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2012 ATLAS SHRUGGED WINNING ESSAY
FIRST PLACE
Andrew Sandberg, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Why does John Galt go on strike when the Starnes heirs take over the Twentieth
Century Motor Company? Do you think he is right or wrong to start a strike? Explain.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This is the
moral ideal espoused by the heirs of the Twentieth Century Motor Company and
implemented in their plan for the company’s management. John Galt is compelled to
quit this company and to go on strike against the moral code that is implicit in their
avowed ideal. It is a code which he calls the Morality of Death.
The idea of the Starnes heirs is that need, not ability, should be one’s primary concern,
that the fulfillment of the needs of others is one’s highest moral imperative. It is,
therefore, not the ability to create values that merits earthly rewards, but rather the
inability to do so. Those who have the power and skill to produce should be indentured
servants to the incompetent, buying their right to exist through service to those who
cannot exist without them. When Galt hears this at a meeting of six thousand workers,
he sees that the truth of their moral code is the image of himself on a sacrificial altar.
Galt goes on strike against this image of his own destruction and against the morality
which would make it possible.
Galt’s moral code is one based on the requirements of a man’s life. Since man survives
by the use of his mind, rather than by instincts, he needs a code of values to guide his
choice of actions. The standard of such a code, if it is to serve its purpose, must be
man’s life.
The acceptance of Galt’s philosophy is not, like the codes of mystics throughout the
ages, a duty borne for the sake of some entity outside of oneself; quoting Galt from his
radio speech: “Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose”
(928). By integrating the life of an individual with his nature, this statement reveals its
basis in the central tenet of Galt’s philosophy: A is A. This axiom states that a thing is
what it is independent of man’s volition, and such is true of man’s own nature. If one
chooses to live, therefore, he must live as a man. “If existence on earth is your goal,
you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to
man” (928). The purpose of other codes of morality, says Galt, is the evasion of the
responsibility to live as men, the evasion of the axiom that A is A.
If morality is the means by which man preserves his life, then those who abdicate
the responsibility of their own survival to others, abdicate morality itself. This is the
intention of those who hold need as an entitlement to the sacrifice of others. Morality,
to them, is not a means of achieving life, but a means of extorting life from those
who choose to think and to act and to create the values necessary to live. Having
renounced life, the believers in sacrifice act by another standard. Renouncing material
wealth, they reject that on which human life depends; renouncing the mind, they
reject man’s only tool of survival; renouncing concern for their lives on earth, they
reject existence as such. What is left in their philosophy is: nothing. The ideal of their
morality is non-existence. Its standard is non-life. Rejecting life, yet clinging to survival
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2012 ATLAS SHRUGGED WINNING ESSAY
out of a fear of death, all that is left to them is to become parasites on the living. Galt
names this as the source and secret of their code: “The despoiling of ability has been
the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice” (678).
John Galt, the man of incomparable intellectual abilities, knows that he will be the
greatest victim of the Starnes plan. But he sees that the problem he faces is much
wider than Starnesville. Galt sees that a civilization which can allow a fraud such as
Starnesville to exist, and praise it, is one in which he cannot permit himself to live. He
realizes that the Morality of Death must be eradicated once and for all. “I saw the root
of the world’s tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I set
out to do it” (684).
Galt makes it his mission to find the men of ability in the world and to give them
the weapons they need to fight. When asked what he told these men to make them
abandon everything, he responds, “I told them that they were right” (685). Galt
explains to his potential strikers that the thing they have accepted as guilt—their
immeasurable ability—is actually their greatest claim to pride. He explains to them that
to compromise with the looters of the world is a betrayal of their moral grandeur—as
well as the only source of the looters’ power.
When the strikers disappear, one by one, the world is made to bear witness to the
ugly truth of their moral code and of their leaders’ actual intentions. A world that had
claimed that sacrifice is the one great virtue discovers what happens when their victims
refuse to be sacrificed; a world that had abandoned the mind discovers what happens
to their lives and their futures when the men of the mind abandon them. The strikers’
absence is a weapon of great power. Galt forces nothing on the people of the world,
but allows them to discover the truth for themselves: “They are free to believe what
they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist—without our help”
(679).
The deterioration of Starnesville represents a microcosm of the events and theme
of the story, and so Galt’s words on his last night at the Twentieth Century Motor
Company contain the essence of his purpose: “I will stop the motor of the world”
(617). Galt’s work at the Twentieth Century consisted in the invention of a new type
of motor that would have changed all industrial civilization. Galt removed himself
from the factory and so withdrew that on which his motor depended—a functioning
mind. Jeff Allen, an employee who lived through the slow destruction of the company,
recounts the events that followed from that night. Since each man gave according
to his ability and received according to his need, all were forced to hide their abilities
in fear of working themselves to death. Their goal became the demonstration, not of
merit, but of incompetence. They learned what Galt would later state to the hearing
of the world: “A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—nonexistence—
as its standard of value” (945). They achieved this emptiness, as the once proud
workers descended to the lowest levels of depravity, and the once great industrial
town descended to the savagery of starvation. Allen speaks ominously to Dagny of his
memory of Galt: “We began to think that he had kept his word, that he, who had seen
and known the truth we refused to know, was the retribution we had called upon our
heads, the avenger, the man of that justice we had defied” (617).
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2012 ATLAS SHRUGGED WINNING ESSAY
The men of Starnesville received that retribution through the evil they had unleashed
upon themselves, just as, in time, the world would suffer the same fate. Just as Galt’s
motor lay lifeless in that factory, so the men of the mind lay dormant in society, hiding
their talents from the world—revealing the great machines of our industrial civilization
to mean nothing without the guiding spirit of human intelligence.
Galt’s message is clear: “Our work or your guns” (937). Men may choose the lifegiving bounty offered to them by the men of the mind, or they may choose the
Morality of Death. By withdrawing the first Galt removes his sanction of the second.
The justification of his strike is self-contained in its motivation. Galt strikes in the name
of that which is the only standard of right that exists on earth, the Morality
of Life.
Copyright © 1985–2015 The Ayn Rand® Institute (ARI). Reproduction of content and images in whole or in part is prohibited. All rights reserved. ARI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions to ARI in the United States are tax-exempt to the extent provided by law.
Objectivist Conferences (OCON) and the Ayn Rand Institute eStore are operated by ARI. Payments to OCON or the Ayn Rand Institute eStore do not qualify as tax-deductible contributions to The Ayn Rand Institute.
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