Love in Atlas Shrugged
As Ayn Rand depicted in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, healthy romantic relationships are non-sacrificial.
Author’s note: This article contains spoilers for Atlas Shrugged.
“Love is about sacrificing, serving, surrendering, sharing, supporting, and even suffering for others,” writes pastor Rick Warren.1 He’s not alone in this view; many claim that sacrificing for someone is a clear demonstration that you truly love him or her. People often hold up sacrifice (real or supposed) as the true measure of love—whether the sacrifice is big, as when Jack sacrificed his life for Rose in Titanic; or small, as when Landon gave up his reputation for Jamie in A Walk to Remember.2 But is it true that love requires sacrifice?
First, what is sacrifice? Many consider giving up anything of value, regardless of what one gets in return, to be a sacrifice. For example, people often say that to succeed in your profession, you need to “work hard and sacrifice.” In this context, “sacrificing” supposedly means applying one’s time and energy to building one’s career and giving up or forgoing other goals or activities one might otherwise have pursued. But if you value your career more than those other things, this is not a loss of value but a gain of value. And to call that a sacrifice makes no sense. The reason we need the concept “sacrifice” is to identify instances when one gives up something of greater value for something of lesser value or of no value. For example, if someone wants to succeed in his career but fritters away his time on social media and thus fails in his career, he has engaged in a net loss. He has committed a sacrifice.
Given that we do not have unlimited time and resources, we must prioritize some values above others. To do so rationally, we must consider which are most important to building a thriving life and which are less important. For example, a career one loves and a creative hobby are both life-serving values, but people tend to spend more time on the work they love than on hobbies, not only because the work pays their bills, but also because a career one loves is a long-range activity that provides meaning and purpose in their lives. To spend one’s time and energy on hobbies to the detriment of one’s career would be a sacrifice. As Ayn Rand defined it, a sacrifice is giving up a greater value for the sake of a lesser value or a nonvalue; it’s an action that violates your value hierarchy.3 She further explained:
If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.4
As Rand depicted in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, healthy romantic relationships exclude sacrifice. By examining a few of the most important relationships in the book, we can better understand how sacrifice is incompatible with love and how a totally different approach paves the way for strong, loving relationships.
Lillian Rearden: The Ball and Chain
Hank Rearden is an innovative, self-made businessman. He struggled for decades to build up a steel business and develop a groundbreaking new alloy, Rearden Metal. He holds himself to high standards of integrity and productivity, and he takes pride in his work.
But he’s miserable at home. His mother and brother shamelessly live off him, while his wife, Lillian, not only fails to appreciate his achievements but openly mocks them. They look down on him as a greedy materialist, and he accepts their standards and resulting evaluation, thinking, “If his family called him heartless, it was true.”5 More and more frequently, he escapes his home to spend time at his steel mills, where he uses every ounce of his rationality and energy to produce and innovate. In this, he excels, and his employees and customers appreciate him for it.
But Lillian, an icy, indifferent woman, doesn’t appreciate Hank and instead demands that he essentially become someone he’s not. She tells him,
To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.6
In other words, she demands that he sacrifice his mind, judgment, and values to prove his love for her. Hank cannot fathom such an idea; to expect a person to love another causelessly—or worse, for her failings—is beyond his comprehension. Why would he love a woman he doesn’t admire or even respect?
Although Lillian’s standards don’t make sense to Hank, he implicitly accepts the destructive idea that moral truth is different for different individuals. Having adopted this premise, he proceeds on the idea that if Lillian holds that sacrifice is how one shows love, he should respect her view and act accordingly. This very decision requires that Hank sacrifice his independent judgment and go by hers—something he would never dream of doing at work, because it is through his rational judgment that he’s built his business. But in his marriage, he struggles to act on the idea that “real devotion,” as Lillian tells him, “consists of being willing to lie, cheat, and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn’t like the one that exists.”7 And though Hank fortunately never engages in that level of self-deception, he does continue in their marriage for seven years, bound to her by a sense of duty. He spoils his own happiness by choosing to be weighed down by a wife whose values are the opposite of his own—and moreover, are self-destructive.
