FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL


The Philosophy of AYN RAND


Who are to be the New Intellectuals?


 Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that
man's life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life
and are not witting to surrender it to the cult of despair in the
modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to
surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes. 

This book presents the essentials of Ayn Rand's philosophy  for
those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence.  In the
title essay, she offers an analysis of Western culture, discusses the
causes of its progress, its decline, its present bankruptcy, and
points the road to an intellectual renaissance.

Ayn Rand raises the standard of  reason, individualism, and
capitalism  against today's prevalent doctrines of mysticism,
altruism, and collectivism. The novels that present her unconventional
views have become modern classics.

 
Preface 
This book is intended for those who wish to assume the
responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. It contains the main
philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a
new philosophical system.  The full system is implicit in these
excerpts (particularly in Galt's speech), but its fundamentals are
indicated only in the widest terms and require a detailed, systematic
presentation in a philosophical treatise. I am working on such a
treatise at present; it will deal predominantly with the issue which
is barely touched upon in Galt's speech: epistemology, and will
present a new theory of the nature, source and validation of
concepts. This work will require several years; until then, I offer
the present book as a lead or a summary for those who wish to acquire
an integrated view of existence. They may regard it as a basic
outline; it will give them the guidance they need, but only if they
think through and understand the exact meaning and the full
implications of these excerpts.  I am often asked whether I am
primarily a novelist or a philosopher. The answer is: both. In a
certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot
present a picture of human existence without a philosophical
framework; the novelist's only choice is whether that framework is
present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of
it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously
or subconsciously. This involves another choice: whether his work is
his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or whether
he originates a philosophical framework of his own. I did the
second. That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it,
because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with
most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define,
explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher
in the specific meaning of the term.  For those who may be interested
in the chronological development of my thinking, I have included
excerpts from all four of my novels. They may observe the progression
from a political theme in We the Living to a metaphysical theme in
Atlas Shrugged.  These excerpts are necessarily condensed summaries,
because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in
each novel, by means of the events of the story. The events are the
concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract
summations.  When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I
do not mean to imply that my full system is still to be defined or
discovered; I had to define it before I could start writing Atlas
Shrugged. Galt's speech is its briefest summary.  Until I complete the
presentation of my philosophy in a fully detailed form, this present
book may serve as an outline or a program or a manifesto.  For reasons
which are made clear in the following pages, the name I have chosen
for my philosophy is Objectivism.  
                             AYN RAND October, 1960
 
For the New Intellectual 

When a man, a business corporation or an
entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that
those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their
situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment
expediency--not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the
truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them
somehow--or they can identify the situation, check their premises,
discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.  America, at
present, is following the first course. The gray-ness, the stale
cynicism, the noncommittal cautiousness, the guilty evasiveness of our
public voices suggest the attitude of the courtiers in the story
 The Emperor's New Clothes  who professed admiration for the
Emperor's non-existent garments, having accepted the assertion that
anyone who failed to perceive them was morally depraved at heart.  Let
me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is
naked--or that America is culturally bankrupt.  In any given period
of history, a culture is to be judged by its dominant philosophy, by
the prevalent trend of its intellectual life as expressed in morality,
in politics, in economics, in art. Professional intellectuals are the
voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators
and its bodyguards. America's intellectual leadership has
collapsed. Her virtues, her values, her enormous power are scattered
in a silent underground and will remain private, subjective,
historically impotent if left without intellectual expression. America
is a country without voice or defense, a country sold out and
abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.  Bankruptcy is defined as
the state of being at the end of one's resources. What are the
intellectual values or resources offered to us by the present
guardians of our culture? In philosophy, we are taught that man's mind
is impotent, that reality is unknowable, that knowledge is an
illusion, and reason a superstition. In psychology, we are told that
man is a helpless automaton, determined by forces beyond his control,
motivated by innate depravity. In literature, we are shown a line-up
of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as
representatives of man's soul, and are invited to identify our own
among them, with the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a
foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love
everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except
greatness. In politics, we are told that America, the greatest,
noblest, freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior
to Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in history, and that
our wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa,
with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they
haven't. If we look at modern intellectuals, we are confronted with
the grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant
uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful
self-abasement and self-righteous depravity, in an atmosphere of
guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive
evasion. If this is not the state of being at the end of one's
resources, there is no further place to go.  Everybody seems to agree
that civilization is facing a crisis, but nobody cares to define its
nature, to discover its cause and to assume the responsibility of
formulating a solution. In times of danger, a morally healthy culture
rallies its values, its self-esteem and its crusading spirit to fight
for its moral ideals with full, righteous confidence. But this is not
what we see today. If we ask our intellectual leaders what are the
ideals we should fight for, their answer is such a sticky puddle of
stale syrup, of benevolent bromides and apologetic generalities
about brother love, global progress and universal prosperity at
America's expense, that a fly would not die for it or in it.  One of
America's tragic errors is that too many of her best minds
believe, as they did in the past, that the solution is to turn
anti-intellectual and rely on some cracker-barrel sort of folksy
wisdom. The exact opposite is true. What we need most urgently is to
recognize the enormous power and the crucial importance of the
intellectual professions. A culture cannot exist without a constant
stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them;
it cannot exist without a philosophy of life, without those who
formulate it and express it. A country without intellectuals is like a
body without a head. And that is precisely the position of America
today. Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained
and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we
haven't any. The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today
are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who
admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing
such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.  After decades of
preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming
the impotence of the intellect, these modern zombies are left aghast
before the fact that they have succeeded, that they are impotent to
ignite the lights of civilization, which they have
extinguished, that they are impotent to halt the triumphant advance
of the primordial brute, whom they have released, that they have no
answer to give to those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that
reason and freedom have had their chance and have failed, and that the
future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith
and force.  If all the manufacturers of railroad engines suddenly went
irrational and began to manufacture covered wagons instead, nobody
would accept the claim that this is a progressive innovation or that
the iron horse has failed; and many men would step into the industrial
vacuum to start manufacturing railroad engines. But when this happens
in philosophy, when we are offered Zen Buddhism and its equivalents
as the latest word in human thought, nobody, so far, has chosen to
step into the intellectual vacuum to carry on the work of man's mind.
Thus our great industrial civilization is now expected to run
railroads, airlines, intercontinental missiles and H-bomb stock piles
by the guidance of philosophical doctrines created by and for barefoot
savages who lived in mudholes, scratched the soil for a handful of
grain and gave thanks to the statues of distorted animals whom they
worshipped as superior to man.  Historically, the professional
intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the
industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in
primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were
no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only
monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth
of capitalism, the men of the intellect, the philosophers, the
teachers, the writers, the early scientists, were men without a
profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a
market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits
had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and
financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned
on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force,
by political power, or by the favor of those who held political
power. Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on
favor than the intellectuals.  The professional businessman and the
professional Intellectual came into existence together, as brothers
born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of
capitalism, and if they perish, they will perish together. The
tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the
major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.  With very
rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for
the creative power of man's mind, neither in the creation of ideas nor
in the creation of wealth. Reason and its practical expression, free
trade, were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated,
usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who
could revoke the tolerance at whim. Such societies were ruled by faith
and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge
and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal
chiefs. These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of
history, whether one calls them tribal chief and witch doctor, or
absolute monarch and religious leader, or dictator and logical
positivist.  
 The tragic joke of human history , I am quoting
Join Galt in Atlas Shrugged, 
 is that on any of the altars men
erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom
they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that
humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force, the
mystics and the kings, the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible
consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions
were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits,
blindly to be followed, not doubted, and the kings, who ruled by
means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting
as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their
power. The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings,
and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach, but
both were united against his mind.  These two figures, the man of
faith and the man of force, are philosophical archetypes,
psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical
archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of
existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic
motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or
society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of
mankind's societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.
The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all
ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of
the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality
immediately before him, respects nothing but man's muscles, and
regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any
problem, and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality,
dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his
emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a
supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.
Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what
they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual
method of functioning, an awareness that does Hot choose to extend
beyond the automatic, the immediate, the given, the involuntary, which
means: an animal's 
 epistemology  or as near to it as a human
consciousness can come.  Man's consciousness shares with animals the
first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but
it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are
integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of
an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process
of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to
perform, and he has to perform it by choice. The process of
abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of
thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor
infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear
responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of
consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first
syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade, to maintain a
state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a
semi-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the
unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces.  But the living
organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness need to exercise
it in order to survive. An animal's consciousness functions
automatically; an animal perceives what it is able to perceive and
survives accordingly, no further than the perceptual level permits and
no better. Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his
consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic
guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the
material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the
only living species who has to perceive reality, which means: to be
conscious, by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty
of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of
survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by
adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting
his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals
perish, man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them,
animals perish, man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them
animals perish, man writes the Constitution of the United
States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom, by
instinct.  It is against this faculty, the faculty of reason, that
Attila and the Witch Doctor rebel. The key to both their souls is
their longing for the effortless, irresponsible, automatic
consciousness of an animal. Both dread the necessity, the risk and the
responsibility of rational cognition. Both dread the fact that

 nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.  Both seek to exist,
not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the
immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those
who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.  The
physical conquest of men is Attila's method of survival. He regards
men as others regard fruit trees or farm animals: as objects in
nature, his for the seizing. But while a good farmer knows, at least,
that fruit trees and animals have a specific nature and require a
specific kind of handling, the perceptual mentality of Attila does not
extend to so abstract a level: men, to him, are a natural phenomenon
and an irreducible primary, as all natural phenomena are irreducible
primaries to an animal. Attila feels no need to understand, to
explain, nor even to wonder, how men manage to produce the things he
covets, 
 somehow  is a fully satisfactory answer inside his
skull, which refuses to consider such questions as 
 how?  and

 why?  or such concepts as identity and causality. All he needs,
his 
 urges  tell him, is bigger muscles, bigger clubs or a
bigger gang than theirs in order to seize their bodies and their
products, after which their bodies will obey his commands and will
provide him, somehow, with the satisfaction of any whim. He approaches
men as a beast of prey, and the consequences of his actions or the
possibility of exhausting his victims never enters his consciousness,
which does not choose to extend beyond the given moment. His view of
the universe does not include the power of production. The power of
destruction, of brute force, is, to him, metaphysically omnipotent.
An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over. Whether he
conquers a neighboring tribe or overruns a continent, material looting
is his only goal and it ends with the act of seizure: he has no other
purpose, no plan, no system to impose on the conquered, no values. His
pleasures are closer to the level of sensations than of perceptions:
food, drink, palatial shelter, rich clothing, indiscriminate sex,
contests of physical prowess, gambling, all those activities which
do not demand or involve the use of the conceptual level of
consciousness. He does not originate his pleasures: he desires and
pursues whatever those around him seem to find desirable. Even in the
realm of desires, he does not create, he merely takes over.  But a
human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human
consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain
degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being
needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no
matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a
sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which
means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila with
values? The Witch Doctor.  If Attila's method of survival is the
conquest of those who conquer nature, the Witch Doctor's method of
survival is safer, he believes, and spares him the risks of physical
conflict. His method is the conquest of those who conquer those who
conquer nature. It is not men's bodies that he seeks to rule, but
men's souls.  To Attila, as to an animal, the phenomena of nature are
an irreducible primary. To the Witch Doctor, as to an animal, the
irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own
consciousness.  An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control
over the function of his brain and no power to question its
content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute
that corresponds to reality, or rather, it is a distinction he is
incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or
feels. And this is the Witch Doctor's epistemological ideal, the mode
of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the Witch Doctor,
emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over
facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by
obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality,
between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic
certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted
to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward,
contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy
associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his
undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an
absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality,
it is reality that he ignores.  Since the clash is constant, the Witch
Doctor's solution is to believe that what he perceives is another,

 higher  reality, where his wishes are omnipotent, where
contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions,
which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a

