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David N. Mayer

Atlas Shrugged at Fifty

Part II:  Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus

            “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 upon his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”

            “I . . . don’t know.  What . . . could he do?  What would you tell him?”

            “To shrug.”

            October 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, the magnificent novel written by Ayn Rand.   As I noted in Part I of this blog essay, I will be joining other leading Objectivist scholars, libertarians, and entrepreneurs in celebrating the novel’s 50^th anniversary at a day-long conference on October 6 in Washington, D.C. sponsored by The Atlas Society.  (See the conference schedule here.)  I will not steal my own thunder by discussing my planned remarks on “Atlas Shrugged and the American Revolution” here, but rather I’ll continue my comments generally about the importance of Rand’s novel.  And I’ll identify some of my own personal favorite things about the novel, as well as discuss its past fifty years – and the next fifty years.

The Theme

            As Nathaniel Branden observes in his essay “The Moral Revolution in Atlas Shrugged,” the book is “a novel about man’s relationship to existence.  It is a novel about the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the actions, values and goals necessary and proper to man if he is to sustain and further his life.  It is the dramatization of a new system of ethics: a morality of reason.”  He adds, “Atlas Shrugged identifies and demonstrates that which has never been fully grasped: the philosophical meaning of the Industrial Revolution.”  (Branden, “Moral Revolution,” Atlas Society reprint, p. 5). 

            The story of Atlas Shrugged is essentially that of a labor strike, but of a wholly unprecedented nature:  for the first time in the history of the world, it is a strike by the “men of the mind,” the men and women of ability, whose productive work literally runs “the motor of the world.”  As John Galt, the leader of the strike, explains it: 

“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 have 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 the men of the mind . . . . . This is the mind on strike.”

(p. 738) (Page numbers refer to the original hardcover edition of Atlas Shrugged).  The novel graphically portrays the world in crisis, as the world’s best businessmen, one by one, join Galt’s strike.  Factories close, industrial cities become ghost towns, railroad tunnels collapse, as disasters cease being extraordinary events and instead become virtually everyday occurrences.  Society itself breaks down, along with its infrastructure, as people become animals, resorting to crime, for their bare sustenance.      

            Behind this socio-economic-political crisis, however, was an even greater crisis – fundamentally, a moral crisis, as Francisco d’Anconia, one of Galt’s best friends and one of the first to join the strike, explains: 

            “[T]his is not a battle over material goods.  It’s a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last.  Our age is the climax of centuries of evil.  We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish – we, the men of the mind.  It was our own guilt.  We produced the wealth of the world – but we let our enemies write its moral code.

            “ . . . We kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers.  We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned.  By accepting punishment, not for any sins, but for our virtues, we betrayed our code and made theirs possible.”

(p. 619).  Later in the novel, Francisco explains why he joined the strike, after he had inherited his family’s centuries-old copper-mining business: 

“I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries 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 outsmart 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 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 lights, its power, its wealth – all of it 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 by being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others.”

(p. 766). 

            John Galt describes the moral crisis this way, at the beginning of his radio speech, in Part III of the novel: 

            “You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis.  You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning.  You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded.  Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.  In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight.  You have sacrificed justice to mercy.  You have sacrificed independence to unity.  You have sacrificed reason to faith.  You have sacrificed wealth to need.  You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.  You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

            “You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good.  Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you?  That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues.  It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.  You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I – I am the man who has granted you your wish.

            “Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy.  I have withdrawn that enemy.  I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach.  I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one.  I have ended your battle.  I have stopped your motor.  I have deprived your world of man’s mind. . . .

            “While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem – I beat you to it, I reached them first.  I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp.  I showed them the way to live by another morality – mine.  It is mine that they chose to follow. . . .  We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

            “We are on strike against self-immolation.  We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties.  We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil.  We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

            “There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries:  our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them.  We are evil, according to your morality.  We have chosen not to harm you any longer.  We are useless, according to your economics.  We have chosen not to exploit you any longer.  We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics.  We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer.  We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy.  We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality – the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind. . . .

            “Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.  Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil.  But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame.  It is your moral code that’s through, this time.  Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course.  And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality – you who have never known any – but to discover it.” 

(pp. 1009-1011).   

            The moral code that Rand presents in the novel, speaking through Galt, is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian altruistic moral code that has dominated Western thought for two millennia.  The essential difference, which Rand brilliantly illustrates through the novel’s plot and characterization, is that the altruistic code preaches self-sacrifice and leads, logically, to death.  As Branden observes, “The moral code that Galt is challenging – that Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand are challenging – is the creed which, in one form or another, has dominated mankind’s history: the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake.”  Altruism (a term coined by the 19^th-century collectivist, Auguste Comte), as an ethical principle, “holds that man must make the welfare of others his primary moral concern and must place their interests above his own; it holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the moral justification of his existence, that self-sacrifice is his foremost duty and highest virtue.”  And, Branden adds, all the major ethical systems in human history were, “at root, variations on the theme of self-sacrifice”; in all such systems, “man has always been the victim, twisted against himself and commanded to be ‘unselfish’ in sacrificial service to some allegedly higher value called God or Pharoah or Emperor or King or Society or the State or the Race or the Proletariat.”  (Branden, “Moral Revolution,” p. 7). 

            Rand’s Objectivist ethics – the moral code espoused by John Galt – in contrast, is a moral code fitted for life; not mere biological survival, but the life that is proper for human beings – beings of volitional consciousness.  As Galt briefly explains 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.”

(p. 1018).  Galt then elaborates briefly on each of these seven virtues.  What’s important about this approach to morality – what makes Rand’s philosophy so original – is that it derives values and virtues from the facts of human existence, which create the need for them.  As Nathaniel Branden explains in his “Moral Revolution” essay, Galt’s speech “answers the question `What are values and why does man need them?’ by analyzing man’s distinctive nature in the context of the universal class of living organisms.  . . . [This approach] does not advocate a single moral principle that cannot be traced back to the demonstrable requirements of man’s survival qua man.”  (Branden, p. 20). 

            Like Rand herself, Galt is not a professional philosopher.  (Perhaps that is why he is able to think so clearly.)  He majored in two subjects while in college at the distinguished (albeit fictional) Patrick Henry University – physics and philosophy – and, after college, he was employed as an engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, where he began his strike by revolting against the collectivist credo that the new owners of the Company tried to implement (more on this below).  Galt identifies himself as “an inventor,” but the moral philosophy he espouses is not “invented,” in the usual sense of that term, but is rather naturalistic and rational, based on reason.  His 60-page, three-hour radio speech in Part III is addressed to everyone who has a clear, intransigent mind – and the courage to think for oneself, rather than merely reciting the tired old clichés, or “bromides” (as Rand called them), of conventional thought.  