“Surrendering that which makes life meaningful makes life meaningless,” as one author put it.8 Though Hank would never do that at work, he does it at home. Hank is unhappy because he’s sacrificing his values in his personal relationships. But when he pursues his true values—notably, another woman, one who embodies his ideals of rationality, productivity, and justice—he begins to achieve some measure of happiness.
Dagny and Hank: A Glimpse of What’s Possible
That other woman is Dagny Taggart, a top executive at Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. Hank and Dagny have had a business relationship for a couple of years; she even defies her company’s board, vociferous protests of the media, and staunch union opposition to rebuild the railroad’s most important line using Rearden Metal. Together, they successfully run the first train over the new track, and in the joy and pride of their celebration, finally act on their long-unstated attraction, beginning an affair.
That affair becomes the bright spot of joy and affection that sustains the two of them through a variety of attacks and manipulations by the government and the press. At this point in the story, Hank is beginning to sense that he should be with someone who shares and supports his values, not someone who demands that he sacrifice and destroy them. He adores Dagny, showering her with gifts and seeing her as often as he can. “I’ve always wanted to enjoy my wealth,” he explains to her over a romantic dinner one evening,
I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even have time to know how much I wanted to. But I knew that all the steel I poured came back to me as liquid gold, and the gold was meant to harden into any shape I wished, and it was I who had to enjoy it. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t find any purpose for it. I’ve found it, now.9
He goes on to explain that the pleasure of treating her to luxuries gives him the feeling of having “made it,” of being able to experience the success he’s worked for all those long years.
Dagny, for her part, loves and admires Hank for, among other reasons, his intelligence and his strength of character. At the beginning of their affair, she tells him, “for [the past] two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you.”10
She shows him how to approach personal relationships as non-sacrificially as he approaches his work—by trading value for value—in this case, spiritual values, meaning those pertaining to the mind. They support each other through hardships, helping one another sustain their love for existence. For instance, when Hank ably defends himself at trial against unjust charges, his courage and integrity inspire Dagny: “Hank, I’ll never think that it’s hopeless, not ever again. . . . I’ll never be tempted to quit. You’ve proved that the right always works and always wins . . . provided one knows what is the right.”11 Hank, following a meeting with fellow producers whom he is helpless to assist against invasive new government regulations, feels “that the world is a loathsome place where he does not want to belong”—until he gets to Dagny’s apartment and speaks with her.12 Then, he begins to notice the beauty of the city again, and slowly realizes that
the thing which was returning was within him: the shape coming back drop by drop was his love for the city. Then he knew that it had come back because he was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.13
They admire each other and provide not only comfortable companionship, but inspiration and the sense that their values are achievable and right. Dagny is forthright with Hank about how she approaches their relationship:
My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifices and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all.14
Through the affair, Hank remains married to Lillian. Though he doesn’t share Lillian’s belief that love can be causeless, he does accept that in marrying her, he took on an obligation to her, and he is loath to default on that obligation. And rather than sensibly sever it via a divorce, he continues in the marriage even when they both know it’s a sham. He sacrifices time and happiness that could have been his if he had left Lillian and been with Dagny openly.
Nonetheless, he refuses to end his affair with Dagny; that is one sacrifice he won’t make. It’s so important to him that he insists to Lillian, “no human being can hold on another a claim demanding that he wipe himself out of existence.”15 That is what ending his affair with Dagny would amount to: giving up one of his most important sources of joy, a relationship based on his and Dagny’s highest values. Not until Lillian helps government officials blackmail him does he finally divorce her, freeing himself from her clutches forever. He tells Dagny what he’s learned: Just as he opposed bureaucrats’ attempts to stop him from selling the metal he invented to the customers he chose, he ought to oppose those who try to guilt him into hiding his love for the woman he admires—and who demand his support without earning it. He says:
I rebelled against the looters’ attempt to set the price and value of my steel—but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth—but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction.16
Hank had always been rational and just in his professional life. But he hadn’t applied the same standards to his personal life, and it cost him dearly. Only when he stops sacrificing his values to his family’s irrational ideas and expectations, when he fully embraces that love is “a celebration of one’s self and of existence,” can he achieve happiness.17
Dagny Taggart: A Strong Heroine with Strong Relationships
Many readers celebrate Dagny as a determined, intelligent heroine, which she certainly is. But one aspect of her character that is sometimes overlooked is that all her romantic relationships (and friendships) are healthy and non-sacrificial.
We see Dagny in three successive romantic relationships over the course of the novel. The first is with her childhood friend Francisco. Their time together gave her “a feeling greater than happiness, the feeling of one’s blessing upon the whole of the earth, the feeling of being in love with the fact that one exists and in this kind of world.”18 But their youthful romance doesn’t last, and Francisco begins to build a reputation as a playboy. We later learn that this reputation is merely a cover and that he is in fact still in love with Dagny; at one point, conversing with Hank, he cries out passionately, “I’ve never loved but one woman in my life and still do and always will!”19
Later, Dagny has the aforementioned relationship with Hank and later still, one with John Galt. Though each relationship is unique, all three are based on their shared values. As we’ll see, knowing this enables Francisco and Hank to take an unusually rational approach to the painful situation of being in love with Dagny when she chooses John over them.
When Dagny and John are initially falling for each other, Francisco (who’s close friends with John) doesn’t realize it. Dagny worries that John might sacrifice their budding romance to spare Francisco’s feelings. She pictures what that would mean for the three of them. John, the novel’s primary hero, would be
giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled.20
Given this, Dagny envisions a bleak future in which she turns “for consolation” to Francisco, “a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake . . . then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection.”21
Nor would Francisco benefit from the imagined sacrifice. Though he’d have Dagny, he’d be
struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man.22
As this reflection eloquently shows, if John gave up Dagny “for” Francisco, it would harm all three of them in the long run. But John knows this and therefore refuses to sacrifice his values. He admires Dagny, feels himself worthy of her, and pursues her. He spends all the time he can with Dagny and later makes his feelings for her crystal clear. They have a passionate, deeply loving romance—the kind most of us aim for.
When Francisco learns that Dagny and John are in love, he doesn’t fault either of them for it. He still loves Dagny, and part of him is naturally hurt and even acknowledges his jealousy. He explains to her that they’ll still have certain emotions for each other, because they still share the same values and see the other embodying those values. But, he says, there is a greater emotional response “that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won’t be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it’s the same payment in answer to the same values.”23 Given that John embodies Dagny’s values more completely, she should be with him, and Francisco accepts that. He deeply respects both Hank and John. When he first learns that Dagny and Hank are together, he tells her that “if it had to be anyone, I’m glad it’s he.”24 When he later learns that John is in love with her, Francisco describes it as all but inevitable that his dearest friend would fall for the same woman—including her brilliant virtues and sense of life.
Likewise, when Hank learns that Dagny’s fallen for someone else, he understands and isn’t resentful. He explains to her, “What you’ll give him is not taken away from me, it’s what I’ve never had. I can’t rebel against it. What I’ve had means too much to me—and that I’ve had it, can never be changed.”25 The two remain friends and allies, sharing meals together and helping each other through the struggles of a collapsing world. When Hank eventually meets John, he sends Dagny a brief note reassuring her: “I have met him. I don’t blame you.”26
All of Dagny’s relationships are built on the strongest of foundations—shared fundamental values, including intelligence, honesty, and integrity. But John is the complete embodiment of Dagny’s values, the man she didn’t know existed but always wanted. Francisco and Hank recognize that encouraging Dagny and John to be happy together is not a sacrifice; they’re not giving up anything. Rather, they’re keeping two wonderful people in their lives, admiring and enjoying their happiness, and embracing a future in which they will meet many other women and, no doubt, fall in love with someone in a noncontradictory, non-sacrificial, mutually self-interested way. It’s both healthy and in their best interests.
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Through Hank, Dagny, John, and Francisco, Rand shows that healthy relationships are based on shared moral values and a harmony of self-interest, and they exclude sacrifice.