FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Sanction of the Victim

It’s Thanksgiving at the Rearden home, and Hank dines in the bosom of his family of moochers and vipers. Hank’s mother’s prayer describes a country where the people lack food and housing. The Reardens have been fortunate, and Mrs. Rearden thinks Hank should toast the American people who have given him so much.

Lillian is concerned that Hank might make a stand at his trial tomorrow. He says he intends to, which prompts remonstrance from his mother. Why can’t he play by the rules, like Orren Boyle? Lillian thinks that concepts like right and wrong are irrelevant, and Hank is conceited for trying to take a stand on principle. The men whom Hank will face at the trial are weak, and their only way of getting rich is to grab the fruits of Hank’s labors. So what? That’s the human condition. Hank should abandon the illusion of his perfection and go along to get along. Nobody is right or wrong; we are all in this together.

Hank has no thought about his going to jail or what it will do to his family. Philip damns him for taking advantage of the national emergency to make money for personal gain. Hank quietly tells Philip that if he opens his mouth again, he will throw him out in the street with nothing but the clothes on his back and the change in his pocket. Philip has been living off Hank’s charity and exhausted his credit long ago. Philip decides he wants to leave – but he needs money to maintain his social position. Hank tells him that money will not come from him. Philip now thinks he needs to stay to help their mother. Hank decides to go to New York. Lillian understands and forbids him to leave, but he leaves anyway.

Hank recalls that the Wet Nurse had failed to turn him in for the Danagger sale and couldn’t explain why. Hank had told him to murder somebody quickly before the reason he didn’t turn informant destroyed his career. Despite this, he now finds the Wet Nurse hanging around the plant and engaging in hero worship.

Dagny had been experiencing one train wreck after another as the rail wore out. Jim said the track would last another year, but that’s not how it worked out. Dagny couldn’t get Rearden Metal, so she had to settle for regular steel instead. Taggart revenues are collapsing.

At the office Dagny and Eddie Willers are working through Thanksgiving as Hank shows up. Hank tells Dagny that she is going to get Rearden Metal, not steel, for the money she has spent and more of it than she paid for. He intends to give Dagny plausible deniability by tangling up the bookkeeping to the point where no auditor could hope to figure it out, except possibly to blame it on Hank. The two raid the illicit bar of the traffic manager and down a pair of brandies to drink to Thanksgiving, the holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.

The trial of Hank Rearden is not conducted under the Constitution of the United States. It’s an administrative law panel presided over by three judges from the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources with no jury; however, this tribunal, empowered by the directives of Wesley Mouch issued under a state of emergency, has the power to send people to prison. One judge acts as prosecutor.

The observers in the courtroom are not necessarily on the government’s side. Although the Mainstream Media had characterized Hank as an enemy of the people, these same people are there to see the inventor of Rearden Metal. They are not there out of admiration – that emotion is something Americans can no longer feel in their tribulations – but curiosity and defiance.

In the intervening weeks, Danagger Coal had fallen apart after its owner’s disappearance, and Orren Boyle’s steel girders were collapsing in construction projects across the nation and killing people; everyone in the courtroom knows that the media is hiding Boyle’s responsibility.

Hank refuses to offer a defense after the charges are read; in fact, he doesn’t even recognize the right of this so-called court to try him, nor does he recognize his actions as criminal. Hank is complying with the law to the letter; his property may be disposed of without his consent. He does not wish to be a party to this farce. Told that he must defend himself, Hank tells the court that a defense is only possible if there are objective principles that bind him and the judges to the law; in the absence of such principles the court may do as it wishes.

The judge condemns Hank for opposing the public good. Hank tells him that “good” was once a concept determined by moral values, and no one had the right to violate the rights of another. If men may sacrifice Rearden and steal his property because they need it, how does this make them any different from a burglar? At least a burglar doesn’t ask for sanction. The judge asks if Hank holds his interests above those of society. Hank says that question can only arise in a society of cannibals. If people wish to decrease his profits, they should not buy his metal; anything else is the method of the looter. If the judges wish to impose punishment, then impose it. The judge says Hank’s only alternative is to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Hank refuses; he will not do anything to facilitate this farce.

A judge demands that Hank not make it look like he is being railroaded. Realizing his mistake, the judge stops cold, but someone in the audience whistles; the cat is out of the bag. Rearden explains that they are choosing to deal with men by means of compulsion. This court is only possible when the victim permits it to be possible. If the judges wish to levy punishment and seize his property, then let them do it publicly at the point of a gun. Hank makes it clear he is working for his own property and profit; he does not seek the sanction of others for his right to exist, nor does he recognize the good of others as a justification for the seizure of his property. When looters run out of victims, the result is universal devastation. “If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public be damned. I will have no part of it!” The crowd bursts into applause.

