John Galt had given birth to his speech a decade before he had actually delivered it. It all began when Gerald Starnes died, and his two brothers, Gerald Jr. and Eric, their sister Ivy, and his three children proposed a drastic change in management for the factory. Under their new proposal, the employees would work according to their ability, but they would be paid according to their financial needs. The employees had no idea of what the conception of the plan would mean, but they were in favor, except John Galt. On that day, he went on a strike, a strike of the mind.
The day was November 22, 8pm in the afternoon, and the most anticipated day that the entire country had been waiting for. The day in which, “Mr. Thompson will give the people a report on the world crisis” (919). While the entire country was anticipating what Mr. Thompson had to say about the crisis that was putting the entire country in a financial hole, John Galt had his mind on delivering a speech that would finally answer all the questions from which the people wanted answers. It was a kind of voice that was not heard in the airwaves for years, a man’s voice that sounded calm and clear, said “For twelve you have been asking, who is John Galt?” (923). John Galt delivered his three hour long speech addressing the age of moral crisis and the strike of the mind and its reasons. It was a speech that he had been waiting to give for years, and now he has found the perfect time to give the speech. “For centuries the battle of morality has been fought by those who said that your life belongs to the God’s, your neighbors, but it was never said that your life belonged to you, and that the good in life was to live it”(926). John Galt have felt for years that his sense of life was taken away, that he will not be able to live again, because he would not be acknowledge as an individual. During the decade that he first began his strike, that had successfully taken effect, society was an unthinking majority. It was then, that through John Galt, Ayn Rand gave us a whole new meaning, for us the modern society, to look at our society with hopes of improvement.
Ayn Rand’s conception of the man’s mind was that it was what powered the world’s motor, and you could never punish the man that uses his mind, because if you do eventually he will stop moving the world. And that was what happened in the Twentieth Century Motor Company; it became a collective body of workers, who have now had their reasoning deduced to an unthinking whole.
Galt’s provocative speech may have started as a man who is angry and egotistical, but as the speech begins to evolve, he begins to speak as a man whom already knows his audience and vice versa. He was speaking about what he knew, the subjects that captured the energy, and the focus of the audience. The people did not wanted to hear what they were doing wrong, instead they would blame each other for the failures of the world. However, it was themselves that they had to blame for their failures because they did not think for themselves. John Galt stated, “You have sacrificed justice to mercy, independence to unity, self-esteem to self-denial, and reason to faith” (924). It was nothing new to them, it is certain that they as individuals had a piece of mind within themselves that would ask, “What contribution have I made to this crisis?”
“You seek to escape pain; we seek to achieve happiness. You