the speech. To understand what an Ayn Rand Asshole is, you have to study that sixty-page Speech Rand stuffed in John Galt's mouth at the end of Atlas. She spent two years writing it. Her publisher asked for cuts. "Would you cut the Bible?" she snapped. Thing is, Rand was right. (And not just because a Library of Congress/Book-of-the-Month Club survey conducted thirty-four years after its publication ranked Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book ever written after, you guessed it, the Bible.) She viewed the Speech as the keystone to…everything. And to a degree that still confounds mainstream academic philosophers (most of whom find Rand's work laughable), that is how it has been taken. Which means there are three things that all Americans must know about it.
The first is that the Speech serves as both the foundation and finished edifice of Objectivism, Rand's utopian vision of an entrepreneurial elite freed at last from any obligation, financial or moral, to the hangers-on of the world; free from religious hokum and from having to feign concern for the wee; free to exercise the "virtue of selfishness" in pursuit of money and glory. (The novel ends with Galt atop a mountain, raising a hand to trace the sacred sign of the dollar over the desolate earth that he and his A-Team are at last ready to return to and revive.) Is greed good, you ask? My friend, in the Objectivist world of Ayn Rand, whose funeral featured a six-foot dollar sign made out of flowers next to the open casket, greed is God.
The second thing is that it is helpful to conjure Keanu Reeves in his What would you DO? proclamatory mode when reading it (silently or aloud):
Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain…and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral.
