In its barest of bones, Atlas Shrugged is the story of two people: Dagny Taggert and John Galt; and the kind of world Rand would have them build: one founded on her own brand of objectivist philosophy. Notice how I didn’t say “the kind of world Dagny and John would build” but “the kind of world Rand would have them build.” I did that primarily because Rand’s voice is ever present in the “novel,” animating every character with either the strident purity of her own beating heart or with the puppet-like demonization of her own imagination. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand is both her own protagonist and her own antagonist, and she has transparently stacked the deck to let the cards fall in the order she has predetermined.
Let’s start here.
Pure Evil
Dagny Taggert is the operating vice-president of Taggert Transcontinental Railroad -- a kind of family business empire struggling to survive in the midst of an economic downturn in what feels like -- but isn’t -- 1940s America. But Dagny, unlike everyone else, is different.
At sixteen, sitting at her operator’s desk, watching the lighted windows of Taggert trains roll past, she had thought that she had entered her kind of world. In the years since, she learned that she hadn’t. The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude -- a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible. She could find no answer.
Rand has little patience for ineptitude, which, as we follow Dagny through her youth and education, we will see first associated with collectivism dedicated to the social good and then to an undefined monstrous evil.
First, the social good.
As young people, Dagny and her brother Jim are friends with the heir to a steel fortune, Francisco D’Anconia.
Jim was approaching his senior year in college in New York. His studies had given him a manner of odd, quavering belligerence, as if he had found a new weapon. He addressed Francisco once, without provocation, stopping him in the middle of the lawn to say in a tone of aggressive self-righteousness:
“I think that now that you’ve reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It’s time to forget your selfish greed and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you’re going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that a person who doesn’t realize that is the most depraved type of human being.”
Francisco answered courteously, “It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”
Dagny asked him, as they walked away, “Are there many men like Jim in the world?”
Francisco laughed. “A great many.”
“Don’t you mind it?”
“No. I don’t have to deal with them. Why do you ask that?”
“Because I think they’re dangerous in some way … I don’t know how …”
By this point in the book James Taggert has already been painted as one of those pitiful inept fools, and I found Rand’s equation of his ineptitude with his collectivist leanings somewhat curious. As if the only reason to be a collectivist is because you’re no good at anything worthwhile.
But it will get much worse than that. Two hundred pages later, Dagny will find herself trying to track down the plans for a revolutionary new motor that could save her struggling business -- a motor that was evidently invented by some whiz kid that used to work for one of Taggert Transcontinental’s many subsidiaries, but who has now vanished. Dagny goes to question Eugene Lawson, a bank officer who once loaned money to the subsidiary, the Twentieth Century Motor Company.
“I wanted to inquire about the men who owned the factory at the time when you made a loan to--”
“They were perfectly good men. They were a perfectly sound risk -- though, of course, I am speaking in human terms, not in the terms of cold cash, which you are accustomed to expect from bankers. I granted them the loan for the purchase of that factory, because they needed the money. If people needed money, that was enough for me. Need was my standard, Miss Taggert. Need not greed. My father and grandfather built up the Community National Bank just to amass a fortune for themselves. I placed their fortune in the service of a higher ideal. I did not sit on piles of money and demand collateral from poor people who needed loans. The heart was my collateral. Of course, I do not expect anyone in this materialistic country to understand me. The rewards I got were not of a kind that people of your class, Miss Taggert, would appreciate. The people who used to sit in front of my desk, at the bank, did not sit as you do, Miss Taggert. They were humble, uncertain, worn with care, afraid to speak. My rewards were the tears of gratitude in their eyes, their trembling voices, the blessings, the woman who kissed my hand when I granted her a loan she had begged for in vain everywhere else.”
I wasn’t sure exactly when I had entered a Frank Capra movie, but it seemed like I was there to stay. But, under Rand’s pen, things were about to take a very un-Capra-esque turn.
“Could you possibly recall the names of any of the engineers who worked there?”
“I don’t believe I ever inquired about their names. I wasn’t concerned with the parasites of office and laboratory. I was concerned with the real workers -- the men of callused hands who keep a factory going. They were my friends.”
“Can you give me a few of their names? Any names, of anyone who worked there?”
“My dear Miss Taggert, it was so long ago, there were thousands of them, how can I remember?”
“Can’t you recall one, any one?”
“I certainly cannot. So many people have always filled my life that I can’t be expected to recall individual drops in the ocean.”
“Were you familiar with the production of that factory? With the kind of work they were doing -- or planning?”
“Certainly. I took a personal interest in all my investments. I went to inspect that factory very often. They were doing exceedingly well. They were accomplishing wonders. The workers’ housing conditions were the best in the country. I saw lace curtains at every window and flowers on the window sills. Every home had a plot of ground for a garden. They had built a new schoolhouse for the children.”
Do you see what Rand is doing here? Lawson can’t remember individuals, but he knows all about their collective production? In case her sledgehammer isn’t obvious enough, Eugene Lawson is a communist -- one who, evidently, was able to create that Capra-esque utopia.
But Dagny keeps pressing him. Details. Please. Details of the motor. Or the person who invented it.
“Have you preserved any records pertaining to the motor factory?” She sat straight, her hands clasped tight together.
“What records? I believe I told you that I lost everything I owned when the bank collapsed.” His body had gone slack once more, his interest had vanished. “But I do not mind it. What I lost was mere material wealth. I am not the first man in history to suffer for an ideal. I was defeated by the selfish greed of those around me, I couldn’t establish a system of brotherhood and love in just one small state, amidst a nation of profit-seekers and dollar-grubbers. It was not my fault But I won’t let them beat me. I am not to be stopped. I am fighting -- on a wider scale -- for the privilege of serving my fellow men. Records, Miss Taggert? The record I left, when I departed from Madison, is inscribed in the hearts of the poor, who never had a chance before.”
It was right about here that I began to realize that the antagonist in Atlas Shrugged, the creeping and insidious forces of collectivism, was, in fact, a caricature. Under Rand’s reportedly masterful pen, she had created a strawman to throw her forces of objectivism against. And quickly on the heels of that realization came the next logical step: if her antagonist was a golem, stumbling forward on legs Rand’s own imagination had animated, what did that portend for her protagonist? Was the protagonist a caricature, too? And if so, what did that mean for the work I was reading?