 superior  truth which he perceives by means of a special
faculty denied to other, 
 inferior,  beings. The only validation
of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the
obedience of others, when they accept his 
 truth  as superior to
their own perception of reality. While Attila extorts their obedience
by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much
more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.  There is no
way to turn morality into a weapon of enslavement except by divorcing
it from man's reason and from the goals of his own existence. There is
no way to degrade man's life on earth except by the lethal opposition
of the moral and the practical. Morality is a code of values to guide
man's choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and
mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of
his own destruction. There is no way to make a human being accept the
role of a sacrificial animal except by destroying his
self-esteem. There is no way to destroy his self-esteem except by
making him reject his own consciousness. There is no way to make him
reject his own consciousness except by convincing him of its
impotence.  The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is
possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to
another, 
 higher,  reality; the damnation of all values,
enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity;
the damnation of man's mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of
reason as a 
 limited,  deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty,
incapable of perceiving the 
 real  reality and the 
 true 
truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul)
against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the
damnation of man's nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of
self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and
faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death,
with the promise of rewards beyond the grave, these are the
necessary tenets of the Witch Doctor's view of existence, as they have
been in every variant of Witch Doctor philosophy throughout the course
of mankind's history.  The secret of the Witch Doctor's power lies in
the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy,
whether he is aware of his need or not, and whenever, through
ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of
it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them
feel that the Witch Doctor's philosophy is true.  The first to feel it
is Attila.  The man who lives by brute force, at the whim and mercy of
the moment, lives on a narrow island suspended in a fog of the
unknown, where invisible threats and unpredictable disasters can
descend upon him any morning. He is willing to surrender his
consciousness to the man who offers him protection against those
intangible questions which he does not wish to consider, yet dreads.
Attila's fear of reality is as great as the Witch Doctor's. Both hold
their consciousness on a subhuman level and method of functioning:
Attila's brain is a jumble of concretes unintegrated by abstractions;
the Witch Doctor's brain is a miasma of floating abstractions
unrelated to concretes. Both are guided and
motivated, ultimately, not by thoughts, but by feelings and
whims. Both cling to their whims as to their only certainty. Both feel
secretly inadequate to the task of dealing with existence.  Thus they
come to need each other. Attila feels that the Witch Doctor can give
him what he lacks: a long-range view, an insurance against the dark
unknown of tomorrow or next week or next year, a code of moral values
to sanction his actions and to disarm his victims. The Witch Doctor
feels that Attila can give him the material means of survival, can
protect him from physical reality, can spare him the necessity of
practical action, and can enforce his mystic edicts on any
recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority. Both of them
are incomplete parts of a human being, who seek completion in each
other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist
without mind.  Since no man can fully escape the conceptual level of
consciousness, it is not the case that Attila and the Witch Doctor
cannot or do not think; they can and do, but thinking, to them, is
not a means of perceiving reality, it is a means of justifying their
escape from the necessity of rational perception. Reason, to them, is
a means of defeating their victims, a menial servant charged with the
task of rationalizing the metaphysical validity and power of their
whims. Just as a bank robber will spend years of planning, ingenuity
and effort in order to prove to himself that he can exist without
effort, so both Attila and the Witch Doctor will go to any length of
cunning, calculation and thought in order to demonstrate the impotence
of thought and preserve the image of a pliable universe where miracles
are possible and whims are efficacious. The power of ideas has no
reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof
of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.  Thus
Attila and the Witch Doctor form an alliance and divide their
respective domains. Attila rules the realm of men's physical
existence, the Witch Doctor rules the realm of men's
consciousness. Attila herds men into armies, the Witch Doctor sets
the armies' goals. Attila conquers empires, the Witch Doctor writes
their laws. Attila loots and plunders, the Witch Doctor exhorts the
victims to surpass their selfish concern with material
property. Attila slaughters, the Witch Doctor proclaims to the
survivors that scourges are a retribution for their sins. Attila rules
by means of fear, by keeping men under a constant threat of
destruction, the Witch Doctor rules by means of guilt, by keeping
men convinced of their innate depravity, impotence and
insignificance. Attila turns men's life on earth into a living
hell, the Witch Doctor tells them that it could not be otherwise.
But the alliance of the two rulers is precarious: it is based on
mutual fear and mutual contempt. Attila is an extrovert, resentful of
any concern with consciousness, the Witch Doctor is an introvert,
resentful of any concern with physical existence. Attila professes
scorn for values, ideals, principles, theories, abstractions, the
Witch Doctor professes scorn for material property, for wealth, for
man's body, for this earth. Attila considers the Witch Doctor
impractical, the Witch Doctor considers Attila immoral. But,
secretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious
faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the
true exponent of the power to deal with Existence. In terms, not of
thought, ; but of chronic anxiety, it is the Witch Doctor who believes
that brute force rules the world, and it is Attila who believes in
the supernatural; his name for it is 
 fate  or 
 luck. 
Against whom is this alliance formed? Against those men whose
existence and character both Attila and the Witch Doctor refuse to
admit into their view of the universe: the men who produce. In any age
or society, there are men who think and work, who discover how to deal
with existence, how to produce the intellectual and the material
values it requires. These are the men whose effort is the only means
of survival for the parasites of all varieties: the Attilas, the Witch
Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast consists of those who go
through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the
words and the motions they learned from others. But the men from whom
they learn, the men who are first to discover any scrap of new
knowledge, are the men who deal with reality, with the task of
conquering nature, and who, to that extent, assume the responsibility
of cognition: of exercising their rational faculty.  A producer is any
man who works and knows what he is doing. He may function on a fully
human, conceptual level of awareness only some part of his time, but,
to that extent, he is the Atlas who supports the existence of mankind;
he may spend the rest of his time in an unthinking daze, like the
others, and, to that extent, he is the exploited, drained, tortured,
self-destroying victim of their schemes.  Men's epistemology, or,
more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of
awareness, is the most fundamental standard by which they can be
classified. Few men are consistent in that respect; most men keep
switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the
circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full
rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of
human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly
consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and
motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view
of existence, with echoes responding to them, in support or
opposition, in the switching, flickering souls of the others.  A man's
method of using his consciousness determines his method of
survival. The three contestants are Attila, the Witch Doctor and the
Producer, or the man of force, the man of feelings, the man of
reason, or the brute, the mystic, the thinker. The rest of mankind
calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of
those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those
three are the source which determines the current's direction.  The
producers, so far, have been the forgotten men of history. With the
exception of a few brief periods, the producers have not been the
leaders or the term-setters of men's societies, although the degree of
their influence and freedom was the degree of a society's welfare and
progress. Most societies have been ruled by Attila and the Witch
Doctor. The cause is not some innate tendency to evil in human nature,
but the fact that reason is a volitional faculty which man has to
choose to discover, employ and preserve. Irrationality is a state of
default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not
choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no
recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions. If a
missing link between the human and the animal species is to be found,
Attila and the Witch Doctor are that missing link, the profiteers on
men's default.  The sound of the first human step in recorded history,
the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene,
was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures
had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of
philosophy, the formulation of an integrated view of man, of
existence, of the universe, was the monopoly of various religions
that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural
knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men's
lives. Philosophy was born in a period when Attila was impotent to
assist the Witch Doctor, when a comparative degree of political
freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man
was free to face an unobstructed universe, free to declare that his
mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and
that reason was his only means of knowledge.  Even though the
influence of the Witch Doctor's views permeated the works of the early
philosophers, reason, for the first time, was identified and
acknowledged as man's ruling faculty, a recognition it had never been
granted before. Plato's system was a monument to the Witch Doctor's
metaphysics, with its two realities, with the physical world as a
semi-illusory, imperfect, inferior realm, subordinated to a realm of
abstractions (which means, in fact, though not in Plato's statement:
subordinated to man's consciousness), with reason in the position of
an inferior but necessary servant that paves the way for the ultimate
burst of mystic revelation which discloses a 
 superior 
truth. But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of
Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the
title of the world's first intellectual, in the purest and noblest
sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in
Aristotle's system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that
he defined the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of
man's consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man
perceives, that it exists as an objective absolute (which means:
independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any
perceiver), that the task of man's consciousness is to perceive, not
to create, reality, that abstractions are man's method of
integrating his sensory material, that man's mind is his only tool
of knowledge, that A is A.  If we consider the fact that to this day
everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that
we possess, including the birth of science, the industrial
revolution, the creation of the United States, even the structure of
our language, is the result of Aristotle's influence, of the degree
to which, explicitly or implicitly, men accepted his epistemological
principles, we would have to say: never have so many owed so much to
one man.  Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so
Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his
power last without the other. Politically, the centuries of the
Greco-Roman civilization were still dominated by Attila (by the rule
of local tyrants or tribal aristocracies), but it was a tame,
uncertain, subdued Attila, who had to contend with the influence of
philosophy (not of faith) in men's minds. The best aspects of Western
civilization still owe their roots to the intellectual achievements of
that era.  Attila regained his power with the rise of statism in the
Roman Empire. What followed was the fall of Rome, as a drained hulk,
bankrupt in spirit and body, unable to muster any power of resistance
to the invasion of barbarian hordes, then the looting and
devastation of Europe by the literal Attila, and the centuries of
brute violence, of bloody tribal warfare, of unrecorded chaos, known
as the Dark Ages. The Witch Doctors were re-emerging, with a new
version of mysticism, in answer to the pleas for help of the various
local Attilas, who were bowing to them voluntarily, in speedy
conversions, in exchange for the guidance of some form of basic
principles to help them stabilize their power.  The Middle Ages was a
period ruled by the Witch Doctor, in a firm, if mutually jealous,
alliance with Attila. The Witch Doctors controlled every aspect of
human life and thought, while the feudal Attilas looted one another's
domains, collected material tributes from serfs, who worked, lived
and starved in subhuman conditions, and maintained the Witch
Doctors' monopoly on spiritual law and order, by the power to burn
heretics at the stake.  Philosophy, in that era, existed as a

 handmaiden of theology,  and the dominant influence was,
appropriately, Plato's in the form of Plotinus and
Augustine. Aristotle's works were lost to the scholars of Europe for
centuries. The prelude to the Renaissance was the return of Aristotle
via Thomas Aquinas.  The Renaissance, the rebirth of man's
mind, blasted the rule of the Witch Doctor sky-high, setting the
earth free of his power. The liberation was not total, nor was it
immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural
influence of mysticism, of avowed mysticism, was broken. Men could
no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the
proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest
perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were
seeing the achievements of science.  The Renaissance did not dethrone
Attila at once: he clung to his fading power a while longer, building
his absolute monarchies on the remnants of his crumbling feudal
state. But once again, as in the Greco-Roman era, Attila was
ineffectual when left on his own. He was mentally helpless and scared,
unable to cope with the tide of liberation sweeping the world. He ran
blindly amuck in the practice of his only skill and purpose, that of
material extortion, bringing nations to ragged poverty by his constant
wars and levies, taxing away the last of his subjects'
possessions. But when it came to intellectual issues, he kept
appeasing the advocates of freedom, he assumed the role of their
pupil, protector and 
 patron of the arts,  lapsing occasionally
into frantic bursts of censorship 
 and persecution, then returning
to the role of 
 enlightened monarch.  Attila, like any bully and
like many animals, feels confident only when he smells fear in his
opponents, and it is not fear that thinkers project when they fight
for the freedom of the mind. 
 The divine right of kings  was not
much of a weapon against men who were discovering the rights of man.
The industrial revolution completed the task of the Renaissance: it
blasted Attila off his throne. For the first time in history, men
gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men
over men, that is: men discovered science and political freedom.
The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor
Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers,
was the United States of America. The moral code implicit in its
political principles was not the Witch Doctor's code of
self-sacrifice. The political principles embodied in its Constitution
were not Attila's blank check on brute force, but men's protection
against any future Attila's ambition.  The Founding Fathers were
neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking
looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in
history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had
rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the
impotence of man's mind and the damnation of this earth; they had
rejected the doctrine of suffering as man's metaphysical fate, they
proclaimed man's right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined
to establish on earth the conditions required for man's proper
existence, by the 
 unaided  power of their intellect.  A society
based on and geared to the conceptual level of man's consciousness, a
society dominated by a philosophy of reason, has no place for the rule
of fear and guilt. Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and
self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance
of one's thinking, the right to live by one's own independent
judgment Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom;
political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind
and a free market are corollaries.  The unprecedented social system
whose fundamentals were established by the Founding Fathers, the
system which set the terms, the example and the pattern for the
nineteenth century, spreading to all the countries of the civilized
world, was capitalism.  To be exact, it was not a full, perfect,
totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. Various degrees of
government interference and control still remained, even in America,
as deadly cracks in the system's foundations. But during the
nineteenth century, the world came close to economic freedom, for the
first and only time in history. The degree of any given country's
economic freedom was the exact degree of its progress. America, the
freest, achieved the most.  Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and
in spirit It replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of
wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the
producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge, the businessman
and the intellectual.  Capitalism demands the best of every man, his
rationality, and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free
to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product
for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of
achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success
depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of
those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with
reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical
force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the
best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the
standard of living, and of thought, ever higher for all those who
take part in mankind's productive activity.  In this complex pattern
of human co-operation, two key figures act as the twin-motors of
progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts
that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of
society: the intellectual and the businessman.  The professional
intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief
is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of
philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a
society's course by transmitting ideas from the 
 ivory tower  of
the philosopher to the university professor, to the writer, to the
artist, to the newspaperman, to the politician, to the movie
maker, to the night-club singer, to the man in the street The
intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences
that study man, the so-called 
 humanities,  but for that very
reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal
with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for
philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social
theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above
all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of
philosophy which studies man's means of knowledge and makes all other
sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a
free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to
evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other
fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the
stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the
same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling
minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But in the
racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices
of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the
entire economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries
are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all
the others, men need a knowledge wider than their particular
specialties, they need those who can point the way to the better
mousetrap, or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the
better view of existence. The more specialized and diversified a
society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge;
but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time
profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its
intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable,
precise and objective as the printing presses and the television sets
that carry their voices.  The professional businessman is the field
agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the
scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the
laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them
into material products that fill men's physical needs and expand the
comfort of men's existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these
products available to every income level of society. By using
machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising
labor's economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive
enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless
professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a
century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical
needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an
eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence,
has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant
hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the
pre-capitalist centuries, and in which most of it still lives, in
non-capitalist countries.  It is on this fundamental division of labor
and of responsibility that the intellectual has defaulted. His twin
brother, the businessman, has done a superlative job and has brought
men to an unprecedented material prosperity. But the intellectual has
sold him out, has betrayed their common source, has failed in his own
job and has brought men to spiritual bankruptcy. The businessman has
raised men's standard of living, but the intellectual has dropped
men's standard of thought to the level of an impotent savage.  It has
often been noted that mankind has achieved an enormous material
progress, but has remained on the level of the primitive brute in
spirit (The solution usually offered is to abandon material progress.)
The cause of the discrepancy is ignored or evaded. The cause is to be
found at that crossroads of the post-Renaissance period where man's
physical existence and his philosophy broke apart and went in
different directions.  Just as a man's actions are preceded and
determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society's
existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy
of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with
ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the
thinking of the preceding period. The nineteenth century, with its
political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the
necessary conditions of material progress, was the result and the
last achievement of the intellectual power released by the
Renaissance. The men engaged in those activities were still riding on
the remnants of an Aristotelian influence in philosophy, particularly
on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly). But
they were like men living on the energy of the light rays of a distant
star, who did not know (it was not their primary task to know) that
that star had been extinguished.  It had been extinguished by those
whose primary task was to sustain it.  From the start of the
post-Renaissance period, philosophy, released from its bondage as
handmaiden of theology, went seeking a new form of servitude, like a
frightened slave, broken in spirit, who recoils from the
responsibility of freedom. Descartes set the direction of the retreat
by bringing the Witch Doctor back into philosophy. While promising a
philosophical system as rational, demonstrable and scientific as
mathematics, Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of
every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine):

 the prior certainty of consciousness,  the belief that the
existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved
by deduction from the contents of one's consciousness, which means:
the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of
perception, which means: the indiscriminate contents of one's
consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which
reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic
spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an
external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor's blind, inward
stare, at the random twists of their conceptions, then of
perceptions, then of sensations.  When the medieval Witch Doctor had
merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the
philosophers' rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they
doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed
for him to be conscious of.  It is at this point that Attila entered
the philosophical scene.  Attila, the type of man who longs to live
on the perceptual level of consciousness, without the

 interference  of any concepts, to act on the whim and range of
the moment, without the 
 hampering restriction  of principles or
theories, without the necessity of integrating one experience with
another or one moment with the next, saw his chance to escape from
his subservience to the Witch Doctor, which he had always resented (to
muscle in on the racket, one would have to say), and to obtain from
science the sanction of his actions and of his
psycho-epistemology. Attila, who hated and feared intellectual issues,
saw his chance to take over the intellect and found his voice.  When
Hume declared that he saw objects moving about, but never saw such a
thing as 
 causality , it was the voice of Attila that men were
hearing. It was Attila's soul that spoke when Hume declared that he
experienced a flow of fleeting states inside his skull, such as
sensations, feelings or memories, but had never caught the experience
of such a thing as consciousness or self. When Hume declared that the
apparent existence of an object did not guarantee that it would not
vanish spontaneously next moment, and the sunrise of today did not
prove that the sun would rise tomorrow; when he declared that
philosophical speculation was a game, like chess or hunting, of no
significance whatever to the practical course of human existence,
since reason proved that existence was unintelligible and only the
ignorant maintained the illusion of knowledge, all of this
accompanied by vehement opposition to the mysticism of the Witch
Doctor and by protestations of loyalty to reason and science, what
men were hearing was the manifesto of a philosophical movement that
can be designated only as Attila-ism.  If it were possible for an
animal to describe the content of his consciousness, the result would
be a transcript of Hume's philosophy. Hume's conclusions would be the
conclusions of a consciousness limited to the perceptual level of
awareness, passively reacting to the experience of immediate
concretes, with no capacity to form abstractions, to integrate
perceptions into concepts, waiting in vain for the appearance of an
object labeled 
 causality  (except that such a consciousness
would not be able to draw conclusions).  To negate man's mind, it is
the conceptual level of his consciousness that has to be
invalidated. Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions,
equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance
philosophy, the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains
the rest, is: a concerted attack on man's conceptual faculty. Most
philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but
its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies. They were
unable to offer a solution to the 
 problem of universals,  that
is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the
relationship of concepts to perceptual data, and to prove the
validity of scientific induction. Ignoring the lead of Aristotle, who
had not left them a full answer to the problem, but had shown the
direction and the method by which the answer could be found, the
philosophers were unable to refute the Witch Doctor's claim that their
concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific
knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations.
The philosophers chose to solve the problem by conceding the Witch
Doctor's claim and by surrendering to him the conceptual level of
man's consciousness, a victory no Witch Doctor could have hoped to
achieve on his own. The form of that absurd concession was the
philosophers' ultimate division into two camps: those who claimed that
man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from
concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the
perception of physical facts (the Rationalists), and those who
claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held
to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to
concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined
the Witch Doctor, by abandoning reality, and those who clung to
reality, by abandoning their mind.  Thus reason was pushed off the
philosophical scene, by default, by implication, by evasion. What had
started as a serious problem between two camps of serious thinkers
soon degenerated to the level where nothing was left on the field of
philosophy but a battle between Witch Doctors and Attila-ists.  The
man who formalized this state, and closed the door of philosophy to
reason, was Immanuel Kant.  Kant gave metaphysical expression to the
psycho-epistemology of Attila and the Witch Doctor and to their
primordial existential relationship, shutting out of his universe the
existence and the psycho-epistemology of the Producer. He surrendered
philosophy to Attila, and insured its future delivery back into the
power of the Witch Doctor. He turned the world over to Attila, but
reserved to the Witch Doctor the realm of morality. Kant's expressly
stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and
self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic
base, and what it had to be saved from was reason.  Attila's share
of Kant's universe includes this earth, physical reality, man's
senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the

 phenomenal  world. The Witch Doctor's share is another,

 higher,  reality, labeled the 
 noumenal  world, and a
special manifestation, labeled the 
 categorical imperative, 
which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself
known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.  The