A judge now tells Hank that the court wishes to approach him in the spirit of amity, but Hank isn’t having any of that. The judge tries to place the blame on the missing Danagger, but Hank isn’t having any of that either. The judge tries to get him to say he was working for the good of the people, but Hank shoots that one down too. Realizing that the government has badly misplayed its hand, the judges fine Hank five thousand dollars – but suspend the sentence. The crowd applauds Rearden and jeers the judges. The curtain comes down on the farce.

Dagny is elated, Lillian is noncommittal, and the Wet Nurse is sure that Hank has won. Hank explains to him that the thing that makes him sure is a moral premise. The Mainstream Media is silent, and businessmen are fearful, although some think that government controls are desirable.

Hank drops in unannounced at Francisco’s suite at the Wayne-Falkland. Francisco is thrilled to see him but hides the mechanical drawings he is working on. Hank wonders when Francisco is going to finish his talk, and Francisco tells Hank that he finished it brilliantly at his trial but three generations too late. Hank still thinks the world can be saved by fighting the looters, but Francisco tells him to read the transcript of the trial and see if he is practicing his philosophy fully. It’s too soon to finish the talk he and Hank had started at the mill.

Hank wants to know why a man like Francisco is spending his time running after loose women. Francisco asks Hank to check his premises, and he launches into his Sex Speech. Francisco admits that he has been creating a certain impression but has never slept with any of those women. He has been donning camouflage for purposes of his own; he can’t tell Hank what is going on, but he is becoming impatient with the rules he has sworn to observe. There is only one woman Francisco has ever loved, and he hopes he has not lost her.

Hank tells Francisco he is going to sell his metal to the customers of his choice, but Francisco warns him he is merely accepting the position of a criminal for the sake of keeping in place a system that can be kept going only by its victims. Hank says he is going to outlast the system, and he is one of Francisco’s best customers thanks to the work of front men. Francisco is horrified, reminding Hank that he had warned him to stay away from d’Anconia Copper. Francisco swears that Hank is his friend, no matter what he will think in the next few days. And three days later, Hank’s copper goes to the bottom of the Atlantic courtesy of Ragnar Danneskjøld.

This is a moderately long set piece that encapsulates Rand’s philosophy of sexuality in one place. This is a blessing for the reader because her characters’ talk about sex gets tedious rather quickly, so it’s nice to get the lecture over with.

But this speech is worth a second read because it is so definitive. While Rand was no fan of the biblical sexual morality of the Fifties, one suspects she held little regard for the New Morality of the Sixties. Her standards were higher than that, if a bit odd. The Sex Speech shows that those who view Rand as a sexual libertine are wide of the mark.

Howdy, Pub’!

An important chapter, number 14, entitled “The Sanction of the Victim.” In it are two set-piece speeches, Hank Rearden’s at his trial and Francisco’s five-page disquisition on Rand’s sexual theories. In between are the actual dramatic developments, and they’re really pretty interesting. But clearly Rand would rather lecture than entertain, which is one problem in a novel of ideas where occasionally the novel and the ideas diverge, at least for a time. One can almost feel Rand’s determined effort to reunite them in the ensuing chapters.

That said, I did enjoy the thing. It begins at a Thanksgiving dinner, at which celebratory occasion Hank experiences another of his continuing epiphanies about the nature of his family and acquaintances. Brother Philip chirps the customary progressive drivel about the evils of business:

“Businessmen are taking advantage of the national emergency in order to make money. They break the regulations which protect the common welfare of all…grow rich by defrauding the poor of their rightful share…they pursue a ruthless, grasping, grabbing anti-social policy…I think it’s contemptible.”

It is, to say the least, indiscreet to refer to one’s host in such a manner, especially when he is about to be put on trial for precisely those things. Hank calls him on it and Philip discovers very quickly that there are now, where there weren’t before, some distinct lines drawn with respect to Hank’s toleration. Hank is changing, hardening before their eyes, becoming less malleable, less capable of the crude manipulation they have been practicing on him for what Lillian describes as “the last 25 years.” Along the way Hank throws off this rather interesting statement:

“You concluded that I was the safest person in the world for you to spit on, precisely because I held you by the throat.”

