Here we are at the beginning of the second section of Atlas Shrugged, entitled “Either-Or,” a reference, as we have seen, to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and to the dilemma Rand is beginning to flesh out for us: can a society both possess its achievers and exploit them to death simultaneously? It will be one or the other, but we’re not quite there yet.
The chapter title is “The Man Who Belonged On Earth,” an invocation of an individual yet nameless but whose identity we finally learn in this chapter, those few of us who haven’t figured it out by now. Why he “belongs” and certain others do not is a topic it will take the rest of the novel fully to explore.
Dr. Stadler is becoming aware of just how corrupt his assistant/minder Dr. Ferris is – he is, after all, a scientist who writes that knowledge is impossible - and how far he has bent the State Science Institute to the will of its political backers. Stadler has finally sensed that nature of his fall and he’s finding it difficult to deal with. He deals with Ferris’s book, however:
He picked up the book and let it drop into the wastebasket.
…And thinks of the Man Who Belonged On Earth:
A face came to his mind…a young face he had not permitted himself to recall for years. He thought: No, he has not read this book, he won’t see it, he’s dead, he must have died long ago…The sharp pain was the shock of discovering simultaneously that this was the man he longed to see more than any other being in the world – and that he had to hope that this man was dead.
Ambivalence doesn’t come any more perfect than that. Still no name for this man, though, this ex-student, this hypotenuse of the d’Anconia – Dannerskjold triangle. But he appears to embody something Stadler finds that he has lost, and misses bitterly. So, apparently, does Dagny Taggart, for Stadler makes his way to her New York office in search of nothing less than his soul.
[Stadler speaking] “…He [the missing engineer] arrived at some new concept of energy. He discarded all our standard assumptions, according to which his motor would have been impossible. He formulated a new premise of his own and he solved the secret…Do you realize what a feat of pure, abstract science he had to perform…?”
Intentionally or not – one hopes for the sake of humility that it was not – Rand is describing here what she herself is attempting to accomplish with respect to philosophy. A new paradigm, a structure built on first principles that leads in a direction entirely different from that of conventional philosophy. Whether she actually achieved that will be the topic of future controversies, but it is quite clear that she is aware that it is what she is attempting.
And this Man Who Belongs, Stadler’s and Akston’s ex-student, who Stadler found himself hoping to be dead? It is John Galt, of course.
“I knew a John Galt once. Only he died long ago…He had such a mind that, had he lived, the whole world would have been talking of him by now.”
“But the whole world is talking of him.”
He stopped still. “Yes…” he said slowly, staring at a thought that had never struck him before. “Yes…why?” The word was heavy with the sound of terror.
Who is John Galt? Ayn Rand is John Galt.
Meanwhile, Hank Rearden is watching how the bounty given to the world in the form of his metal has been expropriated, throttled, and redistributed in accordance with current political doctrine. It is not how fortunes are made, but it is how they are stolen:
He turned away without a word when anybody mentioned to him what everybody knew: the quick fortunes that were being made on Rearden Metal. “Well, no,” people said in drawing rooms, “you mustn’t call it a black market, because it isn’t, really. Nobody is selling the Metal illegally. They’re just selling their right to it. Not selling, really, just pooling their shares.”
Carbon credits, anyone? Rand was being exaggeratedly cynical with respect to metal; how incredulous would she be to learn that someone was seriously treating the very air we breathe as a commodity the rights to which may be bartered by those whose only power over them is granted by arbitrary statute? Had Rand placed that scam into Atlas Shrugged people would have laughed at its outlandishness. No one’s laughing now.
We meet briefly a young man known derisively as the Wet Nurse – a government representative empowered to see that Rearden Metal is distributed to the approved recipients. Earnest but deluded, a fully fledged product of the corrupt educational institutions of the day, he retains an innocence that Rearden finds amusing.
“You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can’t go by rigid principles…we’ve got to…act on the expediency of the moment.”
“Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”
It is an engineer’s answer to some of the sillier excesses of post-modern philosophy – one may happily entertain the argument that there is no truth, that everything is contextual, a matter of interpretation between reader and word, and yet those of us whose lives depend on it would rather not drive over a bridge built on the assumption that the difference in tensile strength between steel and cardboard is merely a matter of opinion.
There is an entertaining cognitive dissonance there – I have personally heard an apparently sincere assertion that words have no meaning coming from the mouths of people who moments later were outraged that the pizza delivered to them was not the one they ordered. Amazing. Think of this when dealing with theory-bound friends – the principles that they actually believe aren’t the ones they asseverate; they’re the ones they act on. That isn’t hypocrisy, it’s the unacknowledged recognition of the existence of objective facts by persons who steadfastly deny them.
One is similarly irritated by the commonplace insistence that societal convention is merely a chain that the intellectually liberated may cast aside at a whim and must cast aside in order truly to be free. One seldom sees advocates of this overheated nonsense make a habit of running red lights at busy intersections. You almost wish they would.
Enough of that. Stadler does leave Dagny with a name, someone who just might be able to untangle the conundrum that is the motor, a young fellow named Quentin Daniels. He won’t, on principle, work for Stadler, which leads us to suspect that he just might be one of the good guys. Either way, it’s a lead that Dagny will follow up.
