Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (Part 1) - The Death Worship
This chapter starts with James Taggart giving a hundred-dollar bill to a beggar on the street. No compassion. No thought. Just a mechanical motion, the way you’d flick a crumb off a table. The beggar takes it with the same indifference. “Thanks, bud.” And walks away. Neither of them cares. And the thing that disturbs Jim isn’t the beggar’s contempt. It’s the realization that they share the same emptiness.
That opening sets the temperature for everything that follows. This is a chapter about what happens when a man who has spent his entire life avoiding self-knowledge finally gets dragged toward the mirror.
The Deal Nobody Celebrates
It’s August 5th. Jim has spent the day in a chain of meetings and cocktail parties, each one layered in polite language about “the welfare of the globe” and “neighborly duties.” The actual business being transacted underneath all that fluff: Argentina is about to become a People’s State. A four-billion-dollar loan will go to the new People’s States of Argentina and Chile. And a fresh corporation called The Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, with Orren Boyle as president, has locked down a twenty-year lease to manage all nationalized industrial properties in the Southern Hemisphere.
And the crown jewel: d’Anconia Copper will be nationalized on September 2nd.
Jim should be celebrating. This is his victory. He pulled the strings, managed the politicians, played the factions against each other. He should feel triumphant. Instead he feels a restless, feverish need for some kind of pleasure that nothing can give him. He tries to tell himself the motive was money. But money means nothing to him anymore. He’s been throwing hundred-dollar bills around all day for uneaten food and pointless phone calls.
Then comes the line that punches: he realizes he would feel equally indifferent if he were reduced to the beggar’s state. He had always assumed he was a hypocrite, someone who preached against greed while secretly wanting money. But the truth is worse. He was never a hypocrite about money. He genuinely doesn’t care about it. And if not money, then what was the real motive?
That question is the blind alley Jim keeps running from the entire chapter.
Dinner with Cherryl
Jim goes home to his wife. And this is where the chapter becomes one of the most brutal domestic scenes Rand ever wrote.
Cherryl has changed. She’s no longer the starstruck shopgirl from the slums. She sits at the table in a tailored brocade housecoat, composed, watchful. She matches the room. Jim hates it. He preferred the old Cherryl, the one with cheap bracelets and wide eyes, the one who looked at him like he was a titan of industry.
He tries to impress her with the deal. She asks what deal. He snaps at her for prying. She backs off. He snaps at her for not being interested. She asks quiet, precise questions and each one peels back another layer of his fraud. When he brags that the deal took “knowledge and skill and timing,” she shows a spark of interest. Then he starts listing the actual skills involved: manipulating Wesley Mouch, keeping the wrong people away, playing political factions. The spark dies.
He offers to buy her anything. A yacht. The neighborhood where she grew up. The crown jewels of the People’s State of England. She says no to everything. “I don’t want anything, Jim.” He explodes: “But you’ve got to! You’ve got to want something, damn you!”
I grew up around people who confused having power over others with being somebody. In the old Soviet system, the guys who could get you a phone line installed or bump you up a hospital queue strutted around like they’d invented electricity. Jim is the same species. He can wreck a continent’s economy with a phone call, but when his wife won’t be impressed, he falls apart. Because the power was never the point. The reaction was the point.
What Cherryl Learned
Rand then takes us back through the entire arc of Cherryl’s marriage in a long flashback. And it’s devastating.
After the wedding, Cherryl threw herself into becoming the woman Jim’s world expected. She hired teachers. She studied etiquette, art, politics. She approached it like a military cadet, working to earn the position she believed Jim had given her on trust. When she finally succeeded, when she walked into a party and held her own and people actually admired her, she looked across the room at Jim, beaming. He sat in a corner, watching her with a face she couldn’t read. On the drive home, he told her she’d embarrassed him.
I’ve seen this pattern before, in workplaces, in families, in post-Soviet bureaucracies. Someone gives you a task. You do it well. And the reward is hostility. Because the task was never meant to be done well. It was meant to keep you insecure. Your competence is an insult to them.
Cherryl starts digging. She talks to railroad workers. “Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead.” “The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don’t you?” Eventually Eddie Willers tells her the whole truth, in his quiet, factual way. No opinions, no drama. Just the facts about who actually runs Taggart Transcontinental.
When Cherryl confronts Jim, he doesn’t defend himself. He attacks. “So that’s your idea of gratitude? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!” He flips the guilt. He makes her the criminal for discovering the truth.
The Real Question
The chapter builds to a confrontation at that dinner table. Cherryl, after a year of confusion, finally asks the question that has been eating her: “What do you want of me?”
Jim answers: “Love.”
She says she did love him once, for his courage and ability. But those things weren’t real. So what is left?
“What is it that you want to be loved for?” she asks.
And here Jim says the thing that Rand clearly considers the core of the anti-life philosophy: “I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself. Not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself. Not for my body or mind or words or works or actions.”
Cherryl, with the clarity of someone who has nothing left to lose, asks: “But then… what is yourself?”
Jim can’t answer. Because the answer is nothing. He wants to be valued without being anything. He wants love as a blank check with no signature required. She calls him out: “You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without… the necessity… of being.”
He screams at her to shut up. The champagne arrives. He raises his glass, not like a toast but like a weapon: “To Francisco d’Anconia!” He wants her to celebrate the destruction of a man who was once his friend. She refuses. He smashes his glass and storms out.
Cherryl quietly changes into street clothes and leaves the apartment.
The Anti-Life Principle
The chapter title is “Anti-Life” and it earns it. What Rand is building here, through Jim’s psychology, is the argument that the collectivist mindset at its deepest level isn’t about redistributing wealth or helping the poor. Those are just surface justifications. The real drive underneath is a hatred of competence, of achievement, of existence itself. Jim doesn’t want Francisco’s money. He wants Francisco destroyed. Not as a means to an end, but as the end itself.
Having lived in a country that ran on this philosophy for decades, I’ll say this: Rand exaggerates, but she’s not wrong about the type. I knew people who would rather have everyone poor than see their neighbor do well. Not because they’d benefit from the neighbor’s poverty. Just because someone else’s success felt like a personal insult. That impulse is real. Whether it’s the whole explanation for collectivism is another question. But as a portrait of one specific kind of human ugliness, this chapter is precise.
The chapter then shifts briefly to Dagny, alone in her apartment, dealing with her own quiet pain. But that’s where Part 2 will pick up.
Previous: Part III, Chapter 3: Anti-Greed (Part 2)
Next: Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (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.