I Am John Galt Read Online Free PDF Page B

activity.”
    Retiring at a young and vigorous 58 years old amid a crumbling banking system, Allison has left behind the bank that Atlas built. Like Galt, he’s devoting himself no longer to business, but instead to evangelism for the morality of capitalism.
    Discovering Rand
    No one would have predicted that John Allison, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised in a deeply religious family, would turn out to be an Ayn Rand devotee, and certainly not the real-world embodiment of Rand’s great hero. As with so many Rand-heads, the conversion happened in college.
    Allison was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, majoring in business administration. In his economics classes, he says, “even though my professors were largely left-wing, they actually pushed me to the right because I didn’t agree. Their ideas just didn’t make any sense. They weren’t my experience in life. So it’s funny: I think they intended to indoctrinate me to the left, and they ended up pushing me right.”
    Then, between his junior and senior year, he discovered Ayn Rand.
    Most people start with the fiction, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged , seduced into Rand’s philosophy as they are swept away in the heady romanticism of these compelling stories and their mythic heroes. Not Allison. He started with Rand’s nonfiction masterpiece, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (published in 1966), stumbling upon it by chance in a bookstore.
    Allison says, “I was really impressed with particularly the first part of the book where she talks about the principles underlying capitalism.” Though Rand’s philosophy was aggressively secular, it appealed to Allison’s religious instincts. “I was raised in a very religious background which put a premium on values, and derived in a religious way, so I guess in a certain sense I’ve always been interested in the issue of principles—how you really should live your life.”
    He was hooked. He says, “Then from that I read Atlas Shrugged , read The Fountainhead , and then basically read everything I could get of her materials and every book she recommended.”
    After getting his master’s degree in management from Duke University, in 1971 Allison went to work for BB&T in the small farm bank’s loan administration group. Amid a group of stodgy older executives, Allison’s boss was a bright young go-getter who put Allison into the bank’s management development program. But that consisted pretty much of just slumming on the teller line for a while to see how the other half lived. After 10 months, Allison’s bright young boss figured out that Allison himself was a bright young man, and challenged him to create a real management development program.
    It turned out that Allison and his boss were both Rand fans. So the first thing they did in the new program was give everyone a copy of Atlas Shrugged . Allison remembers, “We got a lot of the future leadership to read Atlas. . . . It wasn’t officially required, but it was officially encouraged. . . . A lot of the best people did read it.”
    By 1973 four other bright young men had showed up at BB&T, and joined Allison in what would turn out to be the leadership nucleus of a Rand-based build-out of the sleepy farm bank into a colossus. They all read Atlas and they all were transformed. Allison says, “Anybody that reads Atlas Shrugged —that comes with a general business background in particular—it does change their worldview. They may say, ‘Well, I reject this aspect of Rand,’ or ‘I reject that aspect,’ but . . . the particular thing I think almost everybody gets out of it is the destructive role of government.”
    For Allison himself, Rand resonated with his personal quest for meaning in life. He recalls, “Before Rand, first I had a hodgepodge of philosophical beliefs. I was trying to be religious, but I wasn’t