Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 7

Oh, Hank!

Chapter 8

The John Galt Line

In this chapter a train goes through a tunnel.

But let's start at the beginning. Our story resumes with a conversation between Eddie Willers, who at Dagny's command is keeping her seat warm as Vice President of Taggart Industries, and a nameless worker. Because Rand is utterly uninterested in anything not Ubermensch-ish she does not bother give us the worker's side of the conversation. Instead we have a nearly two page monologue in which Eddie fawns over Dagny and celebrates her accomplishments and flair. Rand said that Dagny is herself, although more healthy and energetic, and Rand doesn't miss a chance to wallow in self-glorification. A good writer (or a good person) would show flaws as well as good traits to humanize her characters but Rand was neither. Rand needed to glorify the few at the expense of everyone else; her bad guys are uniformly repulsive and wretched and her good guys are flawless. Rand's writing began as an escape into a happier world of imagination but over time hardened into a mean-spirited attack on everyone who refused to play along with Rand's inflated views of herself.

Her greatest pleasure was inventing plots. And when the plot had been put into words, she discovered the heady feeling of living in the world of her own creation. She experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her. She was discovering, without yet the words to name it, the Aristotelian principle that the fiction writer creates the world "as it might be and ought to be."

When Rand inserted herself into her stories she, too, became greater, more important, and more interesting than anyone else. Rand Dagny takes a moment to rest in her new office, two nearly empty rooms in an abandoned building next to her old office.

[Dagny] glanced at a jagged crack on the wall of her office. She heard no sound. She knew she was alone in the ruins of a building. It seemed as if she were alone in the city. She felt an emotion held back for years; a loneliness much beyond this moment, beyond the silence of the room and the wet, glistening, emptiness of he street, the loneliness of a gray wasteland where nothing was worth reaching; the loneliness of her childhood.

...

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Dagny feels her body longing for someone to give her the same kind of satisfaction and joy that her work gives her. As she rubs against her desk (yes, you read that correctly), she longs for a man who can give her that kind of satisfaction. A shadow falls across the room; a man disappears into the shadows. Who could it have been? Francisco D'Anconia warned her than John Galt would come for her but he also warned her that he would behave strangely, which Dagny also ignored. She is left to wonder for another 800 pages.

Hank Reardon is faring better than Dagny. Despite the anguish of being forced to sign over most of his industries he is determined to succeed. His Reardon Metal bridge is rising and that gives him the energy to soldier on. He meets Eddie at his hotel which, despite the overall decrepitude of the city, manages to serve Reardon orange juice over crushed ice on a crisp, white tablecloth. Rand pays no attention to consistency or reality; her half-dead city has virtually no street crime and Dagny walks through the city in the middle of the night, dressed to the nines, and nobody accosts her. The city is falling apart when Rand wants it to and operates efficiently when she doesn't want it to. Reardon tells Eddie that all will be well, and to not worry about the scum.

Reardon laughed. "Eddie, what do we care about people like [Jim Taggart]?" We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along--haven't we?"

Ayn Rand is balm to the soul of authoritarian leaders, who believe that rules are for the little people. But Rand's characters are stiff with a kind of honor; they don't mind supporting the scum as long as the scum leaves them alone. They loathe unearned honor or respect and glorify both natural ability and ability gained through hard work. Libertarians, that is authoritarian wanna-be leaders, try to claim superior status without actual living up to that superiority. Bob Altemeyer describes (pdf)  these "social dominators."

They thrill to power in and of itself. They want to control others, period. (Make that, “exclamation mark!”) Their name says it all. And they come bundled with a shock of nasty attitudes that completes the package.

Social dominance scores correlate very strongly with [...] answers to the Power Mad scale. High scorers are inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top. Authoritarian followers do not feel this way because they seldom have such a drive to start with.

[...]

In a similar vein, remember those “group cohesiveness” items in chapter 3, such as, “For any group to succeed, all its members have to give it their complete loyalty.” We saw that authoritarian followers endorse such sentiments. But social dominators do not. Oh sure, they want their followers to be super loyal to the group they lead. But they themselves are not really in it so much for the group or its cause, but more for themselves. It’s all about them, not about a higher purpose. If trouble arises, don’t be surprised if they start playing “Every man for himself” and even sell out the group to save their own skin.

[...]

Empathy. Here’s an easy one. How empathetic, how compassionate do you think dominators are? Not very, right? You got it, for they agree with statements such as “I don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people less fortunate than me,” and “I have a ‘tough’ attitude toward people having difficulty: ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’” And they disagree with, “I feel very sorry for people who are treated unfairly” and “I have a lot of compassion for people who have gotten the bad breaks in life.” For high social dominators “sympathy” indeed falls, as the saying goes, between “ship” and “syphilis” in the dictionary. (Well, maybe that’s not the exact saying, but this is a family web-site.)

