Well, well, well… we meet again. I have to say that this is one of those chapters that goes completely off of the rails. It is completely and unnecessarily too long. It is an over sixty page soliloquy by John Galt and his reasons for doing what he has done. I actually think that this is probably Rand speaking. I think that the this probably could have been done very effectively in 10 pages. It took me probably six hours to read this and even then I don’t think I got most of it.

After the last chapter, he finally did it. Reardon finally through in the towel. As a result Mr. Thompson was going to give a national address. In case you don’t recognize the name, Mr. Thompson is the President at the time. Not so fast, John Galt hijacks the broadcast and here is the longest statement in written history.

There is a lot of good stuff here that just makes sense, but really there are two things that I want to talk about. The first one is the name of the section ‘A is A’. On the surface, you might think that this is kind of gibberish. But, it makes perfect sense because it is exactly as it sounds and it is exactly what is happening today.

What John Galt is saying is a functioning and proper society must be accept the reality that one thing cannot be another. Or said another way, A cannot be B otherwise it would actually be B and not A. As one example let us talk about gender. It is pervasive throughout the school system and soon throughout society that there are more than two genders. In fact, at our local high school we had a homecoming king, queen and a non-binary (something or other).

There are kids that are X, there are kids that allegedly identify as they/them or literally plural. This stuff doesn’t even make sense. This creates all kinds of issues related to sports competition and even locker room assignment. I have even been seeing stories about how people went through gender re-assignment and now are trying to transition back to their original gender. These are kids that don’t even know what they are going to do after high school thinking that they are born in some deficient manner with respect to their gender. I would argue that they don’t even know what being either a man or a woman is supposed to be.

Like any good Libertarian, I could care less if someone wants to identify are a cat, but A is A. It is dangerous to deny biology and reality because we are convincing ourselves that it doesn’t exist or we can wish reality is not really true if we tell ourselves that it isn’t. We should probably do away with all the homecoming nonsense anyway, I don’t see much value.

The second thing that I want to talk about is to quote John Galt directly. “The evil of the world is made possible by the sanction that you give it. Withdraw you sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to win on your enemies terms or win at a game that they are setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those that enslave you, do not beg for alms from those that robbed you be it subsidies, loans or jobs do not join their team to recoup what they have taken by helping them rob your neighbors.”

It goes on but it makes the point so elegantly. This is what I have been saying about politics all along. No matter the side, either side is taking from someone to further their own agenda and personal riches of the people that are connected within. We need to stop thinking that we can vote ourselves out of the problems we have. To be frank, our problems are the result of us voting in the first place. Picking a side endorses the system into existence.

I do this as a hobby and because I am trying to change people’s programming. The fact of the matter is that I am not surprised that a single contested race did not end the way that I wanted. I didn’t vote for third party candidates or just ‘throw in a protest vote’. I voted for what I thought was the lessor of the two evils. But I also did it to make a point that my local society is 180 degrees of my own personal beliefs.

I have talked about scientific laws and theories before. A theory is something that cannot be either completely proven or disproven but a law is something that cannot be disproven. The theory of relativity is a theory because we can’t actually test it. We cannot travel at the speed of light to find out that we have aged relative to the speed that we have travelled while others have aged relative to the distance that we travelled in that time. If we start to tell ourselves that Newton’s first law is Force = sunshine/rainbows instead of mass * acceleration then we haven’t accomplished anything other than making ourselves collectively dumber. For those that don’t know E = mc^2 is the exact equation as F = m*a, more on that some other day.

End Your Programming Routine: It doesn’t surprise me that my philosophy falls on deaf ears. In the book, John Galt is willing to wait for the collapse of society because it is the only tool he has remaining. It seems like the course of the book lasts five years or so and accelerates quickly. We are watching and even enabling our own collapse as we live and breathe, it is just happening so much slower that we are not even seeing it. Like John and his peers, there might come a day where I realize that my efforts to change programming are beyond my reach or ability. And like Dabny at this point, I am not willing to give up.