Outline Of John Galt's Speech
Posted by richrobinson 11 years, 10 months ago to The Gulch: General
I came across this outline by David Kelley of Galts speech. I thought it was interesting. I need to read the speech again. Ayn Rand covered a lot in that speech.
If it were me giving the speech, I would simply have laid out the case that said that I was no longer willing to be stolen from by an overbearing government. It's fine to explain the rationale, but seriously, the best speeches are under five minutes. That one would have take 30+ minutes to orate.
Remember - the mind can only absorb what the hind end can endure...
Not so much.
I disagree with all the Rand-bashing on this issue, and consider this her greatest single piece of writing (as anthologized in For the New Intellectual).
It is in fact our nation's (and specie's) second Declaration of Independence, a comprehensive summation of the entire philosophy minus Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (which is implicit in the tight structure and integration, the stylization and phraseology).
As a linguist and an Objectivist, it is like taking a trip to Atlantis.
That's impressive, I gotta say. And I'll certainly bow to your estimation of the time required. Mine was off-the-cuff.
Please don't mistake my comments for Rand-bashing. Here's my critique, however: you have to consider the audience. You don't go into the level of detail present in Galt's speech in an actual speech except to an audience already well-versed on the subject matter: your audience tunes out after about five minutes. Every savvy politician knows this by heart. (It's also the reason why sound-bites and emotional outrage do so well for the Democrats.)
There's probably no better example than a few years ago when then-Congressman Paul Ryan was trying to illustrate to the American populace why Obamacare was a bait-and-switch. His entire presentation was about 20 minutes and while it was factually 100% accurate, it was boring. You had to want to watch the whole thing. The purpose of that presentation was education but it wasn't very successful because it didn't hold the audience's attention. (In contrast, watch this parody: https://youtu.be/eXWhbUUE4ko).
Same thing with Galt's speech. I don't disagree that the philosophy is solid, but he takes far too long to explain why it is important for people to listen to and take his message seriously. There is a reason most advertisements last about 30 seconds to a minute, and it is only partially about the cost. Marketing 101 is that your message has to be important to your audience before they will pay any attention. In a long message, you have to re-iterate that importance about every three to five minutes to draw your audience back in. To an Objectivist, yes! Galt's speech is Mulligan's Gold, but that speech wasn't ostensibly offered to an audience of Objectivists, but to the untrained populace. Having sat through hundreds of public speeches (and given a few myself), I can tell you that that speech was not only too long for the intended audience, but too complicated for the uninitiated mind. If actually given, people would have walked away after about three minutes or about 1-1/2 pages in and never given it a second thought.
Out of curiousity (because my wife is a linguist), what do you find linguistically significant in Galt's speech?
Ayn Rand was not a second-hander. And thank Galt she wasn't. Almost every one of the 296 paragraphs that make up the speech is like a poem in a series that make up one of five overall arguments (or mini-treatises).
For details I'll refer you to Alan Gotthelf's analysis in Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: "Galt's Speech in Five Sentences (and Forty Questions)."
Much of the speech is reiterated, even quoted at length, in Rand's own voice in her "The Objectivist Ethics" in The Virtue of Selfishness. Galt's voice is the voice of a bard, a profoundly rational seer, her ideal man.
But the voice of Galt, the rhythm, alliteration, close-synonyms emphasizing different aspects to a given principle. One of the seeming anomalies in the speech demonstrating contextual absolutes is that early in the speech Galt says that happiness is man's highest moral purpose, but after he details the virtues and other fundamentals says that happiness is man's ONLY moral purpose.
But as a student of both history, and cultural geography along with linguistics (and musicology), I've always been impressed on the powerful, germinal role epic poems and their oral transmission have had on their respective civilizations (e.g., Homer's Iliad and Odyssey on Ancient Greece epics or India's two great and massive epics The Mahabharata and The Raamayana).
It seems no civilizations ever sprung into being without some epic serving as the repository of all accumulated knowledge and foundation for all subsequent development.
