| Who was John Galt? More on Ayn Rand. |
| (To read about Jon's mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.) |
Who was John Galt? More on Ayn Rand.
By Jon Rappoport
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours." (John Galt, Atlas Shrugged)
More on Ayn Rand, the most hated and adored novelist of the 20th century.
Her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, proposes a radical effort by inventor John Galt, and his assembled creative colleagues, to withdraw from society and take their inventions with them.
Civilization is already crumbling, owing to the federal government and its cronies installing a socialism based on top-down domination and the theft of material and intellectual private property.
Galt decides that a head-on struggle with the government would be futile. Instead, he wants to apply the coup de grace: remove the authentic creators from the scene and let the system implode.
Here are key Galt quotes from the novel:
"You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others---that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler..."
"The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others..."
"You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value---you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good..."
There are key elements of the novel that escape many people's attention. For example, Galt is the inventor of a revolutionary engine that can provide energy to the whole planet. He created the engine. He owns it. The government, on the verge of an economic collapse, wants to take Galt's engine from him and use it for "the greater good."
Galt refuses.
He knows, of course, that the government could do unpredictable things with that engine---they could, in fact, put it in a vault and bury it.
On the other hand, he could maintain control over his invention and sell the abundant energy---not with the objective of becoming a king or an oligarch---at a price he sets. And eventually, the world would be swimming in energy.
Agents of the government (who resemble CIA types) kidnap him and prepare to torture him to get their hands on his engine---but at the last minute his friends rescue him, and they vanish to Galt Gulch, a hidden valley, where they wait for the government to cave in, collapse, thereby ushering in, by necessity, a truly free market.
Author Rand doesn't bother spending time in her novel excoriating energy companies for their secret deals with government and their monopolies. She lets the chips fall where they would: in favor of the creative individual and his private property, his own inventions.
This is one reason why leaders of collectivism and their addled followers hate Rand and her work. They scream that every good thing in this world must be given away, which means that every good thing will be taken over by men who hate life and freedom and the individual and hate the population as a whole, while pretending to be messianic altruists.
Among these addled followers of collectivism are people who believe they themselves are unable to earn a living, and therefore insist that "everything should be free."
For decades now, an operation has been underway to convince more and more people (especially the young) to see themselves as dependent. As if that status were righteous, as if that status were a badge of honor.
This is an intense rejection of the free and independent individual.
"You didn't build that" and "we're all in this together" and other such inanities are sparks shot by weapons of degraded thought. They intend to encircle humanity in a wretched fume of pretended helplessness.
Indeed, there is no intention to raise up the individual. Instead, there is a goal of sinking to the lowest common denominator---as if at the bottom of a stagnant lake lies some magic clue to the resurrection of the human species.
There, at last, beyond desperation, is the "sharing and caring" everyone has been seeking. This is the core of a Church of Failure.
Because at the bottom, there is nothing but sludge. And in this case, the fishermen of souls are casting their nets for participants in a half-light dystopia of abject need.
Endless need, never to be satisfied---the ultimate spiritual drug.
In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt wins. Rand wrote about the ultimate victory of the individual, and that is why she is a silver bullet aimed at vampires.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment