I hadn’t really noticed before how into Galt people are. I know, offhand, that lots of things are named after Galt in some way, and his name is used to promote Objectivist stuff. But I don’t recall a single thing named after Dagny, except maybe a “Taggart Terminal” which isn’t named after her specifically. I knew some facts but I hadn’t put it together and noticed the problem. Maybe that’s because it’s so intuitive to me that Dagny is the most important character, so I had a hard time recognizing that other people don’t get it. To me, it’s similar to reading The Fountainhead and not noticing that Roark is the most important character, and focusing on someone else.
I think that’s really bad.
Dagny is the most interesting character and the best one to learn from or use as a role model. I identify primarily with her. Out of all the characters, I have the most traits in common with her. (The main exception is when she returns to the world from the Gulch. I’m less tied to the world than her and I identified more with Quentin Daniels’ response when asked about choosing the gulch or the world. A big world with millions of people is relevant to a transcontinental railroad, but if you want to have conversations with people then quality matters more than quantity.)
Rearden is a good role model too. If someone pays a lot of attention to him, and identifies with him the most, that’s OK. But Galt is not a good role model. He isn’t in the book enough. You don’t get to know him well enough. He’s too much of a fantasy. It’s a little like the fantasy relationships people have with romantic partners who they don’t know very well, where they make up the other person. His big speech is the author, Ayn Rand, sharing her ideas – not character development. Dagny and Rearden offer a lot more concretes, examples, traits, specifics, etc., than Galt does.
Dagny is a hero and is also the most main character, so she’s the most primary hero of the book. We see the world and story most through her eyes. Second is Rearden, not Galt. Rearden is also a hero and is the second most main character. Francisco is also a hero who you get to know better than Galt, so he would also make a better role model.
Related, people often speak of Roark’s time at the quarry, but I never see anyone talking about Dagny’s time at the cabin. (Tangentially, I also don’t see Objectivists talking about automatization of ideas much. Some Objectivism stuff, including politics and art, gets way more attention than other stuff. Some of the topic emphasis preferences a lot of people seem to have are bad.)
I wonder how much of it is sexism, and seeing Dagny as the prize, the princess to win, just because of her gender. That’s the same kind of cultural force that made her brother the President, not her. I’d understand if Dagny had a lot of scenes about her gender, and it told her story as a woman, and she kept being treated differently by sexists, then it’d make sense if that didn’t resonate with male readers. But there isn’t much female-specific stuff.