“The Aristocracy of Pull,” is the title of the chapter, but that may actually be a bit premature. In it we are introduced to the concept but its membership and operations are only hinted at. We’ll see more of those in the next two chapters. But Rand has chosen her terms carefully – it is, in fact, an aristocracy, an insular ruling class with its own hierarchy and means of exchange.
I should like to take up the topic of humor in this chapter’s commentary, or more precisely a sense of humor, which Ayn Rand is occasionally accused of being without. Certainly some of her principal characters seem to suffer from this deficiency: Rearden the tormented, for one, whose blood pressure could probably benefit from a sense of the ridiculous. James Taggart, too stupid to know a joke if it were tattooed to his forehead and too anxious to laugh at it in any case. Dagny herself, too driven, too “pure” as Lillian puts it at one point although she meant something else by it. Frankly there isn’t a great deal that makes Dagny laugh, and she could use a good one.
And so could we. Watching a country slide inexorably into ruin tends to be grim business. Does Rand have it in her? We shall see.
It is September, and industrialists are falling faster than the leaves that are about to. Quentin Daniels, Dagny’s hope for somebody to reveal the mystery of the motor, has already “gone Galt,” earning his daily bread working as a night watchman. We remember from a previous chapter one engineer’s sneering demand that Dagny support him at the rate of $25,000 a year (quite a generous salary in 1957) to investigate the thing, hinting openly that it is likely to be a long-lived and fruitless effort, fruitless, that is, except for the health of his bank account. Daniels, on the other hand, is a risk taker who only expects to get paid for results and paid well if he manages to produce them. That is Rand’s idea of a moral business arrangement.
But Daniels lets slip one possible weakness:
“…If I spend the rest of my life on it and succeed, I will die satisfied… There’s only one thing I want more than to solve it: it’s to meet the man who has.”
We could not be accused of clairvoyance to suspect that, in Hugh Akston’s words, he will.
Ken Danagger, who has been illegally supplying Dagny – revealing that we think of it as her personally and not her corporation – with the fruits of his coal mines, which is all that is keeping Taggart running now that it has been forced by industrial shortage to shift its engines back to coal. Coal is necessary to the forging of Rearden metal as well. Danagger and Hank find it necessary to meet in secret to conclude an illegal but honest business arrangement. We have reached the point at which the only legal business arrangements are the dishonest ones. But why would anyone want to make the honest ones illegal?
The reader might be forgiven for skipping some of the grim depression that is the exploration of Lillian’s and Hank’s relationship. We already know what that is, and Lillian is an enduring mystery, namely that a woman that simultaneously shallow and dense isn’t holding up a bridge abutment somewhere.
Cherryl Brooks is now Cherryl Taggart, beneficiary of the sort of leech-like arrangement in love that James Taggart appears to have with business. She is treated by James’s contemporaries with the same regard one might expect of a horsefly floating in the Dom Perignon. She is the innocent that Lillian thinks Dagny might be, and is cautioned by a nameless newspaper columnist who has befriended her:
“Listen, kid,” the sob sister said to her, when she stood in her room for the last time, the lace of the wedding veil streaming like crystal foam from her hair to the blotched planks of the floor. (A lovely word image, actually. Rand should do more of it.) “You think that if one gets hurt in life, it’s through one’s own sins – and that’s true, in the long run. But there are people who’ll try to hurt you through the good they see in you – knowing that it’s the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don’t let it break you when you discover that.”
It’s good advice that flies far over the head of the naïf. This cannot end well for the poor dime-store clerk married to the rich poltroon. She gets a welcome to the big leagues from none other than Dagny herself:
[Cherryl] “I’m not going to put on the sweet relative act…I’m going to protect him [Jim] against you…I’m Mrs. Taggart. I’m the woman in the family now.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Dagny. “I’m the man.”
Oh my, yes. You might not read that line in a contemporary novel due to the tender feelings of feminists whose intellectual attainment appears principally to consist of tender feelings. But we know exactly what she means. She is quite as direct with Lillian. Concerning her continuing to wear the Rearden metal bracelet (and in formal dress, too. Tacky.):
“I’m sure, Miss Taggart, that you realize how enormously improper this is…don’t you think that this is a case where one cannot afford to indulge in abstract theory but must consider practical reality?”
Dagny would not smile. “I have never understood what is meant by a statement of that kind.”
Oh, but she does. The sort of abstract theory with which Lillian is most familiar is the sort that issues from the impure mouths of Pritchett the philosopher, Ferris the false scientist, and Scudder the polemicist. It isn’t really the sort of stuff in which Dagny tends to indulge. She will have her own confrontation with abstract theory, not that kind but the real thing, and the time is not yet.
So why does Dagny continue to wear the bracelet in public? It is an acknowledgment of Rearden’s achievement, and hence Rearden himself in a non-sexual sense, and it is, as well, a covenant, a private sign of possession strictly between the two of them, but although she knows that it is also a public statement that she is sleeping with Rearden, she appears not to care. Does she find the inability of those around them to conceive that they might be having an affair to be amusing? Perhaps – “she would not smile” – but if so, it isn’t obvious, and it doesn’t strike me as the sort of sense of humor that fits Dagny’s straightforward personality. But Rand finds it highly amusing, and so does the reader.
