Atlas Shrugged is such a powerful book, because it shows the final consequences of popular beliefs today. It is a more dramatic story than most of us experience day to day, but the same battle of ideas is taking place in our world today. We can see the same elements and errors in the people we interact with day to day. I’m currently re-reading it for the fourth time, and once again getting a lot of value from the experience. Below are my favorite quotes from Part Two. You can see my notes and comments on part one, here.
“The little fellow’s day in the sun,” the columnist had said. Their sun had been the flames that twisted through the derricks of Wyatt Oil. In its glare, they made the kind of fortunes they had dreamed about, fortunes requiring no competence or effort. Then their biggest customers, such as power companies, who drank oil by the trainful and would make no allowances for human frailty, began to convert to coal—and the smaller customers, who were more tolerant, began to go out of business—the boys in Washington imposed rationing on oil and an emergency tax on employers to support the unemployed oil field workers—then a few of the big oil companies closed down—then the little fellows in the sun discovered that a drilling bit which had cost a hundred dollars, now cost them five hundred, there being no market for oil field equipment, and the suppliers having to earn on one drill what they had earned on five, or perish—then the pipe lines began to close, there being no one able to pay for their upkeep—then the railroads were granted permission to raise their freight rates, there being little oil to carry and the cost of running tank trains having crushed two small lines out of existence—and when the sun went down, they saw that the operating costs, which had once permitted them to exist on their sixty-acre fields, had been made possible by the miles of Wyatt’s hillside and had gone in the same coils of smoke. Not until their fortunes had vanished and their pumps had stopped, did the little fellows realize that no business in the country could afford to buy oil at the price it would now take them to produce it. Then the boys in Washington granted subsidies to the oil operators, but not all of the oil operators had friends in Washington, and there followed a situation which no one cared to examine too closely or to discuss.”
Ayn Rand does an exceptional job of showing the second-order consequences of events in Atlas Shrugged. You see that here with the story of the aftermath of Wyatt Oil’s collapse and in a few more examples below.
“Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own—they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal—for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them—while you’d give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors—hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom—the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don’t respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?” – Dr. Stadler talking to Dagny about the static electricity motor.
Most people look around and feel threatened by the success of others. They would prefer to be worse off so long as someone else wasn’t better off. This is the instinct that drives the inequality fears that are so popular today. They proper view is the admire, not resent the success of others.
“He looked at the dim, sculptured beauty of the room and at the people who sat at the tables. They sat in a manner of self-conscious display, as if the enormous cost of their clothes and the enormous care of their grooming should have fused into splendor, but didn’t. Their faces had a look of rancorous anxiety. “Dagny, look at those people. They’re supposed to be the playboys of life; the amusement-seekers and luxury-lovers. They sit there, waiting for this place to give them meaning, not the other way around. But they’re always shown to us as the enjoyers of material pleasures—and then we’re taught that enjoyment of material pleasures is evil. Enjoyment? Are they enjoying it? Is there some sort of perversion in what we’re taught, some error that’s vicious and very important?” “Yes, Hank—very vicious and very, very important.” “They are the playboys, while we’re just tradesmen, you and I. Do you realize that we’re much more capable of enjoying this place than they can ever hope to be?” – Reardon on enjoying luxuries.
Luxuries need to be earned. You must work first to enjoy a vacation. You must earn your money to enjoy it. That is why self-made men are content and their heirs are so often not. They have the same money that their parents had and wonder why it doesn’t make them happy in the same way. They fail to realize that it is because they didn’t earn it.
You see this error played out on a giant scale with the lottery. People imagine that the unearned wealth of the lottery will make them happy. It will relieve their problems and they will get the respect they have always craved. But they and others will always know that it is unearned wealth. It can provide momentary satisfaction, but only by pulling a trick on yourself and trying to act as if you earned the money yourself. They people who are attracted to you, will help you create the illusion so you can keep the illusion going and leech off you.
“Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?” “Because they’re never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am.” “I do admire self-confidence.” “Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank.” “What’s the whole?” “Confidence of my value—and yours.” He glanced at her as if catching the spark of a sudden thought, and she laughed adding, “I wouldn’t be sure of holding a man like Orren Boyle, for instance. He wouldn’t want me at all. You would.” “Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?” “Of course.” “That’s not the reaction of most people of being wanted.” “It isn’t.” “Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.” “I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not.” – Dagny on why she likes a man that likes her.
“She saw that the trim, confident girls had a nasty insolence of manner when they spoke to Jim, as if they did not respect him and never had. One of them in particular, a Betty Pope, the daughter of the hostess, kept making remarks to him which Cherryl could not understand, because she could not believe that she understood them correctly.”
This is a quote from the scenes recounting Jim and Cherryl’s relationship. But the line “which Cherryl could not understand, because she could not believe that she understood them correctly” stands out. The phrase we experience this as “No, it couldn’t be that.” Sometimes your stories about other people can be out of line and fake. Sometimes the worst is true. It is important to trust your judgment and learn how to differentiate the two.