            Galt’s speech, which is the philosophical climax of the novel (integral to, though not the climax of, its plot), is also addressed explicitly to those listeners (and readers) who remain “young at heart.”  (Perhaps this is why Atlas Shrugged appeals to so many young, high-school- or college-age readers, readers who encounter the novel before they’ve become thoroughly disillusioned with life by formal “higher” education and life in the supposed “real world.”)  He mentions the myth of the city of Atlantis (a major theme of the novel), observing that the root of that legend “exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man”: 

“You still retain a sense – not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing – that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe.  That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek – and which is yours for the taking.”

(p. 1058)  Each of the men of ability who join Galt’s strike do so after Galt reminds them of their own “sense of life.”  Hank Rearden, one of the novel’s prinipal heroes who is presented as the greatest industrialist of his time (the founder of Rearden Steel and the inventor of Rearden Metal), experiences this epiphany when he finally decides to join the strike: 

“He felt a peculiar cleanliness.  It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs.  It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men known in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor – the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity:  the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life.  It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary.  It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.”

(p. 997).     

            The tragedy in the novel is that the “Atlases” of the world had to go on strike – and thus to accelerate the world’s inevitable destruction – in order for both them and the world to realize their value.  Dagny Taggart stands out, not only as the novel’s chief heroine and protagonist, but as the hero who falls victim to her own virtues – “held prisoner” in the world, Galt says at the conclusion of his radio address, by her own “desperate courage,” her love for the railroad business built by her ancestor, Nathaniel Taggart, and her almost unlimited generosity and innocence.  These make her “unable to conceive of [her destroyers’] evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt.”  It is to Dagny and others like her – and to all the rational individualists in the world, then and today – that Galt addresses his final appeal: 

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. . . . The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of the past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others.  Fight for the value of your person.  Fight for the value of your pride.  Fight for the essence of that which is man:  for this sovereign rational mind.  Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle – and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:

“`I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.’” 

(p. 1069).  In stark contrast to the Judeo-Christian religious and moral tradition, which extols Jesus as the man-god who died for the supposed “sins” of others, Rand gives us John Galt – the man who lives for the sake of his own values.

Some Personal Favorites

            Atlas Shrugged is indeed a magnificent book.  It’s also a damn good read.   Since my first reading in 1974-75 (discussed in Part I of this essay), I’ve re-read the novel many, many times – so many that I’ve now lost track of how many, although I try to do so at least once every two or three years.  Each time I find myself reading it more slowly, savoring each passage and finding new, wonderful things.  The book is chock-full of profound insights about human nature and politics.  Here are some of my favorites. 

n     Villainous Names 

            In her discussion of the novel’s characters – in Chapter 5 of her Reader’s Companion, aptly subtitled “A Study in Black and White, Few Shades of Gray” – Mimi Gladstein writes that “[v]illanous characters swarm over the blighted landscape of Atlas Shrugged like maggots on a dead host.”  Rather than have one overarching villain – like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead – Rand  has “squadrons of scoundrels,” in many walks of life, whose very names evoke their parasitic character.  Two splendid examples are Wesley Mouch and Orren Boyle.  Mouch, aptly, is one of the primary “moochers” in the novel: as Hank Rearden’s “man in Washington,” he betrays his employer and then “rises, appropriately, to the level of Economic Director of the country as it moves into a state of nonproductivity.”  Boyle, who name evokes “a societal infection in need of lancing,” epitomizes the “aristocracy of pull” (discussed below).  Lesser villains are given names that suggest their unpleasant personalities or diminutive stature:  “Buzz,” “Chick,” “Cuffy,” “Kip,” and “Tinky.”   (Gladstein, pp. 76-77).  For example, it is Kip Chalmers’ political ambition – his obstinate insistence on traveling to a political rally in California – that leads to the disaster in the Taggart Tunnel.

n     The Best Press Conference, Ever 

            As I noted in my story of the young man reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time, in the introduction to Part I of this essay (see last week’s posting), one of the best scenes in the novel – one of those scenes that makes you want to shout out loud in triumph as you read it – is Dagny Taggart’s press conference prior to the opening of the John Galt Line.  Her comments break all the conventional rules for such events, where the speaker typically gives bullshit answers in response to bullshit questions.  Facing a barrage of negative publicity – with media commentators giving all sorts of dire warnings about disaster when the train makes its inaugural run on the track (and bridge) made of the new Rearden Metal – Dagny responds with a recitation of the technological facts about the Line, “giving exact figures on the nature of the rail, the capacity of the bridge, the method of construction, the costs,” and finally, “the financial prospects of the Line,” including the large profits she expected to make.  When a well-meaning young reporter cries, “Oh, Miss Taggart, don’t say that!” she replies with a more explicit statement, noting that at a time when any industrial profit above four per cent was considered usury, she intended to “do my best to make the John Galt Line earn a profit of twenty per cent for me” and that was “my motive for building the Line.”  To make herself quite clear, she adds an even more explicit statement, which she asks the reporters to write down verbatim:  “Miss Taggart says – quote – I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt Line.  I will have earned it.  Close quote.”  (pp. 234-35). 

            This frank statement of a businesswoman’s pride in the profits she earned is followed up later in the novel by another splendid scene involving Dagny, where she again speaks frankly – and with similar dramatic effect.  When she learns the reason why Hank Rearden signed the “gift certificate” giving up his rights to his invention, Rearden Metal – that he had succumbed to the government’s blackmail threat that his and Dagny’s love affair would be publicly exposed – Dagny agrees to appear on Bertram Scudder’s national radio show, but not for the reason the blackmailing government officials believe.  She calls their bluff – and tells the whole world about both the blackmail and the sexual relationship it targeted: “For two years, I had been Hank Rearden’s mistress.”  She feels no shame, only pride, in elaborating:  “Did I feel a physical desire for him?  I did.  Was I moved by a passion of my body?  I was.  Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure?  I have. . . . I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. . . . We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies . . . .  I wanted him, I had him, I was happy.  I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy.” (pp. 852-53).  Just as the press conference scene dramatizes Rand’s theme of the moral meaning of the profits capitalists earn, Dagny’s interview on the Bertram Scudder show dramatizes, in a rather direct way, another important theme of the novel, the meaning of sex (discussed below).

n     What Politicians Are 

            The  definition Rand gives in Atlas Shrugged is the best I’ve heard:  Politicians are”men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalizations that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun" (p. 744).  (Speaking of politicians, doesn’t Hillary Clinton seem to be a hybrid of Lillian Rearden and Ellsworth Toohey?) 

n     Human Rights 

            The definition of rights that John Galt gives in his speech – “Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival” (p. 1061) – is also one of the best I’ve ever read.  Rand elaborates on this definition in her essay “Man’s Rights,” published in her book The Virtue of Selfishness and reprinted in the appendix to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. 

