Origin of who is john galt

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Your world is only the product of your sacrifices. While you were dragging the men who made your happiness possible to your sacrificial altars, I beat you to it. I reached them first and told them about the game you were playing and where it would take them. I explained the consequences of your 'brother-love' morality, which they had been too innocently generous to understand.

You won't find them now, when you need them more than ever. We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made them quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life. I am a trader.

I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit.

Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.

You've allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they're born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please.

The name of this absurdity is 'original sin'. That's impossible. That which is outside the possibility of choice is also outside the province of morality. To call sin that which is outside man's choice is a mockery of justice.

To say that men are born with a free will but with a tendency toward evil is ridiculous. If the tendency is one of choice, it doesn't come at birth. If it is not a tendency of choice, then man's will is not free. And then there's your 'brother-love' morality. Why is it moral to serve others, but not yourself? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but not by you?

Why is it immoral to produce something of value and keep it for yourself, when it is moral for others who haven't earned it to accept it? If it's virtuous to give, isn't it then selfish to take? Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his.

You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.

You know that you can't give away everything and starve yourself. You've forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him.

Yes, if it's your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth. Then it began apologizing for its greatness and began giving away its wealth, feeling guilty for having produced more than ikts neighbors.

Twelve years ago, I saw what was wrong with the world and where the battle for Life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my acceptance of that morality was its only power. I was the first of the men who refused to give up the pursuit of his own happiness in order to serve others.

To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.

If you've understood what I've said, stop supporting your destroyers. Don't accept their philosophy. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, and your love.

Don't exhaust yourself to help build the kind of world that you see around you now. In the name of the best within you, don't sacrifice the world to those who will take away your happiness for it. The world will change when you are ready to pronounce the oath that I took at the start of my battle:. I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Thousands of listeners took John Galt's advice. They could not contact him, so they could not come to Mulligan's Valley. But many of them set up their own versions of Mulligan's Valley, chiefly armed camps in various forests and other "wilderness" regions. John Galt now made his almost-fatal mistake. He could have stayed in Mulligan's Valley and relied on Francisco, or Ragnar, or both to watch for signs that Dagny was ready to quit, and bring her to him.

But he had promised Dagny that all she need do was draw a dollar sign in chalk on the plinth of Nathaniel Taggart's statue in the Terminal, and he would come for her that evening. True to his promise, and perhaps not willing to hire either of his friends to do what was his own private business, he returned to New York City and stayed long enough for Dagny Taggart to come to him. Before he did, he retrofitted Hank Rearden's aircraft with an electrostatic powerplant.

He couldn't have known how valuable that would be, but he would want to be prepared. Besides, Rearden would certainly have ordered such a retrofit. He waited for nearly three months, during which time Rearden Steel of Berks County, Pennsylvania, deteriorated under successive mismanagement not to mention embezzlement and finally died in an act of sabotage on January 22, Galt passed the information back to the valley, via short wave.

Hank Rearden had to know about it, per Galt's own rigid code. The word he got back was that Rearden took it all in stride. On February 22, , Dagny Taggart did come to him. But, unknown to her, she had the FBI on her tail, and in consequence, John Galt was arrested, as he knew he would be. The authorities could not charge him with anything. Instead, Mr. Thompson tried to urge him to take the post of "Economic Dictator" of the country, a suggestion that Galt found laughable.

To illustrate the absurdity of the proposition, Galt said that his first order would be to abolish all income taxes and fire all government employees. Naturally, Thompson rejected those proposals. A steady stream of Mr.

Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute did not plead; he threatened. Specifically he threatened to institute a program of executions of "unproductive citizens," a program he said would be necessary if Galt did not cooperate. Thompson was horrified and said that Ferris was not serious. Galt was having none of that.