Later on in her investigation, Dagny will interview Ivy Starnes, the daughter of the man who founded the Twentieth Century Motor Company.
“I can’t answer the kind of questions you’re asking, my girl. The research laboratory? The engineers? Why should I remember anything about them? It was my father who was concerned with such matters, not I. My father was an evil man who cared for nothing but business. He had no time for love, only for money. My brothers and I lived on a different plane. Our aim was not to produce gadgets, but to do good. We brought a great, new plan into the factory. It was eleven years ago. We were defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men. It was the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, between soul and body. They would not renounce their bodies, which was all we asked of them. I do not remember any of those men. I do not care to remember. … The engineers? I believe it was they who started the hemophilia. … Yes, that is what I said: the hemophilia -- the slow leak -- the loss of blood that cannot be stopped. They ran first. They deserted us, one after another … Our plan? We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Everybody in the factory, from charwomen to president, received the same salary -- the barest minimum necessary. Twice a year, we all gathered in a mass meeting, where every person presented his claim for what he believed to be his needs. We voted on every claim, and the will of the majority established every person’s need and every person’s ability. The income of the factory was distributed accordingly. Rewards were based on need, and the penalties on ability. Those who had not produced as much as the vote said they could, were fined and had to pay the fines by working overtime without pay. That was our plan. It was based on the principle of selflessness. It required men to be motivated, not by personal gain, but by love for their brothers.”
This is not a novel. There is no possible way to approach this text with the level of subtlety that good novels offer and require of their readers. Atlas Shrugged is a fable. A thousand-page fable where the industrious ants go on strike and leave the inept grasshopper to fend for itself.
In the wake of this realization, it is Dagny’s horrified reaction that begins to capture my attention.
Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it -- remember it well -- it is not often that one can see pure evil -- look at it -- remember -- and some day you’ll find the words to name its essence. … She heard it through the screaming of other voices that cried in helpless violence: It’s nothing -- I’ve heard it before -- I’m hearing it everywhere -- it’s nothing but the same old tripe -- why can’t I stand it? -- I can’t stand it -- I can’t stand it!
There it is. The second thing: pure evil. Rand thinks collectivism is evil. Fine. I get that. But there seems a more important question. It’s not why. Why seems pretty straight-forward, from a Randian point of view. Collectivism is evil because it strips the will-to-power and the just rewards that go with it away from the objectivist. No, the question that came to plague me through the rest of the work is not why Rand thinks collectivism is evil, but how does that evil manifest itself in our world.
Is it conscious, this evil? Is the collectivist a person acting with the same holy will of the objectivist, just to other ends? Or is the evil unconscious, a great coherence of natural systems and events, bringing about a state that oppresses its adherents as much as its antagonists?
Hank Rearden is one of the central characters of the book, an inventor and steel magnate who has an illicit affair with Dagny Taggert. And there’s a scene where Rearden is suspecting that his wife Lillian is aware of this affair, and he wonders if she is now taking conscious actions against the actualization of his will as a kind of retribution.
He could not get rid of the impression, which he had kept receiving and rejecting for three months, that her vengeance was not a form of despair, as he had supposed -- the impression, which he regarded as inconceivable, that she was enjoying it. He could find no trace of pain in her manner. She had an air of confidence new to her. She seemed to be at home in her house for the first time. Even though everything within the house was of her own choice and taste, she had always seemed to act as the bright, efficient, resentful manager of a high-class hotel, who keeps smiling in bitter amusement at her position of inferiority to the owners. The amusement remained, but the bitterness was gone. She had not gained weight, but her features had lost their delicate sharpness in a blurring, softening look of satisfaction; even her voice sounded as if it had grown plump.
He did not hear what she was saying; she was laughing in the last flicker of the blue flames, while he sat weighing the question: Did she know? He felt certain that he had discovered a secret much greater than the problem of his marriage, that he had grasped the formula of a policy practiced more widely throughout the world than he dared to contemplate at the moment. But to convict a human being of that practice was a verdict of irrevocable damnation, and he knew that he would not believe it of anyone, so long as the possibility of a doubt remained.
No -- he thought. Looking at Lillian, with the last effort of his generosity -- he would not believe it of her. In the name of whatever grace and pride she possessed -- in the name of such moments when he had seen a smile of joy on her face, the smile of a living being -- in the name of the brief shadow of love he had once felt for her -- he would not pronounce upon her a verdict of total evil.
Evil. There’s that word again. And it seems clear that Lillian’s knowledge of her actions -- her intention -- is a crucial component of Rearden’s decision to render that verdict on her. These people, these collectivists, they are evil because they act with foreknowledge and intention. Right? If that is what Rand intends me to think, then her boogeymen are even more a caricature then I may have first suspected. Do they twirl their mustaches, I wonder, while they hatch their evil collectivist plans against our strappy heroes?
But she can’t really think that, can she? Surely that is a literary device, a part of the interminable fable that she has constructed. The collectivist forces that Rand depicts, in the real world, they are not that simplistic, are they? They persist not because men push them forward, they persist because they push men forward. They are inherent in the human system, and always will be. Rand knows that, doesn’t she? Does she think I don’t?
There’s another scene where Dagny encounters a tramp on one of her trains, a man who used to work at The Twentieth Century Motor Company. He might be John Galt incognito, I don’t remember, but that’s not really the point. He tells her a longer version of the story Ivy Starnes told her, about the collectivist plan that Ivy and her brothers implemented, and about how the company fell apart under this guidance.
“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it -- for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren’t many chislers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country’s labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do -- and it was called a moral ideal!
Evil. That word again. But here, it is clearly systemic, not conscious. Those decent people that worked at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, the ones who were proud of their jobs, they’re not evil, are they? They were turned into bastards by an evil system. But they, themselves, are not evil, are they?
It’s really hard for me to tell. There’s another scene after Dagny discovers Atlantis, the secret utopian community that Galt has established in the mountains of Colorado, before she is fully converted to his cause, when Francisco d’Anconia tells her about the challenges he has had in running his business in these times of increasing government oversight and regulation.