            Galt also exposes the false dichotomy of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as an instance of the false conflict between mind and body:  “Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort.  The doctrine that `human rights’ are superior to `property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property our of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle.  Whoever regards this a human and right, has no right to the title of `human.’”  (p. 1062). 

n     Uncompromising Integrity 

            In his radio address, John Galt also observes, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.  . . .  In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.  In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”  (p. 1054).  This principle, which is a corollary of the virtue of integrity (defined by Galt as “recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness” (p. 1019)), is illustrated in many passages in the novel – among them, the pain (both to himself and Dagny) caused by Rearden’s decision to succumb to the government’s blackmail threat, because he was feeling unearned guilt over his love affair with Dagny.

n     “White Blackmail” and the “Sanction of the Victim” 

            Rand coins these terms – and uses them as chapter titles in Part II of the novel – to identify concepts integral to the plot.  Heroes like Rearden fall victim to their own unjustified guilt, as the world’s perverse moral code makes it possible for them to be blackmailed for their virtues rather than their vices.   Both the moral tyranny of Christianity and the political-economic tyranny of the regulatory state are based on the same sort of extortion.  The “monstrous absurdity” of Original Sin – the doctrine that man is born with sin, the root of the Christian theological and moral code -- is a mockery of morality, nature, justice, and reason, as Galt explains in his speech (p. 1025).    

            The evil Dr. Floyd Ferris, the bureaucrat in charge of the State Science Institute, tries to obtain 5,000 tons of Rearden Metal by threatening Hank Rearden with ten years in jail for making illegal sales of the metal to fellow industrialist Ken Danagger, who desperately needed the metal to keep his coal mines in production.  Ferris lectures Rearden on “the modern way of doing business.”  When Rearden observes, “After all, I did break one of your laws,” Ferris replies, “Well, what do you think they’re for? . . . Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed?  . . . We want them broken. . . . There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.  Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?  What’s there in that for anyone?  But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.  Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with” (pp. 435-36).       

            Rearden finally realizes the exact nature of the extortion as he sits in a courtroom, waiting for the decree granting his divorce from Lillian:   

“He, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that . . . the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs.  It was like blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug.  And yet – he thought – through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists.  The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.”

(p. 933).  And as Francisco explains to Dagny, in his first serious attempt to get her to quit working for Taggart Transcontinental, 

“By accepting punishment, not for any sins, but for our virtues, we betrayed our code and made theirs possible.  Dagny, theirs is the morality of kidnappers.  They use your love of virtue as a hostage.  They know you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life.

. . . Dagny, your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power.  Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools.  Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you.  They know it.  You don’t.  The day when you discover it is the only thing they dread.”

(p. 619).

n     Real Patriotism 

            As an immigrant from Soviet Russia who chose to become an American citizen, Ayn Rand always revered America and the hope it represents to all mankind.  She began the conclusion to her March 6, 1974 address to the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by saying, “The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”  Although Atlas Shrugged depicts the United States in decline, at various places throughout the novel Rand reminds her readers of the nobility of America’s founding ideals.  Francisco d’Anconia describes this country as one “built on the supremacy of reason – and for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world.”  (p. 771).   It’s not the USA as it is – the “mixed economy,” a compromise between good (capitalism) and evil (statism), whether as depicted in the novel or as it actually existed in 20^th-century America – but rather the USA as it could and should be, if it were truly the capitalist nation of limited, constitutional government as envisioned by America’s Founders. 

            Francisco elaborates on the true meaning of America and its founding principles in his speech on the meaning of money (see “The Root of All Good,” discussed below). 

n     “The Aristocracy of Pull” 

            In the corrupt “mixed economy” state portrayed in the novel, it’s not the best businessmen who succeed but rather the best-connected.  The capitalist system of reward based on merit has been replaced by a new system, which Rand describes as “the aristocracy of pull.”  The villain who best represents this new kind of “aristocrat” is Orren Boyle, president of Associated Steel, who Rand describes as having “started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred-million-dollar loan from the government”; he headed “an enormous concern which had swallowed many smaller companies” (p. 45).  Rather than earning profits for his company by producing steel at competitive prices – in other words, earning profits through free and fair competition – Boyle trades favors with other “pull-peddlars,” such as James Taggart, who use their influence with Washington bureaucrats to get government to pass laws forcibly restraining their competitors.  “We are at the dawn of a new age,” Jim Taggart announced at the party celebrating his wedding.  “We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power.  We will set men free of the rule of the dollar.  We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means.  We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers.  We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by—“  It i Francisco d’Anconia who completes Jim’s sentence:  “—the aristocracy of pull” (p. 404). 

            One scene, in the Part I chapter titled “The Top and the Bottom,” illustrates how the “aristocracy of pull” functions.  It takes place in a room that looks like a cellar – a room with a ceiling “so heavy and low that people stooped when crossing the room,” “circular booths of dark red leather built into walls of stone that looked eaten by age and dampness,” no windows and only “patches of blue light shooting from dents in the masonry, the dark blue light proper for use in blackouts” – a room that was “the most expensive barroom in New York,” built on the roof of a skyscraper.  Four men sat hunched around the table:  Orren Boyle, James Taggart, Paul Larkin (a friend of Rearden’s family), and Wesley Mouch (at the time, Rearden’s “man in Washington”).  They spoke in low voices – Boyle complaining about how it’s not “fair” that Rearden has invented a new kind of metal, lighter and stronger (and less expensive) than steel, and that Rearden owns his own iron-ore mines; Jim Taggart complaining about “destructive, dog-eat-dog competition” from newer railroad lines, like Dan Conway’s Phoenix-Durango.  Out of the meeting comes an agreement that the men do not explicitly acknowledge:  Boyle will use his influence with “a few friends” in the National Alliance of Railroads to get the Alliance to pass the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog rule to throttle Conway’s railroad, while Jim will use his influence with Washington to get the Legislature to pass the Equalization of Opportunity bill, to throttle Rearden.  “That’s how great projects are born – over a drink with friends,” declares Larkin (p. 50).  

            Later, at the end of the same chapter, a different scene takes place, in a different kind of room, the employees’ cafeteria of Taggart Transcontinental.  It’s underground, but “a large room with walls of white tile that glittered in the reflections of electric lights,” and with “a high ceiling, sparkling counters of glass and chromium, a sense of space and light.”  Eddie Willers, Dagny’s assistant, is talking to an anonymous railroad worker – who, the reader later discovers, is John Galt. 

            As Robert Bidinotto observes, the scenes are typical of the powerful symbolism Rand uses throughout the novel, enhancing its dramatic impact.  “Here, Rand is presenting a metaphor for the moral inversion taking place in this corrupt society – a society that rewards evil and punishes good.  The chapter’s title and events it depicts illustrate what [literary scholar Kirsti] Minsaas describes as a `recurrent idea in Rand’s novels:  that in an irrational society, the best are frequently demoted to the bottom, while the worst are to be found at the top.’”  (Robert Bidinotto, “Atlas Shrugged as Literature,” The New Individualist, October 2007, p. 52).

 n     “Robber Barons,” Real and Imagined 

            Ayn Rand was a good student of American history.  In doing research for the novel, as she studied the history of the railroad industry, she discovered that there were generally two types of businessmen:  those who built their railroads, and made their fortunes, on a free market (i.e., without the use of force, without government assistance or interference), who created new wealth; and those who built their companies, and their fortunes, by political “pull” (i.e., using the coercive power of government to restrain their competitors and/or expropriate wealth produced by others).  Only the latter type of businessmen – the “aristocrats of pull” – could be fairly described as “robber barons,” the epithet that leftist scholars frequently use to deride the great industrialists of the so-called “Gilded Age.”  James J. Hill, the real-life, historical inspiration for Nathaniel Taggart, was the first type of businessman; his Great Northern Railroad was exceptional for being the only major intercontinental railroad built entirely by private capital, with no federal government subsidies of any kind.  The “Big Four” of the Central Pacific Railroad, in contrast, were businessmen of the latter type, the true “robber barons”:  they built their railroad with generous federal subsidies (land grants) and were able to charge monopoly prices because of their control of the California legislature, which protected them from competition.  (See Rand’s essay “Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).) 

