Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 5: Their Brothers' Keepers (Part 1) - Society Eats Itself

The chapter title says it all. “Their Brothers’ Keepers.” It sounds noble. It sounds compassionate. And in this chapter, it becomes the exact mechanism by which everyone devours everyone else.

A Wire Breaks

The chapter opens with a tiny event that says everything about the state of the country. A copper wire breaks in California. One wire, between two telephone poles on a Taggart Transcontinental branch line. Rain did it. Just the weight of raindrops on a wire that had been hanging there years longer than it was designed for.

And nobody can fix it.

Not because the repair is complicated. Because copper wire doesn’t exist anymore. The division storekeeper sold their stock weeks ago to shady dealers connected to Cuffy Meigs. Everyone knows this. Nobody says it out loud. The guy who reports the problem might get punished. The guy who stole the wire has friends in Washington. So they all sit around discussing “appropriate procedures” while a critical communication line stays dead.

One young roadmaster breaks the paralysis. He walks to a drugstore, calls Dagny Taggart directly in New York on his own dime, ignoring every layer of management between them. Because the chain of command is no longer a chain of command. It’s a chain of fear.

Dagny’s solution? Rob Montana to save California. Ship half of Montana’s wire stock west, because California still produces oil, and oil is more critical than whatever Montana needs to survive. She’s playing triage with a continent now, not running a railroad.

Jim Wants a Discussion

Meanwhile, Jim Taggart has called Dagny into his office for an “emergency conference.” He wants to “discuss the situation.” He wants her “views.” What he really wants is for her to solve everything while he takes no responsibility for any of it.

Jim speaks in endless generalities. “Something has to be done.” “We’ve got to deal with facts as they are today.” “You’re the doer.” He literally tells her it’s her duty to make this broken system work, because she has the talent and he has the title.

This is the brother’s keeper idea in its purest form. Jim supported every regulation, every directive, every act of looting that got them here. And now he wants Dagny to fix it. Not by undoing the damage. But by somehow producing abundance inside a system designed to prevent abundance.

Dagny sees through it completely. She tells him to give up. Give up, get out of the way, let the people who can actually produce start over from the ruins. His response is a scream. “No!” Not because he has a counter-argument. But because the system, broken as it is, gives him something he values more than survival: a feeling of importance.

Then Jim pulls out his trump card. He slumps in his chair and says, “Dagny, I’m your brother.” And what follows is one of the most honest confessions of parasitism in the entire book. He tells her that her happiness is his suffering. That her ability makes him a victim. That she owes him the fulfillment of his desires because she’s capable and he isn’t. “I have the right of weakness,” he says. “That’s a moral absolute.”

Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I watched this logic play out at every level. The competent were told they owed the incompetent. Not temporarily, not as charity, but as a permanent duty. And the incompetent weren’t grateful. They were angry. Because the more you gave them, the more they needed, and the more they needed, the more you were to blame for not giving enough.

Dagny’s response is two words: “You bastard.” Then she turns to leave.

Francisco Burns It All Down

But Jim stops her. He wants her to hear a radio broadcast. And this is where the chapter explodes.

The news comes from Chile. The People’s State of Chile was about to nationalize d’Anconia Copper. A secret session of the legislature, timed perfectly. But on the stroke of ten, just as the chairman’s gavel hit the rostrum, the ore docks blew up. Then the smelters. Then the labs. Then the offices. Every single d’Anconia property on earth, from Chile to Siam to Montana, detonated simultaneously.

Francisco paid his workers their last checks in cash at nine in the morning. Cleared them from the premises by nine-thirty. And at ten o’clock, every building, every ship, every mine was gone. Many of the mines turned out to have been exhausted for years. He’d been running them empty, keeping up appearances, while draining every last peso out of the fortune. No bank accounts remained. No assets anywhere.

The greatest fortune on earth, erased in one synchronized moment. And Francisco vanished without a trace.

Dagny’s reaction is a silent prayer: “Thank you, my darling, thank you in the name of the last of us.” She doesn’t mourn the destruction. She celebrates it. Francisco chose to destroy his own wealth rather than let parasites take it. The only option left to a producer in a world that punishes production.

Then the calendar in the sky, the giant screen that hangs over New York, goes blank. The date vanishes. And in its place, in Francisco’s own handwriting: “Brother, you asked for it! Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia.”

Rearden, sitting with Dagny at dinner that night, can’t stop grinning. He says, “He did keep his oath, didn’t he?” And then he laughs. Out loud, in a restaurant full of terrified people. A laugh of surrender and triumph at the same time.

Rearden’s Quiet War

The dinner scene with Rearden reveals what the good people are doing while the system collapses. Rearden is running his mills at full capacity because the current set of gangsters in Washington needs his steel and has temporarily lifted quotas. Tomorrow a different gangster might shut him down. So he’s smuggling his own Metal out of his own mills and selling it to farm equipment manufacturers on the black market.

Why? Minnesota. The last granary in the country. Nebraska gone. Oklahoma wrecked. North Dakota abandoned. If Minnesota can’t harvest its bumper crop this fall, every Eastern city starves this winter. And the farmers there are running on broken tractors because tool manufacturers got shut out by the pull system.

So Rearden is illegally selling his own steel, on credit, to manufacturers who are illegally making equipment and shipping it to farmers who are illegally bypassing every regulation to harvest wheat. An entire underground economy of production, held together by people who still believe in honest trade.

“Charity, hell!” Rearden says. “We’re helping producers, not lousy mooching consumers. We’re giving loans, not alms.”

That distinction matters. He’s not feeding helpless people. He’s backing people who are fighting to produce. That’s the difference Rand keeps drawing in this book, and honestly, it’s a distinction most real-world charity could benefit from understanding.

Then California collapses. An emergency tax of fifty percent on corporate gross income wipes out the oil companies overnight. Phone calls from Washington start coming. Unctuous voices assuring Rearden he’ll get oil. Top priority. Don’t worry. The very politeness makes him nervous. When the looters are being nice, it means they want something.

The chapter’s first half is a perfect picture of a society eating itself alive. Everyone is their brother’s keeper, and everyone is starving. The only people producing anything are doing it illegally. And the greatest fortune on earth just went up in smoke because its owner decided that destruction was better than surrender.

Part 2 will cover Rearden’s confrontation with his brother Philip, his divorce, and the beginning of the end for the remaining producers.

Previous: Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (Part 2)

Next: Part III, Chapter 5: Their Brothers’ Keepers (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.