There is at least one character among the opposition who does possess a sense of humor – it is the brutal and marvelously cynical Orren Boyle. He is a wolf among sheep and knows it, and enjoys letting the sheep know it as well. He gives us a glimpse of what passes for a medium of exchange in his political circles:
“The ones you buy aren’t really worth a damn because somebody can always offer them more…but if you get the goods on a man, then you’ve got him, and there’s no higher bidder and you can count on his friendship…what the hell! – one’s got to trade something. If we don’t trade money – and the age of money is past – then we trade men.”
The age of money, past. It isn’t only Boyle’s opinion:
“We are at the dawn of a new age,” said James Taggart from above the rim of his champagne glass. “We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free from the rule of the dollar…We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by – “
“ – the aristocracy of pull,” said a voice beyond the group.
They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d’Anconia.
It is Francisco the playboy, the wastrel, the clown. He has been Loki in Rand’s tripartite pantheon, but no one seems to be laughing.
“Senor d’Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”
“Just exactly what it deserves.”
“Oh, how cruel!”
“Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.”
Moral law? That’s pretty rich coming from a playboy, and everybody knows that Francisco is a playboy, don’t they? And now Francisco gets to deliver the opening salvo in the battle that is being joined. He steps out of the party for a moment and in front of the proscenium where he makes his “Root of Money” speech. I shall quote only a small part but it seems hauntingly pertinent:
“Do you wish to know whether that day [of reckoning] is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”
Are we doomed, then? It is no idle question. In order to run a commercial enterprise in the United States one may very soon need to purchase a remarkable contrivance known as carbon credits from, and obtain the kind permission of, men who produce nothing. We know who they are. Consider that from Rand’s point of view – we have here a group of political operators who have created a webwork of real law around a scientific fiction and are drawing from it the power to dictate every aspect, not only of commercial enterprise, but of the lives of human beings unfortunate enough to come under their sway. Rand has not yet expounded on morality – she will – but she has described obscenity with sufficient accuracy for us to recognize it when it appears before our astounded eyes.
The Root of Money speech is the first indication that Rearden gets of Francisco’s true nature and game. But he already knows that Francisco is far more than he appears.
“What are you doing at this party?”
“Just looking for conquests.”
“Found any?”
His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered…”Yes – what I think is going to be my best and greatest.”
He means Rearden himself, of course, but Hank doesn’t make the connection.
Rearden’s anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: “How can you waste yourself that way?”
The faint suggestion of a smile…came into Francisco’s eyes as he asked, “Do you care to admit that you care about it?”
And Hank does care, because he senses a kindred spirit under the tuxedo and suntan.
“I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do.”
“When you’ll learn the full reason, you’ll know whether there’s ever been anything – or anyone – that meant a damn to me…and how much he did mean.”
He, who? We know, of course, but Rearden does not, yet. We also know where the looters have been keeping their ill-gotten gains, safely invested – or so they think – in d’Anconia stock, a company that has never failed in 150 years. That is why Francisco is systematically ruining it.
No one listening seems to take this disquisition very seriously although is it not entirely the sort of talk one might expect to hear at a wedding party. Francisco is putting on a show, but it is a show for a very select audience. He is a select audience as well, being the only one at the party who knows both Dagny and Hank well enough to realize that they really are lovers. I think that knowledge in the face of the stubborn denial of lesser souls would be the sort of thing that would appeal to his own mordant sense of humor. That it is the woman he loves might appeal to his sense of tragedy. Loki indeed.
And he returns to that character so quickly that no one other than Hank and Dagny seems to notice, starting a run on his own stock with the mere suggestion that it is about to fail, the guests scattering from the exclusive wedding party like cockroaches exposed to the light. It is sordid, and very funny. I suggest that Rand’s characters may lack a sense of humor but their author definitely does not. Hers just happens to be a very dark one.
Have a great week, Publius!
The art of deconstruction is as sublime as the attempt to erect an edifice with a single dose of Cialis.
On a tangent, I've always wondered about the attitude some people have toward money and physical possessions. People will say "It's only money," or, "it's just an object and easily replaced."
Orren Boyle would have loved people who thought this way. As a corollary, I'm always appalled by those who don't understand why thieves should be harshly punished.
People never want to think through the underlying effort put forth in order to own the things they have, whether it's essential or non-essential.
No matter what, it requires effort and time out of your life that can never be replaced. Man is born on this earth with a finite time to live. So, when one says "it's only money" or "only an object" what they are really saying is "I don't value my life very much."
Think about it, everything that is taken by force from you is robbing you of life, because of the hours, or days, needed from your life in order to reacquire that which had already been obtained.
However, I also recognize this thought pattern as being the end result of valuing life so little.
In this particular chapter, I think you see Ayn pointing in that direction. Ayn Rand fully understood the value of individual effort.