Who is John Galt?

""I swear by my life and my love of it I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." - John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.

First Things in an October 11, 2007 article by Brian Murray entitled “Who is John Galt? And Does Anyone Care Anymore?” discusses the influence of Ayn Rand on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her novel “Atlas Shrugged”. Murray writes:

Atlas Shrugged was a huge, hotly debated bestseller in its day, and its sales have held steady ever since. Its author, certainly, retains a certain mystique as the exacting thinker still revered by many Americans as a great intellectual and seer. All of us, surely, know someone who has passed through an Ayn Rand phrase, mild or severe. At some point we’ve all heard the words: “Atlas Shrugged changed my life.”

Ayn Rand took herself very seriously indeed. She was a born iconoclast and provocateur: one of those restless souls forever seeking to bend the world to her will. She was not easily impressed, deciding early on that nearly all philosophy after Aristotle was a waste of time. One day, Rand famously assured her university professors, she would produce timeless philosophical writings of her own. She had very little humor but plenty of push.

First, however, she would write movies and plays. Alicia Rosenbaum—as her family knew Ayn Rand—spent much of her childhood reading far-fetched novels featuring square-jawed adventurers in exotic locales. Besides Aristotle, Rand’s heroes were all fictional he-men—late Victorian versions of Indiana Jones. When, in 1926, Rand left her native Russia for the United States, she headed straight for Hollywood, where in short order she found a husband, took an extra’s part in Cecil B. De Mille’s The King of Kings, and started cranking out scripts. Alicia Rosenbaum became Ayn Rand, the headstrong heroine of a decidedly American story.

Rand’s educated, prosperous family suffered terribly under the Soviets, and her hatred of communism burned on like a hard, gemlike flame. But she loved the United States in her own, highly stylized way: She loved its skyscrapers, its technology, its machinery, its energy. Rand’s first big bestseller, The Fountainhead (1940), is in part a long hymn to this America of her imagination, and its hero, Howard Roark, is her first extended portrait of the consummate American—a world-class architect based loosely on Frank Lloyd Wright.

Rand’s Ideal Man could never be a schoolteacher, say, or a physical therapist, or a claims clerk in the Social Security Administration. He must not be short-winded or fat. He must be perfection in action—gifted and brave, uniquely talented, and utterly free of irrationality and fear. He must, like Roark, defend the premise that no man should ever compromise his individual will or submit to pathetic notions of “sacrifice”; he must recognize that men of genius like himself will forever fight the lazy, inferior parasites who seek to take what superior minds have made. He must, in short, look like Gary Cooper and think exactly like Ayn Rand. As The Fountainhead showed, Rand’s beliefs were well-suited for the big screen, where outsize heroes, defiant acts, and stirring speeches have always been the order of the day.

Rand hated religion as much as she hated communism; for her Christianity was, of course, the religion of fools and slaves. Rand’s “marginalia,” culled from the books in her library and published in 1998, are particularly revealing: The woman who despised emotionalism and valued reason above all became, when faced with C.S. Lewis, like one of those “literary guys” faced with Mickey Spillane. Lewis, Rand averred, was a “driveling non-entity,” a “mediocrity,” and “scum.”

Still, Atlas Shrugged, you’ve heard countless times, is a classic, and apparently it’s soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. And so, finally, you’re ready to give it a go—all 1,168 pages. It is full of rich characters: They own steel mills and railroads. Otherwise they’re ponderous and flat. It’s possible, then, that early on your eyes might start to glaze a bit, and you’ll find yourself thinking “Really, I couldn’t care less” each time the novel demands: “Who is John Galt?” It’s very possible, actually, because fifty years after its publication Atlas Shrugged is much better as a doorstop than a novel.

Atlas Shrugged – Good novel or good doorstop?.

Posted October 17, 2007