or just delude themselves into thinking it’s only a mass of cells and not new life). In the same brain there also exists a justification for the state to control and distribute health care to its constituents.
It’s the same delusion that wants the disadvantaged taken care of (who doesn’t?) yet puts a never ending faith in the state to efficiently address those needs without creating generational dependency, tyranny, or corruption. They would do well to heed the words of Milton Friedman, “Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”
Read the books, saw the films and read a bit about Larrson. The books are highly entertaining and the movies ok, though they get progressively weaker.
Larrson’s Sweden terrified me. No religion. No coherent morals. Children (the future) exist, but are not the focus of anyone’s life. Many characters seemed to simply exist without any purpose. There is a remarkable lack of charity and kindness in everyday life.
It seemed to me that the only significant characters with motivations such as duty and honor were the Muslim and the Jew.
I reached no conclusions other than, poor poor man. If you exam your life and see yourself as Blomquist, what a waste.
Worth reading.
Your description of the situation in Larson’s Sweden sound suspiciously like California now.
Taken up with all the hype about Larsson’s book.. I forecd myself through all three… looking back nothing strikes me as memorable.. all completely forgetful.
It’s interesting that some find Larsson on the left.. some on the right.. to me he was NOWHERE!
I find it a bit disturbing that this twisted trilogy is so popular. I do not believe that it speaks well to the mental health of contemporary culture.
Not all Swedes are amoral socialists, I personally have my personal cardinal virtues that i live by ; duty, honor, work ethic and endurance.
I like many other Swedes despise smug and self – righteous swedish leftwingers who every day touts their own moral self – importance why they like the former Prime Minister Olof Palme who called Khaddafi `s Prime Minister of 1974 Jalloud for “my friend” hearts tyrants like Castro
and Chavez.
I just finished “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and enjoyed it. It really strikes me in retrospect however that Salander – the eponymous “girl” – is almost entirely superfluous to the story. The central mystery is the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. Insofar as Salander’s adventures are unrelated to that mystery they are at best entertaining filler. And while at the end she does aid in the solution of the mystery, there is nothing that she does that couldn’t just as plausibly been done by one of the other characters in the book.
From what I’ve heard she is a far bigger part of the subsequent novels, but the character is far from a big draw for me. If there are no mysteries in the follow-ups that are as good as the mystery in the first one, I’d find myself pretty disappointed with the sequels.
I also only read the first novel, but I saw lisbeth as you did. To be honest, I’m shocked the series is so popular. Lisbeth really is not an appealing character, although she is a realistic one, suffering from serious abuse and possibly mentally ill or autistic. It makes it even creepier that first her employer and than the main male character fall for her.
The main character to me was the worst though. He’s married, sleeps with his editor on the side, sleeps with a suspect, and then goes after Lisbeth. He’s easily gulled, first into libelling someone, and in a cringe inducing scene, going to the villain’s lair alone to get himself in trouble.
As for the main point, I really don’t think Lisbeth is coherent enough to be any form of libertarian. Her actions are a reflex based out of illness and pain, and you could spin the book against libertarianism as for it. Considering how the whole first book plot was wrapped up in a very libertarian old-money family.
The heroes of Rand’s novels are only anti-social with those that don’t share their values. Unfortunately, that’s not so clear because virtually all of society doesn’t share them. Rand’s heroic characters promote benevolence and community with one another, but the space given to that is dwarfed their rejection of the rest of society. That has led to a misunderstanding of Objectivism.
Roark’s detonation of the building project that corrupted his design ended with him staying on the site to surrender to justice. I suspect Lisbeth Salander didn’t surrender to authorities after her first act of violence. Still, Roark’s destruction is arguably inconsistent with Rand’s rejection of retaliatory force expressed throughout her works.
The society Lisbeth Salander lives in doesn’t share her values either. She’s presented as being very much the lone moral person in an amoral world, which is why she has to resort to violence. I believe Dagny Taggert does so as well at the end of Atlas Shrugged, and does not wait for the authorities to apprehend her. Obviously, by that point in the novel society has completely broken down; but an argument can be made that Larsson is portraying a similar situation in his books.
