by Tom Pratt
Such is the confusion of values, of virtues and vices, in a world given to irrationality by its rulers. One must fight the battle one has been given to restore sanity. Hugh Akston went on strike rather than stay in the employ of an institution that sanctioned such a world in its philosophy departments: “When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking, as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought—it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind. They grant the enemy’s basic premise, thus granting the sanction of reason to formal dementia. A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance.” (pp. 741-742) He refused to grant an irrational basic premise for conversation. If he had, he would have become part of the problem. He and Galt are making a clear distinction between the betrayer and the unwitting abettor of one’s own sufferings. Rand’s characters all grant that it is possible to be wrong in one’s judgments and conclusions and to require examination of the premises of one’s actions, but it is unforgivable (unless one changes) to refuse to think (in favor of “feeling”) or to persist in patently irrational patterns of thought based on palpably wrong or pernicious premises. There are “enemies” and there are enemies.
There are also comrades in arms and fellow-laborers and those who are in the vanguard of aspiration to higher attainment and ideals and those who would learn from those who have moved on ahead. Otherwise there would be no reason for a destroyer and nothing to carry the plot. The idealized and almost mythical “Titans” are there to clarify the issues for those interested in Rand’s philosophical ideals. John Galt is the ultimate teacher, surpassing even his own teacher. But others are clearly teachers of a sort along the way. Dagny is a constant influence on Eddie Willers, who has loved her from their childhood and is the only person she will trust fully to implement her directives as chief of operations. Willers is also influenced by Galt without realizing what is going on. He is the kind of man the most creative visualize as benefiting from their work. We see this in the sequence between d’Anconia and Rearden when he is about to go on trial for making a deal to sell some of his Metal outside the government’s rules. Francisco asks him what kind of men he wanted to ride on his rails and have better lives. Of course the men who are being taken out of the world by Galt are mentioned, but then he asks, “Did you want to see it used by men who could not equal the power of your mind, but who would equal your moral integrity—men such as Eddie Willers—who could never invent your Metal, but who would do their best, work as hard as you did, live by their own effort, and—riding on your rail—give a moment’s silent thanks to the man who gave them more than they could give him?” “Yes,” said Rearden gently. (p. 453)
Much of the novel is seen through the eyes of this common man, though he is not recruited to go on strike. At the end of the collapse of the TT system he is in charge of the last hours of the final run of the Comet. The train has been abandoned in the wasteland between cities, and he cannot stop the inexorable. He has no resources left but his sheer will to survive and not let the Comet die:
He was pulling at coils of wire, he was linking them and tearing them apart—while the sudden sense of sunrays and pine trees kept pulling at the corners of his mind. Dagny!—he heard himself crying soundlessly—Dagny, in the name of the best within us! . . . He was jerking at futile levers and at a throttle that had nothing to move. . . . Dagny!—he was crying to a twelve-year-old girl in a sunlit clearing of the woods—in the name of the best within us, I must now start this train! . . . Dagny, that is what it was . . . and you knew it, then, but I didn’t . . . you knew it when you turned to look at the rails. . . . I said, “not business or earning a living” . . . but, Dagny, business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible—that is the best within us, that was the thing to defend . . . in the name of saving it, Dagny, I must now start this train . . . (p. 1166)
The pathos of the scene is overwhelming, but it represents the essence of the titanic struggle that has gone on for almost 1200 pages. It is most telling in its juxtaposition to the burst of sound in the next paragraph, the sound of Richard Halley’s Concerto of triumph in the Valley of the heroes, for the death of the Comet is the signal for the rise of a new world from the ashes of the old. It should not be lost on us that the collapse of Eddie Willers does not happen until the men of the mind have been fully extracted from the chaos created by those who believed it possible to build a livable world without them. It is the Eddie Willerses of the world who then suffer the most, for they do not have the over-the-top abilities to actually change the context within which all of us live.
Across the country a bit earlier in the story another small story within the story has reached a climax. Washington had sent a spy to tag along with Hank Rearden about a fourth of the way through the book. Rearden refers to him as “Non-Absolute” and the “Wet Nurse” in various settings, having surmised the mission on which the young man has been sent. He is supposed to oversee compliance with the web of directives designed to hamstring business and Rearden in particular. Along the way he begins to warm up to his relationship with his boss and seeks to instruct him on the ways of Washington politics and the means of gaining favors. His justification is that nothing is absolute and everything is relative anyway, so why not take advantage of the situation? The steel man growls to Mr. Non-Absolute, just try to pour a heat of steel or build a mill without absolutes. In time there is a grudging respect for Rearden growing in the young man, and he overlooks a back door deal Hank makes with Ken Danagger. Rearden assumes he is saving the information to play against him at some ideal time of his own choosing. He questions him about it and finds the boy is losing his confidence in the ways of Washington.
The Wet Nurse becomes an admirer of the process of steel making and the character he sees in Rearden. When Rearden finds him hanging out on a holiday in the offices and out watching the process of pouring steel, he asks him what he is doing there on a holiday. He finds out the boy has no real family and once studied to be a metallurgist before he found his job in Washington. The conversation is wistful for both characters as they explore in their minds what it would have been like for them to be father and son. One day he asks Rearden, “What’s a moral premise?” This elicits the reply, “What you’re going to have a lot of trouble with.” The issue heats up when James Taggart arranges to extort the patent for Rearden Metal away from Henry and make it the property of the state and Orren Boyle in particular. The Wet Nurse has found out about the plot and is outraged. The exchange between the two is telling:
“Mr. Rearden,” he said, “I wanted to tell you that if you want to pour ten times the quota of Rearden Metal or steel or pig iron or anything, and bootleg it all over the place to anybody at any price—I wanted to tell you to go ahead. I’ll fix it up. I’ll juggle the books, I’ll fake the reports, I’ll get phony witnesses, I’ll forge affidavits, I’ll commit perjury—so you don’t have to worry, there won’t be any trouble!” “Now why do you want to do that?” asked Rearden, smiling, but his smile vanished when he heard the boy answer earnestly: “Because I want, for once, to do something moral.” “That’s not the way to be moral—” Rearden started, and stopped abruptly, realizing that it was the way, the only way left, realizing through how many twists of intellectual corruption upon corruption this boy had to struggle toward his momentous discovery. “I guess that’s not the word,” the boy said sheepishly. “I know it’s a stuffy, old-fashioned word: That’s not what I meant. I meant—” It was a sudden, desperate cry of incredulous anger… (pp. 555-556)
Still later on the Non-Absolute asks for a job, as he realizes the dirty business he is employed to carry out and simply cannot live with it any longer:
“I want to quit what I’m doing and go to work. I mean, real work—in steel-making, like I thought I’d started to, once. I want to earn my keep. I’m tired of being a bedbug.”
After Rearden shows his shock and disbelief, the boy continues,
“I mean it,
Mr. Rearden. And I know what the word means and it’s the right word. I’m tired of being paid, with your money, to do nothing except make it impossible for you to make any money at all. I know that anyone who works today is only a sucker for bastards like me, but . . . well, God damn it, I’d rather be a sucker, if that’s all there’s left to be!” (p. 934)
The conversion is complete!
Ultimately the government and its henchman among unionists cannot be stopped. The mills are invaded by union-inspired and hired goon squads, and the young man makes a vain attempt to stop the violent takeover. They shoot him and leave him for dead. When Rearden arrives at the scene he finds the boy at the top of a slag heap wounded and dying with bloodied hands and face and knees. The dying conversation reveals that the whole thing has been staged to justify taking over the steel industry. The boy has had all he will take and staked his life on trying to stop it and get Rearden there before it was too late. Rearden realizes from the conversation that he was dropped at the bottom of the huge heap and has clawed his way to the top to try to get word to him. As he is dying he realizes he has accomplished this last act of heroism and asks Rearden, “Mr. Rearden, is this how it feels to . . . to want something very much . . . very desperately much . . . and to make it?” Rearden manages to answer yes. Hank attempts to get him to be calm and let him take him to the hospital, but the boy knows he is dying. As Rearden relents and lets him lie undisturbed, he says,
“I won’t make it, Mr. Rearden . . . No use fooling myself . . . I know I’m through.” Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical, intellectual tone, “What does it matter, Mr. Rearden? . . . Man is only a collection of . . . conditioned chemicals . . . and a man’s dying doesn’t make . . . any more difference than an animal’s.” “You know better than that.” “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I guess I do.” (p. 991)
As the struggle between life and death play out, the boy, who in another reality might have been his son, puts the exclamation point to much of Rand’s bottom line philosophy:
“I know . . . it’s crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but—” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “—but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs . . . No values!...I’d like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I’d like to!” His voice was passionately quiet. “Not because I’m dying . . . but because I’ve just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive . . . And . . . it’s funny . . . do you know when I discovered it? . . . In the office . . . when I stuck my neck out . . . when I told the bastards to go to hell . . . There’s . . . there’s so many things I wish I’d known sooner . . . But . . . well, it’s no use crying over spilled milk.”
