Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 2: The Utopia of Greed (Part 1) - Life in Galt's Gulch
The chapter title is “The Utopia of Greed,” and Rand is clearly enjoying herself. After hundreds of pages of collapse and bureaucratic horror, she finally gets to show us how things should work. Or at least how she thinks they should. Whether you buy it or not, the woman earned this chapter.
Morning in the Gulch
The chapter opens with something almost shockingly domestic. Dagny wakes up in Galt’s house. He’s already dressed, stuffing calculations into his pocket. The powerhouse called. Her plane knocked the ray screen off key when she crashed through. He tells her he’ll be back in half an hour to cook breakfast. No grand speeches. Just a guy heading to fix a technical problem before making eggs.
Dagny offers to cook instead. She’s still banged up from the crash, but she wants to be useful. She wants to earn her place. And Galt simply says “If you wish.”
Being alone in his house hits her in two opposite ways. She feels an almost reverent awe, like touching anything would be too intimate. At the same time she feels completely at home, “as if she owned its owner.” Rand is not subtle about the tension here. But after two thousand pages, the reader has earned some payoff too.
She finds pure joy in squeezing oranges and slicing bread. Rand compares it to the pleasure of dancing. Dagny hasn’t felt this kind of satisfaction since her early days as a station operator. The point is clear: work that you choose, done for someone you value, in a place where nobody is leeching off you, feels fundamentally different from the same motions performed under compulsion.
Having lived through the tail end of a system where everyone “worked” but nobody cared about the output, I understand that distinction at a gut level. There’s a difference between sweeping a floor because you want it clean and sweeping a floor because the state says you must.
Enter Ragnar Danneskjold
While Dagny sets the table, a man bursts through the door calling for John. Gold hair. A face of “shocking perfection.” Dagny doesn’t recognize him. He figures out who she is quickly, and he’s amused that she calls herself a “scab,” the valley’s term for someone who hasn’t joined the strike.
When Galt returns, their handshake “came an instant too late and lasted an instant too long, like the handshake of men who had not been certain that their previous meeting would not be their last.” Then Galt introduces him: Ragnar Danneskjold. The pirate. The man with a bounty of millions on his head.
Dagny’s shock isn’t about what Danneskjold does to others. It’s about what others do to him.
The three of them have breakfast, and Ragnar explains this is a tradition. Every June first for twelve years, Galt, Francisco, and Ragnar have shared a meal. Francisco is late. Nobody knows why.
Ragnar is a pirate who does bookkeeping. He tracks income taxes, refund calculations, bank accounts. His mission is a “method of taxing the income taxers.” And Dagny is one of his customers. He has been refunding her stolen taxes, deposited at the Mulligan Bank, waiting for her to claim. But not all of it. He only refunded taxes on her salary as VP. Not on Taggart stock income, because under Jim’s management the railroad profited through government favors. Even the pirate has accounting standards.
The Terms
After Danneskjold leaves (casually mentioning his wife Kay Ludlow is waiting), Dagny explodes. She won’t accept the money.
Galt is calm. In this valley, nobody lives off anyone else for free. She’s staying one month. He’ll charge fifty cents a day.
Her answer: “I shall comply with your terms. But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts.” She proposes to earn her keep as his cook and housemaid.
This cracks Galt open. He laughs like she’s hit something deep in his past. She plays it completely straight, listing duties like a job applicant: cooking, cleaning, laundry. He hires her for ten dollars a month and throws a five-dollar gold piece on the table as an advance.
When Dagny reaches for that coin, she feels “the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.” This is the VP of the biggest railroad in the country. And she’s trembling at a five-dollar gold piece because it represents something she hasn’t felt in years: work that is clean, voluntary, and honestly earned.
The Outside World Thinks She’s Dead
Owen Kellogg arrives on her third day. He’s stunned. Because out there, Dagny Taggart is dead. Her plane was reported lost in the Rockies. Hank Rearden was told.
Kellogg describes calling Rearden from a station in New Mexico. There was a pause. Then Rearden said, “Thank you for calling me.” And Kellogg adds: “I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live.”
It hits Dagny hard. She’s in paradise mending shirts, and two thousand miles away a man she loves thinks she’s dead. No communication with the outside is allowed. When Galt asks if she wants an exception, she says no. But the cost of that “no” is all over her face.
Francisco
Francisco finally shows up. Late. Exhausted. He spent three days searching the Rockies for the wreckage of her plane. Flying over every peak, climbing on foot through the nights with railroad men from Winston.
He finds Dagny in the guest room and drops to his knees. Everything he’s held back for years comes out. He loves her. The playboy act was cover while he destroyed d’Anconia Copper from within. The night he knew he loved her was the night he knew he had to leave. He tells her about Galt calling him and Ragnar to New York, about the three of them deciding to withdraw from the world.
When he asks Galt if they can notify someone outside that Dagny is alive, Galt asks: “Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?” Francisco drops his eyes. “No.”
He shows Dagny his house: bare, simple. Two ancient silver goblets from Sebastian d’Anconia sit in a niche in a wall of bare logs. That’s all he saved from his Buenos Aires palace. He has a copper mine in these mountains, started with his own hands. One pound of copper produced by right, he says, is worth more than all the thousands of tons his ancestors produced by permission.
That’s Rand’s thesis in a single image. Not the size of the output. The terms under which it was made.
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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.