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BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU 167
complete economic freedom and social respect, the strikers intend to
withhold their talents from society. To Dagny and Hank, who do not
understand the motivation of the strikers, the mysterious disappearance
of their counterparts in every industry is yet another burden to bear.
The man masterminding this strike, John Galt, does not appear as a
main character until more than halfway through the 1,084-page novel.
Although Galt is only a shadowy fi gure for most of the book, he is the
culmination of Rand’s efforts to create a hero. Like Howard Roark, Galt
is a man of physical beauty, outsize genius, and granite integrity. He has
created a motor run by static electricity that will revolutionize science
and industry, but keeps it a secret lest it be captured by the collectivists.
Once Galt enters the story, he begins pursuing Dagny and Hank, the last
two competent industrialists who have not joined the strike. He wants
to lure them to his mountain hideaway, Galt’s Gulch, where the strikers
have created a utopian free market society.
The dramatic tension in Atlas Shrugged comes from Rand’s underlying
belief that evil is impotent unless aided by the good. Galt must teach
Dagny and Hank that by refusing to join the strike, they are aiding and
abetting the collectivist evils that have overcome their country. Without
“the sanction of the victim”—the unwitting collaboration of exceptional
individuals—Rand’s collectivists would be powerless. 3 The book
tips into philosophical territory as Galt makes his case to Dagny and
Hank, aided by a cast of colorful secondary characters such as Francisco
Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián D’Anconia, a renegade aristocrat.
Here the novel becomes more than a parable about capitalism. Rand’s
characters learn to reject the destructive sacrifi cial ethics and devotion
to community they have been taught, and instead join the ethical selfishness
of Galt’s strike.
As in The Fountainhead, Rand redefi ned morality to fi t her vision.
It was moral to make money, to work for oneself, to develop unique
talents and skills. It was also moral to think, to be rational: “A rational
process is a moral process,” Galt lectures his audience. “Thinking is
man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed” (944). It is
immoral to ask for anything from others. Galt’s strikers swear an oath
that encapsulates Rand’s ethics: “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” (680).
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