Altemeyer says that social dominators don't believe in equality.

Given all of this, do you really believe the social dominator who says people should have to earn their success in life? He’s quite willing to let the children of the rich get rich merely through inheritance. Do you trust him when he says he’s in favor of a level playing field? He’s against programs that would give the disadvantaged a better chance. Does he really believe the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or is he content to let them face an uphill struggle that very few can overcome? It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others, he says. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court, even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on.

If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.

This is how social dominators can tell us that insider trading is no big deal, that we live in a meritocracy instead of a country with third-world levels of economic inequality, and that if workers are permitted to retire instead of working until they die, they will get lazy and greedy. They genuinely believe that rules are for the little people and do not hesitate to take advantage of every opportunity for personal profit while lecturing the poor on morality and humility.  Some sheep are a little smarter than others, however, so the elite and their servants dress up their greed and callousness with pretty bows and ribbons, calling them a philosophy and their adherents people of principle. Think tanks are formed, magazines are financed, fellowships are handed out with great ceremony, large prizes are awarded. But in the end it's nothing but propaganda to disguise greed and exploitation.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, it is the scum and lice who collaborate on propaganda that attacks the Ubermensch. Libertarians routinely use tactics that their heroes looked upon with disdain and disgust, such as making excuses for failure and using propaganda.  The tactics used to fight Reardon are very familiar to those who read libertarian and conservative propaganda. Facts are useless, the people are told. Magazines, newspapers, pundits and radio hosts all spread the message that Reardon metal is unsafe. The unions refuse to let their men work on the John Galt Line so Dagny calls for volunteers, who line up for the honor of working for her. When the work is nearly completed, Dagny calls a press conference.

The reporters who came to the press conference in the offices of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audiences for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific.

Substitute "corporate good" for "public good" and you will have every Koch or Bradley-fed libertarian magazine that exists. The newspapermen are shocked that Dagny and Reardon state they are in business to make money; in RandLand money is a dirty word. Dagny invites everyone to witness the first train run and tells them that she (and Reardon) will be riding along. When the day arrives she is swept away with joy at her success, the only joy in life, according to Rand.

Only if one feels immensely important, she had told [Reardon], can one feel truly light. Whatever the train's run would men to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day's sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.

...

She looked at the crowd , and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

Rand describes how the train's crew gathered to make this first run to Denver and Ellis Wyatt's oil fields, with contemptuous, indifferent looks of superiority at the rabble. For Rand, these qualities are both natural and right; who could not feel contemptuous, indifferent and superior when looking at scum? It's no more than they deserve for their inferiority. The newsmen are caught up in the excitement despite themselves; the sight of all that superiority makes them wish to be superior as well. As the train flashes across the countryside at 100 mph, Dagny sees old men and boys lining the track, guarding it against sabotage. The stations they pass are covered in decorations as railwaymen celebrates Dagny's great accomplishment and Ellis Wyatt is there to help her down when they make their triumphant arrival. He welcomes them to his home and that night she and Reardon have sex in the spirit of mutual triumph and contempt.

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.... He was not smiling; his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy; he jerk her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him-this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater-he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire-and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom-that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service-and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

Reardon tears off Dagny's clothes and give her more looks of contempt. Dagny gladly gives herself to him and rejoices that he takes what he wants, which is the only way for proper Ubermenschen to live.

... [T]hey had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal.

The world and its people exist to fulfill the needs of the Special, and when the lice and scum forget that, it is time for them to be eliminated.

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 5

Chapter 6 The Non-Commercial

America has always been primarily concerned with the making of money. Many of the first settlers were part of a corporation which hoped to extract America's riches; if not gold and gems, then timber and tobacco and slaves. Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony Trollope, wrote in her critique of America:

