Currency and Collapse: What the Atlas Crowd Won’t Say Aloud

Would Francisco d’Anconia Help Repatriate Africa’s Gold? Or Just Lecture It on Productivity?

A spam email invoking Ayn Rand’s “money speech” sparks a reckoning—on capitalism, empire, and the moral collapse of Randian ideology. I step into the scene with Francisco and offer a rebuttal forged from care, history, and refusal.

Introduction: The Theatre of My Mind Lit Up Like a Fuse

I didn’t open the email expecting anything profound. Just another bit of ideological spam—deadnamed, naturally—pinging into my inbox like capitalism’s version of junk DNA. I was about to bin it. But then I caught the phrasing. The baited question: “But have they ever asked themselves what is the root of money?” And just like that, the Theatre of My Mind lit up like a fuse.

Of course I know the speech. The speech. Francisco d'Anconia’s long, smug, soaring defence of money as the highest moral expression of man’s genius—the glowing centrepiece of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I read her work years ago, in that first fevered bloom of literacy, when I was still finding language for the scripts I already carried—gestalts of justice, care, refusal. I held them up against her words, trying to match shape to shape, but the fit was wrong. Her sentences rang with certainty, but they could not contain the values I already knew, even if I didn’t yet know how to name them in English. I devoured her prose—sharp, sweeping, seductive—and then, just as quickly, rejected it. Something in me had already survived what her philosophy refused to see.

But this email wasn’t offering literature. It was a fundraising pitch for the Atlas Society—begging for donations in the name of moral capitalism, animated videos, and comic book Objectivism. Apparently, “the rising generation” needs to learn that money is not the product of greed, but the fruit of virtue. That capitalism is not exploitation, but liberation. That people like me—queer, disabled, not rich, not assimilated—just haven’t understood the adventure of entrepreneurship.

So I did what my system does. I paused. Let it click. The curtain lifted.

And I imagined myself in the room with Francisco. I let him deliver the full monologue—every word, uncut—and then, I stood.

What follows is the script I spoke in that space. Not a debate. Not a counterpoint. A reckoning.

Hang On A Minute …

[I rise. A pause. The audience stirs. Then—]

So. That was quite the sermon.

You speak of money as if it were virtue incarnate—as if gold has memory, paper has ethics, and capital is handed out according to merit like blessings from a just god. You dress exploitation in the language of reason, and then dare to call it moral.

But Francisco, if you’re so enamoured of money’s root, then let’s dig a little deeper.

You say money is a tool of exchange. That it arises from value-for-value trade. That it demands honour, effort, and intellect. But that has never been how money works—not in your world, not in mine. The dollar you worship is not the product of honest trade. It is the outcome of war, of conquest, of oil deals struck with despots, of gold extracted from the bones of colonised peoples and stored in vaults oceans away from those who mined it.

You call the looters “criminals,” but forget that your entire financial system is a structure of looting—of land, of labour, of lineage. Ask the nations of West Africa what it means to be paid in CFA francs—currency printed in Paris, backed by their own stolen reserves. Ask them how noble France was when it demanded they deposit half their wealth in its coffers. Ask them if that’s what you mean by “value for value.”

And what of Gaddafi? A man no saint, but who dared imagine a gold-backed dinar for Africa. A continent-wide break from the tyranny of the dollar, the euro, and the World Bank. For that act alone, his country was bombed into blood and rubble. Not for virtue. For daring to step outside the empire’s ledger.

You preach that money is the product of the mind. But whose mind has shaped the terms? You speak as if wealth simply appears from the ether of individual genius. But the capitalist you glorify does not build alone. They build on stolen land. With coerced labour. Through supply chains that exploit the unseen and unheard—those you call “lazy,” “incompetent,” “undeserving.”

What you call “production” is too often extraction.

You cloak this all in reason—reason as a weapon, reason as justification. But it’s not reason. It’s rationalisation. And what you’ve rationalised is a system that punishes care, erases community, and rewards those most ruthless at playing a game designed in their image.

You say money doesn’t compete with guns. Tell that to the people of Iraq. Of Libya. Of Vietnam. Of every country whose currency was deemed a threat to the dollar. Tell it to the miners in Congo whose lithium fuels your phone, but who are paid in the debt of generations.

You say when money ceases to be the medium, men become tools. But I ask you: what is a sweatshop if not a human being turned into a tool? What is wage slavery but consent manufactured under threat of hunger?

And you ask me to run from anyone who damns money?

No, Francisco. I run from anyone who worships it.

Because in this world—your world—money is not neutral. It is not noble. It is not earned by the best among us. It is hoarded by those who were born close enough to the fire to stay warm, and who then turned around and called it merit.

You argue that virtue creates wealth. But in this system, wealth erases the need for virtue entirely. The hedge fund manager who shortens lifespans with insulin prices will die a hero to your market, while the teacher who starves in retirement will die forgotten.

Your speech is a relic, Francisco. A gospel of scarcity preached to the privileged, dressed in the language of moral clarity. But the world has changed. The looters now wear suits. The moochers write policy. And the rest of us? We are done apologising for wanting to live.

I don’t want your version of money. I want something worth more.

I want food grown in community, not branded by conglomerates. I want gold that stays in Africa. I want children who don’t have to choose between water and school. I want dignity, not credit. Value, not price. Relationship, not transaction.

You said the root of money is man’s mind. But perhaps the root of your money is fear. The fear that without capital, you’d have to face the fact that you were never worth what you were paid.

And now the world is waking up. BRICS is forming alternatives. Nations are demanding their reserves back. Fiat is cracking. The dollar’s grip is loosening. The moral force you once claimed for capitalism now belongs to those who reject it—not out of envy, but out of survival.

Your time, Francisco, is running out.

We are not savages returning to the jungle. We are people who have remembered that value does not come from coins, but from care. And we are not interested in the redemption of your market. We are building something else.

You may keep your gold. We’ll keep our souls.

Final thoughts …

There’s a reason they’re pushing Rand again. Harder now. Louder. More animated. They sense the end, even if they won’t say it outright. America—the self-declared land of liberty and virtue—is behaving more and more like a cornered animal: hoarding, threatening, retreating into bunkers and hedge funds, clutching at the myth of meritocracy like it’s life raft and relic both. The world sees it. The dollar is being challenged. The empire’s teeth are dulling. The looters, as Rand would call them, are not outside the gates—they’re running the treasury.

And maybe that’s why her words feel so desperate now. The virtue of selfishness has run its course. It brought us ecological collapse, pandemic profiteering, privatised everything, and billionaires launching vanity rockets while the ocean swallows coastlines and children go hungry in the shadow of ten thousand Whole Foods. Her Galt’s Gulch fantasy—that libertarian utopia of hyper-rational producers—has become parody in real time: Silicon Valley oligarchs displacing Indigenous people to build bunkered crypto compounds in Patagonia and the Andes, still pretending they are creating civilisation, not fleeing its consequences.

There is no dignity left in this script. No moral weight in the clinking of coins. Just men scrambling for exit plans whilst the theatre burns.

So no, I don’t believe money is the root of all evil. But I do believe that unquestioned money—money raised as god, as virtue, as proof of worth—will take everything from us if we let it. And I will not let it. Not quietly.

We were meant for more than this.