 phenomenal  world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as
perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is
man's conceptual faculty: man's basic concepts (such as time, space,
existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from
an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled

 categories  and 
 forms of perception ) which impose their
own design on his perception of the external world and make him
incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which
he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man's concepts are
only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power
to escape. Thus reason and science are 
 limited,  said Kant;
they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a
permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion
of reason's validity was switched from the objective to the
collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental,
metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the 
 noumenal 
world. The 
 noumenal  world is unknowable; it is the world of

 real  reality, 
 superior  truth and 
 things in
themselves  or 
 things as they are , which means: things as
they are not perceived by man.  Even apart from the fact that Kant's
theory of the 
 categories  as the source of man's concepts was a
preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only
of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as
such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a
consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means
and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is
blind, because he has eyes, deaf, because he has ears, deluded,
because he has a mind, and the things he perceives do not exist,
because he perceives them.  As to Kant's version of morality, it was
appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of
universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is
moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but
performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of
any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral
value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot
be good; if one has, one can.)  Those who accept any part of Kant's
philosophy, metaphysical, epistemological or moral, deserve it.
If one finds the present state of the world unintelligible and
inexplicable, one can begin to understand it by realizing that the
dominant intellectual influence today is still Kant's, and that all
the leading modern schools of philosophy are derived from a Kantian
base.  The popular slang expression 
 head-shrinker,  applied to
psychologists, is much more literally applicable to Kant: observe the
sharp drop in the intellectual stature of the post-Kantian
philosophers, and the progressively thickening veil of grayness,
superficiality, casuistry that descends on the history of philosophy
thereafter, like a fog enveloping a sluggish river that runs thinner
and thinner and finally vanishes in the swamps of the twentieth
century.  The major line of philosophers rejected Kant's

 noumenal  world quiet speedily, but they accepted his

 phenomenal  world and carried it to its logical consequences:
the view of reality as mere appearance; the view of man's conceptual
faculty as a mechanism for producing arbitrary 
 constructs  not
derived from experience or facts; the view of rational certainty as
impossible, of science as unprovable, of man's mind as
impotent, and, above all, the equation of morality with
selflessness. They rejected the root or cause of Kant's system, but
accepted all of its deadly effects. They accepted it as some monstrous
spider hanging in midair, in a web of unintelligible, almost
unreadable verbiage, and, today, few people know that that spider is
not supported by a single thread of proof.  Such was the intellectual
equipment with which philosophers approached the task of observing the
unprecedented historical events of the nineteenth century, and the
responsibility of providing guidance for the new, free society of
capitalism.  While scientists were performing astounding feats of
disciplined reason, breaking down the barriers of the

 unknowable  in every field of knowledge, charting the course of
light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man's
body, what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and
guidance for their achievements was the plain Witch-doctory of Hegel,
who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is
Idea (not somebody's idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by
the dialectical process of a new 
 super-logic  which proves that
contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that
omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity,
gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the
observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea's triple
somersaults inside his, Hegel's, mind. This was offered as a
philosophy of reason.  While businessmen were rising to spectacular
achievements of creative ability and self-confidently ambitious
courage, challenging the primordial dogma of man's poverty and misery
on earth, breaking open the trade routes of the world, releasing
mankind's productive energy and placing in its service the liberating
power of machines (against the scornful resistance of loafing,
ex-feudal aristocrats and the destructive violence of those who were
to profit most: the workers), what philosophy was offering, as an
evaluation of their achievements and as guidance for the rest of
society was the pure Attila-ism of Marx, who proclaimed that the mind
does not exist, that everything is matter, that matter develops itself
by the dialectical process of its own 
 super-logic  of
contradictions, and what is true today, will not be true tomorrow,
that the material tools of production determine men's 
 ideological
superstructure  (which means: machines create men's thinking, not
the other way around), that muscular labor is the source of wealth,
that physical force is the only practical means of existence, and that
the seizure of the omnipotent machines will transfer omnipotence to
the rule of brute violence. Never had Attila's psycho-epistemology
been transcribed so accurately. This was offered as a philosophy of
history and of political economy.  What was offered as philosophical
antidote to those who would not accept these theories?  As a defense
against the Witch-doctory of Kant and Hegel, the businessman was
offered me neo-mystic Attila-ism of the Pragmatists. They declared
that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of
dispensing with all absolute principles and standards, that there is
no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth, that truth is
that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its
consequences, that no facts can be known with certainty in advance,
and anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb, that reality is not
firm, but fluid and 
 indeterminate,  that there is no such thing
as a distinction between an external world and a consciousness
(between the perceived and the perceiver), there is only an
undifferentiated package-deal labeled 
 experience,  and whatever
one wishes to be true, is true, whatever one wishes to exist, does
exist, provided it works or makes one feel better.  A later school of
more Kantian Pragmatists amended this philosophy as follows. If there
is no such thing as an objective reality, men's metaphysical choice is
whether the selfish, dictatorial whims of an individual or the
democratic whims of a collective are to shape that plastic goo which
the ignorant call 
 reality,  therefore this school decided that
objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that knowledge is
to be gained by means of public polls among special elites of

 competent investigators  who can 
 predict and control 
reality, that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever
people wish to exist, does exist, and anyone who holds any firm
convictions of his own is an arbitrary, mystic dogmatist, since
reality is indeterminate and people determine its actual nature.  The
scientist was offered a slightly different version of philosophy. As a
defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal
omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic
Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured
him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing
or matter or mind are meaningless, let the mystics care whether they
exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of
theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are
the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality
conform to their will (
 matter is that which fits mathematical
equations ). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of
words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social
convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a
matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is
not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by
means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another,
since the criterion of validity is only 
 convenience  and the
definition of science is 
 that which the scientists do.  But
this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists
or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by
philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim
certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknowable to man, and
that he claim, instead, 
 percentages of probability,  not
troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates
percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge
the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science,
that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a
matter of subjective choice, dictated by one's feelings, not one's
mind.  The great treason of the philosophers was that they never
stepped out of the Middle Ages: they never challenged the Witch
Doctor's code of morality. They were willing to doubt the existence of
physical objects, they were willing to doubt the validity of their own
senses, they were willing to defy the authority of absolute
monarchies, they were willing (occasionally) to proclaim themselves to
be skeptics or agnostics or atheists, but they were not willing to
doubt the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal, that he has no
right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only
justification of his existence and that self-sacrifice is his highest
moral duty, virtue and value.  Under all its countless guises,
variations and adaptations, that doctrine, best designated as the
morality of altruism, has come from prehistoric swamps to New York
City, unchanged. In savage societies, men practiced the ritual of
human sacrifices, immolating individual men on sacrificial altars, for
the sake of what they regarded as their collective, tribal
good. Today, they are still doing it, only the agony is slower and the
slaughter greater, but the doctrine that demands it and sanctions
it, is the same doctrine of moral cannibalism.  The philosophers
preserved it, by leaving the subject of morality to the mystics, or
by consigning it to the province of subjective feelings, which means:
to the mystics, or by the vehement rejection of reason's capacity to
deal with moral values and the branding of all value-judgments as

 unscientific,  which means: the reaffirmation and perpetuation
of the mystics' monopoly on morality, or, worst of all, by accepting
the mystics' moral code in its irrational entirety, then translating
it into earthly terms and propagating it in the name of reason.  The
convolutions of this last attempt provide what is, perhaps, the most
grotesquely terrible chapter in the history of Western thought The
political 
 me-too-ism,  abjectly displayed by the

 conservatives  of today toward their brazenly socialistic
adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the
ethical 
 me-too-ism  displayed by the philosophers of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of
reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality.  Auguste Comte, the
founder of Positivism, the champion of science, advocated a

 rational,  
 scientific  social system based on the total
subjugation of the individual to the collective, including a

 Religion of Humanity  which substituted Society for the Gods or
gods who collect the blood of sacrificial victims. It is not
astonishing that Comte was the comer of the term Altruism, which
means: the placing of others above self, of their interests above
one's own.  Nietzsche's rebellion against altruism consisted of
replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of
others to oneself. He proclaimed that the ideal man is moved, not by
reason, but by his 
 blood,  by his innate instincts, feelings
and will to power, that he is predestined by birth to rule others
and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to
be his victims and slaves, that reason, logic, principles are futile
and debilitating, that morality is useless, that the 
 superman 
is 
 beyond good and evil,  that he is a 
 beast of prey 
whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim. Thus Nietzsche's
rejection of the Witch Doctor consisted of elevating Attila into a
moral ideal, which meant: a double surrender of morality to the
Witch Doctor.  Jeremy Bentham, the champion of capitalism, defended it
by proclaiming 
 the greatest happiness of the greatest number 
as its moral justification, and propounded a 
 hedonistic
calculus  for men's moral guidance, which enunciated the principle
that before taking any action one must consider all the possible forms
and amounts of happiness and unhappiness to accrue to all the people
possibly to be affected by the consequences of one's action (including
oneself as one unit among the dozens or hundreds or millions), one
must compute them all, then act accordingly and sacrifice the

 hedonistic  minority to the majority.  Herbert Spencer, another
champion of capitalism, chose to decide that the theory of evolution
and of adaptation to environment was the key to man's morality, and
declared that the moral justification of capitalism was the survival
of the species, of the human race; that whoever was of no value to the
race, had to perish; that man's morality consisted of adapting oneself
to one's social environment, and seeking one's own happiness in the
welfare of society; and that the automatic processes of evolution
would eventually obliterate the distinction between selfishness and
unselfishness.  And when Karl Marx, the most consistent translator of
the altruist morality into practical action and political theory,
advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all, starting
with the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the
successful and the wealthy, whatever opposition he did encounter,
nobody opposed him on moral grounds. Predominantly, he was granted the
status of a noble, but impractical, idealist.  The great treason of
the philosophers was that they, the thinkers, defaulted on the
responsibility of providing a rational society with a code of rational
morality. They, whose job it was to discover and define man's moral
values, stared at the brilliant torrent of man's released energy and
had nothing better to offer for its guidance than the Witch Doctor's
morality of human sacrifices, of self-denial, self-abasement,
self-immolation, of suffering, guilt and death.  The failure of
philosophers to challenge the Witch Doctor's morality, has cost them
their kingdom: philosophy. The relationship of reason and morality is
reciprocal: the man who accepts the role of a sacrificial animal, will
not achieve the self-confidence necessary to uphold the validity of
his mind, the man who doubts the validity of his mind, will not
achieve the self-esteem necessary to uphold the value of his person
and to discover the moral premises that make man's value possible.
The intellectuals share the philosophers' guilt. The
intellectuals, all those whose professions deal with the

 humanities  and require a firm philosophical base, have known
for a long time that no such base existed. They knew that they were
functioning in a philosophical vacuum and that the currency they were
passing was rubber checks which would bounce, some day, wrecking their
culture.  One can never know, only surmise, what tragedies, despair
and silent devastation have been going on for over a century in the
invisible underground of the intellectual professions, in the souls
of their practitioners, nor what incalculable potential of human
ability and integrity perished in those hidden, lonely conflicts. The
young minds who came to the field of the intellect with the
inarticulate sense of a crusade, seeking rational answers to the
problems of achieving a meaningful human existence, found a
philosophical con game in place of guidance and leadership. Some of
them gave up the field of ideas, in hopeless, indignant frustration,
and vanished into the silence of subjectivity. Others gave in, and saw
their eagerness turn into bitterness, their quest into apathy, their
crusade into a cynical racket. They condemned themselves to the
chronic anxiety of a con man dreading exposure when they accepted the
roles of enlightened leaders, while knowing that their knowledge
rested on nothing but fog and that its only validation was somebody's
feelings.  They, the standard bearers of the mind, found themselves
dreading reason as an enemy, logic as a pursuer, thought as an
avenger. They, the proponents of ideas, found themselves clinging to
the belief that ideas were impotent: their choice was the futility of
a charlatan or the guilt of a traitor. They were not mediocrities when
they began their careers; they were pretentious mediocrities when they
ended. The exceptions are growing rarer with every generation. No one
can accept with psychological impunity the function of a Witch Doctor
under the banner of the intellect.  With nothing but quicksands to
stand on, the shifting mixture of Witch-doctory and Attila-ism as
their philosophical base, the intellectuals were unable to grasp, to
identify or to evaluate the historical drama taking place before them:
the industrial revolution and capitalism. They were like men who did
not see the splendor of a rocket bursting over their heads, because
their eyes were lowered in guilt. It was their job to see and to
explain, to a society of men stumbling dazedly out of a primeval
dungeon, the cause and the meaning of the events that were sweeping
them faster and farther than the motion of all the centuries behind
them. The intellectuals did not choose to see.  The men in the other
professions were not able to step back and observe. If some men found
themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a factory, that
was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive
beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in
the pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the
cause. They could not tell why the periodic famines, that had been
striking every twenty years to wipe out the 
 surplus  population
which pre-capitalist economies could not feed, now came to an end,
as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why fear seemed to be
lifting away from people's voices and from the streets of growing
cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the
world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them.  The
intellectuals, or their predominant majority, remained centuries
behind their time: still seeking the favor of noble protectors, some
of them were bewailing the 
 vulgarity  of commercial pursuits,
scoffing at those whose wealth was 
 new,  and, simultaneously,
blaming these new wealth-makers for all the poverty inherited from the
centuries ruled by the owners of nobly 
 non-commercial 
wealth. Others were denouncing machines as 
 inhuman,  and
factories as a blemish on the beauty of the countryside (where gallows
had formerly stood at the crossroads). Still others were calling for a
movement 
 back to nature,  to the handicrafts, to the Middle
Ages. And some were attacking scientists for inquiring into forbidden

 mysteries  and interfering with God's design.  The victim of
the intellectuals' most infamous injustice was the businessman.
Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of
Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate
between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and
the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm
of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like
the Witch Doctor's, their secret vision (almost their feared and
envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of
reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force,
fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were
practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever
ask what made it possible (they had been taught that causality is an
illusion and that only the immediate moment is real). They took it as
their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired
only by force, and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder,
with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.  With their eyes
still fixed on the Middle Ages, they were maintaining this in the
midst of a period when a greater amount of wealth than had ever before
existed in the world was being brought into existence all around
them. If the men who produced that wealth were thieves, from whom had
they stolen it? Under all the shameful twists of their evasions, the
intellectuals' answer was: from those who had not produced it. They
were refusing to acknowledge the industrial revolution (they are still
refusing today). They were refusing to admit into their universe what
neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit: the existence
of man, the Producer.  Evading the difference between production and
looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference
between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave
driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called
him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns,
they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and
force, they called him a tyrant The most crucial issue they had to
evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.
Ignoring the existence of the faculty they were betraying, the faculty
of discrimination, the intellect they refused to identify the fact
that industrial wealth was the product of man's mind: that an
incalculable amount of intellectual power, of creative intelligence,
of disciplined energy, of human genius had gone into the creation of
industrial fortunes. They could not afford to identify it, because
they could not afford to admit the fact that the intellect is a
practical faculty, a guide to man's successful existence on earth, and
that its task is the study of reality (as well as the production of
wealth), not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a
special monopoly on the 
 unknowable.  The Witch Doctor's
morality of altruism, the morality that damns all those who achieve
success or enjoyment on earth, provided the intellectuals with the
means to make a virtue of evasion. It gave them a weapon that disarmed
their victims; it gave them an automatic substitute for self-esteem,
and a chance at an unearned moral stature. They proclaimed themselves
to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading
the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer, and the
defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact
that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any
longer, but the strength of man's mind.  But while the intellectuals
regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave
as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to
behave: he was impervious to their power. The businessman was as
bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp
his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no
defense, and, knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing
also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not
his role, he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals'
attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but
had no use for Immanuel Kant. That which today is called 
 common
sense  is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was
the businessman's only form of philosophy. The businessman asked for
proof and expected things to make sense, an expectation that kicked
the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had
nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of
the 
 noumenal  world.  To understand the course the
intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch
Doctor's psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch
Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the
necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to
rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as
a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive their mutual
security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each
has a hold on the other's secret weakness. It is not the security of
two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the
security of two blackmailers, who count on each other's fear.  The
Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist
society, as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any
universe he cares to recognize. He has no means to deal with
innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in
guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his
living, who takes pride in his work and in the value of his
product, who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless
ambition to do better and still better and ever better, who is
willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his
achievements, who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness
of a child, knowing it to be intelligible, who demands straight
lines, clear terms, precise definitions, who stands in full sunlight
and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the
unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the
psycho-epistemology of guilt.  What the businessman offered to the
intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that
which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of
ideas.  To live by the work of one's mind, to offer men the products
of one's thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on
nothing but the merit of one's ideas and to rely on nothing but
objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think
and has 
 to judge, accept or reject on his own, is a task that
only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome
or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic

