First Place
According to John Galt, selfishness is both moral and practical. Explain what he means by this and how events of the story illustrate and dramatize his point.
The Subversion of Selflessness in Atlas Shrugged
Addressing the masses during his radio broadcast, Galt is quick to signal the fundamental philosophical fallacy that has guided civilization to its current state of crisis: “Virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice” (1010), he declares. As Galt deconstructs the prevailing morality, it becomes clear that the secular society of Atlas Shrugged is in fact steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition that glorifies selflessness as the pinnacle of ethical action, treating the selfsacrifice of Christ as its perfect and total fulfillment. Though religious practice may have fallen to the wayside, the ethics of selflessness persist, emerging in the modern era as the insistence on subduing individual desire for the sake of the “public good.” Galt’s indictment of humanity thus involves, crucially, the redefining of morality at its most basal level: the de-throning of selflessness and the inauguration of selfishness as the necessary ethical standard for the survival of human civilization.
In this regard, Galt’s glorification of selfishness is his response to a world screaming for solutions. As such, his is a practical code. The ethics of self-immolation, requiring man “to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender” (1027), set the practical (man’s livelihood) against the moral (his virtue). Establishing as given man’s inherent depravity —the “monstrous absurdity [of] Original Sin” (1025)—such a code demands constant penance, man’s atonement “for the guilt of his existence” (1025). Moral perfection, according to this teaching, can thus only be achieved by total sacrifice; in other words, “how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death” (1028). The global decay Ayn Rand illustrates is the result of a collective advancement towards this “zero” state. Forever atoning for his existence, man has chosen to forgo not only a healthy enjoyment of life, but also the “selfish” practicalities that make living possible. By contrast, the practice of rational self-interest would allow him to pursue his livelihood once more, holding life rather than death as his ideal.
It is in this reversal of ideals that Galt exposes not only the practical, but the moral underpinnings of selfishness. When man’s singular purpose is not his death but his life, then the measure of his virtue becomes the extent to which he “preserve[s], fulfill[s] and enjoy[s] the irreplaceable value which is his life” (1014). Importantly, however, Galt contends that selfishness is not merely an alternate ethical code to selflessness: it is the only ethical code available to man, for it reflects the “one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence” (1012). This choice between life and death—a choice at once primal and perpetual—alone imbues an ethical system with meaning since it is “only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible” (1013). Thus, it is only “to a living entity that things can be good or evil” (1013)—good if they work to sustain life, evil if they work to drain it. By returning humanity to the most basic purpose of ethics, Galt realigns the moral with the practical in the virtue of selfishness, uncovering the path to a world where man does not have to choose between his livelihood and his virtue, the two being in fact mutually dependent.
However, the world’s leaders, rather than reject the code of selflessness in such a time of crisis, insist that man adhere to it more faithfully still. It is only, they believe, when men act as their “brothers’ keepers” that society will be redeemed. Thus do they institute, for instance, the Railroad and Steel Unification Plans—socializing directives designed to save failing businesses by pooling the total profits and allocating the money according to the need, rather than the output, of each company. Such mandated sacrifice would cause the most industrious companies, like Rearden Steel, to go bankrupt. But under this system, as Hank Rearden worked towards his own demise, so would society at large: only the few remaining ventures like his possess the potential to revive the economy. Were he permitted to be selfish rather than self-immolating, to freely pursue his own interest rather than that of others, his success would spur growth and development in other sectors.
As it is, he is expected to give more precisely because he produces more. The right of the lesser companies to his wealth is conferred by their lack, by the fact that they are” unable to produce it…unable to give you any value in return” (1031). To this extent, the government initiatives exemplify the creed of the Twentieth Century Motor Company: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It is a creed that the motor company, like the unification plans, proves impractical, for when ability goes unrewarded, the workers strive towards incompetence and the company’s products become unsellable. Moreover, the Starnes’ “noble plan” demonstrates in a singularly explicit manner how the company’s financial bankruptcy coincides with what might be termed its moral bankruptcy. That is to say, the fate of the motor company ties together the simultaneous impracticality and immorality of the creed of selflessness. Because the workers’ only claim to their pay is need, they turn into beggars—“rotten, whining, sniveling beggars” (662). Because ability is punished, they learn to “watch like hawks, that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow” (664). And because they have to work longer for no pay when another man’s need increases, they resort to crime, even, it is suggested, killing someone’s invalid grandmother so as to avoid the enormous burden of paying her medical bills. As the former employee, John Allen, confesses to Dagny, “Under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us” (665). This is the cruel reality of a world in which man acts as his brother’s keeper: men “who had once been human” (662) are transformed into something less than themselves—victims who “labor to fill the needs of others,” parasites “whose needs must be filled by others” (1033), creatures, in short, of an underworld where altruism is the reigning principle.
Man is restored to his full worth only when he acts as a trader, for the trader “earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved” (1021). He exchanges value for value, seeking fairness above all else. For this reason, Galt dubs the trader “a man of justice” (1022) and decrees that in Galt’s Gulch, the vivid converse of Starnesville, the doctrine of fair trade be practiced to the last penny. This means, to Dagny’s initial incredulity, that Midas Mulligan charges twenty-five cents for the simple service of a car ride. Galt explains the situation to Dagny, warning her, “there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give’” (714). Even the most negligible of services is performed only for just compensation. In Galt’s capitalist utopia, selflessness—the free rendering of a service—is sinful. Man is expected not to deny himself, but to strive towards the fullness of his life through all the honest means available to him. In this way, he rises from the level of beggars, victims and parasites, emerging anew as that practitioner of justice, that celebrator of life—the trader.
Condemning the code of altruism, Rand thus achieves a profound indictment both of socialist ideology and of Christian ethics, Christ’s gospel being, after all, a “social gospel”—that is, not merely an exaltation of the world to come, but a guide to living on earth. The socialist precepts of collectivization and payment according to need all find their root in Christ’s example of serving others and his commandment to act as our “brothers’ keepers.” This means that in exposing the fundamental weaknesses of such a system, Rand overturns millennia of ethical thought: Atlas Shrugged stands as her subversion of a moral code that has gripped the western world for two-thousand years. It is a staggering philosophical revolution, promising, through its reversal of the ethical code, the redemption of man himself. For under the creed of selflessness, to be human—to be alive—is to be flawed and sinful: you have not sacrificed totally, you have not given your life, and so “you are guilty every moment of your life” (1033). By aligning morality with the effort to live, rather than to die, Rand makes it possible for being human to be a point not of shame but pride. As the Judeo-Christian God and his crooked commandments are put to rest, man is resurrected—a creature not of guilt but joy, a being whose endeavors to preserve his life render him not less moral but more so. He does not confess, shamefully, the fact of his humanity, but proclaims it to the world. Rewriting the framework of ethics, Rand reclaims our right to exist, enacting through the figure of John Galt, the salvation of human life.
