"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of... sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man." - John Galt
Yes, I'm a conservative and I know Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has, in some quarters, has become the textbook retort manual to socialist ninnery. And although I have some very positive opinions of her work, and that novel in particular, I have a real problem with her go-to-guy and main protagonist.
John Galt, as written, is as deceitful and disingenuous as the political system he claims to fight against. He, simply put, is a con man.
The character of John Galt must have (in his imagined literary world) never actually read what he's talking about…Adam was no robot. Adam had values expressly given by his Creator, was given a woman to love and to be loved by and was given labors to perform, as work is good. Also, he was not sentenced and condemned because of existing inner virtues, desires or qualities that represented an ability to live apart from God, thus offending God.
No, he suffered the consequences of disobedience by putting his own will and desires ahead of the Creator that loved him, breathed life into him, gave him a beautiful world in which to live and created for him the perfect soul mate in Eve. He threw all of that away to defy his greatest benefactor. Adam was no robot - he had a mind and was a rational being before the Original Sin. Only he chose to use that mind to make an outright disobedient and selfish choice.
Galt is pushing forward a straw man argument attempting to tear down a faith he refuses to honestly understand or consider by offering a post-fall Adam as a whole and actualized being in no need of any God, and that Adam’s internal characteristics are enough to beautify and justify.
But without the God that Galt dismisses with such churlish snark, Adam would never have existed, never drew a breath and the world that Adam woke up into would never have been. Being the Creator that granted Adam all of that, God possesses the right to place limits on behavior because God, being that omnipotent Creator, would know that certain behaviors are destructive and their ends represent ruin.
God wasn’t “keeping Adam down” so as to enslave him, God set moral boundaries in order to protect Adam because as God, He certainly knows more than the the man (Adam) that He created. His moral impositions were fashioned out of the same love that prompted Him to create Adam and gift him so much in the first place. Galt is rather uncleverly trying to fashion God as a controlling overlord that seeks to inhibit Adam’s potential so as to obtain control over Adam. Not so.
God gave Adam total freedom and dominion over ALL but one thing. Adam took all the gifts and benefits from God, but refused the simplest, solitary boundary – don’t try to be god yourself, because you are creation, not Creator, and you cannot fill that role and it will end in punishment and ruin. Adam willful ignored that boundary.
Besides, if God wanted to be a controlling overlord that truncated Adam’s ‘human’ potential and force Adam to actually be a robot, there is nothing Adam could have done about anyway. But God is loving, not controlling, and that is evidenced by one major issue that Galt further ignores. One of the greatest gifts that God gave Adam was the freedom of choice.
And he screwed it up. For selfish reasons. Yes, he did get kicked of the garden, but much more significantly, he got kicked out of harmony with the loving God that created him in the first place.
Galt refuses to accept the premise that he, Galt, is beholding to anything or anyone for any reason; Galt is moral simply because Galt has the ability to think and therefore Galt has decided that he is in fact moral. With no standard, how does he know he is? Just because he says so? How is his unprovable, untestable and arbitrary hubris any better than the 'myth' he is trying to dismantle?
Galt also seems to bristle a bit at Adam's pre-fall garden as a concept, mainly because it comes attached with undeniable strings of expected moral behavior, and that is simply not tolerable to a character like Galt. The problem there is, one can dismiss and ignore 'expulsion from paradise' because one doesn't like the rules, but then one must also simultaneously throw away the reconciliation and redemption that follows.
If there is no God, then one has lost nothing, but if one is wrong, then one has lost everything - hope, joy, redemption, reconciliation and justification. That's a high price to pay just to demand to play god.
Also, thinking Adam wasn't a real human until after he broke the rules argues that no society can effectively exist unless people refuse to adhere to boundaries of morality and insist on living by their own individual compass, as they see fit whenever they decide to accede to it. There is a word for that type of society - anarchy.