Nothing can exceed their activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculation, handicraft, and enterprise, which promises a profitable pecuniary result. I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking, in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants' nest. The result is exactly what might be anticipated. This sordid object, for ever before their eyes, must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind, and, worse still, it produces a seared and blunted conscience on all questions of probity. I know not a more striking evidence of the low tone of morality which is generated by this universal pursuit of money, than the manner in which the New England States are described by Americans. All agree in saying that they present a spectacle of industry and prosperity delightful to behold, and this is the district and the population most constantly quoted as the finest specimen of their admirable country; yet I never met a single individual in any part of the Union who did not paint these New Englanders as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricking. The yankees (as the New Englanders are called) will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on the earth can match them at over reaching in a bargain. I have heard them unblushingly relate stories of their cronies and friends, which, if believed among us, would banish the heroes from the fellowship of honest men for ever; and all this is uttered with a simplicity which sometimes led me to doubt if the speakers knew what honour and honesty meant. Yet the Americans declare that "they are the most moral people upon earth." Again and again I have heard this asserted, not only in conversation, and by their writings, but even from the pulpit. Such broad assumption of superior virtue demands examination, and after four years of attentive and earnest observation and enquiry, my honest conviction is, that the standard of moral character in the United States is very greatly lower than in Europe. Of their religion, as it appears outwardly, I have had occasion to speak frequently; I pretend not to judge the heart, but, without any uncharitable presumption, I must take permission to say, that both Protestant England and Catholic France show an infinitely superior religious and moral aspect to mortal observation, both as to reverend decency of external observance, and as to the inward fruit of honest dealing between man and man.

America sold everything it could get its hands on. We cut down forests and dug up mountains. We killed passenger pigeons and buffaloes and whales. We built foundries and factories and mills and sold our products to the world. "The business of America is business," Calvin Coolidge famously said during the Roaring '20s. And now, centuries after the Massachusetts Bay Company reached our shores, the corporate class dominates all others. But our world is not the world of Any Rand, and in her world all businessmen and their labors are despised. Join us as Hank Reardon of Reardon Metal is forced by duty to attend his anniversary dinner, where the inferiority of the rest of the (sub)human race tears at his sensitive yet inviolable soul.

"You don't care for anything but business." He had heard it all his life, pronounced as a verdict of damnation. He had always known that business was regarded as some sort of secret, shameful cult, which one did not impose on innocent laymen, that people thought of it as of a ugly necessity, to be performed but never mentioned; that to talk shop was an offense against higher sensibilities; that just as one washed machine grease off one's hands before coming home, so one was supposed to wash the stain of business off one's mind before entering a drawing room. He had never held that creed, but he had accepted it as natural that his family should hold it. He took it for granted--wordlessly, in the manner of a feeling absorbed in childhood, left unquestioned and unnamed---that he had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect.

The millionaire industrialist is a social outcast, just like Du Pont, Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt, Schwab, and Mellon. It's something Reardon knows from his childhood, just like little Ayn Rand.

The great exception in her somewhat alienated childhood affections was her handsome father, Zinovy....Like Vasili, Zinovy was, for the most part, silent, but he was immensely proud of his accomplishments as a self-made businessman. He admired his eldest daughter's proud spirit and original, razor-sharp mind. An avid reader of Russian literature, he encouraged her efforts to write her first stories and, later, her drive to craft a fiction of ideas.

...

From the age of five or six, Ayn Rand took in everything in, including the ugly and nonsensical pieties and prejudices of neighbors and official spokesmen who treated Jews as, at best, second-class human beings. Often, their pretext for such treatment was that the Jew were the greedy entrepreneurs, rabid industrialists, and ruthless bankers who were spoiling Russia's "pure" Slavic traditions and fomenting labor unrest. In such circumstances, Rand's love for her self-made father was strongly roused. The result would be seen in her pro-individualistic, pro-industrial novels, which more than one commentator has also viewed as an impassioned defense of gifted, productive Jews.

Rand's mother, on the other hand, was socially ambitious and critical.

Though Rand made good use of [the advantages given her by her educated mother] as she grew older, she viewed her mother as hypocritical and shallow, an opinion not entirely borne out by the evidence. She once characterized Anna as an aspiring member of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia whose main interest in life was giving parties, and she suspected that Anna enjoyed books and plays less than she enjoyed the appearance of talking about them at her frequent gatherings of family and friends....Still, until the 1917 Revolution changed everything, Anna seems to have been an artistic social climber (though a remarkably intelligent and resourceful one, as we shall see) who wanted her daughters to rise in the city's Jewish social hierarchy--a project for which Ayn Rand was particularly unsuited.

...

[Rand] claimed not to care about being approved of or accepted by her family and pers. Since she generally wasn't accepted, the proud, intelligent child appears to have learned early to make a virtue of necessity. In her twenties and thirties, she would construct a universe of moral principles built largely on the scaffoldings of some of these defensive childhood virtues.

As he dresses for the party, Reardon ruminates on how he ignores his wife yet feels no guilt. He admits he does not and never did devote a moment of his time to her, that he has no idea what her interests are or who her friends are. His thoughts are always on his business and what he must do next, since Ubermensch purity demands he not soil his mind with trivial matters. The only important occupation in the world is running a business; every minute not spent running a business is agony and Reardon has pressing matters on his mind, such as the government's attempts to break up corporations with the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

Reardon married Lillian because she seemed to worship him as much as he felt she ought to, but she instantly disappointed him by expecting him to actually acknowledge her existence.

