by Tom Pratt
“I mean that there is no way to disarm any man,” said Dr. Ferris, “except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it—we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.” (p. 548)
It is at this point that Taggart regains his composure and asserts his ability to “deliver” Rearden at the desired moment. We know that the plot has been developing that possibility all along. Taggart has a “secret” conspirator who has reason to want to see Rearden reduced to the un-heroic and suffering punishment. The guiltless man must be exposed. The “aristocracy of pull” will see to this business.
Chapter 4 - The Moratorium on Brains
Ayn Rand believed that the universe as we know it is benevolent. Most people consider that idea to be at least a feint toward theism. Of course, this is not true of her at all, for she was always a confirmed atheist from the time of her youth when she made the commitment to view the world from that perspective. It is arguably the reason such stalwarts of capitalism and market economics as Wm. F. Buckley and the crew assembled around the launching and nurturing of National Review as the banner publication of “conservatism” made the decision to virtually read her out of the conservative movement along with the likes of the John Birch Society. She is known to have chided Buckley for his unabashed Catholicism and failure to rule God out of consideration in philosophical and political thought. We would call this poor strategy, but strategy was clearly not what she was about.
By benevolence Rand meant that the universe was understandable to rational observation and by implication reality is intelligible, with the corollary that if one understands it rationally and responds in kind it is not hostile. She also clearly understood this in the Aristotelian sense; that is, that this is the nature of reality itself, not just the way we think about it or wish it to be. This is the meaning of her three section titles: Non-Contradiction, Either-or, and A is A. Stated as succinctly as possible, these three premises (or one-in-three) are the foundation of both Rand’s and Aristotelian logic: The nature of reality is such that (1) something cannot be and not-be at the same time and in the same respect; (2) something either exists or does not exist at a given time and in a given respect; and (3) something is what it is at a given time and in a given respect. The “benevolence” in this is that it is so simple that any rational being can be taught its implications and no rational adult can claim exemption from its consequences. The bumper sticker motto is, “You can’t fake reality,” or in the words of the old TV commercial, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”[23] This forms a solid base from which to formulate morality for Rand. Everyone is responsible to engage in rational self interest to their own benefit and that of their fellows without the use of force for anything but self-defense or that of the innocent. Rand herself shortened this rule to “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”[24]
The strike of the producers in Atlas Shrugged was brought on by the growing and stifling encroachment of a societal and political commitment to irrational impulses directed at an alleged “common good” to which all were expected to adhere regardless of their own interests or ability to see through its smarmy charade. The protagonists and antagonists we have seen so far are engaged at the highest level of the struggle to win the day—one to save the remnants of a once free and productive political economy and the other bent on establishing themselves, politicians and businessmen, as the “aristocracy of pull.” The latter require a pliable public and a willing group of victims to carry out their scheme. The former are struggling to compete in an arena unfamiliar to them, in the sense that it does not come at all naturally to them to play such games. The task John Galt took for himself was to convince the producers that they could not win in a game stacked like this and must therefore deny their enemies the one thing they cannot produce on their own—the minds of their victims. The strikers gradually remove from the mix any benefit the looters and moochers might gain from the use of their minds in the conviction that one day a critical mass will be reached and society will collapse of its own mindless weight and the strikers can then return to their loved way of life.
At the center of the story is a tragic event that illustrates the corollary to this battle of the Titans. Their battle is but a symptom and result of a societal battle that has been gradually but inexorably waged through all levels of class and economics and education. The “people” for whom the aristocrats of politics and pull have been supposedly waging the war have themselves become more and more mindless, not by their own deliberate design necessarily, but by neglect and conformism and sloth and confusion and general weariness of the myriad choices incumbent upon those who would maintain their freedom. The three Aristotelian foundations of rational thought all come to bear in the fateful experience at the Winston Tunnel. Our chapter title is taken from Rand’s title and is intended to convey the truth that while some have gone on strike, others have been complicit, in the way we describe here, in the abdication of their own responsibility to think for themselves and find themselves caught up in the consequences of their own non-decisive decisions and irrationality. As in the case of so many of Rand’s themes there is a double entendre in the title of the chapter.
