Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 3: Anti-Greed (Part 1) - The Looters Double Down
The chapter title is “Anti-Greed,” which is already a joke. The people in charge have spent the entire book fighting greed. They’ve punished every producer, taxed every profit, nationalized every breakthrough. And the country is falling apart faster than ever. So naturally, their answer is to do more of the same, but harder.
Project X: Science as a Weapon
We open on Dr. Robert Stadler, the great physicist, sitting on a wooden bench in the middle of an Iowa prairie, sweating in the sun and wondering why the hell he’s here. Dr. Floyd Ferris, his political handler at the State Science Institute, dragged him out with no explanation, just vaguely threatening letters on official government stationery demanding his “loyalty” and “co-operation.”
Stadler is sitting in a set of hastily built grandstands facing nothing. Empty prairie. A few hundred people. And then, about a thousand feet away, there’s this squat, ugly building on a knoll with a heavy dome and strange funnel-shaped outlets. Rand describes it as looking like “a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.” The building gives Stadler the creeps, and it should.
Ferris parades Stadler in front of the press like a trophy. “The man who made it all possible!” Stadler, who has no idea what’s going on, hears himself mouthing government slogans about public welfare and non-profit service. He hates himself for it, but he can’t stop. This has become his pattern: complain privately, comply publicly. What can you do when you have to deal with people?
Then someone mentions “Project X” and Stadler’s blood goes cold. He’s never heard of it.
Through his field glasses, Stadler watches a ruined farmhouse about two miles away. Goats chained to stakes. A baby goat, a little white kid, bouncing around its mother in the sun. The detail of that kid is pure Rand. She wants you to see something alive and innocent before what comes next.
Dr. Ferris gets on the loudspeaker and starts explaining sound vibrations and controllable frequencies. He introduces the “Thompson Harmonizer,” named after the Head of State. The switchboard gets pulled, and in less than a minute, the farmhouse is gone. The goats are a gray pile. The tractor is a pancake. The steel trestle collapses like matchsticks. Everything within two miles is destroyed. The baby goat is gone.
I grew up around enough Soviet-era “peaceful purposes” rhetoric to know exactly what Rand is doing here. Name a weapon something friendly. Call it a “harmonizer.” Talk about peace and stability and welfare. Make the scientists sign off on it. Make the intellectuals clap. This scene could be a documentary about any number of real programs from the 20th century.
Stadler asks Ferris who invented this thing. Ferris says: “You did.” Stadler’s own research into cosmic rays and energy transmission was the theoretical foundation. Third-rate scientists did the engineering. Stadler provided the breakthrough and the credibility. He’s been used, and he knows it.
Then Ferris drops the real purpose. The weapon isn’t for foreign enemies. There are no foreign enemies left. Every other country is a starving People’s State. The weapon is for “internal enemies.” For keeping order. For making sure nobody steps out of line. And Stadler, who once had the motto “To the fearless mind, to the inviolate truth” carved over his Institute’s door, walks up to the microphone and reads a speech Ferris wrote for him. Praising Project X. Praising Mr. Thompson. Praising the great achievement of government science.
A young reporter begs him to tell the truth. “You’re the only one who can!” Stadler looks at the kid and sees the eyes of his old students. Then he turns to Ferris and calls the reporter a disloyal punk. Ferris demands the boy’s press card and work permit.
That scene broke something in me. Stadler had one moment left where his name, his reputation, his knowledge could have counted for something real. One moment where the truth from a credible source could have changed something. And he threw it away to protect his position at an institute he doesn’t even control anymore. He chose comfort over courage, and in this book, that’s the one sin that can’t be undone.
Dagny Returns to the Wreckage
Meanwhile, Dagny is back in the real world. She left Galt’s Gulch and walked out of the valley into an unknown town in Nebraska. She’s been in a hidden paradise where everything works, where people trade honestly, where ability is respected. And now she’s standing on a street corner in New York City, looking at a place that feels like an abandoned city.
The sense of unreality hits her hard. People’s faces show pain and fear, but they refuse to look at it. They go through motions, pretend everything is fine, and avoid the obvious question of why they’re so miserable. Dagny, who just spent weeks in a functioning society, can see the contrast with brutal clarity.
She gets back to the Taggart Building and finds Eddie Willers looking like he’s aged ten years in a month. And she meets Mr. Meigs, the “Director of Unification,” a government appointee who controls all railroad scheduling. Meigs is ordering Eddie to cancel the Comet, Taggart’s flagship passenger train, so the engines can haul grapefruit for some connected businessmen in Arizona.
Grapefruit. The country’s starving, the tunnel is destroyed, coal trains are being cancelled, and this guy is using the nation’s remaining rail capacity to ship grapefruit for political cronies. Eddie tells Dagny the whole story: the Smather brothers bought a fruit ranch with a government loan, and they have “friends in Washington.” Everybody knows why certain shippers get trains and others don’t. Nobody is allowed to say it out loud.
Eddie’s line sums up everything: “Dagny, ‘why’ is a word nobody uses any longer.”
The Winston Tunnel cleanup was abandoned. The detour was shelved. There’s no transcontinental route through the mountains anymore. And yet Eddie says the railroad has been “making money.” Because the rules are so twisted now that the books can say whatever the people in charge want them to say.
Dagny asks Jim about the “Railroad Unification Plan” and starts getting the picture. Jim rushes in, mentions her death announcement (he told the press she died in a plane crash to cover her disappearance), and panics about getting a statement out. Washington is calling. Everyone wants to know where she was. She dictates a cover story about a crash in Wyoming, an old sheepherder’s cabin, and a fifty-mile walk. Clean. Simple. Untraceable.
But before any of that, she called Hank Rearden. He was out in the Rockies searching for her wreckage. He didn’t know she was alive. When she says “Hank, is that you?” on the phone, there’s a long silence. Then just one word: “Dagny.” The phone call is short and quiet and probably the most emotionally honest moment in the whole chapter. Two people who thought they’d lost each other. Just breathing on the line for a few seconds before either one can speak.
In Part 2, we’ll see what Dagny finds when she digs deeper into the new order, the Railroad Unification Plan, and how far the looters have gone while she was away.
Previous: Part III, Chapter 2: The Utopia of Greed (Part 3)
Next: Part III, Chapter 3: Anti-Greed (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.