            Historian Burton Folsom has confirmed Rand’s analysis, discussing two types of business – what he calls “market entrepreneurs” (the true capitalists) and “political entrepreneurs” (the “aristocrats of pull”), in his book The Myth of the Robber Barons (1991).

n     Antitrust versus Capitalism (and Individual Rights) 

            The government directives involved in the novel – the Equalization of Opportunity law and the omnibus edict called Directive 10-289 – illustrate governmental power that is virtually limitless, constrained by no constitutional protections for individuals’ economic liberty or property rights.   

The Equalization of Opportunity law mandated that no one may own more than one business.  It splintered Rearden’s industrial empire, forcing him to sell off his affiliated businesses, including one of his first companies, Rearden Ore – much as one of the earliest real-life antitrust cases, the Standard Oil case of 1911, had forced John D. Rockefeller to split his successful business into several smaller companies.  Couched in language pretending it was protecting competition, the Equalization of Opportunity legislation epitomizes the fallacy that underlies American antitrust laws.  Indeed, as Rand acknowledged in her 1964 lecture “Is Atlas Shrugging?” “the principles of every edict and every directive presented in Atlas Shrugged . . . can be found, and in cruder forms, in our antitrust laws.”  (Rand, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967), pp. 150, 159).   

Rand is quite right about that, as modern scholars who have criticized the antitrust laws (principally, the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton and FTC Acts of 1914, together with their state law counterparts) have also pointed out:  the laws are based on faulty historical premises as well as flawed economic theories, which bear no relationship to real-world markets.  And the laws provide no clear, objective guidance to businesspeople about how they ought to conduct their business.  (The ambiguous, subjective nature of antitrust law was one of Rand’s principal objections.  As she noted, with only a bit of exaggeration, in her essay “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” also published in the Capitalism book:  “Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does.  If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others.  For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or rather, for a successful `intent to monopolize’; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for `unfair competition’ or `restraint of trade’; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for `collusion’ or `conspiracy’ [for “price-fixing”].” (p. 49).  One can almost hear Dr. Ferris saying in the background, “Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed?  . . . We want them broken. . . . There’s no way to rule innocent men.”)  

It is little wonder, then, that Alan Greenspan, in a 1961 economics paper also reprinted in Rand’s Capitalism book, concluded that “the effective purpose, the hidden intent, and the actual practice of the antitrust laws in the United States have led to the condemnation of the productive and efficient members of our society because they are productive and efficient.” (Greenspan, “Antitrust,” in Capitalism, pp. 63).  Although the U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of Microsoft for antitrust violations awakened some scholars and legal commentators to the irrationality of antitrust law, at least as applied to high-tech companies, most policymakers still have a long way to go to appreciate the truth in Rand’s and Greenspan’s arguments from over forty years ago. 

n     “From Each According to His Ability, To Each According to His Need” 

One of the most important passages in Atlas Shrugged is the parable of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, as told to Dagny Taggart by a bum whom she invites as a guest into her private railroad car in the last chapter of Part II of the novel (pp. 660-72).  The bum, Jed Allen, was a former employee of the once-great Twentieth Century Motor Company, of Starnesville, Wisconsin.  He tells how, after the death of the company’s founder, the Starnes heirs destroyed it by implementing a supposedly noble, idealistic plan, implementing the Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  The story eloquently shows the depravity to which human beings inevitably will sink, as they compete to show who’s the least able and who’s the most needy – the perverse incentives that such a collectivist plan necessarily creates.  As Allen sums it up, 

“What was it we were supposed to work for?  For the love of our brothers?  What brothers?  For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us?  And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable – what difference did that make to us?  If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? . . .

“Love of our brothers?  That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives.”

(p. 665). 

All fools who think that Marxism, communism, or socialism in any of its forms is a “noble ideal” ought to read this story.   Mimi Gladstein notes in her book on Atlas Shrugged, “Writing when she did, Rand had to create a fictional company to illustrate how the communist credo would work in a real-life situation.  She did not live to see the failure of communist economic systems worldwide.  One wonders what she would have thought about President Mikhail Gorbachev proclaiming, in his analysis of the flaws in the economic system of the USSR, that the Soviet worker had forgotten how to work.”  (Reader’s Companion, p. 97).

n     Predicting Postmodernism 

The villainous Dr. Floyd Ferris, the bureaucratic chief of the State Science Institute who epitomizes the abuse of science by government, uses the resources of the Institute to deride reason and logic in his book Why Do You Think You Think?  The book contains such gems as: 

“What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the contents of your stomach.  . . .

“The more certain you feel of your rational conclusions, the more certain you are to be wrong.  Your brain being an instrument of distortion, the more active the brain the greater the distortion.

 . . .

“The more we know, the more we learn that we know nothing.

“Do not expect consistency.  Everything is a contradiction of everything else.  Nothing exists but contradictions. . . .”

(pp. 340-41). 

Rand, who was certainly aware of and seriously concerned about the dangers of philosophical subjectivism and skepticism, seems here to be predicting the current modern form of subjectivism that’s – unfortunately – so popular, so chic, in many academic circles, the movement known as “po-mo,” or post-modernism.  (If anything, Rand’s fictional account is a bit off base by being a bit too rational in its tone and style, compared to much of the current post-modernist literature.)  On post-modernism generally, see the excellent book by my friend Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (2004).

n     “The Root of All Good” 

Another classic passage in Atlas Shrugged is Francisco’s speech on the meaning of money, which he delivers in the second chapter of Part II (pp. 410-15).  At the party celebrating James Taggart’s wedding, Francisco overhears an intellectual pompously declaring that money is the root of all evil: 

“`So you think that money is the root of all evil?’ said Francisco d’Anconia.  “Have you ever asked what is the root of money?  Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them.  Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. . . . Is this what you consider evil?

(p. 410).  He goes on to explain the source of production – not brute muscular labor, but the rational mind: “man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth” – and the moral code that’s the basis of money:   

“Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.  Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return.  Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more.  Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders.  . . . And when men live by trade, with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.  This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money.  Is this what you consider evil?”

(p. 411). 