 elite.  A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector,
by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by
suppression, by censorship.  Having accepted the philosophy and the
psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut
the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own
historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to
make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the
intellectuals rebelled against the 
 commercialism  of a
capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was
the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas
were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were
great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective
reality.  Just as Attila, since the Renaissance, was looking for a
Witch Doctor of his own, so the intellectuals, since the industrial
revolution, were looking for an Attila of their own. The altruist
morality brought them together and gave them the weapon they
needed. The field where they found each other was Socialism.  It was
not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor
unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began the revolt
against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute state:
it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason who
brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.  Growing throughout
the nineteenth century, originated in and directed from intellectual
salons, sidewalk cafes, basement beer joints and university
classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the Witch Doctors
and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce ideas at the
point of a gun, that is: through the power of government, and compel
the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who would
gain control of the government's machinery. They extolled the State as
the 
 Form of the Good,  with man as its abject servant, and they
proposed as many variants of the socialist state as there had been of
the altruist morality. But, in both cases, the variations merely
played with the surface, while the cannibal essence remained the same:
socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own
sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to
society, that the only justification of his existence is his service
to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases
for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective
good.  It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist,
anti-conceptual mentality, which grants no validity to abstractions,
no meaning to principles and no power to ideas, that can still
wonder why a theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice
to the torrent of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist
societies as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Only the Attila-ist
mentality can still claim that nobody can prove that these had to be
the necessary results, or still try to blame it on the

 imperfection  of human nature or on the evil of some specific
gang who 
 betrayed a noble ideal,  and still promise that its
own gang would do it better and make it work, or still mumble in a
quavering voice that the motive was love of humanity.  The pretenses
have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer; the intellectuals
are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to evade its cause
and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man's metaphysically
predestined impotence.  Guilt and fear are the disintegrators of a
man's consciousness or of a society's culture. Today, America's
culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three
injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are
typical of guilt: don't look, don't judge, don't be certain.  The
psycho-epistemological meaning and implementation of these three are:
don't integrate, don't evaluate, give up.  The last stand of
Attila-ism, both in philosophy and in science, is the concerted
assertion of all the neo-mystics that integration is impossible and
unscientific. The escape from the conceptual level of consciousness,
the progressive contraction of man's vision down to Attila's range,
has now reached its ultimate climax. Withdrawing from reality and
responsibility, the neo-mystics proclaim that no entities exist, only
relationships, and that one may study relationships without anything
to relate, and, simultaneously, that every datum is single and
discrete, and no datum can ever be related to any other data, that
context is irrelevant, that anything may be proved or disproved in
midair and midstream, and the narrower the subject of study, the
better, that myopia is the hallmark of a thinker or a scientist.
System-building, the integration of knowledge into a coherent sum
and a consistent view of reality, is denounced by all the
Attila-ists as irrational, mystical and unscientific. This is Attila's
perennial way of surrendering to the Witch Doctor, and it explains
why so many scientists are turning to God or to such flights of
mysticism of their own as would make even an old-fashioned Witch
Doctor blush. No consciousness can accept disintegration as a normal
and permanent state. Science was born as a result and consequence of
philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly
epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to
go.  The abdication of philosophy is all but complete. Today's
philosophers, qua Witch Doctors, declare that nobody can define what
is philosophy or what is its specific task, but this need not prevent
anyone from practicing it as a profession. Qua Attila-ists, they
declare that the use of wide abstractions or concepts is the
prerogative of the layman or of the ignorant or of the man in the
street, while a philosopher is one who, knowing all the difficulties
involved in the problem of abstractions, deals with nothing but
concretes.  The injunction 
 don't judge  is the ultimate climax
of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked
essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic
forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous
compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while
turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and
the innocent, one may see the actual purpose, motive and
psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same
compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces
moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the
determination to fight against evil, one may see the kind of moral
blank check that the altruist morality hands out.  Perhaps the most
craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the Injunction

 don't be certain.  As stated explicitly by many intellectuals,
it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody
holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to
everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the
destruction sweeping the rest of the world. This is the secret voice
of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as
a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but
a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the
fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of
confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely
such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a
society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of
resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent
conviction and moral certainty, not by chickens hiding their heads
in the sand (
 ostrich  is too big and dignified a metaphor for
this instance).  And, paving the way for Attila, the intellectuals are
still repeating, not by conviction any longer, but by rote, that the
growth of government power is not an abridgment of freedom, that the
demand of one group for an unearned share of another group's income is
not socialism, that the destruction of property rights will not
affect any other rights, that man's mind, intelligence, creative
ability are a 
 national resource  (like mines, forests,
waterfalls, buffalo reserves and national parks) to be taken over,
subsidized and disposed of by the government, that businessmen are
selfish autocrats because they are struggling to preserve freedom,
while the 
 liberals  are the true champions of liberty because
they are fighting for more government controls, that the fact that
we are sliding down a road which has destroyed every other country,
does not prove that it will destroy ours, that dictatorship is not
dictatorship if nobody calls it by that abstract name, and that none
of us can help it, anyway.  Nobody believes any of it any longer, yet
nobody opposes it. To oppose anything, one needs a firm set of
principles, which means: a philosophy.  If America perishes, it will
perish by intellectual default There is no diabolical conspiracy to
destroy it: no conspiracy could be big enough and strong enough. Such
cafeteria-socialist conspiracies as do undoubtedly exist are groups of
scared, neurotic mediocrities who find themselves pushed into national
leadership because nobody else steps forward; they are like
pickpockets who merely intended to snatch a welfare-regulation or two
and who suddenly find that their victim is unconscious, that they are
alone in an enormous mansion of fabulous wealth, with all the doors
open and a seasoned burglar's job on their hands; watch them now
screaming that they didn't mean it, that they had never advocated the
nationalization of a country's economy. As to the communist
conspirators in the service of Soviet Russia, they are the best
illustration of victory by default: their successes are handed to them
by the concessions of their victims. There is no national movement for
socialism or dictatorship in America, no 
 man on horseback  or
popular demagogue, nothing but fumbling compromisers and frightened
opportunists. Yet we are moving toward full, totalitarian socialism,
with worn, cynical voices telling us that such is the irresistible
trend of history. History, fate and malevolent conspiracy are easier
to believe than the actual truth: that we are moved by nothing but the
sluggish inertia of unfocused minds.  Collectivism, as a social ideal,
is dead, but capitalism has not yet been discovered. It cannot be
discovered by the psycho-epistemology of Witch Doctors and
Attila-ists, and as to the businessman, he is struggling to forget
that he had ever known it. That is his guilt.  The businessman,
historically, had started as the victim of the intellectuals; but no
injustice or exploitation can succeed for long without the sanction of
the victim. The businessman, who could not accept the intellectual
leadership of post-Kantian Witch Doctors, made his fatal error when he
conceded to them the field of the intellect. He gave them the benefit
of the doubt, at his own expense: he concluded that their meaningless
verbiage could not be as bad as it sounded to him, that he lacked
understanding, but had no stomach for trying to understand that sort
of stuff and would leave it respectfully alone. No Witch Doctor could
have hoped for a deadlier concession.  By becoming anti-intellectual,
the businessman condemned himself to the position of an Attila. By
restricting his goals, concerns and vision exclusively to his specific
productive activity, he was forced to restrict his interests to
Attila's narrow range of the physical, the material, the immediately
present. Thus he tore himself in two by an inner contradiction: he
functioned on a confidently rational, conceptual level of
psycho-epistemology in business, but repressed all the other aspects
of his life and thought, letting himself he carried passively along by
the general cultural current, in the semi-unfocused, perceptual-level
daze of a man who considers himself impotent to judge what he
perceives. It is thus that he turned too often into the tragic
phenomenon of a genius in business who is a Babbitt in his private
life.  He repressed and renounced any interest in ideas, any quest for
intellectual values or moral principles. He could not accept the
altruist morality, as no man of self-esteem can accept it, and he
found no other moral philosophy. He lived by a subjective code of his
own, the code of justice, the code of a fair trader, without
knowing what a superlative moral virtue it represented. His private
version or understanding of altruism, particularly in
America, took the form of an enormous generosity, the joyous,
innocent, benevolent generosity of a self-confident man, who is too
innocent to suspect that he is hated for his success, that the
moralists of altruism want him to pay financial tributes, not as
kindness, but as atonement for the guilt of having succeeded. There
were exceptions; there were businessmen who did accept the full
philosophical meaning of altruism and its ugly burden of guilt, but
they were not the majority.  They are the majority today. No man or
group of men can live indefinitely under the pressure of moral
injustice: they have to rebel or give in. Most of the businessmen gave
in; it would have taken a philosopher to provide them with the
intellectual weapons of rebellion, but they had given up any interest
in philosophy. They accepted the burden of an unearned guilt; they
accepted the brand of 
 vulgar materialists ; they accepted the
accusations of 
 predatory greed , predatory toward the wealth
which they had created, greed for the fortunes which, but for them,
would not have existed. As a result, consciously or subconsciously,
they were driven to the cynical bitterness of the conviction that men
are irrational, that reason is impotent in human relationships, that
the field of ideas is some dark, gigantic, incomprehensible fraud.  No
one can accept unearned guilt with psychological impunity. Starting as
the most courageous class of men in history, the businessmen have
slipped slowly into the position of men motivated by chronic
fear, in all the social, political, moral, intellectual aspects of
their existence. Their public policy consists of appeasing their worst
enemies, placating their most contemptible attackers, trying to make
terms with their own destroyers, pouring money into the support of
leftist publications and 
 liberal  politicians, placing avowed
collectivists in charge of their public relations and then
voicing, in banquet speeches and full-page ads, socialistic
protestations that selfless service to society is their only goal, and
altruistic apologies for the fact that they still keep two or three
percent of profit out of their multi-million-dollar enterprises.
There are many different motives behind that policy. Some men are
moved by actual guilt: they are the new type of businessmen, the
product of a 
 mixed  economy, who make fortunes, not by
productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political
pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special
privileges; these are psycho-epistemologically and economically closer
to Attila than to the Producer, and have good reason to feel
guilty. Others are forced reluctantly into a mixed position, where
they still live by productive ability, yet have to depend on
government favors in order to function; these are the closest to the
position of self-destroyers. The majority of businessmen, perhaps
the ablest and best, work in silence and are never heard from
publicly. Most businessmen have probably given up the expectation of
any justice from the public. But there is one motive which is shared
by too many businessmen and which is the penalty for renouncing the
intellect: an unconfessed fear of ideas under the professed conviction
that ideas are futile, which leads to a nervously stubborn
evasiveness, an anxious feeling or hope that wealth as such is power,
that only material possessions are of practical importance.  Today,
the businessman and the intellectual face each other with the mutual
fear and the mutual contempt of Attila and the Witch Doctor. The
businessman has lost confidence in all theories, and functions on a
range-of-the-moment expediency, not daring to look at the future. The
intellectual has cut himself off from reality and plays a futile
word-game with ideas, not daring to look at the past. The businessman
considers the intellectual impractical; the intellectual considers the
businessman immoral. But, secretly, each of them believes that the
other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the
true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with
existence.  It is by this mutual attitude and the philosophical
premises from which it comes that they are destroying each other. The
major share of the guilt belongs to the intellectual: philosophical
leadership was his responsibility, which he betrayed and is now
deserting under fire.  The most grotesquely anachronistic and
atavistic spectacle in history is the spectacle of the modern
intellectuals raising the primordial voice of the Witch Doctor and, in
the midst of an industrial civilization, wailing about the hopeless
misery of life on earth, the depravity of man, the impotence of man's
mind, the ignoble vulgarity of material pursuits, and the nobility of
longing for the supernatural.  The echoes answering them are the
voices of the plain, medieval Witch Doctors that are beginning to be
heard again, preaching the doctrine of man's innate, preordained
impotence, of humility, passivity, submission and resignation, here,
in New York City, the greatest monument to the potency of man's
mind, and proclaiming that all the disasters of the modern age are
man's punishment for the pride of relying on his intellect, for his
attempt to Improve his condition, to establish a rational society and
to achieve a perfect way of life on earth.  On a recent television
panel discussion, an alleged conservative intellectual was asked to
define the difference between a 
 conservative  and a

 liberal.  He answered that a 
 liberal  is one who does
not believe in Original Sin. To which a liberal intellectual replied
hastily: 
 Oh, yes, we do! , but proceeded to add that the
liberals believe they can improve men's life just a little.  Such is
the bankruptcy of a culture.  It is into the midst of this dismal gray
vacuum that the New Intellectuals must step, and must challenge the
worshippers of doom, resignation and death, with an attitude best
expressed by a paraphrase of an ancient salute: 
 We who are not
about to die ...  Who are to be the New Intellectuals? Any man or
woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man's life must
be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not
willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of
cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world
to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.  The need for
intellectual leadership was never as great as now. No human being who
has a trace of personal worth can be willing to surrender his life
without lifting a hand, or a mind, to defend it, particularly not
in America, the country based on the premise of man's self-reliance
and self-esteem. Americans have known how to erect a superlative
material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against
the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a
corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material
greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on
cracker-barrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on
prayers, nor on meta-language. The new wilderness to reclaim is
philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric
doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture,
nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do. The present
state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the
proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to
this state, it is only philosophy that can lead them out.  Those who
could become the New Intellectuals are America's hidden assets; their
number is probably greater than anyone can estimate; they exist in
every profession, even among the present intellectuals. But they are
scattered in silent helplessness throughout the country, or hidden in
that underground which, in human history, has too often swallowed the
best of men's potential: subjectivity. They are the men who have long
since lost respect for the cultural standards to which they conform,
but who hide their own convictions or repress their ideas or suppress
their minds, each feeling that he has no chance against the others,
each serving as both victim and destroyer. The New Intellectuals will
be those men who will come out into the open and have the courage to
break that vicious circle.  If they glance at the state of our
culture, they will see that the entire miserable show is kept up by
nothing but routine and pretense, which disguise bewilderment and
fear: nobody dares to take the first new step, everybody waits for his
neighbor's initiative. If a society reaches the stage where every man
accepts the feeling that he is 
 a stranger and afraid in a world
[he] never made,  the world it gives up will be made by Attila. The
greatest need today is for men who are not strangers to reality,
because they are not afraid of thought. The New Intellectuals will be
those who will take the initiative and the responsibility: they will
check their own philosophical premises, identify their convictions,
integrate their ideas into coherence and consistency, then offer to
the country a view of existence to which the wise and honest can
repair.  The New Intellectual will be the man who lives up to the
exact meaning of his title: a man who is guided by his
intellect, not a zombie guided by feelings, instincts, urges,
wishes, whims or revelations. Ending the rule of Attila and the Witch
Doctor, he will discard the basic premise that made them possible: the
soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and
contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action,
reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an
integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will
know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and
that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the
conceptual level of psycho-epistemology, the volitional level of
reason and thought, is the basic necessity of man's survival and his
greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the
purpose of living on earth.  The New Intellectual will be a reunion of
the twins who should never have been separated: the intellectual and
the businessman. He can come from among the best, that is: the most
rational, men who may still exist in both camps. In place of an
involuntary Witch Doctor and a reluctant Attila, the reunion will
produce two new types: the practical thinker and the philosophical
businessman.  The best among the present intellectuals should consider
the tremendous power which they are holding, but have never fully
exercised or understood. If any man among them feels that he is the
helpless, ineffectual stepson of a 
 materialistic  culture that
grants him neither wealth nor recognition, let him remember the
meaning of his title: his power is his intellect not his feelings,
emotions or intuitions. It is not the businessmen who have robbed him
of efficacy, but those of his colleagues who have degraded his
profession to the level of soothsayers, tea-leaf readers and jungle
oracles. Let him break with the neo-mystics; let him realize that
ideas are not an escape from reality, not a hobby for

