In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged there is a famous scene when a series of irrational mistakes lead to the Taggart Comet disaster. It is caused when railroad officials, under political pressure from a powerful passenger and unwilling to take responsibility, ordered the Comet into an eight-mile mountain tunnel with an unsafe coal-burning locomotive instead of a diesel. The train stalled from the fumes, passengers and crew asphyxiated, and an oncoming Army munitions train crashed into it, triggering an explosion that permanently sealed the tunnel. The catastrophe resulted from the broader collapse of competence and judgment under collectivist policies that had driven capable people out of the system.
Rand’s description in effect blames the victim-passengers for sharing the irrational views that led to it. She starts out:
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
And after reciting their flawed idease, ends:
These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.
It’s too long to quote; here is an overview of the passage from Kevin Baker, “Ayn Rand’s Rapture of the Rails: The train deaths of Atlas Shrugged,”Harper’s Magazine (June 16, 2014):
By Atlas Shrugged’s seventh chapter, “The Moratorium on Brains” …, so many of the great men have opted out of society that a working diesel engine cannot be found to run a revolutionary express train, the Comet, through an eight-mile tunnel in the Rockies. Nevertheless, one of the “looter” politicians ruining the world insists that the Comet … make the trip anyway, so that he can make a campaign appearance in California. The spineless, government-appointed bureaucrats now running the railroad attach a coal-burning engine instead, even though they know it might asphyxiate everyone on board.
“It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them,” writes Rand, who then begs to differ, spending the next two pages ranting about sixteen unnamed individuals who will die aboard the Comet — and a good thing, too, as they embody all the sorts she most despises.
The doomed include everyone from a lawyer who feels he can “get along under any political system,” to “an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards” because they believed in the will of the majority; to “a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays” that insulted businessmen, and finally a doting mother of two who would not denounce her husband because of his weaselly government job.
“These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas,” she concludes with relish, presumably including in her condemnation the young tots the doting mother had just tucked into their bunks with visions of collectivism inculcated deep in their heads. To them, Rand adds a group of soldiers aboard a munitions train that runs into the Comet after it stalls in the tunnel, killing everyone in a spectacular explosion.
See also My Favorite Quotes from Part Two of Atlas Shrugged.
I asked Grok to riff on this:
It is said that the stifling of invention, the silencing of creators, and the ruin of independent businesses are the unavoidable price of progress, and there were those who would have said that the victims of patent, copyright, and trademark law were not responsible for the system that destroyed them. The inventor whose superior design could never reach the market because a broad, government-granted patent blocked every path of competition still insisted that such monopolies were the only way to reward genius and spur innovation. The artist and writer who could not freely quote, borrow, remix, or build upon earlier works without risking ruinous lawsuits still proclaimed that creators must “own” their ideas and expressions for decades or centuries. The entrepreneur whose packaging, name, or product appearance was declared an infringement of another’s trademark or trade dress—driving his company into bankruptcy, as with the ice-cream maker crushed by a multi-million-dollar judgment—still defended these laws as necessary to protect brands and prevent consumer confusion. There was not a man among them who did not share one or more of the ideas that had erected the very monopolies under which they were crushed.