“There’s something I want you to know,” said Cherryl, her voice taut and harsh, “so that there won’t be any pretending about it. I’m not going to put on the sweet relative act. I know what you’ve done to Jim and how you’ve made him miserable all his life. I’m going to protect him against you. I’ll put you in your place. I’m Mrs. Taggart. I’m the woman in this family now.” “That’s quite all right,” said Dagny. “I’m the man.”
Mic drop.
Francisco’s Money Speech:
You can find the full speech from Fransisco here; it is well worth reading on its own and in full. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the speech.
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
“Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.”
“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind. “Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”
“To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”
People who hate money or long for a system where they don’t have to work for money are the people that don’t believe they deserve money and don’t want to do the work needed to become good enough to deserve it.
“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
There is a moment later in the book when Lillian and Jim reminisce for the time a few years earlier before the new straightforward crooks like Cuffy Meigs showed up. They preferred to pretend they were noble, but they lose out to the crooks who don’t need to maintain the veil. They don’t realize that they are playing a game where violence is the standard.
“Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifices and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank. Don’t do it in your own life.”
This is simple but provocative life and relationship advice. Most people would find this view of a relationship, as a mutually beneficial trade, as scary. Most people want commitment in a relationship they want protection from having to be of value to a partner.
“I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people—the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbors and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability—I refuse to apologize for my success—I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code—and I will accept no other.” – Reardon during his trial.
“Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”
“It was only one day’s delay. It caused a three days’ delay in the run of Freight Train Number 386, bound from California to New York with fifty-nine carloads of lettuce and oranges. Freight Train Number 386 waited on sidings, at coaling stations, for the fuel that had not arrived. When the train reached New York, the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River: they had waited their turn too long in the freight houses of California, with the train schedules cut and the engines forbidden, by directive, to pull a train of more than sixty cars. Nobody but their friends and trade associates noticed that three orange growers in California went out of business, as well as two lettuce farmers in Imperial Valley; nobody noticed the closing of a commission house in New York, of a plumbing company to which the commission house owed money, of a lead pipe wholesaler who had supplied the plumbing company. When people were starving, said the newspapers, one did not have to feel concern over the failures of business enterprises which were only private ventures for private profit. The coal shipped across the Atlantic by the Bureau of Global Relief did not reach the People’s State of England: it was seized by Ragnar Danneskjöld.”
Mr. Quinn, of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company which had once moved from Connecticut to Colorado, waited a week for the freight train that carried his order to Rearden Steel. When the train arrived, the doors of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company’s plant were closed. Nobody traced the closing of a motor company in Michigan, that had waited for a shipment of ball bearings, its machinery idle, its workers on full pay; or the closing of a sawmill in Oregon, that had waited for a new motor; or the closing of a lumber yard in Iowa, left without supply; or the bankruptcy of a building contractor in Illinois who, failing to get his lumber on time, found his contracts cancelled and the purchasers of his homes sent wandering off down snowswept roads in search of that which did not exist anywhere any longer.
Like the Wyatt Oil quote earlier, these are two more great example in the story of the power of unintended consequences. The bad and the good have a massive ripple effect.
“Look around you,” he said. “A city is the frozen shape of human courage—the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not ‘It seems to me,’ but ‘It is’—and to stake one’s life on one’s judgment. You’re not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as those on your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this?” He pointed at the city.
The Train Disaster
The chapter detailing the train disaster in Colorado is probably the most powerful chapter in the book. It is worth reading on its own and shows with a crystal clear example how avoidance of responsibility and refusal to think leads to horrors. This is Nazi Germany. This is how great evil happens. This is what you see when you go to socialist countries.
“He saw, in astonished horror, that the choice which he now had to make was between the lives of his children and the lives of the passengers on the Comet. A conflict of this kind had never been possible before. It was by protecting the safety of the passengers that he had earned the security of his children; he had served one by serving the other; there had been no clash of interests, no call for victims. Now, if he wanted to save the passengers, he had to do it at the price of his children.”
When you accept small wrongs for experience on a day to day basis, you end up with choices like this.
“The responsibility that James Taggart and Clifton Locey had evaded now rested on the shoulders of a trembling, bewildered boy. He hesitated, then he buttressed his courage with the thought that one did not doubt the good faith and the competence of railroad executives. He did not know that his vision of a railroad and its executives was that of a century ago. With the conscientious precision of a railroad man, in the moment when the hand of the clock ended the half-hour, he signed his name to the order instructing the Comet to proceed with Engine Number 306, and transmitted the order to Winston Station.” – On the boy who was stuck issuing the order after everyone senior ran away or quit.
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,” which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by “a feeling”—a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied solely on his own “good intentions” and on the power of a gun. 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, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing. 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, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice. 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, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man’s mind is conditioned by material tools…
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