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city of New York will starve in two days. That’s all the supply of food its got. It’s fed by
a continent three thousand miles long. How will they carry food to New York? By
directive and ox-cart? But first, before it happens, they’ll go through the whole of the
agony- through the shrinking, the shortages, the hunger riots, the stampeding violence in
the midst of the growing stillness ... They’ll lose the airplanes first, then their
automobiles, then their trucks, then their horsecarts ... Their factories will stop, then their
furnaces and their radios. Then their electric light system will go.”
Francisco d’Anconia, who blew up all the copper mines in the world, said of Galt:
“He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood.
He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had
to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go
out, we would know that our job was done.”
Galt led the men of the mind, on strike, and they retired to a self-supporting valley, where a
character, Midas Mulligan, says that “the world is falling apart so fast that it will soon be
starving. But we will be able to support ourselves in this valley.” Galt said: “There is only one
kind of men who have never been on strike in human history ... the men who have carried the
world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment ... Well, their
turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they
refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind.”
The book describes what resulted from the strike: “But years later, when we saw the lights
going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood like mountains for generations,
when we saw the gates closing and the conveyer belts turning still, when we saw the roads
growing empty and the streams of cars draining off, when it began to look as if some silent
power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly...” And the
culmination of their efforts: “The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly,
with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city had disappeared
from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power
stations- and the lights of New York had gone out.” The men of the mind had taken over the
world.
Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, which was a bestseller; had previously written We the
Living (1936); The Fountainhead (1943), which became a 1949 movie starring Gary Cooper as
an architect willing to blow up his own work, rather than see it perverted by public housing
bureaucrats; and Anthem (1946). She later wrote For the New Intellectual (1961), Capitalism:
The Unknown Ideal (1966), and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1970). She also
published a monthly journal (with Nathaniel Branden, a psychological theorist) called The
Objectivist.
Rand based her novel on her philosophy which she calls Objectivism. As she puts it: “We are
the radicals for capitalism ... because it is the only system geared to the life of a rational being ...
The method of capitalism’s destruction rests on never letting the world discover what it is that is
being destroyed.” She also said about the book: “I trust that no one will tell me that men such as
I write about don’t exist. That this book has been written- and published- is proof that they do.”
In the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in a chapter titled “Is Atlas Shrugging” she
wrote that “the purpose of this book is to prevent itself from being prophetic.” She also quoted