Explain the meaning and wider significance of the following quote: “The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.” According to the story of Atlas Shrugged, what ideas underlie the opposing maxims that “money is the root of all evil” and that “money is the root of all good”?
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe,” John Galt says, “existence or nonexistence.”(926) The connotations of evil that have been attached to money throughout history, and those of good that have been championed in Atlas Shrugged, are but a concretization of this fundamental alternative.
The heroes of the story fundamentally differ from the villains by first acknowledging the necessity of making this basic choice, and then by the choice itself. Every penny they thus make is by choosing their own selves over the society, their rationality over the collective whim and their productivity over the collective impotence. They create value of goods by means of their own vision and volition. They know that one always has a choice, but one cannot escape the necessity of making it. The villains have evaded choice all their lives, which is a huge moral error in many different ways. Evading the necessity of choice is firstly a metaphysical default, since it comes from evading reality (as James Taggart demonstrates when he defends Directive 10289, crying “Nobody will be permitted to decide anything. It will be decided once and for all.” (502)) – and later invariably culminates into stark contradictions. The looters have always ignored this axiom and have built edifices of trickery and contradictions around their ignorance of the axiom. But whenever they saw their mechanism crumbling, they called upon the heroes to act for them. They have been happy to let the heroes choose for them, and yet they are always the first to claim the rewards of these choices – choices that are rational, choices that are results of unyielding integrity. The villains are what Francisco calls ‘hitchhikers of virtue’, “…men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create value for their looted money.” (383)
The looters have always taken the productivity of the movers for granted. As Francisco tells Rearden, the looters are using the movers’ love for their work as a weapon against them. The looters have been preying on the movers, ignoring their motivations. They have been evading the causality behind money for so long that they have grown to believe there exists no deeper thought or morality behind the production of goods – as if production were a dead process devoid of any spirit or humanity. The other extreme of this fallacy is exhibited by Mayor Bascom, “No principle ever filled anyone’s milk bottle. The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets.” (275) Balph Eubank says “Men have lost all spiritual value in the pursuit of material production and technological trickery” (128). He does not recognize that material pursuits are not as such the motivation of men. And technology is merely an expression of the human mind and its ability to create wealth and value, towards building sustenance and earning ever higher standards of living. What is basically Rearden’s immense potential to create wealth by giving value to his products and his rightful ownership of such products is taken to be nothing more than his material greed – not recognizing that it takes a man like Rearden to go beyond material pursuits and give his wealth its true meaning. A compelling personification of this idea is Rearden’s brother Philip, who lives on Rearden’s charity, begs him for a job and is still capable of calling Rearden “the blackest element of social retrogression” (47) with an air of sincere righteousness. The looters fail to recognize that humanity has survived only by the courtesy of the men of mind, men who have been dragging the rest of humanity simply as dead weight. That the men of the mind did not exact their deserved value from the looters is why the looters continue to condemn the heroes for the very things that make them heroes. As Francisco so desperately tries to tell Dagny, and Rearden – “This is not a battle over material goods, it’s a moral crisis… We produced the wealth of the world, but we let our enemies write its code.” (570)
One of the effects of this surrender of the moral code into the hands of the altruists and the looters is money being called the root of all evils. The very people who could not grasp the nature of money were allowed to be arbiters of morality and pass unqualified judgments on the ownership of wealth – and these judgments were accepted unquestioningly by the producers of wealth. The looters never had anything of value to offer to anyone, and thus for them money simply became a dead, static entity, no more than a formality that exists by unnamed and undefined social norms. They could bargain only by appealing to the altruism of others, by crying out their needs and not their abilities. They needed money, but could not understand its source. Consequently, money became evil, since it appeared to be causeless to the looters and they were unable to grasp the role of intelligence in making money. If indeed, as Dr Stadler says, no intelligence was required to see the commercial value of Galt’s motor (331), why was it left lying in ruins? What, but intelligence, can grasp the commercial value of a product? And since intelligence is not collective, all its products belong to the individual. The looters also could not understand ownership ‘by right’ – the fact that a man owns his mind and its products. Bertram Scudder shows this misconception by saying, “One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not seize it.” (130) And yet, the looters count on the security of private property for protection of their looted money – “Trouble? Not at San Sebastian. It’s private property.” (52) This contradiction ultimately results into the looters nationalizing all major businesses in the US, all of which are useless to them.
The producers of wealth, on the other hand, are not plagued by altruism. They are fully and proudly conscious of their own value and they demand the highest appraisal of it, by dealing with equals for mutual benefit. When Dagny defends Dan Conway against the Anti-dog-eat-dog rule, she is not trying to save his business or his money. She does it because she knows that only a worthy competitor could reflect her vision of herself. She thus defends the very principle behind making money that men deal only by mutual respect of one another’s productivity. When asked if he held his own interest above the interests of the public, Rearden replies, “I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.” (442) Money is what keeps humanity from descending into cannibalism that Rearden is here referring to. When men have the capacity to produce wealth, they survive by benefiting from the skills of one another, not at the expense of one another. Ellis Wyatt says he’s much richer in Galt’s Gulch, since he recognizes that what he has earned there is far more precious than the wealth he used to have – not a penny of it has gone to feed the looters. Only such men can have the courage and the tools to defend money as the root of all good. They are armed not with guns but with the mind and the knowledge of its value. Their enemies so righteously worship as ‘human factors’ weakness and pity over that weakness. But the heroes are ‘human’ in the real sense because of their relentless defense of the freedom of the human mind, and acknowledging it as the only tool of survival. Human factors cannot be recognized through altruism, only through the cold and rational eye of a businessman. For such men an investment is not an act of charity. A businessman does not ‘invest’ without expecting returns. And returns can be expected only from material factors and the human ability to process them as a means of production. They are, as per Mulligan, people who “…never asked for faith, hope or charity but provided facts, proof and profit.” (681) In a world where lethargy has become the means of exchange, these are the men who uphold the power of ideas and efforts. Only these men can give a morally good meaning to money, since “Money demands that you sell your talent to their reason, not your weakness to their stupidity.” (381) Only these men can uphold an economic system that is characterized by skill being paid and talent being rewarded. In such a place, men will have earned their sense of life; they will not have been endowed with it by some unnamed arbiter of morality. Money is the most immediate and most uniformly indicative result of a man’s productivity. The money made by production and sale of goods is the only objective reality left after the goods are consumed. It is this objective reality that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are defending. No one can live in an Atlantis by “faking reality in any manner whatever.” Money is the root of all good essentially by recognition of this reality.
The only other alternative to this recognition is destruction of the only moral system of exchange – laissez faire capitalism. Without ‘good’ money, the ring of a cash register will be replaced by the bang of a gunshot. But the creed that making money holds the essence of human morality will bring out the best within men. This creed reflects the uncorrupted, uncompromising, and heroic vision of a young Francisco – “I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all – that I was a man who made money.”
Work Cited
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged, Signet (Penguin Group Inc., New York), 1996