He said,. The last person to see Galt, and this at Galt's seemingly incongruous request, was his former chairman of physics at PHU, Dr. Galt said nothing; he merely allowed Stadler to babble at him about how much he wanted a laboratory and what he could have done with it. But Stadler talked too much, and revealed his conclusion that Galt was now the man who had to be destroyed. Stadler tried to take that back, but Galt said to him,. The authorities left him in solitary confinement in the Royal Suite of the Wayne-Falkland for another three days.

Then they put on a television show and announced a new "John Galt Plan for Peace and Prosperity," and ordered Galt at the point of a gun to dress for the occasion and appear on camera.

Galt cooperated until at last the time came for him to speak. And then, moving swiftly enough that the viewers could not miss the gun aimed at him, he rushed to the on-stage podium and said,.

The authorities stopped the show immediately and then took Galt to the New Hampshire campus of the State Science Institute. They then tried to examine him under torture by electric shock—but Galt was prepared for it, and knew in advance that they would not dare deliver to him a lethal shock. Then the electroshock generator broke down, and the operator could not repair it.

John Galt himself gave the diagnosis of the trouble and suggested a repair, and the rich irony of the situation caused the operator to flee in terror. The three interrogators also fled, after one of them James Taggart cried out that he wanted "to make him scream," and then screamed himself, now that he realized exactly what sort of man he had become.

Ferris and Mouch half-carried Jim Taggart from the torture chamber, and did not come back. Thus Galt waited alone, lashed to a mattress, but supremely confident that all he need do was wait. He did not have long to wait. Fifteen minutes later, he heard gunfire and the sound of crashing glass on the floor above, echoing down the single stairwell. Then he heard a voice he recognized as that of Francisco d'Anconia ordering a guard to surrender himself.

Then the hurried footsteps of four people pounded down the stairs to the single door. Galt heard several knocks on the door, and sounds of someone picking the lock. Then the door flew open. Francisco d'Anconia rushed in, held his arm out to bar the entry of those behind him, and surveyed the scene. Galt caught his eye and smiled at him. Dagny rushed to his side and embraced him, while Ragnar and Henry cut him loose.

Francisco offered him brandy, and Galt asked for a cigarette. He and Dagny understood one another well enough for her to know that he was unharmed.

Francisco needed a bit more reassurance, and Galt gave it to him. Francisco then threatened to hunt down Galt's torturers and kill them, but Galt told him,. Ragnar concentrated on smashing the torture equipment to smithereens. Then the rescue party helped Galt to dress, and left the chamber. Galt took note of the signs of the battle, such as it had been, that his four rescuers had fought: five enemy dead, one "friendly" wounded Rearden, who had sustained a flesh wound , a window broken in, and some other minor damage.

As clean a rescue as he could have asked for. The five made their way to Francisco d'Anconia's plane and took off in it at once, with Ragnar at the controls. Once they were in the air, Galt turned to Rearden and thanked him for his rescue. He and Rearden then repeated what they had said to one another last November, faithfully in reverse. Then Galt heard Ragnar giving a radio report, and Francisco told him that half the men in the valley had come to help rescue him.

Galt spoke to one of those men: Hugh Akston. Galt didn't ask how Ragnar could have allowed such an oldster to take part in a mission more appropriate to a man half his age.

Hugh Akston was the one such "oldster" who could have insisted. As their escape plane overflew the Eastern seaboard, the entire ground fell dark in an instant. The collapse of the world system was now complete. Galt said only one thing: he told Dagny, seated next to him, not to look down. Galt returned to Mulligan's Valley and finished out the winter there.

He married Dagny, with Judge Narragansett presiding. He watched with pride as she built the narrow-gauge railroad for Francisco, and even accepted an order to build the world's first electrostatic locomotive for it. Eventually, spring came, and the last of the government radio and television stations fell silent.

John Galt then declared that the world couldn't threaten them anymore, and it was time to come back. The Northeast Blackout of is especially memorable to anyone who called himself a student of Objectivism at the time.

Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand's work spoke only half-jokingly of trying to tune in their radio to see whether they could catch someone saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Johnson will not be speaking to you tonight.

