My post yesterday was on my favorite quotes from part two of Atlas Shrugged. A few of the quotes come from the most powerful chapter in the second part of the novel, the Winston, Colorado train disaster.
In brilliant detail, Rand shows the how the evasion of responsibility and refusal to think lead to a disaster that kills hundreds of passengers.
A train dispatcher, who is no longer legally allowed to quit his job, is forced to decide between his job and the lives of the passengers:
“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.”
Everyone through the entire chain of command runs and hides in order to evade the chance of being held responsible and the final decision rests on the shoulders of a young call boy, who was promoted into the role when the last moral man on the branch quit:
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.
This example of the train disaster is certainly extreme, but every day of our lives we are faced with decisions of right and wrong. Every time we go to work we are faced with decisions about what is right and wrong.
In a post on work as a moral testing ground, James Walpole writes about the importance of acting with integrity and making hard choices at work.
James writes:
“You can face all of these decision points in a single day. You have countless opportunities to choose right over wrong. And those choices are significant – they affect not just your livelihood, but the livelihood of everyone in your company and the wellbeing of everyone which your company’s product serves (and could serve).
Don’t pretend that your work is trivial. Don’t pretend like important decisions can only happen to people other than you. The workplace is a moral testing ground like no other. Use the opportunities every day gives you to recognize and make the right choices.”
You don’t become a hero only when the stakes are life and death, you become a hero by choosing what is right over what is momentarily easy, even in the smallest and seemingly most insignificant cases.
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