It is a behavior common to those who are manipulating other people through a scheme of contrived obligation and guilt. (It also describes the five-decade-long relationship of the European Left with their despised, ruthless, and yes, anti-social, protectors across the water). This behavior requires the sanction of the victim. Without that sanction it has no power. And Hank is slowly coming to the realization that it is a crime and a betrayal, an act of immorality, for the victim to grant that sanction.

Lillian, who one might expect to be the most aware of this change in Hank, seems the least so, and attempts to play on the guilt she believes that Hank feels for having an extramarital affair. It is one more case of lead-like density from a woman who has little else going for her but her ability to pull the strings on a puppet who seems busily occupied in cutting them. Lillian’s stock in trade is her ability to “deliver” her own husband to other people. But Hank simply does not feel the guilt for his affair that she is counting on. The reason for this will become clearer later in the chapter when Rand spins her theory of the nature of human sexuality.

It is an uncomfortable scene, broken when Hank decides he’d be better off spending the balance of the last day before his trial at the factory. And lo and behold! – in an otherwise empty factory there is the young fellow sent to spy on him, the one Hank refers to derisively as the Wet Nurse. He is in the midst of his own existential crisis, and we learn two things: first, that he is a metallurgist by training and second, that he has a conscience, a real one.

Why didn’t you inform your friends about me?” he [Hank] asked.

The boy had answered brusquely, not looking at him, “Didn’t want to.”

“It could have made your career at the very top level. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it.”

“I knew it.”

“Then why didn’t you make use of it?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t know.”

And on to the show trial, for that is what the hearing into Rearden’s and Danagger’s illegal business dealings really is. Here we have a necessary departure from reality in order to support Rearden’s expression of his current philosophical state, of which Rand, as a witness to the great Soviet show trials of the 30’s, was certainly aware. For one thing a refusal to enter a plea would most likely have resulted in a plea of “not guilty” being entered for him (in an American court, anyway), for another, no judge charged with the mission this sort of trial entails would allow the victim to make a defiant, three-page declamation. It is not a real courtroom, of course, it is a stage, and it is not a real trial, it is a dialectic, and the reader will be more comfortable simply accepting that.

I shall not belabor the specifics of the arguments – most have already been developed and are merely re-stated in Rearden’s words. (In fact, later he accuses Francisco of placing them in his head – “your stooge” – whereupon Francisco reminds him that they were, on the contrary, things Rearden had believed and acted on all his adult life). There is, however one additional development in the spirit of the chapter title, and that is that Rearden is refusing to grant sanction to the court’s proceedings and hence its sentence. He’s no longer playing the game. And the alternative to that is a naked use of force:

“If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary cooperation of your victims…[who] will discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot enforce – that makes you possible…Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun…If you believe you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you do disguise the nature of your action.”

And there is Rand’s case: that the ethical system under which looting is permissible requires the victim’s buy-in in order to masquerade as anything but naked coercion. In a cultural sense this is very powerful – to refuse to grant the moral standing of those who feel that “social justice” entitles them to expropriate your property is to expose them for the bullies and thieves that they are, once they do so. In Rand’s world they hesitate; in ours they will do so enthusiastically, self-righteously, and in the spirit of class vengeance. Rearden is let off with a minor fine, suspended, which he suspected he would be from the beginning. His counterparts in the great Moscow trials were shot, as they knew they would be from the beginning.

That is the nature of a show trial, after all, not a masquerade for power but an open expression of it. A real show trial is a public display that one side is triumphant and the other both disgraced and helpless. That is the reason certain activists of the Left are so insistent on holding such trials for former members of the Bush administration if they can find a means to effect them. Justice has absolutely nothing to do with it and political theater, everything.

And the truth is that, pace Rand, the state and the people behind it will not be in the least reluctant to resort to naked coercion, they revel in it, in fact, that’s the point of the exercise in the first place. Coercion is the nature of the state. Rand, a Russian expatriate, knew it better than most people of her time. Rearden’s triumph here – he walks, of course – will not and cannot be a final victory. He has refused to grant the sanction of the victim, and it leaves the state only with the resort to naked force. Is he naïve enough to think that the state will not use it? Perhaps he is, but Rand knows better, as we shall see.

Dagny misses the point.

“Hank, I’ll never think that it’s hopeless…I’ll never be tempted to quit. You’ve proved that the right always works and always wins…”

Does it, now? There are, of course, motivations for quitting other than hopelessness. It will take both Dagny and Hank a long time to realize that but realize it they will. One who has realized it is Francisco, whose own motivations are becoming clearer both to Rearden and to the reader. But first we finish our post-trial visit with the Wet Nurse, who is undergoing a push toward clarity all his own.

