Suddenly Tories are asking: who is John Galt?
The answer is: bad news
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
According to the Daily Telegraph, a number of Conservative MPs and candidates are seriously planning to establish a breakaway right-wing party influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957. Rand is one of those strange but intriguing figures who used to hang around in the intellectual underworld of the 20th century and never entirely went away. She is still a hero on the libertarian Right in the United States, but it is rare to hear her name in English Conservative circles.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia into a prosperous middle-class family that was ruined by the Revolution. She got herself to America in the 1920s and achieved considerable notoriety in the 1960s as the prophet of a brand of economic individualism more rigid and extreme than anyone had previously imagined. One of her followers was Alan Greenspan, nowadays the respectable chairman of the Federal Reserve, Her theme that altruism is the root of all evil, and every form of taxation a kind of theft, found a warm response from many able and ambitious young Americans.
Margaret Thatcher never really meant to say that there was no such thing as society, but Ayn Rand would have said it and meant it. On this precise point she quarrelled with people like Hayek and Friedman. They believed in free-enterprise capitalism for the common social good, or greater general prosperity. To Ayn Rand it was a matter of individual rights: once you started talking about the common good you were letting collectivism in through the back door.
According to Gore Vidal, Atlas Shrugged is the one novel that everybody in the US Congress has actually read. Her books sell about 200,000 copies a year, mostly to college students. Helen Mirren recently won an Emmy for her portrayal of Ayn Rand in an American television movie about her life — a life in which she achieved fame and some fortune but which was emotionally destructive for everybody who was close to her, and which left her lonely and miserable at the end in 1982.
'Who is John Galt?' is the question that begins Atlas Shrugged, The answer is that he is a messiah or anti-messiah, who seeks his disciples among the talented and successful people in business, science and the arts. Though few people have noticed it, Atlas Shrugged is a long, inverted and malevolent parody of the New Testament. Galt convinces his followers, without much difficulty, that they have been working too hard on behalf of others instead of spending all their time on their own interests. They are being exploited by a corrupt semi-socialist political system. And by allowing themselves to be used they are enabling the system to continue.
They join Galt on a secret strike, withholding their services from society in order to bring about a collapse: the end of the world, in effect. Galt is an engineer whose miracle is a machine that converts static electricity in the atmosphere into motive power, thus giving mankind unlimited, cheap and environmentally-healthy energy.
Galt destroys the miraculous machine so that a corrupt society cannot have it. Jesus in the Gospels used divine power to heal the sick. Galt withholds scientific knowledge knowing that the sick will die. Jesus sent his disciples into the world to heal and preach and save. Galt calls his disciples in from the world in order to bring it down in ruin. There is a kind of Day of Judgment in Atlas Shrugged in which Galt addresses the American people, having taken temporary control of the radio stations. He says, in effect, You are in a terrible mess; it is all your own fault, and it is no use thinking that I am going to lift a finger to help you.' He then bangs on for 35,000 words spelling Out Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy.
It is the men of the mind who create wealth, he tells them. Without them there can be only poverty and desolation, as the world is now starting to see. The code of self-sacrifice must be ended, the pursuit of self-interest recognised as the source of all good, and a laissez-faire economic system established if the men of the mind are to end their strike. He concludes his speech with Rand's moral credo: 'I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.'
One of Rand's heroes in Atlas Shrugged is Ragnar, a former student of philosophy who has somehow become a pirate. Ragnar says he is out to destroy and discredit the legend of Robin Hood. He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor; I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich, or, to be more exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.' We could take this to be Ayn Rand's response to the Sermon on the Mount.
After his big Judgment Day speech Galt is captured by the socialist looters and tortured. The Romans crucified Jesus because he claimed to he the Messiah. In Atlas Shrugged the looters try to force Galt to become a messiah and show them how to save the world — which he refuses to do. Eventually his fellow strikers rescue him. A little later the world collapses into total anarchy. Galt is satisfied, and the last words of the book read:
'The road is cleared, said Galt. 'We are going back to the world.' He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.
Rand claimed to be interested in men of independent mind, but in practice she could never tolerate any contradiction. She surrounded herself with acolytes: emotional cripples who found that Rand's work gave them a kind of ecstasy and who just wanted to be near her. They lived for her approval and were terrified of her wrath. She became a kind of sacred monster, and the guru of a cult which still continues, though it is now divided into bitter factions who hurl abuse at each other over the Internet. Yet she had real talent, amounting almost to genius, as a mythic storyteller. Because of her story-telling gift she was able to seduce quite intelligent people, for a while. Her new British admirers should note, however, that she reserved her most withering contempt for conservatives.
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