A few moments later Rearden attempts to calm him and steel his courage for an attempt to move to the hospital being carried by Rearden himself. In the exchange he calls the boy Tony.
He saw a sudden flicker in the boy’s face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. “Not ‘Non-Absolute’ any more?” “No, not any more. You’re a full absolute now, and you know it.” “Yes. I know several of them, now. There’s one”—he pointed at the wound in his chest—“that’s an absolute, isn’t it? And”—he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain—“and men can’t live . . . if rotten bastards . . . like the ones in Washington . . . get away with things like . . . like the one they’re doing tonight . . . if everything becomes a stinking fake . . . and nothing is real . . . and nobody is anybody . . . men can’t live that way . . . that’s an absolute, isn’t it?” “Yes, Tony, that’s an absolute.” (pp. 992-993)
The mills are eventually “saved” by the organization of his own tested men and the leadership of Francisco d’Anconia who has been working secretly for him as a foreman, but really being his body guard. But the realities of the experience have made him ready for the coup de gras by his “savior.” He has had enough of the guilt that had kept him working in slavery for others of unknown and known description, whose only response was to disdain his efforts and reach out a hand for more.
He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world…If it’s true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—“Come in!” he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door. (pp. 997-998)
Chapter 8 - Who Is John Galt?
Let Dagny Taggart answer that question:
You—she thought—whoever you are, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you—that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’ll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t. . . . She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love. (p. 634)
She thinks these thoughts even as she realizes it appears to be a hopeless quest to continue running Taggart Transcontinental in the face of the approaching national and international catastrophes. She has just admitted to Hank Rearden, who has signed his signature metal over to the government because of the extortion of James Taggart,
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 and moving in token of human intelligence. We’ll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we’ll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we’re paying, but—price is no object any longer. (p. 632)
She has not yet met John Galt, and she is still committed to her relationship to Rearden. She has returned from an absence during which she has weighed the price of continuing her own battle. The catalyst for her return is the tunnel disaster we have related above. Her statement to Hank is the essence of the truth Galt has been impressing upon those he takes from her at every turn. It is clear she knows the price she is paying and is bound in her own mind to continue doing so. In the loneliness of her apartment she looks out at the lights and streets of New York and reflects on her passion for work and achievement and the man she knows she has been seeking all her life. A ring of the doorbell reveals the presence of her childhood and youthful friend and lover, Francisco. He has come in the hope she has arrived at the conclusion he and Galt and others have seen. His disappointment is painful as the conversation proceeds:
“If Taggart Transcontinental is to perish with the looters, then so am I.” He did not take his eyes off her face and he did not answer. She added dispassionately, “I thought I could live without it. I can’t. I’ll never try it again. Francisco, do you remember?—we both believed, when we s
tarted, that the only sin on earth was to do things badly. I still believe it.” The first note of life shuddered in her voice. “I can’t stand by and watch what they did at that tunnel. I can’t accept what they’re all accepting—Francisco, it’s the thing we thought so monstrous, you and I!—the belief that disasters are one’s natural fate, to be borne, not fought. I can’t accept submission. I can’t accept helplessness. I can’t accept renunciation. So long as there’s a railroad left to run, I’ll run it.” “In order to maintain the looters’ world?” “In order to maintain the last strip of mine.”
“Dagny,” he said slowly, “I know why one loves one’s work. I know what it means to you, the job of running trains. But you would not run them if they were empty. Dagny, what is it you see when you think of a moving train?”
She glanced at the city. “The life of a man of ability who might have perished in that catastrophe, but will escape the next one, which I’ll prevent—a man who has an intransigent mind and an unlimited ambition, and is in love with his own life . . . the kind of man who is what we were when we started, you and I. You gave him up. I can’t.”
“Do you think that you can still serve him—that kind of man—by running the railroad?” “Yes.”
“All right, Dagny. I won’t try to stop you. So long as you still think that, nothing can stop you, or should. You will stop on the day when you’ll discover that your work has been placed in the service, not of that man’s life, but of his destruction.” (p. 635)