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FReeper Book Club: Introduction to Atlas Shrugged
Part I, Chapter I: The Theme
Part I, Chapter II: The Chain
Part I, Chapter III: The Top and the Bottom
Part I, Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers
Part I, Chapter V: The Climax of the d’Anconias
Part I, Chapter VI: The Non-Commercial
Part I, Chapter VII: The Exploiters and the Exploited
Part I, Chapter VIII: The John Galt Line
Part I, Chapter IX: The Sacred and the Profane
Part I, Chapter X: Wyatt’s Torch
Part II, Chapter I: The Man Who Belonged on Earth
Part II, Chapter II: The Aristocracy of Pull
Part II, Chapter III: White Blackmail
Part II, Chapter IV: The Sanction of the Victim
Part II, Chapter V: Account Overdrawn
Part II, Chapter VI: Miracle Metal
Part II, Chapter VII: The Moratorium on Brains
Part II, Chapter VIII: By Our Love
Part II, Chapter IX: The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
Part II, Chapter X: The Sign of the Dollar
Part III, Chapter I: Atlantis
Part III, Chapter II: The Utopia of Greed
Chapter 23 now, “Anti-Greed,” wherein we learn that the opposite of “greed,” (which we saw in the previous chapter was anything but), is “anti-greed,” or what Rand terms “altruism,” which is, symmetrically, anything but. Anti-greed in this case is a monstrous act justified by the claim that its motives are other than profit. That isn’t, actually, all that difficult inasmuch as there are so many human motivations more sordid than profit. We’re going to encounter them in this chapter.
Rand is back in full stride here in her characterizations of her villains, and there is a subtle shift in this chapter. They have always been manipulative, whining, contemptible, but here one feels the full impact of malice and realizes that these are genuinely dangerous people. The economy is in a steep downward spiral, the surplus on which they feed is dwindling, and they are desperate enough to do anything. Except for the Taggart Tunnel disaster the story has been remarkably bloodless so far. Even there we simply saw a train disappear and a mountain collapse, and even that in retrospect. Death was distant, unreal. It isn’t likely to stay that way.
Dr. Stadler has been summoned to a demonstration of a new technology based on some theoretical work he accomplished while taking the looters’ coin at the State Science Institute. Dr. Ferris is in charge, present are luminaries such as Simon Pritchett, Wesley Mouch, and yes, even the Head of State, Mr. Thompson himself. Stadler hangs his head in shame at being associated with that group – he knows full well what they are, but they support him, and he comforts himself with his personal rationalization:
What can you do when you have to deal with people?
Project X, or Xylophone, is a sound weapon, a weapon of mass destruction, and if once again we cringe a little at Rand’s invocation of “sound rays,” at least something of the sort is imaginable even if certain laws of physics might have to be suspended a bit in order for it to have the effects described. The ones demonstrated are to blow a house off its foundations and liquefy the internal organs of a small herd of sacrificial goats.
Dr. Stadler leaned back a little…and asked, “Who invented that ghastly thing?”
“You did.”
His theoretical work and that of whom Ferris mocks Stadler for referring to as “third-raters.” They were certainly good enough to produce a particularly nasty weapon and place it into the hands of particularly nasty people.
“What is the practical purpose of this invention?”
“It is an invaluable instrument of public security. No enemy would attack the possessor of such a weapon…it will promote peace, stability, and…harmony. It will eliminate all danger of war.”
“What war? With the whole world starving and all those People’s States barely subsisting on handouts from this country – where do you see any danger of war? Do you expect those ragged savages to attack you?”
We chuckle a little at Stadler’s naivete.
Dr. Ferris looked straight into his eyes. “Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones,” he answered. “Perhaps greater.”
And yet it is a purely virtuous sort of mass-murdering device. It was, after all, produced without the idea of making a penny of profit. What we have demonstrated for us here is the malevolent power of the collective when it expropriates and concentrates the surplus given it by the productive individuals within it.
Dr. Ferris smiled. “No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X,” he said softly. “It’s an enormous investment with no prospect of material gain.”
It took a good deal of convincing the powers that be to get them to invest in such a thing, and Dr. Stadler’s reputation was the clincher. And he will grant its use, or else.