“I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d’Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name -- I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures -- I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible -- I saw that any man’s desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed -- I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and out-smart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap -- and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth -- all of was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others.”
Tax-collecting vermin. Loafing failures. Winking politicians. Feeding parasites. Unshaved humanitarians. Seems to me that d’Anconia’s own face is pretty pudgy with malice in this scene, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He feels he has been robbed -- of money, of opportunity, of vitality. He’s pissed. But as I read this passage, my thoughts do not align with his sense of angry righteousness, but with the vermin, the failures, the parasites. Why are they different from the decent men of the Twentieth Century Motor Company? He even seems to admit that they are not much different -- victims of a system that feeds on them as they feed on others. So what makes them villains instead of victims?
Increasingly, as I read these passages, my thoughts returned again and again to my experience of reading Left Behind, the end times prophecy turned pulp fiction authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. There, the authors had to figure out how to bring the mythology of Biblical Armageddon into the real world, into a plausible series of events and decisions that would allow the story to progress in the way it had to. And in the end, they couldn’t do it. Like the magical disappearance of the saved that kicks off the series, at the end of its first volume the powers of the Antichrist to shape world events reverts to exactly the same mechanism: magic.
Is that how evil manifests itself in Atlas Shrugged? It comes about magically, leaping fully formed from the mind of its creator?
Speaking in Manifestos
On page 380 of my copy of Atlas Shrugged, our primary characters are at a cocktail party, and Francisco d’Anconia, when asked about what he thinks is going to happen to the world, gives an impromptu speech that Google has helpfully pointed out to me is a famous kind of dissertation on the use and role of money in society. It’s a short speech by comparison to others in the text -- only about six pages. It ends like this:
“Senor d’Anconia,” declared the woman with the earrings, “I don’t agree with you!”
“If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully.”
“Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.”
“How do you know it?”
“I feel it. I don’t go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you’re heartless.”
“Madame, when we’ll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won’t be of any earthly use to save them. And I’m heartless enough to say that when you’ll scream, ‘but I didn’t know it!’ -- you will not be forgiven.”
The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: “Well, it’s certainly a funny way to talk at a party!”
It certainly is. It’s also a funny way to talk in a novel. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that a lot of this "novel" is a vehicle for Rand to publish her manifestos on the sundry topics that move the world.
It happens a lot in the text. By the time we get to page 923 and the climactic manifesto -- when John Galt speaks to the world through the magic of radio -- I’m just not up to it. When he starts, with “This is John Galt speaking,” I wrote in the margin: “God. By this point I am just not up to another ten-page screed of unproven platitudes. Man is what I say Man is!”
Except, regrettably, my estimate of ten pages was woefully inadequate. Counting forward from that point, I found myself suffering through a total of 56 pages of John Galt speaking. There’s no way I can appropriately dissect all of his arguments here -- and some of them may have some validity to them -- but I was surprised to discover how many of his premises were fundamentally flawed. Needing to occupy my mind in some constructive way, I found myself circling each flawed premise as I came across them and scribbling a countervailing note in the margin.
...thinking is not a mechanical process…
It isn’t? What is it, then? A magical one?
They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal...
They do not claim that man is ONLY an animal. They claim that man is AN animal. Big difference.
A rational process is a moral process.
Umm, no. The end is what’s moral or not, not the process of achieving it.
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason -- Purpose -- Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge -- Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve -- Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
Ugh. What a word salad. But let’s focus on just this part: “his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think.” I get that there’s not much point in engaging in philosophical inquiry if you don’t believe that you are competent to think, but still, thinking that does not make it true. Let the imbecile claim that his mind is competent to think and reality will likely wipe him out.
If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: “What is the good?” -- the only answer you will find is “The good of others.” The good is whatever others wish…
No. The good of others is not equal to “whatever they wish.”
...all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the “non-good for me.”
No. The good of others is not equal to the “non-good for me.”
You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim -- the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A -- and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.
Wow. So close but yet so far. Don’t confuse the right to do something with the idea that it may be right to do that thing. We use the same word, but they are not the same thing. And “wrong” is the opposite of “right,” as in the right and wrong thing to do. “Wrong” is not the opposite of “rights,” as in the ethical principles of freedom or entitlement that govern human society. And “wrong” is not always “evil.”
It goes on like that page after page -- axioms asserted but never proved, non-sequiturs glossed over, confusing wordplay masking the need for deeper thought on the part of the reader.
Here’s one more example -- this one hitting closer to my intellectual home than the others.
Richard Halley is a minor character in the story -- both a mystic and a composer of classical music, whose elusive Fifth Concerto weaves itself through the many aspects of the plot and Rand’s rugged objectivist symbology. When Dagny finally meets him in Atlantis, he, like everyone there, gives an impromptu manifesto -- this one on the role and motivations of the artists in their ideal society.
“Miss Taggert, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?”
“Not many,” she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.
“That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotion -- emotions be damned! -- I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from your conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it -- I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not that fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired.” He chuckled. “There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek -- I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively -- or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show -- or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart -- only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggert, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?”
This is a great example of the tendency of Rand’s characters to speak in manifestos, because it is exactly the kind of gobbledygook that exemplifies the third part of Rand’s work. Let’s just approach the words and concepts at face value. An artist is a trader -- someone looking for a mutual trade to mutual profit with a customer? Really? That sounds more like a craftsman to me. For an artist, the most violent passion they possess is neither to be admired nor to understand the nature of the admiration that they receive. It is to create. And that fact that Rand doesn’t seem to understand that surprises me -- since so much of her philosophy seems to exalt the creative mind in action.
But it is also a great example because, while missing the mark on art and artists, it does underscore the essential concept on which Rand’s very philosophical fulcrum pivots. Everything must be earned.
Everything Must Be Earned
It is clear throughout the book that Rand wants to reorder everything about the society she lives in. On this front, her treatment of sexual relationships is especially noteworthy. Prior to Hank Rearden’s affair with Dagny Taggert, we are given a detailed tour of his marriage to his wife, Lillian.
She had never objected; she had never refused him anything; she submitted whenever he wished. She submitted in the manner of complying with the rule that it was, at times, her duty to become an inanimate object turned over to her husband’s use.
