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by Jon Rappoport
March 4, 2022
NOTE TO READERS: As of this writing, Thursday night, the situation at the nuclear power plant in the Ukraine is quite serious, but not catastrophic. Latest report is the fire is in a training building, and radiation levels at the power plant are not elevated. But all this could change in a moment, and sources of information are not reliable.
Huge organizations and huge governments (and their leaders) dictate fates like these—and yet people say these organizations are our saviors. So today I wanted to present a radically different view. Here it is:
I’m an admirer of Ayn’s two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
If she were here today, I would try to engage her in discussion on one point: philosophic materialism. I would attempt to show her that she embraces a contradiction.
If physical existence means the motion of tiny particles that make up every object, including the body and brain, then the concept of consciousness means nothing—because those particles do not contain any quality that would imply consciousness or freedom or meaning or understanding.
To say humans are conscious—which Rand does (in celebratory fashion), while asserting there is no non-material existence whatsoever—is a blatant contradiction.
I believe she discovered that, when she shuffled off her mortal coil on March 6, 1982.
In Ayn Rand’s titanic novel (1957), Atlas Shrugged, the inventor and philosopher, John Galt, and his bold industrialist companions withdraw from society and vanish, abandoning and destroying their key companies.
This revolutionary action strikes a final crippling blow to an America already ruined by strangling government-imposed measures, aimed at taking over the means of production and killing the creative individual.
Galt plans to return when the destruction is complete; he and his friends will rejuvenate the country when the paralyzed government surrenders to freedom and stands aside.
Those were the mythic terms of the struggle portrayed by Rand.
Her novel, of course, was hated by mainstream pundits. One of their incidental criticisms: “nothing like that could happen in America.”
61 years later it did happen; in reverse.
The government “withdrew its support of the economy” with COVID lockdowns. The government announced the economy would be returned only when the population obeyed all the measures designed to protect them.
No corporate leaders and industrialists staged a Galt-like rebellion. They folded. They went down on their knees. They wriggled their way to a mighty government money-trough and inhaled massive bribes.
Looking more closely—the government was intent on destroying smaller businesses, independent companies, and free individuals who had created and sustained those companies. All on the basis of a medical and scientific fraud; that was the pretext.
Actually, the snorting hogs at the biggest government money trough—the corporate leaders—were already collaborators with government.
The government was putting what it hoped were finishing touches on a form of Collectivism, in which every human was viewed as connected to every other human—by infection with a virus. And therefore, every individual action would be judged through interrogation: ARE YOU SPREADING THE DISEASE?
Acting in freedom automatically carried a verdict of spreader.
A grinning skull broadcast the universal message: WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER…
The message of the group trying to regress to a primitive illiterate stage before an attempt at rule by law.
—Ayn Rand’s hero, John Galt, has invented a new kind of motor. Turned out in mass production, it can make enough energy to power the industry of a nation. A world.
The government wants Galt to surrender his invention, for “the greater good.” He refuses. Government agents find him and prepare to torture him, to obtain his secrets—but Galt’s friends rescue him.
Galt’s view is the invention and the technology belong to him. He can sell energy to whomever he chooses, and withhold it from whomever he chooses. He can set the price.
Critics of the novel pounce on this position as the most horrific sin imaginable. OF COURSE a groundbreaking innovation of such magnitude must be shared, given freely, donated to the world.
Except, when you decipher “the world,” it means government. It means top-down political power coming out of the barrel of a gun. It means government can leverage its unearned ownership of technology into an instrument of give and take: “we give you this, but we take that.”
And what’s taken is freedom.
Socialists and collectivists always manage to pin the label SELFISH on the individual, and never on government. The State is good, the State is kind, and if you go too far in denying its sainthood, it will arrest you.
Anyone who intelligently reads Atlas Shrugged knows Galt is not an evil man. He doesn’t sit up nights scheming ways to sell energy with the purpose of enslaving people—as opposed to the motives of governments.
But he does make the simple and stark judgment that his inventions are his. They don’t belong to persons who did nothing. They don’t belong to agents of the State. They don’t belong to religious prelates or second-hand hustlers or brainless pundits or universities or corporations or foundations or institutes or the poor or the rich or the in-between. Or the shapers and enforcers of lockdowns.
More than 80 years ago, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that the technology existed to provide the essentials of survival—food, shelter, clothing, education—to every human on the face of the Earth.
He was right. But the open question was, who would be in charge of making that happen?
99.999 percent of Fuller’s followers blithely assumed it would be governments. Well, those followers are still waiting. And the fulfillment is no closer now than it was 80 years ago.
That’s called a clue.
Fuller’s vision could be brought into being on two conditions: tyrannical and controlling governments, who don’t want their populations to succeed, get out of the way; and bright entrepreneurs in many countries form companies that sell the essentials of survival, on VERY reasonable terms, to 6 BILLION eager customers.
That’s quite a sizable market. 6 billion is roughly the number of people in the world who live close to or below the poverty line.
I believe bright entrepreneurs, left to their own devices, could find ways to make Essentials of Survival for All come to pass. And their profits would soar.
Governments, however, don’t like this brand of business. They want to be in charge of it. Meaning: they want to make sure it fails.
If it fails, they’re still in power. If it succeeds, they’re dead. They’re useless husks on the side of the road.
An intelligent reading of Atlas Shrugged reveals that “lifting all boats” of people everywhere is possible, as a side effect of visionary, creative, relentless men and women owning what they invent and produce.
I use the word “possible,” because through no fault of Ayn Rand or her novel, the individual creators she presents on the page have to will themselves into existence in the everyday world—never abandoning their ownership of what they’ve made or their souls.
Atlas Shrugged, read today, is a doubly jolting experience, because you see, laid out before you in the book, a reverse mirror image of what has happened in the past two years of lockdowns. But through Rand’s vision, you see the escape hatch.
It’s not a trick or a system or a piece of luck. It’s the creative and powerful and uncompromising individual.
The silver bullet to the predatory werewolf of the State.
And as a bonus, you see technology, Galt’s technology, as a triumph—not as the omnipresent technocracy of control.
Great fresh air blows through open windows.
John Galt speaks from the pages of Atlas Shrugged:
“Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.”
“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.”
“If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you?… Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”
“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”
“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—that you’re unable to earn your living by use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied…”
“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 open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason…”
“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment: you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.”
