Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 3: Anti-Greed (Part 2) - Cherryl's Tragedy
If Part 1 of this chapter was about watching the looters tighten the noose around the country’s neck, Part 2 is about watching the noose tighten around the people who still care. Dagny is back at the railroad, and within hours she’s getting crushed from every direction. But she doesn’t break. She does something that changes everything.
The Railroad Unification Plan
Dagny sits down in her old office with Jim, Eddie Willers, and a new character: Cuffy Meigs. Meigs is the government’s man assigned to the railroads under something called the Railroad Unification Plan. He wears a fake military jacket, a big yellow diamond ring, and has the general energy of a guy who took his seat at the table by force and doesn’t plan on explaining himself.
Jim explains the plan. All railroads in the country now pool their revenue. A board in Washington collects everything and redistributes it. Not by how many trains you run or how much freight you carry. By how many miles of track you own.
Let that sink in. Taggart Transcontinental has the most track mileage in the country, including huge stretches of empty, useless track out west that carries almost nothing. And now they get paid for those empty miles. Meanwhile, they use the Atlantic Southern’s track for their transcontinental traffic, for free.
Eddie Willers delivers the punchline in his usual dry, factual tone: “The railroad to survive will be the one that manages to run no trains at all.” And then, quietly: “The president of the Atlantic Southern has committed suicide.”
Dagny sees it instantly. She doesn’t argue. She just says, “I see.” And Jim, who expected a fight, is more terrified of those two words than of any argument she could have made.
The Trap
Then Jim drops the real bomb. He wants Dagny to go on Bertram Scudder’s radio show tonight. The government needs her to tell the nation that everything is fine, that Directive 10-289 is working, that the country’s industrial leaders support the current policies. They picked Dagny because nobody believes politicians anymore. But a known industrialist, one who’s been critical of Washington, saying everything is OK? That would calm the panic.
Dagny sees the trap immediately. They announced it to the whole country before asking her. If she refuses now, it looks like open rebellion. Jim is sweating, almost hysterical. “We have no choice!” he screams. “Nobody has any choice!”
She tells him to get out.
Lillian’s Move
Then comes the visit nobody expected. Lillian Rearden walks into Dagny’s office, cool and composed, and tells her point blank that she will appear on that broadcast.
Because Lillian knows why Hank Rearden signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal. It wasn’t patriotism. It was blackmail. The bureaucrats threatened to expose Rearden’s affair with Dagny. And Lillian was the one who handed them the proof.
She says it with something close to pride: “It was I who took Rearden Metal away from him.”
This scene is disturbing. Lillian isn’t doing this for money or political power. She says so herself: “I’m devoid of greed. I am doing it without gain.” And that’s exactly what makes her terrifying. She’s doing it purely for the satisfaction of control, of forcing a woman she envies to bend. Rand calls this the “anti-greed” that the chapter is named after. It’s destruction pursued not for profit but for the pleasure of destruction itself.
Dagny agrees to appear. Not because she’s surrendering. Because she just learned something she can use.
The Broadcast
The scene at the radio station is incredible. Scudder is sweating at the microphone, doing his usual cynical-and-superior routine. Jim and Lillian watch from the booth above. Chick Morrison’s staff are standing by, ready to cut the feed.
Dagny steps up to the microphone. It’s made of Rearden Metal.
And then she does something nobody in the booth expected. She tells the truth.
She tells the nation she shared Hank Rearden’s political views. That Directive 10-289 is destroying the country. And then: “For two years, I had been Hank Rearden’s mistress.”
Not a confession. A declaration of pride. She describes their relationship in terms that leave nothing to interpretation and dares anyone to call it shameful. Then she delivers the kill shot: Rearden signed the Gift Certificate because the government blackmailed him with their affair.
Scudder knocks the microphone to the floor. The feed gets cut. The booth erupts into screaming. Everyone is blaming everyone else. And Dagny walks out. Nobody stops her.
Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I remember the specific feeling when someone spoke plain truth on an official channel. It happened so rarely that when it did, the silence afterward was louder than the words. That taxi driver who recognizes Dagny and says “Thank you, ma’am” with too much weight for a simple tip? I know that guy. I’ve been that guy.
Rearden’s Answer
Dagny gets home and finds Hank Rearden waiting in her apartment. He heard the whole broadcast. And instead of anger or shame or recrimination, he is calm. More than calm. He looks like a man who has finally settled something inside himself.
What follows is one of the most powerful love speeches in the entire book. Rearden tells Dagny he loves her, but he says it as a confession of everything he got wrong. He ran his business by one set of rules and his personal life by another. He fought for his right to produce but accepted guilt for his right to be happy. He kept their love hidden as a shameful secret, and that’s exactly what gave the looters power over them.
“A lie is an act of self-abdication,” he says. “One surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master.”
And then, with that same terrifying clarity, he tells her he knows she’s met someone else. He figured it out from her broadcast. She used the past tense. “I wanted him,” not “I love him.”
“Who is he?” Rearden asks. And Dagny, with a desperate laugh, answers: “Who is John Galt?”
There is a real John Galt. He invented the motor. He is the destroyer. And Dagny loves him.
Rearden takes it all in. He doesn’t collapse. He says: “I think I’ve always known that you would find him.” He asks if she could give up the railroad. She can’t. He can’t give up Rearden Steel either. “Not yet.”
They make a quiet pact to fight the looters as long as they can. “We’re all that’s left of it,” Rearden says. Dagny falls asleep with her hand in his, feeling the void of a continent where the man she loves has chosen to be invisible.
This chapter rips you apart. And it does it without a single explosion or chase scene. Just people talking in rooms, making choices that cost them everything.
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Next: Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (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.