Ferris spoke again…”It would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to jeopardize the State Science Institute…or if any one of us were to be forced to leave it. Where would we go? Are you thinking, perhaps of universities? They are in the same position. If anyone wished to oppose a government policy, how would he make himself heard? Through these gentlemen of the press, Dr. Stadler? Is there an independent newspaper left in the country? An uncontrolled radio station?”
Fortunately this is only fiction. The bulwark of freedom in the United States is a fearless press that is not beholden to the government, respects truth above all, and does not attempt to become a tool of party for the manipulation of public opinion. Unfortunately, that is fiction as well.
There is a dissenting voice, of course – Rand places it into a young newsman’s mouth:
“Dr. Stadler! Tell them you had nothing to do with it! Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it’s intended to be used! Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it! Tell them the truth! Save us! You’re the only one who can!”
Dr. Ferris whirled upon the young man and snapped, his face out of control, distorted by rage… “Give me your press card and your work permit!”
So much for a press that has sold its soul for the trappings of power. It has earned the yoke it bears. But what does Ferris mean? The Unification Board controls the ability of an individual to find employment – Rand saw this in Russia before she fled, her own father having had his business establishments twice expropriated by the State – and what is “unified” in this sense is very real – work, and the ability to find it. And the power to withhold it. The young man has just been sentenced to slow starvation. As the State progresses, there will be ration cards and the starvation even quicker.
That is now the threat held over Stadler’s head, and it is unanswerable. “Greed” – profit – employs no one in the scientific community anymore, and that’s a problem because where there is no competition there are no alternatives.
“A man like Rearden would have fought for us. Would a man like Orren Boyle?”
The answer to that is a lifeless lump of fur that once was a goat, lying in a field. That could have been Stadler and it will unless he obeys his masters. His worth to them now is his name, not his mind. His thirst, like that of the composer Halley, is for the praise of those capable of appreciating his achievements. He has lost his soul but praise he has. Not, alas, on that basis; the praise is hollow, and he is now a hollow man.
The scene shifts suddenly, and we are once again in the company of Dagny Taggart, who has been deposited in Nebraska by Galt’s airplane and makes her way back to New York. There she is greeted by Eddie Willers, who has managed somehow to hold Taggart Transcontinental together for the last two months, and her brother James, who explains to her that all of the railroads in the country are now to be consolidated under a Railroad Unification Board. It’s perfectly all right – Taggart being the largest, it has the right to anyone else’s track, and the lion’s share of the proceeds – not profits, of course, that would be greed.
[Dagny] “We run our trains without charge for the use of the [Atlantic Southern] track? Has anybody calculated how long the Atlantic Southern is expected to be able to remain in business?”
“That’s no skin off your – “ started [Cuffy] Meigs.
“The president of the Atlantic Southern,” said Eddie impassively, “has committed suicide.”
As well he might, given that his line and Dagny’s, all of the lines, are now relieved from the necessity of competition by the simple virtue of being owned by the same entity. Not The People, not even The State except in the persons of that ruling class that has assumed power over them both. And those persons have their own agenda.
[Dagny] “Just tell me whether I understood that Unificator correctly: he wants you to cancel the Comet for two days in order to give her engines to a grapefruit special in Arizona?”
“That’s right.”
“Grapefruit?”
“The grapefruit special is for the Smather brothers. The Smather brothers have friends in Washington.” He paused, then added, “the Director of Unification is sole judge of the public welfare and has sole authority over the allocation of any motive power and rolling stock on any railroad anywhere in the United States.”
As always, the “good of the people” turns out to be the good of a very small and influential subset. The rest need merely be placated by soothing and inspiring propaganda campaigns, such as the one to which Dr. Stadler found his name lent. Such as the one Dagny’s name is to be lent.
Like Stadler, she is to be forced in front of a microphone to promote confidence in a failing government, this in the company of her old nemesis Bertram Scudder. She balks, naturally, and in walks Lillian Rearden to inform her that she will appear for the same reasons that Hank signed over the ownership of Rearden Metal – pure, cold-blooded blackmail. Although Dagny must have guessed, this is confirmation for the first time that Hank had given over his life’s achievement in order to shield her from public opprobrium. She’ll have none of that, and to everyone’s shock declares their affair over the air in frank and shameless terms. And there is no opprobrium – they need her too much to have their press destroy her in a smear campaign that would be depressingly familiar to us today.