After dispelling some common myths about money – among them, that money can “purchase happiness,” even for someone who is value-less or purposeless, or that it’s somehow unfair for some men to inherit wealth – Francisco adds some insightful observations about how money can be a barometer to both the character of persons and the health of society.  “Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters:  the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it,” he observes (p. 412).  As to society generally, his advice exposes the fatal flaw of the half-capitalist, half-statist mixed economy:   

“Watch money.  Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.  When you see that trading is done, not by consent but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you must obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.  Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality.  It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

(p. 413). 

Francisco’s speech also contains an eloquent tribute to the United States of America, which he proudly describes as “a country of money”: 

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. . . . If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase `to make money.'  No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor.  Americans were the first to understand that wealth had to be created.  The words `to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

(p. 414).  (Francisco is definitely speaking as Rand’s mouthpiece here.) 

He concludes, “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.  When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.  Blood, whips, and guns – or dollars.  Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.” (p. 415). 

n     The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine 

With many of the 2008 presidential candidates proposing some form of national government takeover of the American health care system – what is euphemistically called “universal health care” – it’s especially timely to remember the real impact of socialized medicine, not just on consumers but also on the producers of health care.  I know of no finer statement than Dr. Hendricks’, in explaining why he joined the strike:   

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control. . . . Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation?  Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?  That was not what I would place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. . . .  I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors.  Men considered only the `welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it.  That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only `to serve.’ . . . I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect me to depend, on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

(p. 744).

n     The Meaning of Sex 

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand develops her theme about the meaning of sex through the plotline involving Dagny Taggart and the three men who were her lovers.  The most important of these affairs, both to the overall plot of the novel and to this theme, is the one with Hank Rearden, whose love affair with Dagny is integral to his gradual reeducation (see “The Education of Hank Rearden,” below). 

Rand has Francisco d’Anconia – ironically (or is it fittingly?), Dagny’s first lover – deliver a dissertation to Hank on the meaning of sex.  As Mimi Gladstein nicely summarizes it, 

“[Francisco] explains that `a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.’  He argues that what a man finds sexually attractive, the type of woman he chooses as a sexual partner, is reflective of his evaluation of himself.  Thus, if a man chooses the highest type of woman, a woman he can admire, one who is strong and hard to conquer, then he is demonstrating his attraction to a woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself.  A man of self-esteem chooses a heroine.

“By contrast, Francisco explains, a man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises.’ Such a woman can give him a momentary illusion of his own value.  . . . For Rand, sex is not the cause but the effect of a man’s sense of self.  It is `the means for expressing in physical form one’s greatest celebration of life, of joy, of one’s highest self-exaltation and one’s highest moral values.’”

(Gladstein, Reader’s Companion, pp. 93-94 [references omitted]).  

            Over the course of the novel, Dagny learns the full meaning of a sexual relationship.  In her youth, when she loses her virginity to Francisco, he tells her, “Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?”  Rand describes them as “happy and radiantly innocent,” “incapable of the conception that joy is sin” (pp. 108-9) – a wonderful description of youthful sexual experimentation.  As one matures, however, one realizes that it’s not just the body of one’s lover, it’s the whole person, to which we respond (as Rand’s former associate Nathaniel Branden has written about as the “visibility” principle in his books, beginning with The Psychology of Romantic Love (1980)).    

            After Hank Rearden realizes that Dagny had met John Galt – and accepts the fact that she was no longer Hank’s lover, for she had used “nothing but the past tense” in describing their affair on the Bertram Scudder radio show – he tells Dagny, “[Y]ou have met the man you love, and if love means one’s final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you’ve ever loved.”  (p. 860)    

            When Rand and Galt consummate their love – the first time they have sex, in the vaults beneath the Taggart Terminal, Dagny is conscious of the fact that it is Galt with whom she’s making love:  

“It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself – it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life . . . – it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers.”

(pp. 956-57).  Finally, in the novel’s last chapter, after Galt’s rescue from the State Science Institute’s torture chamber, Dagny and Galt lay still in the airplane, “leaning back in their chairs, silently looking at each other.”  At that moment, Dagny realizes the full meaning of sexual love: “[T]heir persons filled each other’s awareness, as the sum and meaning of the future – but the sum included the knowledge of all that had had to be earned, before the person of another being could come to embody the value of one’s existence” (p. 1159). 

n     Thank You for Smoking 

            Ayn Rand smoked cigarettes – as did many people in the 1950s, when the health risks associated with the use of tobacco products were not widely known.  So it is not surprising that most of the characters in Atlas Shrugged – and virtually all the novel’s heroes – smoke cigarettes, too.  Rand uses the cigarette as a symbol, which is explained by the old man who owns the newsstand in Taggart Terminal (and who collects cigarettes from around the world).  He tells Dagny: 

"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart.  I like to think of fire held in a man's hand.  Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips.  I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking.  I wonder what great things have come from such hours.  When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his own expression."

(p. 61).  Special cigarettes, stamped with a dollar sign and manufactured at Midas Mulligan’s factory in “Galt’s Gulch,” are smoked by the heroes; outside the valley, they give them a sense of camaraderie among the heroes outside of the valley – “allies gaining support from the fact of each other’s existence” (p. 921).  (Today, one might say that the heroes who smoke cigarettes do so in defiance of the “public health” authorities’ paternalistic decrees – taking risks with their health, to be sure, but risks they’re willing to take because it’s their lives.)

n     The Sign of the Dollar  

            The cigarettes that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged smoke bear a distinctive trademark – the dollar sign – which is the most important symbol in the novel.  The strikers adopt it as their sign, the insignia of Galt’s Gulch.  One of the minor heroes, Owen Kellogg, explains its meaning to Dagny: 

“It stands – as the money of a free country – for achievement, for success, for ability, for man’s creative power – and, precisely for these reasons, it is used as a brand of infamy. . . .  Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity?  . . .  It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man’s right to this own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.  If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we – we, the dollar chasers and makers – accept it and choose to be damned by that world.   We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility – the badge we are willing to life for and, if need be, to die.”

(pp. 683-84).   When Dagny finally joins the strike, she drew a large dollar sign on the pedestal of the statue of Nathaniel Taggart in the Terminal (p. 1138).  And, at the very end of the novel, when John Galt decides it’s time to return to the world, he raises his hand and traces in space “the sign of the dollar” (p. 1168) – the book’s final five words.

n     Cherryl Brooks Taggart and Tony (The “Wet Nurse”) 

Perhaps the two most sympathetic minor characters in the novel are Cherryl Brooks, the young woman who marries James Taggart and thus becomes Dagny’s sister-in-law, and the young man whom we know only by his first name, Tony, the government watchdog whom Rearden’s steelworkers nickname “The Wet Nurse.”  In her Reader’s Companion to the novel, Mimi Gladstein describes these characters as “basically good people” who have been “either mislead or misinformed”; they represent “how statist regimes destroy what is good in the human spirit.”  Their sympathetic treatment by Rand also belies those critics who claim that the novel lacks emotional warmth. 