I though of that incident too. I recognize the similarities, but the differences are significant. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny had to kill a guard in a rescue operation to free a friend who was kidnapped by a rapidly collapsing government. It was not an attempt to extract justice according to her values from a system that doesn’t share them. I’m not aware of anything in Objectivism or Rand’s novels that’s supportive of that.
Both The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged are littered with instances where Rand’s heros are pacifistic, enduring injustice without any claim to extract justice though retalitorial use of force. Rand promoted government as having sole authority over that. I think that’s the most significant difference between Objectivism and Lisbeth Salander.
I don’t really see how that’s different from, say, Salander torturing and blackmailing the man who raped her in order to escape from his domination and hopefully extricate herself from state guardianship. Or hunting down and killing the man she believes has brutalized her lover and framed her for murder. Quite a few of Rand’s heroes, especially in Atlas Shrugged, commit crimes of various kinds which they believe to be justified in light of the corruption of the society they live in. One could make an argument that John Galt himself is a terrorist or a dangerous subversive, given that he deliberately sets about destroying society from within. You could easily reverse the moral equation and set him up as a comic-book supervillain. What justifies all of this, for Rand, seems to be what justifies it for Salander – her characters are adherents of a personal and superior moral code to those they are fighting against.
Isn’t the belief that a person’s own moral code is better than the government’s the basis for all rebellion?
Now that I think about it, there is one character that resembles Salander. First lets put this in perspective. We’re comparing three distinct actions that vary slightly but have widely different implications:
Acting illegally
Acting illegally with force
Acting illegally with force to achieve justice
Every ideology puts its values above those of the state (as it should) and will act with sedition when persecuted. With two exceptions, this is the extent of the “various crimes” and arguable “terrorism” practiced by Atlas Shrugged heroes: illegal walkouts, hording, financial manipulation, scavenging and broadcasts. I think most of that is model behavior against tyranny.
Acting illegally with force was carried out once by Dagny and once by Roark as we discussed. Maybe they’re similar to “Salander torturing and blackmailing the man who raped her in order to escape from his domination”. I don’t know the story. All of it should be up to a jury to judge.
The pirate Ragnar Danneskjold on the other hand used force systematically in order to both bankrupt governments and to reshape the concept of justice. This is the one character that acts somewhat similar to Salander “hunting down and killing the man she believes has brutalized her lover and framed her for murder.” Ragnar was a terrorist, even if (as I remember) he never killed anyone. The other heroes didn’t approve of his methods, but they didn’t turn him in either, making them complicit. Ragnar’s partial motivation of achieving justice is inconsistent with everything else I’m aware of that Rand wrote about granting that power only to government. In this perspective, I think calling Salander an example of an Objectivist is a stretch at best.
@Bill Carson, Ragnar never mentions not killing anyone. On the contrary, he has a line that goes something like “My father was a Bishop, and I only accepted one line from his book: Let them that live by the sword, die by the sword.” But he wasn’t really acting directly as an Objectivist there; the whole point of Galt’s strike was to give in to every demand society made. So the genius inventor spurned the genius society disparaged, and did the brute, animal, manual labor society loved. The talented industrialist became a worthless playboy who “couldn’t” make a dollar of hated profit. And the scholarly philosopher of the group behaved as though he accepted society’s view on force (that might made right), and openly pit his guns and brains against that of the navies of the world. By my reading, most of the disapproval Ragnar gets from his friends is about the unnecessary mortal danger of his path.
I think some of the appeal of Lisabeth Salander is similar to that of Dr. Hannibal Lecter: the cool, calculating, antisocial genius who can “get away with murder.”
Compare “Silence of the Lambs,” “Hannibal” and the first Larrson book (the only one I’ve read to date) to “Batman” (1988 version) and “The Dark Knight.” The latter two were also showcase vehicles for the sociopathic Joker character who, unlike the stoic hero, is not bound by any moral code. However, Lecter and Salander have a “moral code” all their own. This “takes us [the audience] off the hook” as we revel in their complex plans to outwit and wreak horrible vengence on those who seem even more odious, such as Dr. Chilton and Mason Verger.
