The Sanction of the Victim

Henry Reardon’s struggle in Atlas Shrugged

One of the chief tasks of fiction is to create characters that illustrate a concrete vision of an abstraction, and no novel does this better than Ayn Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s heroes and villains represent the clear distinction between good and evil. In Atlas Shrugged in particular, the actions of the plot reveal the necessity of non-contradiction in one’s life, both publicly and privately. To this end, the author presents Henry Rearden, a great steel industrialist who gradually comes to a realization of his own inconsistent application of principles, and then betters himself by correcting the error. At the beginning of the book, Rearden runs his business by his own ingrained code of justice and self-reliance, but he fails to apply this same philosophy to his personal relationships. This failure subjects him to abuse from his family, attack from his business associates, and manipulation by governmental bureaucrats. Though he knows that these parasites feed off of him while providing him nothing, he makes his central error in believing that it is right that he, by virtue of his ability, should serve their “need.” As the plot progresses, however, the hero corrects his mistake and re-claims his life, and in doing so he discovers what it means to be uninhibitedly happy.

In the early pages of Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden’s family feeds off of his charity, but they do not admit that they owe him their gratitude. Indeed, they treat their provider as if he owed them his love and support, merely by virtue of the fact that they are less able than he. As the story reveals when Henry first arrives home from the mills, “He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him” (37). While he acknowledges their claim and attempts to meet it in the best way that he knows how, they treat his actions with contempt for one whose lifestyle is beneath their dignity. While Reardon holds productive achievement as the highest good, his family treats it as, at best, a necessary evil. His mother, for instance, while accepting his alms, still accuses and berates him for selfishness, as she says, “You don’t have to help. You don’t have to feel anything for any of us” (41). Rearden’s wife, on the other hand, manipulates and abuses him in a far crueler fashion through her feigned acceptance of his “moral inferiority.” She sums up her view of the life of the producer when she asks, “What would happen to Henry’s vanity if he didn’t have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn’t have weaker people to dominate?” Her husband, in her view, thus becomes subservient to her whims through his own power over her.

In addition to Rearden’s family taking advantage of his benevolence, his acceptance of an unrewarded duty also leads to pull-peddlers using his ability for their own temporary gain. Though he does not believe in their code of self-immolation as a standard of virtue, he cedes to them the right to demand it of him, and he thus continues to work to provide the bureaucrats and “intellectuals” with the means that they use to exploit him. The industrialist gradually comes to realize, though, as society degenerates around him and more and more vultures turn to his ability for their unearned feed, that their actions against him depend entirely upon his own merit. “What sort of code permitted the concept of a punishment that required the victim’s own virtue as the fuel to make it work? A code – he thought – which would destroy only those who tried to observe it” (465). In other words, the parasites’ demands for undeserved payment rest entirely on the “sanction of the victim.”

Upon recognizing the nature of his aggressors’ moral code, Hank Rearden delves to discover his own fundamental error in living with it. He had previously taken for granted that “He had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect” (127-28). But, as he learns in his search, he has the right to expect the respect and gratitude that he has earned through his efforts. His had not been a moral flaw, but an error of knowledge, an over-confidence in his ability to shoulder the problems of others. When his family had mistreated him, he had felt that “It was he who had to make himself learn to understand them, since he had so much to give, since they could never share his sense of joyous, boundless power” (40). This belief, though it springs from the right intent, proves itself more and more destructive as the story progresses, and only when Henry changes it can he free himself for happiness.

As the looters and moochers increase their demands upon the products of his life and labor, Hank Rearden comes ever closer to discovering the nature of their code and of his own error, and in the end he enables himself to overthrow it. Halfway through the book his wife tells him that he has been too hard to deal with, to which he replies, “No. I’ve been too easy” (466). He learns that his over-willingness to forgive has created his problem, and he eventually comes to the conclusion that he must, like Atlas, shrug off the world that clings to his shoulders. In a moment of startling revelation, he finally sees the truth, “that I am free of their guilt, that I can now stand guiltless in my own eyes, that I know I am right, right fully and for the first time” (566). His acceptance of an undeserved guilt had been a dangerous mistake, but by correcting it and restoring his belief in his self, he comes to a discovery of what happiness can be. As he later confesses, “I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he’s started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body” (857-58). In recognizing that one cannot rationally set his moral values in opposition to his physical being, Rearden chooses to follow his reason as it guides him to his own moral worth. Then, and only then, can he finally say, “I am happy . . . I am happy that I have seen the truth . . . Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach” (860).

Ayn Rand’s hero sets himself a hard path, and he must suffer an uphill struggle to attain happiness. Through his acceptance of the mind-body dichotomy, he implicitly gives his enemies the moral high ground, thus exposing himself to abuse and exploitation from those who can never equal his achievements. At the novel’s beginning, Henry Reardon has taken on an unearned guilt, and only by purging himself of this contradiction can he find true happiness in the end.