The plot has proceeded to the point that the aristocracy of pull has begun to implement the Directive 10-289 mandates. Enforcement is proceeding and the bureaucracies are exploding. Taggart Transcontinental has been furnished with a substitute, Clifton Locey, for the mysteriously missing Dagny by government directive, and he is implementing the reign of mindless incompetency from the executive’s office, for he is there for no other reason than political pull. James Taggart is simply along for the ride, having made his trade-offs for “delivering” Hank Rearden to the Unification Board. Taggart Transcontinental is becoming a shell of its former self as rolling stock breaks down all over the country with no one able to fix, repair, or replace the losses, since competent personnel are slipping away to who knows where, escaping the dying beast. Gradually lines are shutting down due to insufficient revenues, passengers, repairable rails, freight, and working equipment, not to mention competent employees. The one route that seems untouchable is the Comet, a coast to coast passenger train that has been the pride of TT. On the fateful day a government bigwig, Kip Chalmers, attaches his personal rail car to the Comet for a ride to the west coast for a campaign shindig that will decide his future as a politician. Along with him in the car are his mistress and several fawning sycophants whose only fraternal relationship with each other and Chalmers is fear of being left out when the game of musical chairs stops.
The critical point in the journey is an eight-mile long tunnel in the Rocky Mountains near Winston Station. Travel through this narrow passage is possible with diesel engines traveling at a rate of speed sufficient to dissipate carbon monoxide fumes that gather from exhaust. The older coal-burning engines used around the country safely are completely unsafe for this operation, so the standing order in TT has been that a spare diesel engine is always stationed at Winston in case something goes wrong with the usual engine. This permits the Comet to move through no matter the breakdown and maintain its famous on-time schedule and reputation. The cold truth is that the spare engine has recently been commandeered by government operatives and moved to duty thought more politically expedient. In its place is a standard coal-burning locomotive. Naturally the Comet breaks down and the sad political dance begins, for Chalmers is not about to let anything deter him from making his campaign appearance. His methodology is the applicatio
n of unabashed fear to every person and entity he can touch with hand or voice or telegram. He will not take this lying down, so to speak, and the universal fear of the actions of the Unification Board on all business and employment relationships runs rampant throughout all levels of the TT structure, up to and including the incompetents James Taggart and Mr. Locey.
Orders fly to find a diesel anywhere, get the train on schedule, insure safety, don’t disappoint Mr. Chalmers, maintain the Comet’s reputation, ad infinitum. Pressure builds inexorably on the station manager and his assistants and various lackeys. All of them are aware that it is suicidal to send the train through the tunnel with a coal-burning engine. No one wants to take responsibility for such an order, but they have no choice, since the Unification Board has made it illegal to quit one’s job, the only apparent alternative to issuing this order. Chalmers continues to insist and the buck finally stops with an order issued to Dave Mitchum, the superintendent of the Colorado Division: “Give an engine to Mr. Chalmers at once. Send the Comet through safely and without unnecessary delay. If you are unable to perform your duties, I shall hold you responsible before the Unification Board. Clifton Locey.” (p. 594) Locey makes sure he is nowhere to be found for the next several hours, and Dave Mitchum now must walk through the detritus of the moratorium on brains. “He knew that no railroad order would ever speak in such terms as giving an engine to a passenger; he knew that the thing was a show piece, he guessed what sort of show was being staged, and he felt a cold sweat at the realization of who was being framed as the goat of the show.” (pp. 594-595)
Mitchum had recently gotten this job through the influence of friends with pull. He makes frantic calls to find someone somewhere who will relieve him of this consequence of being in a place without the skills or competence or courage to fix the problem. “If he held the train, they would make him the scapegoat to appease the anger of Mr. Chalmers; if he sent the train through and it did not reach the western portal of the tunnel, they would put the blame on his incompetence; they would claim that he had acted against their orders, in either case. What would he be able to prove? To whom? One could prove nothing to a tribunal that had no stated policy, no defined procedure, no rules of evidence, no binding principles—a tribunal, such as the Unification Board, that pronounced men guilty or innocent as it saw fit, with no standard of guilt or innocence.” (p. 596) No one is there to absorb his date with reality. He had spent his life getting ahead and getting along in this manner and no one had taught him that just this situation is attached to this kind of bargain—“the manner in which he obtained this job, and the frame-up, were inextricable parts of a single whole.” (p. 597)
