In the training we provide at Practical Defense Systems, one principle sits at the foundation of almost everything else we teach: you cannot outsource your judgment.
A security officer, church security volunteer, or private citizen carrying a concealed firearm may eventually face a moment when the decision is theirs alone. A supervisor may give an order. A company may have a policy. Political pressure, institutional expectations, fear of losing a job, or simply the desire to avoid conflict may encourage someone to ignore what he knows to be true. But when lives are at stake, responsibility ultimately belongs to the person making the decision.
The lesson in short: When a decision could get someone hurt or killed, responsibility can’t be passed up the chain of command or handed off to policy. Security officers, armed citizens, and everyday people who see a problem coming have an obligation to act on what they know, not wait for someone else to give permission to say no.
Ayn Rand illustrated that principle with brutal clarity in one of the most memorable sequences in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged: the Taggart Tunnel disaster. You don’t need to have read the book to understand the lesson.
Books That Once Gave Us a Common Language
There was a time when references to books such as Atlas Shrugged, 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Law, To Kill a Mockingbird, and others required little explanation. Generations of Americans encountered books like these in school or read them as young adults. They didn’t all carry the same political message. Far from it. Nor did you have to agree with their authors. What they provided was a common language for discussing difficult ideas: government power, censorship, conformity, prejudice, personal responsibility, technological and social change, individual liberty, and the danger of allowing ideology to replace independent thought. That common vocabulary has faded. So rather than assume that you’ve read Rand, or that you agree with her philosophy, I want to focus on one scene because the lesson it illustrates is remarkably practical. What happens when competent people know reality is telling them no, but fear, politics, self-interest, institutional pressure, or simple cowardice persuades them to say yes anyway?
The Taggart Tunnel
In Atlas Shrugged, the Taggart Tunnel is an eight-mile railroad tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. The railroad has deteriorated badly, and diesel locomotives have become increasingly difficult to obtain. A politically influential passenger, Kip Chalmers, is aboard the Taggart Comet and demands that the railroad get him to his destination immediately.
There is a problem. No diesel locomotive is available. There is a coal-burning steam locomotive. But everyone with the necessary railroad knowledge understands that sending a coal-burning locomotive through the tunnel is extraordinarily dangerous. The tunnel’s ventilation system cannot adequately clear the smoke and fumes. The people aboard the train could be overcome by carbon monoxide. The safe decision is obvious: wait for a diesel.
But waiting would anger a politically powerful man. So the pressure begins. Chalmers pressures James Taggart. Taggart passes the pressure downward. Orders are carefully phrased and responsibility is carefully avoided until the decision eventually reaches the railroad personnel who must actually move the train. Everyone wants the train sent. Nobody wants his name attached to the decision that will send it.
Passing Responsibility Down the Line
The division superintendent, Dave Mitchum, knows the danger. He also understands the danger to himself. If he refuses to send the train, there could be consequences from the people above him. If he orders the train through the tunnel and hundreds of people die, there will certainly be consequences for that. So Mitchum attempts to solve his personal problem. Not the railroad’s problem. Not the passengers’ problem. His problem. He announces that he will leave to search for a diesel locomotive that supposedly might be available elsewhere even though he knows there isn’t one. Before leaving, however, he arranges for the fatal decision to be made in his absence.
His chief dispatcher, Bill Brent, understands exactly what is happening. Brent is an experienced railroad man. He knows that sending the coal-burning locomotive into the tunnel is unsafe. He also recognizes the game being played with responsibility. He refuses to participate. He quits rather than put his name on an order that could kill the people aboard the train.
That doesn’t end the matter. The decision falls to a younger dispatcher. He is frightened. He has doubts. He recognizes that something about the situation is terribly wrong. Then he does something human beings have probably done for as long as authority has existed. He rationalizes. The people above him must know what they’re doing. Surely they wouldn’t order this if it were really that dangerous. The responsibility must belong to someone else. And he sends the order.
The Train Enters the Tunnel
The predictable result follows. The coal-burning locomotive enters the tunnel. The train becomes disabled inside. The passengers and crew are overcome by fumes and die. Then another train enters the tunnel without knowing the Comet is blocking the track. It crashes into the stranded train, producing a catastrophic explosion that destroys the tunnel. Hundreds of people are dead. The important point is that this wasn’t an unforeseeable accident. The danger was known. The people with the necessary expertise understood it. There was an opportunity to stop it.
They knew – and ordered it anyway.
Bill Brent’s Choice
For those of us who train security professionals, Bill Brent may be the most important person in the story. He couldn’t control James Taggart. He couldn’t control Dave Mitchum. He couldn’t control the young dispatcher who ultimately transmitted the order, and he couldn’t save the passengers. He could control only one thing: whether Bill Brent would participate. He refused.
That distinction matters. Sometimes refusing to participate in something wrong will stop it. Sometimes it won’t. Someone else may carry out the order. The institution may continue without you. The bad outcome may happen anyway. Personal responsibility doesn’t mean that you control what everyone else does. It means that when the decision reaches your desk, you still have to decide what you are going to do. Security professionals face smaller versions of this problem all the time:
- A supervisor may tell an officer to do something the officer believes is unlawful.
- A client may demand that a security officer physically remove someone when the officer recognizes that doing so will unnecessarily escalate a situation.
- Management may discourage calling the police because an incident would be embarrassing.
- A supervisor may pressure someone to change an incident report.
- Everyone may know that a safety procedure is being ignored, but nobody wants to be the troublesome employee who objects.
- And sometimes the assurance comes: “Just do it. I’ll take responsibility.”
