The Journals of Ayn Rand (90 page)

Taggart gives orders for the sheer sake of being obeyed (sometimes even knowing that the order is preposterous—
that
is why he wants to force an abler man to obey it), and he causes untold damage to TT that way. Dagny is fighting that constantly.

[Regarding] Taggart’s desire to “influence others”: he gives advice to some helpless person (perhaps a poor girl he’s trying to have a “romance” with), finds that the advice is wrong and detrimental to her—and insists that she carry it out, just because it’s
his
advice and he wants to see
his
influence realized. The actual result of his advice means nothing to him. (Here is the parasite’s unreality: the girl asked him to save her, instead he’s destroyed her, but he considers
that
beside the point; she took
his advice,
doesn’t that make him great and powerful?)

Taggart’s nagging jealousy and his insistence on
beingfirst
in the affections of any woman or friend is sickening and becomes unbearable even to the weaklings whom he picks for affection.

Taggart is always surrounded by inferiors—a kind of personal court of fawning moochers. When he brings them into his business (forcing them on TT in the manner of and for exactly the same motive as Caligula and his horse) the results are disastrous. This may be one important incident in the contest between Taggart and Winslow: Taggart forces an offensive mediocrity into the position of Winslow’s boss.

Taggart steals someone’s invention or idea for TT—then tries to destroy the creator, in order to take the credit (like the designers who steal from Adrian).

Taggart is extremely “touchy” about his “feelings.” He believes [subconsciously] that all he has to do is
want
something and he should get it; if he doesn‘t, then he hates the universe. It never occurs to him that before you can want anything, you must have defined standards, purposes, and reasons; that is, desires proceed from the rational faculty and, therefore, will be (and
must
be) based on reality. The rational man will not want the impossible, the undefined, the self-contradictory; nor will he merely sit and want something, but will know clearly what he wants and how to get it, and will act to get it. But Taggart’s attitude is a chronic damning of the universe, because he just
wants
and nothing happens.

Taggart’s hatred for the creators is an all-pervading theme-song in his actions. The immediate objects of it are Dagny, Rearden, Winslow. (And in the background, there is always his dread of John Gait.)

An incident when Taggart, after having eliminated a better competitor, stuns Dagny by declaring (she forces this out of him) that he has no desire to improve TT or to make more money now. He wanted to run three trains a day when his competitor ran two, and he wanted to make two million dollars to the competitor’s one. But now he is perfectly satisfied to run just one train a day and to make just half a million. It’s not the fact that counts, not the actual, objective value—but the relation of beating that other man. (This is toward the end of the story, and Dagny begins to realize the horror of a parasite’s nature; she sees a faint hint of an explanation for what’s wrong with the world—and she begins to hate her brother.)

Taggart is forever engaged in forming “collaborations,” “cooperatives,” “agreements,” gangs and cliques—and forever running to Washington to have laws passed for “protection.” Toward the end, he no longer has any clear sense of what it is that he must be protected from, and his efforts have no practical meaning at all, they are like the convulsions of an animal getting more and more tangled in the thread he has unraveled.

Taggart hates any success or happiness, even of those unrelated to him. Incidents when he double-crosses friends or protégés, just because they seemed happy or had succeeded in something.

Taggart will always sneer and make disparaging remarks whenever anyone is praised in his presence--even if it’s only some professor of botany or some prize-cattle farmer. (He likes all the “debunking” biographies, the news and gossip about “feet of clay.”)

Taggart’s envy—of everything and everyone—is constant, ever-present, and motivates most of his actions.

Taggart loves to talk about and gloat over any misfortune.

Taggart hates Dagny and needs her. He wants to destroy her and to get all he can out of her. One way of doing this is to try to ruin her personal life, make her unhappy, yet permit her to function in business, even hoping that this would make her function better. This is what Taggart does in relation to Stan Winslow.

Taggart’s dependence on the material (like the big, luxurious home) reflects his crazy half-notion that his spiritual greatness will come from that. Yet he is extremely stupid about spending money on luxuries (flat, no imagination) and he gets no pleasure from it.

There must also be one of the parasites who will start poor, make a Peter Keating kind of career, and go to pieces when he reaches the top, when he sees that money does not give him what he wanted.

Examples of parasites who don’t want to
make
but to
“take over.”

Taggart always talks about “striving being better than achievement” and “and man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” etc.

Examples of collectivists that are inordinately concerned with material wealth, and of creators that are calmly indifferent about it—not really indifferent, but self-confident.

Important incident (near the end of the story) showing James Taggart’s abject terror of some of his own gangsters.