That is how revolutionary and truly epic Ayn Rand's two great novels are. I rank her above everyone who came before her for the universal scope of her philosophic vision, the potential paradigm-shifting impact on all human culture and for her unprecedented stylistic genius: economy of syntax, purposefully essentialized lexicon, semantic richness and total lack of ambiguity.
She didn't cater, however to short-range mentalities growing shorter by the hour. Thought takes time and focus and determination. I've always likened my goal to climbing a mountain: each paragraph another segment offering as reward a broader view of the foothills, plains or forests stretched out below.
It really does feel that way. But I didn't commit myself to the task until my niece came along needing her uncle to walk her about the neighborhood, to the park or along the beach. At first I tried to recite it out loud as I listened on headphones to the tape so she would get lots of language, but it went to fast, so I started to memorize one paragraph at a time and see how far I could go as I walked her --- and it got longer and longer. By the time she reached the age of two I was up through the virtues (GS-63-69).
I've actually had the speech on tape since the early "90s (read, I think by, Branden who Rand regarded as her ideal reader) and I listened to it numberless times over the years, often falling asleep with the "voice of Galt" and it had always been something of a pipe dream that I might be able to recite parts of it from memory.
Now, I can't get into a conversation on any important subject without the relevant words springing to mind unbidden. But it is extremely hard work, especially as I don't go in for any random-associational memory shortcuts forcing my mind to see the connection to the whole of my life, the world and reality to facilitate recall instead.
But music is the ultimate mnemonic, and language has a music of its own. Another motivator was the idea for a John Galt Oratory (as I also compose). Frederick Delius (who was an atheist) did that with his one oratory: Nietzshe's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (the libretto).
The possibilities are endless (where would all those thousands of great Greek tragedies be without Homer? Thanks to the literary dialogues by a frustrated playwright named Plato, the vast majority of them were destroyed or lost by medievals looking forward to Dante's "Inferno."
Anyway, Jews memorize the Torah, Christians the Bible and Muslims the Quran. That praxis is the fountainhead of civilizations, and followers of Ayn Rand should do the same if they want to experience the greatest sense of happiness and fulfillment possible on reaching the top of Galt's peak -- which is his oath, the speech, the novel (Fahrenheit 451 was also an instigator for the idea).
I don't necessarily disagree with anything you have said, but all you've done is to argue that Galt's speech should be canon for the Objectivist just as the Bible is for Christians, the Qu-ran is for Islamicists, and the Torah is for Jews. You've ignored that the original audience for Galt's speech was not the Objectivist, but the common layman.
Should the Objectivist study Galt's speech? Absolutely. But as an introduction to philosophy, the common person isn't going to be motivated to sit through a first reading. A good foundation has to start with the simple and then build upon that the more complex (unless of course you practice conversion by the sword). Why? Because it takes time for the human mind to sort out, categorize, and internalize new things. We are very susceptible to overload, which is why we have to take things in chunks and properly digest them. Galt's speech is like drinking from a fire hose where most people are used to slurping through a straw.
PS - you mention writing a musical adaptation or oratory. How far did you get? Is it something you could publish and offer for sale here on the site?
For the rest, I will simply suggest the spiral-theory of knowledge. I have and will continue to study the rest, but it all comes back to the original. What Rand wrote before (and during) leads into it, everything that came later derives from it or is an explication of the method inherent in it (e.g., ITOE).
Force does not work and never did. No one ever grasped religion under another's sword (only learned to parrot the words perhaps).
Take it slow. Be selective. Choose which passages of the literature (I don't really recommend this with non-fiction) and commit that bit of "poetry" to memory through routine recitation. Let that be your own personal mantra.
Really, all your arguments redound to a failure to think in principle. I get kickback from you and others, but zero counter-suggestions on the principle I've applied.
On the "PS" I got no closer than a rationalistic scheme for treating the whole range of vowels as notes, but such "shortcuts" can never work but to disintegrate atonally.
The trick to that approach is really to intone the words as you're reciting them (whatever you choose to recite), but not to change them. One may omit but never alter. Any paragraph or passage can be an art-song.
Cheers.
"You've ignored that the original audience for those seminal sacred texts or epics was not the adherent either (there was nothing to adhere to)."