Perhaps they will. Perhaps, when everything goes wrong, they will say: “I never told him to do that.”
You cannot outsource your judgment.
But What About the Passengers?
Rand doesn’t end her lesson with the people running the railroad. She turns her attention to the passengers.
This is one of the most controversial portions of the novel, but also one of the most thought-provoking. Rand briefly tells us who many of the passengers are and what they believe. In her telling, each has contributed in some way to the political and moral culture that produced the disaster resulting in their own destruction. They supported different ideas and pursued different interests, but a common thread runs through them. They had accepted a world in which political influence, entitlement, coercion, expediency, self-interest, moral and ethical decay, or wishful thinking could override competence and consequences.
They expected reality to accommodate what they wanted reality to be. The passengers didn’t board the train intending to die. They wanted to reach their destinations. They expected the railroad to function. They expected competent people to keep them safe. Most probably would have denied having any responsibility for the condition of the railroad or the decisions that ultimately killed them.
The tunnel did not care about their denials.
Reality Gets the Final Vote
That may be the most enduring lesson in the entire episode: reality gets the final vote.
A policy either produces its intended result or it doesn’t. A safety procedure either works or it doesn’t. A security tactic either de-escalates a confrontation or makes it worse. A criminal justice policy either contributes to public safety or fails to do so. A housing policy either makes housing easier to build or makes it more difficult. An energy policy either produces reliable and affordable energy or it doesn’t. A person either possesses the skills required when an emergency arrives or does not. And a tunnel either has sufficient ventilation for the locomotive entering it or it doesn’t.
We can argue about policies. We should. Reasonable people can disagree about what government should do, how laws should be written, how businesses should operate, and what solutions will produce the best results. But eventually the argument encounters reality. Good intentions cannot repeal consequences. Political popularity cannot repeal them. Neither can ideology.
Our Own Taggart Tunnels
We live in a world where it is increasingly easy to demand that reality conform to what we would prefer to believe. We want reliable energy while sometimes opposing the infrastructure necessary to produce it. We want affordable housing while tolerating policies and processes that can make housing extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build. We demand public safety while sometimes placing conflicting demands on the people and institutions responsible for providing it. We demand competent government while tolerating bureaucratic systems that can reward avoiding responsibility more reliably than producing results. Exactly which policies are responsible for these problems is a legitimate subject for political debate. The larger principle should not be.
When a policy or policy maker repeatedly produces the opposite of what was promised, eventually we have an obligation to examine the policy and policy makers rather than continually invent explanations for the results. When evidence conflicts with what we believe, we should examine what we believe. When experienced people warn that something will fail, we should at least be willing to listen. And when the consequences arrive exactly as predicted, continuing to insist that reality must eventually cooperate is no longer optimism. It is willful blindness.
The Passengers Matter
The passengers matter because they prevent us from placing all the blame on the people giving the orders. It is easy to blame James Taggart. It is easy to blame Dave Mitchum. It is easy to blame politicians, bureaucrats, corporate executives, supervisors, police chiefs, legislators, governors, presidents, or anyone else with authority. It is harder to ask: What have I supported, tolerated, ignored, or rationalized because doing otherwise would have been inconvenient?
A security officer may complain that his employer provides inadequate training while doing nothing to improve his skills independently. A concealed carrier may complain about crime while rarely practicing with the firearm he expects to protect his life. A supervisor may recognize that a policy is dangerous but continue enforcing it because challenging it could affect his career.
A voter may recognize that a policy isn’t producing its promised result but continue supporting it because acknowledging the failure would require questioning his political tribe. A citizen may watch his community deteriorate but remain uninvolved because involvement requires time, effort, and sometimes conflict.
None of these people intends to create a disaster. Neither did the passengers who died in the Taggart Tunnel.
That is precisely the point.
Technique Without Judgment Is Not Enough
This is why our training at Practical Defense Systems emphasizes judgment and personal responsibility.
Technique alone is incomplete. Legal knowledge without the willingness to apply it correctly under pressure is incomplete. The ability to shoot accurately means little if the person holding the firearm has surrendered the habit of thinking independently. Knowing de-escalation techniques accomplishes little if pride prevents you from using them. Knowing the law accomplishes little if someone with more authority can persuade you to knowingly violate it.
Training should help develop competence. But competence also creates responsibility. The more you know, the less acceptable it becomes to pretend you didn’t know.
Don’t Live Like a Passenger
Perhaps that is the most useful way to bring Rand’s fictional disaster into our own lives: don’t live like a passenger. Not professionally. Not politically. Not in matters involving your family’s safety. Not as a citizen. You don’t control the entire railroad. You don’t control the government. You don’t control your employer. You don’t control the people around you.
How to Avoid Being a “Passenger
You control your own decisions. You can:
- Train.
- Learn.
- Question.
- Examine results honestly.
- Admit when something you believed turns out to be wrong.
- Become involved in your community.
- Vote thoughtfully rather than reflexively.
- Refuse to participate when someone asks you to do something you know is wrong.
- Accept the uncomfortable responsibility that comes with thinking for yourself.
The lesson of the Taggart Tunnel isn’t simply that terrible people sometimes make terrible decisions. The harder lesson is that disasters can be created by ordinary people who know better but convince themselves that someone else is responsible for the decision. Security officers cannot afford that luxury. Armed citizens cannot afford it. Free citizens cannot afford it.
Get trained. Stay sharp. Think clearly. Refuse to pretend. And when reality is telling you that the train cannot safely enter the tunnel, have the courage to be the person who says no.