 disinterested  neurotics in ivory towers, but the most crucial
and practical power in human existence. Then let him become an
intellectual leader who assumes full responsibility for the practical
consequences of his theories.  The best among the businessmen should
consider the function of wealth, and realize that the power behind the
incomprehensible evil now unleashed against them is their own. Wealth,
as such, is only a tool; by renouncing his intellect, the businessman
has placed his wealth in the service of his own destroyers. They do
not deed to nationalize his property: they nationalized his mind long
ago. Let him now realize that practical action without a theoretical
base achieves the opposite of his goals, and that intellectual
irresponsibility is not a way of escape from his enemies. Then let him
discover the function of philosophy.  Instead of those ludicrous
programs of 
 student exchanges  between America and Soviet
Russia, for the alleged purpose of 
 gaining mutual
understanding,  there ought to be a private, voluntary program of

 student exchanges  between the intellectuals and the
businessmen, the two groups that need each other most, yet know less
and understand less about each other than about any alien society in
any distant corner of the globe. The businessmen need to discover the
intellect; the intellectuals need to discover reality. Let the
intellectuals understand the nature and the function of a free market
in order to offer the businessmen, as well as the public at large, the
guidance of an intelligible theoretical framework for dealing with
men, with society, with politics, with economics. Let the businessmen
learn the basic issues and principles of philosophy in order to know
how to judge ideas, then let them assume full responsibility for the
kind of ideologies they choose to finance and support.  Let them both
discover (he nature, the theory and the actual history of capitalism;
both groups are equally ignorant of it No other subject is hidden by
so many distortions, misconceptions, misrepresentations and
falsifications. Let them study the historical facts and discover that
all the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused,
necessitated and made possible only by government controls imposed on
the economy. Whenever they hear capitalism being denounced, let them
check the facts and discover which of the two opposite political
principles, free trade or government controls, was responsible for
the alleged iniquities. When they hear it said that capitalism has had
its chance and has failed, let them remember that what ultimately
failed was a 
 mixed  economy, that the controls were the cause
of the failure, and that the way to save a country is not by making it
swallow a full, 
 unmixed  glass of the poison which is killing
it.  The Founding Fathers were America's first intellectuals and, so
far, her last. It is their basic political line that the New
Intellectuals have to continue. Today, that line is lost under layer
upon layer of evasions, equivocations and plain falsehood; today's
Witch Doctors claim that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was
faith and uncritical compliance with tradition; today's Attila-ists
claim that that basic premise was the subordination of the individual
to the collective and his sacrifice to the public good. The New
Intellectuals must remind the world that the basic premise of the
Founding Fathers was man's right to his own life, to his own liberty,
to the pursuit of his own happiness, which means: man's right to
exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation
of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders,
by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.  The moral premises implicit
in the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, in the social
system they established and in the economics of capitalism, must now
be recognized and accepted in the form of an explicit moral
philosophy. That which is merely Implicit is not in men's conscious
control; they can lose it by means of other implications, without
knowing what it is that they are losing or when or why. It was the
morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying
her. From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political
system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are
incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist
in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has
reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new
morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom,
justice, progress and man's happiness on earth, or the primordial
morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force,
stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.  The world crisis of today
is a moral crisis, and nothing less than a moral revolution can
resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political
achievement of the American Revolution. Evasions, equivocations and
guilty apologies will not work any longer. The disgraceful injustice
which penalized virtue for being virtue, which forced businessmen to
apologize for their ability, for their success, for their
achievements, has now been projected onto a global scale and
translated into the disgraceful spectacle of America apologizing for
her virtues and greatness to that bloody slaughterhouse of embodied
altruism which is Soviet Russia.  The New Intellectuals must fight for
capitalism, not as a 
 practical  issue, not as an economic
issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is
what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it The New
Intellectuals must assume the task of building a new culture on a new
moral foundation, which, for once, will not be the culture of Attila
and the Witch Doctor, but the culture of the Producer. They will have
to be radicals in the literal and reputable sense of the word:

 radical  means 
 fundamental.  The representatives of
intellectual orthodoxy, conventionality and status quo, the Babbitts
of today, are the collectivists. Let those who do care about the
future, those willing to crusade for a perfect society, realize that
the new radicals are the fighters for capitalism.  It is not an easy
task and it cannot be achieved overnight But the New Intellectuals
have an inestimable advantage: they have reality on their side. The
difficulties they will encounter on their way are not stone barriers,
but fog: the heavy fog of passive disintegration, through which it
will be hard for them to find one another. They will encounter no
opposition, since, in this context, an opposition would have to
possess intellectual weapons. As to their enemies, they should comply
with their enemies' request, and leave them to heaven.  The process
of identifying, judging, accepting and upholding a new philosophy of
life is a long, complicated process, which requires thought, proof,
full understanding and conviction. But there are two principles on
which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a

 basic minimum,  as a precondition of any discussion,
co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. One
principle is epistemological, the other is moral; they are not axioms,
but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he
is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are:
a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the
right to initiate the use of physical force against others.  a. The
first of these two principles represents one's basic rejection of the
Witch Doctor's psycho-epistemology. It means that one must
differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full
clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to
possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know,
and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full
system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one's own
considered judgment from one's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. Those
who claim that they cannot do it are merely confessing that they have
never learned how to use their mind and are incapable of perceiving,
judging or evaluating reality. This may be a psychological problem,
but it becomes an intellectual fraud when such persons enter a
philosophical discussion and demand consideration for their ideas. No
discussion, co-operation, agreement or understanding is possible among
men who substitute emotion for proof.  b. This second principle
represents one's basic rejection of Attila's psycho-epistemology. To
claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another
man, the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical
destruction, is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of
rights, of morality and of the intellect. Perhaps the most obscene
legacy of altruism among modern intellectuals is their axiomatic
acceptance of brute force and of somebody's sacrifice as a normal and
necessary part of a human society, and their refusal to consider the
possibility of a non-sacrificial, non-compulsory co-existence and
co-operation among men. Observe that they cannot conceive of

 selfishness  except in terms of sacrificing others to oneself,
and they cannot conceive of anyone who does not regard such
sacrificing as to his own interest This, of course, is a psychological
confession about the nature of their own desires and about the Attila
in their souls. When they declare that they see no difference between
economic power and political power, which means: no difference
between an employer and a holdup man, no difference between the United
States and Soviet Russia, they are confessing a Witch Doctor's
abject fear of reality, which makes them equate a Producer with an
Attila.  One would suppose that any man who makes claim to the title
of moralist, humanitarian or intellectual would spend his life trying
to devise, as an ideal, a social system where no man or group of
men may initiate the use of physical force against others or demand
the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. But when one remembers that such a
system was devised and did exist less than a hundred years ago, one
knows how to evaluate the brutes and thugs of the spirit who refuse to
consider it possible.  So long as men believe that the initiation of
physical force by some men against others is a proper part of an
organized society, hatred, violence, brutality, destruction,
slaughter and the savage gang warfare of group against group are all
they can or will achieve. When physical force is the ultimate arbiter,
men are driven to connive, conspire and gang up on one another in
order to destroy rather than be destroyed; the best perish, but the
Attilas rise to the top. It might be understandable that primitive,
savage tribes could not conceive of a way of life without resort to
physical violence, and the bloody chaos of tribal warfare was all
they achieved, as those who remained on that level still demonstrate
today. But when men propose to live in an industrial civilization by
the moral concepts of those jungle savages, with nuclear missiles and
H-bombs at their disposal, they deserve the catastrophes they ask
for. Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or
supports any social system that initiates the use of physical force
against individual men, in any form whatever. Let no man posture as an
advocate of freedom if he claims the right to establish his version of
a good society where individual dissenters are to be suppressed by
means of physical force. Let no man posture as an intellectual if he
proposes to elevate a thug into the position of final authority over
the intellect, or if he equates the power of physical compulsion
with the power of persuasion, or if he equates the power of muscles
with the power of ideas.  No advocate of reason can claim the right to
force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the
right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no
co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are
possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational
persuasion.  If men of good will wish to come together for the purpose
of upholding reason and establishing a rational society, they should
begin by following the example of the cowboys in Western movies when
the sheriff tells them at the door to a conference room:

 Gentlemen, leave your guns outside.  Those who will accept the

 basic minimum  of civilization, the two principles stated
above, will have made the first step toward the building of a new
culture in the wide-open spaces of today's intellectual vacuum. There
is an ancient slogan that applies to our present position: 
 The
king is dead, long live the king!  We can say, with the same
dedication to the future: 
 The intellectuals are dead, long live
the intellectuals! , and then proceed to fulfill the
responsibility which that honorable title had once implied.
 
We the Living This novel was published in 1936 and reissued in
1959. Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme
value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that
claims the right to sacrifice it. The story takes place in Soviet
Russia. The excerpt below is the speech of Kira Argounova to Andrei
Taganov, in the following context: Kira has been having a love affair
with Andrei in order to obtain money to save the life of Leo
Kovalensky, the man she loves; Andrei, an idealistic young Communist,
who is profoundly in love with her, was beginning to discover the
importance of personal values, when, in the course of arresting Leo
for a political crime, he learns the truth about Kira's relationship
to both of them.


 No, you didn't know. But it was very simple. And not very
unusual. Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your
Red cities and see how many oases like this you can find. He wanted to
live. You think everything that breathes can live? You've learned
differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren't
many of them, so they don't count with you. The doctor said he was
going to die. And I loved him. You've learned what that means, too,
haven't you? He didn't need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and
food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to
beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor
in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list. ...

 You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one
sees it, but I do, I can't help it, I see it, you must see it,
too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what?
Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn't
even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just
flesh. Human flesh. And they, it, had been registered and
numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if
they're registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a
chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are
cobblestones to you. And diamonds, they're useless, because they
sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it's too hard on the eyes, and
it's too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian
future. You don't pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses
in the world, but of those you've never learned. That is why you had
sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a
firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told
me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why
couldn't one aristocrat die, in the face of the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics
in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to
answer. I'm grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do
what I've done. I don't hate him. You should hate him. What I'm doing
to you, he did it first! ...  
 That's the question, you know,
don't you? Why can't one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of
Socialist Soviet Republics? You don't understand that, do you? You and
your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that's
what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A
great gift, isn't it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it In you
and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living
world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union
Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that
of the State, well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you
to the last hell of despair, well then, why don't you say that one's
own life doesn't really matter? ... You loved a woman and she threw
your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin
have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars
and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen
Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten
thousand bushels of wheat last month! You've had every beam knocked
from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new
electric plant on the Volga! Why don't you smile and sing hymns to the
toil of the Collective? It's still there, your Collective. Go and join
it. Did anything really happen to you? It's nothing but a personal
problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could
worry about, isn't it? Don't you have something greater, greater is
the word your comrades use, left to live for? Or do you, Comrade
Taganov? ...  
 Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I
knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive
in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat
and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food
to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which
knows how to want, isn't that life itself? And who, in this damned
universe, who can tell me why I should live for anything but for
that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for
human reason?... But you've tried to tell us what we should want. You
came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life
you knew nothing about, out of their guts, and you told them what it
had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every
thought in the farthest corners of their souls, and you told them
what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You've
driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and
you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our
spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it's doing to us. Well,
then, look! All of you who have eyes left, look! 
 
Anthem This novelette was first published in England in 1938. Its
theme is: the meaning of man's ego. It projects a society of the
future, which has accepted total collectivism with all of its ultimate
consequences: men have relapsed into primitive savagery and
stagnation; the word 
 I  has vanished from the human language,
there are no singular pronouns, a man refers to himself as 
 we 
and to another man as 
 they.  The story presents the gradual
rediscovery of the word 
 I  by a man of intransigent mind. The
following excerpt is from his statement about his discovery.


 I am. I think. I will. ...  
 What must I say besides? These are
the words. This is the answer.  
 I stand here on the summit of the
mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and
spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning
of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I
need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am
the warrant and the sanction. ...  
 I know not if this earth on
which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of
dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what
happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher
aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is
the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.  
 Neither am I
the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool
for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage
for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. ...  
 I owe
nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to
live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor
is my soul theirs to covet 
 I am neither foe nor friend to my
brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my
love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant
my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to
claim it I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.

 I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor
masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall
love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our
hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple
of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple
untouched and undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he
wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold.  
 For the word ‘We'
must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought
This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it
becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of
man's torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.  
 The word ‘We'
is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and
crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is
black are lost equally in the gray of it. It is the word by which the
depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the
might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

 What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it?
What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my
freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my
masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

 But I am done with this creed of corruption.  
 I am done with
the monster of We,  the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery,
falsehood and shame.  
 And now I see the face of god, and I raise
this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came
into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

 This god, this one word: I. 
 
The Fountainhead This novel was published in 1943. Its theme is:
individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul;
the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the
character of an individualist or a collectivism. The story presents
the career of Howard Roark, an architect and innovator, who breaks
with tradition, recognizes no authority but that of his own
independent judgment, struggles for the integrity of his creative work
against every form of social opposition, and wins.  THE NATURE OF
THE SECOND-HANDER This excerpt is from a conversation between Roark
and his friend Gail Wynand, in which Roark explains what he has
discovered about the psychology of those whose basic motivation is the
opposite of his own.


 It's what I couldn't understand about people for a long time. They
have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at
Peter Keating. ... I've looked at him, at what's left of him, and
it's helped me to understand. He's paying the price and wondering for
what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act
or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in
life? Greatness, in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration,
envy, all that which comes from others. Others dictated his
convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others
believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime
concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He
didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from
others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual
selflessness. It's his ego that he's betrayed and given up. But
everybody calls him selfish. ...  
 Isn't that the root of every
despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a
self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a
respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think
he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that,
second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not
his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes
of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior
and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own
superiority by comparison. ... They're second-handers. ...  
 They
have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with
people. They don't ask: ‘Is this true?' They ask: ‘Is this what
others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to
give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but
friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world
without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You
don't think through another's brain and you don't work through
another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent
judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop
life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not
within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body
from another. Not an entity, but a relation, anchored to
nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's
what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an
ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or
motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the
source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's
everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to
reason. You can't speak to him, he can't hear. You're tried by an
empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or
purpose. ... 


 Notice how they'll accept anything except a man who stands
alone. They recognize him at once. ... There's a special, insidious
kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire
dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual
dependence. They need ties. They've got to force their miserable
little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent
man kills them, because they don't exist within him and that's the
only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of
resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the
malice toward an independent man. ... 


 After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism
is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could
be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living
second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It
has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man
couldn't have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from
selflessness, we're asked to destroy the self. Listen to what is being
preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they
suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped
and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd
find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his
dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really
struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's
delusion, prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no
joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say
about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it,
not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he wonders why he's
unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are
personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are
sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous
sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into
public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We
haven't even got a word for the quality I mean, for the
self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it
selfishness or egoism, the words have been perverted, they've come to
mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is
that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always
demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always
recognized it at once, and it's the only quality I respect in men. I
chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient
ego. Nothing else matters.  THE SOUL OF A COLLECTIVIST This excerpt
is the confession of Roark's antipode and archenemy, Ellsworth
M. Toohey, an architectural critic and sociologist, who spends his
life plotting the future establishment of a collectivist society. He
is addressing one of his own victims.


