Oh, I want to shrug. Don't you?
I even understand that book and the impulse that drives it, and I'm not deriding it. Once or twice, I might have stomped around the house yelling "Who is John Galt?" Or if you prefer "Who is Jung Alt" (from a vanished comic some of you might remember.)
But ultimately...
Today is a day I didn't want to get up. before you worry overly, let me assure you that I'm better, but with the current crud, better seems to be process. Yesterday I was better than the day before, in that it took me till after I'd put up the promo post to feel like I really needed a nap. And today I don't feel tired, but I slept something like 12 hours. And let me tell you, that worried the kitten unduly. Indy started at 7 am, the hour he's sure we should both be up, by proffering belly for wake-up pets, which is the normal routine. When I ignored him, he escalated and in order, opened the light-excluding curtains, opened the bathroom door and turned the light inside. Brought me the squeak mouse. When that failed, played with the squeak mouse on top of me. And finally jumped into the office, turned on Dan's synthesizer (Why are you going to ask. Obviously the mathematician has one 90 degrees from his work desk. Sometimes a problem needs to be played out, and unlike Sherlock Holmes, he never learned the violin) and danced on it. By then it was close on to eleven and it worked. Since then he's been following me around in some worry, because I shouldn't still be dragging tail.
The point is, while the ginger beasty is silly, and bears watching, because there are too many brains in that wedge-shaped head, and enough thought to get him into trouble, he wasn't wrong.
While in Ayn Rand's elaborate setup -- and a society that articulated its aims to exploit the productive more than ours does. Ours is just zombie-stumbling to collectivist ghost dance -- withdrawing from society works... Does it really?
When I was young and suicidal -- did I say that changed? I just learned to control it. Which is why references to my unremitting sunny optimism make me giggle or cry depending on the mood. What you call optimism is called "reality checking". Someone with my disposition HAS to learn it to survive her teens -- I used to imagine that if I killed myself everyone would realize how terribly they wronged me, and everyone would miss me forever, and lament the wonderful person they lost.
I'm told by someone who should know that this is as much bullshit as I started suspecting, about the time I learned reality-checking. What happens -- particularly during the holidays, when suicides are endemic -- is that (at least in a largish town) -- you'll be in the coroner's lab the next morning, and the pathologists will be bopping to hard metal under bright lights, while they autopsy you and the rest of the despair harvest.
And then you'll be buried -- or these days likely cremated -- and the world creaks on. Oh, you'll make an immense impact on some people: those who love you. Your parents, your siblings, your children. You'll scar them forever and increase the chances they'll follow you. But those aren't the people you want to "show" their mistakes, are they? Oh, okay, maybe some, if you're young, but--
Let me put it this way, my own familiar issues, had I killed myself, would have given the person most likely to have driven me to it (in retrospect because we're like chalk and cheese and still, these many years later, totally opaque to each other) a heroic-tragic story forever. Which is not what I wanted. Hey, I was young, it was supposed to be all about me.
The world creaks on. The world adapts. It will shock you and amaze you how quickly and thoroughly the world heals over your loss.
I know this, because though I never committed suicide, I very thoroughly removed myself. I got married, crossed the ocean, and once the kids came had less and less money/time to go over. So yearly visits (honestly, mostly, while grandma was alive) turned to three year spacing, then, as the kids grew and had school and stuff, five.
I had a shock, eight years ago, going back. Remember, I grew up in a very small place, where my family had been forever, and therefore it was well known and to an extent looked up to. When grandad died, it was like being under the microscope, with the village examining all our expressions and interactions.
Yes, the place has been eaten by the city. Stack-a-prol apartments moved in. This means the population is 10 times bigger, and most came from far away. (All those abandonned villages, in the mountains.) My brother says he can walk up main street, and no one knows him from Adam. I took younger son for a walk, 13 years ago, and we got lost. (He's hilarious when he gets lost. For some reason, in the middle of an urban landscape, he always assumes he's going to starve to death.)
That's all fine. But the thing is, you know? Mom's circle is not that. With one or two exceptions, mom's circle are maybe up to 20 years younger than her (she turns 90 next year, so...) but all of them village old-timers. They were all there for my first communion (well, the older ones) and my wedding. Mom probably shared with them my dating misadventures. etc. etc.
.... as of eight years ago, they'd forgotten me. Thoroughly. Completely. In their heads, my mom had only one child, a son. they knew my brother, his sons, their spouses. Me? I was a ghost. I didn't exist.
If that seems completely insane -- it does to me honest, but it was true -- I had experienced it before: I moved to the Us before finishing my degree, and went back a year later for my finals. (Then came back, leaving my mom to walk some of my graduations if she wished. She went to the one for the BA in Italian, because the party afterwards had gourmet ice cream. Mom has her priorities right, people.) But going back was a shock. Look, I wasn't big on the college social scene, partly because I was on a very demanding schedule; tutored; and took external courses. but I was active in the Shakespeare club, the American Culture club, and had various friends and groups and associations.
