3:10 In the Name of the Best Among Us, “All Skewed Things…”

PREVIOUSLY: Dagny and the Objectivists rescued John Galt, and the villainous bureaucrats abandoned their posts. The fight was won. Unfortunately, Dagny committed an entirely unnecessary first-degree murder in the process, exposing the horrifying intellectual rot and moral depravity at the heart of Ayn Rand and John Galt’s philosophy.

—

Rearden and Ragbeard untie Galt from Ferris’ torture machine while Francisco provides him with medicine in the form of brandy and cigarettes. Awesome.

Francisco swears revenge upon Galt’s torturers, but Galt is like, “Let it go man, they’re powerless now. I doubt we’ll ever see them again.” Ragbeard agrees, I’m sure, and takes this moment to smash the torture device to smithereens with… I don’t know, let’s just say his bare fists.

They lead the still feeble Galt out of the Project F infrastructure and back to whatever vehicle they used to get here. Francisco’s plane apparently. Ragbeard pilots it off the State Science grounds and into the night sky. Francisco gets out the first-aid kit and tends to Galt and Rearden while Ragbeard gets on the radio, announcing the news of Galt’s escape on a secret frequency.

“Who is he talking to?” Dagny wonders, and Francisco explains that half the population of Galt’s Gulch came with them as back-up. Apparently they’re manning a fleet of airplanes, no doubt built single-handedly from matchsticks and elbow grease by the former CEO of Boeing, circling State Science. Now all of them are in formation behind Frankie’s plane, celebrating their victory.

As they fly over New York City, Dagny and Galt look upon the island of Manhattan and see enormous traffic jams as everybody tries to flee. Word has hit the public about the wholesale demolition of the Midwest, including all routes across the Mississippi, and everybody is racing to move closer to sufficient sources of food.

Dagny recalls that Frisco once told her that the Objectivists would only know they had accomplished their goal when the lights of the greatest city in the world went out. Hey, that sounds incredibly nefarious! And it’s also what our old friend Joel Salatin the Organic Farmer wanted, in a somehow less vindictive way. However you take it, it’s exactly what happens now as the power stations are abandoned and the plane arcs southwest over a suddenly pitch-black concrete jungle.

In the air above the empty plains, Dagny realizes she feels as free as her ancestor Nat must have felt when he set out to explore the open and unpopulated frontier.

Well, unpopulated, aside from a continent’s worth of peaceful people who were callously exterminated by ideological invaders who disguised their sense of entitlement to the land behind a pretense that their economic contracts were morally superior to the common bonds of humanity and a harmonious coexistence with nature. So yes, unpopulated. Aside from that.

Anyway, somewhere on the ground, that patron saint of noble mediocrity, Everyman Eddie Willers, oversees an eastbound train that I can only assume is full of food intended to save thousands of lives because Eddie is not a tremendous egomaniacal asshole.

Sadly the train breaks down in the middle of the desert. Eddie corrals the conductor and engineer to help him try to fix it but they have mostly given up on life and can only roll their eyes at his earnest effort. Calls to all the nearby stations are failing to reach anyone. There is no help coming.

Eddie, knowing it’s mostly futile, tackles the task of repairing the engine himself. Too bad he doesn’t have a perpetual clean-running electric motor lying around. No worries though, because his work is interrupted by a caravan of covered wagons arriving from the west, following the train tracks eastward. Rescue! And look at that: no matter how hard life gets, people pull themselves together with whatever resources are at hand! Ingenuity and ambition will always drive humanity to action, move  us to new destinations and purpose!

Oh no wait, sorry, we’re supposed to be disgusted by this, because of the devolution in the most practical mode of transportation. Or at least, Eddie sure is. He does not take it very well when the ringleader of this antiquated exodus tells him he should abandon the train because there’s no crew left to work it and nowhere to go: the bridge across the Mississip’ is destroyed, the Midwest is a graveyard, and the cities of the eastern seaboard megalopolis have all been abandoned. Sounds pretty reasonable.

When he recovers from the shock of this news Eddie sees that indeed his crew and the train’s scant passengers have jumped aboard the conestogas in order to, you know, not starve to death inside the useless metal husk of a broken vehicle. The conductor pleads with Eddie to join them, but Eddie’s assessment is that this posse is just not smart enough to start a new utopian village on the Galt’s Gulch model, so starving to death in a useless metal husk is the wiser choice. Somewhat… less reasonable.

And this is how we leave the archetypal Everyman of Atlas Shrugged. This is his reward for staying true to the Objectiverse’s rules of moral justice, even when it meant admitting his own inferiority, even if it now means sacrificing (aww shit) his own life. It’s Everyman Eddie, alone in the desert, banging madly and unintelligibly at the control panels and wheels of a useless, dead machine. Any Objectivists in the audience? This is a metaphor for YOU.

Poor Eddie chases a rabbit for sustenance but it gets away. He falls to the ground on the tracks in front of the train and weeps. Silently, he prays to his unrequited love, Dagny Taggart. And I can’t help but think, “What an ineffectual pussy.”

SIDEBAR. Aside from condemning the way Eddie’s characterization says all sorts of demeaning things about Ayn’s view of the average man’s competency and dignity, I would like to say something semi-positive in testament to this poor docile patsy. Throughout the blog I have frequently treated Eddie as Dagny’s faithful pet. If there is any redeeming quality to his final scene, it’s that it’s basically the utterly heartbreaking ending of the Futurama episode “Jurassic Bark” except with people. The “dog” is dumb, but his love is unconditional! Err, wait, no! Unconditional love is evil! Right? Jesus, this universe is falling apart at the seams.

Oh well. Good night, sweet prince…

And here we are in Galt’s Gulch. Valhalla of tremendous egomaniacal assholes. Snow is falling, it is a peaceful winter’s night. New Year’s Eve maybe? In their cozy log cabins, the World’s Greatest Cult Members go about their World’s Greatest Business.

In one cabin, Richard Halley, the World’s Greatest Most Deluded Composer, plays his signature Fifth Concerto.

In another cabin, Midas Mulligan, the World’s Least Diversified Financier, builds a spreadsheet detailing who among his brethren will receive the greatest investments from him in their efforts to rebuild the great cities of the east coast. Which I still don’t understand, by the way. Why would the population flooding back into the rebuilt cities be any more morally upstanding than the population that left? Is there going to be some kind of test? Doesn’t sound very practical. Unless, of course, this whole project has been a deliberate ideological genocide cleansing society of the impure behind a facade of hands-off plausible deniability… Oh.

In another cabin, the Dread Philosopher Ragbeard reads a little Aristotle while his wife, the World’s Most Useless Movie Star, examines… um, a box of make-up samples. Yup, sounds about right.

In another cabin, Judge Narragansett, the World’s Most Ignorant Jurist, finishes his absurd corrections to the Constitution of the United States. Don’t worry, the changes aren’t anything that would be genuinely helpful in real life, like moving to a system of parliamentary elections. No, the Good Judge has added a clause that “congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production or trade,” which I think the Fourth and Fifth Amendments’ protections of private property already cover within all reason. 

But the Judge probably crossed those out, for the Judge has indeed crossed out a whole bunch of passages, the better to resolve “the contradictions in [the Constitution’s] statements that had once been the cause of its destruction.”

Hey, that is SO WEIRD, I could’ve sworn there was already a constitutional crisis in American history that resulted in amendments that resolved “contradictions in its statements.” And I could’ve sworn it successfully prevented the United States’ destruction.

Yeah, yeah, it’s coming back to me now. Those real-life amendments enshrined in the Constitution formal legal equality for all citizens, to protect the rights of millions who had to be freed by the federal government by force, in direct contradiction of the desires of rich aristocrats who rebelled under a false banner of perversely-defined liberty in defense of their sense of economic entitlement. Hey, how did that work out for them? Aah, who can remember!

Pretty weird though, that this vital, defining chapter of the American story hasn’t really come up in this entire novel about a class-based American constitutional crisis. Well, I guess the narrator and heroes have repeatedly referred to the course of history going horribly wrong somewhere in the 2nd half of the 19th century, but they never got all that specific about it. I wonder why…

Finally we arrive at the last cabin, deep in the woods: Francisco’s lodge. Frankie and Rearden are making their plans for rebuilding the national infrastructure. Rearden talks about how Dagny will run their train system and probably charge them an arm and a leg and Francisco laughs merrily.

THEN, all of a sudden, I burst through the fraying narrative boundaries of the Objectiverse like a cosmic consciousness from an alternate dimension, compelled by the evil nature of this world’s native God, and I make potent and real the ecstatic vision lying latent in Francisco’s soul.

In one moment of profound epiphany, he understands that he is the John Locke of this Lost-like tale, used as a puppet by a dark and sinister force posing as his saving grace. John Galt was the Man in Black all along, and Galt’s Gulch was never just a lush and beautiful state of nature, but a holding pen and the world’s only salvation from his malevolent bile.

Clear-eyed and full-hearted, Frisco stands up and tells Hank Rearden that he is leaving Galt’s Gulch forever. For he has seen reason. He has seen that the only thing John Galt ever really did was tell them it was okay to treat other people like irrational animals. And tragically, even after holding out longer than anyone, Dagny fell under his spell too.

But Francisco was uniquely positioned to realize the falsehood of Galt’s cult of personality, to receive my gift of revelation, to realize that Dagny did not gain anything by converting, in fact she lost the very thing that made her special — because Francisco is the only member of this ridiculous cult who actually worked endlessly and tirelessly in pursuit of its goals, sacrificing everything he cared about and lived for, putting himself in danger, and on top of all that, accepting with incredible emotional maturity that he would never get any of it back, including the woman he loved, for whose sake he undertook the whole endeavor, because it wasn’t about his personal pleasure, it certainly wasn’t about any reasonable definition of his own self-interest… it was about justice.