Galt also seems to miss the fact that post-fall Adam can't be the ‘hero’ of secular humanist that Galt is attempting to morph him into without God's assistance. It was God that gave Adam freedom of choice, meaning the ability to choose to rebel against God to begin with. That freedom of choice is starkly the clearest evidence that Adam was certainly no robot. Adam can’t even get close to being the misunderstood, emerging symbol of sentient self-awareness that Galt wants him to be if God hadn't gifted him the facilities to decide to sin upon creation.
One wonders if Ayn Rand, in her attempt to make Galt into some pseudo-intellectual super-judge of Christian Doctrine, even read the story she’s attempting to debunk, because Galt ignores the totality and context of that story. Seemingly because it wouldn't serve the purpose of her ultimate argument, which of course is “I am my own god and your myth of suggesting boundaries other than those I set for myself offends me. I will live my live by my own objective morality and kneel to nothing but my own intellect."
Well, go for it. You have have been gifted the same freedom of choice Adam had. But in doing so, be honest about it. Trying to use just pieces of a story cherry picked to advance one’s preconceived conclusion is intellectually dishonest and a cheap debate trick one might see on a high school stage.
Galt’s picking apart portions of the first part of the story (Creation) and ignoring the direct implications and resolutions it is connected with later (the Gospels) is like a bit like saying “The Japanese had the greatest navy in the world and proved it in December of 1941. The impact of their action showed the world they were an emerging power that effectively halted the aggression of hostile nations by strategic brilliance, superior planning and surprise execution”...
...while intentionally leaving out all of the events that occurred from 1942-1945. The end of the story dramatically changes the context of the first part of the story. Read the whole thing in context next time, Ms Rand. Your characters might more sense that way when they're talking.
What Galt is clearly ignoring here is that God knew Adam would commit this exact Original Sin before the foundation of the world was created, but nevertheless created and loved Adam anyway, despite foreknowledge of Adam’s coming selfish, arrogant disobedience. And God had a plan for reconciliation in place for that sinfulness that satisfied a holy justice rightfully stirred to wrath over the ultimate transgression of trying to making oneself god in place of God.
And the plan called for God to lovingly and sacrificially punish Himself in Adam’s place. Not only just for Adam's sin, but for the sinful acts and sinful nature of every offspring of Adam since the Original Sin occurred. He did this by pouring out justifiable holy rage on Himself in the person of Jesus Christ on the cross. Galt either ignores this critical part of the story in deference to his agenda or was too lazy to look it up, but any basic research of the Genesis story will include the connections to the cross of Calvary.
It seems that if Galt was seeking a true self interest for Adam, he'd have quickly recognized that would have been in obeying God and not seeking to dethrone Him with his own mortal flesh. 'Me, me, me' really isn't the best policy when your Creator just looked you in the face and said "Don't do that." Not prudent.
Galt also doesn't seem to want to see that God created, loved and redeemed Adam, preferring instead make Adam out to be some innocent victim of God’s unreasonable controlling personality, trying to twist God into being the bad guy for tossing Adam out of the ball park. Talk about taking a sliver of a story and dishonestly distorting it into an agenda driven talking point to achieve one’s own end...this is the type of thing one might expect from a modern leftist news reporting outlet.
In fact, reading the above quote, one is reminded of today's modern liberal that uses semantic akido to flip meanings and contexts so as to always arrive back at their closely held beliefs, no matter how dishonest they have to be to get there, the type that worships a system promoting humanity without boundaries, behavior without consequence and in the end is simply pushing forward an agenda of codifying the right to narcissistically worship oneself as god and to re-write moral codes to fit any current fads, trends or craze and justify whatever the 'pleasure of the day' might be.
Ironically, it is in this character's self worship as his own god, which is the true heart of the thinking behind his quote, that Galt's contradiction is revealed; in being disobedient and choosing ourselves as god and in ignoring the righteous morality required of us, we accomplish exactly that which Galt sought to oppose - tyranny. Specifically, we'll get some form of failed egalitarianism as the waste product of collective socialism, stripping humanity of the ability to be individual, thinking, moral people created to live freely.