 I've always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It's
not my fault if you couldn't hear. You could, of course. You didn't
want to. Which was safer than deafness, for me. I said I intended to
rule. Like all my spiritual predecessors. But I'm luckier than they
were. I inherited the fruit of their efforts and I shall be the one
who'll see the great dream made real. I see it all around me today. I
recognize it. I don't like it. I didn't expect to like it Enjoyment is
not my destiny. I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity
permits. I shall rule. ...  
 It's only a matter of discovering the
lever. If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the
rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords
or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons
were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which
can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers
on it, and the man is yours. You won't need a whip, he'll bring it
to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse, and his own
mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to
know how it's done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven't
heard all this for years, but didn't want to hear, and the fault is
yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here's one. Make man feel
small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his
integrity. That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal
in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it
against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all
integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for
others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them
has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living
instinct screams against it. But don't you see what you accomplish?
Man realizes that he's incapable of what he's accepted as the noblest
virtue, and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic
unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp he gives up
eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal
value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can't practice. But
one can't be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one's
integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be
corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You've got
him. He'll obey. He'll be glad to obey, because he can't trust
himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That's one way. Here's
another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize
greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want
any great men. Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from
within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up
standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most
inept, and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or
small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to
perfection. ... Don't set out to raze all shrines, you'll frighten
men. Enshrine mediocrity, and the shrines are razed. Then there's
another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human
joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a
sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a
sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain
sacred in a man's soul, and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill
reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence
with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to his
obedience, anything goes, nothing is too serious. Here's another
way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is
self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use
for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take
away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them
have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal
desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want' is no
longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great
help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll
come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no
vacuum. Empty man's soul, and the space is yours to fill. I don't
see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of
all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from
the Orient up. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy?
Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single
leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able
to catch their theme song, ‘Give up, give up, give up, give up'?
Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from
cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered
depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy, and
you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to
guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into
a sacrificial furnace, lie on a bed of nails, go into the desert
to mortify the flesh, don't dance, don't go to the movies on
Sunday, don't try to get rich, don't smoke, don't drink. It's
all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this
nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But
there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a
folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of
ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled
millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people
that they'll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up
everything that makes them happy. You don't have to be too clear about
it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony', ‘Eternal
Spirit', ‘Divine
Purpose', ‘Nirvana', ‘Paradise', ‘Racial
Supremacy', ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.' Internal
corruption, Peter. That's the oldest one of all. The farce has been
going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should
be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of
sacrifice, run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason
that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial
offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The
man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And
intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that
you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty
is to yourself, that will be the man who's not after your soul. That
will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and
you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish
monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you
might have noticed something. I said, ‘It stands to reason.' Do you
see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure
to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be
careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give
your hand away. Don't say reason is evil, though some have gone that
far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is
limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be
too clear about it either. The field's
inexhaustible. ‘Instinct', ‘Feeling', ‘Revelation', ‘Divine
Intuition', ‘Dialectical Materialism.' If you get caught at some
crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make
sense, you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something
above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must
believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in
any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule
a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men. ...  
 Peter, you've
heard all this. You've seen me practicing it for ten years. You see it
being practiced all over the world. Why are you disgusted? You have no
right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of
being shocked. You're in on it. You've taken your share and you've got
to go along. You're afraid to see where it's leading. I'm not. I'll
tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of
obedience and unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be
his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his
neighbor who'll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the
thought of the next neighbor who'll have no thought, and so on,
Peter, around the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where
no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts
to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who'll have no desires except
to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who'll have no
desires, around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world
in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but
for that headless monster, prestige. The approval of his
fellows, their good opinion, the opinion of men who'll be allowed
to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. Judgment,
Peter? Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon
zeros, since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its
motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand, and the
hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what
makes you tick, you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen
in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you
who've liked and accepted those names. You'll sit enthroned and
enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past
rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet
and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the
general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The
rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by
someone at some time. We'll do the originating. Vox dei. We'll enjoy
unlimited submission, from men who've learned nothing except to
submit. We'll call it ‘to serve.' We'll give out medals for
service. You'll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can
submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek. No
other form of personal achievement. Can you see Howard Roark in the
picture? No? Then don't waste time on foolish questions. Everything
that can't be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born
occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When
their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will
explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of
deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future
Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the
imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on
his forehead. The touch of thought. But we'll have neither God nor
thought. Only voting by smiles. Automatic levers, all saying yes
... Now if you were a little more intelligent, like your ex-wife,
for instance, you'd ask: What of us, the rulers? What of me,
Ellsworth Monkton Toohey? And I'd say, Yes, you're right I'll achieve
no more than you will. I'll have no purpose save to keep you
contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your
vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good. Peter,
my poor old friend, I'm the most selfless man you've ever known. I
have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your
soul. You've used people at least for the sake of what you could get
from them for yourself. I want nothing for myself. I use people for
the sake of what I can do to them. It's my only function and
satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world
of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none
profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all
stagnate. There's equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will
of all. Universal slavery, without even the dignity of a
master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle, and a total
equality. The world of the future. ...  
 Look around you. Pick up
any newspaper and read the headlines. Isn't it coming? Isn't it here?
Every single thing I told you? Isn't Europe swallowed already and
we're stumbling on to follow? Everything I said is contained in a
single word, collectivism. And isn't that the god of our century? To
act together. To think, together. To feel, together. To unite, to
agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and
conquer, first. But then, unite and rule. We've discovered that
one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity
had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for
centuries. But we'll have the last laugh. We've accomplished what he
couldn't accomplish. We've taught men to unite. This makes one neck
ready for one leash. We've found the magic word. Collectivism. Look at
Europe, you fool. Can't you see past the guff and recognize the
essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no
rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the
mass, as God. No motive and no virtue permitted, except that of
service to the proletariat. That's one version. Here's another. A
country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the
State is all. The individual held as evil, the race, as God. No
motive and no virtue permitted, except that of service to the
race. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents
already? Watch the pincer movement. If you're sick of one version, we
push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We've closed the
doors. We've fixed the coin. Heads, collectivism, and
tails, collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the
individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up
your soul to a council, or give it up to a leader. But give it up,
give it up, give it up. My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and
poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main
objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun, but
don't forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the
individual. Kill man's soul. The rest will follow automatically. 
THE SOUL OF AN INDIVIDUALIST This is the speech that Howard Roark
makes in his own defense, while on trial for having dynamited a
government housing project under construction; he had designed the
project for another architect, Peter Keating, on the agreement that it
would be built exactly as he designed it; the agreement was broken by
the government agency; the two architects had no recourse to law, not
being permitted to sue the government.


 Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make
fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers
to light He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon
mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to
cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they
had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries
later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the
rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a
transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter,
men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had
not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.  
 That man,
the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every
legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was
chained to a rock and torn by vultures, because he had stolen the
fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer, because he had eaten
the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in
the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one
and that that one paid for his courage.  
 Throughout the centuries
there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing
but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in
common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed,
and me response they received, hatred. The great creators, the
thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors, stood alone
against the men of their time. Every great new thought was
opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was
considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power
loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the
men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and
they paid. But they won.  
 No creator was prompted by a desire to
serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and
that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was
his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his
own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a
building, that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read,
operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The
creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived
from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth
above all things and against all men.  
 His vision, his strength,
his courage came from his own spirit. A man's spirit, however, is his
self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to
judge, to act are functions of the ego.  
 The creators were not
selfless. It is the whole secret of their power, that it was
self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a
fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served
nothing and no one. He lived for himself.  
 And only by living for
himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of
mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.  
 Man cannot survive
except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his
only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs,
no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt
it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs
weapons, and to make weapons, a process of thought. From this
simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the
wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have
comes from a single attribute of man, the function of his reasoning
mind.  
 But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no
such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a
collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a
compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a
secondary consequence. The primary act, the process of
reason, must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal
among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man
can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain
to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are
private. They cannot be shared or transferred.  
 We inherit the
products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a
cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an
airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is
only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the
creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and
originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or
received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual
men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn
from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of
material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that
capacity is our only means of survival.  
 Nothing is given to man
on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces
his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways, by
the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds
of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator
faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

 The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's
concern is the conquest of men.  
 The creator lives for his
work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The
parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime
motive.  
 The basic need of the creator is independence. The
reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be
curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It
demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator,
all relations with men are secondary.  
 The basic need of the
second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He
places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve
others. He preaches altruism.  
 Altruism is the doctrine which
demands that man live for others and place others above self.  
 No
man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot
share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of
exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men
have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have
been taught dependence as a virtue.  
 The man who attempts to live
for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes
parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but
mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach
to it in reality, the man who lives to serve others, is the
slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is
the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a
vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of
considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself
voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He
degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of
love. But this is the essence of altruism.  
 Men have been taught
that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot
give that which has not been created. Creation comes before
distribution, or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of
the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we
are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not
produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act
of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.  
 Men have been
taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of
others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries
to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue
is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must
wish to see others suffer, in order that he may be virtuous. Such is
the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but
with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of
disease after another, in man's body and spirit, and brought more
relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive.  
 Men
have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the
creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a
virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes
against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand
together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.  
 Men have
been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the
ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense,
and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or
act. These are functions of the self.  
 Here the basic reversal is
most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no
alternative, and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was
offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean
the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism, the sacrifice of self to
others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing
but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or
pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added
that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man
was forced to accept masochism as his ideal, under the threat that
sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever
perpetrated on mankind.  
 This was the device by which dependence
and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.  
 The
choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence
or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the
second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative
of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the
reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the
second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of
survival. All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is
good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil.

 The egoist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices
others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any
manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with
them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in
his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He
does not exist for any other man, and he asks no other man to exist
for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect
possible between men.  
 Degrees of ability vary, but the basic
principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence,
initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a
worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human
virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has
or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal
dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

 In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to
anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his
work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house
just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual
consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and
they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not
forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only
possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a
relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.  
 No work is
ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is
achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An
architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does
not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free
agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses
steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain
just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What be
does with them is his individual product and his individual
property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

 The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty
is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within
the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes,
provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This
includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his
work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist
and the dictator.  
 A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob,
exploit or rule, alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose
victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the
second-hander.  
 Rulers of men are not egoists. They create
nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal
is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as
dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of
dependence does not matter.  
 But men were taught to regard
second-handers, tyrants, emperors, dictators, as exponents of
egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves
and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or
to harness them. Which is a synonym.  
 From the beginning of
history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and
the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the
first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.  
 The
creator, denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited, went on, moved
forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The
second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the
impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the
collective.  
 The ‘common good' of a collective, a race, a
class, a state, was the claim and justification of every tyranny
ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed
in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever
equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the
fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The
most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the
perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing
squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were
murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be
sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy
remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love
for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so
long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That
permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The
leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But
observe the results.  
 The only good which men can do to one
another and the only statement of their proper relationship
is, Hands off!  
 Now observe the results of a society built on
the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country
in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest
prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless
service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was
based on a man's right to the pursuit of happiness. His own
happiness. Not anyone else's. A private, personal, selfish
motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience.  
 It is
an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was
destroyed each time and one civilization fell after
another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The
savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his
tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

 Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and
second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running
amuck. It has brought men to a level of intellectual indecency never
equaled on earth. It has reached a scale of horror without
precedent. It has poisoned every mind. It has swallowed most of
Europe. It is engulfing our country.  
 I am an architect. I know
what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are
approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.  
 Now
you know why I dynamited Cortlandt.  
 I designed Cortlandt. I gave
it to you. I destroyed it.  
 I destroyed it because I did not
choose to let it exist. It was a double monster. In form and in
implication. I had to blast both. The form was mutilated by two
second-handers who assumed the right to improve upon that which they
had not made and could not equal. They were permitted to do it by the
general implication that the altruistic purpose of the building
superseded all rights and that I had no claim to stand against it.

 I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected
as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for
my work. I was not paid.  
 I do not blame Peter Keating. He was
helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had
a promise that the structure he offered would be built as
designed. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity
of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague
intangible and an inessential. You have heard the prosecutor say
that. Why was the building disfigured? For no reason. Such acts never
have any reason, unless it's the vanity of some second-handers who
feel they have a right to anyone's property, spiritual or
material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the
dozens in authority. No one cared to permit or to stop it. No one was
responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all
collective action.  
 I did not receive the payment I asked. But the
owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme
devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one
else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took
the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am
not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.  
 It is
said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten
that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular
home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who
have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed
that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my
work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my
duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the
second-hander's credo now swallowing the world.  
 I came here to
say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my
life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No
matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their
need.  
 I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not
exist for others.  
 It had to be said. The world is perishing from
an orgy of self-sacrificing.  
 I wished to come here and say that
the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than
any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are
the men who're destroying the world.  
 I wished to come here and
state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.  
 I recognize
no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to
take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten
years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I
will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has
been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what
has taken its place.  
 My act of loyalty to every creator who ever
lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the
Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial,
frustration, abuse he was made to spend, and to the battles be
won. To every creator whose name is known, and to every creator who
lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To
every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry
Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn't want to be named, but
who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of
him. 
 
Atlas Shrugged This novel was published in 1957. Its theme is: the
role of the mind in man's existence, and, as corollary, the
demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational
self-interest.  The story shows what happens to the world when the
mind goes on strike, when the men of creative ability, in every
profession, quit and disappear. To quote John Galt, the leader and
initiator of the strike: 
 There is only one kind of men who have
never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have
stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world,
claiming to be indispensable, except the men who have carried the
world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as
sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their
turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and
what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the
men of the mind.  THE MEANING OF MONEY This is a speech made by
Francisco d'Anconia, copper industrialist, heir to an enormous
fortune, Galt's closest friend and first to join him in going on
strike.


 So you think that money is the root of all evil?  said
Francisco d'Anconia. 
 Have you ever asked what is the root of
money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are
goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material
shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must
deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the
moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take
it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who
produce. Is this what you consider evil?  
 When you accept money in
payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you
will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not
the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of
tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of
paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive
tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a
token of honor, your claim upon the energy of the men who
produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the
world around you there are men who will not default on that moral
principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

 Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an
electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the
muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat
without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for
the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but
physical motions, and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of
all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on
earth.  
 But you say that money is made by the strong at the
expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength
of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to
think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the
expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the
intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of
the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is
made, before it can be looted or mooched, made by the effort of
every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is
one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.  
 To
trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money
rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his
effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort
except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his
effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your
labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no
more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the
unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition
that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury,
for their gain, not their loss, the recognition that they are not
beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery, that you
must offer them values, not wounds, that the common bond among men
is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money
demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your
talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest
they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live
by trade, with reason, not force, as their final arbiter, it is
the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best
judgment and highest ability, and the degree of a man's
productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of
existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider
evil?  
 But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you
wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the
means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide
you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to
reverse the law of causality, the men who seek to replace the mind
by seizing the products of the mind.  
 Money will not purchase
happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will
not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to
value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the
choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool,
or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man
who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him,
with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim
of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats
and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not
discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the
reason why you call it evil?  
 Only the man who does not need it,
is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his own fortune no
matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves
him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money
corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a
worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no
better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed
among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one,
would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a
living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind
that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

 Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon
the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your
life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own
existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's
vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting
more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing
work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will
not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things
you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an
achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is
evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect?
Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the
root of your hatred of money?  
 Money will always remain an effect
and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of
virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your
vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in
spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?  
 Or did you say
it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is
to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the
fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your
passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among
men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is
loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money, and he has good reason
to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know
they are able to deserve it.  
 Let me give you a tip on a clue to
men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it
dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.  
 Run for your
life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is
the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live
together on earth and need means to deal with one another, their
only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

 But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make
it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men
who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not
willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for
being rich, will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait
for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but
come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven
for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the
guilt, and of his life, as he deserves.  
 Then you will see the
rise of the men of the double standard, the men who live by force,
yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their
looted money, the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral
society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to
protect you against them. But when a society establishes
criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize
the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators'
avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once
they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet
for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race
goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at
brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the
pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and
slaughter.  
 Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch
money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that
trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion, when you see
that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who
produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who
deal, not in goods, but in favors, when you see that men get richer
by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you
against them, but protect them against you, when you see corruption
being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know
that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does
not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It
will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

 Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying
money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral
existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit
pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men
into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an
objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage
on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are
expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon
an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch
for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.' 
 When
you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain
good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the
purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to
produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask,
‘Who is destroying the world?' You are.  
 You stand in the midst
of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization
and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its
life-blood, money. You look upon money as the savages did before
you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of
your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by
looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method
remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers
bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the
evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes
from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves, slaves
who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left
unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force,
and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet
through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted
the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as
aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as
traders, as shopkeepers, as industrialists.  
 To the glory of
mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country
of money, and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to
America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom,
production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were
set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only
fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared
the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of
human being, the self-made man, the American industrialist.

