"This is John Galt speaking..."

This is a stunning presentation: The centrepiece of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged -- described by the New York Times as "one of the most influential business books ever written" and still selling at the rate of 130,000 copies a year fifty years after publication -- is the tour de force that is Galt's Speech.  It took Rand two years to write the Speech (the effort of writing it, she once said, endowed her with at least ten more IQ points) and you can now see a four-minute video introduction to this incisive and powerful piece of writing here on YouTube.  Don't waste your lunch hour reading about the minutiae of Michael Cullen's latest wriggling or what John Key might once have said to a Northland journalist about wages -- or how we all need to sacrifice to politicians like these in order to appease Gaia -- spend four minutes instead watching this YouTube presentation, and hearing words that cut through and explain all the crap:

"You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis... Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish... Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality–you who have never known any–but to discover it."

Discover morality? What could that mean? The answer is here in this short article on 'Galt's morality' in New Statesman: Objectivism. A philosophy for living? - the first of a four part series by Onkar Ghate.
Part 2 is here: The Selfish Life.
Part 3 is The Roots of Objectivism.
Part 4: Objectivism's Appeal and Demands. [Hat tip Noodle Food]

Do yourself a favour. Watch and read today. Do it not because it's your duty, but because it's selfishly important to you.

And finally, since its the start of the university year, a special word to students from another Ayn Rand fan: An Open Letter to Students--Will "Atlas Shrugged" Change Your Life Forever?