Atlas Shrugged Movie – John Galt Speech on Individual Liberty and Responsibility

Opinion

The Atlas Shrugged movie series Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike, Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? are an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. The movies are a good representation of the ideas put forth in the book, each imaged with a new set of actors. It feels weird at first when switching between the movies but the essence of each character shines through.

The clip below is of the speech made by the character John Gault in the third movie Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? Lets break down some of the ideas within that approximately 5 minute speech. I suggest watching the movie clip first before continuing on.

There are many themes within the speech that could be used to write entire books on but will keep it short to the main ones. The concepts of liberty, truth, relinquishing power, personal responsibility, Honor, Respect, and Justice are some of the many mentioned within the speech.

Relinquishing Power

The speech starts with the concept of the people in society relinquishing their power to politicians and people in positions of power. This creates a perceived dynamic of the people in power know better and will continue to do actions in the best interest of the people they are looking over. A problem with giving up that personal power over ones own destiny can be seen throughout history with kings, monarchs, emperors, and warlords all taking power then abusing the people. History is littered with atrocities of power collecting in the hands of a few Sheppard’s with the masses of people becoming a flock of sheep. In the movie the people of that world caused their own problems when they relinquished the power to oligarchs. The oligarchs keep telling everyone else to sacrifice while they continued gain power. This can be seen in real life in 2021 with all the politicians, both left and right, vying for power and tax payer money to spend as they, the politicians, see fit.

Truth

The second theme is the concept of truth. Without being able to identify the truth about what is happening in reality from falsehoods, people are not able to make good choices in their lives. This causes many problems due to many different perceptions vying for power. As in the previous paragraph talking about relinquishing power to a small subset of ruler’s perceptions new information and truth cannot be found and disseminated to the people. That creates group think were the truth gets put on hold to sacrifice personal autonomy to a collective. A personal liberty that does not act like a collective allows new ideas to be introduced into a group creating progress in a society. Without those new ideas introduced by individuals thinking differently the society will crumble and decay like stated at the beginning of the John Gault speech. Each individual is tasked with finding out what is happening inside their own mind and in the world around them. This enables liberty, the ability to choose well, because when people know what is happening there is a shared experience that everyone can point to as what could be true.

Liberty

Another concept is one of liberty. Liberty is the ability to be free to choose what one wants to do, often associated with freedom of choice, speech, thought, and action. Liberty cannot happen without people being able to tell the truth of what is happening to them and the world they live in. When the masses of people relinquish their power of choice to a few rulers at the top of society, that choice reduces the individual liberty. When individual liberty is reduced there are less choices a person has to make thus ending a world that appears more secure and safe. That causes problem when the system breaks down around the person, the person does not have the skills to be able to fend for themselves. If a person does not have the skills to fend for themselves, it results in the likeliness of bad outcomes like injury and death to increase. Liberty taught and maintained from a young age can resist most of life’s harshness thus the phrase “Prepare your child for the road, do not prepare the road for your child.”

Personal Responsibility

The phrase about the road is the foundation of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is when a person takes charge of the actions and reactions in their life. The assumption is that unless a person does something in their own self interest to achieve their own goal no one else will help them or give them anything. The personal responsibility comes with the freedom of opportunity to chart a path that you choose as long as it is not stepping on the will of others. The understanding of respecting other people along with yourself is a large part of personal responsibility. In the clip John Gault suggests to leave people to their own choices, no matter what that person will choose. That may sound harsh, but it is moral to allow others to make mistakes and hopefully they will learn from those mistakes. As long as creative people are creating amazing things, get out of their way. That is unless the creative person is actively harming others like the example of polluting rivers that people get their drinking water from is bad. This is a way to say “Stop letting others tell you how you have to live.” Take the reigns of your own life and make choices that you want to do. Personal responsibility will also manifest itself by presenting to the world that the person is competent making more people want to interact with them.

Honor, Respect, and Justice

Lastly the final concepts portrayed are of honor, respect, and justice that round out John Gault’s speech. These concepts are considered virtues coming from personal responsibility to uphold each one both inside the individual and externally to the world around them. Honor says to create personal rules that are well thought out and not to break them. A principled position will not allow a person to be greedy because the actions will take advantage of others. The golden rule is a foundation of honor “do onto others that which you would want done to you.” Respect also comes from the golden rule. Respect for yourself so that other people will not shame you into doing what they think is correct, going against your own morality and self interest. Justice encompasses honor and respect because it is the external manifestation of the moral code of what is right and wrong that is fair. If an action harms one person and helps another the action could probably be unjust. The ideal is to have mutual agreements that allows both parties to gain what they want out of the agreement. These win-win situations are the ideal in which to strive for or in other words an objective standard of Justice.

I hope you enjoyed reading this small discussion of this clip. Happy learning!

updated 07/08/2022 added tag of opinion.