Detailorific

The Taggart Train rolls into Philadelphia with Rand’s, ahem, breathtaking descriptions of the industrial complex of Reardon Steel – of which the passengers (those idiots) literally “could not grasp the complexity” – just as the first heat of Reardon Metal is being poured, and I wonder, “what’s wrong with this picture?”…  

 

Oh, that’s right, PITTSBURGH is the steel city, not Philadelphia…  Hence the Steelers (from Pittsburgh, not Philly), Iron City beer (from Pittsburgh, not Philly), and, well, the general lack of steel industry in Philadelphia as compared to Pittsburgh in general…

Hmph.

This lack of “attention to detail”  isn’t surprising, considering Rand is launching an economic and social theory that lacks any sort of practical application, due in part to the total lack of consideration of details like, for example, what would happen if single individuals didn’t really invent, and then physically create, and then mass produce all of their own ingenious projects, in a vacuum, independent of everything and everyone else in the world…

Let’s take Hank Reardon and his metal as a case in point. 

 

Hank Reardon is a genius.  Not only is he the inventor of Reardon Metal, which lonely collectivist has already explained is good, not bad, but Reardon is also so powerful that he even controls natural elements.  Literally.  “…every inch of [the metal], every pound of its pressure and the content of every molecule within it, were controlled and made by a conscious intention that had worked upon it for ten years.”  (I’ll talk about the always fun man vs nature battle that Rand has embedded in her storyline in another post, but here I want to talk about his vacuum-packed individuality before I get too distracted.)

From what Rand tells us, Reardon spent ten long years working working working in his laboratory (in addition to neglecting/disdaining his family and running his regular steel business) alone, with only a “small staff” that “waited for instructions like soldiers” despite having “already exhausted their ingenuity” and doubting the possibility of Reardon Metal in general.  Despite Dagny continuing the work laid buy her ancestor Nat, and despite Reardon, later in the story, making awed reference to the people who invented/built something or the other, which made something or the other else possible, each of the achievers in this story works and exists in a vacuum.  Their inventions are not connected to other developments that preceded them, they are simply new and transcendent.  (And, in some ways, or at least described by Rand as, a final step to greatness, which is basically against everything Rand is trying to argue for.)  The inventors of these totally independent and ground-breaking inventions are also the builders of these inventions, in the most solitary way possible.  Dagny organizes and runs and schedules and plans and god-knows-what-else a national railroad completely unaided (despite Eddie carrying out her every command and the people she relies on for materials and the people she relies on to form the materials into railroad tracks…); Reardon invented and then physically implemented Reardon Metal all on his own (despite his small army of hand-selected scientists, the people who actually run the machines that pour the metal, anyone who ever worked in metallurgy, the people who extract the ore for him or ship said ore to him or in any way collaborate in his tremendous factories which he apparently runs entirely buy his own wits); Galt’s invention (I know I’m getting ahead of myself – I promise not to give anything away) was ideated, manifested and applied by Galt and Galt alone… The list goes on.  In terms of personal support, Reardon actually decides during this first scene with his family that he does not “need any person as part of his life” which sounds, frankly, like a joke lonely collectivist and I have talked about a bit.

 

Psychologists have argued for [insert long time period here] that social support networks not only improve but also lengthen lives, positive feedback in group settings promotes initiative and self-valuation, and that collaboration in general promotes innovation.  They have also, interestingly, classified loners with an inflated sense of themselves and a lack of ability to sympathize with others as sociopaths.  Hmmmmm.