Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 7: This Is John Galt Speaking (Part 1) - The Speech Begins
This is the chapter. The one everyone talks about. The one people skip, argue over, or read three times. John Galt’s 60-page radio speech. Rand basically stops the novel, puts the plot on hold, and has her main character deliver a philosophy lecture to the entire world. It’s bold. It’s exhausting. And whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit: nobody else would try this in a novel and actually get away with it.
Let’s break down what happens and what he actually says.
The Setup: Rearden Is Gone
The chapter opens with James Taggart banging on Dagny’s door at ten in the morning, white-faced and panicking. Hank Rearden has vanished. Quit. Disappeared. Left his mills, his bank accounts, everything. Just walked away. A bunch of his top people went with him: the superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, even his secretary and the hospital doctor.
Jim wants Dagny to bring Rearden back. “You’re his lover, aren’t you?” he screams. She tells him she can’t and wouldn’t. Then she kicks him out.
But alone in her apartment, she smiles. She’s glad Rearden is free. And she’s also quietly heartbroken, because she’s still choosing to stay behind and fight for the railroad, even as everyone she respects disappears into Galt’s valley.
A week later, she gets a two-sentence letter from Rearden, postmarked from some hamlet in Colorado: “I have met him. I don’t blame you.” That’s it. That’s all she gets.
The country keeps falling apart. Factories close. Steel becomes impossible to find. The newspapers deny everything, then contradict their own denials. “It is not true that…” becomes the way people learn the news. If the paper says it’s not happening, you know it’s happening.
Mr. Thompson’s Big Night
The government announces that Mr. Thompson, the Head of State, will address the nation on November 22. This is going to fix everything. Banners go up in subways, on buildings, on government cars. “Don’t despair! Listen to Mr. Thompson!” Army planes write slogans across the sky. Public loudspeakers blast hourly reminders. The whole country is being told that one speech will solve the crisis.
Dagny is invited to the broadcast studio. She brings Eddie Willers as a bodyguard. The “best leadership of the country” is there, and Rand describes them like merchandise at a going-out-of-business sale. Wesley Mouch, Chick Morrison, Dr. Ferris, Dr. Stadler, and a handful of scared businessmen. The whole scene is staged for television: armchairs in a semicircle, microphones dangling like fishing bait.
At 7:51, every radio station in the country goes dead. Not broken. Not jammed. Just silent. The chief engineer tells Mr. Thompson it’s not a malfunction. The equipment is fine. Something is broadcasting on a frequency no one has ever seen before, blocking every station in the world.
Dr. Stadler, the physicist, goes white. “There’s nobody on earth to make it!” he says. But there is.
At exactly 8:00, a voice comes through every radio in the world:
“Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over.”
Three people in the room recognize the voice. Dagny. Stadler. Eddie Willers. For twelve years everyone has been asking “Who is John Galt?” Now he’s answering.
The Speech: Core Arguments
What follows is the longest monologue in fiction. I’m going to summarize the key points from the first half, because honestly, if I quoted the whole thing, this post would be 30 pages long.
The opening salvo. Galt tells the world: you created this crisis. You demanded sacrifice, and you got it. You sacrificed justice to mercy, independence to unity, reason to faith, wealth to need. You got exactly what you asked for. The world you see is not the product of your sins. It’s the product of your virtues. Your moral ideal, fully realized. And I’m the man who made it happen by removing the people you depended on while despising them.
The strike explained. “We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.” This is not a strike demanding better conditions. It’s a strike that grants every demand. You said we were evil? Fine, we stopped “harming” you. You said we were useless? Fine, we stopped “exploiting” you. You got the world without us. Enjoy.
The mind as survival tool. Galt argues that the mind is man’s basic tool of survival. A plant acts automatically. An animal follows instinct. But a human must choose to think. Thinking is not automatic. Reason is not a reflex. Every piece of knowledge, from how to plant a seed to how to build a nuclear reactor, had to be discovered by someone who chose to use their brain. And that choice is the fundamental moral choice: to think or not to think.
Existence exists. This is the philosophical foundation. A is A. A thing is itself. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Every disaster in the world, Galt says, comes from trying to evade this simple fact. He connects Aristotle’s law of identity to everything: logic, knowledge, reality itself. Existence is identity. Consciousness is identification. If you refuse to identify reality, you’re refusing to exist.
The three values and seven virtues. Galt lays out his moral system. Three supreme values: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem. Seven virtues that support them: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. Each one gets its own paragraph. Each one is defined not as a social obligation but as a requirement for your own survival and happiness.
I have to say, as someone who spent years in Soviet-era academia, the part about independence hit me the hardest. “The vilest form of self-abasement is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another.” I watched good scientists do this for decades. I watched brilliant people pretend to agree with nonsense because the person saying it had the right title or the right connections. Galt is basically saying: if you outsource your thinking, you’re destroying yourself. And he’s right about that, regardless of what you think about the rest.
Force and mind. Galt makes one absolute moral rule: no one may initiate physical force against another. Force and mind are opposites. “Morality ends where a gun begins.” You can use force in retaliation, but never to start a conflict. A society that uses force as its primary tool is a society that has chosen death over life. His ultimatum to the world: “Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both.”
That’s the first half of the speech. Galt has laid out his entire philosophical framework: reality is real, thinking is a choice, your life belongs to you, and no one has the right to take it by force. In Part 2, he goes deeper into what he considers the root of all evil, tears apart the morality of sacrifice, and explains exactly why he called his strike.
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Next: Part III, Chapter 7: This Is John Galt Speaking (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.