Who is John Galt?
This is not another travel story — this is a challenge.
Who is John Galt? The answer to this question is neither unambiguous nor obvious, and therefore it will not be given at the beginning of this text. Today, I will present the meanings behind the title question — the taste of this discovery can take on different shades, but each of them will be more exciting than having everything handed to you on a plate. Let’s go.
What do you see every day in the world around you? What are the events that happen to you? What drives you, each morning, to begin another day of your life? Do you know why you are in the place from which you are now reading these words? Deep beneath the mask of your personality, are you satisfied with who you are?
Each of your inner answers is a perfect ground for reflection — for considering what the world you invest a part of your energy into every day really is to you, even without being directly aware of it. For this reflection to be possible, you have to make a profound gesture toward your own mind and appreciate its power — a power that can be used to achieve what you desire. Do you recognize that voice that is always with you?? That voice knows the answers to the questions asked earlier. That voice knows the truth — that voice can strip you bare and leave you at the mercy of your own thoughts.
The world around us is neither obvious nor unambiguous — every day we are entangled in a multitude of processes and interactions whose sources we do not even know. We are capable of looking at our surroundings without reflection, unaware that they are a reflection of our internal beliefs and the vision of the world that we have accepted in the process of shaping our personality and what we believe it to be. Regardless of whether we like or dislike what we perceive in everyday life, it is worth paying attention to the source of this perception and what we truly believe in. By seeking depth and ambiguity, we begin to make space for the driving forces that humanity has, since the dawn of time, tried to capture in words — and still cannot fully grasp. We have created religions, beliefs, mysticism, yet we still cannot clearly point to what force moves this world and generates its endless change, in which the human being plays a very significant role.
But what does all of this have to do with the mysterious figure of John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?
John Galt not only appears throughout most of the book as the title question, but also begins to emerge as a kind of symbol of rebellion against the absurdities of the surrounding world and the surrender of human potential in service of postulates and goals that do not even serve us. In return, we receive an equivalent of our own time — paid for with the lack of independent, constructive thinking and the creation of our own unique story.
“The human mind is the basic tool of survival. Man is given life, but not survival. He is given a mind, but not its content. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. But to think is an act of choice.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
But what does the fragment above say about how we live today?? The book was first published in 1957, so its assumptions must also be confronted with the reality several decades later.
A world of contrast and absurdity looks at us from every corner, and in an entirely obvious way we often cannot find our place within it. Lacking an inner grounding in our own code of values and an anchoring in the principles by which we create our lives. Political correctness and the ease of acquiring material goods have created social layers expecting quick profit, without the need to become something more or to work on one’s own personality — which should undergo the same transformation as our economic status. We surrender our inner integrity and independence to the dictate of political discourse, whose goal is not our happiness but the desire to align our thoughts and opinions with a pre-imposed vision of the world. Critical thinking is suppressed from an early age, replaced with a long-term process of indoctrination. One that slowly absorbs our individual potential, whose shadow is effectively taken over by the need to be useful and functional in a world that does not care about us at all — even if it creates such an illusion.
At what point does the moment come when we surrender our own goals for the sake of the greater good?
Has the corporate world — by fragmenting employee responsibility into the smallest possible parts and reducing people to completely replaceable elements of a structure — already effectively cut off our mental balls? Has the illusion of safety in the form of private estates, kindergartens, air-conditioned offices, and underground parking been enough for us to forget what the power of the individual is, and the sacrifice required to discover one’s own gift and follow intuition without asking for permission or seeking reassurance that everything will be okay?? What happened to wildness and the desire to explore? What happened to freedom and the price that must be paid for it? What happens when we stop searching and begin to treat everything as a reality owed to us by default, without having any idea what built it??
The answer is not unambiguous, nor is it universal — we will not find it outside, but deep within our own existence. But who the hell in this busy world has time for that now?? When everything demands constant reactivity, a fight for tomorrow, and proving to others that we matter — when, in reality, no one really cares. We run after recognition we cannot catch, because it simply cannot be caught — what we are searching for becomes available only after we stop and acknowledge our own thoughts and emotions. Taking a walk with your dark side and saying: “we haven’t seen each other in a long time, it’s good you came.” The question of who I am and what created me can bring an extraordinary result, if we are ready to accept our own inner truth and the acceptance we so desperately seek outside. Naturally, we want to belong somewhere or to something, because loneliness irritates us, because it is uncomfortable, because it is not fashionable. We relentlessly chase social standards without having any idea what that society actually is or what its moral values are. The problem is that if we do not know who we are and what we believe, there will quickly be people, processes, and events that will instill the “right” answers in us.
“Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to preserve it. Man must acquire his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking which nature does not provide automatically. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer — and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. A living species that regards its means of survival as evil will not survive. A plant that struggles to mangle its roots or a bird that fights to break its wings would not last long. Yet the history of man is the history of a struggle to deny and to destroy the mind. Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: a rational being or a suicidal animal. Man must be man — by choice.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
What is the gift of life to you?? Do you even treat life as a gift, or rather as something obvious that you are fully entitled to??