Tosh. Sala(ma)nder is an alienated neurotic with psychopathic impulsions who exists purely within the confines of her own emotional pain. Her contempt is not directed at society but at the human race per se. She would rage even more against Rand’s dreary utopia than the jaded social democracy of our Viking brethern. She is a New Age anarchist with a large dollop of Dworkian feminism thrown in for dramatic PC effect. She is also a comic book character fit for comparison with the entities which populate both the Batman and Rand ouevres.
It is instructive that libertarians seek to recruit such a repulsive individual to their cause. It is the bleak joy of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. She is of course no libertarian, which is about the only thing which can be said in her mitigation. Though she finds human contact distasteful she is not sufficiently self-satisfied to set about raising her misanthropy into a supposedly life-affirming social philosophy.
I like individualism as much as the next guy but the extreme seems to be just as bad.
Let’s not forget that at some point our individualism must be put away in favor of standing in line at times.
Historicly the lone wolves died because they p0ut to much stock in self that they lost siht of the concept that there is more than self to worry about.
Which is why we need and have a constitution. Which needs to be followed. For that to happen we need people of honor to be elected. Sad to say, that seems to be becoming ever more difficult.
I haven’t ventured upon the Millennium Trilogy yet (have promised myself that the next thousand-plus-page project I take on will be Proust [or bust!]), but your review puts me in mind of the deliciously self-contradicting Alison Lurie. While her literary/critical essays tend towards a mean of dreary doctrinaire feminism, heavy on the complaining that The Literary Canon isn’t 51% female like it Should Be, her 1979 novel “The Truth About Lorin Jones” came out as a skewering of feminist fantasies and their devastating effect on her protagonist’s family life. The story ends on a definite endorsement of traditional virtues of patience, trust, devotion to children, and giving of oneself. Another case where artifice ended up truer than self-conscious attempts at Truth. Not to mention fun to read.
She reminds me of Friday from the Henlein book for some reason.
Good read.
Well, what I’ve often found is that the hard left still thinks that this time will be different than all the rest that went before it, no matter how bad their last attempt at Utopia turned out. They never seem to get that their Great Arms of Benevolent Government destroy any honest person who tries to wield them, and are a magnet to those who wish to corrupt them.
I read all three books and wondered how people could live in the inhuman society that was described. I’ve never been there so I don’t know if everyone in Sweden is so miserable and unhappy as all the characters are in the book. Whether it’s a true picture of Sweden or not, because of Larsson’s trilogy I took Sweden off my “places to visit” list. I’ll probably never know if Sweden is in fact a total disaster, but I’m not exactly yearning to find out.
Where’s the bizarre contradiction? Larsson was an anarchist. Rand a libertarian. Both are so far from the Burkean conservative ideal as to be functionally alike.
Rand was not a libertarian. She called them “right wing hippies”.
I haven’t read the books, but saw the movies. From what I see of the character Lisbeth, she takes an individualist stance toward life. It’s probably meant by the author to display the damage that has happened to her over the years. Still, apart from her sense of justice, and desire to be free, there is little that we learn about her values and ideas. Seems that it would be very hard to classify her or her actions anywhere on the political spectrum.
This was an interesting character though. I think the best thing we can say about this character is that it demonstrates the individuals natural desire to be free.
So Salander is like Rorschach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen.
Rorschach was easily the most popular in Watchmen for all the same reasons and who, unfortunately, dies like a punk in the end.
Does Salander survive the end?
Personally, I’ve heard the series is incredibly boring so I’ll likely not be reading it.
Jo (above) is on the money. I wouldn’t even watch the movies without first reading the books.
Lizbeth Salander is the new Lyra Belaqua far as I’m concerned.
Rather than ascribing politics to Lizbeth I would call her Justice. In this world seldom seen.
Sweden, and the way the left sees it is no different than the way the left sees anything, anywhere. And BTW the left has a few good points.
Lizbeth is a woman of righteous anger and good reason for it. She fights the odds and triumphs. What could be more Homeric? This is the true core of why the books are a success.
It is rather hard to square vigilantism with Libertarianism, is it not?
Here is one of the central failures of “Objectivism”: Man is fallen, he must rely on institutions to keep his fellow man (or woman) at bay, the chief among these being the state. Mankind cannot be expected to live up to the precepts of “Objectivism” on his own, precepts which, by the way, are inherited from an much older and wiser moral and social order. “Libertarian Man” os an even rarer beast than “Socialist Man”. Sooner or later, we are right back were we started. This is an intrinsic myopia of libertarians.