She did not censure him. She made it clear that she took it for granted that men had degrading instincts which constituted the secret, ugly part of marriage. She was condescendingly tolerant. She smiled, in amused distaste, at the intensity of what he experienced. “It’s the most undignified pastime I know of,” she said to him once, “but I have never entertained the illusion that men are superior to animals.”
His desire for her had died in the first week of their marriage. What remained was only a need which he was unable to destroy. He had never entered a whorehouse; he thought, at times, that the self-loathing he would experience there could be no worse than what he felt when he was driven to enter his wife’s bedroom.
He would often find her reading a book. She would put it aside, with a white ribbon to mark the pages. When he lay exhausted, his eyes closed, still breathing in gasps, she would turn on the light, pick up the book and continue her reading.
He told himself that he deserved the torture, because he had wished never to touch her again and was unable to maintain his decision. He despised himself for that. He despised a need which now held no shred of joy or meaning, which had become the mere need of a woman’s body, an anonymous body that belonged to a woman whom he had to forget while he held it. He became convinced that the need was depravity.
In the celebrated words of the South Park philosopher Stan Marsh, “This is some fucked up shit right here.” But, surely, this is just the negative example that Rand is purposely setting up. When Rearden and Dagny come together, it will be different. It will be the positive to this negative. It will be the way men and women are meant to relate to one another.
Well, yes and no.
The shock became numbness spreading through her body -- she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach -- she was conscious of nothing but a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes -- now -- because it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can’t name … because it is our being, against theirs … our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness … Now, like this, without words or questions … because we want it …
It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.
Her hand moved from his shoulders to his waist to his legs, releasing the unconfessed desire of her every meeting with him. When she tore her mouth away from him, she was laughing soundlessly, in triumph, as if saying: Hank Rearden -- the austere, unapproachable Hank Rearden of the monklike office, the business conferences, the harsh bargains -- do you remember them now? -- I’m thinking of it, for the pleasure of knowing that I’ve brought you to this. He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.
She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him -- this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she know, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater -- he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction -- of his desire -- and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom -- that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service -- and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.
There were lights burning in the two rooms behind them. He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face. Standing straight, holding his glance, she extended her arm to the lamp on the table and turned out the light. He approached. He turned the light on again, with a single, contemptuous jerk of his wrist. She saw him smile for the first time, a slow, mocking, sensual smile that stressed the purpose of his action.
He was holding her half-stretched across the bed, he was tearing her clothes off, while her face was pressed against him, her mouth moving down the line of his neck, down his shoulder. She knew that every gesture of her desire for him struck him like a blow, that there was some shudder of incredulous anger within him -- yet that no gesture would satisfy his greed for every evidence of her desire.
He stood looking down at her naked body, he leaned over, she heard his voice -- it was more a statement of contemptuous triumph than a question: “You want it?” Her answer was more a gasp than a word, her eyes closed, her mouth open: “Yes.”
She knew that what she felt with the skin of her arms was the cloth of his shirt, she knew that the lips she felt on her mouth were his, but in the rest of her there was no distinction between his being and her own, as there was no division between body and spirit. Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence -- chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one’s own desire and every shape of its fulfillment -- through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors -- they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one’s enjoyment, that man’s spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one’s chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it -- as proof, as sanction, as reward -- into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one’s existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath, she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.
I’ve read and re-read this several times, and I still can’t make heads or tails out of it. Especially given the Randian maxim that is supposed to guide this and everything else: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.” Isn’t that exactly what Dagny is doing here, turning herself into a vessel to receive Rearden’s sexual frenzy, and somehow elevating that into an expression of Self and triumph?
Perhaps Dagny is still on her journey towards the ideal. But Rearden? What the hell is going on with Rearden?
“I want you to know this.”
He stood by the bed, dressed, looking down at her. His voice had pronounced it evenly, with great clarity and no inflection. She looked up at him obediently. He said:
“What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore -- for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind. You’re not. You’re as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don’t. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who’d tell me that you were capable of doing what I’ve had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise, not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you -- I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal’s sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren’t we? Well, this is all that’s left of us -- and I want no self-deception about it.”
He spoke slowly, as if lashing himself with the words. There was no sound of emotion in his voice, only the lifeless pull of effort; it was not the tone of a man’s willingness to speak, but the ugly, tortured sound of duty.
“I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone. I need you. It had been my pride that I had always acted on my convictions. I’ve given in to a desire which I despise. It is a desire that had reduced my mind, my will, my being, my power to exist into an abject dependence upon you -- not even upon the Dagny Taggert whom I admired -- but upon your body, your hands, your mouth and the few seconds of a convulsion of your muscles. I had never broken my word. Now I’ve broken an oath I gave for life. I had never committed an act that had to be hidden. Now I am to lie, to sneak, to hide. Whatever I wanted, I was free to proclaim it aloud and achieve it in the sight of the whole world. Now my only desire is one I loathe to name even to myself. But it is my only desire. I’m going to have you -- I’d give up everything I own for it, the mills, the Metal, the achievement of my whole life. I’m going to have you at the price of more than myself: at the price of my self-esteem -- and I want you to know it. I want no pretense, no evasion, no silent indulgence, with the nature of our actions left unnamed. I want no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect. I want no shred of honor left to us, to hide behind. I’ve never begged for mercy. I’ve chosen to do this -- and I’ll take all the consequences, including the full recognition of my choice. It’s depravity -- and I accept it as such -- and there is no height of virtue that I wouldn’t give up for it. Now if you wish to slap my face, go ahead. I wish you would.”
When not speaking in manifestos, people generally speak like this throughout the book -- long stream-of-conscious Randian speeches instead of the clipped sentences that most humans actually use. But, clearly, this Rearden is a wretched creature. A slave that has decided to embrace the manacles he himself has clapped on his own wrists. How will Dagny respond to this depravity?
