Robin Hood Thesis

The story of Robin Hood could be used as a metaphor for the message of Atlas Shrugged. Its original form is the story of a man, who fights from those who would seek to steal the rightful property of the people, but human perception corrupted its meaning, and it became the story of a man who steals from the wealthy and gives to the needy. To some, this may seem like a minor difference, but it changes the meaning. It shifts the purpose of robin from a defender of property, to a provider for the weak and needy. This is the reason that Ragnar Danneskjöld asserts that his goal is to kill Robin Hood, because Robin Hood is a symbol of the war between the wealthy and the rich, while the real war is against those who can produce and those who depends …show more content…
... But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law...then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman”. The looters created a society where being successful was immoral, and to steal from the wealthy was no longer a crime. This meant that, by working to destroy Robin Hood, Ragnar Danneskjold was a criminal. Ragnar Danneskjöld spent the book fighting this philosophy with force, his justification being that the looters would understand the language of force. One of the more popular metaphors in the book is of the gun. Throughout the book, the producers claim that the looters force them with a gun, but not a physical gun. The use of the word “gun” means a both a legal gun, in that they can legally demand whatever they choose to, as well as an implied gun, in that they control the military and police, so they can use their guns to claim whatever they chose to. As the book nears the end, the metaphorical gun becomes a real gun, as Meigs forcibly takes over the Xylophone, and Galt is held captive by gun toting guards. The looters feared the conclusion that they used force to control, while Ragnar openly used force. Ragnar became a pirate for the sole sake of stopping the looters from profiting from the producers; be it destroying foreign relief ships, furnaces attempting to smelt Rearden Metal, ships carrying D’Anconia Copper, or even Anconia Copper’s many seaports. Ragnar didn’t do any of it to try to change the minds of the looters, as a philosopher, he knew that society and its leaders wouldn’t change that easily. He became a criminal to stop the result of the looters. Just as Robin Hood fought to steal back from the unrightfully wealthy, Ragnar Danneskjold fought to prevent the incompetent from profiting off the work of the