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Arsonist Discovered During the Summer of Love at Capitalists’ Hillside Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)

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On June 1st of year 39, an intrepid search party of one embarked on a mission. Its goal was to rescue a brilliant young man from the grips of his would-be captors. It turns out that her prey had taken refuge inside a newly established and barricaded cop-free enclave. Dagny Taggart was forced to crash their party and remain as an uninvited guest for 30 days. This begins Atlas Shrugged, Part III – titled “A is A.” Existence exists.

We last visited her in the April 17th installment of this series that began “Dagny burst out laughing.” For her, watching her corrupt brother lose his mind to his corrupt friends was Poetic Justice, and funny. However, losing the incorruptible mind of Quentin Daniels to her own mysterious destroyers was intolerable. Yet it was during Dagny’s Summer of Love (so dubbed by Seattle’s mayor) that she discovered the existence of several “community organizers” who had disappeared from traditional society. One of those had been her biggest, most reliable, and demanding customer – oilman Ellis Wyatt.

In a culture governed by the morality of life, where mind and body are an integrated system for independent and productive living, community organizers are traders. They voluntarily exchange values in networks of friends, employees, and customers for the mutual benefit of everyone. Virtue is admired, and Ellis Wyatt was a prolific community organizer. To prove it, he torched all of his oil fields, crippled the railroad industry that hauled his product, (ostensibly) sent the American economy into a tailspin, and disappeared. A paradox that Dagny could not understand, and such is the mystery of Atlas Shrugged.

Wyatt and Dagny Taggart had enjoyed great mutual respect for each other, their trust was inviolable, and despite her stoic resilience, no one was more personally crushed by his loss. So imagine her astonishment to find him productively alive and well in the seclusion of CHAZ.

It was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges. But the machinery did not resemble the installation of an oil derrick. This was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible. Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, saw the car stopping below, and called, Hi Dagny! Be with you in a minute.

Working with Wyatt were two young employees, and one of them Dagny recognized. “She felt certain that she knew this face, and as if to help her, he whistled softly the first notes of Halley’s Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet. Do you know that I stole him from you? said Wyatt. He used to be your best brakeman and now he’s my best grease monkey. Neither one of us is going to hold him. He’s Halley’s best pupil.” Dagny was still taking it all in,

I know this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs. – They’re all aristocrats, that’s true, said Wyatt, because they know there’s no such thing as a lousy job, only lousy men who don’t care to do it. – She asked, Shale oil? That’s the process you were working to develop while you were on earth? – He laughed, While I was in hell, yes. I’m on earth now.

Consider the stark contrasts between Ayn Rand’s fictional version (Part III, Chapter 1 is titled Atlantis), aka Galt’s Gulch; or Seattle’s literal hell hole. Aesthetically, there is the romanticism of Richard Halley’s piano compositions; or the nihilism of Raz Simone’s hip-hop. Metaphysically, the choice is Ellis Wyatt’s ingenuity that nurtures the higher needs of his community; or the zeroes whose primitive needs are sated by their truly evil appeasers in government and media.

Ethically, young people journeyed to ‘Atlantis’ to earn their keep and improve their lives; or to Seattle to blank-out their minds with primitive slogans, sloth, and anger. While both advocate certain ideals, they are moral opposites. Because one example benefits from being fictional, and the other is exposed to real-life scrutiny, the political comparisons can be set aside. As Dagny and Ellis discuss,

A note of sadness came back into her voice: It’s the process by which you once intended to fill five tanks a day. – Dagny, one gallon is worth more than a tankful back there in hell, because this is mine. – You’re hidden in the wilderness, she said bleakly. You could have flooded the world with it. – What for? To feed the looters? What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? I’m manufacturing time.

Ellis Wyatt has treated us to an enlightening example of Economics in Atlas Shrugged. His mind and body produce a commodity that is essential to his customers. Also, he can enjoy the increased efficiency of his productiveness as he sees fit because the profits are not being used to support his destroyers. “Every hour I save is as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave further away.” Continuing, Rand explains Say’s Law of Markets in Wyatt’s unique style,

Only those who produce, not those who consume, can be anybody’s market. I deal with life-givers, not with cannibals. Here, we trade achievements, not failures – values, not needs. We’re free of each other, yet we all grow together. What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow.

The only alternative are lives that stagnate and rot. Independence and ability derived from reason; or demands for rewards derived from mere wishes. This avoidance of reality is the progressive left’s morality of death, it sacrifices people who think long-term to any short-term thinking coward who joins a mob.

By removing the nature of existence from their minds, Wyatt’s looters had abandoned the concept of property. Not only were they unable to operate Wyatt’s oil fields without the minds needed to give them value, they couldn’t extinguish his last oil field fire that shone brightly over Colorado, and the world.

Poetically, Ellis Wyatt left behind a beacon for Dagny, and an enduring and unassailable reminder of his virtuous act of arson. Like Lady Liberty’s eternal flame graces New York Harbor, Wyatt’s Torch lit the way toward the bright future anticipated by Atlas Shrugged.