She threw the blanket off with a stressed, deliberate sweep of her arm. She stood up. She saw her clothes on the floor and kicked them aside. She stood facing him, naked. She said:
“I want you, Hank. I’m much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you -- and the only thing I’m ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed -- and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There’s nothing you’ll have to pretend -- don’t think of me, don’t feel; don’t care -- I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it’s to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but the sensation of pleasure which you despise -- but I want it from you. You’d give up any height of virtue for it, while I -- I haven’t any to give up. There’s none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. And seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don’t have to fear that you’re now dependent upon me. It’s I who will depend on any whim of yours. You’ll have me any time you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It’s such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please -- I’m not afraid to admit it -- I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I -- as my pride. I’m more proud of it than of anything I’ve done, more proud than of building the Line. If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.”
Earned it. Zoom in on that. Dagny earned it. This concept, and the word that represents it, is VERY important to Rand and her philosophy. Anything given is corrupt and evil. Anything earned is pure and good. And as the author seems to go out of her way to stress in these extended passages, everything, up to and including sexual pleasure, must abide by that universal truth.
Except here’s the problem. After more than a thousand pages, I still have no idea what on earth Rand means by earning something.
The problem is especially pronounced here in this transaction between Dagny and Rearden.
In fact, that might be the better word to capture the essence. Not earned. Transacted. Everything, in order to be good, must be transacted, including the exchange of sexual pleasure between partners. Love, I suppose, in this paradigm, the giving of one’s self to another, is corrupt and evil. But transactional sex? That’s earned. Pure and good.
Go back and read those passages again. Is Rand describing the ideal? Or some kind of fall from grace? Frankly, it is impossible for me to honestly tell.
Eventually, the bad guys will try to blackmail Rearden, demanding that he turn over his intellectual property to the government or risk exposure of his affair with Dagny. And, as the text makes abundantly clear, this revelation will be much more devastating to Dagny Taggert than it will be to Hank Rearden.
“If this affair of yours is spread from one end of the country to the other,” said Dr. Ferris, “by such experts in the art of smearing as Bertram Scudder, it will do no actual damage to your reputation. Beyond a few glances of curiosity and a few raised eyebrows in a few of the stuffier drawing rooms, you will get off quite easily. Affairs of this sort are expected of a man. In fact, it will enhance your reputation. It will give you an aura of romantic glamour among the women and, among the men, it will give you a certain kind of prestige, in the nature of envy for an unusual conquest. But what it will do to Miss Taggert -- with her spotless name, her reputation for being above scandal, her peculiar position of a woman in a strictly masculine business -- what it will do to her, what she will see in the eyes of everyone she meets, what she will hear from every man she deals with -- I will leave that up to your own mind to imagine. And to consider.”
The primness here is almost as outdated as Rand’s philosophy, but it is another time, with women and their sexuality locked within the prison built for them by the very forces Dr. Ferris is describing. But can such a threat actually work? Rearden, to his credit, sees how empty it actually is, given the facts of his relationship with Dagny.
Rearden felt nothing but a great stillness and a great clarity. It was as if some voice were telling him sternly: This is the time -- the scene is lighted -- now look. And standing naked in the great light; he was looking quietly, solemnly, stripped of fear, of pain, of hope, with nothing left to him but the desire to know.
Dr. Ferris was astonished to hear him say slowly, in the dispassionate tone of an abstract statement that did not seem to be addressed to his listener, “But all your calculations rest on the fact that Miss Taggert is a virtuous woman, not the slut you’re going to call her.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Ferris.
“And that this means much more to me than a casual affair.”
“Of course.”
“If she and I were the kind of scum you’re going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn’t work.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“If our relationship were the depravity you’re going to proclaim it to be, you’d have no way to harm us.”
“No.”
“We’d be outside your power.”
“Actually -- yes.”
It was not to Dr. Ferris that Rearden was speaking. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.
The last rhetorical flourish aside, Rand now actually has my attention. What is Rearden going to do? Is he going to succumb to the morality of his time -- or he is going to stand by this new philosophy that Dagny has introduced him to? What would John Galt do?
If I had not known that my life depends on my mind and my effort -- he was saying soundlessly to the line of men stretched through the centuries -- if I had not made it my highest moral purpose to exercise the best of my effort and the fullest capacity of my mind in order to support and expand my life, you would have found nothing to loot from me, nothing to support your own existence: It is not my sins that you’re using to injure me, but my virtues -- my virtues by your own acknowledgement, since your own life depends on them, since you need them, since you do not seek to destroy my achievement but to seize it.
So begins about six pages of some of the densest text in Rand’s entire tome. It is ostensibly Rearden’s inner dialogue, synthesizing all he has learned about the way things are and the way they should be as he struggles to decide which way he should bend at this moment in time -- should he betray the product of his immortal mind or the object of his mortal desire? It is, quite clearly, five and a half pages of Rand wrestling with the same question, working her way up to the ultimate conclusion that validates her objectivist creed.
I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one’s body as it is the goal of one’s spirit, that my body was not a weight of inanimate muscles, but an instrument able to give me an experience of superlative joy to unite my flesh and my spirit. That capacity, which I damned as shameful, had left me indifferent to sluts, but gave me my one desire in answer to a woman’s greatness. That desire, which from the knowledge that the lovely form I saw did express the spirit I was seeing -- it was not her body that I wanted, but her person -- it was not the girl in gray that I had to possess, but the woman who ran a railroad.
But it is also clearly, almost laughably, half a page of Rand slapping a moralistic band-aid on the inevitable conclusion that she herself has been building towards. Rearden should definitely betray Dagny, not his inventive mind. It is not only what Rand would have him do. It is also clearly what Dagny would have him do, should she be given the chance to weigh in on the subject.
But, in the end, Rearden remembers Dagny as the alluring girl he first saw on a flatcar…
He asked himself whether he could deliver the radiant being he had seen in that moment, to the looters of the mind and the thugs of the press. Could he continue to let the innocent bear punishment? Could he let her take the stand he should have taken? Could he now defy the enemy’s code, when the disgrace would be hers, not his -- when the muck would be thrown at her, not at him -- when she would have to fight, while he’d be spared? Could he let her existence be turned into a hell he would have no way of sharing?
And so he betrays his invention, signing the rights to it over to the government. It is one of those moments that make me question whether Rand really knows what she is doing -- whether she hasn’t buried under her more than 645,000 words the essential bits and processes that make philosophical novels work. There is no question that Rearden should have told Dr. Ferris to shove it -- but instead, we’ll have to wait another 400 pages or so for John Galt to do that.
