John Galt’s speech: Reality is genocidal - only the virile, who master reality through industrial reason (will + tekhne), can survive, or deserve to. (Does anybody die of old age anywhere in Rand?). The rest owe their very existence to the virile, without whom they will all succumb in almost no time at all to the howling wastes of ungoverned nature (exemplified by the storm raging outside Hank Rearden’s party).

The message is not so much “to the gas chambers, go!” as “you are already in the gas chambers” - the reality principle (“A=A”) is not only indifferent to human wishes, but implacably hostile towards them. (Rand is at heart a Resistentialist: in her world, the toast always lands buttered-side down, unless some man-of-genius manages to invent a buttered-side-up-landing toast). Nature, like any Randian woman-of-spirit, responds best to force, is actually flattered by it; the alchemy of Rearden metal is a yoking-together of mutually hostile elements, a chemical composition that only genius can compel. The actual processes of scientific investigation and discovery are relentlessly mystified by Rand - secret toil in private laboratories miraculously produces the goods, while the public institutions of science are paralysed by bureaucracy, mediocrity and their own political subordination.

That the mind cannot be forced, that it is the uncaused cause of force and never unconsentingly its victimised object, entails that Galt’s mind must remain master of his body even while the latter is being electrocuted. (Don’t try this at home). Psychologism explains the motives of the inferior (typically, hysterical denial of their own willed nullity), but gains no purchase on Galt: he has essentially no psychology, being a kind of AI, a machine for computing the value of “A”.

Not an appealing vision of humanity, but as a vision of post-humanity it has its moments: Atlas Shrugged is an eschatological fiction, comparable in style and message to the Left Behind series: the Rapture for capitalists.