Except it wasn’t, was it? Francisco realizes now that millions, possibly billions of people have died, for no good reason. The entire thing could have been prevented years before. Before the “47%” “formed” and “locked in” a democratic faction that “hobbled” the government’s ability to put reasonable limits on the welfare state. Before the nightmarish doomsday technology of Project X was ever built. How? Oh, if only John Galt had struck up a deeper conversation with Doc Stadler after a lecture or something ridiculously simple like that.

Or, how about this: What if Galt had released his clean perpetual motor to the world, wreaking upon consumerist industrial society the most meritocratic form of capitalistic creative destruction ever seen in the history of civilization, solving in one fell swoop a majority of the world’s most urgent dangers and elevating himself to infinite fame and fortune, leveraging which he could run for President as the living embodiment of human virtue, inspiring citizens the world over with his ideals in a remarkably positive fashion, instead of condemning empathy as immoral and reveling in mankind’s descent into squalor and decrepitude? What if he’d done THAT?

Except he didn’t, did he? Galt turned out to be no better than any other charismatic genocidal mad man. And Francisco admits that he is as guilty as anyone of succumbing to his abhorrent lunacy. He was Galt’s right hand man and primary facilitator.

Only now that it’s too late does he realize the truth, the truth about the myth of Atlas: that in spite of his struggle, perhaps even because of it, the weight of the world on his shoulders was a pleasure to bear. An honor, even. A virtue.

And that is why Francisco must now seek redemption by striking out on his own, into the wilds of post-apocalyptic America. He must wander the earth like Kane from Kung Fu, righting wrongs and teaching men and women how to live for themselves, how to make it in this hard reality we all share, how to find solace in each other and moral fiber within our being.

Don’t worry, he tells Hank, he will not tear down the Gulch like the Gulch tore down the world. Live and let live, is his libertarian creed. Perhaps, some day, Francisco will be called upon to defend freedom, he and the Gulch may come into conflict, if the Objectivists fail to live up to their own creed and form a plutocratic and liberty-infringing regime of class-based institutions that disenfranchise the citizenry, which he’s sure would never happen. But until that day Francisco will simply do his best as an individual, do his best to make the world a better place and himself a better person. That’s just the kind of man he is. And so he must bid Hank farewell.

Rearden, stunned by Francisco’s electrifying gospel, stands and salutes him with the utmost respect. Francisco smiles wryly and shoots him some finger guns or something, and exits, never to be seen again.

Outside, back in the Objectiverse-as-written, Dagny and John Galt stand together at the peak of the cliffs surrounding the valley. They stare out at the dark landscape of the outside world in reverent silence. Galt declares their mission accomplished and marks the sign of the dollar in the air as if he were a profane clergyman anointing the earth with his callow spirit.

But somewhere in that darkness below, the Francisco I have liberated from the tyrannical Ayn-God marches on, braving the void alone, no doubt on track to discover Eddie Willers’ emaciated form desperately clinging to life somewhere out there in the big wide open. He will nurse Eddie back to health and together they will have many adventures, probably about once a week on a basic cable channel, let’s say FX.

This Francisco pauses, turns back to the two small figures on the ledge, with their smallness of character and smallness of mind. He does not yearn to be with them any longer. He sees them for what they are now.

He shrugs.

THE END

3:10 In the Name of the Best Among Us, “Murder Most Foul”

PREVIOUSLY: The core trio of nihilist villains spent a dark night of the soul torturing John Galt for his refusal to save them from their own suicidal impulses. In the face of Galt’s principled calm, Jim Taggart finally had the complete mental breakdown we’ve all been waiting for, and the existentially-shattered bad guys ran away for good.

And so here we are, ladies and gentlemen. The very last chapter of Atlas Shrugged. What a long, strange trip it’s been. One that’s perfectly encapsulated by the fact that this chapter is titled “In the Name of the Best Among Us” and begins with the heroine committing murder.

Yes, quite fitting really, that the narrative climax and moral nadir of the novel are one and the same. This is how it goes down:

Dagny has arrived at the ominous bunker housing Project F where John Galt is being tortured. There is a guard standing outside and Dagny approaches him, announcing that she’s been sent by President Thompson himself and she needs to get inside ASAP.

The guard is confused. Flummoxed, even. Dr. Ferris told him NOT to let anyone in. Now he’s facing CONTRADICTORY ORDERS! OH NO. Whatsoever is he to do? What if she’s lying? What if she isn’t? Somebody’s going to be mad at him!

Dagny draws a gun and aims it point blank at his heart. She tells him that he has two options. He can let her in, or he can get kill’t right and proper. “Gosh, golly, gee whiz miss! I dunno what’s right! I’m ever so simple ‘n all, and I only knows how to obey what’s I been told. You gotsed me all a-foggied up in my mindbrain!”

Dagny says, “I’m going to count to three and then I’m gonna cap your ass like an ice-cold thug.”

“Heavens to Betsy, I’m just a humble country boy what’s never aimed for no higher, how’s ever did I come to this? Lord have mercy, I’ll be wit’ you soon Jesus!”  And then Dagny finishes counting and this idiot gets got.

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.

Sympathy for animals during the callous murder of a human, Dags? How very Tony Soprano of you.

And then Francisco, Hank Rearden, and the Dread Pirate Ragbeard all come out of the shadows, having disposed of the other three guards surrounding the building, which is to say, they bound and gagged them. Which leaves them decidedly alive.

TIME OUT. So, okay, let’s review this little morality play, shall we? Of the four heroes who needed to take out mindless guards, only Dagny killed a person. And never mind that she could have, say, shot him in the hand and taken his weapon, or snuck up behind him and cold-cocked him. Even once she’s pulled the gun and aimed to kill, there are still, clearly, three other people backing her up who are eminently capable of coming up from behind and detaining a goon without resorting to homicide! In short, there is NO EXCUSE for this.

Which means that the entire scene is no more and no less than Ayn Rand’s carefully included, specifically plotted, and consciously intended justification for taking a life above and beyond self-defense, a.k.a. MURDER. This, despite her absolute and uncompromising declaration during Galt’s Speech that such an action represents the vilest most nihilistic form of anti-life. The End, Game Over, Full Stop: Ayn Rand is a loathsome, self-contradicting, literally psychopathic bitchmonster BY HER OWN DEFINITION. Proof, from The Speech:

Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality.

Q. E. Motherfuckin’ D.

“But wait!” you might say, “These people are torturing Galt, so they initiated force first!” But let’s remember that we believe in individual responsibility on this blog, and this guy hasn’t initiated any force himself, doesn’t even know what he’s guarding, and absolutely does not need to die for Dagny to accomplish her mission of ending the use of force against Galt. This is on her. Objection overruled.

“But WAIT!” you might say, “Ayn gives herself an out! She rationalizes this scene in The Speech only two paragraphs after the excerpt you just quoted!” You would be referring to this:

If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.

But considering the extremity of Rand’s convictions about good and evil, this is basically like Ayn saying, “It’s never okay to rape somebody… but if she was asking for it, well, that’s on her.” Like, you know, an illegitimate rape.

So actually, that weird equivocation makes perfect sense.  Ayn is trying to create a category of “illegitimate” murder! That’s ballsy, Rand, I’ll give you that. Trying to hide your flagrant contradictions in plain sight? As Bill Clinton once said, “It takes some brass to accuse a guy of doing what you did.”

At the end of my commentary on Galt’s speech, in teasing out the implications of the Objectivist worldview, I gave Ayn the credit of not endorsing terrorism. But as my friend Max pointed out in the comments, she TOTALLY DOES! This scene is nothing if it isn’t a rationale for killing innocents in the name of your cause because they’re ignorant of and thereby complicit in the corruption of a society gone mad. There is LITERALLY no point here beyond rationalizing politically-motivated violence through moral absolutism. That “Rand the Father” willed this scene into being exposes as a fraud the gospel preached by “Galt the Son.” I don’t know how many more ways I can restate this. There’s no way of getting around it. It’s unforgivable.

TIME IN.

Dagny and the Objectivists (free band name for some prog rockers who are really into ambient mechanical noises) storm into the Project F building and find another guard inside who is apparently too insipid to, you know, guard the place.

In confused awe at the air of authority these intruders carry, the guard asks ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? Why did Rusty let you in?” Francisco says Rusty must have had his reasons. The guard replies, “Well he wasn’t supposed to.”

Francisco replies, “Somebody has changed your suppositions,” which for full effect should be read aloud in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1994 right before he unleashes a hail of subautomatic machine gun rounds on the audience for this amazingly terrible one liner.

But Francisco does NOT unleash a hail of bullets. He shoots the guard in the hand and then Rearden & Ragbeard tie him up, further emphasizing the needless nature of Dagny’s earlier ass-capping.

The gang interrogates the guard about the layout of the structure, how many other stooges are loitering around the place, etc. He says Ferris is gone, but Ferris’ prisoner is still there. The remaining sentries are upstairs in the laboratory playing poker.

It’s Rearden who walks brazenly into the poker game, once again relying on nothing more than charisma and the body language of authority. He insists they hand the prisoner over to him on orders of the President. The chief guard is suspicious but when he picks up the phone he realizes the lines have been cut.

At this he turns on Rearden and draws his gun. Rearden warns him that he’s not alone. The other guards try to cool the chief down. They recognize Rearden and realize that these people are not to be fucked with. But the chief knows only one way to handle this:

The Chief fires on Rearden, hitting him in the shoulder. Francisco, who snuck into the room from the fire exit on the opposite side (the SHITTIEST guards) fires his silenced pistol at The Chief, shattering the man’s hand at the wrist. Seriously, every time Francisco’s ace marksmanship disables a gunman, Dagny’s killing of the first guard becomes more and more apalling and out of line.