Mr. Thompson Is No O’Brien and John Galt Is No Winston Smith
Late in the story we are introduced to Mr. Thompson -- the head of the hapless State that has come to assume unilateral control over the broken economy and from which Galt and his ilk have fled. Mr. Thompson has no first name -- evidently intended as a reflection of his status as the ultimate faceless bureaucrat. In this regard he reminds me of another mononymous character, Inner Party Member O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984.
Right after John Galt’s illegal radio address -- he has somehow broken onto the State’s airwaves in order to issue his manifesto to the world -- Mr. Thompson is surrounded by his ministers and sycophants, who are, collectively, losing their damn minds. But more than anything else, Thompson simply wants John Galt found.
“Put a tail on Miss Taggert,” [Thompson] ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. “Have her tailed day and night. We’ve got to find him.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mouch blankly.
“And when you find him,” Dr. Stadler asked tensely, “you’ll kill him?”
“Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!” cried Mr. Thompson.
Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone’s mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thompson.”
“Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!” said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. “What are you all gaping at? It’s simple. Whoever he is, he’s a man of action. Besides, he’s got a pressure group: he’s cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We’ll find him and he’ll tell us. He’ll tell us what to do. He’ll make things work. He’ll pull us out of the hole.”
“Us, Mr. Thompson?”
“Sure. Never mind your theories. We’ll make a deal with him.”
“With him?”
“Sure. Oh, we’ll have to compromise, we’ll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won’t like it, but what the hell! -- do you know any other way out?”
I like this Mr. Thompson. I know Rand doesn’t want me to, that she is and will hold Mr. Thompson up as the ultimate parasitical bureaucrat, the antipode to her objectivist hero, but I like him nonetheless. I like him, because he’s right about compromise and it being the only way out.
In many ways, this scene reminds me of the one between Samdeviatov and Zhivago in Doctor Zhivago, when Zhivago is aghast at Samdeviatov’s willingness to compromise with reality -- even on the ultra-important principles of the communist revolution.
“There you are. You are a Bolshevik, and yet you yourself don’t deny that what’s going on isn’t life -- it’s madness, an absurd nightmare.”
“Of course it is. But it’s historically inevitable. It has to be gone through.”
“Why is it inevitable?”
“Are you a baby, or are you just pretending? Have you dropped from the moon? Gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don’t you understand the rightness of the people’s anger, of their desire for justice, for truth? Or do you think a radical change was possible through the Duma, by parliamentary methods, and that we can do without dictatorship?”
Are you a baby, or are you just pretending? Throughout Atlas Shrugged, I felt like asking Rand the same question.
Eventually, Mr. Thompson will attempt to bargain with John Galt. And he will not get any satisfaction from the encounter. Mr. Thompson will seek the middle ground, only to be stymied by Galt’s insistence on his principles. In this excerpt, Mr. Thompson begins.
“Now, wait! Wait! Don’t go to extremes! There’s always a middle ground. You can’t have everything. We aren’t … people aren’t ready for it. You can’t expect us to ditch the machinery of the State. We’ve got to preserve the system. But we’re willing to amend it. We’ll modify it any way you wish. We’re not stubborn, theoretical dogmatists -- we’re flexible. We’ll do anything you say. We’ll give you a free hand. We’ll cooperate. We’ll compromise. We’ll split fifty-fifty. We’ll keep the sphere of politics and give you total power over the sphere of economics. We’ll turn the production of the country over to you, we’ll make you a present of the entire economy. You’ll run it any way you wish, you’ll give the orders, you’ll issue the directives -- and you’ll have the organized power of the State at your command to enforce your decisions. We’ll stand ready to obey you, all of us, from me on down. In the field of production, we’ll do whatever you say. You’ll be -- you’ll be the Economic Dictator of the nation!”
Galt burst out laughing.
I did, too. Unfortunately, we’ve slipped back into the land of cartoonish fable. But there is a larger point here. Press on.
It was the simple amusement of the laughter that shocked Mr. Thompson. “What’s the matter with you?”
“So that’s your idea of a compromise, is it?”
“What the…? Don’t sit there grinning like that! … I don’t think you understand me. I’m offering you Wesley Mouch’s job -- and there’s nothing bigger that anyone could offer you! … You’ll be free to do anything you wish. If you don’t like controls -- repeal them. If you want higher profits and lower wages -- decree them. If you want special privileges for the big tycoons -- grant them. If you don’t like labor unions -- dissolve them. If you want a free economy -- order people to be free! Play it any way you please. But get things going. Get the country organized. Make people work again. Make them produce. Bring back your own men -- the men of brains. Lead us to a peaceful, scientific, industrial age and to prosperity.”
“At the point of a gun?”
The point of a gun. I have a habit of listening to libertarian podcasts, and one thing I’ve come to understand is that this “at the point of a gun” phrase is one of their favorite rhetorical devices. I probably shouldn’t be surprised to stumble across its dramatic use here in Atlas Shrugged. In fact, I should almost feel grateful, because Rand’s heavy-handedness with it ultimately helped me understand why it always struck me as such a non-sequitur in the past.
Let me get to that in the next section. Here, let me wrap up with the idea that I tried to lead off with. Although I think he is supposed to be a kind of O’Brien from 1984 (i.e., the nameless apparatchik of the all-powerful State, working ceaseless to shape the will of the faceless masses by any means necessary), the way that Galt is able to emasculate Mr. Thompson shows that the State in Atlas Shrugged is nothing more than a paper tiger, unable to force its will onto anyone not already complicit with its designs. In this way, Mr. Thompson is certainly no O’Brien and, by the same token, the oppressed John Galt is clearly no Winston Smith.
Mr. Thompson and his hoodlums will eventually resort to torturing Galt, running powerful electric current through his body, trying desperately to compel him to do what they want him to do, what they need him to do. As long as I’ve planted the comparison to 1984 in your mind, read this and reflect on a very different scene that took place in Room 101.
The terror of hearing one’s own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.
Wesley Mouch was first to break. “Oh God, Floyd!” he screamed. “Don’t kill him! Don’t dare kill him! If he dies, we die!”