After several other failed moves Mitchum decides to pass the frame along to his chief dispatcher Bill Brent. Brent is a different kind of man from Mitchum and has been sizing up the situation for several hours as it has played out. When the orders and the frame are solidly in place and Mitchum is about to exit to save his skin for the next play in the game, Brent simply says “No.” In the ensuing verbal explosion he makes it plain that he will quit the job and if the sheriff wants to arrest him in the morning he’ll be at his home. Brent is no philosopher. Rand paints the picture of an ordinary man caught in an unimaginable situation making a moral decision simply because he cannot evade it in his own mind and values:
Bill Brent had learned to see, by a single glance at a few numbers on a sheet of paper, the entire trackage of a division—so he was now able to see the whole of his own life and the full price of the decision he was making. He had not fallen in love until he was past his youth; he had been thirty-six when he had found the woman he wanted. He had been engaged to her for the last four years; he had had to wait, because he had a mother to support and a widowed sister with three children. He had never been afraid of burdens, because he had known his ability to carry them, and he had never assumed an obligation unless he was certain that he could fulfill it. He had waited, he had saved his money, and now he had reached the time when he felt himself free to be happy. He was to be married in a few weeks, this coming June. (p. 601)… Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live. (p. 602)
He is not one of Rand’s Titans, or is he? Brent is the oasis of sanity and rationality who obeys the principle of highest value to Rand—he will not live in a world such as the one he finds himself entangled in. He goes to the door and calls two men as witnesses and tells Mitchum that he will do as ordered if he will give the order in front of those men. Mitchum lashes out with a crashing punch that sends him bloodied to the floor, screaming that Brent is a coward and a law-breaker. “In the slow effort of rising from the floor, through the haze of blood running into his eyes, Bill Brent looked up at the two men. He saw that they understood, but he saw the closed faces of men who did not want to understand, did not want to interfere and hated him for putting them on the spot in the name of justice. He said nothing, rose to his feet and walked out of the building.” (p. 602)
Ultimately the real coward, Mitchum, foists his order upon a boy who is simply unable to fathom what is happening around him as his older fellow workers tell him it’s not his job to think. He issues the order to the station agent who tells himself that things may not be as bad as they seem and the train will probably be OK. The conductor and the engineer refuse to obey the order and walk out. The station agent turns to an engineer who has recently arrived with a different train and asks if he will do the job. This engineer is drunk and in a fit of bravado tells himself and the agent he can do it. Kip Chalmers remarks to those in his car as it begins to move that fear is “the only practical way to deal with people.” The train makes its way into the tunnel and never exits.
It is at this point that Rand makes the move that so often troubles unsympathetic readers. In fact, it is just at this point that Jason Lee Steorts (cited above) accuses Rand of hating her characters, of having passed from a more benevolent stage in her life to one of culpable vindictiveness. The cause for this is the following passage that we insert at length to be sure we get a fair take on it.
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men.
The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause,” who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others—to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder—for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of “a good cause,”…
The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly school teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil…
The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another—and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder…
The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.
The man in Drawing Room A, Car No. 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying “frozen” railroad bonds and getting his friends in Washington to “defreeze” them.
The
man in Seat 5, Car No. 7, was a worker who believed that he had “a right” to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.
The woman in Roomette 6, Car No. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had “a right” to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.
The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property…
The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, “I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.”
The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.