We have been given consciousness, and even if to this day we are not able to fully define what it is, using it and developing its potential is not conditioned by understanding its essence. As rational beings, we should, at all costs, explore the complexity of this world and our individual role within it — a role that is our path to happiness. But first, we need to pause for a moment and consider what happiness actually is for us. The universal and “correct” world creates a paradigm of happiness measured in the same categories for all of us. For me, it is the main point of reference and the measure of decisions made in life, where the moment of verification is when we look into the mirror and allow ourselves to feel what we truly feel, even if we do not say it out loud. The mistake in the assumption is believing that the same thing will bring happiness to each of us. The world around us tempts us with quick money, with a thoughtless walk through reality toward ticking off the same checkpoints: school, studies, work, a leased car, a relationship, children, a mortgage, vacations, pension contributions, and waiting until society considers us no longer useful — at the same time condemning us to being an exhausted element burdening the system.
Paying the price for following the inner voice will evoke fear in us, but it cannot become the reason why we stop doing it. It is precisely in this fear, and in reaching beyond our current horizon, that the beautiful and difficult, solitary path of developing our personality and shaping an inner moral code of being human. We have created, and continue to create every day, a world that requires our energy and time as a kind of fuel so that it can function in the form we know. In a form that we criticize just as much as we depend on it in order to survive. We do not have the courage to say “NO”, we do not have the courage to stop giving our engagement to something that drains us from within, we do not have the courage to abandon what we know and say: is this all I am capable of? Is this all that I can be? John Galt is precisely that voice we suppress — that voice that screams, that voice that rises in rebellion, a voice that can cast doubt on everything we have believed about the world so far. The voice that wants to stop the course of the world.
“The mind of man is capable of performing the complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. His own process of reasoning is his only moral process. At each step, he is free to make an error and nothing can protect him except his own severity — he can also attempt to fake reality, to evade the effort of inquiry — but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Do you have the strength and the will to change what does not suit you anymore, or no longer resonates with you? What are you still waiting for… Our rational mind will always find the right justification for why the current state of things cannot change, and within that same line of reasoning we will accept that any change is out of reach. Stop remaining in a diminished, contracted form and accept your own greatness — a greatness no one will ever believe in if you do not first discover it within yourself. This is not a matter of pride, but of rejecting artificial modesty, whose foundation is nothing more than one of the heaviest emotions: shame.
When we recognize what does not suit us in the world, we must be ready to overcome the shame of taking responsibility for ourselves and accept that speaking our truth out loud — a truth completely different from the majority — will bring judgment and a lack of acceptance from others. But is it not the same as with the fear of acting toward change? We know it exists, but is it capable of stopping a man who is going after what is his? Will running away from shame make it disappear? The answer will not be given in a clear, definite way. Because such an answer does not exist.
“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned — that of all the achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character — that your character, your actions, your desires and your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind — that as man must produce the physical values he needs to maintain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining… and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is the glow of contempt and rebellion of your spirit against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile insolence of any doctrine.”– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Now take a look at what you are creating — every smallest element of you is your individual creation, even if you do not perceive it that way. When will you stop treating the events of everyday life as a work of chance, and instead begin to see them as a network of circumstances perfectly tailored for you to discover what life is to you and how much your own unapologetic existence matters to you? You want opportunities to act? Start creating them. You want wealth? Start building it. You want to change? Verify what no longer works and find the tools needed for that change. You want happiness? Understand and discover what it is for you. The foundation of your character requires the same kind of construction as a physical house. Your personality is a highly complex image of your beliefs and convictions. Start living with questions you have never asked before. Do not force answers — allow life to bring them to you in unexpected ways. Notice the subtle connections and shifts in which more knowledge is hidden than in answers handed to you on a plate. Reading between the lines shapes in us the ability to see what is invisible, where in those very spaces we can read much of what we subconsciously seek. We must openly admit our desires, who we are, and accept our differences instead of desperately seeking acceptance that we ourselves do not give.
On the path of self-development, you must not allow yourself to be reduced to the passive role of reproducing a pre-assigned function in which you do not even feel right. The mind and its potential will not reach perfection when satisfied with momentary pleasure. It is about consistent action — often monotonous and even boring — but step by step bringing us closer to a world not yet discovered, in which we can define ourselves. What we possess, where we are going, what we do, and who we surround ourselves with. It is the combination of these elements, in individually chosen proportions, that creates our path — the path on which we become who we once imagined ourselves to be years ago.
