John Galt's Moral Worldview

John Galt is one of the most iconoclastic heroes of 20th century fiction. He's the mysterious protagonist of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the final pages of this novel, he gives a speech damning the whole world and its rotten morality. He also suggests an alternative. Dig in:

John Galt: "You are bearing punishment for your evil. Your moral code is through." In Atlas Shrugged, the world has plunged into darkness. The dystopian cocktail includes energy shortages, food insecurity, political mayhem. The world's most productive people have disappeared.

John Galt pins the blame for the misfortune of the world not on the active cruelty of some tyrant, but the passive refusal to think - of the masses. A human can't live as a "mindless brute" or a "mooching mystic" in the long term - he must live as a "thinking being" or perish.

John Galt gives a shocking summary of the moral history of mankind. Power has been evenly split between those "who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors." But the religious and the socialists are two sides of the same coin.

The religious say: Give up your life for the "sake of ghosts in heaven." The socialists say: Give up your life for the "sake of incompetents on earth." As Marx put it: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Both camps are "anti-mind" because...

The religious will punish you with ex-communication if you veer from their dogma; the totalitarian socialists will punish you for wrongthink. 1 out of 6 people were government informants in Communist East Germany. 1 person inside each family keeping an eye out for free thinking..

Stay within either of these camps and you will be no longer human, you will even become "less than animal." You will become a "thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction." But there's a way out...

And that way out is to think. Evaluate the world honestly: “Just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a totter above a hero—your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices.”

Embezzle = steal. To counterfeit = make worthless money. Ayn Rand brilliantly applies this metaphor to morality: “To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement."

Don't morally embezzle or counterfeit. Don't willfully suspend your "consciousness." Dissociate from those who induce "an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgement." Judge, remain conscious, think - this is your supreme moral duty.

Read: Is Elon Musk John Galt?