Speaking of Dagny, she joins the other two in the room and the slacker guards around the poker table are even more dumbstruck. Understandably so — this is basically the equivalent of being randomly burlged by Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marissa Mayer.

This team of covert CEO spies instructs the guards to lay down their arms. They don’t know who they’re holding, why, or what they’re fighting for. They’re dupes. The Objectivist team does know what they’re doing, why, and what for, and that alone should be reason enough for the guards to defect.

One of the guards does, and The Chief can’t abide it so he dives for his gun with his other hand and kills the defector in one shot. One of the other guards kills The Chief in retaliation. And then the Dread Pirate Ragbeard enters by smashing through the window from a swinging rope. Like you do.

Actually, hold on. Let me get this straight. After they gained entrance to this building through a door, and after all three of his compatriots surrounded this room through its doors, and after the gunfight that inflicted a wound on one of his allies was already over… then Ragbeard runs around outside the building, rigs up an Indiana Jones rope swing and theatrically flies in through a window? What? What kind of useless bullshit is that? God, Ragbeard, you are the DUMBEST character. The DUMBEST. Idiot!

So they tie up the remaining poker players and then have one of them lead the way to Ferris’ office, where there is a secret stone staircase down to the Project F torture chamber. A secret stone staircase? Looks like the good guys aren’t the only ones with a flair for the needlessly theatrical.

Speaking of which, Francisco asks Rearden if he needs any medical attention for the expanding pool of blood staining his shirt, and Rearden is like “Nah bro, blood off my shoulder.” Because as Nietzsche once said, ubermenschen are bulletproof. Oh no, sorry, I’m thinking of Superman.

Anyway, the guards to the torture room don’t put up nearly as much of a fight. They did, after all, see Ferris and Mouch leave in a panic with a catatonic James Taggart in tow. They’re just itching for an excuse to leave. And so leave they do.

Left with no more obstacles, the team of rescuers rush into the torture chamber and find Galt lying calmly on the rack. Dagny runs over to him, crying, and they embrace. “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” Galt asks her, and laughing through her tears she says that no, they did not.

And you know what? As far as narrative closure goes, that pretty accurately sums up how I’ve come to feel about this whole damn book.

—

NEXT WEEK: The conclusive denouement of Atlas Shrugged, and the thrilling climax of Atlas ‘Clubbed.

3:9 The Generator, “The Mindless Consumer”

PREVIOUSLY: John Galt was forced to participate in a fascist propaganda rally, but managed to expose his duress to the world during the broadcast.

Meanwhile, the cowardly Doc Stadler listens to said propaganda rally on his dashboard radio as he flees New York City. Since meeting with Galt, his existential terror has become all-encompassing. This wasn’t helped when President Thompson threatened him with incarceration and potentially torture if Galt didn’t start cooperating. Thompson’s theory was that they needed some leverage over the man, and as his former teacher and the only person he had requested to see during his captivity, Stadler was as good a place as any to start.

So driven by panic and adrenaline, Stadler has bolted for Iowa, where he has some vague idea to take control of Project X and rule the Midwest as his own personal feifdom.

Meanwhile on the radio, when Galt exposes his participation in the rally as a fraud perpetrated at gunpoint, the signal turns into a jumble of screams and shouts and then suddenly cuts out. Stadler goes leadfoot on the accelerator.

Soon enough he arrives at the military installation, called Harmony City, that surrounds the Project X generator. The gate is abandoned, parts of the barbed wire torn down. Trucks and armed men are running around further inward. Stadler ignores the odd circumstances and barrels onward.

When he reaches the control building, the guard is smoking and looking insubordinate and has accessorized his uniform like some kind of guerrilla or militia man. Stadler demands to be let inside and made commander. The guy couldn’t give less of a shit but takes him inside to meet The Boss.

Down in the control room itself, The Boss is instructing his underlings to spread the word from Chicago to Kansas City that he now rules America’s breadbasket and demands exorbitant tithes from all the remaining residents. The Boss, by the way, is Jabba the Hutt, the former G-man who took over Taggart Transcon while Dagny was in Galt’s Gulch. He and his ragtag private army have beaten Stadler to his plan.

Stadler insults and harangues Jabba. He doesn’t know what he’s doing! He’s drunk! He’s completely unqualified to handle this dangerously powerful scientific weapon! Jabba tells Stadler to go screw and starts fucking around with all the control panels just to be a dick. Stadler is like “NOOOO!!!” and then:

The Project X harmony of death whines to life. A shock wave of destructive energy ripples out for hundreds of miles around, felling every structure, killing every innocent, and destroying the Taggart Bridge, last road across the Mississippi. And the eye of the storm is not immune — the Project X control base rises and up and shreds itself to pieces too, collapsing to the ground with the mutilated remains of Jabba and his soldiers and the former Doctor Stadler inside.

Meanwhile, back in New York City:

After Galt raised hell at the rally, all the plutocrats rushed out of the room while Thompson had Galt wrestled to the ground and sent back to his cell/suite. Dagny, inspired by John, snuck back up the hotel and into the room where the Fascists hold their emergency meetings.

Therein she finds everyone freaking out. Goebbels tears his hair out and quits. Doc Ferris is hissing that he TOLD them this would happen. Thompson relinquishes all responsibility, and Ferris takes this opportunity to convince them that with the government completely discredited, their only option left is to let him torture the shit out of ol’ Johnny. Why this would get them anywhere nobody really asks.

A chill runs down Dagny’s spine as she finally realizes the full depravity of these supposedly civilized people. Just as Ferris explains to the rest that his specially designed Persuader, a.k.a. Project F, is located in a soundproof room at the State Science Institute, he remembers that Dagny is there. She returns his gaze dully, shrugs, and lets herself out. Ferris seems to think nothing of it.

I think I forgot to mention that in the last chapter Dagny received a secret letter from Francisco giving her a phone number to call in case of emergency, which is relevant now because call she does. As soon as she’s out on the street she gets on her cell phone.

When Francisco picks up he already knows about the rally and tells her to go to her apartment and office, collect all her valuables and some clothes and other supplies. She does exactly that and we get a roundelay of callbacks to earlier in the book: from her apartment, the Rearden Metal bracelet and the gold coin she was paid in Galt’s Gulch. From her office, the map of the Transcon lines at their long-gone apex and the portrait of her great-grandfather Nat.

But just as she prepares to leave her office, one of her few remaining employees comes in crying. The horror, the horror! He has just learned of the humanitarian atrocity in the Midwest, and the destruction of the bridge. Dagny is momentarily spurred to do her job, but stops herself. She turns to the engineer and tells him there’s nothing she can do for them now, and leaves. She has officially gone Galt; on her way out of the train station she marks the statue of Nat with a big dollar sign graffiti in lipstick.

Outside, Francisco arrives. Dagny joins him and tells him about how the Fascists are flying to State Science with Galt in tow. They head out.

At State Science, Project F is actually up and running already. Quick flight! I guess it was just New York to New Hampshire. Anyway, Galt is strapped to a board and wired up with electrodes. Ferris is supervising the interrogation while Mouch and Jim watch. They run high voltage through various parts of Galt’s body while demanding that he become their ruler. HA! That’s pretty great. For once in this godforsaken novel, the hilarious perversity of the situation comes across as intended instead of ironically doubling back on the author.

After an hour or two of electroshocks, Galt’s heart monitor is spasming wildly, but he remains silent and focuses on meditative breathing. It’s Wesley Mouch who freaks out first. He asks Ferris to stop, for surely Galt will obey them now. But Ferris scoffs. The point isn’t to make him obedient, the point is to break him completely, until he believes in their philosophy and works with them voluntarily.

But when Ferris puts the question to Galt he just stares at them unblinkingly, and they all start screaming angrily at him.

“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!”

It’s all to no avail — they’ve shorted the circuit on their device and the power generator fades out. They crowd around the box and Ferris commands some lackey to fix it! Fix it! But nobody knows how. It’s actually John Galt himself who, smiling wryly, tells them how to get it back up and running. The lackey sees the pointed mocking look in Galt’s eyes and, suddenly realizing the disturbing situation he’s agreed to be in, he runs away, leaving the triumvirate of villainy alone with Sexy Capitalist Jesus.

SIDEBAR: Ferris personally designed this device. And yet he doesn’t know how to fix it, and Galt, who has not looked at its internals, does. It’s a nifty little scene, but I have to call bullshit on this one.

Jim explodes in urgent fury and starts tinkering with the Project F generator himself. He declares that they must destroy Galt’s mind, that it’s a moral imperative they eradicate his ideas from existence. 

But now even Ferris and Mouch are starting to have their doubts. They remind Jim that they cannot afford to kill the only man who can protect them from the anarchy they have unleashed on the world.

At this, Jim has a moment of clarity and screams madly, like a rabid animal. He has suddenly seen the truth of himself, the truth he has fought so hard to obscure. This is his nadir, the mental breakdown he has spent the last five chapters sliding toward, the triumph of his nihilism over his willful refusal to admit it:

He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. … It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts.

A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt’s evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy.

As all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal his hatred of existence—he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live—he was seeing his face as the face of a killer who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.

Taggart collapses into a catatonic state on the floor. Ferris and Mouch are completely unnerved. They call his name but get no response. Shouting to the guard that they will come back, they swear they’ll come back, they pick up Taggart’s limp body and drag him out of the room, more to escape Galt’s unblinking stare than to actually help their friend. They know that he’s a vegetable now.

Jim Taggart, gone forever — never really there at all.

