fredag 27 Feb 2009, 13:46

The Differende Between Wanting To Make Versus Wanting To Have Money
by Christophe Cieters

As in real life, money plays more than a mere supporting role in Atlas Shrugged. Its special quality and relevance as a litmus test in both instances lies in its intrinsic implications. What it drives and why varies greatly depending on the kind of person it touches, and in doing so the under flowing currents that guide these motives are indeed one of the most important and deeply intriguing aspects of the book in its entirety. The central question one is lead to pose himself in this regard is this: what is money, and how do differing views on it reflect on the different types of men who hold them?

The fundamental split between the two distinct and directly opposite ways in which the concept of money is defined by the heroes as opposed to the villains makes its first appearance early on in the book (45), when Phillip is complaining to his brother Hank Rearden about how hard it is to raise money for his charity; Friends of Global Progress. Phillip blames his trouble in doing so on a rampant lack of moral conscience. When Hank offers Phillip the money out of a misplaced and apathetic brotherly love, Phillip adds insult to injury by demanding to have his unearned alms in cash in order to attempt to erase all connection to Hank, so the money’s egotistical origin will not have to offend the organization’s altruistic premises. All parties involved are fully aware either way as to where the money came from, but Phillip and his friends need nothing more to allow them to blank out that which is blatantly contradictory in their poisonous combination of acceptance and indignant condemnation. Full acknowledgement of the nature of their own demeanor would necessarily lead to the collapse of their mental house of cards, which requires nothing less than constant repairs through an unwavering denial of reality and towards which they are obliged to direct all that remains of their life’s energy. By forcefully imagining that the money did not come from Hank, they hope his inalienable bond to it ends there where their wish to it begins. At the same time, unobstructed by any attempt at either subtlety or consistency, Phillip praises himself for his selfless endeavors and scorns individuals like Hank Rearden for their egotistical pursuits. In similar fashion, when Bertrand Scudder claims that money is the root of all evil and Francisco its typical product (380); he puts the basic issue very clearly.

To the heroes, money is to values what color is to blue. The word encompasses not only itself but a wide spectrum of essential coexisting connotations and conditions, understood as such by those with color vision, and seen as useless trivialities and petty semantics by those without. The heroes make money as they make love (453), the villains have money like they have sex (824). To make is to create; but the villains can only have, rob or receive, and lack what it takes to even sustain their second-hand gains. As they have sex, they hope that by imitating the mechanical motions they can emulate the values of which those mechanics are the outward representation but, unbeknownst to them, not the causa sui.

Likewise, the villains believe that it is the money itself which contains the values they observe in those who make it. They hope that by robbing the men who they know to be their betters of their wealth, they will at once humble and destroy them and through the money they looted get an infusion of the value they expected to have drained along with it. They are at once unable and unwilling to conceive of any other way or means to achieve greatness. Consequently, they do not regard individuals like Nathaniel Taggart as men of rightfully earned achievement, but consider them to be nothing more than successful bandits (62) who simply beat them by chance.

When Jim asks Cheryl: “That’s what you’ve always admired, isn’t it, wealth?” (796) he is shocked to find that it is not the wealth itself which the girl admired, but the values which created it and she mistakenly attributed to him. Her only fault, and concurrently Jim’s final disgrace, was her naiveté in considering as evident to the point beyond the need for doubt that the connection between wealth and other values cannot be consciously aimed to be corrupted. In contrast with this, Jim, who has spent his life striving for the exact opposite of the girl’s believes in his desperate quest for salvation from his own inadequacy, is faced with the fact that his unearned riches cannot buy values but only short-lived illusions thereof. His and his associates’ frustrations lie in the inescapable realization that it is not the money that makes the man, but the man who makes the money. Those who they robbed proved to be beyond their power to break, and the values which they sought to steal, even though they did not grasp their meaning, did not reside in - or transfer with - the object; the money which they looted, but remained untouched within the minds of their invincible victims, hidden in plain sight all along.

The protagonists know and understand that in the same way in which fear of death does not equate to a love of life, and a desire is not an instinct (927), money is only a value if and only if a myriad of quintessential and ultimately inseparable positive conditions are met. In short, the difference between wanting to “have” money as opposed to “making” it lies in the uncompromising distinction between the animistic notions of the primitive caveman instinct, which cowers from lightning in the unthinking belief that it is a random omnipotent rage to which it must submit itself, vis-à-vis the conceptions of the rational mind which lives and thinks by means of logic and reason, and whose only emotional response to pure energy is to proudly salute its own burning reflection with a smile.