Moreover, if we are to hate and shun all institutions, how do we progress? How do we defend ourselves? How are we to have civilization?
(I realize that this last notion rather amounts to putting words in the mouth of Libertarians and is not what they mean to say at all, but it is cogent with Kerstein’s post.)
I fear that Kerstein is projecting his libertarian impulses here, and in doing so he casts “Objectivism” in a rather bad light. Our female anti-hero–and she is surely no hero–is a model for an anarchist, not a libertarian, and is morally, socially and politically drawn out of the late 19th and early 20th century. He merely attached some futuristic ornaments to the tale.
Given the capacity for human vanity, narcissism and self delusion, it will not do to have so called “free spirits” running around meting out “justice” for outrages real or imagined.
Reader may think that our anti-hero is an expression of something somehow “real” or “genuine” or “pure”, but in reality she is an expression of crudity, chaos and primitiveness. She is a narcissistic megalomaniac violently acting out. There is little noble in her and much that is ignoble.
It is not by accident that such characters are so broadly valorized by the Left.
Here is one of the central failures of “Objectivism”: Man is fallen, he must rely on institutions to keep his fellow man (or woman) at bay, the chief among these being the state.
“Man is fallen”? Speak for yourself, buster.
That notion of Original Sin as justification for statism, is a failing of conservatism, not of Objectivism, and is a reminder of why conservatism is ultimately incompatible with liberty.
Time, once again, for some imbecile to compare something inane, insane or just repellent to a character “from out of an Ayn Rand novel” and to Objectivism. This go around, it’s a female troglodyte, fashionably Lois Cook (_The Fountainhead_, pg. 240, PB) with a twist–rings in her nose–on a nihilist mission. ‘Lightweight’ does not even start to begin to describe this man’s reasoning ability in reviewing one of the trios in the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson–a pretentious mediocre in his own right.
———————————————————-
The Objectivist with the Dragon Tattoo
…In the midst of all of this, Lisbeth Salander explodes like a grenade tossed into an ammunition dump. (Where she explodes with all the other grenades.) Ferociously individualist (bird cage, anyone? (See: _The Fountainhead_, pg. 307, PB)), incorruptible (like Tooey? (Ibid, pg. 294)), disdainful, and suspicious of all forms of social organization (Misanthrope on steroids? Nah, she’s just asserting her individuality.), and dedicated to her own personal moral code (let’s spell it out, shall we: s-u-b-j-e-c-t-i-v-i-s-t), Salander (Like Salamander?) often seems to have stepped into Larsson’s world from out of an Ayn Rand novel. (There you have it, folks. She’s Dagny crawling through the window of a diesel locomotive.) She despises all institutions, whether they are business corporations, government agencies, or the Stockholm police (Yeah, that sounds like an Ayn Rand character–Roger Enright (_TF_ pg. 251 PB). No, wait, I don’t recall him having a run in with the bulls. Perhaps Ragnar? No, wait…). Rejecting all forms of ideology (First time I’ve heard anyone associate that concept with Ayn Rand or with Objectivism. Maybe we’re actually a Randian cult of non-cultist individualists.), she is dedicated only to her own individual sense of justice (Not just ‘her own sense of justice,’ mind you; but ‘her own individual sense of justice. Well, I’m glad he made that–her whim worship, that is–crystal.). Relentlessly cerebral (With looks like that, she’d have to be, although based upon her ‘emotionalist code,’ I’d say she’s anything but.), she trusts only what she can ascertain with her own mind (based on her own mistaken premises) and her own formidable talents (among those being an inveterate hostility, ostentatious insecurity & a malevolent universe dogma.). She considers Blomquist a naïve fool because of his belief that social conditions cause people to commit the horrible crimes he investigates (Well, even a blind, pig-faced girl can root out an acorn once in a while.). At one point, as Blomquist ponders the motivations of a brutal serial killer, Salander erupts, “He’s just a pig who hates women!” (Wow, that *is* cerebral!) Salander believes there are no excuses, everyone is responsible for their own actions, including herself, and must answer for them accordingly…. (Hopefully, she and her creator–and this very confused writer–will.)