3:8 The Egoist cont’d, “Prisoner’s Dilemma”

PREVIOUSLY: John Galt was captured. 

But you’d never know it from his jail cell, which is the Presidential Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria or The Ritz or whatever you want to call the fictionalized luxury hotel where Francisco used to live. I also assume this used to be Francisco’s room, but if it isn’t that’s a wasted opportunity.

Anyway, armed guards have sealed off and are patrolling the floors sandwiching Galt’s, and to explain this away, enter President Thompson.

The Prez plays the usual ingratiating games with ol’ John. “So glad to see you! Let’s strike a deal! We know you’re brilliant and we want your help– err, we want to help you. I’m willing to give you Wesley Mouch’s job, you can be Economic Dictator of America! Great, right? How would you like to be compensated?”

Galt laughs, not mockingly, just amused. He tells Thompson that the government has nothing to offer him. Thompson keeps insisting. Does Galt want to get rid of price controls? Bust all the unions? Whatever he wants.

Galt tells him he doesn’t get it: he doesn’t want that kind of power. He thinks nobody should have that kind of power.

Thompson still isn’t listening. John’s like, “Fine if you want to show you’re serious, then abolish income taxes and fire all the government employees, including yourself.” Thompson balks.

So the rest of the scene is a repudiation of the idea that you can work within the system. Galt doesn’t think he could take the job and, say, get rid of capital gains and corporate and income taxes, abolish the minimum wage, dismantle the bureaucracy, and then resign. Thompson’s reaction proves that Galt would meet too much resistance from entrenched interests, making the plan futile, and besides that if it spurred economic growth it would effectively bail out the moochers and looters like they always get bailed, and thus fall short of sufficiently “purifying” the nation*.

[*Hey, you know what’s creepy and has basically never been anything but a euphemism for genocide or generalized mass murder? The “purification” of a nation. So weird, right?]

Anyway, please be sure to note that this plan Galt rejects is more or less Paul Ryan’s explicit, name-brand plan. SO WEIRD, right? Whatever, I don’t know, maybe Paulie Blue Eyes just stopped reading after the Speech. Not that he absorbed the ultimatum in that either.

It’s now a week or so after Thompson’s visit, and the state-run media has been boasting headlines claiming John Galt has joined the nation’s leaders and promises to restore prosperity. The press secretary (and/or Minister of Propaganda) is losing his shit because this spin isn’t moving public opinion or boosting morale.

Thompson is holding a meeting in the hotel with the cabinet and some other national leaders, like Kinnan the Union Boss who was in the room when the cabal abolished the Constitution with an executive order. Whereas all the others are in a snit over Galt’s Zen approach to captivity, Kinnan is once again amused and clear-eyed about the nature of the situation. He kinda likes Galt.

SIDEBAR: I find it interesting that Ayn makes the labor leader the one who sees through all the bullshit. Dr. Ferris does this too, but he simply believes in the superiority of nihilism. Kinnan, as the elite representative of the working class, seems to be a man who believes in honest labor but accepts that his job colluding with the management is inevitably corrupting. Sort of the enabler that Galt refuses to be. Of course, one could take that to mean that Kinnan should have led his workers in a strike like Galt does to preserve his integrity, but Ayn says that all strikes in history prior to Galt’s were attempted by whiny entitled little bitches. So… Kinnan: interesting. Ayn: still a fuckface.

Where were we?

The Minister of Propaganda, let’s just call him Goebbels, wants Galt to make a public appearance to prove they aren’t completely full of shit. Dr. Ferris vetoes this idea as just asking for trouble. Kinnan and Thompson both express their begrudging admiration for Galt again, and Jim Taggart, who has been in a spiral of mental instability for about five chapters now, is lashing out hysterically whenever they admit this.

Ferris suggests they torture Galt until he cracks. Thompson rejects this idea outright, because he wants to believe that they’re better than that. Sadly, this lends him more moral integrity than a certain former real-life US president who shall remain named George W. Bush. Suffice it to say that this lowest bar of human decency having been cleared, Thompson adjourns the meeting.

Spinning newspaper montage! Mobs of farmers are systematically burning every mansion and government building in South Dakota. California has descended into a civil war between a “soybean cult of Orient-admirers” and some kind of Western theocratic movement composed of religious zealots and former oil men calling themselves The Republican Party “Back to God.”

President Thompson, having announced a new “John Galt Plan” for securing the nation, but still getting nowhere with Galt himself, visits Dagny. He asks her if, as the sole remaining asset the government has, she can think of any way to influence Galt. She lies without hesitation:

Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor.

And this is the heroine after she finally embraces the right values! And it goes on like this! The term “inanimate objects” repeatedly crops up as the proper way to view literally everyone who’s left. Ayn is a psychopath you guys. Like, textbook.

Dagny wonders if a single person would protest if the bureaucrats killed Galt. Dags, I’m pretty sure that the public likes Galt and — in case you hadn’t noticed — there is armed revolt and insurrection going on all over the place. You are maybe too difficult to please.

Cut to: Thompson, at Dagny’s double-agenty suggestion, showing Galt a bunch of confidential reports illustrating just how close the system is to complete collapse. He thinks this’ll make Galt feel guilt. Dagny knows it will help him see the light at the end of the tunnel. At this meeting Jim Taggart has accompanied POTUS, and while Thompson is still acting all friendly Jim can barely contain himself, frantically spewing incredulous accusations. I kind of like that Jim calls Galt out with the line “You don’t have a monopoly on truth!” but in general the terrified indignation is spilling out at the speed of verbal diarrhea. Thompson realizes Jim’s fucking it up and leads him out.

Cut to: Thompson, this time with Goebbels. Goebbels tells Galt that they agree, Galt is totally right on principle, but he should feel some pity for all the innocents being consumed in the chaos. He shows Galt letters pleading for his help signed by schoolchidren, crippled veterans, the elderly, single mothers. You know, real 47%ers. Galt brushes them off, asking rhetorically if they who ask for his pity ever had any pity for Hank Rearden. In response, I vomit all over the page. What a whiny, entitled little bitch!

Cut to: Thompson, this time with Dr. Ferris. Speaking of vomit… Ferris tells Galt that to address the issue of mass starvation, he will kill one third of the children and elderly of the country, and if Galt doesn’t intervene then the moral responsibility for it is on him. Galt won’t even say anything to this one and Thompson is horrified. He literally throws Ferris out of the room, and Galt’s just looking at him like, “See? Still think you’re better than that?”

Meanwhile, roving bands damage the Taggart Bridge, now the only route across the Mississippi. Some faction in California has taken the train depots there and are holding the eastbound supplies of food for ransom. At Taggart Transcon HQ, Eddie Willers steps his game up and tells Dagny he’s going out there himself to solve the crisis. Yeah Eddie! He bids Dagny a potentially permanent farewell. They shake hands and she acknowledges that she respects his feelings for her. How generous.

Back at Galt’s luxurious prison, Thompson is at the end of his rope and asks Galt straight up if there’s anybody he actively wants to talk to. Galt considers it and says he wants to see Dr. Stadler. Thompson nods.

Cut to: Stadler, arriving at the hotel in a snowstorm under orders to see the prisoner. He had an anxiety attack and refused to comply at first, but as has been true for quite some time now, he simply swallows his own instincts and does what he’s told. This willful passivity does nothing to quell the feverish delirium that grows the closer he gets to the door, scrambling his ability to think, making him dizzy and woozy.

He steps into the room, the door clicks shut behind him. Galt is standing in the corner staring out the window. Unprovoked, Stadler spills his guts, apologizing to Galt, making excuses for himself, saying a whole bunch of nonsense that’s intended to be an Objectivist parody of non-Objectivist nonsense. It’s nonsense. In short, Stadler has devolved into the scarecrow from Oz: a straw man who wishes that he only had a brain. As his tirade goes on it circles from an apologia to a resentful threat. He lashes out angrily at Galt and says Galt is the kind of man who must be destroyed for the world to function. And if you think about it, that’s true.

But Galt turns to him and says “I know you are, but what am I?” and Stadler retreats in fright, banging on the door until they let him out.

SIDEBAR #2: “I know you are, but what am I?” is essentially the entire public relations strategy of the Republican Party. If the Democrats accurately point out that the Romney/Ryan campaign is made up of two brazen liars disguising themselves as moderates to pursue a radical agenda that will fundamentally alter American society, the GOP messaging machine retaliates by winking at the base and saying “I know you are, but what am I?”

Aaanyway. Cut to: Goebbels coming by for a return visit. He has a couple of heavies with him. He commands Galt to dress in formalwear and come with them. Goebbels has got his wish: they’re going to force Galt to make a public appearance with them. One of the heavies jams a gun in the small of Galt’s back.

“Don’t make any false moves,” he said in an expressionless voice.

“I never do,” said Galt.

Okay fine, that line was great.

Goebbels leads Galt into the grand ballroom of the hotel, where all of the coutnry’s remaining plutocrats have gathered in cocktail dresses and tuxes and gowns and applaud wildly upon Galt’s arrival. Dagny is there, having something of a panic attack herself at having to maintain her dual identity when John is practically within arm’s reach.

The mood in the room is panicky in general. Everybody is doing their best to ignore how fucked up the atmosphere in this hotel is. Nobody has an appetite for the buffet except for Ferris, who I imagine just plowing down cocktail shrimp with a shrug while everybody else looks sad.

The TV cameras warm up, a huge LED panel behind the dais illuminates, and Thompson announces that they are about to roll out the John Galt Plan for Peace & Prosperity! The cameras pan across all the political leaders and settle on Galt, who obviously looks like Kennedy to everybody else’s Nixon.