“He won’t,” snarled Ferris. “He’ll wish he did, but he won’t! The machine won’t let him! It’s mathematically computed! It’s safe!”
“Oh, isn’t it enough? He’ll obey us now! I’m sure he’ll obey!”
“No! It’s not enough! I don’t want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We’ve got to have him work for us voluntarily!”
This almost leapt off that page at me. O’Brien knew how to make Winston believe. In the Ministry of Love, Winston betrayed what he loved, and came to love Big Brother. O’Brien did this. Will Mr. Thompson similarly be able to shape Galt’s mind?
“Go ahead!” cried Taggert. “What are you waiting for? Can’t you make the current stronger? He hasn’t even screamed yet!”
“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggert’s face while a current was twisting Galt’s body: Taggert was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.
“Had enough?” Ferris kept yelling to Galt. “Are you ready to want what we want?”
They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.
In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language -- and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: “We want you to take over! … We want you to rule! … We order you to give orders! … We demand that you dictate! … We order you to save us! … We order you to think! …”
They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.
No. Eventually, the machine they are using to torture Galt will break -- break before Galt does -- and no one will know how to fix it. In this final crucible, it is James Taggert, not John Galt, who loses his mind. And Galt -- not the heart, but the mind on which everyone’s life evidently depends, will walk away with his health, sanity, and worldview intact.
Throughout this section, I couldn’t help but see Galt more appropriately in the role of O’Brien, and wondered what kind of book Atlas Shrugged would have been had it been written from that perspective. A sequel, perhaps? Another thousand-page fable in which the objectivist overlords have re-ordered society according to their non-violence principles, and a few, weak agitators work in the shadows to bring some form of collectivism back from the memory hole?
How would the John Galts of that upside down Atlas Shrugged deal with such a movement within their ranks? Non-violently, or at the point of a gun?
The Strike
I read somewhere that Rand’s working title for Atlas Shrugged was The Strike -- a title that is much more suited to her ultimate thesis is this work. What, indeed, would happen, if the people who held up the world, the people, as Hank Rearden says early on, who “move the world” and who will “pull it through,” decided to go on strike? Where would that leave the rest of us evil and blood-sucking collectivists?
But Rand decided to not go with The Strike, but with Atlas Shrugged. It’s not clear to me if she pulled that out of her mind and wrote a scene to explain it, or had written the scene and then decided that this phrase was as good a title as any other. Speaking as a writer, I know it can work in both directions. In any event, here’s the scene where the metaphor of the shrugging Atlas is mentioned. Francisco d’Anconia is lecturing that self-same Hank Rearden.
“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?”
“I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”
For me, it’s like a punch that doesn’t land. It is not entirely clear to me what this even means. Shrug in order to get a better grip? Or to shrug it off and walk away? Somewhere on the Internet I read that Rand’s use of the word shrug is important, because it implies a non-violent rebellion, and non-violence is an all important axiom for Rand and her objectivist ilk.
In contrast, here’s the scene where The Strike is introduced. John Galt is explaining to Dagny what he and his followers are doing in Atlantis.
“We are on strike,” said John Galt.
They all turned to him, as if they had been waiting for his voice and for that word. She heard the empty beat of time within her, which was the sudden silence of the room, as she looked at him across the span of lamplight. He sat slouched casually on the arm of a chair, leaning forward, his forearm across his knees, his hand hanging down idly -- and it was the faint smile on his face that gave to the words the deadly sound of the irrevocable:
“Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable -- except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of men of the mind, Miss Taggert. This is the mind on strike.”
The Mind on Strike. That might’ve been a better title. This scene is certainly more connected to Rand’s philosophy than the strained Atlas metaphor. Right after the excerpt above, Galt launches into one of the essential manifestos of the text -- a paragraph that goes on for three tightly-spaced pages -- perhaps the shortest full explanation of Rand’s underlying thesis.
And it’s a doozy.
“Through all the ages,” he said, “the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter -- every form of inquiry: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation -- every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad -- have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection.”
You know the going is about to get rough when you can’t even parse the first sentence.
“Yet only to the extent to which -- in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders -- some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice -- it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two makes four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction -- only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human, and only the sum of such moments permitted them to continue to exist. It was the man of the mind who taught them to bake their bread, to heal their wounds, to forge their weapons and to build the jails into which they threw him. He was the man of extravagant energy -- and reckless generosity -- who knew that stagnation is not man’s fate, that impotence in not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power -- and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. This was his glory and his guilt -- that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of the sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined.”
Perhaps Rand should have chosen Prometheus instead of Atlas as the titan to claim the title of her seminal work, since she seems clearly more interested in the motif of being tortured for saving the world than in shrugging it off. But, importantly, it was here that I found myself asking some more fundamental questions about what Rand is saying about the people that populated the world.
“It was always the animal’s attributes, not man’s, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force -- the mystics and the kings -- the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and rules by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted -- and the kings, who rules by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man’s soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man’s body were concerned with his stomach -- but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust. Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work.”
The man of reason and the brute. Rand will sprinkle the word ‘humanity’ liberally through her text, but the more one reads the more one becomes convinced that she would prefer to reserve that term for the former and withhold it from the latter. She may grudgingly refer to them as “the lowest of humans” but seems much more comfortable with their simple consignment to the status of animals.
And that really makes me think. Wait. Isn’t everyone human? The overindulged prose scaffolding that Rand has built up over a thousand or more pages serves to obscure the rough and unrestored surface of her core principles, but it is passages like this where we are able to see them more clearly. Us and them. Rand’s philosophy, fundamentally, is one of division. Where the self-appointed men of reason can justify their separation from the classes of humans that they find repugnant. And that, I have to say, is a fairly disappointing revelation. I guess I was expecting something a little more enlightened than that.
But let’s get back to the idea of non-violence.
At the very end of the book, Dagny and Francisco attempt to rescue Galt from the clutches of Mr. Thompson. In order to do so, they must break-in to the facility in which Galt is being held. It’s one of those passages in which Rand appears to tie herself into knots in order to justify into principle what is, in fact, melodrama.
Dagny walked straight toward the guard who stood at the door of “Project F.” Her steps sounded purposeful, even and open, ringing in the silence of the path among the trees. She raised her head to a ray of moonlight, to let him recognize her face.
