Atlas Shrugged – Day 095 – pp. 1009-1069
Holy crap!!! John Galt has just taken the stage.
Actually he’s used his hulking intellect to commandeer the broadcast.
Hulk Galt say, “Puny looters!”
Certainly, a mind of this superior capacity would obviously have something to say. But Ayn Rand goes nuts. I mean freakin’ nuts. His broadcast, her — what? — diatribe?, lasts for SIXTY pages. SIXTY!
Now, I’m on page 1,009 here. You’d think Rand has gotten her point across by now. I mean, if you can’t deliver a message in this many words… Figure roughly 11 words per line with, pretty consistently 40+ lines per page means 440 words per page times 1,200 pages is in the ballpark estimate of 528,000 words!
If, as a writer, you can’t make a point in over half a million words, maybe you need to find another job.
On the other hand, that’s probably why she leaves a dissertation like this for the very end. We’re all in for a dollar by now.
Anyway, I’m not going to go ten pages at a time for this. I believe (hope) I’ve got the gist. I’m guessing I have an idea of what JG is going to talk about. So I’m going to try to point out some of the highlights of what he says over the course of the broadcast.
(Deep breath) Here we go…
“…this is an age of moral crisis.”
OK.
“Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, … You have sacrificed justice to mercy… independence to unity… reason to faith… wealth to need… self-esteem to self-denial… happiness to duty.”
“Your ideal had an implacable enemy … I have withdrawn that enemy.”
“…our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer.”
So we’ve set up the basis for our argument and basically told the listeners they got what they asked for.
And then he puts things in a different perspective.
“…we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it.”
So essentially there are two ways to look at things. The right way and the wrong way? The fantasy way and the reality way? Hmmmm.
Then Galt (Rand) goes on a bit of an atheist rant.
“You have been taught that morality is a code … to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare … but not to serve your life or pleasure. … For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors…”
“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and practical are opposites…”
So really, she’s put three groups at odds here. The religious who live for God’s will, the socialists who live for their fellow man’s will, and her own objectivists who live for their own will.
The fact that belief in God is an act of faith does not preclude any of her other arguments. It doesn’t “demand the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind.” Frankly, I don’t know that God says you can’t have things. Even lots of things. The problem is putting things before Him.
(Now, all that said, I don’t know what the church was teaching back in Rand’s day. Certainly there were times throughout history, religion was used as a means to force submission. But that’s just as incorrect and perverted a view as the “socialist” concept. Which by the way, I’m giving no air time to because “altruism” — living solely for the benefit of others — is stupid.)
If Galt would take his criticism of religion just one step further, he’d have to concede that God has given man his mind. And given he holds man’s mind as almighty, that would make it God’s greatest achievement. Why on earth would religion then demand that you don’t use God’s greatest gift?
“But to think is an act of choice…”
Yes, and God also gives us choices (and the mind to choose.)
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. … Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. … An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code for action [I can see that from the osprey who lives outside my window] … Man has no automatic code of survival. … An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct in an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct.”
I don’t know if I fully agree with that. We do have an instinct for survival and self-preservation. “Self-immolation,” as Hank keeps saying, runs counter to our very natures. That’s why the G needs to exert such persuasion to get us to act counter to that instinct. That’s why Rand criticizes education that teaches our children not to think. Because our innate instinct to survive. And the extension of our minds to find a way to do so.
Then Galt lays out is overarching philosophy:
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”
Then he goes on to adulate man’s ability to think.
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.”
OK.
“Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”
Now that’s a pretty broad statement. It assumes we all hold the same things valuable. Sure, certain values are universal. But others are very personal.
“Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud…”
Rant against “subsidized classrooms” and “those who pose as scientists” ensues.
Galt says living is an act of choice.
This, he says, is the realization that made all the industrialists go on strike.
Then he goes off into the real deep shit.
“…the axiom that existence exists.”