Dagny thinks that there’s no way this sham ceremony could possibly work as each of the bullshit artists takes a turn giving a vacuous speech about how much they love John Galt and how proud they are to be working together. On stage, Thompson leans over to Galt and whispers that John will have to say a few words at the end to seal the deal. What an idiot.

So Thompson gets up and gives a whole speech about how there will now be three meals a day and a house and a car in the garage and free electricity for everyone forever, all thanks to John Galt and his wonderful humanitarian generosity, and then cedes the floor.

And shocking no one, John Galt leaps up, exposing Goebbel’s gun to the audience. Everyone gasps in shock. Galt storms the podium and barks at the world to “GET OUT OF MY WAY!” and the whole place erupts in chaos.

NEXT: 3.9 The Generator, “The Mindless Consumer”

3.8 The Egoist, “The Apocalypse of Apathy”

Galt’s speech is over. The assembled political brain trust (well, “brain” “trust”) immediately goes into panicky denial mode. Jim Taggart in particular is in the throes of a desperate manic episode.

As they work to convince themselves the common man is too stupid to buy Galt’s call for a peaceful revolution, and to figure out how to spin this in their favor, Dagny steps forward. “Your only option is to resign. You’ve been exposed as frauds. Give up your political power and maybe the real elites return.”

The cronies grumble but President Thompson didn’t win his office by being a bad politician — he calms everybody down. One should hear out all arguments and viewpoints, no harm in it. Thank you Dagny, I appreciate your opinion. Please don’t consider us your enemy.

Dagny, having said her piece, tugs on Eddie Willers’ leash and they head back to the car. As soon as they’re out, Doc Stadler turns to Thompson. “You aren’t actually thinking of working with them, are you?” Thompson is. Galt is an asset. He wants to cut a deal with him. Stadler scoffs. Galt would never go for it. They need to find him and kill his ass to death.

Even these creeps find Stadler’s sudden certainty disturbing, but either way the next move is to find Galt. Stadler is the only one who knows how: tail Dagny.

At that moment, Dagny and Eddie are returning to the Transcon offices. Eddie, still in shock, confesses to Dagny that he knows John Galt. How’s that? Galt was the grimy Prole whose ear Eddie was always bending in the mess hall! You remember that character? Neither did I! Literally when I first read this I was like, “Huh? Oh right, that guy.” I mean, he basically never spoke and Eddie’s monologuing was boring as shit every time. Nevertheless, if you consider either this noun or verb to apply, then the ‘twist’ is ‘revealed.’

Dagny makes Eddie promise never to mention this to anyone, nor go looking for Galt, for his safety and their own. Eddie consents, and asks Dagny if she’s going to quit now too. She will not; she need only bide her time for the cronies to abandon their posts.

How does that work out? Well, over the next few months social order breaks down (to whatever small extent it hasn’t already). A bunch of people disappear of course. Others get into physical fights over philosophical differences, like a lady who has her jaw broken by some random dude for telling her child to give one of his toys to a neighbor kid. Ayn sides with the assailant, clearly*. Also, apparently the politicians were right to say that the masses were too dumb to revolt peacefully.

[According to one of the sources I’ve read, though I can’t remember which one, Ayn’s mother once asked 7-year old Ayn to give up some of her toys for a year. Ayn, being Ayn (or at that point, Alyssa), gave up all of her favorites in anticipation of how rewarding it would feel to get them back after this exercise in patience and will power. A year passed and Ayn asked Mom for her toys back. Mom was like, “What? Oh, right. Sorry kiddo, I donated that shit to charity.” So there’s that, for whatever it’s worth.]

President Thompson gives regular addresses preaching tolerance and moderation, peace and the rule of law. This is a biting satire of… reasonableness, I guess?  He promises that the state is working with John Galt to address the economic crisis, while at the same time sending out secret signals and investigators to find Galt and — per his plan from the night of the speech — ask for Galt’s help for real.

Eventually Thompson calls in Dagny to ask her face to face if she can find Galt for him. He’s willing to hand all power over to Galt. Dagny says she doesn’t know where to find him (this is a lie, she has his address based on the Transcon payroll records).

Thompson says he won’t abandon his office until Galt shows up to take over — considering the violence and anarchy, he can’t in good conscience just dissolve the government in its entirety. Dagny tells him to start rolling back taxes and regulations, then. He refuses. He wants to confer with Galt and won’t take any action until he gets a meeting.

Dagny takes this as her cue to leave and Thompson oh so casually says he sure hopes his allies-cum-rivals like Stadler and Ferris don’t find Galt and kill him before Thompson’s more peaceful faction can strike a deal. The militant wing of the government wants to crack down, institute the death penalty for civil infractions to squelch dissent, etc. Basically go the full fascist. Oh well! Too bad I have no way of knowing if Galt’s safe! he says. Dagny’s blood is chilled, but she betrays nothing.

Cut to: a terrified and ultra-focused Dagny at four in the morning a week later, sneaking through the slums of Alphabet City to John Galt’s apartment. Thompson’s insinuations got to her. She’s been looking for Galt in direct contradiction of her orders to Eddie, but Galt has abandoned his job as a menial proletarian. This visit is her last hope.

Moody atmospheric wandering, blah blah blah. Alphabet City is completely abandoned, reminding her of the ghost towns of the midwest she visited waaay back in Part One. To think Galt’s been living here!

[A] city that had left him in these slums for twelve years was damned and doomed to the future of Starnesville.

But the city didn’t “leave him” there! He chose to live there of his own free will! GAH.

Dagny finds Galt’s tenement, makes her way up to his apartment and prepares to knock on the door, but her head is spinning with too much adrenaline and the next thing she knows he’s opened the door, pulled her inside, and kisses her.

She’s thrilled that he’s alive but he sits her down and tells her there’s no time. He’s sure she was followed, and that the feds will be busting down the door shortly. Probably already set up a perimeter — though to be fair to Dagny, in fiction a secure perimeter has never once managed to be effective, ever. Don’t be a slacker, John.

Galt tells Dagny that he’s glad she came, but there’s only one thing left to do now. When the authorities arrive, she has to claim that she doesn’t know him, was investigating this “John Galt” listed on her payroll for the first time. She has to hand him over and pretend to have finally committed to the fascists’ side.

Why?! she wants to know. Galt tells her that they need him too much to hurt him, but if they know about their relationship they’ll torture her and he’ll break. She realizes he’s right and consents.

While they still have a few minutes together, John shows Dagny his super-secret mad scientist laboratory that he keeps hidden behind a closet door. No rotating bookcase? John, what did I just say about slacking.

The lab is standard mad scientist stuff. Boards full of blinking lights, chalkboard full of equations, presumably some glowing beakers bubbling over Bunsen burners. But Dagny’s attention is focused most on two things: first, a working version of Galt’s clean and perpetual motor. Second, a newspaper clipping of her standing triumphant on the day the John Galt line opened.

Galt tells her the look on her face embodied his values, and they make out some more. Then they hear boots coming up the stairs of the tenement and leave the secret lab. Well that was productive.

Once back in the rundown apartment proper, Galt opens the door. Three soldiers and a g-man in a trenchcoat enter and ask if he is John Galt, THE John Galt. He’s all, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and then Dagny acts out her previously assigned role.

“He is John Galt! Take him away, officers.” And the g-man is like, “No no no don’t worry, Mr. Galt, we’re huge fans. We want to help you achieve your goals.”

Galt gets in on the roleplaying. “Whatever, man. Just tell me who the hell is this woman?” And the g-man tells him not to worry again, Ms. Taggart is just a patriot doing her duty. Anyway, Mr. Galt, please come with us!

Galt asks if he’s being arrested. G-man says of course not, even as the soldiers begin ransacking the apartment searching for evidence. They eventually come to the lab door but it won’t budge. G-man asks John to open the door, but he refuses. G-man says he doesn’t want to have to use force, but Galt is like, “Force is the subtext of what you’re doing here, dude, deal with it.”

The soldiers bust down the door but as they snap the lock there’s a rush of wind from inside, and when they go in to investigate the lab turns out to be a completely barren room with a thick layer of dust and ash on the floor. Galt had the place booby-trapped to disintegrate upon forced entry. This waste of his work would be totally unnecessary if John had just built that secret swiveling bookcase, but so it goes.

Confused and unsettled, the state agent and his muscle back out of the lab. Galt tells them he’s ready to go, and they escort him and Dagny out.

—

NEXT: 3.8 The Egoist cont’d, “Prisoner’s Dilemma”

3:7 This is John Galt Whining, part 3

By his own estimation, John Galt’s podcast and its monopoly on all media streams worldwide has been going on for about two hours now. He has outlined the following philosophy:

1) The true human spirit is the spirit of ambition, achievement, intelligence, and self-reliance. It is impossible to embody this spirit if one does not believe in the unlimited power of one’s intellect and will.

2) The false human spirit, practiced by most of the world wittingly or unwittingly, is the spirit of cowardice, neediness, humility, complacency, and self-evasion. By lowering the bar for the definition of human nature, these moral/spiritual/economic/political weaklings are implicitly enabling, even promoting, a culture of death and dissolution.

And you know what? Putting aside differences among people about which other people should fit into which category, this rubric seems like something a lot of us buy into to some degree or another. A cynical degree perhaps, but if we’re being honest we all struggle with pessimism about the quality of human beings when regarded en masse. There is something deeply relatable here.

With this paradigm in mind, John Galt is echoing the call to action of ’60s liberal activist Mario Savio:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Galt inverts Savio’s imagery, though, seeing the human spirit in the machinery itself. He wants to remove the levers and gears and wheels of the meritocratic elite, to save them from the corrosive effects of the commodity being processed — namely the other, inferior human beings. Doesn’t the quality of the product of the machine say something about the quality of the machine itself? Also, aren’t the inferiors the owners/runners of the machine too, in this version? It’s all a little confusing. Let’s just say that in John Galt’s worldview any metaphor for global society as a dehumanizing machine is bound to get a little convoluted.

