Part 2 ch. 8
She said, her voice quietly desolate, “That’s what I came here for— to try to understand. But I can’t. It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. I had always thought that any sort of battle was proper, anything, except renunciation. I’m not sure we’re right to quit, you and I, when we should have fought them. But there is no way to fight. It’s surrender, if we leave— and surrender, if we remain.
Dagny realizes more and more about the situation.
your love of virtue is your love of life.
In regards to virtues of Rand’s morality, besides her
The Virtues of Selfishness, see, Tara Smith’s excellent work on the virtues,
Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.
We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body— and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses.
Analogous to a decapitated body: can’t go on without the mind.
They need railroads, factories, mines, motors, which they cannot make or run. Of what use will your railroad be to them without you? Who held it together? Who kept it alive? Who saved it, time and time again? Was it your brother James? Who fed him? Who fed the looters? Who produced their weapons? Who gave them the means to enslave you? The impossible spectacle of shabby little incompetents holding control over the products of genius— who made it possible? Who supported your enemies, who forged your chains, who destroyed your achievement?”
The nature of the parasites. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” They need ability. They need hosts. They are bodies that need a mind. They need producers/creators/ability, so they have something to loot. They need, need, need - and hold that as a claim on ability. Rand has a firm position against such need as a claim on others.
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Eddie Willers tells Dagny once she returns to the railroad:
“Dagny, there’s another problem that’s been growing all over the system since you left. Since May first. It’s the frozen trains.” “The what?” “We’ve had trains abandoned on the line, on some passing track, in the middle of nowhere, usually at night— with the entire crew gone. They just leave the train and vanish. There’s never any warning given or any special reason, it’s more like an epidemic, it hits the men suddenly and they go. It’s been happening on other railroads, too. Nobody can explain it. But I think that everybody understands. It’s the directive that’s doing it. It’s our men’s form of protest. They try to go on and then they suddenly reach a moment when they can’t take it any longer. What can we do about it?” He shrugged. “Oh well, who is John Galt?”
So we can see more of the effect that the directives, governmental intervention in the economy itself, have on people. You can see that as it’s steadily increased in the novel, more and more regulation, more and more control, more and more centralized planning.
Mr. Weatherby says to her:
“I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to . . . circumstances.”
“Then start being elastic right now, because I’m not and neither are railroad catastrophes.”
This is just one of many reasons why Rand is for
objective law, not such non-objective laws. One can learn more about that particularly in this audio available at the Ayn Rand BookStore’s estore:
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/163