He tells them that torture is the only weapon they have—and this is limited by his own will to live. “You can get away with it only so long as I have some desire of my own to remain alive, for the sake of which I will accept your terms. What if I haven’t? What if I tell you that I wish to live in my own kind of world, on my own terms—or not at all? This is how you have exploited and tortured us for centuries. Not through
your
power—but through
ours.
Through our own magnificent will to live, which you lack, the will that was great enough to carry on, even through torture and in chains. Now we refuse you that tool—that power of life, and of loving life, within us. The day we understand this—you’re finished. Where are your weapons now? Go ahead. Turn on the electric current.”

(The electric current was invented by one of the creators—and this is the use parasites put it to, when the creators give it to them.)

Even in Dagny’s suffering there is a sense of beauty, strength, and hope. Even in Taggart’s joys there is a sense of guilt, shame, and disgust.

Important: dramatize the connection between joy in living and the rational faculty. The reason is clear: the basic sense of joy in living [arises from] the firm realization and conviction that you have the means to satisfy your desires, to achieve joy. Joy is the emotional reaction to a satisfied desire. Reason “produces” the desire and the means to achieve it; joy is the “consumption” of this production. The parasite, who has discarded reason as impotent in his desire to escape reality, is left with the unadmitted, but implicit, conclusion that he has no means to achieve joy—hence his chronic sense of frustration and misery. This primary joy in living is present and shown in all the strikers, but most eloquently in John Galt and Dagny.

For the “reversed process of expansion”: just as Henry Ford opened the way (created the chance) for scores of new industries, James Taggart kills the chances of any attempted endeavor that comes in contact with his business. Show lesser, but potentially important, inventions that are killed through his rejection, and more important, through his retrenchment of the particular line where they would be useful. Example: somebody suggests lunch cars on trains; somebody else has a gadget that would make quick, compact lunches possible and could have many uses besides those on trains, could grow into a valuable industry; Taggart declares that there’s no reason to give the passengers quick lunches, let them carry lunch boxes, they have no other means of transportation, they’ll ride on floors in boxcars if necessary, why should he give them lunches? The gadget and the unborn industry are killed. (This example is not necessarily the one to use, but this is the pattern.)

In clear connection with that, show the method of Hank Rearden, who expands everything he touches (and gets penalized for it in the parasite’s world), and [perhaps] have flashbacks to the career of Taggart’s great-great-grandfather, founder of TT, who functioned like Henry Ford
. Show the spreading creativeness of the creators-and the contracting destructiveness of the parasites.

Show instances of the irrational state of the world in retrogression. Progress proceeds logically and new industries grow when and as they are needed, but there can be no logical retrogression. The economy in the parasite’s world presents all the senselessness of destruction: [the attempt to maintain] difficult, complex industries, while primary necessities are gone. They’re manufacturing—with difficulty and at incredible cost—a few botched tractors a year, when the farmers have no simple plows. They manufacture double-deck observation cars, and have no passenger coaches. There are (botched) television sets for the officials—and no safety pins for the public. It is the spectacle of an erratic, unnatural, irrational shrinking; the signs of the break up, of retrogression. For man, retrogression can only be unnatural; it has to be irrational, because where reason is in control, there is expansion and progress.

Show an instance of penalizing ability: early in the story, Taggart rejects an able employee (the young engineer?) for reasons such as: “He’s too good—too brilliant—which will make it difficult for the other employees—there will be no harmony,
no balance
—we’ll do better with a lesser, milder man who’ll
fit in.”
Then show the
specific
results: what the brilliant one would have done, and what the “milder” one does (and the consequences for TT). (In connection with the Tunnel catastrophe.)

Show an instance of an employee (of medium importance) forced to act on his worst, not his best (toward the end of the second stage)—with results disastrous to TT. This, in a higher, more complex sense, also applies as a main line for Stan Winslow.

Show specific, repeated instances when the honest average men (particularly in the later stages) run to the “thinkers” of the period (the pseudo-philosopher, the pseudo-critic, etc.) for spiritual guidance in their growing bewilderment and despair. What they actually need is the basic, profoundly philosophical advice which the thinkers who are on strike could have given them; the advice they get only pushes them into the general horror.

In each instance of creators working with the parasites, show where and how the creators contribute to their own destruction (like Dietrich Gerhardt). The pattern is that of Soviet Russia stealing foreign ideas and inventions, hiring foreign engineers and experts, repudiating loans and debts. The free enterprises must not deal with anyone except free enterprises, otherwise they are working for their own destruction. This means: you cannot work against your own principles, there is no “middle road” or compromise here; if you do, you’ll pay for it. Principles
are
absolute. And, applied to the creators on strike: you cannot compromise or work against the basic life principles of the creators.

 

 

 

 

A society of parasites is like a body with hemophilia: the slightest cut can be fatal and lead to bleeding to death; the slightest error, failure of routine, or new circumstance can destroy a whole industry (or society)—there is no power of recovery in the body, no thinking mind.