Gone. Like, one of the Stalinist pictures where you just get removed. Seriously. No one had any idea who I was. There was great shock when I had one of the four (of 200 or so) passing exams, because "I didn't know you were smart." (Said by one of the midwits who'd been with me since high school and who, to be a dim bulb would need to borrow someone else's light.) It was astounding.
So I knew this was possible, I'd seen it. But because we are each the character of our novel, it's hard to believe our not being there won't be remarked on, of felt.
Trust me on this, it won't.
So -- Galt's Gulch... Unless it forms its own country, patents its inventions, etc, and btw is ready to defend them with force? The world will heal over it. No one will remember. (That's besides and beyond getting every creative/productive person. I mean, even in associations that have obviously crossed the threshold of irrecoverable, some Boxer will still be in there, giving it his all, trying to build up. (And not all boxers are dimwitted, at that. Just, hopeful.)) The world will go on without them.
And the Gulchers? Well.... We are social animals. We who comment here listen to the other side -- how could we not? They're the dominant opinion/flavor -- We know their version of things, their idea of history, their motives, their beliefs. They have no clue of ours. Some of the reason they're struggling, despite dominating the institutions, and a lot of the reason I believe that in the end we win they lose, (besides their being at war with reality) is that they've isolated themselves. They not only have no idea how the other 3/4 lives. They have no clue how we think.
Galt's Gulch, geographical or philosophical means the same for us. We'd be isolated. Separated. We'd have no idea. It's like deliberately blinding yourself and expecting the other person to be lost. As much as their ideas make our head hurt and we often want to stop listening, it's worth it to know why they think what they're doing makes sense/will work.
And then there's just.... the market.
Look, some of this happens normally when we're living under an hostile regime. It was what Rand saw/tried to describe, with the added fantasy of a place where you could keep producing/be engaged. (She wasn't wrong. My most productive years are/were when surrounded by sharp minded creatives, against whom I could sharpen my intellectual blades and my creative sword.)
But under any regime where creation and work aren't rewarded, people go inside, stop working. Why make that extra 10% when it means another 25% in taxes? Why market your invention when you won't have half the price it's worth? Why write another book, when no trad pub will touch it.
We saw that under Carter. We are seeing it now.
But the terminal form of this, when the regime changes after 70 years or so is not some great flowering of suppressed creativity, force and invention.
The terminal form of this is visible in the old ex-communist countries. They've forgotten. They've forgotten you can create and build. They've forgotten you can engage with each other in mutually profitable exchanges. The very mode of innovation is lost, gone, fallen down a well.
Will it come back? Probably. Humans create. It's a thing we do. But it will take time. How much time? I don't know. It's not just the repressive mechanisms being removed. The forges of creation need to be rebuilt and the pathways of dissemination re-created. We who make and build tend to forget distribution and commerce are just as vital, just as important. Perhaps more so, for a healthy society. They are also the first to withdraw and the last to come back, when a society is whacked with a totalitarian stick. And it's needed for creativity to fully bloom and innovation to flower. Because innovation and creativity have to pay off, and be seen to pay off for people to feel the drive, the consistent need to keep at it, instead of a one-off, a hobby.
In the end our fantasies of Galt's Gulch -- not in the book, and how it worked, but in real life -- are a suicide fantasy. "I'll withdraw! They'll be sorry!" (Note again this is not a criticism of the book. The book was an anti-collectivist fable, which is needed in our culture.) They won't be sorry. They'll forget you. And eventually they'll forget that creativity and productivity are even possible. And society tumbles into a morass. As with suicide, the ones you hurt are the ones who most need you.
It is the same for your belief in liberty; your belief in the individual; your knowledge of the constitutional republic which, maimed and thwarted almost from the beginning, has been the greatest engine of creation, innovation and wealth the world has ever seen. Withdraw it from public discourse; give up; decide it's time to burn it all down.
That's not a suicide fantasy -- though it is, really, think on it! -- it's a revenge fantasy. Only it doesn't work. You withdraw the idea, and people forget it. The world heals over it. You're banking on a day when it will spontaneously come back. You think we're natural and normal and inevitable and that this our Republic -- under attack, wounded, limping, in the control of its enemies -- isn't, still, the greatest miracle this tired, bleeding old world has ever seen.
It's not that I don't understand wanting to shrug. It's not that at times my fingers don't itch for a flame thrower. You'd have to be more than human -- or considerably less -- to not understand both of those impulses.
It's just that they don't work. But working quietly does. We've seen in in the gun rights movement. We've seen it in the fact that computers has removed the left's ability to utterly control our discourse, and that this is hurting them every day. We've seen it in Indy books that stoke the idea of liberty, all wrapped up in fun and amusement.
And if you tell me it's impossible to win that way, I invite you to study the history of Christianity. Easy? No. Always growing from victory to victory? No. That's not human. That's not how any of this works.
But not taking your ball and going home keeps you in the game.
And as Heinlein said (I used to have this hanging over my desk, but it disappeared in the move): "Surely the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you. If you don't bet, you can't win."
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