Without the bulwark of righteous morality, societal decay will always occur and with a dearth of moral boundaries, the most evil will always gain control since they have no moral obstacles in committing the worst crimes to achieve the top spot. That is story of human history. It will always happen in an amoral society, period.
The reason for that is that freedom, liberty and a decent society are not simply by-products of some well designed economic system or ‘stop at my nose’ societal/political interaction policies. They are choices that require commitment to the underpinnings of a strong morality that, without which, we’ll always end up just arguing over who gets how much and what can the majority do to the minority, despite the system you pledge allegiance to.
Without a Godly moral foundation, you'll always end up with Lt. Breaker Morant's 'Rule 303' on a nationwide scale, morally, economically, socially and politically. The fact is, without the code that Adam believed in, spurned, then later returned to, pure democracy and pure capitalism are as grossly unjust and savage as pure economic and political communism.
Galt's above quote is actually Marxist in tone and Stalinist in application, because in the end his ‘sanitizing’ of God's moral code in humanity places us at the mercy of another code, one decided on and written by government instead. A ‘god free’ code written by men with massive ambition, unquenchable thirsts for power and a delight in ruling and dictating the policies of their whims. And Galt is saying this is preferable or beneficial? Or is it anarchy he pines for? At any rate, that still pretty much ends up with the guy with the biggest gun getting all the goodies and everyone else getting shot.
By ripping away Adam's true responsibility to obey God's moral code and trying to crunch him into some perverted secular humanist anti-hero, Galt leapfrogs over a critical point of the story. Yes Adam was kicked out for 'sinning', but Adam later obtained grace and forgiveness after repentance and ultimately gained a much, much greater reward by that same loving God that imposed those original moral boundaries on Adam.
Galt seems to think Adam's personal story ended after hitting the bricks. "God's a jerk, threw him out. That's what you get for believing in God anyway. Oh well, story's over." No, it wasn't. If Adam could speak to Galt, he'd probably say "Quit misrepresenting my choice - I was truly human before the sin, but all that got me was that afterwards I was then a wretched fallen human. The same God that gave me punishment also gave me the rationality to repent and ask for forgiveness, which He loving quick to provide."
Galt would no doubt scoff at that notion, most likely suggesting we ignore such childishly mythical trivia and pursue our own pure selfish interests, or more accurately ourselves as ‘god’, thus ignoring the greatest advocate of our self interests and benefactor ever - our Creator.
But in doing so, he condemns us to live by the fortunes of own small strengths, weaknesses and pitiful resources against the fury of a world consumed by agendas synergistically working to indenture the world’s population so as to cement the power, authority and privilege of the one percent.
In the end, without a moral code higher than a man himself, a man has no reason to abide to any other code but that which he invents. If there is nothing bigger than he, then that implicitly allows him to make himself the biggest thing in the universe. And those with the most power, ambition and resources will live by their own spurious codes and eventually seek to collective shackle those that have little or no resource to fight back or mount an opposition.
I'd go so far as to argue the one of the main reasons gun ownership in America has skyrocketed in recent years is exactly because so many people in power have adopted Galt's 'god free' secular philosophy, coming from that same pool of 'sanitized from morality' thinking. And as a result, they allow the worst of society to do the same, run amok free of consequence for the same reason sharks seldom eat politicians - professional courtesy.
The product is a nation is careening towards socialism like a roller coaster, and what used to be kept under tamp is now exploding in our faces. 2015 Baltimore is the text book example of what Chris Rea called 'the perverted fear of violence' in his song 1989 Road to Hell (no irony there, none, not at all) and it's blowing up in our face. Today's America has, more than ever, a generous portion of Galt's much desired freedom from mythical deities and their false morality. So how come things are worse now, and not better? When the USA was largely a nation that respected biblical morality, it simply didn't have these problems of violence, riots, mass murders or other vexing evils. People are buying guns like smart phones today...why?
