Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 1: Atlantis (Part 2) - The World Without Its Movers
This is the part where the tour stops being scenic and starts being philosophical. And the philosophy hits hard.
The Tour Continues
Dagny’s ride through the valley keeps delivering one gut punch after another. Every stop reveals another titan of industry doing something humble with their hands. Ted Nielsen, who once ran a motor company, is cutting lumber. Roger Marsh, electronics manufacturer, is growing cabbages. Andrew Stockton runs a small foundry. Ken Danagger, the coal magnate, is working as a foreman in smudged overalls.
Each of these people was someone Dagny tried to save in the outside world. Each of them vanished, one by one, while she watched her world fall apart. And now here they all are, content and productive, building something new from scratch.
The detail that got me: Stockton’s foundry has a sculptor working as a mold-maker and a chemist who became a fertilizer expert. These people aren’t wasting their talents. They’re just applying them in a smaller sandbox. And when Dagny asks Stockton whether he’s worried about training competitors, his answer is basically: “Any employer who’s afraid of hiring people better than him doesn’t belong in business.”
Growing up where I did, I heard the opposite message all my life. Don’t stand out. Don’t be too good. It makes people uncomfortable. Reading Stockton casually shrug off competition as the natural order of things felt like opening a window in a room that had been sealed shut for decades.
Francisco’s Cabin
Then Galt takes her past Francisco d’Anconia’s cabin. This is a quiet, painful moment. The cabin is simple, almost rough, with the ancient silver coat-of-arms of the d’Anconia family hanging above the door. It’s the crest that traveled from a marble palace in Spain to the Andes to this log cabin in Colorado. The crest of men who would not submit.
Galt stops the car, and Dagny stands there in silence, remembering Francisco’s words, his sacrifice, his pain. She’s remembering a man who loved her, who destroyed his own reputation and fortune as part of this strike, and who once asked her to help him refuse to join. She couldn’t help him then. She didn’t understand.
And Galt just watches. He doesn’t intrude, doesn’t comment. When she gets back in the car, he says quietly: “That was the first man I took away from you.”
He knows. He knows everything about what Francisco felt for Dagny. Not because Francisco told him in words, but because of the tone of his voice whenever he spoke of her. There’s something brutal and honest about that line.
The Powerhouse
Then they reach the powerhouse. It’s a tiny granite building, the size of a toolshed, with no windows and a polished steel door. This is where Galt’s motor lives. The motor that could have powered the entire country. The motor Dagny spent years searching for.
Above the door, carved in stone: “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’s the oath. Every person in the valley has taken it. Every person except Dagny.
She says it has always been her own rule of living. Galt says he knows. She says she doesn’t think his way of practicing it is correct. He says she’ll have to learn which one of them is wrong.
And then he demonstrates the lock. It opens to the sound of the oath spoken aloud. A voice-activated lock in the 1950s. Rand was writing science fiction inside her philosophy and didn’t blink. The door opens when Galt speaks the words, and he tells Dagny he doesn’t mind revealing the secret, because he knows she won’t pronounce those words until she means them his way.
The Dinner
That evening, at Mulligan’s house, the real revelation lands. Dagny meets them all: Ellis Wyatt, Ken Danagger, Hugh Akston, Dr. Hendricks, Quentin Daniels, Richard Halley, Judge Narragansett. Mulligan introduces her with two words: “Taggart Transcontinental.” And the way he says it, it sounds like it did in the days of her ancestor Nat Taggart. A title of honor.
One by one, they tell her what they’ve been doing. Halley has written more music in ten years of hiding than in his entire public career. Dr. Hendricks discovered a cure for brain strokes. Judge Narragansett is writing a treatise on the philosophy of law. Mulligan compares his banking to blood transfusion. Akston is writing a book on moral philosophy.
And not a single one of these breakthroughs will be shared with the outside world.
When Dagny cries “Why?”, Galt answers with three words that reframe the entire novel: “We are on strike.”
The strike of the men of the mind. The mind on strike.
He lays it out. Through all of history, every class of workers has gone on strike at some point. Laborers, farmers, servants. Everyone except the people who actually kept civilization running. The thinkers. The builders. The inventors. They always kept working, no matter how much they were punished for it. And now, for the first time, they’ve stopped.
I want to be honest here. Growing up in the USSR’s aftermath, I saw what happens when the capable people leave. My parents’ generation watched engineers become taxi drivers in other countries, doctors become warehouse workers, scientists become nobody. The brain drain was not a metaphor. It was the plot of my childhood. So when Galt talks about pulling the bright flares out of a growing night of savagery, it doesn’t read like fiction to me. It reads like a documentary with better prose.
The Choice
Each striker tells their story. Halley quit when the public treated his genius as their entitlement. Dr. Hendricks quit when medicine was placed under state control. Narragansett quit when the courts ordered him to enforce injustice. Mulligan quit when he was ordered to fund the incompetent with the money of the competent.
And Galt? His answer is the simplest: “My refusal to be born with any original sin.” He never felt guilty for his ability. Never. And when he heard an unspeakable evil spoken in a tone of moral righteousness at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, he saw the root of everything and walked out.
The chapter ends with Dagny in the guest room of Galt’s house. She sees inscriptions carved into the walls by previous guests on their first night in the valley: “You’ll get over it” from Ellis Wyatt. “It will be all right by morning” from Ken Danagger. “It’s worth it” from Roger Marsh. This room is called the torture chamber, the anteroom. Everyone enters the valley through Galt’s house, and everyone breaks here, on the first night, saying goodbye to the world they loved.
Galt’s last words to her are devastating in their restraint: “This is the room I never intended you to occupy. Good night, Miss Taggart.”
He wanted her here. But not like this. Not as a prisoner of circumstance. He wanted her to choose.
And she hasn’t. Not yet.
Previous: Part III, Chapter 1: Atlantis (Part 1)
Next: Part III, Chapter 2: The Utopia of Greed (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.