There are many villains in Ayn Rand’s masterpiece,
Atlas Shrugged. However, her ultimate villain by far is Dr. Robert
Stadler – a man who knew better. Robert Stadler is a villain and a man
of stature who once possessed some excellent qualities. A man of great
intelligence, Stadler early in the novel loved ability in others,
hated ineptitude, exhibited no envy of others, and was focused on
achievement. Throughout the novel he increasingly becomes an
irrational power-luster who wants unlimited funds for his laboratory
in which he will seek pure knowledge without the requirement of
producing anything of practical use to people. Stadler, a famous and
brilliant physicist and mentor of Ayn Rand’s greatest hero John Galt,
sells his soul to the state. Stadler’s guilt and breach of morality
are beyond forgiveness because of his great virtues and the fact that
he knew what he was doing. Robert Stadler, a once great man,
deliberately becomes evil through his own free will.
The character of Robert Stadler has many times been compared with Alan
Greenspan who left Ayn Rand’s Objectivist circle to enter politics
eventually becoming an “economic czar” as Chairman of the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Of course, Greenspan can be
viewed as only one of several modern-day Robert Stadlers.[i]
Robert Stadler, Director of the State Science Institute, is a
Plato-like character who holds a theoretical versus applied science
split. He is a cynical and brilliant theoretical physicist and
intellectual elitist who believes that most people are corrupt,
stupid, and incapable of virtuous behavior and that only a rare
handful of men are open to reason. Stadler is contemptuous of applied
science and material production. He is a thoroughgoing Platonist who
thinks that the human mind, reason, and science exist on a higher
realm that has nothing to do with life on earth.
According to Stadler, the mind has its own higher and better abstract
dimension divorced from practical applications in the world. He is
disdainful of the notion that the purpose of science is to develop
technologies to improve man’s life on earth. Stadler is not concerned
with practical products of technology and refers to them as “gadgets”
or “plumbing.” For example, with respect to Galt’s motor, Stadler is
only concerned with the extraordinary theoretical breakthrough the
inventor made in the field of energy and not with the practical
applications of such a motor which, to him, is just another gadget.
Like Hamlet, Stadler is content with his abstract isolation.
Stadler resorts to the extortion of citizens to finance his
theoretical noncommercial projects. Why would a man with such a great
mind tragically turn to the use of brute force to get the funding he
desires? The answer is that Stadler concludes that his work must be
sustained through government force because he thinks that reason is
impotent in the world. Because he wants unearned material wealth for
his laboratory, he aligns himself with the statist brutes and looters
and their barbarous methods. Stadler thinks that the role of the mind
is to deal with a higher realm of reality that is divorced from this
world and that, therefore, the mind is inefficacious in dealing with
this world. He deduces that brute bodily power is dominant in a world
in which most people are irrational, emotional, and impervious to
reason. Because most individuals can’t appreciate science, he needs a
state-backed science institute to force people to finance his
research. John Galt recognizes that Stadler, his former professor at
Patrick Henry University, is a traitor to the mind and breaks with him
when he endorses and joins the State Science Institute. At one time,
Stadler would say that the phrase “free scientific inquiry” was
redundant. He later insists that government is necessary to conduct
scientific inquiry.
Stadler, a man with a great mind, chooses to renounce the mind by
throwing in with the force-wielders. Believing that the thinkers are
his enemies, he seeks dictatorial physical power over others and, in
the end, is destroyed by his own power-lust. Stadler is doomed once he
turns his mind over to the brutes. He is destroyed because he
mistakenly thinks that he can survive by joining the power-lusters. At
that point, the men of the mind become his enemy alongside the looters
who always were his enemy given that Stadler, at least in the
beginning, was one of the thinkers. Ultimately, Stadler has nowhere to
go. Toward the end of the novel he realizes that if Galt and the other
men of the mind are victorious he will be repudiated as a traitor to
the mind and if the looters win he will be shackled to the irrational
brutes. At the end of the story, Stadler, the great mind who once
yearned for other great minds, wants to have John Galt murdered!
To gain power, Stadler makes himself invaluable to the government’s
looter-politicians. He aligns himself with the looters even though he
knows that reason and force are opposites. Stadler gets to the point
when he views other people’s reason and accomplishments as threats.
For example, Stadler knows that Rearden Metal is an excellent product,
but does nothing to publicly recognize it or to save it because it
would make the State Science Institute appear to be inept. If a
private individual produces a new metal, while the State Science
Institute’s metallurgical researchers have created nothing of such
value, the public will question the need for the institute and
Stadler’s funding will be put at risk.
Stadler says nothing against and even supports the book, Why Do You
Think You Think?, written by Dr. Floyd Ferris, top coordinator of
the State Science Institute, even though he vehemently disagrees with
the ideas espoused in it. Ferris’ book tells people to accept, adapt,
obey, and follow those few who are the “thinkers” in the world.
Accordingly, people are told to take orders, obey their superiors, and
to not use their minds. Stadler promulgates these views in his efforts
to gain and keep political power. He tells the public that too many
people think too much and that they should leave the thinking to the
few thinkers that exist in society of which he happens to be one. As
one of the few people in the world concerned with knowledge, it
follows that he should have political authority and power.
Stadler’s sanctioning of the appalling Project X, a weapon that uses
sound waves to cause mass destruction, symbolizes the total
annihilation of his once great mind. Rather than leave the Project X
demonstration or tell the public what he really thinks of it, he
delivers a speech praising it. Through this endorsement, Stadler
openly accepts the rule of the brutes.
At the end of Atlas Shrugged, Stadler attempts to take personal
control over Project X which was created through the use of his
breakthrough ideas. When he drives to the Project X site in Iowa, he
finds that the brainless politician, Cuffy Meigs, has already taken
command of the horrific weapon. In the ensuing struggle, Project X is
activated destroying everything and everyone for hundreds of square
miles, including Stadler himself.
Talk about justice! Stadler is killed by the machine that was created
through the use of his theoretical research – a machine that was
triggered by a ruthless looter-politician that Stadler had helped to
empower. Stadler’s demise highlights his essential guilt. By
sanctioning the looters, he delivered his mind into their grasp and
ends up being destroyed by the state. Stadler, once a man of the mind
with many virtues, turned against reason, logic, and morality. It is
Stadler’s great qualities and virtues and the fact that he knew better
that makes his moral fall all the greater.
[i] Walter
Block, “The Non-Fictional Robert Stadlers: Traitors to Liberty,” in
Edward W. Younkins (ed.), Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Philosophical
and Literary Masterpiece. (forthcoming)
Edward W. Younkins is Professor of Accountancy
and Business Administration in the Department of Business and
Technology at Wheeling Jesuit University and the founder of the
university’s undergraduate degree program in Political and Economic
Philosophy. He is the author of
Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise
and a contributor to The Rational Argumentator. He may be contacted at
younkins@wju.edu. |
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