Because folks are genuinely afraid of the godless, on the street and in the halls of power. That's why they're arming themselves like never before. They're truly scared out of their wits because of these godless "I will do it because I can" bullies who actually subscribe to the same moral worldview that Galt does. And what's to stop them? They're on a roll and believe they have the right to keep going.
It is the purest form of Darwinism; the strongest should advance, prosper, profit and devour the weak according to the law of the jungle...they have the power, so they have the right to use it. Politically, philosophically and socially speaking, without God’s morality providing restraint, those that can should, because they can. That hardly describes a world of grace, peace and harmony.
And Galt inadvertently invites in this very dangerous godless system because he’s attempting to mock and minimize the one thing that can counter such evil – an educated, outraged, morally committed population willing to fight and die for what is truly righteous. And no, I’m not talking fanatics that cut the heads off of handcuffed prisoners, use children to blow up discotheques or fly planes into buildings, either. I’m talking about the real warriors of ‘right and wrong’ that intelligently live by the same code Adam came back to after the fall.
I imagine that Galt, were he real, would sit back and laugh at the likes of Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer or anyone else that gave their life in a righteous cause for the lives, freedom or souls of others. But personally I would rather live in a world full of men like that, men that believe in this verse...
Psalm 94:16 (ASV) "Who will rise up for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"
...than a world of Galt-like theorists staring at their bellybutton and scoffing at right and wrong.
Do these agnostic know-it-all's really believe that they are going to finally figure out the perfect socio-economic political model that lets everyone have wealth, a great education, great healthcare, truly equal participation, safety from all harm while simultaneously eliminating all forms of corrupt governments?
Oh, and add to that the complete removal of all constraints on personal conduct and behavior by obliterating any moral obstacle to 'personal becoming' and the right of unlimited human expression. Yeah, the intellectually 'god free' really think they can accomplish that? If there was ever a definition for a Sisyphean task, that one takes the cake, muffins, scones, baguettes and the entire bakery with it.
The solution to evil is trust in God and adheracnce to His word. Blaming belief in God and His morality only removes a barricade to evil. Deep secularization doesn't solve or remove disease, anger, jealousy, greed, ambition, war, lust, deviancy, murder, blight, drought, tyranny, slavery, hopelessness, ignorance, bigotry or any of a thousand other ills. It just leans on its expensive limousine and watches, its hands buried in the pockets of very expensive suit, promising solutions if folks will just keep it in power a bit longer.
So, who is John Galt? A figure that can't help one single solitary person who is without hope, without love or with no chance. He's a characterization of a self serving elitist fool that is of no use to the child dying of starvation in profound poverty, nor to a worker strapped across the back being forced to work 18 hours a day by the armed muscle of a money lusting nation that uses its population like toilet paper, nor does he offer an iota of an answer to the upper middle class, educated, relatively free person that is despairing and can't see the point in staying on the revolving wheel of their life and it considering suicide as a way out.
The question isn't "Who is John Galt" as much as it is, "What can John Galt do?", as it is with all of us. Do we have an answer for those souls facing death, despair, pain, disease and enslavement? We do if we share with them the truth of God, His word and His mercies that sustain through the worst that this world can throw at us. The God that Adam returned to has those answers. And in rejecting that mercy, grace and forgiveness, John Galt has revealed who he ultimately is. A useless self serving fool.
John Galt (although just a literary character) is a wonderful illustration of philosophical and moral failure, because his worldview would sooner or later cause him to fall into a pit of foolish, narcissistic self-worship, dug by his own hands. Because there simply is no liberation, freedom or peace in making yourself your own god.
Seriously. I know you're just a figure in a book, Mr. Galt. But really, it's creepy. Stop being this guy....
