Clash of Titans

by Tom Pratt

  The conversation proceeds as they discuss whether this man exists at all. Francisco assures her he does, without naming him. He then describes what kind of man he is in these powerful words:

  You know, Dagny, we were taught that some things belong to God and others to Caesar. Perhaps their God would permit it. But the man you say we’re serving—he does not permit it. He permits no divided allegiance, no war between your mind and your body, no gulf between your values and your actions, no tributes to Caesar. He permits no Caesars.” (p. 636)

  This statement elicits from Dagny an assurance that if she ever comes to see what Francisco is trying to explain, she will beg for forgiveness on her knees. He assures her she will beg for forgiveness, but not on her knees. He then makes the statement of his purpose crystal clear in the language we have seen in the last chapter:

  Until then, Dagny, remember that we’re enemies. I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’re the first person who almost stepped into heaven and came back to earth. You’ve glimpsed too much, so you have to know this clearly. It’s you that I’m fighting, not your brother James or Wesley Mouch. It’s you that I have to defeat. I am out to end all the things that are most precious to you right now. While you’ll struggle to save Taggart Transcontinental, I will be working to destroy it. Don’t ever ask me for help or money. You know my reasons. Now you may hate me—as, from your stand, you should. (p. 636)

  Her response is a cry and his answer is an exclamation point to his disappointment and her continued quest:

  “Francisco!” she cried, in desperate defense of him against herself. “How can you do what you’re doing?” “By the grace of my love”—for you, said his eyes—“for the man,” said his voice, “who did not perish in your catastrophe and who will never perish.” (p. 637)

  This is who John Galt is—the single vision of an ideal man in the mind of Dagny Taggart, who is clearly standing in for Ayn Rand herself. In the previous chapter we saw that he is the enemy of all that Dagny holds dear in her world, and that he has vowed to stop that world in its tracks. In the process he must defeat her, but that requires his remaining somewhere in her world. We discover through her stay in Galt’s Gulch that he is actually her secret lover, a love that has never been consummated sexually, and is not during her stay. But his defense of returning to the outside world betrays his clear intention to win her to himself completely, and that he is willing to pay any price to do so. This is clearly what the literary world knows as “romantic” tension, though it is just as clearly in service of the philosophical ends in view. The sexual and “romantic” issues will not be settled without resolving the main conflict that takes 1200 pages to reach its denouement. Nevertheless, it is inescapable that the tension between the two is that between the sexes which must reach its consummation or die in rejection. Dagny as “enemy” is never defeated by Galt’s persuasion or argumentation. She is ultimately defeated by her inability to live without his presence in her life while she knows he is somewhere near at hand. When she discovers that he has been working for her as a track laborer for several years, and she manages to find his local address, she cannot resist going to him, even though he has warned her that she will be used by the authorities to find and get at him. He “wins” when she is driven to find him, but the state’s thugs are right behind. She must engage in an elaborate betrayal charade in order to convince them that Galt is her enemy and that she has deliberately led them to him. In the brief interim between her arrival at his door and the arrival of her followers he explains that he is willing to suffer anything at their hands, but he is unwilling to endure what they will do to her if they believe she is important to him, especially if they know of their love for one another.

  Francisco’s prophecy comes true as she sees him taken away at their mercy. Now she sees that her very presence has become the cause of his apparent defeat and eventual torture and possible death. The last sequences of the novel show how a state apparatus that is run by men who do not know how to actually produce and multiply wealth, only to confiscate and distribute it, requires some form of popular approval to survive—it must be sanctioned in some way by its victims. Their ridiculous mission in Galt’s case is to force him to take command and rule, thus rescuing their bacon. He simply refuses every persuasion, every trick, every inducement—he clearly does not live his life for the sake of money or position or pleasure--until in exasperation threats begin to come, and finally they resort to a torture chamber.[31] The device they use is the one produced from the scientific research of Robert Stadler, the man who believed in the purity of science and disdained its use for something as trivial as a motor, even one like Galt has invented, what we might call the ultimate “green machine.” By converting static electricity to power, it promises unlimited power for any use without diminishing resources or adding to pollution (issues important to us, but not to Rand in her day). The torture machine, nicknamed the Ferris Persuader, is designed to induce varying degrees of pain electrically to all parts of the body simultaneously or at intervals and for varying periods. They have him wired to EKG and EEG monitors to facilitate giving the maximum pain without killing him.