From this point in the chapter we digress into yet another Randian disquisition on human sexuality that frankly I am beginning to find a bit tedious. We see Dagny naked before a mirror with a blood-red ruby between her breasts (an image that appears, better done, in one of the most touching of Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long stories), Dagny half-naked and smothered in a blue fox cape, Dagny as a toy, as a kept woman, pretending to be all of those things she patently isn’t and the two of them turning philosophical somersaults to claim sensuality as the legitimate birthright of the virtuous. One is tempted simply to scream at them in frustration “Just shut up and…” ahem.
But there is, in the midst of all of this pre-coital slurping, a statement of one of Rand’s central theses regarding the maintenance of the corruption of society – that it requires the sanction of the exploited:
He [Rearden] leaned forward. “What he wanted from you was a recognition that he was still the Dr. Robert Stadler he should have been, but wasn’t and knew he wasn’t. He wanted you to grant him your respect in spite of and in contradiction to his actions. He wanted you to juggle reality for him…and you’re the only one who could do it…”
“Why I?”
“Because you’re the victim.”
It is a sanction that can be withheld, the result being that the looter no longer feels good about himself. For someone for whom self-esteem is deified that is a deadly blow. For the rest who really don’t care for anything but the loot – Orren Boyle, for example – other things must be withheld. What sort of thing might that be?
Well, we can’t complain that we aren’t being given hints. Industrialists are dropping out of sight at an increasing rate. (More impending notches on the Publius Body Count). Andrew Stockton the manufacturer for one, Lawrence Hammond the auto tycoon for a second. Ken Dannagger has his own game to play but he’s starting to look like the last man standing. The boys in Washington are busy dividing the loot from a rapidly dwindling pile. Wealth is being redistributed, but it isn’t being created. And the country is running down like a clock with a broken mainspring.
One side note before we wrap the chapter. Despite Rand’s notorious atheism not all of her characters appear to be of that theological bent. Hank Rearden expresses his approval of Ellis Wyatt –
…the words which he had not pronounced, but felt, were: God bless you, Ellis, whatever you’re doing!
It isn’t a slipup on Rand’s part, nor is the balance of Atlas Shrugged relentlessly anti-God. Far from it – as I have previously commented, many of her ethical dilemmas are foundational issues in all of the great religions, discussed at length by their intellectual giants. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism – all of these have to deal with the existence of evil and the true source of human ethics. These are fundamental issues that Rand will not be able to avoid.
I shall later take up the curious topic of a character written into the original draft of Atlas Shrugged but out of the final copy, a Catholic priest named Father Amadeus who was to be James Taggart’s confessor. One might expect him to represent the evils of modern religion to an unrepentant atheist such as Rand, and one would be wrong – he was, by all reports, a sympathetic character whose dialectical function would have been debate with John Galt himself. Rand explained that his presence would have made the narrative unnecessarily complicated, which it undoubtedly would. Perhaps, as well, she did not care to misrepresent her interpretation of Christian doctrine as the real thing. That may be intellectual cowardice, it may be scrupulous honesty, it is certainly prudence, and it spared us another 500 pages. At least.
Have a great week, Publius!
One of my co-workers is fond of saying,
“An optomist is one who sees the glass as half full;
“A pessimest is one who sees the glass as half empty;
“An engineer sees a glass that was designed twice as large as it was needed to be.”
Bill, the Carbon Credits fiasco is the single most asinine thing I believe I’ve ever seen in politics. And that’s a VERY high bar. People make, and will continue to make huge sums of money on this. It simply amazes me that people are actually able to talk about this with a straight face. And the people listening to them sit there with serious looks on their face, and nod in approval. I’d like to say it’s unbelievable, but I can’t.
So when we find that we are in a period of global cooling, which we appear to be entering, do we sell carbon debits?
Quoting your post...
The chapter title is “The Man Who Belonged On Earth,” an invocation of an individual yet nameless but whose identity we finally learn in this chapter
and...
...He picked up the book and let it drop into the wastebasket. …And thinks of the Man Who Belonged On Earth:...
And this Man Who Belongs, Stadler’s and Akston’s ex-student, who Stadler found himself hoping to be dead? It is John Galt, of course.
Now quoting AS...
(Stadler)"Why did he want to waste his mind on practical appliances?" (Dagny)"Perhaps because he liked living on this earth"
So I see why you think the reference is to John Galt but...
...later in the chapter Dagnys thoughts about Rearden...
Again quoting AS "...He belonged in the countryside, she thought-he belonged everywhere-he was a man who belonged on earth-..."
I hate to appear obtuse but what was Rand trying to convey? Are both of them 'The man who belonged on earth?'
Your insight into the parallel of Objectivism and the motor was intriguing. Thanks!
“You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can’t go by rigid principles…we’ve got to…act on the expediency of the moment.”
Bill, the above can also be applied to laws that are currently used against people, based on a completely subjective interpretation.
We can’t go by rigid principles as it were.
For example: as it now stands, as long as someone “feels” they’re working in a hostile environment, they have the ability to sue for compensation.
A lot of sexual harassment is subjective. It’s amazing how much trouble one can get in based on the opinion of the person claiming harassment.
Sadly, if one presses forward with a claim in either of the above, more than likely, they will be offered a settlement, known as “cost of defense.” (My ladyfriend is a legal secretary, she probably has lost count of the number of cases she’s seen settled in just such a manner)
Hank Rearden is in a “cost of defense” position. He could have allowed the government to “buy” his metal and government would let him alone. Instead of paying, though, Hank chose to fight.
So, since there is always a price to be paid when one doesn’t play the game by the rules set by government, what price is Hank going to pay down the road? What price will government exact for his non-cooperation?