Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 8: The Egoist (Part 1) - The Government Tries to Use Galt
“It wasn’t real, was it?” says Mr. Thompson, staring at the radio. The speech is over. Three hours of John Galt dismantling their entire worldview, and the first thing out of the government’s mouth is denial. Not “what do we do now” but “that didn’t just happen, right?”
I have to say, I’ve seen this exact reaction before. In the Soviet system, when something went publicly, obviously, undeniably wrong, the first reflex of every bureaucrat was never to address the problem. It was to pretend the problem hadn’t occurred. Mr. Thompson and his crew are textbook.
The Panic Room
The scene right after the speech is one of the funniest in the whole book, even though Rand probably didn’t intend it as comedy. All these government officials and advisers are standing around in the empty radio studio, and each one tries to explain why the speech won’t matter.
Dr. Simon Pritchett: “Scientists know better than to believe in reason.” Ma Chalmers: “Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women.” Chick Morrison: “People of mystical insight won’t go for that speech.” Dr. Ferris: “People are too dumb to understand it.”
Everyone has a reason why their specific constituency will reject Galt’s message. Nobody addresses the actual content. It’s a masterclass in bureaucratic self-comfort. Like a committee meeting where the building is on fire and each department head explains why the fire isn’t their responsibility.
Then Fred Kinnan, the labor boss, cuts through all of it with one sentence: “In the third place, they don’t want to starve. And what do you propose to do about that?” And silence falls.
Dagny steps forward and tells them to give up. Just quit. Get out of the way. Dr. Stadler, the physicist who sold his soul to the government, screams “Don’t listen to her!” and then tells Thompson to find Galt and kill him. Thompson’s response is perfect: “Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!”
And here’s where Thompson reveals his master plan. He’s going to find Galt and make a deal with him. Because in Thompson’s world, everyone has a price. Everyone can be bought. “There’s no such thing,” he says, as a man who won’t make a deal.
The Country Falls Apart
Rand then gives us a montage of collapse, and it’s effective. The weeks after the speech, everything accelerates. Factories close. Workers disappear. A speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland gets beaten up when he tells the audience their problems come from selfishness. Chick Morrison tries a morale tour and gets stoned at his first stop.
The country is hemorrhaging its best people. Everyone knows who the competent ones are in their community. And those are the ones slipping away, one by one. Oil refineries explode. Airplanes crash. The new executives who take over abandoned positions are either incompetent or corrupt.
Wheat goes from eleven dollars a bushel to two hundred. The printing presses race starvation and lose.
Rearden Steel gets nationalized after Hank Rearden vanishes. The first “People’s Manager” quits after a month. The second one, a Cuffy Meigs type with a gun on his hip and perfumed hair, sells off most of the equipment to foreign racketeers before disappearing himself. Then a sixty-year-old worker sets fire to one of the structures, crying “To avenge Hank Rearden!” and that’s the end of the mills.
Meanwhile the government broadcasts into empty air every night: “Calling John Galt! Are you listening? We wish to negotiate.” No answer.
I find this montage convincing. Not because I think the world would collapse in exactly this way, but because Rand captures something true about what happens when competent people stop participating. I’ve seen it at a smaller scale. A good team lead leaves a company, and within three months the whole department is in chaos. Now multiply that by an entire economy.
Dagny Finds Him
The most tense sequence in the chapter is Dagny going to find Galt. She’s been searching for weeks, walking through the Terminal tunnels at night, holding fake morale meetings just to scan the faces of track workers. She’s desperate to know if he’s alive.
At four in the morning, she walks through the slums of the East River to house number 367. She climbs five flights of stairs. He opens the door in slacks and a shirt, and his reaction is a smile.
But Galt immediately tells her what she doesn’t want to hear: she was followed. The government agents will be there in half an hour. He tells her she must pretend to be his enemy. She must claim she came to investigate him. She must be the one to identify him to the authorities. She must collect the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for his capture.
Why? Because if they suspect she loves him, they’ll torture her in front of him. And he will kill himself before letting that happen. Not as sacrifice, he’s clear about that. Simply because a life where he watches them destroy her isn’t a life worth continuing.
The doorbell rings. Three soldiers and a civilian enter. Dagny, in a metallic voice, tells them: “He is John Galt.” The performance works. They take him away.
The Offer He Laughs At
They put Galt in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. Three floors evacuated, machine guns at every corner, guards in full battle gear. And in the middle of it all, Galt sits in a brocaded armchair with his legs stretched out on a velvet hassock, looking at the ceiling.
Mr. Thompson comes in and makes his pitch. It’s a long pitch, and it’s funny because Thompson genuinely believes he’s offering something irresistible. He wants Galt to become the Economic Dictator of the nation. Total power over production. The government will obey him. He can issue any directive. He can bring back the men of brains. He can lead the country to prosperity.
Galt bursts out laughing.
Then Galt plays a simple game. He says: okay, I’ll be your Economic Dictator. First order: abolish all income taxes. Thompson jumps up screaming: “We couldn’t do that! That’s distribution, not production!” Galt says: fire your government employees. Thompson: “That’s politics! You can’t interfere with politics!”
And just like that, the “total power” offer is exposed as a fraud. They want Galt to produce miracles while they keep their system intact. They want results without changing anything. They want him to think for them while they hold a gun to his head.
Galt’s response is the philosophical core of this section. He says he’ll obey them literally. He’ll sit at the desk. He’ll move into the office. He’ll issue whatever directive they order him to issue. But he won’t think for them. Because that’s the one thing a gun can’t compel. “How will your gun make me think, Mr. Thompson?”
Thompson tries money. A billion dollars in fresh bills. Galt: “What will it buy me?” Thompson tries power. Galt: “After I teach them to obey?” Thompson tries favors for his friends. Galt: “After I bring them back?”
Finally Thompson gets honest for one moment: “Without me, you couldn’t get out of this room right now.” And Galt smiles. “True.” Thompson says: “What I’ve got to offer you is your life.” And Galt gives him the answer that defines everything: “It’s not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson.”
That line is probably the single best summary of the entire book. The government can only threaten to take things away. It can’t create value. It can’t offer anything positive. The removal of a threat is not a payment. The offer not to murder someone is not a deal.
I won’t pretend this confrontation is realistic in the way a political thriller would be. But as a philosophical dialogue, it’s clean and sharp. Every evasion Thompson tries, Galt cuts through in one sentence. And the brilliance of Galt’s strategy is that he agrees to comply, literally. He’ll do whatever they say. He just won’t do the one thing they actually need: use his mind. And they can’t order that. Nobody can.
Thompson leaves confused. Galt, smiling, shrugs and gives the only fitting answer: “Who is John Galt?”
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Next: Part III, Chapter 8: The Egoist (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.