  As the final scenes unfold, Galt’s fellow strikers along with Dagny hatch the plan to rescue him from his captors. The situation of the government is desperate because the chaos in the countryside is mounting and no one actually knows what to do. In the irony of the moment Dr. Stadler has inadvertently set a sequence of actions that results in the destruction of the last link over the Mississippi River, the famous Taggart Bridge, by the other “invention” resulting from his research, the Xylophone. It is a device designed for use in subduing masses of people and cities and towns through wave technology allowing areas to be reduced to dust in an instant. The game is really already up for the statists, but they persist in various groupings in trying to maintain some last vestige of control, especially with reference to Galt whom they all know is their only hope for recovery. The certainty, and therefore the urgency, they have about this has been born out of and grows from the famous speech in the text of the novel. It was delivered from Galt’s apartment in New York using a radio frequency unknown to the outside world and powered by his motor so as to reach the entire country.

  The speech has done several things. First it has ripped the mask off the government’s robbery of the people in the name of “the common good.” It has also revealed the incompetency of the cadre of rulers (we now know them as “czars”) and their mass of bureaucrats who facilitate the various directives. The speech also left the unmistakable impression that Galt knows what to do to rescue the situation, thus making his persona a focus of hope and morale for the masses. But, it has struck fear and loathing into the statist planners and the looters and moochers and crony-capitalists who benefit from the current arrangements. The problem is that time is running out on what can be done when the producers have vowed no longer to produce for the benefit of such a regime. They know that if Galt cannot be “persuaded” to take charge, their goose is cooked and their lives are worthless. Dr. Ferris paints the picture:

  “We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won’t save you now. We want ideas—or else. We won’t let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you’ll take to save our system. Then we’ll have you tell it to the country over the radio.” He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we’ll start. Do you understand?” (p. 1140)

  Three men watch and listen to the pitiless cycle of pain and release, then pain again and release and the beating of his heart, the gasp of his lungs. Wesley Mouch, James Taggart and Dr. Ferris play the sadistic and deadly game of pushing Galt to the edge of death and releasing him. At one point Mouch c
ries out, “Don’t kill him! Don’t dare kill him! If he dies, we die!” Taggart on the other hand is wanting to see more pressure applied. He virtually snarls, “No! It’s not enough! I don’t want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We’ve got to have him work for us voluntarily!”

  Suddenly there is a realization among them that the machine has ceased its deadly assault upon Galt’s heaving body. The generator that supplied power has gone out. The technician in charge of the equipment is at a loss to explain or remedy what has happened. “The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing any buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order.” (p. 1143) As the men engage in loud and angry recriminations against one another for not having knowledge to carry on with their mission, a voice rises above the cacophony. It is Galt. Through labored breathing he deliberately instructs them on what is wrong with the machine and what to do to get it running again. The technician stands in silence for a moment looking into Galt’s eyes and suddenly drops his tools and runs from the room. Galt laughs. The other three look at one another hesitantly, except for Taggart, who insists they must go on as he drops to the floor and picks up tools to fix the machine. The other two demur and begin to suggest waiting till the next day to continue, but Taggart is intent on carrying on NOW! The others realize something is happening to Taggart and warn that they must not do anything that might kill Galt. He cries out, “I don’t care! I want to break him! I want to hear him scream! I want—” “And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment—the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.” (p. 1145)

  The realization in Taggart’s mind at once reveals his own sordid character and that which he sees in Galt. He knows who is James Taggart and who is John Galt:

  He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt’s evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence. (p. 1145)

  Another visceral vision born of years of ignoring the value of words in favor of emotions forced him to see another face:

  He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence—he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat—he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil. “No . . .” he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. “No . . . No . . .” “Yes,” said Galt. He saw Galt’s eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing. “I told you that on the radio, didn’t I?” said Galt. (p. 1146)

  As Taggart sinks to the floor in demented torment the other two men quickly retrieve him and leave the room promising to be back, but they know they will not be able to face again what they have seen there. “Their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar—the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.”

