FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, By Our Love

Dagny spends her time at the cabin in the Berkshires depressurizing, but also building a footpath because she can’t relax. On occasion she drives into Woodstock, an isolated and depressing hamlet. Finding that kerosene is not available because of a road washout, she asks why the road is never fixed. “It’s always been that way,” is the response. She can’t take her mind off what may be happening back in the world, and she yearns for Hank.

Then Francisco shows up unannounced, and Dagny could swear he’s whistling the theme from Halley’s Fifth Concerto. Francisco takes Dagny in his arms and kisses her, but Dagny backs off. Francisco tells her that he can now explain everything. He should have intercepted her when she quit and spared her the past month in seclusion.

Dagny wishes that The Destroyer had come for her, and she was surprised that he didn’t; now she thinks he doesn’t exist. Francisco reminds her of that night, twelve years ago, when he warned her in agony about what was going to happen that he couldn’t talk about; that was the night he gave up d’Anconia Copper. Now he is destroying it to keep it from the looters, but in such a way that they cannot detect it and seize it to stop him. He was the first of the industrialists to quit, but he stayed in place. The worst part was what he knew it did to Dagny.

He and Dagny charged too little for their accomplishments, and their error went all the way back to Sebasian d’Anconia and Nat Taggart, who created the wealth of the world, but let their enemies write the moral code. He and Dagny lived by their own standards but paid ransom to the looters to survive. Dagny perceives, and just as the recruitment of Dagny Taggart by Francisco d’Anconia approaches a successful consummation, the radio broadcast of a symphony is interrupted by a news bulletin about a train wreck in the tunnel in Colorado. All of Francisco’s hard work retreats into insignificance as the horror hits Dagny with full force.

As we left the Comet in the last chapter, it had entered the tunnel pulled by a coal burning steam locomotive. Three miles into the eight mile bore, the crew felt the effect of the fumes, and the engineer, that alcoholic friend of Fred Kinnan, threw the throttle wide open to gain enough speed to surmount the heavy grade. As the passengers felt the effect of the fumes, one panicked and pulled the emergency stop cord, breaking the locomotive’s air hose and stopping the train almost midway through the tunnel. The fireman fled through the tube, reaching the western portal when he was flattened by the blast of a explosion behind him. Apparently, the Army munitions train had been cleared to proceed because the tunnel’s signaling system was defective, and it plowed into the Comet, setting off an explosion that demolished the tunnel and most of the mountain with it.

Dagny screams and flees, and Francisco begs her not to go back, but to no avail.

Jim Taggart stares at the letter of resignation he hopes to avoid signing. Clifton Locey is hiding behind his doctor’s statement that he has a heart condition, and most company officers are playing hooky. Jim decides to hide in his office; even Wesley Mouch knows better than to call him.

But finally galvanized into action, Jim accosts Eddie Willers and demands to know where Dagny is; Eddie won’t answer. Jim tries to intimidate Eddie, accusing him of treason, but Eddie won’t budge. Then Dagny walks in. Jim screams that the disaster is all her fault, but Dagny ignores him and gives orders to Eddie. She quickly discovers that key personnel on the railroad have quit and disappeared. While Jim slinks off to shred his letter of resignation, Dagny asks what has been done since the disaster. Nothing, says Eddie, because the first person to act would have set himself up for the Unification Board. The entire Taggart system is in chaos.

Dagny opens up a rail map and tells Eddie to route trains over the tracks of other railroads, even to buy abandoned railroads and put them back into service. To fill gaps in the map, she tells Eddie to hire local crews to build new rail lines; bribe the Unification Board goons if necessary. Then she tells him to get the pre-tunnel system map out of the archives to see how they can reclaim the old route through the Rockies.

Eddie updates Dagny: Hank has signed the Gift Certificate, Quentin Daniels hasn’t been heard from, and trains have been abandoned on the system with the crews disappearing into the night.

Wesley Mouch calls Dagny, making the official excuse that her health was the reason for her absence. She sloughs Mouch off and demands to talk to Clem Weatherby. She tells the rail czar that Mouch is never to call her again; she will deal exclusively with him. Weatherby balks until he realizes that Dagny is handing him preferment, the right to use her as an item of “pull”. She tells him that she is going to start breaking laws immediately, and Weatherby tells her the laws are certainly flexible in such a situation. Finishing the call, she looks at Clifton Locey’s collection of liberal magazines and sweeps them off the coffee table in one stroke.

After giving the orders that will put the railroad back in working order, Dagny calls Hank. He tells her to start handing out bribes so that he can pour the steel – any kind of steel – to make her railroad whole again. He agrees to come over that night.

During the 19th Century, many states granted railroads the right of eminent domain. Railroads used that provision to claim the land for rail lines just as states used eminent domain to build highways. The provision was last used wholesale during the Twenties when America saw its last great period of railroad building.

Railroads often purchase trackage rights from other railroads to gain access to certain areas. In the event of an emergency, railroads are also quick to grant competitors the rights to their track because one day the shoe may be on the other foot. These emergency rights will be paid for, as will diesel fuel consumed at the host railroad’s depots.