The Wet Nurse asked him at the mills, “Mr. Rearden, what’s a moral premise?” “What you’re going to have a lot of trouble with.” The boy frowned, then shrugged and said, laughing, “God, that was a wonderful show! What a beating you gave them, Mr. Rearden!...” “How do you know it was a beating?” “Well, it was, wasn’t it?” “Are you sure of it?” “Sure, I’m sure.” “The thing that makes you sure is a moral premise.”

One very minor note for writers of dialogue – I reproduced the form of the thing in the paragraph above; a rapid-fire exchange that eschews the normal paragraph-break-per-quote form found in the rest of the novel. It is a curious departure, and I’m not sure quite what to make of it. Perhaps at that point even Rand had had her fill of dialectic.

But this is Rand’s moral premise: a notion that to do one thing is right and another in its place, wrong, and that the principle does not change as a function of who is doing the doing. Special rules for special people need not apply. That may seem strange for one whose imagery is so heavily Nietzschean, and is one reason that Rand is not really Nietzschean at all. The moral premise applies to everyone, stock boy to stockbroker, policeman to politician. Were it otherwise the looters would always be in the right. And so that is all that stands in the way of a consensual victimhood, in the way of an outright use of force: a moral premise. And the reason that Atlas must shrug is that the moral premise now is held in contempt and will not serve to protect the victim.

Hank seeks out Francisco – they’re pals now, at least for the balance of the chapter, and Rand uses this particular sounding board both to suggest very broadly what Francisco’s real game is and second to present, in his mouth, her theory on human sexuality. The latter isn’t anything we haven’t figured out by now, but briefly it consists of the idea that sexual attraction is perfectly normal and is one manifestation of intellectual admiration; that to the virtuous the ultimate aphrodisiac is virtue. It is a completely logical extension of her idealized human condition and in my opinion it is false, or at best, incomplete. Francisco informs us – at length, one unbroken stream of pop psychology running to 618 words (good Lord, doesn’t the fellow ever pause for breath?) that to Rand the reason for imperfect coupling is an imperfect view of self, low self-esteem, and a lack of personal actualization. As those improve so, apparently, does one’s focus on the ideal mate. It’s a beautiful idea, one supposes, but not one held in much favor by anyone who has actually observed the maddening, contradictory, baffling complexities of human sexuality in action in the real world.

If the frequent visitation of this particular issue seems a bit too insistent to the modern reader we must remember that the 50’s, although not quite as sexually repressed as certain contemporary commentators like to think, still were quite repressed in terms of public expression of matters sexual. “Pregnant,” for example, was not a word uttered on the public airwaves. At the time of writing, Rand’s philosophy of sexual liberation was just as radical as her philosophy of economic liberation. And presumably the same philosophical considerations that free a person from guilt over making money, free her or him from guilt over making love. Not, presumably, from the responsibility of making babies – reliable chemical birth control was still in the future as of the writing of the novel (the FDA approved the first hormonal contraceptive in 1960) and one notices that the complication never arises within its sexually liberated main characters.

I would be the last to deny that admiration of the character and achievement of a partner act as a sexual attractant, but there is rather a bit more to it than that. I admire Mother Teresa’s character and achievements, for example, but that’s as far as it goes. I swear.

Francisco is still carrying a torch for Dagny based on that premise, and so is Hank, her current partner in the making of the two-backed beast, and so, one suspects, is that mystery admirer who has haunted Dagny’s surroundings from time to time. Three – at least – worthy admirers, and only one will be chosen. One sees Rand projecting herself into Dagny here after the manner of a medieval romance: the woman is the transcendent, the desired, the unattainable. It isn’t, in my view, one of her more admirable moments. “Love pure and chaste from afar” is a nice turn of phrase but a feller can get awfully lonely occupying a permanent and hopeless second place on Superwoman’s list of finalists. And he can, in this system, desire no other. It doesn’t strike me much as how people really behave and I thank God for it.

We leave the chapter with a triumphant Rearden determined to defy all the looters and sorely tempted to kick the moochers out of his house. He’ll make as much metal as he likes and sell it to whomever he pleases and keep the country running despite the worst efforts of those who are trying to tear it down. Well, he intends to, anyway. His pal’s copper, on which he had based these hubristic plans, resides at the bottom of the ocean courtesy of one Ragnar Danneskjold and very obviously with Francisco’s collusion. Hank is furious, of course, but the reader is unmoved. He was warned, after all.

Have a great week, Publius!

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