Not at all. Adherents were irrelevant there and I am not making them any more or less relevant. My focus is on the application or oration of that speech in today's world just as if the speech were given today in the same manner as in the book - via a commandeered, mandatory government radio broadcast.
Is such a person going to see beauty or poetry? No. They're going to ask the fundamental question: why does this matter to me? That question MUST be the one answered in the first 30 seconds or you have lost the audience (think elevator pitch).
But aside from direct quotations, the essential content is there in my subconscious ready to be triggered and deployed in words appropriate to the context. That's the big payoff.
So please do wrap your eyeballs around this pinnacle of scholarship on that most important epic and it's absolute pinnacle of oratory.
And that's funny, because I just remembered another influence on my commitment: the recitation I saw in grade school of an actor dressed as Patrick Henry dramatically delivering his "Give Me Freedom or Give Me Death" speech that actually triggered the American Revolution.
I mean, it's not a matter of length or complexity. There is no good argument for not availing ourselves of the powerful banquet Ayn Rand provided -- for your own understanding, in your life or to the world, dramatic oratory is the literary gold-standard that needs to be fully restored to our lives if there is to be a future.
Young people are rigorously taught to memorize and psycho-dramatically recite long Shakespearean soliloquies, and preachers in churches all across the country are giving every Sunday long, impassioned sermons ripped straight from the Bible or "prophecy."
I'm looking for the 300 of today needed to stop barbarism at today's post-modern Battle of Thermopylae, not to martyr themselves by approaching anything "from the standpoint of the ignorant." Not by the standard of hero, but by the standard or in service to the zero (emphasis added).
This is why I gave up my profession. I can't compete with such egalitarian mentalities as mandate the baby-steps, concrete-bound, approach in any accredited ESL classroom (I didn't exist, so I left).
But you do, so please look at this easiest, most accessible presentation I know of:
http://thecertaintysite.com
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As for the rest, I commend you for your passion but something about "preaching to the choir" ...
I'm not "preaching" to anybody: anyone who agrees with Ayn Rand enough to grasp the truth and beauty of her prose should want to memorize literary passages they find particularly inspiring.
The one paragraph that I do like to recite to people is GSS-063:
"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason -- Purpose -- Self-Esteem.
Reason, as his only tool of knowledge -- Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve -- Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride." -Atlas Shrugged, p. 1018 (Plume)
The essay by Allan Gotthelf is chapter 20 of the book "Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged." (page numbers in parentheses correspond with my Plume softcover edition).
"Here , with some slight editing, are the formulations I arrived at by working from the five paragraphs of the 600 word summary:
"I. The world is perishing from the morality of sacrifice, and the men of the mind are on strike against this morality, which is speeding up the process of destruction (1009-11).
"II. The proper, rational morality for man is one of life and reason, based on the axiom that existence exists (1024-34).
"III. The morality of sacrifice is the morality of death, for it demands renunciation of that which makes life possible: the mind -- and thus of any enjoyment of life on earth (1024-34).
"IV. This code is taught by men who, having renounced their minds, seek power over the consciousness of other men, by attempting to convince them to renounce their own minds and accept the morality of sacrifice; the deepest motive of these teachers of sacrifice is hatred of existence, of life, of man, of themselves -- and their goal is to destroy their victims and themselves (1034-47).
"V. If all men who desire to live reject -- as we the strikers have -- these doctrines of mysticism and sacrifice, realizing that no compromise is possible, and refuse to support their destroyers, demanding instead a society of rights and freedom, then the society of the mystics and looters will perish, and we will come to have a world of reason, freedom, achievement, and joy (1047-69).
"These five capsule statements, I submit, help one to see the overall structure and the unity of Galt's Speech." -Allan Gotthelf, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged," Robert Mayhew, ed.
And the final step with anything memorized, as proof of one's inductive grasp, is not just the "authenticity" of the recitation, but one's ability to put the statement in other words, their own.
So far I am up to [GSS-105], p. 1027. Unless you love it as performance art that most will never want to hear (maybe with the idea of posting exciting Youtube videos), you will make very slow or only sporadic progress (and "progress really _is perfection).