When Cherryl meets James Taggart, she is 19, starry-eyed, and working in a dime store.  As Mimi Gladstein notes, “She has dreams of bettering herself; she wants to learn.”  She believes James Taggart is the unsung hero of Taggart Transcontinental and, initially, is so enthralled with Jim’s attention that she buries her doubts about him.  In the months after their marriage, however, “she learns, slowly and painfully, that Dagny is what she thought Jim was.”  (Gladstein, Reader’s Companion, p. 75).  Eventually, Cherryl summons her courage to visit Dagny to apologize; Dagny befriends her and tries to get her to understand why she should not feel guilt over her errors of knowledge.  Cheryl begins to grasp the value of her own life, recognizing

“ . . . that’s what I felt when I was a child . . . that’s what I seem to remember most about myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I’ve never lost it, it’s there, it’s always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something I must hide. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your own life – is that good?”

Dagny replies, “Cherryl, list to me carefully:  that feeling – with everything which it requires and implies – is the highest, noblest, and only good on earth.”  She adds a warning about those people who want to destroy that feeling.  “And when you learn to understand their motive, you’ll know the darkest, ugliest, and only evil in the world, but you’ll be safely out of its reach.” (p. 891).  Unfortunately, Dagny’s intervention comes too late for Cherryl:  she lacks the strength to cope with the horrors she subsequently encounters (including a very unsympathetic social worker) and, running through the dark streets of New York City, plunges over a parapet to her death. 

Tony, the “Wet Nurse,” is called “Non-Absolute” by Hank Rearden because, when he’s first assigned by Washington bureaucrats to Rearden’s steel mill – as the official government watchdog, to enforce the draconian regulations known collectively as Directive 10-289 – he’s a young man, fresh out of college, and filled with the philosophical subjectivism, skepticism, and cynicism he was taught in school.   Rearden teases the boy, with whom he develops a mentor-protégé relationship.  Eventually, Tony comes to see the evil in the government’s actions and develops a profound admiration for Rearden.  He tells him to conduct his business as he pleases and that he’ll juggle the books so that Washington won’t know; he even asks Rearden to give him a real job at the steel mill.  When the looters’ thugs try to start a riot at Rearden Steel, Tony gives his life fighting to protect the mill.   

Rearden returns to the mill just in time to discover Tony, barely still alive, near the bottom of a ravine.  In one of the most touching scenes in the novel, Rearden carries the fatally-wounded young man in his arms, trying to save his life.  He implores Tony to do him “a big favor” – “You were willing to die to save my mills.  Will you try to live for me?  . . . Will you make up your mind that you want to live – . . . will you fight for it?”  “I’ll try,” the young man replies, as Rearden tells him, “Take it easy, Tony.”  A sudden flicker appears on Tony’s face, “an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. “`Not “Non-Absolute” any more?’  `No, not any more,’” Rearden replies, “`you’re a full absolute now, and you know it.’”  He shocks Tony, as he carefully carries his fragile body, and presses his lips to the boy’s forehead.  “`Do you know what you did?’ he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him. `Put your head down,’ said Rearden, `and I’ll do it again.’  The boy’s head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father’s recognition granted to a son’s battle.”  (pp. 992-93). 

By the time he reaches the top of the slope, Rearden knows that Tony is dead:  he heard no more sobs and felt no more trembling from his body; he continued at the same pace, “even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of man – a collection of chemicals.”  As Rearden solemnly walked, carrying the body “as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms,” he felt intense anger – “directed not at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy’s body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy’s teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug’s gun – at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.”  (p. 994).  “Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence . . . – and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.” (p. 995).

 n     Ruthless Justice 

            In her philosophy as in the novel, Ayn Rand drew a distinction between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality, and she followed the advice Galt gives at one point in his radio speech, “Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality” (p. 1059).   This principle is an application of the virtue of justice, which Galt defined as “recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the name incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification – that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly . . . – that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement” (p. 1019).  

            It is this principle that explains the patience and understanding that Galt and the rest of the strikers have for both Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, as they persevere in their work while the world around them crumbles.  It also underscores Rand’s grim summary of the passengers who died aboard the Comet in the Taggart Tunnel train disaster (pp. 605-7).  And it also informs Dagny’s comments to Cherryl, on how justice is the motive that’s the “opposite of charity.” (p. 889).

n     “Galt’s Gulch” 

            In the “utopia” sections of the novel – first two chapters of Part III, aptly titled “Atlantis” and “The Utopia of Greed,” and last section of the final chapter of the novel – Rand depicts life in the strikers’ retreat, the hidden valley in Colorado purchased by Midas Mulligan and which the other strikers dubbed “Galt’s Gulch.”  It’s an inspiring depiction of what kind of social life would be possible to human beings, if they truly lived rationally.  And it’s a terrific answer to those collectivists who claim that individualism means treating human beings as alienated, isolated, atomistic beings in “cut-throat” competition with one another (what some derisively call “social Darwinism”).  On the contrary, as Galt explains to Dagny – and as life in his Gulch shows – “there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their personal desires – if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical.”  (p. 798).  When Dagny puts Galt to the test – giving him an opportunity to sacrifice his and Dagny’s love for each other so that Francisco could have Dagny, his first love – she learns that Galt is true to his principles (pp. 797-98).

n     Respecting Reality 

John Galt’s admonition/explanation to Dagny about life in “Galt’s Gulch” – “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever” – is a splendid general rule for living.    

n     The Man With a Purpose 

            In his essay “The Revolutionary Philosophy of Atlas Shrugged,” Robert Bidinotto describes Francisco d’Anconia as “[e]asily the most romantic figure Rand ever invented” as well as “her most compelling portrait of the practical man of action.”   “Serenely confident and supremely capable, Francisco confronts any obstacle or challenge as if were merely another opportunity to exercise his enormous talents.  And though the strike ultimately costs him both his family fortune and the woman he loves, he remains untouched by any hint of tragedy.”  Quoting Rand’s statement that she created Francisco “in the tradition of the Scarlet Pimpernel – or Zorro,” in other words, as “the concretization in a human character” of what she heard in the operetta music she fell in love with in her childhood, Bidinotto adds, “Francisco represents the conventional morality turned on its head”:  “Where traditional codes uphold meekness, mercy, and selflessness, he’s boldly self-assured, implacably just, and passionately assertive” – the antithesis of the public image he deliberately adopts (the irresponsible hedonist), he’s a man “of iron determination” who “thinks, plans, and acts long range.”  When Dagny asks him, “What’s the most depraved kind of human being?” – Francisco answers: “The man without a purpose.”  (Bidinotto, “Revolutionary Philosophy,” The New Individualist, October 2007, p. 37). 