The railroad world has changed since the book was published. Back then it was rare to see the locomotive of one railroad running on a different railroad unless there was an agreement or an emergency. In the 21st Century, however, high priority freight trains changing domain at Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans change crews but not locomotives. For high priority freights time lost at a rail yard is money; that is why it is now common to see locomotives in Union Pacific livery popping up in New York and vice versa.

Howdy Pub’!

Chapter 18, “By Our Love,” is a very short chapter, one of the shortest in the novel (the next one, 19, is even shorter), and in it Rand intends to isolate one issue and address it with one crisis of conscience. She has certainly made her point by now concerning the abuse of the producers by the looters, of the achievers by the leeches, so much so that the reader is probably wondering why the whole system hasn’t already collapsed. Why do the victims persist? Why can’t they let it go? Why hasn’t everyone simply gone Galt, done a Danagger, slipped into seclusion and let the whole rotten edifice fall down? They are held in harness by love; by, as a previous chapter title has suggested, a form of white blackmail. Love of what? That’s the question we’ll explore in this chapter.

Dagny has finally had enough. Directive 10-289, the “moratorium on brains,” has sent her flying in disgust and revulsion to an old cabin in the wilderness where she can think it all out, a plot device going back at least four millennia wherein the author can speak to us through her protagonist’s internal dialogue. It isn’t any surprise that Dagny finds it impossible to turn her previous life off like a light switch. She is in the same frame of mind reported by many retirees from active working lives, feeling like a roaring engine whose load has suddenly been removed. Both engines and people can fly apart under those conditions.

She’s game about the whole attempt, though, building paths to assuage her relentless drive to build something, fighting the ennui of a shopkeeper by making the simple suggestion that she move her produce out of the sun. The latter is so worn down by it all that she answers bovinely, “It’s always been there.” It is what much of the world is becoming and Dagny doesn’t fit into that world at all and so she retreats to the cabin, where her old friend and lover Francisco arrives to comfort her. He knows the price of giving up what one loves (and will relearn it through the rest of the novel). Dagny is only now getting her first taste.

She wonders how he found her, and asks him if Eddie, the only person in whom she has confided her location, has told him. No, he hasn’t seen Eddie for more than a year, but Rand gives us a clue that something or someone is a go-between, for the chatterbox Eddie was, in fact, the only one who did know where she was.

Francisco at last admits openly what we have known all along:

“I am destroying d’Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand.”

…and that he is doing it to prevent that remarkable achievement from helping to sustain the cosmic fraud that is the looters’ creed, as it has for a century and a half. Like Ellis Wyatt he intends to “leave it as I found it,” not as he personally found it but as his ancestor did. For the oil industry, whose tools are derricks and machine-tooled drills, that is the work of a few moments only. For the mining industry, whose tools are pick and shovel, it takes quite a bit more effort. Dagny is astonished to realize that the knowing destruction of what he most loves has become his life’s work.

To Dagny that is inconceivable, in the exact sense of the word. Builder that she is, it strikes her as profoundly immoral, a rejection of everything that man is.

But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature…but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails, and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

Certain Gaia-worshippers of my acquaintance would shrink in horror from such blasphemy. And yet the straight line is not really an artifact of man, but his imitation of the horizon. The horizon isn’t perfectly straight, of course, either in terms of curvature or of granularity, but then neither are the lines made by men. In this man is one with his world whether he likes it or not.

The truly straight line is, as Dagny just said, an abstraction, an artifact not even of man’s mind if Immanuel Kant is to be believed, but an a priori concept that is one of the laws of the universe that form the foundation of Ayn Rand’s epistemology. It is there, but we can only imitate it in such worshipful constructions as a railroad track reaching toward the horizon. To Dagny that makes that track’s destruction, either deliberate or merely by allowing it to happen, an act of apostasy.

And this is why she is not yet ready despite Francisco’s hopeful overtures. One feels for the fellow – he has not only become such an apostate himself, but has given up the woman he loves in doing so. Does he hope to win her back now that the charade is known? For she is close, so very close to the realization that abnegation of all of this is the price that they must pay for the sin of selling it too cheaply.

“You, the heir of the d’Anconias…you’re turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. And I – I’m playing with cobblestones and shingling a roof while a transcontinental railroad system is collapsing in the hands of congenital ward heelers. Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world. If this is what we let it come to, then it must have been our own guilt. But I can’t see the nature of our error.”

“We never demanded the one payment that the world owed us – and we let our best reward go to the worst of men…Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It’s a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We, the men of the mind…it was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world – but we let our enemies write its moral code. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t. You won’t be free of them until you do. But when you do, you’ll reach such a stage of rightful anger that you’ll blast every rail of Taggart Transcontinental rather than let it serve them!”

“But to leave it to them!” she moaned. “To abandon it…when it’s…it’s almost like a living person…”

Her child by Hank Rearden, in fact, if we are to believe Lilian’s mocking. We should remember this cry later when we come to consider whether the act of abnegation does include living people. It is an extremely cruel choice, but if Francisco is to be believed the men of the mind brought it upon themselves.

