I have linked here before to Johann Hari’s deliberate/incompetent/negligent – who knows? – misreading of one of the key passages in Atlas Shrugged:

Thus Johann:

… her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that when a railway worker in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ decides to punish the wicked socialist government by making a train crash happen, Rand implies the passengers had it coming.

She runs through the politics of the train crash victims, implying they were accessories to the socialist government that is being justly punished: “The man in Bedroom A, Car No One, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that everything is achieved collectively, that it’s the masses that count, not men…

The woman in Roomette 10, Car No 3, was an elderly school teacher who who spent her life turning class after class of helpless schoolchildren into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that they must not assert their personalities, but do as others were doing.”

And so endlessly on, through over a dozen deserving victims. “There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas,” she notes – so let them burn.

It is about as clear as it can be that either he has not read the passage concerned or, that if he has, he’s deliberately twisted it beyond recognition to make a sneery point of his own.

In the book the crash is set against the background of a collapsing economy brought about by corrupt state over-regulation. The owners of the railroad are struggling to keep the business going as the government grabs whatever value it can to reward its cronies and friends.

Shortages of spare parts compel an agonising decision – not to run the train through a dangerous tunnel, or take the chance? Health! And Safety!

Far from a railway worker ‘deciding to punish the wicked socialist government’ by making the crash happen, the story describes with grisly realism how no-one at the top of the railway corporation is willing to take the decision, but want someone to take it for them. Responsibility drifts right down the chain of command to someone hapless and incompetent, who takes it – with catastrophic results.

Thus:

Not only is the cause of the train disaster totally mis-described in this review, the argument quite misses the point.

The core issue is rather that ‘ordinary people’ too have to think, and to have responsibility for the results of their decisions.

Sooner or later if we all in our own spheres, high or low, act in a way which in fact risks disaster, disaster is inexorably what we eventually get.

It is the sheer relentless ‘objectivism’ of this position which is powerful and striking

This scene is so extraordinary and uncompromising that it prompted no less than Jason Lee Steorts of National Review to stop reading the book at that point – in disgust! At least, unlike poor little shifty Johann, he manages to follow the plot:

Kip Chalmers screams at a station agent. “But if you don’t get me an engine and don’t start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!”

This is persuasive. “The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power — the power of life or death.”

And so the station officials, knowing that the loss of their jobs means the loss of their lives, call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation.

Mr Steorts is of course lumbered with the legacy of one of the most outlandishly dishonest book reviews of All Time, namely the infamous Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review back in 1957:

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

… From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”

This absurd tirade from a famous former Soviet spy turned anti-communist crusader did a lot to create a profound and lasting (and damaging) division in the conservative intellectual world between Rand-fan libertarians and what later emerged as the ‘religious right’.

Even now it apparently is expecting too much to hope that National Review would step back from Chambers’ studied ranting and look carefully at what passages like the train crash one in this book tell us about personal responsibility, and the link between careless/cynical attitudes and later bad consequences.

See, for example, Greece and the Eurozone. The whole towering edifice wobbles now precisely because it has been built on doubtful assumptions about responsibility, integrity and self-discipline.

Which is why now the options for preventing disaster are so difficult. How far should ‘Germany’ (ie German taxpayers and/or German banks) be ‘expected’ to help ‘Greece’ (ie the Greek population as a whole) deal with the results of the latter’s collective fecklessness? Moral hazard anyone?

Jeffrey Sachs has a clever scheme for solving the problem, but read the many comments – who pays?

Yup. It all comes back to personal responsibility and accepting that bad behaviour often has bad consequences.

This means you, Johann, I have written to the Orwell Prize organisers saying that their awards can have no credibility while Mr Hari keeps his Journalism Award. That should do it.