It was the difficulty of the conquest that made him want Lillian. She seemed to be a woman who expected and deserved a pedestal; this made him want to drag her down to his bed. To drag her down, were the words in is mind; they gave him a dark pleasure, the sense of a victory worth winning.

When he joins his wife Lillian, Reardon is furious to see that she is wearing his gift of a Reardon metal bracelet with a profusion of diamonds, the better to show off the apparent cheapness of the revolutionary metal. Every word she utters, every gesture she makes to Reardon is portrayed by Rand as sly, cruel, vindictive, arrogant and immoral. Hell hath no fury like a little girl habitually found wanting by her unkind, critical mother.

Reardon suffers the cocktail chatter with undisguised disgust. All of Lillian's distinguished guests are ignorant, foolish, dogmatic, and ugly. Only the relatives of industrialists are given attractive features, morals and intelligence. Reardon stands around like a statue until his composure is broken by the unexpected appearance of our heroine, railroad magnate Dagny Taggart. Reardon is struck by the difference between Dagny the Ubermensch and Dagny the woman.

Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of Dagny Taggart's body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing--because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful; and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

Let us all pause to take a minute to say, What the hell? Surely that is some kind of inartful use of language, perhaps Rand meant wrapped in chains or a more metaphorical type of belonging.

Sadly, no.

The moment Dagny sees Reardon, she is reduced into a simpering little man-tease, doing her damndest to get him to throw her over his shoulder and have his superior way with her. She has all the subtlety of a sorority girl trained from birth to attract a man by alternately buttering him up and trash-talking anyone he ought to dislike. Like poor Caroline Bingly, who unsuccessfully attempted to snare Mr. Darcy by alternately insulting Elizabeth Bennett and praising her own small, elite circle, Dagny is driven to try to impress Reardon.

"Why have we left [this world] to fools," she asks Reardon plaintively. When he rebuffs her she is full of "desolate emptiness." She shrugs the disappointment off, mumbles a few words, and wanders off. She runs into Francisco D'Anconia, who also admires her bare shoulder.

She stood as she always did, straight and taut, her head lifted impatiently. It was the unfeminine pose of an executive. But her naked shoulder betrayed the fragility of the body under the black dress, and the pose make her most truly a woman. The proud strength became a challenge to someone's superior strength, and the fragility a reminder that the challenge could be broken.

There is no such thing as equality in Rand's world. You either break or are broken. There is no reciprocity, no sharing, no affection. Everyone is alone, always, and the only relationship that can exist between people is that of master and subordinate, exploiter and victim. It is incredible that such a philosophy could find acceptance, that such an attitude of cruelty, selfishness and violence could be considered just another philosophy or viewpoint by society. People should be too embarrassed to admit becoming devotees of Rand, out of fear that everyone will realize their secret, masturbatory fantasies of domination over beautiful women and evil men, while becoming the richest, most famous, most special person In All The Land.

Meanwhile, to prove to Reardon that she really loves him and that mean Lillian doesn't, Dagny demands to swap her diamond bracelet for Hank's pencil with his teeth marks on it Lillian's bracelet of Reardon metal. That'll show her who likes Reardon best! He rewards her doggy devotion the only way he knows how.

His eyes remained expressionless. Yet she was suddenly certain that she knew what he felt: he wanted to slap her face.

It was not necessary." he answered coldly, and walked on.

Now he's done it. Now he'll never get rid of her.

More McArdle Dishonesty

There's nothing to do here but point out that some of Megan McArdle's commenters correct her errors, lies and misdirection again. My work is done for me, but as always I want to point out McArdle's bad manners and lack of class, upper or lower.

How DARE I claim that stimulus spending didn't get us out of the Great Depression? GDP growth was really, really high under FDR!!!

Megan McArdle, B.A., MBA, writes like a junior high girl with an attitude problem. Capitals? Multiple exclamation point? Please. It's embarrassing. And she's supposed to be one of our finest public intellectuals?

The Bush years are over. Having conservative opinions and a pulse are no longer enough to be taken seriously.

It Was A Brief Moment

Megan, 20 Jan 2009 12:04 pm:

I am rooting for Obama to succeed, and if he does, I will look back happily on this moment as a promise of better things to come. And if he doesn't, I will look back wistfully on that one moment when everything seemed all right.

Next Post 20 Jan 2009 12:23 pm

I was disappointed by the beginning of his speech, which seems to have consisted of saying: "There are no tradeoffs, and the people who tell you there are are just big fat HATERS, okay?"