Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 1: The Man Who Belonged on Earth (Part 1) - Welcome to Either-Or

We made it to Part II. The title of this section is “Either-Or” and that’s already telling you something. Part I was called “Non-Contradiction.” The philosophical logic of Rand’s structure is simple: first she showed you the contradictions piling up, now she’s going to force the characters to pick a side. No more pretending both halves of a contradiction can be true at the same time.

And the world she drops us back into has gotten noticeably worse.

Dr. Stadler Is Cold

The chapter opens with Dr. Robert Stadler pacing his office at the State Science Institute, and the first thing you notice is that the man is freezing. Not metaphorically. The heating was bad all winter because of an oil shortage. The electricity went out for five days. A flood washed out a section of railroad track and they ate canned vegetables for two weeks. These are the kinds of problems you associate with developing countries, not with the most advanced scientific institution in a modern nation.

I grew up in a place where power outages were a regular feature of winter. The feeling Rand describes here, that slow creep of infrastructure failure where each little breakdown feels temporary until you suddenly realize the whole system is sliding, that’s something I recognize in my bones. It doesn’t happen all at once. One day the heat is low. Next month the lights go out. Then you just sort of accept it.

But Stadler isn’t thinking about infrastructure. He’s staring at a book on his desk and trying to pretend it doesn’t bother him.

The Book That Killed Reason

The book is called Why Do You Think You Think? and it was written by Dr. Floyd Ferris, the “Top Co-ordinator” of the State Science Institute. Rand gives us a generous sampling of its contents and they’re spectacularly awful. Thought is a superstition. Reason is irrational. Your brain is a distorted mirror. The history of science is just a series of mistakes. Logic is a chain to be broken. And the kicker: don’t fight what you see around you, because you can’t know anything anyway. Accept. Adjust. Obey.

Here’s the thing that makes this passage hurt. Ferris explicitly invokes Stadler’s own scientific discoveries to argue that reason is useless. He took the man’s life work in physics and twisted it into a weapon against thinking itself. And the book was published under the imprint of the State Science Institute.

When Stadler confronts Ferris about it, the conversation is one of the most quietly terrifying scenes in the novel. Ferris doesn’t deny that the book is garbage. He doesn’t even pretend to believe what he wrote. He just calmly explains why it’s useful. People don’t want to think, he says. They feel guilty about not thinking. So give them a prestigious, scientific-sounding excuse not to think, and they’ll love you for it.

“The man who doesn’t see that, deserves to believe all my statements,” Ferris tells Stadler. And when Stadler protests about the disgrace to science, Ferris asks with bored ease: “Why should we worry about them?” Meaning the intelligent people. The ones who can see through it.

That line lands like a slap. Twenty thousand copies sold in two weeks. Wesley Mouch sent a letter of praise. Academic magazines reviewed it seriously. And Hugh Akston, the philosopher who would have destroyed this nonsense in public, has conveniently disappeared.

The Real Horror: Stadler Says Nothing

Stadler is furious. He knows exactly what Ferris has done and why. But here’s what he doesn’t do: he doesn’t say he’ll publicly denounce the book. He doesn’t threaten to repudiate it in the name of the Institute. He stays silent because he’s afraid that if he makes the threat, Ferris won’t care. That the name of Dr. Robert Stadler no longer carries the power to stop anything.

So he throws the book in the wastebasket and tells himself he’ll think about a public protest later. Knowing he won’t.

This is one of the saddest moments in the novel so far. Stadler is brilliant. He understands what’s happening. And he chooses to do nothing because the alternative means admitting he’s already lost his authority. I’ve seen this dynamic play out in academia, in corporate life, in politics. The person who knows better but stays quiet because speaking up would cost them something. And every day they stay quiet, their silence gets cheaper.

Meanwhile, Everything Is Falling Apart

The chapter then shifts to Dagny, and Rand gives us a long, devastating economic cascade. Ellis Wyatt is gone. His oil fields are burning. The government took them over, handed the reclamation project to the State Science Institute, and after six months they’ve managed to squeeze out exactly six and a half gallons of oil. The Institute reports this as “fully successful” because Wesley Mouch is pleased. That’s the metric now. Not production. Approval from Washington.

After Wyatt left, the “little fellows” rushed in to fill the gap. They formed cooperatives and made quick fortunes. Then the power companies switched to coal. Then the small customers went out of business. Then oil rationing hit. Then drilling costs tripled. Then the pipe lines closed. Then the railroads raised freight rates. And by the time the dust settled, the little operators realized their whole existence had been made possible by Wyatt’s scale of production, and without him the math didn’t work.

Andrew Stockton, the foundry man who was casting parts for coal furnaces, retired without warning. A stranger visited him one evening. They talked late into the night. Next morning, Stockton was gone. Lawrence Hammond, the car manufacturer, did the same. Just vanished. A committee of local citizens is begging him on the radio to come back. No answer.

Dagny watches all of this from her desk at Taggart Transcontinental, drawing black lines through train schedules. Canceling freight runs. Erasing towns from the map. The John Galt Line, that triumph from Part I, now runs trains of forty cars at fifty miles an hour with coal-burning engines past their retirement age. And Jim boasts about record profits because the government subsidies for running empty trains look great on the balance sheet.

We’ll pick up the second half of this chapter in the next post, where Dagny makes a desperate call to the one scientist she least wants to see, and the motor from the abandoned factory comes back into the story.

Previous: Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt’s Torch (Part 2)

Next: Part II, Chapter 1: The Man Who Belonged on Earth (Part 2)

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.