            One of my favorite passages involving Francisco is Rand’s description of him in his youth, during the summers he spent with the Taggart children at their estate on the Hudson.  “He flew through the days of his summer month like a rocket, but if one stopped him in mid-flight, he could always name the purpose of his every random moment.  Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.”  (p. 94).  “Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort.  There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison.  His attitude was not:  `I can do it better than you,’ but simply: `I can do it.’  What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.”  (ibid.)  Francisco had said that after Jim, who had been given a motorboat for his birthday, challenged him to operate it, something Francisco had never done before.  Slipping behind the wheel, Francisco said, “Wait a moment” to the instructor, who remained at the landing.  “Let me take a look at this.”  “Then, before the instructor had time to move, the boat shot out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun. . . . As it went shrinking into the distance and sunlight, Dagny’s picture of it was three straight lines:  its wake, the long shriek of its motor, and the aim of the driver at the wheel.”  (p. 93).  

n     The Education of Hank Rearden 

            Francisco d’Anconia might be the most romantic hero in Atlas Shrugged, but my favorite hero – and certainly the most interesting character in the novel – is Hank Rearden, who undergoes the greatest intellectual growth over the three and a half years the story spans.   Rearden personifies the conflict between the conventional altruistic morality and the requirements for proper human life – the conflict between supposed virtue and happiness, between supposed morality and life itself.  As Robert Bidinotto describes him, “He’s passionately in love with life and happiness; yet he accepts uncritically the conventional view that his personal desires, such as his love for his work, are subjective, base, and lacking any nobility or moral significance.  This belief leaves him morally defenseless against those who plot to destroy his steel mills.  Similarly, he views his passion for his mistress, Dagny Taggart, as animalistic and degrading.  This belief leaves him trapped in a loveless marriage to a vicious wife, held by a gray, empty sense of guilt and moral duty.”  (Bidinotto, “Revolutionary Philosophy,” TNI, October 2007, p. 34). 

            In their first conversation, Francisco tells Rearden, “It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.” (p. 149).   As Mimi Gladstein notes in her Reader’s Companion, Rearden’s “greatest guilt is accepting the undeserved guilt [the exploiters] have heaped upon him. . . . But although it is they who need him and not he who needs them, he has allowed them to use that need and impotence as justification for his immolation, for adding to his ever increasing burden.  It follows, then, that he is the Atlas who needs to shrug” (Gladstein, p. 91). 

            Soon after Dagny’s appearance on the Bertram Scudder radio show, when Rearden visits her to tell her he accepts the end of their love affair, he also tells her that he finally realizes his error: 

            “I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them, I had accepted the worst of our enemies’ creed – and that is what I’ve paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must.  I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he’s started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body.  . . .  I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires.  But I did not know that this was virtue.  I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one’s life, because it’s that which makes life possible.  . . .

            “I accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions.  . . . I could not understand why I was losing every battle.  I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own.  While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality.  I had accepted unwittingly and by default, the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one’s existence, to one’s work, to reality, to this earth – as if ideas were not the province of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. . . .

            “I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of ethics, but my own life by another. . . .

            “If some man like Hugh Akston had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics’ theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face.  I would not laugh at him now.”

(pp. 857-59).  He adds that he also realizes that Francisco was “my fried, my defender, my teacher, the man who set me free by helping me to learn what I’ve learned.”  “I loved him, Dagny, he was the brother, the son, the comrade I never had – but I knocked him out of my life, because he would not help me produce for the looters.  I’d give anything now to have him back, but . . . there is no way to deserve even the right to ask forgiveness” (p. 859).  Thankfully, by the time he again sees Francisco, he has one further realization – that asking forgiveness isn’t necessary.  

n     Male Bonding 

Hank Rearden is also a principal character in the two scenes of the novel involving intimate physical contact between men.  One, in which he is portrayed as a father figure, involves the death of Tony, the young man nicknamed the “Wet Nurse,” discussed above.  The other involves his relationship with a peer, Francisco d’Anconia.  Not only does Francisco take it upon himself to recruit Rearden to join the strike – in a series of deliberate, though seemingly chance, encounters – but he also interrupts their conversation to risk his life, working side by side with Rearden, when an emergency arises at the steel mill.   A break-out occurs in one of the furnaces; the two men stood next to each other, on a slippery muddy bank overlooking the flow of molten metal, practicing an old art – closing the hole by hand, by flinging chunks of clay to dam the flow.  At one point, Francisco accidentally slips – and Rearden instantaneously leaps to his side, “held him in his arms, hung swaying together between space and ridge, over the white pit,” until he regains his footing, then as he pulled him back, “for an instant, still held the length of Francisco’s body against the length of his own, as he would have held the body of an only son.”  “His love, his terror, his relief were in a single sentence: `Be careful, you goddamn fool!’”  (p. 458).  

It was probably not Rand’s intention, but the scene is quite remarkably homoerotic.  (In my fantasy sequel to Atlas Shrugged, Francisco and Hank are lovers:  each has acknowledged his bisexuality and has realized that he’ll never find another woman like Dagny and will never love another man as much as he loves the other.  Rather than live the rest of their lives in self-denial, they would find in a sexual relationship with one another a celebration of each other’s life and value:  each of them worshiping the other, “everything that was his person and his life,” their “pride in [themselves] and that it should be [he] whom [the other] had chosen as his mirror, that it should be [his] body which was now giving [the other] the sum of his existence, as [the other man’s ] body was giving [him] the sum of [his].”)

n     Happiness, Not Suffering, as the Norm 

            The heroes in Atlas Shrugged follow a moral code that views happiness, not suffering, as the normal state of human existence.   A nice illustration of this occurs in Galt’s Gulch when Dagny discovers that Ragnar Danneskjöld – the philosopher-turned-policeman (and the third member of Galt’s triumvirate) – is married to the actress Kay Ludlow, who lives in the valley.  “How can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be . . . ?” she asked.  Ragnar replies, “She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction.  We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster.   We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it – and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it.  It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural.  It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.”  (p. 759). 

            Rand describes John Galt as a man whose face shows no signs of pain or fear or guilt.  But as Galt explains to Dagny after the first time they make love, in the vaults beneath the Taggart Terminal in New York City, “Dagny, it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering.  I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”  (pp. 959-60). 

n     “The Best Within Us” 

            Another inspiring theme in Atlas Shrugged – and another aspect of Rand’s philosophy for living – is the invocation to live as if reaching for “the best within us.”  The theme is introduced by Eddie Willers, whom Mimi Gladstein describes in her Reader’s Companion as “the average man” in the novel:  Dagny’s chief assistant, her close friend since childhood – almost like a brother, fiercely loyal to her (and secretly in love with her) – who, like his father, was a retainer of the Taggart Transcontinental, the “feudal serf” who devotes his life to the railroad.  Ironically, in the novel’s first chapter,  describing a childhood conversation he had with Dagny over what they planned to do with their life, he’s not the one who has the railroad in mind: 

[Eddie told Dagny], “`[We] ought to do something great. . . . Not just business and earning a living.  Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains.’  ‘What for?’ she asked.  He said, `The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us.  What do you suppose is the best within us?’  `I don’t’ know.’  `We’ll have to find out.’  She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.”

