Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 7: The Moratorium on Brains (Part 1) - When Thinking Becomes a Crime
The title of this chapter is “The Moratorium on Brains” and it’s not a metaphor. Directive 10-289 has been signed into law. The best people are chained to their jobs. Innovation is frozen. And the immediate result is that the best people are leaving anyway, just faster and angrier than before.
Eddie Tells Us Everything
The chapter opens with Eddie Willers in the underground cafeteria, talking to that mysterious worker he keeps spilling his guts to. And this time, Eddie is falling apart.
Dagny has quit. Actually quit. Not a leave of absence, not a vacation. She walked away from Taggart Transcontinental. Jim is covering it up because having a “deserter” in his own family would look terrible to his friends in Washington. So officially, she’s on leave. But Eddie knows the truth. He’s the only one who knows where she is. And he won’t tell anyone, no matter how hard they push.
The railroad is hemorrhaging people. The best workers, the ones who had been loyal for twenty years, are quitting over the smallest disagreements. Before the directive, they would have stayed through anything. They had no intention of leaving. But now that they’ve been told they can’t leave, suddenly every petty frustration becomes the last straw. And the replacements coming in are either terrified and useless or the kind of people who actually enjoy the new system. Eddie can’t believe that such people exist. But they do. They got the jobs and they know they can’t be fired, so they don’t bother pretending to work.
I grew up in a country where this dynamic was the whole economy for decades. When you tell people they can’t leave, two things happen. The good ones find a way to leave anyway. And the ones who stay learn that effort is pointless. You get a workforce of people who are physically present and mentally checked out. That’s not a failure of the policy. That’s the policy working exactly as designed.
The Trained Seal
In Dagny’s place, Jim has installed a man named Clifton Locey. Eddie’s description of him is one of the most precise portraits of a certain type of manager I’ve ever read. Locey’s purpose is not to operate a railroad. His purpose is to hold a job. He doesn’t care if a single train moves, as long as Jim is happy and Washington is impressed.
He never gives a direct order. He makes sure no decision can ever be traced back to him. When things go right (which never lasts more than half an hour, Eddie says), Locey reminds everyone that “these are not the days of Miss Taggart.” When things go wrong, he quietly calls Eddie into his office and asks what Dagny used to do. Then he goes back to being rude to Eddie so nobody thinks he needs him.
His first act was to remove the portrait of Nat Taggart from the office wall. Too associated with selfish greed. Not a good look for our modern progressive policies. Eddie took the picture down himself. That detail hurts.
The big crisis is a Diesel engine. A Washington celebrity named Chick Morrison needs a special train for his morale-boosting speaking tour. He demands a Diesel. There are no spare Diesels on the entire system, except one. The emergency backup at Winston, Colorado, at the mouth of the Taggart Tunnel. Dagny had made it an absolute rule that Winston Station always had a spare Diesel, because if a train broke down inside that eight-mile tunnel, you needed a way to pull it out fast. Locey overruled it. Chick Morrison got his Diesel. The Colorado Division superintendent quit in protest.
Eddie wanted to quit too. But he didn’t. He tells himself it’s because of Taggart Transcontinental, because of the thousands of lives on the trains. But you can hear in his words that he’s running on fumes.
Rearden Walks Alone
The chapter shifts to Rearden, and the mood changes completely. He’s left his family. Moved to an apartment in Philadelphia. Told his attorney to get him a divorce at any cost, on any grounds. No alimony. No settlement. The attorney gives him a sad smile, like he’d been expecting this call for years.
Nobody asks Rearden about signing the Gift Certificate that handed over Rearden Metal. But the men at the mills look at him like they’re searching for scars of torture on his body. They know something was done to him. They just don’t know what.
Rearden feels nothing. That’s not a dramatic statement. Rand describes it precisely: like slag crusting over molten metal, swallowing the last white glow. He doesn’t care that looters will now manufacture his Metal. The human shapes moving past him in the streets are just physical objects. The only thing that feels real is the empty countryside at night, the darkness that washes away all traces of human activity.
Every evening he walks from his mills to Philadelphia, a long walk through dark country roads. He carries a gun because the police told him no road is safe after dark anymore. He finds that amusing, in a grim way. The gun would have been more useful at the mills, against the men who claimed to be his protectors.
The Pirate Appears
On one of these walks, a man steps out of the darkness near a willow tree. Tall, blond, wearing a dark windbreaker. He carries no weapon. Only a package wrapped in burlap.
The conversation that follows is one of the longest and most philosophically loaded scenes in the novel. The stranger says he’s come to return money to Rearden. Not a gift. A refund. A small payment on a large debt.
He hands Rearden a bar of solid gold.
The stranger turns out to be Ragnar Danneskjold, the pirate who’s been terrorizing government shipping for years. He explains his mission: he raids government relief ships, subsidy ships, and loot-carriers. He sells the cargo for gold. And then he deposits that gold in a bank, in the names of the productive men it was stolen from. He’s been keeping accounts. He has copies of their income tax returns for the past twelve years. He’s refunding their taxes. In gold.
Rearden laughs like a boy when he hears this. “You’re a policeman and a collector of Internal Revenue, too?”
But Danneskjold isn’t done. He launches into a speech about Robin Hood. In his telling, Robin Hood is not a hero but the most destructive myth in human history. Not because he stole from the rich. But because the legend, as it survived, turned need into a virtue and ability into a crime. Robin Hood became the symbol of the idea that you don’t have to produce, only to want. That the earned doesn’t belong to you, but the unearned does.
“I’m the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich,” Danneskjold says. It’s the most deliberately provocative line in the book.
He also reveals that he destroyed Orren Boyle’s steel mills on the coast of Maine. Boyle had started secretly producing Rearden Metal the moment the Gift Certificate was signed. Danneskjold gave the workers ten minutes to evacuate, then leveled the place with naval guns. Nobody will manufacture Rearden Metal without Rearden’s consent. Not while Danneskjold has ammunition.
Rearden’s Choice
Rearden is torn. He can feel something waking up in him, something he buried years ago. That feeling of dealing with a rational mind, of being in a world that makes sense. But it’s coming from a pirate offering violence as the answer. He can’t accept it.
When a police car pulls up, the moment becomes electric. The cops are looking for a tall blond man worth three million dollars in rewards. They ask Rearden if he’s seen anyone suspicious. Rearden looks at Danneskjold standing right there, arms relaxed, face blank, making no move for a weapon. Completely exposed.
“No,” Rearden says. “I didn’t.”
The second cop notices the blond hair under the cap. “Who is that, Mr. Rearden?”
“My new bodyguard.”
After the cops drive away, Rearden realizes he had been gripping the gun in his pocket the whole time. Not to use on Danneskjold. To protect him. Without deciding to, without thinking about it, he had been ready to shoot the police to save a pirate.
Danneskjold smiles and vanishes into the night. Rearden stands alone on the road. Then he looks down, sees the bar of gold lying in the dirt, picks it up, and walks on.
Something has shifted. The moratorium on brains is in full effect, but the brains have other plans. In Part 2, we’ll meet Kip Chalmers and see what happens when an entitled politician demands that a train ignore the laws of physics.
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Next: Part II, Chapter 7: The Moratorium on Brains (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.