Young people especially stand to benefit tremendously from this praxis of mine -- which I stole from the Greeks (and the Hindus) -- whatever the epic prose or even ideology -- whether it is Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Victor Hugo, it will build strength of character, the ability to think philosophically and judge men by grasping of what moves them.
And what invariably moves them is principles: good or bad, right or wrong.
Now I won't presume to speak for all religions, nor even for all factions under the term Christianity, but this is a fundamentally wrong interpretation of the Christian religion.
1) God created man with free-will, to choose how they live their life.
2) Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love one another, which can be viewed as a simple form of you own yourself, your neighbor owns himself, you must respect your neighbors rights to self ownership just as you expect him to respect your rights to self ownership.
Neither of these call for us to surrender one's mind or to live for others.
God set out a moral code (espoused most succinctly in the 10 commandments) but gave us the ability to accept or reject same. The caveat is that with choices come consequences. That seems to be the problem that most atheists have with a moral code. They do not like that there are consequences.
In a nutshell... In a word... Excellent!
Saved to my HD!
Regards,
O.A.
No. Thank you! It is most appreciated. :)
O.A.
Years later, a friend who'd read AS several times confessed he always skipped the Speech. I was dumbfounded. First I knew that others weren't as enamored as I.
p.s. I have, again, copied it to Word,
and can share at will.
As to the difficulty of reading the speech, I found that I wasn't able to absorb it in one reading. I thought I had the gist of it, but I finished the novel and went back to the speech enough times to wrinkle the pages. After reading her subsequent non-fiction, I found it easier to understand the full meanings and implications of the speech.
This might have been what Nathaniel Branden meant by "a novel is not to be read as a philosophical treatise."
It lays out her philosophy as nothing else could. But does it take too much dramatic license? I say it does. I suggest to you that John Galt would have delivered a few pithy remarks that would have taken all of fifteen minutes. He would have made the same pitch he made to Kenneth Dannager--and did he really take three hours to convince him? Recall that Midas Mulligan famously boasted he took all of fifteen minutes to join John Galt in his strike.
Whom was he trying to reach?
1. Dagny Taggart, and
2. Anyone out there who might form their own rebel community. Which, according to AS, many did.
After that speech, the country saw a mass exodus. Yet a few holdouts still hung on at Rearden Steel, until finally one of them set the plant on fire--two months later.
The point is: if you can't convince anyone in maybe an hour, you're not going to convince them in three. At least, I don't think you are. Any ideas?
Actually, those long and involved explanations of the motives and emotions of her characters was another example of breaking the proscenium.
Where the 'chorus' would keep the audience up to speed with the motives of the characters....
Don't hesitate to correct me, if I labeled, or told it, wrong!
I won't say which one.
Wow, I'm good at this, huh?
But...few today appreciate the value of the very first 'non stick' utensil.
I have a kitchen worth of cast iron that Shrug has made claim to...and rightly so, since it is obvious that she knows the value of this cookware.
It is hard to be using a cast iron skillet, and not picturing your wagon train settled for the night, and the venison and vegetables sizzling for your supper....
P.S. It just occurred to me that John Galt would be carrying a cast iron skillet all his way to the Gulch...and then some.
The Treasure of the Sierre Madre is on the top of my favorite movies!
And John Huston's real father is the key actor in the rest of the story....
No one has ever topped this movie...and Bogart only did an equal job in Casablanca.
Post Script: I have to add Key Largo to Bogart's accomplishments!
I could frame a house swinging one....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KFVLWX7e...
Writers either LOVE to do it or HATE to do it. Which do you think DK chooses? Love or hate?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUoO_YwQR...
The Greg Salmieri's outline and Allan Gotthelf's analysis (Galt's Speech in Five Sentences (and Forty Questions) in the book, "Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged" (Robert Mayhew, ed.) are superior and set the standard for grasping the speech in form and content.
The only thing I changed from the Kelley/Raibley outline was to divide it into 4 rather than 3 parts. This issue is discussed on the relevant Atlas Project podcast on Youtube:
https://youtu.be/TplWOBQMV6k