And that’s one place where the book was so evil. Even Eddie was left to die, because he wasn’t one of Rand’s “innovators.” Let alone that he ran her railroad for months, very successfully, while Dagny was literally just screwing around. In Rand’s world, you are either completely self-made, or you were the problem, and begging for your own death. Tell me Eddie was part of the problem. Tell me Eddie deserved death.
Probably most of us can relate to Eddie. In reading the book, I didn’t find the protagonists to be heroes. They seemed to be merely examples of real-life “producers” and what they would do if pushed too far.
John Galt didn’t save anyone, and wouldn’t. Billions of people died, and civilization was utterly destroyed, while a few hundred people survived in a village like Syfy’s “Eureka.”
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That bothered me too for a long time that Eddie died But I finally came to realize that Eddie could not let go of the railroad and he chose to die with it. Remember John Galt was talking to Eddie all throughout the book. Eddie told him that he didn’t want to go on any more after what he had seen. He saw that Eddie was not ready to give up and become a striker. He only told people about his strike when he thought that they were ready lest they reveal the truth about him and what the strikers were doing. Dagney Taggert held out til almost the very end and had she decided to stick it out with the railroad she would have also died and Galt would have let her even though she was his greatest love. But he had taken an oath never to ask anyone to live for his sake and he did not believe in forcing anyone.
There are sins of commission and sins of omission. I don’t consider them even vaguely equivalent.
Galt and Co. left. They left the world to solve it’s own problems or to suffer from them. It was not their responsibility to be slaves to those who would squander their efforts and deny them any recompense from them. Even more to the point they were being actively vilified for those efforts. It’s hard to have sympathy for a world which blames its saviors for the trouble it suffers.
Yes, I did feel bad for Eddie when he’s abandoned at the end since he really wasn’t a bad sort, but sometimes you can’t save everyone.
Let me ask you a question in return- if Eddie couldn’t save himself, then why was it someone else’s fault?