Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 9: The Sacred and the Profane (Part 2) - The Guilt Machine
The second half of Chapter 9 moves fast. We go from a quiet evening in Dagny’s apartment to a road trip through decaying rural America to one of the biggest discoveries in the entire book. Rand is laying groundwork here that will carry the rest of the story.
Dagny’s Apartment
The John Galt Line is done. It’s been folded back into Taggart Transcontinental as the Rio Norte Line, although the train crews still refuse to call it by its official name. Dagny is back in her office, back in control, and back with Rearden.
He shows up at her apartment one evening after a banquet held in his honor by the National Council of Metal Industries. He has a key to her place. This is their private world, and Rand draws it with a kind of warmth that’s rare in this book. They talk like two people who actually like each other, which, honestly, is refreshing after all the hostile conversations with Lillian and Jim and the rest.
But Rearden is bothered by the banquet. Not because anyone insulted him. The opposite. Everyone praised him, told him how much the world needs him, gave all the right speeches. And he found it hollow. Nobody there actually cared about the Metal or what it represented. They were going through the motions of honoring achievement because that’s what they thought they were supposed to do. Like ghosts pulled by distant echoes from a better age, as he puts it.
This hit me. I’ve sat through ceremonies like that. Soviet-era award ceremonies where everyone clapped at the right time and nobody meant a word of it. The ritual of recognition without any actual recognition happening. Rearden wanted to be celebrated by people who understood what he’d done. Instead he got a performance.
Dagny gets it immediately. She asks the right question: “You wanted to enjoy it…” And you can hear the pain in that line.
The Guilt That Won’t Let Go
There’s something Rearden can’t shake, and Rand keeps poking at it throughout this section. He and Dagny are together. They plan a road trip. They talk about building a transcontinental track of Rearden Metal. They’re happy. But Rearden still treats their relationship like something shameful.
He signs “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” at roadside hotels with a tight jaw. He separates the physical and emotional sides of what they have, as if acknowledging both at once would break something. Dagny notices that he’s alive and guiltless when they’re alone together, but the second the outside world creeps in, the guilt machine starts up again.
This is the core of what Rand means by “the sacred and the profane.” Society has taught Rearden that his desire, his pleasure, his body are the profane part of him. The sacred part is supposed to be duty, sacrifice, suffering. So the thing that actually makes him happy is the thing he’s been trained to feel worst about. And the things that make him miserable (his marriage, his family obligations, the hollow banquets) are the things he’s been told are noble.
I’ve seen this pattern in real life, many times. People who build real things, who create real value, being made to feel guilty for enjoying the results of their own work. The trick is always the same: convince the productive person that their happiness is selfish and their suffering is virtuous. Once you do that, you can extract anything from them.
America Crumbling
Dagny and Rearden take their road trip through Wisconsin and the small towns of the Midwest, and what they find is not pretty. The houses have no fresh paint. Porch steps are broken. Windows are patched with clapboard. People in the streets stare at their new car like it’s from another planet. Horse-drawn carts are back. At one grade crossing, they see a train pulled by an ancient coal-burning locomotive coughing black smoke.
Rand is not subtle here. This is a country going backward. The roads are cracking. The towns are dying. Money doesn’t circulate because there’s nothing to buy and nowhere to go. When they reach a settlement near the old Twentieth Century Motor Company, they find people living without money altogether, just bartering among themselves. An old woman who turns out to be thirty-seven looks like she’s sixty. A man draws water from a well with a rope pulley.
Growing up in the post-Soviet space, I recognized this world instantly. The decay is not dramatic. It’s slow and quiet. People adjust. They stop expecting things to work. They stop asking why the roads aren’t repaired or why the factory closed. “Where to?” says a man when asked why he didn’t move away. “What for?” That’s what collapse sounds like. Not an explosion but a shrug.
A kid throws a rock at their windshield and runs away laughing. Nobody reacts. That’s the detail that got me.
The Motor
They reach the Twentieth Century Motor Company. It’s been gutted. The big machinery was removed by someone organized. Everything else was picked apart by random looters. The steel staircases remain, built to last, spiraling up to nothing.
Dagny searches through the laboratory ruins and finds something buried in a pile of junk: a coil of wire in an arrangement she’s never seen, but that reminds her of something from an old textbook. She digs it out, cutting her hands, and uncovers the broken model of a motor unlike anything she knows.
It’s an electric motor that draws static electricity from the atmosphere and generates its own power. Scientists tried to build this decades ago and gave up. Someone here actually did it. There’s a partial manuscript describing how it works. The motor is real. It worked.
She screams for Rearden. He reads the manuscript and says “Good God.” They sit on the floor of a ruined factory, holding the remnants of what could have been the greatest invention since the internal combustion engine. A motor that needs no fuel. That could power locomotives, cars, ships, power plants. That could have, as Rearden says, added ten years to the life of every person in the country.
But who built it? And why is it here, abandoned in a junk pile at a dead factory in a dead town?
Rearden’s guess is grim: the inventor is probably dead. Because no living person would leave something this valuable to rot. Dagny refuses to accept that. She says she’ll find him if she has to drop everything else.
The chapter ends with them looking down from the factory hill at the valley below. The only lights are the faint glow of tallow candles.
My Take
This is where Atlas Shrugged stops being a political argument and becomes a mystery. Who built the motor? Why was it abandoned? And what happened to the kind of mind that could create something like this?
The guilt angle is interesting because it’s not just about Rearden and Dagny sneaking around. It’s about a whole society that has inverted its values so completely that the most important invention in a generation ends up in a garbage pile while people push plows by hand a few miles away. The motor is the ultimate symbol of what guilt does to producers: it makes them stop producing.
And the decaying towns are not just setting. They’re the result. When you punish success long enough, you don’t get equality. You get tallow candles.
Rand is building toward something big here, and even if you know where it’s going, this chapter earns its weight. The discovery of the motor is one of the best scenes in the book.
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Next: Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt’s Torch (Part 1)
This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.