The course of each great cultural step forward runs like this: a genius makes a great discovery; he is fought, opposed, persecuted, ridiculed, denounced in every way possible; he is made a martyr—he has to pay for his discovery and for his greatness, pay in suffering, poverty, obscurity, insults, sometimes in actual arrest, jail, and death. Then the common herd slowly begins to understand and appreciate his discovery—usually when he is too old, worn, embittered and tired to appreciate that which they could offer him in exchange, money, fame, recognition, gratitude, and, above all, freedom to do more; or long after he is dead; then the herd appropriates the discovery—physically, in that they get all the practical ben-efits from it, and spiritually, in that they appropriate even the glory. This is the most important point of the book... The achievements of the great men are embezzled by the collective—by becoming “national” or “social” achievements. This is the subtlest trick of “collectivization.” The very country that opposed and martyred a genius becomes the proud author of the genius’ [sic] achievement. It starts by us-ing his name as the proof and basis of its glory—and ends up by claiming credit for the achievement. It was not Goethe, Tchaikovsky, or the Wright brothers who were great and achieved things of genius—it was Germany, Russia, and the United States. It was “the spirit of the people,” “the rhythm of the country,” or whatever.
The great man was only the robot—he “expressed the aspiration of the people,” he was “the voice of the country,” he was “the symbol of his time,” etc. The intent in all this is single and obvious: the expropriation of the great man’s credit. After taking his life, his freedom, his happiness, his peace, and his achievement, the collective must also take his glory. The collective wants not only the gift, but the privilege of not having to say “thank you."...This is how the genius is made the victim of the collective’s crime and the whitewash for that crime.
Such is the relationship between the prime mover and the collective. It has been such all through history—and it is sanctioned, demanded, expected, held to be virtuous by mankind’s moral codes and philosophies. It is against this that the prime movers go on strike in my story...This is the basis of the whole story.
Sayfa 57
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302 görüntüleme
"... The great man as an individual genius is obliterated, subsumed, forgotten. Who cares who he is, after all? Who is that John Galt, anyway? The question, in other words, is a statement, and a bad one. It is not a question at all. Asking the question “Who is John Galt?” as a guideline to assigning credit, would be a good thing. But asking the question as something other than a question, transforming the question into an admission that there is no answer, is to say that it does not matter who John Galt is, or who any of those of his ilk are, because any John Galt is “really” the voice of the collective. To ask “Who is John Galt?” as if there were no answer, or as if the answer does not matter, is to deny the facts about the role in human life of the prime mover. And it is those facts—about exactly who John Galt is—that the strike attempts to bring to the attention of the world..." (p. 58)
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