  Chapter 9 - The Man Who Loved His Life

  When the famous speech in Atlas Shrugged begins, the world is in chaos and along with it the USA. Mr. Thompson, the head of state, is scheduled to speak on the world crisis. His radio transmission is jammed and despite his loud and abusive insistence that communication be restored all are left in suspension until a voice comes through loud and clear. Only three people outside Galt’s Gulch recognize it—Dagny Taggart, Eddie Willers, and Dr. Robert Stadler. John Galt has at last reached that point at which he had aimed for twelve years—the removal of the victims of collective greed. What’s left is his true enemy and betrayer (Stadler), the only object left in the world that wants from it (Dagny), and the man he has been talking to throughout the story (Willers) as he worked for Taggart Transcontinental and sought to stop its motive power while “winning” its Chief of Operations. He begins appropriately, “For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.” (p. 1009) And it takes more than two hours of radio time and sixty pages in the Centennial Edition to tell them!

  The speech, of course, is the distillation of Rand’s Objectivism, now being explained in the abstract language of the philosophers and moralists and even preachers and prophets. The story of the novel has the purpose of unveiling the world that must follow from the accomplishment of the goals set by the “enemies of the mind,” as Rand sees them. The speech is the indictment brought against those who have now arrived at the world their own philosophy demanded, aided and abetted by Galt’s acceleration of the deterioration through removal of the “men of the mind.” As Francisco d’Anconia stated earlier in our survey, the world is getting just what it deserved from imbibing at the well of irrationality (as Rand sees it). In stark black and white it looks like this:

  You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. (pp. 1009-1010)

  Galt declares that all the world has been calling virtuous is now in the place of rule and the supposed “enemy” has been vanquished. The voice on the radio says, now see what you have!

  Galt continues by explaining the nature of the strike he has caused. It is a strike by those who do not recognize the claim of “need�
�� as binding on another’s mind or the claim that a single individual can be “owned” by another human being or the claim that the “duty to serve” requires living without joy or happiness. In short, “We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.” (p. 1010) The direction of the strike has been reversed, in the way we have seen throughout the narrative, so that the world may see in stark reality what it produces:

  There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: 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. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind. (pp. 1010-1011)

  What follows from this, as it probably seems obvious to most that it must, is the necessity of wrestling with the moral code that delivers such a result. Throughout the novel the “good” has been constantly torn between the code of the collective and the code of the men of the mind. Just exactly what is the “good” in such a struggle? Rand’s thesis in all her philosophical discussions is that “spirit” and physical reality must not be separated, so that one is torn between the “ghost” without a body (that is, intellectual, philosophical, or theological constructs that do not translate into a living reality of goodness) and the physical actions involved in work and labor divorced from the creative power of the mind. These two ends of the continuum produce the strange clash of two irrational possibilities to define the good: “The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.” (p. 1027) Each “possibility” in this dichotomy is “mystical” for Galt and Rand because they produce what the novel’s story reveals. Galt says that this struggle was introduced to mankind by those who say that morality is derived from the fact that a person’s life belongs to God on the one hand and/or those who say that that same person’s life belongs to one’s neighbor.[32] This juxtaposition of choices results in the strange and, for Galt, intolerable situation that one is trapped “between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.” (pp. 1011-1012) Both these sides are agreed, he says, on the idea that no morality can come from reason—“in reason there is no reason to be moral.”