Check out this first part of a dramatisation of the famous speech by John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The speech itself is infamously long, and, despite Rand’s assertion that it’s the best thing she ever wrote, it’s breathtakingly inaccessible in its original form. Anything that gets its message across - including this project - must be a good thing.

I almost want Fred Thompson to win just to see this happen. More instalments are to follow.

The philosophy of the state is domination, and its currency is coercion. It is up to those friends of freedom to resist that coercion and end that domination. In Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, Ellis Wyatt is pushed over the edge by the coercion of the state, and refuses to cooperate. He refuses to exist in a position where the state may coerce him any longer. Instead of surrendering his business to the grubby hands of the looters, he chooses to destroy it, leaving nothing to reward the state’s theft. Left, ablaze in the heart of his Colorado oil fields, stands Wyatt’s Torch. The Torch is a testament that the victim will yield no ground to his victimiser, and grants him no sanction or power to coerce him any longer. The Torch is a testament that we refuse to be victims.

This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and has thus destroyed your world, and, if you wish to know why you are perishing - you who dread knowledge - I am the man who will now tell you.
- John Galt in Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged (1957)