 

 

 

Terms of Endearment – Galt’s Gulch Remembers Neil Peart

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To date, more than three dozen individuals have been Spotlighted as members of the Poetic Justice Warrior Society, yet none have garnered the high level of Comments and Likes, all in admiration and affection, as Neil Peart. Among many other things, Neil Peart can be described as an individualist with an active mind (redundancy intended). When he focused on something new to learn and experience, he did it. When asked in an interview if there was anything he wished he had tried, his answer was no. The world he desired, he won. It exists.

Of course he is our contemporary. Neil’s creative genius, life experiences, and profound humanity are readily available online, to all of us, and to countless others as personal memories. This adds mightily to the responses’ authenticity. A fine example is an online forum of dedicated individualists known as Galt’s Gulch, several of whom are committed fans of Peart’s influence and achievements. Here we will Spotlight some of their reactions to the passing of Poetic Justice Warrior Neil Peart. After all, EW from Wisconsin wrote in galtsgulchonline, “I often wondered if Rush, or at least the songs you mentioned, held Objectivist values, but never took the time to find out. Thanks for sharing this info.”

To understand why the perspective of Galt’s Gulch denizens matters, JB from Florida shared a link in the Gulch to Anthem Vault. It had publicized the Rush album 2112’s dedication to the “Genius of Ayn Rand,” and its progressive rock rendition of her 1938 novella Anthem. To jog memories, the album included the song The Temples of Syrinx whose chorus begins “We are the Priests.” To the priests, “All the gifts of life, Are held within our walls.” They are the philosophers of collectivism, of speech codes, of the illegalization of the word “I.” Every utterance must be couched in the words “We” and “Our.” Think of that the next time you listen to a politician on the campaign trail.

OC from Ohio elaborates, “I bought the album 2112 because I liked the cover, and it seemed to have something to do with science fiction. It just blew me away. Soon after, I looked up Ayn Rand in the library, and read Anthem. I believe that liner note introduced many of my generation to the works of Ayn Rand, and earned Rush the undying hatred of most rock critics. But I didn’t care; the music was like no others, and the lyrics espoused thought and values. Many other kids didn’t care about critics’ opinions either, and they built their fan base album by album, tour by tour, and over the period of about 20 years they became legendary.”

This attitude is essential to individualism, why active minds gravitate to Galt’s Gulch, and explained by prime protagonist John Galt himself in Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged,

The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth.

Neil Peart was uniquely connected to the minds of his closest male friends – they would insult each other mercilessly. When asked by his wife why he talks to his friends this way, Neil would tell her that its how they communicate their mutual respect and affection. Its a guy thing. If they weren’t comfortable in their own skin as individuals, and didn’t see the same sense of life in the other, the insults would create no value. As he writes in his 1975 song Anthem,

Know your place in life is where you want to be. Don’t let them tell you that you owe it all to me. Keep on looking forward; no use in looking ’round. Hold your head above the ground and they won’t bring you down.

Elevating our spirits in the wake of Peart’s passing was CDR from Minnesota, “Thank you for an insightful, compassionate epitaph. A friend called me on the eve following Neil’s death to lament the loss of his hero. His initiation into thoughts about Objectivism were sourced from Rush (mine from Lao Tzu). “We have clients in order to build” I recall him conveying quite some time past. I’m happy that I know the origin of this and can share deeper with him on the expression.”

We are not only grateful for the achievements and influence of our Poetic Justice Warriors, they also inspire us to live the one life we have to the fullest. For example, author Robert Begley says “My top goal in 2020 is to become a world-class speaker. This 10 minute video shows I’m not there, also it shows the lasting impact of Neil Peart, whose lyrics about love, reason, and happiness have inspired me since I first heard them, back in 1977.”

But before we praise and ratify heroes, “we must properly identify them, we must understand who and what they are. And what they are not.” He explains that heroism rejects self-sacrifice as a virtue. Understood correctly, heroes rationally pursue their highest values, and shed bright light on our path for doing the same. As RR from New Hampshire related, “I discovered Rush in junior high with Moving Pictures, and ever since then they became my favorite band with tremendous influence on my life. There’s never been a rock group which more closely matches my sense of life.”

Honoring heroes is life-fulfilling when their actions are guided by noble principles, and their achievements ennoble our consciousness. On the Rush album 2112, Peart wrote about human consciousness, as it could and should be,

Through astral nights, galactic days. I see the works of gifted hands. That grace this strange and wondrous land. I see the hand of man arise. With hungry mind and open eyes.

Metaphorically, Galt’s Gulch. Peart’s active and hungry mind saw heroes to emulate in great literature, and one of his greatest was Ayn Rand’s fictional, heroic individualist Howard Roark from The Fountainhead who believed that “The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.” As OC continues in galtsgulchonline, “The career of Rush parallels the career of Howard Roark. Despite the critics disapproval, they succeeded on their own terms.”

While Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism had a singular influence on Peart’s early career, his enthusiasm for it waned over the years in favor of what he called bleeding-heart Libertarianism. Interestingly, Rand is considered a godmother of Libertarianism, even though she rejected its misuse of her ideas. As poetic justice would have it, we have many great ways to remember the man whose advice was to “be your own hero,” and humorist: “When I’m riding my motorcycle, I’m glad to be alive. When I stop riding my motorcycle, I’m glad to be alive.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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