And maybe that’s why the details of his views are so reductive — he has no other choice.  His argument is getting really weird and tangled up in itself. He hails certain people throughout history as his intellectual and moral predecessors, and who are they? The people who sacrificed their own potential, who “function at a fraction of their capacity” because they’re bitter about the world and characterized by their “revulsion.”

But aren’t these the most despicable people of all? People who abandon their value, their hope? Aren’t they the walking dead, the implicit zero-worshippers? Doesn’t their attitude betray Galt’s core value of proving one’s moral worth through realizing one’s potential? And yet he pities them, valorizes them for vilifying the world…

Galt finally makes the following explicit: he is calling for massive civil disobedience, just like every idealistic left-wing college activist you’ve ever met. He is opting out of a broken system, and because he and his ilk are the most powerful and competent citizens, the system is inevitably breaking down faster and faster. The only way to save yourself is to likewise opt out. To put your skills and intelligence to use from the ground up and for you and your loved ones only.

Populism is now creeping in at the edges. The common people, too, should go on strike! This is the purpose of broadcasting his philosophy to the world at large, to empower the masses. By virtue of their self-sufficiency, the worthy will prove their worth, and the unworthy will perish. This man, who hails civilization and rationality, who speaks of naturalists as savages, is suggesting that the true measure of a man’s moral value is determined by the law of the jungle.

I’m reminded of a quote by the great American philosopher Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said he enjoyed paying his taxes because they “bought him civilization.”

Now Galt turns to directly address those listeners (like me) who have ambivalent feelings about all this.

He accuses me of trying to avoid reality when I say I don’t have to make an extreme and radical choice.  He scathingly rebukes basically everything I articulated as my philosophy, my choice to value conservative judiciousness, to aspire to the virtue of adaptability to any circumstance.  And then he says this:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

And this is when my ambivalence dissolves, and I know that I am right and John Galt is wrong. Because the middle is not always evil. And quite often it is vital to consider more than two facets of an issue to decide well between right and wrong. 

Galt and his authorial God, they believe that to admit the possibility of non-absolutes is to reject the reality of all absolutes. This is irrational. The Rand-God of the Objectiverse, and Galt by extension, has built her house on a logical fallacy.

So I hold this truth to be self-evident: that not all ideas are created equal, and Ayn Rand’s were born defective and degenerate, and this is why she spends 1100 pages aborting her own universe.

As I said in articulating my philosophy, though I value flexibility, sometimes certainty and stubbornness are called for. Now is one of those times.

John Galt rails against my false moral code as preventing me from “casting the first stone,” mere pages after he asserted the absolute wrongness of initiating force.

Galt spends several pages more telling us fence-sitters what we believe, and why it is damnably wrong. He urges us to embrace his philosophy, for all alternatives are evil, and “no man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.”

You must believe in yourself, believe in your goodness, Galt declares inspirationally, his attitude toward his audience getting increasingly bipolar.

Galt describes the innocence of children as a form of pure rationality — and there the Ayn-God goes again, proving herself incapable of dealing with the reality of human development. Galt preaches that one should never lose touch with one’s inner child, and I really do think it sad, all this common sense, all this age-old wisdom and good advice, mangled and chained by all thse perverse and self-defeating conditions.

So in the name of a superior flexibility and openness, let us appreciate the inspirational parts once more. Galt addresses us all again, tells us we have the choice to embrace life and love existence, to cherish our minds and our ability to make something of ourselves. “Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.” Accept that “man is an end in himself.”

And I love that! I love that sentence. Of my own philosophy I wrote, “it is a paradigm for living life as an art form … it’s about being your best self as an end in itself.” And I would be so happy to work with Rand and Galt, to share this common ground and agree to disagree on the rest. To compromise for mutual benefit.

But they will not admit of disagreement, they will brook no compromise. For them, it is all or nothing. Literally.

And this is why they must get nothing. Why Rand’s bastardized heirs in the real life Republican Party must be denied power and reduced to powerlessness. If you, John Galt, Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand by any name — if you insist on all or nothing, insist that the time has come for a principled stand, then I, the compromiser, the accomodator, the non-absolutist… I will take all, and you can have the nothing.

For nothing is the measure of the logic of your code, and nothing is therefore what you deserve. We the People will give you what you want, Randians, what you secretly desire and seek to deny through evading true self-knowledge: nothing.

Galt says “only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience,” and yet Galt’s vision of rational thought is this very standard. He claims logic and reason are the fundamental code of reality, and thus that rationality is omniscient. He declares rationality intrinsic and pure in childre, that it is automatic. And in reality, that reality which he so seeks to deny, indeed to destroy, this omniscience and this automaticity is, yes, impossible. 

Galt’s absolutism, his belief in human perfectibility, is based on a mystic misattribution. He blanks himself out. He is what he condemns. He has removed himself from the world by his own admission. It is his defining decision. He has zeroed himself. He does not need to worship zero, for he is a zero.

I see it now! I see it in the litany of conditions he places on our redemption, in these final pages of his speech, in the dictums he proclaims which have turned out to be so disastrous for the real world, for the real America, for our real politics.

I see the plea for help, and I see the cannibalism, in his equating a plea for help with cannibalism. I see his cowardice in his immediate qualification and conditioning of that statement, his defense of helping someone if you deem the person in need of help to be virtuous — a statement itself qualified to depend entirely on the qualities he subjectively categorizes as virtuous. Look at how he compromises his own absolutes in absolute contradiction of his own absolute against compromising absolutes. Absolutely contradictory!

I see the insecurity in his insistence that the standard of perfection is not impossible. It is, and just as he claims, he is the proof.  His strength is so fragile, so brittle, and afraid. His self-defeat, his self-negation, his subconscious nihilism… it’s so clear, and so obvious, to anybody who dares to think, who dares to be a man.

Galt approaches his whimpering conclusion. He outlines the framework of a minimal libertarian state, as if he has proved its necessity and history has not proved its inadequacy. He declares all other social structure to operate by a code of conduct by which “you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his,” as if this dynamic is not a danger when “bank account” is substituted for “gang.”

He grants one more moment of praise for the immeasurable value of a great idea or innovation. One more insight about the retarding effect of economic and legislative uncertainty on growth. And then one more fist, furiously shaken in the direction of janitors and menial laborers for not earning their paychecks and their livelihoods by intellect. You were so close, John! But no, his disregard for dignity is undignified, his disgust disgusting.

His final rallying cry: all men and women of heroism, break the back of the system with us! Abandon the villains in your midst, live alone, or in like-minded communities, and when global civilization collapses, we will find each other and rebuild the world anew!

This rabid dog of reason, this hollow braggart and bully of rhetoric, he dares preach the value of the human spirit while he warns those who retain sympathy for their fellow man that they must sever the bonds of affection with their kin. Give up on life so that you may live! he commands. Join me in my historically horrific desire to purge and purify, like a Jacobin or a Bolshevik!  Join me in my cradle of obfuscation and denial of my own truth! Reclaim your individuality… by being just like me.

Galt directs this last plea surreptitiously at Dagny. And then back to the broader audience, to you and me, he recites his mantra, that one should not live for others nor others for you. He signs off, leaving us to digest his poisonous message.

And you know what? He was right about one thing — he has made the truth about himself clear, and his philosophy naked and plain. It is ugly.

—

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPEECH — John Galt & Ayn Rand versus Reality: Compare and Contrast

NEXT — 3:8 The Egoist, “Apocalypse of Apathy”

 

3.7 This is John Galt Whining, part 2

PREVIOUSLY: John Galt clarified what he believes in — free will, fundamentally and without qualification — he shall pronounce unto us the various evils of believing in… anything else. Specifically, religion. Aaaand GO:

Galt declares that the Christian doctrine of original sin is the foundation of all “mystic” morality and points out various ways in which this doctrine proves religious values perverse.

Note, Galt says, that in the myth of The Fall man’s crime is knowledge, and that the Randian virtues of labor and desire are punishments. Note further that this view of the worldly and physical as fallen pits mind and body against each other. Consider the distress man has suffered for imagining his physical and spiritual desires to be in innate opposition! Fie, fie upon your God! Galt says.

Galt points out two camps of evil proselytizers, “the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness.”  Spiritualists dare to put limits on human knowledge by claiming God is the ultimate reality and beyond our comprehension. Well, fair enough. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but it is an accurate summation. Meanwhile, materialists undermine individual liberty by claiming abstract Society is the ultimate good.

Uhh… what?

So first of all, categorizing materialists as ‘mystics’ seems a little bizarre. Secondly, calling them radical socialists as a class seems… well, par for the course, I guess. Once again Ayn’s attempts to bind her cosmology to her political economy utterly fail to make sense.

Next up: sacrifice. Did you know it’s evil? It is! Well, if you define it strictly as giving up something valuable or virtuous for something shitty and worthless. Which Galt does, with this lovely example:

If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty.

Yes, you awful superficial loveless mother, don’t sacrifice your values — abandon that fucking kid already, like a real hero! Fuck’s sake.

On we go, passing various Gross Mischaracterizations along the way. This train is going off the rails fast, though. Galt has decided that under the logic of sacrifice, all exchanges of value are zero-sum thefts, never mutually beneficial. Sure, if you operate within a narrow definition of sacrifice that you invented just moments ago so as to disqualify inconsequential outlier examples like a mother’s love.

Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Because writ large, a morality of sacrificing your self to meet the world’s needs is impossible to achieve. You would get sacrificed, and the world’s needs would still not be met. Take that, Jesus! Although to be fair I can’t really argue the point.

Spiritualists hide this futility by claiming possession of a sixth sense that contradicts and overrides the physical five. Materialists simply “declare that your senses are not valid, and that [materialist] wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means.” Pfft, who’s claiming that? (Somewhere in the world, Sam Harris rolls his eyes for reasons he cannot explain, because none of us knows why we really do anything because we don’t have free will.)

Basically, Galt says, both of these camps are just trying to wish reality away. If reality is A, spiritualists would rather it be Not-A. Thus their worship of the unreal, and their aspiration to non-existence. Materialists… well, Galt seems extremely confused as to what materialism actually is.

Really, Galt and Ayn are materialists. They believe in an objective reality that obeys the laws of physics, cause and effect, and they reject the claim that there is a plane of existence outside this.

Yet they also explicitly reject the claim that the mind is a mere byproduct of matter. So they are also spiritualists, since positing a free will that can alter the course of an otherwise physics-bound, deterministic reality necessarily suggests some unknown dimension of reality through which abstract thought can influence tangible matter. EITHER/OR, Ayn! Either/Or!

“The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles,” Galt taunts those mystics who would ignore the demands of logic. My point exactly, dude. Go fuck yourself. But no, we must put aside the fact that Galt has stumbled blindly into an eternally recursive paradox defining the relationship between self and reality,  because he’s still talking.

And just to add insult to injury he’s whining like a bitch about how the strong are the victims of the weak now. Was that a theme of this book? If so, too subtle! Needed another couple hundred pages of laborious exposition.

Focusing on the “mystics of muscle,” the godless materialists who have taken over the government (Psych 101: Ayn is channeling her childhood memories of Soviets & Bolsheviks!), Galt points out that maxims such as “I know I know nothing” and “There are no absolutes” are paradoxes. Apparently Galt is able to identify paradoxes now. Hey John, I’ve got a couple to run by you…

BAH, Galt cries, don’t you see?! The secret wish of these nihilists-in-charge is to return man to the synesthetic state of a baby, drowning in magical ignorance, unable to distinguish between subjects and objects, unable to think in coherent and discrete thoughts or integrate them into higher knowledge. These bastards want to dissolve the mind and the self into nothingness! A nothingness just like DEATH! DEEAAATTHHH!

Oi, and here we go with the education system again. Our teachers are teachers of DEATH! They instruct the impressionable youth to believe in nothing, and especially not facts about objective reality, and to rely entirely on magical thinking, like a “savage.”  Is… is that what college was like in the USSR, Ayn? No wonder they lost the Cold War. And I’m pretty sure the CEO of Boeing didn’t reinvent the laws of aerodynamics, so you can fuck right off.

Despite this Gross Mischaracterization of materialism and a liberal education as promoting magical thinking, Galt does get off a good line against the “free will is an illusion” argument:

Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’ and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen.

Zing! And yet somehow this pithy retort becomes part of an argument for laissez faire capitalism. GAH, give it up already! I’m sure there are libertarians out there who believe in material determinism. Come on, Ayn, where’s your imagination?*

[*…and other questions it’s 800 pages too late to ask.]

Galt doesn’t give it up already, obviously, and unleashes another furious rant about how the suffering of rich people is the surest evidence of the dehumanizing nature of modern society. I think downgrading the vast majority of mankind into a category of “subhuman moral pervert” is dehumanizing, but hey, what do I know.

The bottom line is this: a “mystic” is pure evil. If you do not accept Galt/Rand Objectivism explicitly or implicitly, you are a mystic. And whether a mystic seeks to negate the existence of  material reality or the existence of ethereal mentality, he seeks to negate his own existence thereby. Therefore, inevitably, a mystic is an “anti-living object who seeks, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of [its] soul. … [H]is ideal is death,  his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.”

Holy shit, is that what the world looks like from inside Ayn Rand’s head? Because that is fucking terrifying.

Next week, John takes us home by telling us what he actually likes about humanity. Namely, himself.

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPEECH: Ayn Rand’s Fear of Existentialism and Mystery

3.7 This is John Galt Whining, part 1

Here we are, ladies and gentlemen. John Galt, having hijacked every radio frequency in the world (or something), shall now proceed to explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything to the sorry population of earth. I’m going to engage The Speech pretty seriously going forward, but I will breeze through this first part, because it’s the driest of the dry and, to be honest, pretty fuckin’ dumb. Brace yourselves.

—

LO, puny mortals! Mankind has followed a perverse morality and now suffers the consequences! All past moral codes are evil, because they are ‘mystical’ and/or ‘social.’ These false moralities value sacrifice and a belief in something larger than yourself. HORRIBLE!

The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. … [He] has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.

So one must choose values. Except there’s really only one choice, ‘existence or non-existence.’ Existentialism or nihilism. Does that mean that if you haven’t killed yourself you’re doing something right? No! It means that all value judgments are really choices between cherishing life and praying for death, up to and including your taste in smooth v crunchy peanut butter (crunchy peanut butter is the peanut butter of nihilism).

Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer[.]

Ah, so the thing that differentiates us from plants and animals is the capacity for suicide. Are you feeling inspired yet? Wait, it gets better:

A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

Okay then. How reasonable. If you’re keeping score at home, here’s what we know so far: good things are the opposite of bad things. Life, mind, reason, happiness, and existence are all GOOD. Death, ‘anti-mind,’ faith, pain, and non-existence are all BAD. 

More talk about how teachers are paid by the government to educate your children in spiritual bankruptcy, and you know, if the whole goddamn world is such a threat to your beliefs, maybe you’re just really fucking insecure.

Point is, mankind has free will. That’s GOOD. But unless you follow John Galt’s patented One True Way, you are abusing your free will and metaphorically killing yourself and everyone else! That’s BAD.  And if anybody tells you anything different about any of this, they’re deceivers and agents of  evil and destruction.

AND, if all that sound exactly like a fundamentalist religion, well… shut up. Because, OPPOSITE! So there.

Yes, Galt boldly says he believes existence exists, unlike you people. More GOOD words include “logic, truth, reality, and knowledge.”  You might recall from before that good things are good. I know it’s a lot to keep up with. It might be easier if you remember that all good things are effectively just one good thing, which is… whatever Ayn Rand thinks about those things. Let’s learn more about that now:

To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem.

Self-esteem! What are you, a little league coach? More GOOD words — independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, work, character. Yeah, no shit John. Also on the list is pride, which goeth before unintended irony. 

Galt goes on for pages defining each word in detail, mostly by using all the other ones. Then this diamond in the rough:

[Y]our character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining.

And:

Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor … and wreck you on your first attempt to move.

Preach it brother, amen! Exposit it, fellow human, exclamation! Now compare and contrast with this quote from the decidedly mystical Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

So, finally, an axiom of Objectivism that isn’t ugly, misanthropic, and vaguely genocidal! Shame, then, that Galt follows up with more declarations that are ridiculous and out of touch with reality, like “there are no conflicts of interest among rational men.” HA!

Things start to sound promising again when Galt lays down a hard and fast rule that a man must never, ever initiate force against another man because it violates every premise of Rand’s existential argument. Needless to say, I will be quoting it extensively later when Rand violates every premise of her existential argument in exactly this way.

So, whatever. Fuck it. To set the stage for next week’s segment, Galt gives up on sounding reasonable and throws down the gauntlet. YOU (everybody in the world who doesn’t have Galt’s personal stamp of approval) live in fear of all those BAD words. WE (Galt’s elite) live our lives in pursuit of all the GOOD words. WE worship LIFE WORDS. YOU worship DEATH! DEAAAATHHHH! So DIE!

Christ, what an asshole.

NEXT WEEK: John Galt explains why Christ was an asshole.

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPEECH: Ayn Rand, Faith, and Free Will

3.7, This is John Galt Speaking, “Hype Machine”

PREVIOUSLY: Hank Rearden quit and joined John Galt’s hippie utopia.

—

Jim knocks feverishly at Dagny’s door at some ungodly hour of the morning to inform her that Hank has disappeared. Dagny is tremendously proud of Hank, and wonders why she persists in trying to save society if she feels so good about his leaving. Good question! She tells Jim she will not help track Hank down, and he leaves in a fit.

Scanning the day’s papers and seeing only brusque dismissals of any stories about social unrest, Dagny is chagrined. Propaganda!

It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying.

Silly Ayn, America’s problem isn’t an excess of negations, it’s an excess of positions. Facts don’t vanish, they just drown among fictions. If anything it’s a testament to how free our speech is! You’re probably thinking of Soviet Russia. You seem to get them confused. A lot. Anyway…

After a week, Dagny receives a short letter from Hank: “I’ve met him. I don’t blame you.” Dagny gets all wistful that she doesn’t get to hang out with them all in Galt’s Gulch.

At work our heroine has difficulty focusing on the task at hand. She keeps thinking of Galt down in the tunnels, all sweaty and muscular. She checked payroll and he was listed there under the pseudonym… John Galt. Wait. …What?

That’s not even a shitty cover, it’s not a cover at all! This is ridiculous. Wasn’t he just telling Dagny two chapters ago that the two of them boning is what would get him caught? You dumb shit. Ladies and gentlemen, Ayn Rand’s vision of the world’s smartest man.

Moving on to another spinning newspaper montage, things are really going to hell now. Roving gangs! States seceding! Seceding states collapsing into authoritarian feifdoms and violent chaos!

“The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress,” the narrator says sardonically, even though that’s basically the argument for fiscal austerity, a.k.a. the Republican (and libertarian) platform — not to mention a logically sound extension of Ayn’s beliefs that society’s problem is overconsumption and you can’t consume more than you produce.

