Galt's Gulch

Atlas Shrugged, Part 3 Chapter 5: Their Brothers’ Keepers.

Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago to Books
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Summary: Various industries continued to decline. Dagny and James discuss why the Railroad Unification Plan was not working. Rearden and Philip discuss his need for a job, and then Hank ponders the situation. The country continued to decline, as the Eastern Seaboard was not able to get harvest from Minnesota. Dagny met with James and the Washington cartels. Then she went to resolve more railroad problems, and found John Galt working.

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Atlas Shrugged was written by Ayn Rand in 1957.

My idea for this post is discussed here:

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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Galt: “I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I’ve taught them also never to expect the unpaid for – and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Galt: “Dagny, it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    “Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?” She could not resist it. “Man is only muscles, isn’t he? We’re going back – back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity – back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Dagny and a dispatcher: “We’re going to move trains and we’re going to move them manually.”
    “Manually?” said the signal engineer.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    “In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing restlessly. “Retrenching, hell! There’s plenty of pickings left in California and Oregon and all those places.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Rearden thinking: “Men who worship pain – thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand – they’re men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance. He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed – but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the unliving; no, worse, he thought – the anti-living.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Philip Rearden to Hank: “You’re supposed … at least … to have some consideration for my feelings … but you haven’t.”
    “Have you for mine?”
    “Yours? Your feelings?” It was not malice in Philip’s voice, but worse: it was a genuine, indignant astonishment. “You haven’t any feelings. You’ve never felt anything at all. You’ve never suffered!”
    It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train’s engine on the John Galt Line – and the sight of Philip’s eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that his pain be held as the highest of values.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Philip Rearden to Hank: He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, “It’s a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job.” His voice rose: “I’m entitled to it!”
    “You are? Go on, then, collect your claim.”
    “Uh?”
    “Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows.”
    “I mean – ”
    “You mean that it doesn’t? You mean that you need it, but can’t create it? You mean that you’re entitled to a job which I must create for you?”
    “Yes!”
    “And if I don’t?”
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    • Posted by XenokRoy 8 years, 5 months ago
      The thing I find interesting, and I would be interested in hearing from others who hire people, is that this is basically how about half of the phone interviews I do with candidates go.

      The interviewer is telling me why they need a job, rather than what they can do for the company if given a job.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Philip Rearden to Hank: “I’m asking you to give me a job!”
    “Why should I?”
    “Because I need it!”
    Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. “I needed that furnace, Philip. It wasn’t my need that gave it to me.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Rearden: There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men – and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way – illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers – and what tenacious producers! – not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Rearden to Dagny: “Rearden Steel is now working at capacity,” he was saying indifferently. “They’ve lifted the production quotas off my mills – for the next five minutes, I guess. I don’t know how many of their own regulations they’ve suspended, I don’t think they know it, either, they don’t bother keeping track of legality any longer, I’m sure I’m a lawbreaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove – all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead.” He shrugged.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Dagny to James: “Give up.” He looked at her blankly. “Give up – all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch out of the ruins.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    Dagny thinking: What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity? – she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it!” – then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed; they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations” – then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?” now were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on? – she wondered.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    “These were the men…. Whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as ‘friendship.’ These were the men whom official speeches described as ‘the progressive businessmen of our age,’ but whom people called ‘the pull peddlers’ – the species included many breeds, those of ‘transportation pull,’ and of ‘steel pull’ and ‘oil pull’ and ‘wage-raise pull’ and ‘suspended sentence pull’ – men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness of a corpse.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 8 years, 5 months ago
    “In this enlightened age,” Eugene Lawson had said in a radio broadcast; “we have come, at last, to realize that each one of us is his brother’s keeper.”
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    • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 5 months ago
      We meaning he has a toad in his pocket." I am not my brothers keeper. I have no brother. And now no Mother, no Father. One sister . I hold responsibility by free choice to family. What's that got to do with looters and moochers. If Rachel Carson could condemn them to death I can do no less. But like swatting flys I don't keep statistics. It's not important.
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