“Accept as your moral ideal the achievement of your own happiness. Do not say that you are afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Is it safer to trust mystics and to discard your own limited knowledge? Live within the scope of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshop of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing the zombie will not give you omniscience — that your mind is fallible, but abandoning it will not make you infallible — that an error made by your own mind is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, while the latter destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Do you begin to hear John Galt within yourself? Do you begin to feel his personality, hidden in the network of connections that create your image of the world? Are you able to allow yourself to accept that you have been deceived in the process of shaping your understanding of reality?? This is about pain, stagnation, suffering — about touching such a deep inner wound that the tears welling up in your eyes finally allow you to feel alive. I am not writing this as a universal answer for everyone, I am not writing this as a man who has discovered the truth, but as one who has begun to question what it is. I am no one better in the crowd of everyday events — I am a voice that loudly expresses its rebellion and opposition. My John Galt calls for closing your eyes for a moment and taking a deep look at what we do not want to see. I am not looking for opponents or allies, I do not want to lead crowds toward a new truth, I do not care whether anyone reads this to the end. I only want to speak out loud what I discover, regardless of the external reaction of the world. I want to bring a spark where there is still hope, where there is faith and a desire to explore. I want to say what others are afraid to even think. I do not need to fix the world — I need to see wonder for life in the eyes of the people I surround myself with. I need to tell them what I feel and think, and I want to hear the same. In a world where we have begun to measure value through material possession and have forgotten how important moral values are, the ability to think and exchange observations. Where fiction tries to replace authenticity, I shout a loud “Stop!” Where the need to fit in replaces our inner integrity, I take a step back and stand in the shadow. I shape my own ability to observe without asking for permission, believing in what I see and feel, trusting my intuition, and feeding my mind with what develops it — not what condemns it to passivity.
I am not searching here for a happy ending, a general moral, or the conviction that I am right, because that is something everyone can judge individually. My words are only a form of respect for the inner voice after so many years of suppressing it and pushing it aside. After years of discovering my own conditioning and unnecessary traumas. After years of fighting myself and constantly searching for an external enemy, I understood that I myself am my greatest opponent. I will never win this fight through force and repression, but through understanding and acceptance of who I am. Through understanding that I do not have to fit everywhere or fulfill a social role that does not suit me. Do I have a guarantee of success? Absolutely not. Can I be wrong? Of course. But the taste of discovering who I can still become, by crossing the boundaries of a world not yet known, and the exposure to failure also gives me a chance for success and the right to happiness. So that I can feel alive in every minute, treating time as a process that allows me to be human in the full spectrum of experience — not a countdown until I close my eyes without knowing why I opened them in the first place.
“Fight for your own value. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of man: for the sovereign, rational mind. Fight with radiant certainty and unwavering knowledge that your morality is the morality of life and that your battle is the battle for every achievement, value, greatness, goodness, and joy that has ever existed on this earth. You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I took at the start of my battle — and for those who wish to see the day of my return, I will repeat it now before the whole world: I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
– From John Galt’s speech at the end of the novel. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
Who is John Galt?
The story presented by Ayn Rand portrays John Galt as an outstanding inventor and engineer in the American industrial landscape of the early 20th century. Seeing the absurdities of the world around him and the condemnation of exceptional individuals — while their intellectual value is appropriated for the sake of a society that mindlessly consumes the products of the human mind — Galt decides to leave. He leaves and disappears from his environment, leaving behind the title question that runs throughout the entire book as a symbol of searching for an answer that is not obvious. Galt leaves, but he slowly takes others with him — those who share his view of the world. He takes other exceptional minds: bankers, industrialists, engineers — all those who also opposed surrendering their potential for the sake of a so-called greater good. These people begin to disappear without a trace, giving themselves the respect they deserve for who they are. Gradually, these individuals begin to form their own coherent system of cooperation, where each person can use their potential in alignment with their moral values, creating a new kind of society based on different principles. Principles that do not steal potential, but allow it to be used to create good for oneself and for others. It is difficult to present the full concept of a book that spans over a thousand pages in just a few sentences. Galt stopped the motor of the world, showing people that everything around them is the result of the realized potential of the human mind and the free will of individuals who wanted to do and create something more than what was expected of them.
But let’s try to find ourselves in our own everyday life with the same question. Are we doing what we love? Or are we just finding a safe harbor where we get paid, accepted, and are not required to give more than necessary? Are we pushing the boundaries of understanding, or only reaching where someone else has already been? Are we building ourselves, or just creating a version that fits the prevailing norms? I see passivity, stagnation, and an omnipresent conformism trying to direct us where external demands require us to go. Because for the world, we are a resource that must keep it moving. The scale of it is overwhelming. But I also see beauty — a fire in people and the desire to use this one, unique chance of being here to become something more than just fuel for a system that drains us perfectly, slowly, and methodically. This is not a single enemy in a tangible form — it is a carefully constructed, multi-layered system of dependencies that demands our time and energy. Think about it when you are once again driving to work along the same road, to the same place, performing the same tasks, summarizing another presentation or any activity you exchange for money. Is what you are doing building your world the way you want to see it, or is it only helping you survive in something that does not even bring you joy…
John Galt is a manifesto — a rebellion, a scream and silence at the same time, the right to the joy of life and the tears of pain. It is the courage to self-determine and to speak out loud, rejecting the whisper of doubt. It is openness to learning from mistakes and drawing lessons from experience. It is the right to change and resistance to criticism. It is a path still waiting to be discovered — a path that rewards those who dare to follow it with the answer to the question: “Who am I, really?”