When Rand returns explicitly to “The Best Within Us” theme, in the chapter so titled in Part III, after Dagny finally quits the railroad, it’s Eddie who cannot bring himself to quit or to start his life over.  The novel leaves him on a stranded train in the Arizona desert, desperately trying to start its frozen engine: 

“[H]e heard himself crying soundlessly – Dagny!  In the name of the best within us! . . . Dagny! – he was crying to a twelve-year-old girl in a sunlit clearing of the woods – in the name of the best within us, I must now start this train!  . . . Dagny, that is what it was . . . and you knew it, then, but I didn’t . . . you knew it when you turned to look at the rails. . . . I said, `not a business or earning a living’ . . . but, Dagny, business and earning a living, and that in man which makes it possible – that is the best within us, that was the thing to defend . . . in the name of saving it, Dagny, I must now start this train.”

(p. 1166).

The Last Fifty Years – and the Next Fifty Years 

            Today’s world in many respects is vastly different from the world of October 1957, when Atlas Shrugged was first published.   David Kelley sums up the differences quite nicely.  In 1957, 

“Dwight Eisenhower was president.  A novel called Peyton Place topped the best-seller list.  The Soviet Union had just beaten the United States into space, with the launch of Sputnik, and there were fears that communism would fulfill its boast to leave the free world in the dust.

“There were no personal computers, fax machines, DVD players, automatic teller machines.  Most people didn’t even own their telephones – they were rented from Ma Bell, and you could have any model you wanted as long as it was black.

“Though the 1950s were not the halcyon days of family values that conservatives sometimes imagine, the two-parent family was still the norm.  Crime rates were about a third of what they are today.  Most middle-class women expected to marry after college and raise children rather than pursue a career.  Prejudice against blacks was still pretty widespread and pretty openly expressed.”

Today, in contrast, 

“The information revolution has transformed the way people think, work, communicate, invest their money.  The sexual revolution of the 1960s has changed the way we do other things, and it broadened into a wider movement of personal growth, self-help, and self-actualization.  The pursuit of individual happiness has weakened the hold of the old lifestyle conventions.  Racial and ethnic prejudice is much less common today – and so is the sense of personal honor and responsibility.

“The Soviet empire has collapsed, bringing to an end a vast and grisly experiment with collectivism.  Few would deny the economic virtues of a market system.  And a market-liberal movement, aiming to restore a pure capitalist system based on limited government and individual rights, has sprung up over the last fifty years and become a significant political force.”

Given these differences, David Kelly asks, “Is Ayn Rand’s novel still relevant to this very different world?  Will its message still matter in the years to come?”  He answers, resoundingly, “Yes, and yes.”  (David Kelley, “A Philosophy for the 21^st Century,” The New Individualist, October 2007, p. 41).   And I wholeheartedly (or should I say, wholemindedly?) concur. 

            As Kelley observes, “Atlas Shrugged is a timeless work, because it is a philosophical work.”  Its defense of capitalism as the only social system consistent with human nature and human values is just as important today as it was a half-century ago.  To be sure, some of the circumstances of Rand’s story – set in a world where railroads, rather than airplanes, were the chief modes of long-distance travel, a world without cell phones or the Internet – are dated; but the story’s “philosophical core,” as Kelley points out, remains “as valid, as relevant to our lives, and as important for the future of freedom, as they were in 1957.”  Indeed, one could argue that the novel’s ideas are even more important today, after an additional half-century of the growth of the regulatory/welfare state in the United States.  The growth of government – and with it, the continued erosion of the rights of businessmen and other productive persons – has been possible because both sides in today’s “culture wars” – both conservatives and “multicultural” leftists – share an antipathy to rational individualism, as David Kelley shows in his essay.  Capitalism remains “the unknown ideal” in today’s world, and Rand’s principled defense of capitalism as the only social system compatible with individual rights remains something that the people of the world desperately need.  (“A Philosophy for the 21^st Century.” TNI, October 2007, pp. 44-47.) 

            The purpose of Atlas Shrugged, Rand said in 1964, was "to prevent itself from becoming prophetic," and she added that, just a few years after its publication, that there were "many, many signs to indicate that it is succeeding in that purpose."  (Rand, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967), 150, 165).   The novel is, in Ed Hudgins’ words, “the ultimate cautionary tale.”  (Edward Hudgins, “Atlas Shrugged as Prophecy,” The New Individualist, October 2007, p. 27).  

            Now, fifty years later, there are, unfortunately, many more negative developments, more examples for what Rand called her "Horror File."  These include the expansion of federal entitlement programs, the continued dominance of collectivism on the faculties of American colleges and universities, and the further erosion in our civil and criminal law of the concept of individual responsibility.  Many states and some colleges and universities have enacted mandatory "community service" requirements for students.  Radical anti-abortion activists and so-called “animal rights” activists have succeeded in getting more legal protections for the supposed “rights” of fetuses and animals than the law allows for many adult human beings.  Radical environmentalists continue to preach an anti-human message, speaking of the earth and its non-human life and resources as having greater value than human life and prosperity.  And, perhaps most ominously of all, the United States and other Western nations have been put on the defensive against militant Islamist religious fanatics whose culture literally is stuck in medieval times.  As Ed Hudgins observes, “The rise of Islamists is a stark and terrible vindication of Ayn Rand’s insights about where the premises of irrationalism and self-sacrifice logically lead.”  (“Atlas Shrugged as Prophecy,” TNI, October 2007, p. 30). 

            Yet for each "horror," I think, there's at least one encouraging development.  For example, notwithstanding George W. Bush’s failure to push even his modest Social Security privatization plan, genuine reform of Social Security at last is beginning to be discussed seriously by some policymakers.  The popular reaction against "political correctness" on college campuses, together with the entry of pro-individualist, pro-capitalist young scholars into academia, has broken the left's monopoly on higher education.  (Indeed, one of the most promising developments in the past 50 years has been the rise of free-market, or “market liberal,” think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Independent Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies, as well as a growing number of similar organizations at the state level, such as Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Illinois’ Heartland Institute, or Ohio’s Buckeye Institute, with which I’m proud to be affiliated.)  The Microsoft antitrust case has prompted "mainstream" commentators to question not only the application of antitrust laws to high-technology industries but the wisdom of antitrust laws generally.  The enormous popularity of talk radio brings daily into American homes (and offices and cars) the views of individualist commentators like Neal Boortz and such local radio hosts as Detroit’s Mark Scott or Norfolk, Virginia’s Tony Macrini – or even conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, who defends the rights of productive Americans to keep the money they've earned.  (Despite his adherence to conservatism, including the Judeo-Christian moral code with its anti-individualist premises, Limbaugh often espouses a strongly pro-capitalist message.)   And finally, of course, the Internet teaches everyone who uses it the value of free markets.  

            Such positive developments provide, in Rand's words, "many, many signs" to indicate that Atlas Shrugged is succeeding in its purpose of not becoming prophetic.  We “Atlases” need not go on strike and wait for the world’s collapse before returning to it; the world we want “is real, is possible” – and is within our grasp.  Today, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand's observation continues to hold true.

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  October 3, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer