The Journals of Ayn Rand (97 page)

1. Taggart ruins a competitor—and destroys the line.

2. Taggart introduces the “equal rates”—and the consequences.

3. Invention taken over and young inventor kicked out, with the invention then failing.

4. Dagny finding Galt’s early engine in abandoned factory.

5. Factory (needed by TT) closes when irreplaceable freight is lost in switching. Later—freight found in incongruous place.

6. The first death of a section and the young man of the pony express.

7. The crucial train run that fails (due to an infinitesimal reason [that is a consequence] of the parasites’ technique).

8. The looting of one another’s locomotives—and the incident of Dagny’s stolen locomotive.

9. The “transportation pull” deal for “preferred” section that kills off a farming section and a branch of TT.

10. The tunnel collapse—and the return to an old rusted track.

11. The major railroad wreck.

12. Last: branch closed, track ripped for main line—and collapse of bridge.

Incident: the professor,
who stole one of Galt’s early inventions (he was Galt’s teacher in college). “Who is John Galt?” has become the professor’s secret torture (his conscience), growing violently, pathologically unbearable to him as the story progresses. Late in Part I, in a scene with Dagny, the professor talks about this slang-sentence, involuntarily betraying more than he cares to. In answer to Dagny’s wonder about the meaning and origin of the phrase, he says that he knew John Galt, but Galt must have died long since. He had a brain such that: “If he had lived, the whole world would be talking of him now.” “But the whole world is talking of him.” This had never occurred to the professor before; he is struck and stunned. “Yes ...” he whispers softly, terrified. “Why? ... What is he doing?”

But as Dagny tries to question him, he drops the subject, telling her that it’s all preposterous, just a coincidence, the name is common enough, it’s a popular piece of slang without significance. He will give her no clue to Galt’s identity or profession. She thinks that this is just another one of those occasions when people claim first-hand knowledge of John Galt.

Note:
J.H. as one of the typical parasites. He is mild and friendly to everyone—he admires anything and anyone who makes money (or is popular), indiscriminately, without analysis or understanding or reason-then he acts to destroy the very things and people he wants to use. He feels sad and bewildered about this—but he becomes mean and evil on one point only: any suggestion of the necessity for him to think about it, i.e., for him to assume the responsibility of an independent rational judgment. (His preoccupation with “polls” and “trends.”) He is truly the “moron with a dishwasher,” the savage thrown into civilization—understanding nothing about it, not even that understanding is necessary.

More for the professor:
He stole Galt’s invention, early in his career (shortly before Galt vanished) for the following reason: in the growing poverty of the world, there is less and less endowment of science; the professor was passionately devoted to his work, paid little attention to anything else and understood nothing about men, principles or the world; he wanted the government to finance his scientific research work and he had sold himself the idea that he was working for “the common good”; the bureaucrats in charge wanted concrete proof of the practical importance of his work; so he stole Galt’s idea—justifying this to himself by the notion that he stole it “for the common good,” that “science belongs to the people,” that he can do so much for mankind if he gets his laboratory, therefore stealing Galt’s idea is all right, since it will give him the laboratory, etc. He got the laboratory.

Later he is forced by circumstances to invent the deadly weapon which he did not want to invent. Show the gradual disintegration of his conscience and of his work (or its direction) in the course of one collectivist compromise after another.

In the end—he betrays and destroys everything he had lived for, everything for which he made his compromises (he thought of them as “sacrifices”): science, rationality, intelligence. He upholds: brutality, violence, evil, stupidity. (To decide: either circumstances force him to this, i.e., the parasites [force him] through the very power he has given them; or—his own mind and convictions, being totally perverted now, bring him to this and lead him to demand the destruction of John Galt.)

 

 

The dreadful state of TT’s research laboratory. Routine and second-handedness : the alleged scientists spend their time proving that new things “can’t be done”—this in order to justify their inactivity and keep their jobs, which is all they are concerned with. Dagny’s constant clashes with this, her helpless anger and indignation. (This ties to and leads to her interest in Galt’s old engine.)

James Taggart discontinues the research laboratory. The excuse: “Why look for the new when everybody hasn’t got everything of the old? Let’s stop progress until everybody is equal, then we will all go forward together slowly.”

James Taggart tries to have the whole economy frozen and stopped, so that he will have “security”—a set market, a set amount of traffic, a set routine. (“How can I do anything when things change all the time? I would be a great executive if only people weren’t so unreliable and unpredictable.”) The attempt [to freeze the economy] takes place toward the last third of Part I.

The principle of proper cooperation among men is that no man should be forced to do anything, within the specified province of his job, that he considers wrong [by his own judgment].

The decision here must be his. His superiors must not expect him to obey against his own reason. Of course, they must have the right to decide when they are acting properly or improperly. But if they know they are forcing him (through sheer obedience to an order, not through his rational consent), they are acting improperly (but strictly within their legal rights). His protection—and his proper course, in this last case—is to resign.

Now, this presupposes that in proper cooperation, the specific job of each individual man is clearly and objectively defined. It has to be—and, for success, the definitions must be rationally accepted by all the men involved (rationally accepted—not merely accepted because it’s a majority decision, or the boss’s decision).

Any boss has the legal right to establish the rules for the organization he heads—and his employees have the choice to work for him on his conditions or not. But the rational definition of jobs is crucially necessary for the success of any organization; the boss (if he is good at
his
job) is the one who has to work out the proper definitions, make them clear to his employees and make it his policy to see that all of them (including himself) act accordingly. The failures, inefficiencies, hard feelings and chicaneries going on in big corporations, particularly the less efficient ones, are probably due to the lack of such definitions, explicitly or implicitly, in the company’s policies.

No work
(neither mental nor physical) can be
done collectively.
All work is done individually. All human energy is individual—generated by and within
one man:
spiritual energy, mental energy, physical energy. A “collective” piece of work is only the sum of the individual work involved. (And “a collective piece of work” is a sloppy, meaningless corruption; what is meant by it is something like an automobile that comes out of a factory where thousands of men have worked and contributed to the production of the automobile. Well, they didn’t “blend” or “fuse” their work, their minds, bodies, or energies into a
collective
whole or process; they worked individually as individuals.)

Since all work is done individually, a cooperative work is divided into specific parts, each of which has to be done by an individual; when these parts and the specific individual jobs are not consciously defined by the men involved, inefficiency, friction and trouble follow. An organization is successful to the extent that it functions on such specific division of labor and responsibility, even if unstated and arrived at pragmatically, not consciously and rationally. The extent to which jobs and responsibilities infringe on one another and blend “collectively,” with the decisions and judgment of one man interfering with or being forced on another, determines the degree of the organization’s inefficiency and failure.