The Gospel According to John (Galt)

It's possible to create a fairly consistent world picture, if you are willing to disregard that nasty old reality stuff.  Listen, for a few seconds, to Galt's explanation:

Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart,” said Galt...”that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires-if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?  There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another- if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked , that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn’t.  The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor,  the worker who wants a share of his employers wealth,  the artist who envies a rivals higher talent, they are all wishing facts out of existence..."


Now if Rand could actually portray real human beings, and had just a tiny talent for dialog, Dagny might have replied something like this:

Did it ever occur to you Mr. Galt, that your ancestors and mine were able to give birth to us because they survived a million (or billion) years of fierce competition for resources that only a few survived, and their most dangerous competitors were other people whose interest in survival conflicted directly with those of our ancestors?  Did it occur to you that the mind that you pretend to honor was developed by evolution not to build train sets or pyramids, but to facilitate cooperation among people, and that that ability to cooperate was not based on ability to accumulate shiny bits of metal, but to form alliances,  cajole, lie, and otherwise defeat others who were trying to do the same to them.


To which, Galt, clueless animatronic dolt that he is, would probably have replied with some Randian bullshit like:

I can't believe that you, Dagny, have swallowed their nonsense about intelligence being useless and needing to rely on emotions.

And Dagny might add:

And I can't believe that I just now wanted to have sex with you, before you turned out to be such a close-minded clueless dunce, under the spell of some brain damaged ignorant Russian peasant woman.


OK, it's not Jane Austin, but I would have found it an improvement.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

Uneasy Lies The Head

Book Review: Anaximander By Carlo Rovelli