I, John Galt, have taken it over. The Objectivists had only one quarrel with Reagan, and that concerned the issue of abortion. On every other point, they agreed with his stated principles, and many rejoiced to see the Reagan principles in operation.

Sadly, George H. Bush did not follow those principles, and neither did his immediate successor, Bill Clinton , or even his son, George W. But not until the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama did any Objectivist think seriously that the time might have come to do in real life what John Galt does in the novel. Today, the Ayn Rand Institute has enjoyed frequent citations on the Fox News Channel and especially by commentator Glenn Beck , who has interviewed its current head several times on his program.

Beck has not been known to mention the name of John Galt, but he has mentioned the name of Henry Rearden , the novel's hero who becomes a reluctant member of John Galt's strike and the society that he builds. More to the point, "to go Galt" has now become a catch phrase for quitting a system that now begins to look like the extremely collectivistic system that Ayn Rand projected in her novel. The most salient case-in-point today is the finding, published in Investors' Business Daily , that forty-five-percent of doctors surveyed would seriously consider quitting their profession if the Obama Administration 's proposed socialization of health care were to be enacted into law.

Electrostatic motors do exist, chiefly as tutorial demonstration projects. However, in , William J. Beaty published to the World Wide Web a short essay discussing the feasibility of electrostatic motors, especially for applications in the vacuous conditions of outer space.

Beaty also suspects that the power of an electrostatic motor might vary with the length and inductance of its collecting coil. According to Beaty, the recently discussed "micromotors" created on silicon chips are actually electrostatic motors.

Furthermore, he suggests that electrostatic motors would be much lighter in weight and thus much easier to deploy in space. He also asserts that bacterial flagella and cellular cilia run on rotary electrostatic motors, and that all muscles are in fact linear electrostatic motors. From the above, an electrostatic motor, as used in Atlas Shrugged , might have been feasible.

At least one anonymous source, writing in Wikipedia, suggests that an electrostatic motor would require a recharge every half hour. The chief limitation would be on the size and inductance of the collecting coil. The novel specifically states that John Galt built an electrostatic dynamo to provide electric power for all of Mulligan's Valley, and also built a much smaller version to provide electric power for the laboratory that he maintained in his apartment in New York City.

It further states that when the strike was over, John Galt proposed building locomotives that would be powered by his invention. That Ragnar Danneskjold would try to retrofit his vessel to run on an electrostatic powerplant is only logical to suppose. Ayn Rand is not the only author to propose that an electrostatic motor would have such widespread application. Jules Verne initially proposed that the submarine called Nautilus , in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , would have an electrostatic powerplant.

The motion picture adaptation of that novel assumed that the Nautilus would be a nuclear -powered submarine, and indeed the very first nuclear-powered submarine in the United States Navy was named Nautilus in Verne's honor. In the motion picture Master of the World , the helicopter airship Albatross also had an electrostatic powerplant. However, no engineer has yet proposed to build an electrostatic motor that would be nearly as powerful as Ayn Rand suggested. The motion picture adaptation, Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 , proposed an entirely different sort of revolutionary motor.

In the film, Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart mention the Casimir Effect, which classically is an attraction between two metal conducting plates brought close together in a quantum vacuum. In fact, Alexander Feigel, of the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, Yavne, Israel , actually proposed building a "quantum propulsion engine" that employs the Casimir Effect, or something close to it. Usually, the Casimir Effect is too small to be of practical consequences, and the related Lorentz forces cancel one another out.

Feigel's proposed nanoparticle-rotation scheme would cause the Lorentz forces to add up to a resultant that would be strong enough to do useful work. Feigel used the phrase "quantum propulsion machine. Some of the terms that the film's script uses are wildly inaccurate, and are probably a weak attempt to conflate the concept of an electrostatic motor with that of a quantum propulsion motor of the type that Feigel proposes.

