Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar

Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago to Books
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Summary: Dagny’s Comet is heading to Colorado, contemplating the slave labor she has taken part in, when she finds a stowaway tramp (aka, Jeff Allen). Jeff Allen tells Dagny about the 20th Century Motor Company, and the disaster that socialism was. After another nap, she woke up to a ghost train, and goes off with Owen Kellogg to get help. Dagny discusses societal issues with Kellogg, and then finds a plane. She flies after Daniels, but loses control and prepares for a belly-landing.

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Atlas Shrugged was written by Ayn Rand in 1957.

My idea for this post is discussed here:

http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “He stood like a man who knew that he was right. ‘I will put an end to this, once and for all,’ he said. His voice was clear and without any feeling. That was all he said and started to walk out. He walked down the length of the place, in the white light, not hurrying and not noticing any of us. Nobody moved to stop him. Gerald Starnes cried suddenly after him, ‘How?’ He turned and answered, ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    “The man [Jeff Allen] had spoken as if the burden of his years of silence had slipped suddenly out of his grasp… It was as if the life he had been about to renounce were given back to him by the two essentials he needed: by his food and by the presence of a rational being.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world – and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “By the time we saw what it was that we’d asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn’t turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn’t take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pest-hole – till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability… The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory’s needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it – for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness?”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything…But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it…what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need’ than the rest of us could ever imagine – they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “What was it they’d always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who’d do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn’t it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who’d do the worst job possible. There’s no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “Do I have to tell you what happened after that – and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for ‘the family,’ it’s not thanks or rewards that we’d get, but punishment? …So we did our best to be no good.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “It was decided that somebody hadn’t delivered ‘according to his ability.’ Who? How would you tell it? ‘The family’ voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay – because you weren’t paid by time and you weren’t paid by work, only by need.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars – rotten, whining, sniveling beggars all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ – so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher., listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm – so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t stand, working an acetylene torch ten hours a day – together, and you don’t all get a bellyache – together.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there’s a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six – for your neighbor’s supper…for anyone anywhere around you – it’s theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures – and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end…From each according to his ability, to each according to his need...”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal… We voted for the plan – and what we got, we had it coming to us… What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil – plain, naked, smirking evil, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we saw and helped to make – and I think we’re damned, every one of us, and maybe we’ll never be forgiven.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Jeff Allen to Dagny: “They brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody – almost everybody – voted for it. We didn’t know. We thought it was good. No, that’s not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. We – what’s the matter, ma’am? Why do you look like that?”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Dagny to Jeff Allen: “What kind of work are you looking for?”
    “People don’t look for kinds of work any more, ma’am,” he answered impassively. “They just look for work.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 8 months ago
    Dagny thinking: “She had wanted to cry to them in apology. ‘It’s not I who’ve done it to you!’ – then had remembered that she had accepted it and that they now had the right to hate her, that she was both a slave and a driver of slaves, and so was every human being in the country, and hatred was the only thing that men could now feel for one another.”
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