I was reading this for my AS book club this Sunday and it struck me, how many of us are accepting what Hank accepted? Hank is talking to Dagny after her interview with Scudder.
“Let me finish, dearest. I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them. I had accepted the worst of our enemies' creed – and that is what I've paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must. I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he's started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body. I had accepted it like most of their victims, not knowing it, not knowing even that the issue existed. I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires. But I did not know that this was virtue. I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one's life, because it's that which makes life possible. And I accepted punishment for it, punishment for virtue at the hands of the arrogant evil, made arrogant solely by my ignorance and my submission.

“I accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions. I thought I could afford to ignore them-all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads. I thought that the world was mine, and those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality. I had accepted, unwittingly and by default the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one's existence, to one's work, to reality, to this earth-as if ideas were not the providence of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. This was all they wanted me to concede. It was enough. I had surrendered that which all of their claptrap is designed to subvert and to destroy: man's reason. No, they were not able to deal with matter, to produce abundance, to control this earth. They did not have to. They controlled me.

“I, who knew that wealth is only a means to an end, created the means and let them prescribe my ends. I, who took pride in my ability to achieve the satisfaction of my desires, let them prescribe the code of values by which I judges my desires. I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.

“I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looter's attempt to set the price and value of my steel-but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth-but I thought it was my duty to grant unearned love to a wife I despised, and unearned respect to a mother who hated me, and unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury-but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt-but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit-but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil, then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it-and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it's right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who're able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.