“Let me in,” she said.
“No admittance,” he answered in the voice of a robot. “By order of Dr. Ferris.”
See what Rand is doing already? Dagny walks with purpose. The nameless guard answers in the voice of a robot.
“I am here by order of Mr. Thompson.”
“Huh? … I … I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
“I mean, Dr. Ferris hasn’t told me … ma’am.”
“I am telling you.”
“But I’m not supposed to take any orders from anyone excepting Dr. Ferris.”
“Do you wish to disobey Mr. Thompson?”
“Oh, no, ma’am! But … but if Dr. Ferris said to let nobody in, that means nobody--” He added uncertainly and pleadingly, “--doesn’t it?”
“Do you know that I am Dagny Taggert and that you’ve seen my pictures in the papers with Mr. Thompson and all the top leaders of the country?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then decide whether you wish to disobey their orders.”
“Oh, no, ma’am! I don’t!”
“Then let me in.”
“But I can’t disobey Dr. Ferris, either!”
Anyone else getting the James T. Kirk vibe off of this? Remember, Norman. Everything Harry Mudd tells you is a lie. How does the State come to wield so much power if it is composed of automatons like this?
“But I can’t choose, ma’am! Who am I to choose?”
“You’ll have to.”
“Look,” he said hastily, pulling a key from his pocket and turning to the door, “I’ll ask the chief. He--”
“No,” she said.
Some quality in the tone of her voice made him whirl back to her: she was holding a gun pointed levelly at his heart.
At the point of a gun.
“Listen carefully,” she said. “Either you let me in or I shoot you. You may try to shoot me first, if you can. You have that choice -- and no other. Now decide.”
His mouth fell open and the key dropped from his hand.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
He shook his head frantically, pressing his back against the door. “Oh, Christ, ma’am!” he gulped in the whine of a desperate plea. “I can’t shoot at you, seeing as you come from Mr. Thompson! And I can’t let you in against the word of Dr. Ferris! What am I to do? I’m only a little fellow! I’m only obeying orders! It’s not up to me!”
Now, Norman. Listen to me very carefully. I am lying.
“It’s your life,” she said.
“If you let me ask the chief, he’ll tell me, he’ll--”
“I won’t let you ask anyone.”
“But how do I know that you really have an order from Mr. Thompson?”
“You don’t. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I’m acting on my own -- and you’ll be punished for obeying me. Maybe I have -- and you’ll be thrown in jail for disobeying. Maybe Dr. Ferris and Mr. Thompson agree about this. Maybe they don’t -- and you have to defy one or the other. These are the things you have to decide. There is no one to ask, no one to call, no one to tell you. You will have to decide them yourself.”
“But I can’t decide! Why me?”
“Because it’s your body that’s barring my way.”
“But I can’t decide! I’m not supposed to decide!”
“I’ll count to three,” she said. “Then I’ll shoot.”
“Wait! Wait! I haven’t said yes or no!” he cried, cringing tighter against the door, as if immobility of mind and body were his best protection.
“One--” she counted; she could see his eyes staring at her in terror -- “Two--” she could see that the gun held less terror for them than the alternative she offered -- “Three.”
Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.
Her gun was equipped with a silencer; there was no sound to attract anyone’s attention, only the thud of a body falling at her feet.
Okay. Let’s put some of the snark aside. I get the larger point that Rand is clumsily making here -- that the automaton of the State is little more than that, that the horror of collectivism is the way it strips man of his individuality, the way it worships the follower and persecutes the leader. What did Rand call them? The men who move the world?
BUT -- the fact that Dagny kills this man REALLY undercuts the libertarian philosophy that Rand has been preaching for a thousand pages. Galt himself, in his three-hour radio diatribe, will say:
So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate -- do you hear me? no man may start -- the use of physical force against others.
I know from those libertarian podcasts that this is often referred to as the Non-Aggression Principle, and it is absolutely foundational to libertarian thought and political action. Even a fiction writer as ham-handed as Rand could have easily written this scene in a way where Dagny does not initiate violence against the nameless security guard. He was so stupefied by Dagny’s logical paradox that smoke starts coming out of his ears and, like the android Norman in that horrible Star Trek episode, he overheats and slumps over unconscious. Or maybe the security guard isn’t even there in the first place. The wheels are already coming off the Statist bus at this time in the narrative. Maybe he fled in fear and terror? Or maybe the scene doesn’t happen at all? Even in a thousand-page fable, after all, there are plenty of things that happen “off stage.”
But the scene is there -- and Dagny pulls the trigger -- and that tells me that Rand is doing something very deliberate. In Rand’s world, Dagny is NOT initiating violence against another person, because the security guard is not a person. He is not even an animal. We are told that Dagny would have hesitated to shoot an animal, but she doesn’t hesitate to shoot this… this… this what? This loafing failure? This feeding parasite? This unshaved humanitarian? Pick your derogative, they are the same ones that Rand has been using throughout the text to set the world up not just as a competition between people with two different philosophies, but as a competition between people who are fully human and those who are not.
So there’s that. But I’d wager that Rand has a second argument. Even if she granted the humanity of the security guard, Dagny still is not INITIATING violence against him, because people of his ilk initiated the violence against Dagny and her kind -- and that kind of violence is much worse in Rand’s calculation. Dagny may have taken the security guard’s life, but the unscalable pyramid with Mr. Thompson at its apex has taken the world’s intellectual property -- and that is a crime that can never be forgiven.
This, I think, is the underlying flaw in much of Rand’s thinking and in the thinking of her followers. Taxing someone’s income, or their production, or their creative output -- especially in a representative democracy -- is simply not violence in the same way that murdering someone is. Equating the two may give the objectivists in Atlas Shrugged the sense of moral high ground they need to commit their atrocities, but it doesn’t make it true.
And let me leave you with this thought -- assuming you’ve been able to stick with me this far. I used the word atrocity quite deliberately. Because what else is The Strike that Galt and his goons perpetrate? They feel it is just to keep everything they produce and share none of it with others who haven’t “earned” it through objectivist compact or effort -- but when the result of those actions is the collapse of civilization and the death of millions by starvation, it really make me wonder if Rand understands just who the monsters are.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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