The quick explanation:
“Existence exists — and the act off grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”
Wow, thanks. That cleared everything up! (60 pages of that!)
Basically he goes on to explain that our basic rationality is the foundation of our existence. That we can perceive things and understand them as they are is our greatest achievement. That the sin is not that we’re blind, but that we refuse to see. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Moral commandments are bad because the idea of a “commandment” runs counter to the basis of morality which is choice. He prefers the word “axiom.”
Then he goes on to talk about different types of recognitions.
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists.
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment…
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness…
Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value…
Justice it the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of man as you cannot fake the character of nature…
Productiveness is your acceptance of morality… that productive work is the price by which man’s consciousness controls his existence…
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your how highest value and, like all of mans values. it has to be earned…”
I think Robert Ringer summed this whole thing up in “Winning Through Intimidation” back in the 70s. He called it “the theory of reality.” Things are as they are and not the way you wish they were.
Let’s move on…
He says, to be fair, that he doesn’t expect to be forced to live for anybody else’s pleasure, so he doesn’t expect anyone to live for his.
And that said, the worst crime against nature, the greatest act of evil one man can commit against another …
“So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate — do you hear me? no man may start — the use of physical force against others.”
Looters.
He makes a nice illustration a few paragraphs down that may ring a bell…
“Be it the highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum” ‘Your money or your life’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’…”
(Health care or your life?)
He makes an interesting distinction in the goals of man…
“You who are worshipers of the zero — you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ and entity is not ‘the absence of nonentity.'”
That’s good basic logic that I think is lost on a lot of people. I think it was a point made in “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He made a point that the absence of proof of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exits (like the titular black swan.) In medicine he says “no evidence of disease” is not the same as saying “evidence of no disease.”
Two very different goals.
He takes aim at the (possibly inaccurate) claim of bias used by those who would subdue others…
“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice.”
OK, here we go back to a rant against religion…
“What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being.”
Hmmmmmm. I guess taken literally, he makes a point.
But according to Galt (Rand) subordinating your mind to God or society is the ultimate sin.
Here’s an interesting take on sacrifice (and, I guess, by extension, charity…)
“Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
… If you achieve a career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.”
So if you surrender anything for something in which you find value — it is not a sacrifice. Subjective decision? I think so.
But, it is NOT a sacrifice to renounce or give up the unwanted. Has to be valued.
JG’s generally against sacrifice.
This he says is the immorality of the current way of thinking. Give up what you consider value.
Then he slams their (the looters) code that personal desires are evil but the desires of the whole are good. We’ve been through that about 100 times…
Then he asks the $64,000 question…
“Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own?”
Absolutely.
Now another interesting observation…
“When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite… You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. you hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded.”
Now on to romance.
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person….”
Wasn’t Dagny screaming that in bed while Hank was banging her?
On the overall philosophy of the looters (and the Starnes kids)
“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence.”
Can’t shut out the individual.
Then he explains the virtue of causality.
“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it.”
Point he’s making… The industrialists are the causality of all the good stuff they had. Can’t eat the cake before they produce it.
A prod at personal responsibility…
“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.”
He recaps his story of the meeting at Starnes motors for everyone… Then recaps the tenets they’re being force fed:
“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others -0 that your’e unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler — that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you you have no knowledge…” etc…
Then he offers the listeners an out.
“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice. … You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.”
The truth shall set you free!! baby!!!!
It is their sin to “blank out” all the evidence of the evil irrationality around them.
“Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind.”
I like this bit.
“This country – the product of reason – could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts.”
Yet the men who stepped into power somehow discovered what could be gained by the power of the handout. Keep ’em happy enough and you can do whatever you want.
The guiltiest among you are those who had the capacity to understand the truth and chose to ignore it.
“Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?”
Zing…
Now the call to action.
“I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. … If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, … build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence.”
Yadda yadda yadda…
And he closes with his oath.
Wow. Can that woman write and write and write and write….