This is the darkest chapter in Atlas Shrugged. If the rest of the book is about what happens when creators withdraw from the world, “Anti-Life” is about what the people left behind actually want. And the answer is worse than you’d expect.
Chapter 3 opens with one of the most satirical descriptions in the entire novel. Four men sit in the most expensive barroom in New York. The place is built on the roof of a skyscraper but designed to look like a cellar. Heavy low ceilings. Dark red leather. Blue lights like blackout lamps. The men who sit sixty floors above the city speak in low voices, “as befitted a cellar.”
The very first line of Atlas Shrugged is a question. “Who is John Galt?” And the way Rand drops it on us tells you everything about the world she’s building.