She can’t do it. It is a good general rule that radios should not be left on during existential crises but hers was, and its siren sound is that of a newscaster informing the world of the Taggart Tunnel disaster.

Had the reserve diesel whose availability Dagny made her strictest rule not been reassigned to a political hack, the train would have made it through the tunnel. Pulled by an ancient coal-fired train belching poisonous fumes and struggling to make the grade at forty, the chances aren’t good, and once the choking passengers pull the emergency stop cord, there is no chance at all. One poor fireman manages to stagger out the other end of the tunnel before the oncoming ammunition train rear-ends the unfortunate Comet. Perhaps the passengers were all dead at that point, but the resulting explosion made sure of it and brought the mountain down around them. It is the greatest train disaster in history.

…she whirled to the door and ran. “Dagny!” he screamed. “Don’t go back! Dagny! In the name of anything sacred to you, don’t go back!”

But it is in the name of that which is sacred to Dagny that she does go back. And that is the premise that she has left unchecked.

It has been four weeks – 28 days since the declaration of Directive 10-289, and in that time yet another double handful of Dagny’s most crucial people have quit. Taggart is in a state of paralysis, with James’s resignation letter grinning at him from his desk. And she is back, their savior, as if there were anything left worth saving. This is not an act of sacrifice on Dagny’s part, it is an irresistible, existential moment. The situation is a challenge, a drug to an addict, the sound of guns to a warhorse not yet ready to be put to pasture. To give it up would be to give up not just Taggart Transcontinental, but herself. No wonder she can’t do it!

She calls Hank.

“I’m back.”

“I suppose I’d better start bribing people at once to get the ore to start pouring rail for you.”

“Hank, I don’t think they care whether there’s a train or a blast furnace left on earth. We do. They’re holding us by our love of it, and we’ll go on paying so long as there’s still one chance left to keep one single wheel alive…”

Precisely so. “By our love.” And so Rand has answered the question suggested by the chapter title. She should have stopped there.

“…when the flood swallows it we’ll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism…”

Egad. The thud of that clunker hurts the ears, and unfortunately the chapter ends two sentences later so that it reverberates in our head like a lead weight falling down the basement stairs. The last what? If there’s one thing a high-test-fueled, ballbusting railroad executive isn’t going to be invoking with her world in flaming wreckage around her, it’s a syllogism. If the word even occurred to Dagny at that moment I’d have to reach for the straitjacket.

But it would to Rand the thinker. Here the author has so closely identified with her protagonist that there is no longer a filter of fiction between thought and utterance. Odd, really – Rand was a perfectly competent Hollywood scriptwriter – dialogue was second nature to her, but this one rings false. It’s just something to watch out for. When it happens, Dagny has lost her own voice and we lose Dagny.

And we don’t want to do that at this point, because we like her and she’s placed herself right back in the fray. Something she loves too much to give up is a chain that she’s put on herself, stronger than the one of Rearden Metal that she wears on her wrist, and her enemies hold the other end.

Have a great week, Publius!

In order for the physical world to fall into third world disarray, there first must be the fall of the minds of the people. The people, the movers and shakers of the society must fall from their ideals of work ethic, doing your best and the concept that what you produce is the representation of your self. People used to do their best work, not because their bosses required it, but because it provided a sense of satisfaction. In a rising society, the ambitious, highly motivated and talented rise to the top and the society flourishes. When ambition becomes a mockery and success is seen as proof “trampling the rights of the workers”, The society itself starts to spiral down.

Lets look at a segment of current society, black culture. It has become unpopular for black teens to do poor in school, to achieve, because it makes them look too “white,” Intellectual failure and mediocrity has become the cultural standard, the only acceptable fields of achievement is sports, music or crime. This guarantees limited success in the greater society, further marginalizing the culture, dooming most to the welfare culture.

A second facet is the rise of the union lackey. The strangulation of the major industries by the union culture is to blame for the attitude that it is not in our best interest to work hard and achieve, but to “make do. I worked in an environment many years ago where if you worked real hard and achieved, you stood out too much and became a target. Rising up the career ladder was the result of butt kissing and schmoozing, not achievement. This lays the groundwork for the culture of corruption, of “pull” that is in full bloom in AS.

If one looks at current third world nations today, many of them were former colonial societies. During occupation, they were built up to the technological standards of the day by the occupying force, most of them European. They worked by the old standard of doing your best. With liberation, came in those with marxist ideas came into the forefront. The culture of corruption, of “pull” became the standard of operation. When the culture of pull is the rule, those who strive to do their best see it for what it is and they “shrug” that society. It leaves the looters to destroy. Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Venezuela all come to mind. Where did the producers of those societies go? Mostly to the US.

This is probably the most I’ve commented on these threads, because I think I identified with Dagny during her self-imposed exile this past week. I have been on vacation for 3 weeks, mostly because I have too much PTO this year and need to use it or lose it. Due to circumstances, I had no real travel plans, so I used the time to do all sorts of home projects. I clean, sorted, painted, planted and improved all sorts of things around the house. I kinda worked harder at home then I frequently do at work. They idea of just sitting around watching TV? I’d go nuts. Thats the difference I guess between the producing class and the welfare class.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.