 If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I
would choose, because it contains all the others, the fact that
they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.' No
other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had
always thought of wealth as a static quantity, to be seized, begged,
inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the
first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to
make money' hold the essence of human morality.  
 Yet these were
the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of
the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to
regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your
prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as
blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and
property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the
pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference
between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to
learn the difference on his own hide, as, I think, he will.

 Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good,
you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by
which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of
men. Blood, whips and guns, or dollars. Take your choice, there is
no other, and your time is running out.  THE MARTYRDOM OF THE
INDUSTRIALISTS This is part of a conversation between Francisco
d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, a self-made man who has risen to the
position of the country's greatest steel industrialist. (Francisco
speaking.)


 You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out
to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your
comfort, to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who
know from your work that one bears punishment only for being
wrong, what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All
your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but
for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes,
but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those
qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been
called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and
bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called
arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for
your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the
vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been
called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to
your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your
power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of
energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance
where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men
before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all
alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral
man among them, have been sneered at as a Vulgar materialist.' Have
you stopped to ask them: by what right?, by what code?, by what
standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to
their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting
morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them
brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of
values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such
code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of
your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral
code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible
ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of
moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it,
and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the
evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, even though
you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has
given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have
demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction. ...

 You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they
tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept
an undeserved guilt, and that is what you have been doing all your
life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your
virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned
punishment, and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues
you practiced. But your virtues were those which keep men alive. Your
own moral code, the one you lived by, but never stated, acknowledged
or defended, was the code that preserves man's existence. If you
were punished for it, what was the nature of those who punished you?
Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of
value lies at its root? What is its ultimate purpose? Do you think
that what you're facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth?
You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and
much worse than that. Did you ask me to name man's motive power? Man's
motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is
leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil
than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A
viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to
demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the
furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and
have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must
support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the
obscenity of offering their impotence and their need, their need of
you, as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept
it? Do you care to purchase, at the price of your great endurance,
at the price of your agony, the satisfaction of the needs of your
own destroyers? ...  
 If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the
world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down
his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to
hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater
his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders, what
would you tell him to do?  
 I ... don't know. What ... could he
do? What would you tell hull? 


 To shrug.  THE MORAL MEANING OF CAPITALISM This is a statement
made by Hank Rearden at his trial for an illegal sale of a metal alloy
which he had created and which has been placed under government
rationing and control.


 I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to
state it for the record. ... I work for nothing but my own
profit, which I make by selling a product they need to men who are
willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at
the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the
expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they
sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual
advantage, and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this
manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my
money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary
consent of every man I dealt with, the voluntary consent of those
who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who
work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I
shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I
wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do
not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are
willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it
away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me,
according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning
my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt
the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to
support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do
it and to do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am
able to do it better than most people, the fact that my work is of
greater value than the work of my neighbors and that more men are
willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability, I refuse to
apologize for my success, I refuse to apologize for my money. If
this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds
harmful to its interests let the public destroy me. This is my
code, and I will accept no other. I could say to you that I have
done more good for my fellow man than you can ever hope to
accomplish, but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of
others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the
good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or
their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others
was the purpose of my work, my own good was my purpose, and I
despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not
serve the public good, that nobody's good can be achieved at the
price of human sacrifices, that when you violate the rights of one
man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless
creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will
and can achieve nothing but universal devastation, as any looter
must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won't. It is
not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral
premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of
turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to
immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the
price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society
apart from, above and against my own, I would refuse, I would reject
it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I
possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I
could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full
confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right
to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the
belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their
good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will
have no part of it!  THE MEANING OF SEX This is from a conversation
between Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, who are in love with the
same woman, though neither one of them knows it. (Francisco speaking.)


 Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek
to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the
mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises
himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures, which
can't be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an
expression of a man's sense of his own value. ...  
 The men who
think that wealth comes from material resources and has no
intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think, for the same
reason, that sex is a physical capacity which functions
independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that
your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you, just about in
some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of
its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason
and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual
choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell
me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire
philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell
you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught
about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish
of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own
enjoyment, just try to think of performing it in a spirit of
selfless charity!, an act which is not possible in self-abasement,
only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and
being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in
spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard
of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his
deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to
experience, or to fake, a sense of self-esteem. The man who is
proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman
he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to
conquer, because only the possession of a heroine will give him the
sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless
slut. ... He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express
it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the
desires of his body.  
 But the man who is convinced of his own
worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises, because she will
reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective
reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion
of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns
him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex
lives, and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as
their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our
response to our highest values, and can be nothing else. Let a man
corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that
love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not
of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the
noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in
response to values, but in response to flaws, and he will have cut
himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it
will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw
him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always
follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes
that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the
evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that
depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with
pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he
will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his
mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion
of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but
boredom, and sex, nothing but shame. ...  
 You'd never accept any
part of their vicious creed. You wouldn't be able to force it upon
yourself. If you tried to damn sex as evil, you'd still find yourself,
against your will, acting on the proper moral premise. You'd be
attracted to the highest woman you met. You'd always want a
heroine. You'd be incapable of self-contempt. You'd be unable to
believe that existence is evil and that you're a helpless creature
caught in an impossible universe. You're the man who's spent his life
shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You're the man who would
know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is
contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love, and just as physical
action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut
off from one's code of values. It's the same issue, and you would know
it Your inviolate sense of self-esteem would know it. You would be
incapable of desire for a woman you despised. Only the man who extols
the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of
a desire devoid of love. But observe that most people are creatures
cut in half who keep swinging desperately to one side or to the
other. One kind of half is the man who despises money, factories,
skyscrapers and his own body. He holds undefined emotions about
non-conceivable subjects as the meaning of life and as his claim to
virtue. And he cries with despair, because he can feel nothing for the
women he respects, but finds himself in bondage to an irresistible
passion for a slut from the gutter. He is the man whom people call an
idealist. The other kind of half is the man whom people call
practical, the man who despises principles, abstractions, art,
philosophy and his own mind. He regards the acquisition of material
objects as the only goal of existence, and he laughs at the need to
consider their purpose or their source. He expects them to give him
pleasure, and he wonders why the more he gets, the less he feels. He
is the man who spends his time chasing women. Observe the triple fraud
which he perpetrates upon himself. He will not acknowledge his need of
self-esteem, since he scoffs at such a concept as moral values; yet he
feels the profound self-contempt which comes from believing that he is
a piece of meat. He will not acknowledge, but he knows that sex is the
physical expression of a tribute to personal values. So he tries, by
going through the motions of the effect, to acquire that which should
have been the cause. He tries to gain a sense of his own value from
the women who surrender to him, and he forgets that the women he
picks have neither character nor judgment nor standard of value. He
tells himself that all he's after is physical pleasure, but observe
that he tires of his women in a week or a night, that he despises
professional whores and that he loves to imagine he is seducing
virtuous girls who make a great exception for his sake. It is the
feeling of achievement that he seeks and never finds. What glory can
there be in the conquest of a mindless body?  
 FROM EACH
ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED  This is
the story of what happened at the Twentieth Century Motor Company,
which put the above slogan into practice, as told by one of the
survivors.


 Well there was something that happened at that plant where I
worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs
took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they
brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too,
and everybody, almost everybody, voted for it We didn't know. We
thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we
were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the
factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid
according to his need. ...  
 We voted for that plan at a big
meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that
worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it,
and it wasn't too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us
knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that
the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and
kept his mouth shut, because they made it sound like anyone who'd
oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human
being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well,
how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our
lives, from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers,
and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public
speech? Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just?
Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did at that
meeting. Still, we voted for the plan, and what we got, we had it
coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of
us who lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth
Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be?
Evil, plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we
saw and helped to make, and I think we're damned, every one of us,
and maybe we'll never be forgiven. ...  
 Do you know how it worked,
that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank
where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you
pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and
the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand
slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then
fifty-six, for your neighbor's supper, for his wife's
operation, for his child's measles, for his mother's wheel
chair, for his uncle's shirt, for his nephew's schooling, for
the baby next door, for the baby to be born, for anyone anywhere
around you, it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures, and
yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after
year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in
sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without
rest, without hope, without end. ... From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need. ...  
 We're all one big
family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all
stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day, together, and you
don't all get a bellyache, together. What's whose ability and which
of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any
man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim
that he needs a yacht, and if his feelings is all you have to go by,
he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car
until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every
loafer and every naked savage on earth, why can't he demand a yacht
from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No?
He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee
until he's replastered his living room? ... Oh well ... Well, anyway,
it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or
ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public
meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think
what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to
discover that we had become beggars, rotten, whining, sniveling
beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful
earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to
him, it belonged to ‘the family,' and they owed him nothing in
return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need', so he
had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy
moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched
drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that ‘the family' would
throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries,
not work, that had become the coin of the realm, so it turned into a
contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need
was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care
to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame,
and what sort got away with the jackpot?  
 But that wasn't
all. There was something else that we discovered at the same
meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty per cent, in
that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered
‘according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? ‘The
family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and
these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six
months. Overtime without pay, because you weren't paid by time and
you weren't paid by work, only by need.  
 Do I have to tell you
what happened after that, and into what sort of creatures we all
started turning, we who had once been human? We began to hide whatever
ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked
any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when
we knew that if we did our best for ‘the family,' it's not thanks
or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every
stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company
money, either through his sloppiness, because he didn't have to
care, or through plain incompetence, it's we who'd have to pay with
our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.

 There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the
noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful
head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process
that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to ‘the family,'
didn't ask anything for it, either, couldn't ask, but that was all
right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found
himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work,
because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his
brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year.

 What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of
the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job
than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what
it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do
the worst job possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to
force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where
he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish
him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a
living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake
unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of
ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay
off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance
would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not, your
‘housing and feeding allowance,' it was called, and above that
pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you
tried. You couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next
year, they might give you a ‘clothing allowance' or they might
not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or
gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new
suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours, either.  
 There
was one man who'd worked hard all his life, because he'd always wanted
to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high
school in the second year of the plan, but ‘the family' wouldn't
give the father any ‘allowance' for the college. They said his son
couldn't go to college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons
to college, and that we first had to send everybody's children
through high school, and we didn't even have enough for that. The
father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a
saloon, a fight over nothing in particular, such fights were
beginning to happen among us all the time.  
 Then there was an old
guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph
records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old
days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of
classical music. Well, they didn't give him any ‘allowance' for
records, ‘personal luxury,' they called it But at that same
meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little
eight-year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck
teeth, this was ‘medical need,' because the staff psychologist
had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her
teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to
drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any
more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn't forget. One
night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his
fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.  
 Drink, of
course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't ask how
we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden,
there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into
grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to
buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get
stinking drunk and forget, you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns?
Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn't any ‘amusement allowance'
for anybody. ‘Amusement' was the first thing they dropped. Aren't
you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to
give up anything, if it's something that gave you pleasure? Even our
‘tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes
a month, and this, they told us, was because the money had to go
into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of production
that didn't fall, but rose and kept on rising, because people had
nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn't have to care, the
baby wasn't their burden, it was ‘the family's.' In fact, the best
chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was
a ‘baby allowance.' Either that, or a major disease.  
 It didn't
take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play
straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any
pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a
stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that
nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed,
wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that
his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather
than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't
marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra
burden on ‘the family.' Besides, if he still had some sort of sense
of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children into the world,
when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the
shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred
babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless
relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant
sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance,' they got more
sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing,
their furniture, their homes, what the hell, ‘the family' was
paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need' than the
rest of us could ever imagine, they developed a special skill for
it, which was the only ability they showed.  
 God help us, ma'am!
Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by,
a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed
it, for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more
you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your
honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's
dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest
lost the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort
of law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we
started. There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and
we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country,
where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's
labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man
left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that
preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see
alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned
decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could
do, and it was called a moral ideal!  
 What was it we were
supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What
brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around
us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent whether they
were unwilling or unable, what difference did that make to us? If we
were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how
long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability,
we had no way of controlling their needs, all we knew was that we
were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that
was half-hospital, half-stockyards, a place geared to nothing but
disability, disaster, disease, beasts put there for the relief of
whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need.  
 Love of our
brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first
time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they
swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new
shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for
a paint job on their house, it was taken from us, it was paid for by
our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one
another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so
as to cut their ‘allowance' at the next meeting. We began to have
stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that somebody had
bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday, which he'd paid
for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another's
lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody's relatives thrown
out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made
life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn't want
anyone to marry, we didn't want any more dependents to feed.  
 In
the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to
chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be
hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak
to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were
to farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man if he had a bad
illness in the family. Now, well, I'll tell you about just one
case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen
years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all
by our first names and we all liked her, we used to like her. One
day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We
knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said that she'd have
to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would
take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave
for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don't know
whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it
at all. All I know is that I, and that's what I can't forget!, I,
too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This, may God
forgive us!, was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that
the plan was supposed to achieve for us!  
 Was there any reason why
this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there
anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I
hope you're not going to remind me that they'd sacrificed a fortune
and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that
one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends on
what it is you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no
money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.

 Eric Starnes, the youngest, he was a jellyfish that didn't have
the guts to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as
Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything,
except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't
have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got, well, I
shouldn't call it ‘pay,' none of us was ‘paid', the alms voted
to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn't
riches. Eric didn't care for money, he wouldn't have known what to
do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how
chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way
he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the
factory. We couldn't stand him.  
 Gerald Starnes was our Director
of Production. We never learned just what the size of his
rake-off, his alms, had been. It would have taken a staff of
accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the
way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it
was supposed to be for him, it was all for company expenses. Gerald
had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to
throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the
country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his
father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw
a hundred-pound stack, a hundred pounds, we weighed them, of
magazines in Gerald's office, full of stories about our factory and
our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a
great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night,
dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cuff links the size of
a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who's
got nothing to parade but his cash, is bad enough, except that he
makes no bones about the cash being his, and you're free to gape at
him or not, as you wish, and mostly you don't. But when a bastard like
Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn't care
for material wealth, that he's only serving ‘the family,' that all
the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common
good, because it's necessary to keep up the prestige of the company
and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public, then that's when
you learn to hate the creature as you've never hated anything human.