But their use of the term "Casimir Effect" provides the clue to what they actually propose. Perhaps the oversimplified explanation that Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden give in the film would be an accurate portrait of an attempt by any layman, not familiar with quantum mechanics, to explain what would be, to them, a shocking discovery. The model that Feigel proposed, and others have elaborated on, does appear to be quite feasible. The references describe a practical application in outer space, to replace the classic "reaction control"-based attitude systems on spacecraft with quantum thrusters.

But this does seem to have a down-to-earth application as a replacement for any engine that relies on turning a shaft to provide motive power. Such an engine could replace those in automobiles and locomotives, and could also replace the turboprop engines in slower-moving aircraft.

It could possibly serve to design a more-efficient turbofan jet engine, thus extending the range of current jet aircraft. It could also replace the "auxiliary power units" that current jet transports carry. These are miniature turbofan jet engines that provide no motive power to speak of, but serve only to provide electric power while the aircraft loads, until the pilot starts his main engines. We down below are not stupid or lazy. Some of us have sky rocketing IQs and put them to work too.

To the Galtist — please, if you could explain to me why you are worth X my income and the income of the fellow and the woman sitting next to me, I would say, sure, I would say pay not a dime of tax. But you are not. A vacation, however short, would be a welcome relief from the hourly diatribe informing the listening audience that I am an evil, godless, traitor unfit for U. Some doctors may legitimately claim they are productive rich. It is exactly what I have done, quit this economy.

I am out of investing in my business, I am out of making money to pay the government. I will take my very productive business and bleed it. I will take care of my employees and family, not hire anyone, and go climb mountains more often.

Fortunately I have enough cash to last at least 10 years which I figure will be enough to survive the administrations lunacy. Please, go Galt. Be my guest, Hoss. Take that genius talent of yours right over to the bus station at Applebees. What a bunch of whiners the rich are! Of course, everyone assumes that they are naturally entitled to whatever they happen to have at the moment, including, in this case, ridiculously low marginal tax rates on both earnings and capital gains, salaries and bonuses that may be times the earnings of ordinary workers, insulation of their earnings from their actual job performance, etc.

In those pre-Medicare times, doctors were not generally rich, but they still worked very hard, and even made house calls. It is not at all clear that we need to bribe people with promises of riches in order to get them to do useful work. The Right is flailing wildly looking for heroes and standard-bearers.

Rush Limbaugh and Howard Galt. Conor Friedersdorf writes that the ideas are ultimately flawed in Atlas Shrugged, and therefore has no real understanding of the ideas.

It is a system of reason, there is no way to follow it blindly while still staying true to it. That idea is a total contradiction. Also, the book only demonstrates a point, that without victimizing those who produce no other system could ever work. Is that not beautiful? There is actually a very close correlation between Atlas Shrugged and current events. Read the book and then draw your own conclusions.

If this happens, we can for sure stop talking about being a great nation and making a positive difference in the world. I read this book for a book club earlier this year. I would like to know who the Dagny Taggert would be in this scenario and if all the male leads are required to be sexually attracted to her. Please, please, can they all go Gault retroactively? And the opportunities in our society are afforded, in large part, to government institutions and taxes.

How many of the great wealth producers went up through the public schools or state universities? Or benefit from the protections and diligent services of police, firefighters, emergency managers, and sanitation workers?

Or concentrate on their work instead of worrying about foreign invasions and natural disasters, thanks to our soldiers and national guardsmen? Or who enjoy the staggering fruits of scientific and technological progress—from lasers to MRI machines to computers to the Internet—thanks to enormous federal investment in basic research over the century? Half of every dollar the great wealth producers make is owed, at least indirectly, to other people and to the government who made it all possible, who created an environment and a society in which innovation and hard work can indeed yield great results.

These people really believe that they made every dollar entirely themselves. Their self-adulation blinds them to reality. Get real! More like worthless paper traders. The financial industry produces nothing when it is not financing productive enterprise. When financing and trading and insuring and hedging and leveraging ever smaller snippets and collections of snippets of what was once an asset, they are no longer productive in the true sense of the word.