An in an anti-memory I give you Chapter 1 of:
ATLAS SHRUGGED: THE REVISED EDITION
PART ONE: THE THEME PARK IS NOT THE FACTORY
Chapter 1: Who Is John Galt?
The track foreman's name was Eddie Wilkins, and he had worked for Taggart Transcontinental for twenty-two years.
This fact appears here because in the original account of these events, men like Eddie Wilkins were referred to collectively as "the workers" or "the crew" or, in one memorable passage, "the human machinery of progress"—a phrase which, if you stopped to think about it for even a moment, revealed a great deal about the narrator's priorities. Eddie Wilkins had three daughters, a mortgage in a suburb of Philadelphia that was slightly underwater, lower back pain from a 2019 incident involving an improperly weighted freight car, and an opinion about the designated hitter rule that he would share with you at considerable length if you gave him any opening at all. He was excellent at his job.
None of this will be relevant to the plot for several hundred pages. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
The train from Philadelphia to New York was forty minutes late.
Dagny Taggart stood on the platform at 30th Street Station and allowed herself exactly three seconds of visible displeasure before reassembling her face into the expression she had practiced in mirrors since the age of nine: severe, focused, above it all. She wore a charcoal blazer over a charcoal blouse. Her hair was brown. Everything about her communicated I have already solved your problem and found it beneath me.
She was thirty-four years old, Vice President of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental, the largest freight rail company in North America, and she had not taken a vacation since 2019, a fact she mentioned approximately every forty minutes in professional settings because she had been told—by a business school professor who had also never taken a vacation—that this was something to be proud of.
The delay was forty-one minutes now. She checked her phone.
At the top of her notifications was a LinkedIn post. It had been shared by seven of her connections. It read:
John Galt • Visionary | Disruptor | Thought Leader • 3rd+
🔥 REAL TALK: Everyone's asking me HOW I do it.
They see the Gulfstream. They see the compound in Montana. They see the exits. What they DON'T see is the 4 AM mornings. The relentless pursuit of EXCELLENCE. The willingness to make the HARD CHOICES that lesser men call "ruthless" but I call "rational."
My grandfather built something. My father grew something. I am OPTIMIZING something.
That's not inheritance. That's LEGACY ARBITRAGE.
Stop asking permission. Stop apologizing for winning. The MIND is the only motor that matters.
(Swipe for my 7 Principles of Productive Selfhood. Principle #3 will make the "looters" in your life VERY uncomfortable.)
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Dagny stared at this for a moment. Then she put her phone away.
"Who is John Galt?" she said, to no one in particular, in the manner of a person asking a question she expects to find depressing.
The man beside her—also waiting, also checking his watch, also possessed of a name and a history and several things he was anxious about—heard her and shrugged. "Some guy," he said. "He's everywhere lately."
John Galt was, in fact, the grandson of the man who had built the Galt Transcontinental Switching Network, a subsidiary concern that Taggart had acquired in 1987 for what his grandfather had considered an insult and what his father had considered, in retrospect, a reasonable offer. The grandfather, whose name was Harold Galt and who had started as a brakeman in 1951, had built the switching network over thirty years through a combination of genuine mechanical intuition, favorable union contracts that kept his workforce experienced and loyal, a 1969 Small Business Administration loan at preferential rates, and one significant government freight contract during the Vietnam War era that his authorized biography mentioned in the appendix and his grandson's LinkedIn profile did not mention at all.
Harold Galt had died in 2003. His son, Robert, had managed the family's resulting wealth with moderate competence until 2019, when he died of a heart attack on a golf course in Scottsdale.
John Galt—the John Galt, the one with the LinkedIn, the Gulfstream, the seven principles—had inherited, at the age of thirty-one, a trust fund of sufficient size that working was, in the strict sense, optional. He had never operated a switch in his life. He had, however, taken a masterclass in entrepreneurship from a man who had also never operated a switch in his life, and he had emerged from this experience with a philosophy.
The philosophy was, briefly: I am the reason things work.
This was not entirely false. But it was not entirely true either, in the way that a sentence like the sun rises because I wake up is not entirely false if you are the kind of person who wakes up at dawn and finds coincidence philosophically satisfying.
Dagny's train arrived. She boarded. She found her seat in the first class car and opened her laptop.
The quarterly report was not good. The eastern lines were running at sixty-three percent capacity. Three maintenance crews had been cut in the last restructuring—not by her, she was careful to note internally, by the board—and the deferred maintenance backlog on the Rio Norte branch was now long enough to print and use as a yoga mat. She had flagged this in four memos over eighteen months. The board had thanked her for her diligence and asked if she could say more about synergies.
She pulled up the asset report for Taggart Transcontinental's rolling stock. Across from her, a man in a suit was watching financial news on his phone without headphones. The ticker across the bottom showed Taggart's stock up 2.4% following an announcement of a share buyback program.
The tracks would be repaired with the money they were not spending on share buybacks.
She did not say this out loud, because she was a professional.
She typed: Q3 maintenance capital allocation remains critically underfunded. Recommend reallocation from—
She deleted this sentence. She had written versions of it before. There was a word for writing the same memo and expecting different results, and that word was, ironically, one her board used to describe the regulatory environment.
The train moved through the flat grey outskirts of New Jersey. Somewhere in those outskirts, Eddie Wilkins was driving home, his lower back aching in the way that it always did after a double shift, thinking about dinner, thinking about his daughter's college application, not thinking about the larger philosophical questions of the age because he had a great deal of more immediate things to think about.
She was still thinking about the LinkedIn post.
The MIND is the only motor that matters.
She had once believed something like this. She had believed it with the particular fervor of someone who is very good at their job and has confused being very good at their job with being the reason their job exists. She had been twenty-two, and the company had felt like an extension of her own nervous system, and the tracks had seemed to hum with a frequency only she could hear.
She was thirty-four now and what she heard, mostly, was the frequency of the deferred maintenance report.
The motor that actually kept Taggart Transcontinental moving, she had come to understand, was not any single mind. It was three hundred and twelve dispatchers, two thousand and forty-one maintenance workers, eleven hundred engineers, a federally maintained GPS positioning system, an FCC spectrum license, tracks that ran on rights-of-way granted by state governments in the nineteenth century, and—though this one was harder to explain to the board—the accumulated technical knowledge of a workforce that took years to train and about six months of layoffs to lose irreversibly.
My grandfather built something, the post had said. I am OPTIMIZING something.
She had seen what that optimization looked like on a balance sheet. She had also seen what it looked like on the Rio Norte line, where a switch had been replaced with a part sourced from a supplier the procurement team had selected on price. The switch had failed in February. No one had been hurt, which was luck, and the luck had not appeared in the quarterly report because luck did not have a line item.
Who is John Galt?
She knew, now. She had done the research. His grandfather's name was Harold. He had started as a brakeman. He had known which end of the switch to pull.
John Galt had seven principles of productive selfhood and 4,847 LinkedIn reactions and the number of a very good accountant.
The train pulled into Penn Station. Dagny closed her laptop. Somewhere in the city above her, a skywriter was writing something, hired by a company she would not be able to identify because it was organized through a Delaware LLC, but the letters—dollar signs, sweeping and silver in the late afternoon—were already dissolving in the wind before she emerged from underground, which meant she missed them entirely, which was probably fine, since they had not said anything particularly useful.
She had a meeting in forty minutes.
She took the stairs.
