At first sight it might seem that one of Ayn Rand’s dreams has come even more true than she could ever have imagined. In her novel Atlas Shrugged it was necessary for her hero, John Galt, to take over the entire US radio network in order to get his message across, something that even now is hard to imagine as possible. Elon Musk, his nearest modern incarnation, had a much simpler way of achieving the same ends. He bought Twitter.
Closer examination, however, reveals just how far Rand was from understanding the world and the people in it, and that is not merely a matter of an excusable failure to anticipate technology. Few people who have actually read the whole of John Galt’s rant (and I suspect they are far fewer than the numbers who quote items from it) can imagine that it would have fallen on anything other than deaf ears, for one very simple reason. It is not in human nature to tolerate the tedious.
What, after all, was Galt’s message? It was basically a simple one. The individual is paramount, and the only responsibilities of human beings are to themselves, to the satisfaction of their own needs and their own personal development, as long as that does not impinge by violence on the needs and personal development of anyone else. That implies a form of government that is not merely small but almost non-existent, being a provider only of an army, for protection from outside interference, a judiciary, to adjudicate on contracts freely entered into, and a police force to prevent violence between citizens and enforce the judgements of the courts (presumably by employing violence where necessary). Galt himself encapsulated the philosophy when he said , at the end of his tirade, “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”.
That is succinct, but unfortunately for his listener’s patience, he said a great deal more than that. He rambled on for a total of 33,500 words, or well over 5% of the entire book, in a speech that would have taken him at least an hour and a quarter to deliver, even without pausing for breath (I timed myself over the first 500 words). Given his near-superhuman physique, he might have managed that, but how many of his audience would still have been listening?
Galt also broke one of the cardinal rules of public speaking, a rule that all successful politicians, including both the best and the worst, instinctively know they must follow. Do not insult your audience. But he began his speech by doing just that. He had reached no further than what is, in the book, merely the thirteenth paragraph, when he said
“Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too. “
That is aggressive enough as a way to begin, but it gets worse, because Galt passes from insulting his listeners to emphasising to them their inferiority to his colleagues, the “men of the mind”.
“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason— were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value “.
This is not the way to get people on your side, as the worst of politicians, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Putins, know well. They know that the way to get sufficient people on their side is to insult people they are already disposed to dislike and mistrust and with whom they can, by no stretch of imagination, be identified. For Hitler it was the Jews, for Rand, in her more disgraceful moments, it was not only the communists and anything that smacked of socialism, but also the native Americans and the Arabs, and for today’s politicians it is the mass of immigrants fleeing homelands that the policies of those same politicians or their predecessors have made mpoe dangerous than flight.
It is not likely that Elon Musk had to learn those facts. More probably he knew instinctively that to be heard, one had to keep what one had to say short (so he bought Twitter), and find an enemy. And if there is no suitable enemy, create one, knowing that however improbable the charge, if it is shouted loud enough, and often enough, it will be believed by a sufficient number. Who, after all, could have expected the targeting of Jess Phillips, long term campaigner for women’s rights, with complicity in the abuse of teenage girls? In some quarters it seems to have worked.
But this is also, perhaps, where Elon Musk, the beneficiary of billions in US government contracts, parts company with Rand and John Galt. His complaint against Phillips was her rejection of the call for yet another government enquiry, even though such things last for years, cost millions and produce findings that are then ignored. What, in practice, could be more typical of ‘big government’ than that?