As the situation grows dire(r), the White House announces that Mr. Thompson will give a special address to the nation on the global economic crisis. The speech will be simulcast on all radio and TV stations and the web, even though it doesn’t exist.

So it is set for the week of Thanksgiving, and Jim tells Dagny the President wants her there. She won’t speak on camera, but she’ll be part of the photo op and attend a policy conference with the President and other national leaders after the address (this being the reason the speech will be broadcast from New York and not DC). Dagny consents as long as she can bring good ol’ Eddie Willers as a body man slash mascot.

So that’s what she does. On the big night, she strides into the studio and scans the motley crew of pathetic villains before her. She is shocked at how aged — curdled, really — Dr. Stadler has become since completely selling himself out. He sees her with a look of “guilt turning into hatred,” and turns away “as if his refusal to see could wipe a fact out of existence.”

PAUSE. Isn’t the move from guilt to hatred basically the heroes’ character arc in this book? She specifically has Hank abandon guilt as naive, and what John Galt calls indifference I call bullshit, because he clearly wishes the masses ill. Ergo, hatred. Guilt turning into hatred.

And by the way, wiping facts out of existence by refusing to see them is what Ayn does on every page  — remember her fundamental logical fallacy. Apparently the result of her blindered M.O. is a lot of projection and transference of your own negative qualities onto innocent bystanders.

And one more thing! Ayn keeps saying that the moochers and looters’ unconscious strategy is to not do anything themselves as political leaders, let businessmen take care of all the hard work, and then take credit for governing well. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Rand fans, any guesses?

In the words of Nelson Muntz, “Stop hitting yourself, Ayn! Stop hitting yourself!”

PLAY. Where were we? Dagny decides she’s not going to participate in this charade after all. Jim has a conniption. Hey look! It’s the two sentences I’ve had to use in basically every recap. Thank God the book’s almost over; I’m running out of synonyms.

Just as she prepares to go, and just as the broadcast is about to start, the sound tech gingerly approaches President Romney Thompson and tells him that they’re having technical difficulties.

Specifically, there is some phantom signal that’s interfering with transmissions all across the country. Nobody knows what it is or where it’s coming from. Everybody in the studio is unsettled and perplexed.

Just then, the phantom signal itself goes live. A crisp voice, clear as day, calls out over every speaker in the country.

Ladies and gentlemen … Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear.

Dagny, Doc Stadler, and Eddie all gasp. Dagny and Stadler exchange a look of recognition, because she knows he knows Galt and now he knows that she knows Galt too, and nobody knows how Eddie knows Galt but I’ll give you a hint: it’s fucking stupid.

For twelve years you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. … [A]nd if you want to know why you are perishing — you who dread knowledge — I am the man who will now tell you.

WOO! Bust out the popcorn people, and prepare for ENLIGHTENMENT. I only hope Ayn applies logic more consistently as John Galt than she does as herself. Because if  not this is going to be very embarrassing.

—

NEXT — THE SPEECH, “This is John Galt Whining, part 1“

3:6 The Concerto of Deliverance, “Bureaucrazy”

PREVIOUSLY: Poindexter the Regulator warned Hank that Wesley Mouch was quietly filling all the jobs in Hank’s mills with “goons.”

—

Hank learns from the newspapers that his workers asked for a raise — but they asked the Unification Board and not him. And the Board turned them down. The newspaper articles breeze right past that fact and paint Hank as a villainous robber baron. He thinks the “lamestream media” is

counting on the public to forget legal technicalities under a barrage of stories implying that the government was the natural cause of all miseries suffered by its citizens.

Wait, excuse me, that’s a transcription error. What Ayn wrote reads:

counting on the public to forget legal technicalities under a barrage of stories implying that an employer  was the natural cause of all miseries suffered by employees.

Sorry, wrong egregious generalization. Here I thought Ayn meant to satirize false media narratives from REAL life. My bad. Anyway, FOX, er, the “fictional press” is using heated populist rhetoric that Hank grimly thinks might incite the gullible to violence.

Meanwhile Hank gets a notice in the mail that all of his assets have been frozen to pay for back taxes that he doesn’t actually owe. He starts getting calls from IRS agents apologizing for the mistake, just a technicality, the hold will be lifted soon we promise etc. The highest-ranking guy Hank speaks to cajoles him into a friendly off-the-record meeting with the top power-brokers at State, just like the one Dagny had to attend last chapter. Hank takes all of these events in with keen diffidence, certain this is all some shell game to fuck with him but uncertain as to what for.

NEXT! Hank gets a call from his mom Lucille, pitifully asking him to meet with her and brother Buster. He relents and visits his house for the first time in months. Lillian is also there, which pisses him off, but he sits down and hears their case, the gist of which is that they’re terrified Hank will disappear like the others. They tell him they know they’ve been ungrateful and cruel and wrong, and please please will you forgive us?

But Hank is past caring. He rolls his eyes at them and tells them it’s too late. They didn’t respect him when it could’ve made a difference, and they’re only coming around now out of desperation. They haven’t earned forgiveness, they’re still just trying to dilute his awesomeness with their patheticness.

As he moves to leave, Buster tells him he can’t disappear without money and Hank realizes that’s the purpose of the tax freeze. Then, in a last desperate play, Lillian vindictively tell him that before they divorced she fucked Jim Taggart, who she doesn’t even like, so there.  Hank is nonplussed. “Oookay… what are you telling me for?” With that parting remark he sees her soul die inside and her face crumple in defeat. She has degraded only herself, and now she realizes it.  Hank exits.

NEXT! Hank is in New York for his meeting with Mouch, Taggart, Ferris, all the usual shitbags. They’re very unctuous, “Hank Hank, come in, we love your input, we should hang out more often!” He’s as bored with this schtick as I am. They run a Steel Unification Plan by him and he’s like “Makes no sense, everyone will go broke.” They do their best to ignore that and insist they must “equalize the sacrifice.” Hank is about done here, thank you.

Jim, like Lillian before him, makes a last ditch effort to keep Hank’s attention, but left with no rational argument defending the plan, he simply says he’s sure Hank will do something. This makes Hank realize (for like the sixth time) that their whole plan is to leave all the work to him and then consume all the value he creates. Jesus this chapter is nearly as repetitive as the last one.

Hank’s (and our) time thoroughly wasted, he storms off and drives back to the mills, only to see upon approach that while he was diverted the gang of goons Mouch had been slipping into his labor force has started a riot at the plant.

Before he reaches the mob at the gates Hank fishtails to a stop. Down a slope on the side of the road he sees a discarded body and rushes down to it. It’s Poindexter!

Poindexter explains he was shot for refusing to help the rioters. The riot itself has been staged so that Mouch has an excuse to pass the Plan he pitched to Hank even if Hank won’t sign off. And sure, he’s coughing blood and dying now, but he feels good about himself for the first time ever because he finally stood up for something. Hank makes him promise to use that newfound will power to keep breathing just a little bit longer, until Hank can find him a doctor. Nevertheless, as Hank picks him up and scales the hill back to his car, poor Poindexter expires in his arms.

Hank kisses his forehead and is suddenly overwhelmed with “a desire to kill.” Not the thugs who shot Poindexter, or the bureaucrats who hired the thugs. No, he wants to murder all of the nation’s college professors, just as a class of people, for teaching Poindexter the wrong values. He thinks Poindexter’s mother should have poisoned him as a child rather than send him off to higher education. Once again let me emphasize that I am not embellishing here. I just… there are no words.

PAUSE. Well, a few words. Seriously?? This is the sort of stuff you’d find in a serial killer’s notebooks after he was caught and be like, “Oh, I get it now.” Just, holy shit.

PLAY. Hank generously tempers his bloodlust for… teachers… by thinking how there were once good educators like Hugh Akston, the World’s Greatest Philosopher, who now lives in Galt’s Gulch and who, last time we saw him, was similarly extolling the satisfaction he’d feel if he murdered his peers. What a coincidence! A disturbing, disturbing coincidence…

Hank, in his blinding fury, strides right into the mob at the entrance to the mills. He sees that the workers loyal to him have somehow armed themselves and mostly quelled the rioting on the inside. Somebody on the roof is shooting down at the rabble around the gates with a semi-automatic in each hand. Hank admires his competent, efficient gunmanship. Yes, nothing more inspiring than a man on a rooftop firing indiscriminately into a crowd of people, am I right? Bashar Assad gets it.

Okay to be fair, in this particular case the mob is state-sponsored and here to do innocent people harm — and to prove that, a couple of the rioting thugs advance on Hank and beat him about the head, as thugs are wont to do. As he passes out he sees the gunman leap down from the roof, blow the thugs’ heads clean off, and carry him away.

Some time later Hank wakes up in his office. The staff doctor and superintendent are there taking care of him. They tell him the mills have been secured. The gunman was a newly-promoted foreman who smuggled in the arms so they could protect themselves, and no doubt he saved a lot of lives. He is waiting outside to see Hank.

The doctor and superintendent leave, and in comes the new hire: it’s Francisco! He’s been slumming it on the bottom rung of Hank’s ladder since he disappeared, just like Galt has over at Dagny’s. Frankie and Hank don’t fuck in the mud like Galt and Dags did, but you can tell they’d both be down if someone suggested it. It’s okay guys, your insane authorial God is cool with the socially liberal stuff.

Anyway they stare deeply into each other’s eyes and it’s pretty obvious that Hank is finally ready to leave the world behind for Francisco’s warm embrace and the pastoral beauty of Galt’s Gulch. Without further hesitation, they do just that.

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NEXT — 3:7 This is John Galt Speaking, “Hype Machine”