The mystery is no more. I am sorry for ruining Atlas Shrugged for you because every last word after the first four are now pointless. It is true. I am John Galt.
What's this big ruckus about me? Who cares who I am? Apparently a lot of misguided people. A lot of misguided people who wish they were me. So why do they care? I'll explain after the fold.
Sorry to have deceived you, friends, but before I can talk to you about my latest fans, I think that a little bit about me is in order. I am an engineer by training. I build things, and it is my business to make things you didn't think were possible. iPhone? Magnetic Levitation? Genetic Engineering? Carbon Nanotubes? Well, not all those were me, but they were all invented by people like me. The other John Galt's of the world. But there is more to me, too. I am an artist. I am all artists.
I seek to express myself by making something new, and through that act of creation, I uplift every other human.
That is my quintessence, my joie de vivre. Is it now plain why everyone wants to find me, everyone wants to be me? I am the gatekeeper to the future, Father Time's valet. I hold that power sacrosanct, and I have not until now thought it necessary to use my position of influence for my own ends. But no longer can I hide in the shadows, allowing others to use my good name for their own personal ends because I didn't think it important in the grand scheme of things. But, it seems, I was wrong.
You see, there is something of a personality cult arising around me. It is quite natural at times of stress, humanity reaches out its arms in search of the bosom of its mother. I am but the most recent safe rock and castle of a class in stress. The reason for that begins with Ayn Rand, that ostentatiously verbose deceiver. As a fellow John Galt tried to say, "She gives love a bad name." She thought it appropriate, thought it right, to use my creativity to further her own shortsighted vision. Granted, in her own perverse way, she was right, too, because she hoodwinked enough into making her vision their reality. She taught them that they could be John Galt, that their creativity made them special, that they deserved more. More than everyone else and especially more than their share, fair or no. And for that I give her credit. She was, at the least, successful.
But like all lies, the mask must come off eventually, and now it lies discarded, though since its inception there have been holes for those who wish to see. In Atlas Shrugged, it would not have been possible for John Galt to sequester himself from humanity if he had not already siphoned off more than his fair share. This is why I must now speak out, and make my voice be heard: there are those who wish to enact this contradiction in real life. This is why I must come out from the open: underneath the mask is a doppelgänger, an insidious lie that will discredit me much to the detriment of all.
For the last twenty years, Randian John Galt's have sucked the world dry because Rand taught them that they were entitled to more, more, more. "Sir" Alan Sanford, Bernie Madoff, Dick Cheney, Enron, AIG, Wall Street, these "Princes of the Universe," these "Captains" of Industry thought that because they could claim to be me that they deserved everything. And when they decided to cash out and start their own Galt's Gulch (in the Bahamas, for "Sir" Alan Sanford), the mask fell off. It was obvious that they were not John Galt.
Why?
Because I am John Galt. I am Brahma, the Creator. I am creativity, inspiration, invention. I am old reborn. I am new. I am art, I am science, I am knowledge, I am power, I am beauty. I am humanity's creative impulse, and its inventive compulsion.
Ayn Rand and her blinded followers cannot be John Galt because they are not for humanity, they are for themselves. The printing press, the fugue, the cotton gin, the waterwheel, the sonata, the mechanized loom, the steam engine, the induction motor, the Opera, the Hall-Héroult process, the lightbulb, the automobile, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile, the Salk vaccine, the transistor, the Apollo V, the cell phone, the iPod. These are my creations. Leonardo Da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Borodin, Richard Feynman. These are my names.
I am anyone who makes something new, so I am everyone. And I need humanity more than humanity needs me because humanity is my canvas and my laboratory, my inspiration and my patron. Without humanity, what need is there for static electricity motors? None. Without static electricity motors, what need is there for humanity? The need of every child, every adolescent, adult and elder.
So you see, the delusional can wall themselves off, can retire from this world thinking they diminish it, but they cannot diminish it. They can only diminish themselves because they are not John Galt if they think they deserve more than anyone else. They cannot built their static electricity motor without the rest of us to make the wires or the struts or the casings. They cannot hook their motor up without us to provide a useful load.
So don't let anyone claiming to be John Galt fool you. And don't let anyone looking for John Galt worry you. If think you are John Galt but your neighbor isn't, you are not John Galt. If you haven't already found John Galt inside yourself, you are not (yet) John Galt.
Who is John Galt?
Me.
And you.