Hank hears that broadcast and with remarkable perception realizes that she is referring to their affair in the past tense. She has found a new love. And, just as noble as Francisco was under the identical circumstances, he is actually happy for her. Rand’s male heroes are apparently incapable of the jealousy that Dagny herself has felt, and capable of a sacrifice of their own feelings that seems entirely contrary to Rand’s philosophy. This, one is tempted to conclude, may be the sort of contradiction that should impel Rand to check her own premises concerning human relationships.
She can tell him nothing of Atlantis, of Galt’s Gulch. He can’t help himself from pressing her.
“Couldn’t you trace your way back to it?”
“I won’t try.”
“And the man?”
“I won’t look for him.”
“He remained there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you leave him?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Who is he?”
Her chuckle of desperate amusement was involuntary. “Who is John Galt?”
Hank is not fooled by this dissimulation.
“So there is a John Galt?” he asked slowly.
“Oh yes! There’s one thing I can tell you about him, because I discovered it earlier, without promise of secrecy: he is the man who invented the motor we found.”
“Oh!” He smiled, as if he should have known it. Then he said softly, with a glance that was almost compassion, “He’s the destroyer, isn’t he?” He saw her look of shock, and added, “No, don’t answer me, if you can’t. I think I know where you were…Good God, Dagny! – does such a place really exist? Are they all alive? Is there…? I’m sorry. Don’t answer.”
She smiled. “It does exist.”
He remained silent for a long time.
“Hank, could you give up Rearden Steel?”
“No!” The answer was fiercely immediate, but he added, with the first sound of hopelessness in his voice, “Not yet.”
Nor Dagny her Taggart Transcontinental, not yet. Not yet.
Have a great week, Publius!
So in the long run, after you are dead, someone else will be left paying for your excesses and the compounded interest that goes along with it. This is better known as the Selfishness of the Left. It allows the looter to selfishly loot for the moment with no consideration of the long-term effects of his actions.
Another statement by Keynes that hits closer to home in our current situation is this:
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Rand plays with the idea of a state that is willing to slaughter its people to maintain power, but she drops it almost immediately. There are two kinds of people who run such states. One kind understands that if he starves the masses, he'll get food riots, so he makes sure they can at least eat. The other is willing to kill the rioters. Joseph Zdugashvili and Mao Tse Tung were two of the latter group.
Rand avoided the obvious implications of the state she imagined. She wrote extensively about the deaths of the passengers on the Comet when it crashed with the arms train in the Taggart Tunnel. The incident filled twenty pages and introduced several characters, all of whom were portrayed as worthy of their fate. There are also hints of violence prior to this point. Dagny Taggart mentions raiders on the frozen train, but nothing about their actual methods.
Rand portrayed the ideological battle between self love and self hate, not a contest of arms between factions of different stripes. Her method argues that the reader should appreciate himself and not view himself as worthless when compared to society. Another interesting view of a society gone mad “for the common good” is offered in Harlan Ellison's A boy and His Dog.
In the film adaptation of that story, the Topeka Council is the absolute authority in a post apocalypse city. Anyone who defies the council is immediately killed and the death attributed to a farm accident or some other benign circumstance, with the council blithely adding, “Oh, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul,” after they order the murder. In Soviet Russia, the order might be a profane tirade from Papa Joe, followed by the disappearance of the victim, and the state's effort to remove that person from the historical record. Why bother to lie about his death when refusing to admit that he ever lived eliminates the need to answer difficult questions?
Rand's collectivist state sabotaged a wheat harvest so that politically connected traders could ship grapefruits. Such a state has to use force. People find out why they're starving, why their friends and relatives are starving, and they're not nice when they find out who did it. But Rand never mentions the state taking action against the violators of Directive 10-289. The penalty for violation is death, but no one gets executed. This is perhaps a reflection of The Fountainhead, which portrayed the conflict between socialism and liberty as an ideological battle. Perhaps enough people did not understand what The Fountainhead was truly about and Rand changed her theme to make it more clear.