And that’s the last chapter.
This is the closing post of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Yeo Bock Cheng spent 32 years at the United Nations. He believes he was the first Singaporean to build an entire career there. His story starts with a casual job offer in Bangkok and ends with him arranging billions of dollars in peacekeeping payments in New York.
In Part 1 we covered the philosophical foundation of Galt’s speech: his defense of reason, his attack on the morality of sacrifice, his claim that the mind is the root of all human survival. Part 2 is where Galt stops building the theory and starts throwing punches. He names names. He makes demands. And then the radio goes silent.
This is the chapter. The one everyone talks about. The one people skip, argue over, or read three times. John Galt’s 60-page radio speech. Rand basically stops the novel, puts the plot on hold, and has her main character deliver a philosophy lecture to the entire world. It’s bold. It’s exhausting. And whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit: nobody else would try this in a novel and actually get away with it.
“Be careful. You’ll be entering a cesspit of vipers.” That was the advice Dileep Nair got from a former senior UN diplomat before he took the job. He took it anyway.
This second half of the chapter is one of the most intense stretches in the entire novel. Rearden walks into a room full of bureaucrats. He walks out a different man. And between those two moments, a kid dies in his arms. If Rand wanted to show what happens when the system finally runs out of people to exploit, this is it.
When Singapore got a seat on the UN Security Council in 2001, Christine Lee figured she would end up chairing a quiet committee. She was wrong. The job turned into one of the most intense learning experiences of her career.
This chapter is where Hank Rearden finally breaks free. And it starts, as these things always do in Rand’s world, with the system tightening the screws one more time.
The UN is mostly known for security stuff. Wars. Peacekeeping. Big political crises. But there’s a whole other side of the UN that most people never hear about. The part that works on social issues. Education. Health. Aging populations. Disability rights. Housing. Gender equality. This is the world that Thelma Kay spent her career in.
This second half of the chapter is where everything starts breaking in a way that can’t be patched. Not metaphorically. Literally. The infrastructure fails, the last capable people are either leaving or hiding, and Dagny finds something in the tunnels under her railroad that changes everything.