Atlas Shrugged [509]
Yes, Robert Stadler loved them. And yet-I have said that I would have killed to protect them, only there was no one to kill. If that were the solution-which, of course, it isn't-the man to kill was Robert Stadler. Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which is now destroying the world-his was the heaviest guilt. He had the mind to know better. His was the only name of honor and achievement, used to sanction the rule of the looters. He was the man who delivered science into the power of the looters' guns. John did not expect it. Neither did I. . . . John came back for his postgraduate course in physics. But he did not finish it. He left, on the day when Robert Stadler endorsed the establishment of a State Science Institute.
I met Stadler by chance in a corridor of the university, as he came out of his office after his last conversation with John. He looked changed.
I hope that I shall never have to see again a change of that kind in a man's face. He saw me approaching-and he did not know, but I knew, what made him whirl upon me and cry, Tin so sick of all of you Impractical idealists!1 I turned away. I knew that I had heard a man pronounce a death sentence upon himself. . . . Miss Taggart, do you remember the question you asked me about my three pupils?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"I could gather, from your question, the nature of what Robert Stadler had said to you about them. Tell me, why did he speak of them at all?"
He saw the faint movement of her bitter smile. "He told me their story as a justification for his belief in the futility of human intelligence. He told it to me as an example of his disillusioned hope.
Theirs was the kind of ability,' he said, 'one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world'."
"Well, haven't they done so?"
She nodded, slowly, holding her head inclined for a long moment hi acquiescence and in homage.
"What I want you to understand, Miss Taggart, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check-before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity-whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. Robert Stadler now believes that intelligence is futile and that human life can be nothing but irrational. Did he expect John Galt to become a great scientist, willing to work under the orders of Dr. Floyd Ferris? Did he expect Francisco d'Anconia to become a great industrialist, willing to produce under the orders and for the benefit of Wesley Mouch? Did he expect Ragnar Danneskjold to become a great philosopher, willing to preach, under the orders of Dr. Simon Pritchett, that there is no mind and that might is right? Would that have been a future which Robert Stadler would have considered rational? I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic-
are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst -in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. In such a world John Galt, the man of incalculable intellectual power, will remain an unskilled laborer-
Francisco d'Anconia,