Galt's Gulch

Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 Chapter 6: Miracle Metal

Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago to Books
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Summary: Mouch, James Taggart, Ferris, Weatherby, Fred Kinnan, Eugene Lawson, and Boyle hold a meeting to discuss redistribution of scarce resources while keeping up good appearances, along with Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State. They decide to proceed with Directive No. 10-289. As soon as Dagny learned of it, she “quit” (to go on vacation). Rearden met with the Wet Nurse, aka, Non-Absolute, the importance of not giving up the rights to his Metal. After a couple weeks, Dr. Ferris meets with Mr. Rearden to blackmail him over his affair with Dagny, upon whom he reflects, and then signs over the rights to Rearden Metal.

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Atlas Shrugged was written by Ayn Rand in 1957.

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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit – and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pat it.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “Here is the final product of the unearned. I thought that it was proper to commit injustice, so long as I would be the only one to suffer. But nothing can justify injustice.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “I believed that love is some static gift which, once granted, need no longer be deserved – just as they believe that wealth is a static possession which can be seized and held without further effort.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “He thought: Guilty? – guiltier than I had known, far guiltier than I had thought, that day – guilty of the evil of damning as guilt that which was my best.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “‘Yours was the code of life,’ said the voice of a man whom he could not forget. ‘What, then, is theirs?’ Why had the world accepted it? – he thought. How had the victims come to sanction a code that pronounced them guilty of the fact of existing? … And then the violence of an inner blow became the total stillness of his body as he sat looking at a sudden vision: Hadn’t he done it also? Hadn’t he given his sanction to the code of self-damnation?”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden pondering: “We regarded productive ability as virtue – and we let the degree of his virtue be the measure of a man’s reward. We drew no advantage from the things we regarded as evil… But you need the products of a man’s ability – yet you proclaim that productive ability is a selfish evil and you turn the degree of a man’s productiveness into the measure of his loss. We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Rearden to Dr. Ferris: “If she and I were the kind of scum you’re going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn’t work.”
    “No, it wouldn’t.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    “The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a ‘company union’ and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded – and got – the best labor force to be found anywhere.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    “The newspaper was twisted into a roll by the time she stood before him. She threw it at his face, it struck his cheek and fell down to the carpet. ‘There’s my resignation, Jim,’ she said. ‘I won’t work as a slave or as a slave-driver.’”
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    • Posted by CircuitGuy 9 years, 3 months ago
      When Dagny went on vacation, was she in serious violation of the looters' new laws? I know they wanted everyone to be law breakers so they could have a pretense to jail anyone. But I was unclear whether by that point in the story what she was doing had become a major crime.
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      • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
        Good question. What she did was a violation of the law. Directive 10-289 had passed, and she did quit. When she came back, they called it a vacation to save face. They later told her the laws were flexible, and she said she didn't care, she was going to do the business she needed to do. But whether legitimate vacations were permitted by the letter of the law or not, I don't know. I would assume so, since wages and positions were "frozen."
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    Lawson looked away. “To hell with them! Why should we worry about them? We’ve got to run the world for the sake of the little people. It’s intelligence that’s caused all the troubles of humanity. Man’s mind is the root of all evil. This is the day of the heart.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    “But it is their own fault,” said Eugene Lawson, turning aggressively to Dr. Ferris. “It’s their lack of social spirit. They refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty. They have no right to fail, no matter what conditions happen to come up. They’ve got to go on producing. It’s a social imperative.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 3 months ago
    It was Eugene Lawson who answered. “That’s not, it seems to me, the way to put it. We must not let vulgar difficulties obstruct our feeling that it’s a noble plan motivated solely by the public welfare. It’s for the good of the people. The people need it. Need comes first, so we don’t have to consider anything else.”
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    • Posted by VetteGuy 9 years, 3 months ago
      One of the clerks in our office had a sign:
      "Failure to plan on your part does not create an automatic emergency on my part".

      I think an appropriate version in response to Lawson's thinking would be:
      "Need on your part does not create an automatic obligation on my part".
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