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John Galt is a Time Lord.

...someone had to say it.

• No, they didn't.
• What is his TARDIS?
  • His SPEECH...the very long one
    • if it was bigger on the inside then I pity whoever had to sit and listen to it

John Galt is Fontaine.

• No, he's Ryan.

The books The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem are a trilogy.

But they were written in the wrong order.

Ellsworth Toohey started the Looters on their path in The Fountainhead and continued it in Atlas Shrugged. Then, immediately after the end of the book, Galt and Company are forced down, the location of Galt's Gulch is extracted from the weakest link, and the place is stormed. The Thousand Year Reign of Darkness begins. The House In The Mountains in Anthem is the last remnant of Galt's Gulch.

This: http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html seems to follow a very similar line of reasoning.

Or the house is Austen Heller's.

The looters are in league with the Anti-spiral.

They both try to repress humanity's latent exceptionalism and awesomeness. The heroes both want to use their power to the fullest. The strikers are successful for a few hundred years until the main Anti-Spiral force finds them and Lordgenome defects.

For added hilarity and insanity, John Galt is Simon's ancestor.

John Galt is a Who.

"Who is John Galt" was a statement, not a question.

• John Galt was a pseudonym for the guy who was on first.
• As a statement, it seems more like an identification of who Who is. Don't make me spell it out.
  • John Galt is The Doctor?
    • To be more precise, he's the Eleventh Doctor. The prophecy that Silence will fall when the question is asked actually refers to the question "Who is John Galt?" and his speech.
  • He's Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart?

John Galt is not John Galt's real name.

Think of it. The question "Who is John Galt?" appears to be some kind of meme. Maybe the person we get to know as John Galt did "jump to the myth": He adopted the name after the meme was spread. He is not the only one who calls himself John Galt. There are others out there that have adopted that name (though this could even be the case if the John Galt we get to know is the original). It might be some kind of copycat phenomenon.

• Galt has some independent verification -- although he might have planted that hobo, or the hobo's story. There are copycats, though, such as the John Galt Line. Notably, they all betray his ideology, albeit by varying degrees.

Atlas Shrugged is the distant Fan Sequel to Thus Spake Zarasuthra.

And The Bible is the backstory/prologue to the latter. Also, V for Vendetta could be the English branch-off of the Ayn Rand universe, set in the aftermath of the events of Watchmen.

The Bible is the mythological background/CorruptChurch inspiration which Zarasuthra supplants when he finds out the death of God. When Ubermensch Doctor Manhattan leaves Earth, collectivism sets in; Rorschach (who was alive all along) becomes V and inspires John Galt in America.

• Best WMG ever!
• Not really. Rorschach was a fascist. V been a leftist-anarchist would probably have been very collectivist. And Zarathustra, being a good Nietzschean, would consider absurd the objectivist ideas of an objective morality (he would see them as slaves).

John Galt's magical engine doesn't run on ambient static electricity.

Galt combined a normal engine with his magical mind reading lock, and created an engine that's powered by ego. Hence, the people of the Gulch are now guaranteed all the energy they could want.

The story was a Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story

Galts Gulch is a blatant Egopolis only held together through the combined egos of the people there when they die everthing they achieved will fall apart.

John Galt is not in fact a Messianic Archetype. Nor is he a genocidal Jerkass.

At best, he is The Paragon and at worst, is the Dark Messiah and knows it. He believes the world's beyond his power to save and that attempting to do so would just be throwing his life away in the pursuit of an impossibility. So instead he chooses to save what small part of it matters to him most and try to give what remains the best chance they can of picking themselves back up from the ashes.

Dagny Taggart is Amy Pond.

Because for twelve years she's been asking: Who is John Galt?

John Galt had the Ferris Persuader sabotaged

He manged to get cigarettes from Atlantis while in custody so he had an someone on the inside. Working from within he had the torture machine sabotaged and that is why he knew exactly what was wrong with it when it malfunctioned.

John Galt is an agent of Chaos

Think about it – the world is spiralling downward, society and the economy is killing it self from with in, rotten thru and thru as the oak of Eddie Willers childhood and what is it that Galt do: He convicts the people that could turn this development and prevent society to implode on it self and humanity becoming nothing but neo-tribal tech-barbarians, to abound society and the rest of the world. Galt is not trying to create a heaven for the best and the brightest or not even to save them from a failing society that don’t care about them; he is trying to gather them to prevent them from saving the modern society.

Also most of the people in Galt’s Gulch are highly individualistic and Galt not only convict them to follow him and his philosophy but also to abound all their fortunes and place in society. How dose he do that? With help of unnatural charisma gifted by Chaos!

The real question is not Who is John Galt, it is What is John Galt, under that all to perfect human appearance…

Rand did not intend all the superscience technologies in the book to be interpreted as potential future developments, but as physical examples of the abstract capabilities and traits of the human mind.

• The shale-oil drilling process is an example of human ingenuity, which can turn worthless raw materials into sources of great prosperity. The Colorado oil shale hills were believed to be worthless, until Ellis Wyatt developed a process which allowed him to profitably extract huge quantites of fuel oil from them. Without Wyatt's process, the land is worthless: "I'm leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."
• Rearden Metal is an example of human determination, as Hank Rearden did not have a revelation as to its design, but developed it over the course of his adult life. When the Looters force him to give it up, they rename it "Miracle Metal", as they are too small-minded to understand the amount of effort that Rearden put into its development.
• Galt's Motor is an example of human creativity, which has no real limits. Galt created the motor through his own efforts, without support from anyone, and it is fully capable of providing limitless power to the entire world-it is literally the motor of the world. It could have prevented the societal collapse which ocurrs at the novel's climax, yet it has been stopped and left to rust in an abandoned factory. The factory was once the most prosperous in the country, but was inherited by incompetent minds which instituted policies which led to its collapse.
• The Gulch mirage is an example to how intellect may be overlooked by the masses, yet discovered by the determined, as society at large is unaware of Galt's Gulch, yet Dagny penetrates it due to her determination to find Quentin Daniels.
• Project X is an example of how human intellect may be turned to destructive purposes through coercion, and how those intellects are ultimately destroyed by their creations. Stadler, although an incredible mind, believes that the only way he can prosper is by forcing others to support him. Ultimately, he dies along with his creation when Cuffy Meigs clumsily attempts to claim it for himself.
• The voice activated door locks are the ultimate example of Rand's philosophy. When Dagny speaks the words of the Strikers' oath, that she will no longer sacrifice herself to others, nor allow others to sacrifice themselves for her, she is permitted to enter the core of the Strikers' society, a power plant where all of the valley's energy is generated, with enough to spare to power the entire world.
• Palm-activated door locks are an example of the sanctity of the human mind-to attempt to force it open and claim its contents against the owner's will will only result in the destruction of all that it holds. Galt's New York laboratory has one of these locks-only his hand can open it. When the police arrive and force the door, all of his work is destroyed without a trace.
• The torture machine is an example of Rand's concept of the Sanction of the Victim. In the novel's climax, the Looters take John Galt to a secret location and attempt to force him to save them and their failing society. The machine breaks, and none of the Looters know how to fix it. Galt then calmly and eloquently instructs him on how it may be repaired. The Looters are literally unable to even harm Galt without Galt's intellect to make their machine work.