Here’s the next part of my e-discussion with Frances Coppola on Atlas Shrugged and what it all means:

CC             In Atlas Shrugged Dagny’s shooting of Rusty is, I agree, given a curious and opaque justification: “…a man who wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness”. It seems to me to make more sense as “…a man who wanted to exist without the consciousness of responsibility”!

I don’t see the shooting as morally outlandish: Rusty was an armed guard protecting a facility within which John Galt was being tortured. Dagny several times offered him a way to save himself. Plus Rusty sought to avoid responsibility with the most morally vile lines possible: “I’m only a little fellow! I’m only obeying orders! It’s not up to me!”

Nor is this one shooting under extreme circumstances evidence that the John Galt project necessarily involves ‘compulsion’. Jesus in a flash of passion uses the whip to drive moneylenders from the temple? Is Christianity brutally flawed?

You argue that human beings are not perfect: “There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that a workers’ revolution would inevitably lead to a dictatorship but a revolution of the ‘men of mind’ would not.”  It does not matter whether workers or mind-men or anyone else is leading a revolution: what matters is what they believe, and how they plan to rule.

In our times so-called workers’ revolutions led by Marxist-style Leftists have been uniquely catastrophic because the people who prevailed despised individualism, denied the very idea of moral limits and exalted the collective. The Galt philosophy is the opposite in every practical respect…

Frances does not invariably agree.