 But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material
wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about
in scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists, just to show how
selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the
lady in charge of our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat
Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting, by the
voice of the people. But when the people are six thousand howling
voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when
there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has a
right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody's life
except his own, then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the
people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the
pretense of the ‘family meetings', in the name of ‘production
efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days, and
all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes'
office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every
petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us
for our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an
hour. We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda
for discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better
by that time. Nobody can divide a factory's income among thousands of
people, without some sort of a gauge to measure people's value. Her
gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time, all of his
money wouldn't have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper
and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and
their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And
if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her
eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once
and who'd just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing
above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of
any person who's ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need.' 
 This was the whole
secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that
the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a
mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of
abomination, when five minutes of thought should have told them what
would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I
know that they didn't do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this
size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of
insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason
to explain their choice, it's because they have a reason that they
do not wish to tell. And we weren't so innocent either, when we voted
for that plan at the first meeting. We didn't do it just because we
believed that the drippy old guff they spewed was good. We had another
reason, but the guff helped us to hide it from our neighbors and from
ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtue something
that we'd be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn't a man voting for
it who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he'd muscle in on
the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man rich and
smart enough but that he didn't think that somebody was richer and
smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better's wealth
and brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits
from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned
benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain
him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the
idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot
that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need
entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive when
we voted, that was the truth of it, but we didn't like to think
it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for
the common good.  
 Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we
saw what it was that we'd asked for, it was too late. We were trapped,
with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the
first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents,
foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn't
turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it
out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept losing our men, they
kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole, till we had
nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

 And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were
only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever
quit the Twentieth Century, and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves
believe that it was gone. After a while, we couldn't quit, because no
other employer would have us, for which I can't blame him. Nobody
would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the
small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville
fast, till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and
crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept
falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory's
needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was
less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old
days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark
was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what it was that
the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I suppose that
like all social planners and like savages, they thought that this
trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo
power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their
father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered
an order on time and never put out a motor that didn't have something
wrong with it, the magic stamp began to work the other way around:
people wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth
Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never
paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by
his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral
superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not
because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so
badly.  
 By that time, a village half-wit could see what
generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would
our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of
our defective engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an
operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it
do to the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And
if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of
our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for
the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker
of that plane?  
 Yet this was the moral law that the professors and
leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If
this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one
another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do
you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to
work, when you're tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of
the globe? To work, and whenever any men failed anywhere, it's you
who would have to make up for it. To work, with no chance to rise,
with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure
depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on
earth. To work, with no chance for an extra ration, till the
Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through
college. To work, on a blank check held by every creature born, by
men whom you'll never see, whose needs you'll never know, whose
ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn
and no right to question, just to work and work and work, and
leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose
stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your
life. And this is the moral law to accept? This, a moral ideal?
Well, we tried it, and we learned. Our agony took four years, from
our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end:
in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried
to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in
which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the
country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed
in the midst of a selfish, greedy world, and that the plan was a
noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it. A young
boy, the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in
our first year, got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to
Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her
face. That was the end of the noble plan and of the Twentieth
Century.  THE FORGOTTEN MAN OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE This is the
explanation given by a distinguished brain surgeon of why he joined
Galt's strike.


 I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years
ago,  said Dr. Hendricks. 
 Do you know what it takes to perform
a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the
years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to
acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of
men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout
the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of
enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them
dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the
conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my
reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the
enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything, except the
desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare' of the
patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a
doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was
regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said,
only ‘to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion
is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the
stockyards, never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by
making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the
smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to
control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle
my mind, yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie
on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them
to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their
victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover
the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them
discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not
safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have
throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents
it, and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't.  THE
NATURE OF AN ARTIST This is an excerpt from a conversation between
Dagny Taggart, the heroine of the story, and Richard Halley, a great
composer, who is now on strike.


 Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as
much as it does to you?... That is the payment I demand. Not many can
afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your
emotion, emotions be damned!, I mean your understanding and the
fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came
from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious
judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same
values that went to write it, I mean, not the fact that you felt,
but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you
admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be
admired. ... There's only one passion in most artists more violent
than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature
of such admiration as they do receive. But it's a fear I've never
shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek, I
value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly,
emotionally, intuitively, instinctively, or blindly. I do not care
for blindness in any form, I have too much to show, or for deafness,
I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's
heart, only by someone's head. And when I find a customer with that
invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual
profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most
exacting of all traders. ...  
 Do you see why I'd give three dozen
modern artists for one real businessman? ... Whether it's a symphony
or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same
source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own
eyes, which means: the capacity to perform a rational
identification, which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to
make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining
vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies
and novels, what do they think is the driving faculty of men who
discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric
motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and
poets, what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole
world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane,
the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new
continents have done through all the ages? ... An intransigent
devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the
moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist's
intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater
example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth
does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and
copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things,
that it is and does, and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will
not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss
Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth, as against
a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost
reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't
the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained
by such crude concepts as ‘being' or ‘meaning,' he's the vehicle
of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why,
it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard,
he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all
he has to do is feel, he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed,
shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know
what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting
strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of
art, I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang
look like rest and a severity no army-drilling sadist could
impose, I'll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking
vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it's not his
feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth, and he
knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he,
you and I, we are, in fact, the only people capable of
feeling, and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did
not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those
who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know
what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly
error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price, as,
in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists,
who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they
had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to
destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than
the businessman who doesn't know that he's an exponent of man's
highest creative spirit, it's the artist who thinks that the
businessman is his enemy.  
 THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING  This
is the philosophy of Objectivism.


 Ladies and gentlemen,  said a voice that came from the radio
receiver, a man's clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice
that had not been heard on the airwaves for years, 
 Mr. Thompson
will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it
over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you
are going to hear. ...  
 For twelve years, you have been asking:
Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves
his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his
values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has
destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are
perishing, you who dread knowledge, I am the man who will now tell
you. ...  
 You have heard it said that this is an age of moral
crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the
words had no meaning. You have cried that man's sins are destroying
the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to
practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of
sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive
disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all
those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have
sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to
unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth
to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have
sacrificed happiness to duty.  
 You have destroyed all that which
you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be
good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world
around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the
product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought
into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it,
you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I, I am the man who
has granted you your wish.  
 Your ideal had an implacable enemy,
which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn
that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I
have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by
one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have
deprived your world of man's mind.  
 Men do not live by the mind,
you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say?
I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are values higher than
the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.

 While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of
justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem, I
beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the
game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours,
which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them
the way to live by another morality, mine. It is mine that they
chose to follow.  
 All the men who have vanished, the men you
hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from
you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not
cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such
duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do
not cry that you own us. You don't. Do not beg us to return. We are on
strike, we, the men of the mind.  
 We are on strike against
self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned
rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that
the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the
doctrine that life is guilt.  
 There is a difference between our
strike and all those you've practiced for centuries: our strike
consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil,
according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any
longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen
not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled,
according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to
wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to
your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have
left you free to face reality, the reality you wanted, the world as
you tee it now, a world without mind.  
 We have granted you
everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but
have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no
terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to
offer us. We do not need you.  
 Are you now crying: No, this was
not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You
did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you've
always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because
now we know it, too.  
 Through centuries of scourges and disasters,
brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code
had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it,
that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it
required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth,
but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and
struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom, while
you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not
good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question:
Good?, by what standard?  
 You wanted to know John Galt's
identity. I am the man who has asked that question.  
 Yes, this is
an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your
evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature
that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this
time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the
end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need
is not to return to morality, you who have never known any, but to
discover it.  
 You have heard no concepts of morality but the
mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code
of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power
or the whim of society, to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's
welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next
door, but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you
have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would
best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for
you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

 For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who
claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it
belongs to your neighbors, between those who preached that the good
is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who
preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents
on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and
that the good is to live it.  
 Both sides agreed that morality
demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the
moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the
province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides
agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right
or wrong in reason, that in reason there's no reason to be moral.

 Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that
all your moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their
schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose
to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.  
 Man's
mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is
not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is
given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and
before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his
action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of
the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch, or build a
cyclotron, without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to
achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.  
 But to think is an
act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human
nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact
that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work
automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections
of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs
or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour
and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that
effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact
that reason is your means of survival, so that for you, who are a
human being, the question ‘to be or not to be' is the question
‘to think or not to think.' 
 A being of volitional consciousness
has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to
guide his actions. ‘Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep,
‘virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value'
presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what?
‘Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of
action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives,
no values are possible.  
 There is only one fundamental alternative
in the universe: existence or non-existence, and it pertains to a
single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of
inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it
depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it
changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living
organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or
death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated
action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical
elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the
concept of ‘Life' that makes the concept of ‘Value' possible. It
is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.  
 A
plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the
chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its
life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has
no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it
encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts
automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own
destruction.  
 An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its
senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic
knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend
its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves
inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its
knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable
to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as
its own destroyer.  
 Man has no automatic code of survival. His
particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity
to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He
has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what
values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you
prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of
self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An
‘instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire
is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge
required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic:
your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not
hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you
the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and
choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not
force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own
destroyer, and that is the way he has acted through most of his
history.  
 A living entity that regarded its means of survival as
evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a
bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the
existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle
to deny and to destroy his mind.  
 Man has been called a rational
being, but rationality is a matter of choice, and the alternative
his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has
to be man, by choice; he has to hold his life as a value, by
choice; he has to learn to sustain it, by choice; he has to discover
the values it requires and practice his virtues, by choice.  
 A
code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.  
 Whoever
you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living
remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human,
to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality
proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.  
 All that
which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that
which destroys it is the evil.  
 Man's life, as required by his
nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a
mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being, not life by means
of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement, not survival at
any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival:
reason.  
 Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life
is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose
your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to
man, for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the
irreplaceable value which is your life.  
 Since life requires a
specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being
who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions,
is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a
metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict
the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of
destruction, capable of nothing but pain.  
 Happiness is the
successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that
state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's
values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the
renunciation of your happiness, to value the failure of your
values, is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives
you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter
on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the
grace of reality and the nature of life, man, every man, is an end
in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own
happiness is his highest moral purpose.  
 But neither life nor
happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as
man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will
perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek
his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is
all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The
purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to
enjoy yourself and live.  
 Sweep aside those parasites of
subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others
and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of
behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an
animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have
granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living
species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not
claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without
its sense of smell, but man, they claim, the most complex of beings,
man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature,
and there's no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of
survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal
of any orders they might care to issue.  
 Sweep aside those
hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that
the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no
value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's
instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of
self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who
desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.  
 No, you do
not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to
live, you must live as a man, by the work and the judgment of your
mind.  
 No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral
choice. But you cannot live as anything else, and the alternative is
that state of living death which you now see within you and around
you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and
less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself
through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

 No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But
someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you
default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man,
expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you
survive by your evil.  
 No, you do not have to be a man; but today
those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of
survival, your victims.  
 If you wish to know how I have done it
and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told
them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who
had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it
represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation,
but only an identification of their values.  
 We, the men of the
mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom,
which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the
wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.  
 Existence
exists, and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary
axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists
possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of
perceiving that which exists.  
 If nothing exists, there can be no
consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a
contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but
itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as
consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you
claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not
consciousness.  
 Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these
two, existence and consciousness, are axioms you cannot escape,
these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you
undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the
first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the
widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the
shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms
remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.  
 To exist is
to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence,
it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific
attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was, no matter what his
errors, the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula
defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is
A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his
statement I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity,
Consciousness is Identification.  
 Whatever you choose to consider,
be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity
remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot
be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn
at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler
language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.  
 Are you
seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that
have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the
fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and
all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to
evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to
evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.  
 Man cannot
survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to
gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and
integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses
is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying
it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is,
but what it is must be learned by his mind.  
 All thinking is a
process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of
color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he
learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the
object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns
that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules,
that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the
work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it?
His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic
rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of
non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An
atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own
identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is
valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum
of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error
in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's
mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.  
 Reality is
that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely
that negation of existence which is the content of a human
consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the
recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his
only standard of truth.  
 The most depraved sentence you can now
utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how
vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to
acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It
is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others
to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth, and if others
dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final
appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate,
crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can
direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his
judgment but his moral integrity.  
 You who speak of a ‘moral
instinct' as if it were some separate endowment opposed to
reason, man's reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a
process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or
False?, Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to
grow, right or wrong? Is a man's wound to be disinfected in order to
save his life, right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric
electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power, right or
wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything
you have, and the answers came from a man's mind, a mind of
intransigent devotion to that which is right.  
 A rational process
is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with
nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat,
to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest, but if
devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no
greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man
who assumes the responsibility of thinking.  
 That which you call
your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call
‘free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will
you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices
you make and determines your life and your character.  
 Thinking is
man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his
basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which
all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking
out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to
think, not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the
refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an
inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment, on the unstated
premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it,
that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict
‘It is.' Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate
existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists;
reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By
refusing to say ‘It is,' you are refusing to say ‘I am.' By
suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man
declares: ‘Who am I to know?', he is declaring: ‘Who am I to
live?' 
 This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral
choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or
non-A, entity or zero.  
 To the extent to which a man is rational,
life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he
is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.  
 You
who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no
morality on a desert island, it is on a desert island that he would
need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay
for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will
drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a
harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today, and reality will
wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a
value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to
buy it.  
 If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say
that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a
‘moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the
chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is
the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.  
 My morality,
the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence
exists, and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from
these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling
values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem. Reason, as his
only tool of knowledge, Purpose, as his choice of the happiness
which that tool must proceed to achieve, Self-esteem, as his
inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person
is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three
values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues
pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality,
independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

 Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists,
that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over
that act of perceiving it, which is thinking, that the mind is one's
only judge of values and one's only guide of action, that reason is
an absolute that permits no compromise, that a concession to the
irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task
of perceiving to the task of faking reality, that the alleged
short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit
destroying the mind, that the acceptance of a mystical invention is
a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates
one's consciousness.  
 Independence is the recognition of the fact
that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you
escape it, that no substitute can do your thinking, as no
pinch-hitter can live your life, that the vilest form of
self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind
to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your
brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth,
his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your
existence.  
 Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you
cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of
the fact that you cannot fake existence, that man is an indivisible
entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and
consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind,
between action and thought, between his life and his
convictions, that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may
not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole
of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him, that courage and
confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical
form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and
confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own
consciousness.  
 Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the
unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor
cash is a value if obtained by fraud, that an attempt to gain a
value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your
victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of
their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions,
while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness
become the enemies you have to dread and flee, that you do not care
to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of
others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds
in fooling, that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for
the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can
practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to
the deluded consciousness of others.  
 Justice is the recognition
of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot
fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as
conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect
for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as
rational a process of identification, that every man must be judged
for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a
higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining
metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero, that your moral
appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this
payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to
financial transactions, that to withhold your contempt from men's
vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your
admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement, that
to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your
moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only
the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can
profit, and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the
act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward
them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the
Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your
consciousness to the destruction of existence.  
 Productiveness is
your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you
choose to live, that productive work is the process by which man's
consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring
knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an
idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's
values, that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind,
and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical
stupor a routine he has learned from others, that your work is yours
to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more
is possible to you and nothing less is human, that to cheat your way
into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a
fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle
down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is
to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion:
decay, that your work is the process of achieving your values, and
to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to
live, that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and
you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as
the goal of your road, that the man who has no purpose is a machine
that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first
chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine
slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his
course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes
another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick
up, that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed
past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you
might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only
travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going
on their own power in the same direction.  
 Pride is the
recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like
all of man's values, it has to be earned, that of any achievements
open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of
your own character, that your character, your actions, your desires,
your emotions are the products of the premises held by your
mind, that as man must produce the physical values he needs to
sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make
his life worth sustaining, that as man is a being of self-made
wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul, that to live requires a
sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no
automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in
the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being
he is born able to create, but must create by choice, that the first
precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which
desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul
that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing
nothing higher than itself, and that the proof of an achieved
self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against
the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any
creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your
consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to
the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.  
 Are you
beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the
thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed,
corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your
guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional
cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still
long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of
mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to
live.  
 This wish, which you share, yet submerge as an evil, is
the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must
learn to deserve. His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but
only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in
itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the
reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue, and happiness is the
goal and the reward of life.  
 Just as your body has two
fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or
injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so
your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in
answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that
which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving
you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your
capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you
will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you
will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of
value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is
dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and
your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose
a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your
transmission: and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a
machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.  
 If you hold the
irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your
concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for
a fortune or a love you don't deserve, for a loophole in the law of
causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the
opposite of existence, you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach
it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man;
check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.  
 Happiness
is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is
not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly
attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy, a
joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of
your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of
escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not
the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not
the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only
to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals,
seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but
rational actions.  
 Just as I support my life, neither by robbery
nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my
happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my
own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as
the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of
the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values
and no conflicts among my desires, so there are no victims and no
conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the
unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who
neither make sacrifices nor accept them.  
 The symbol of all
relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human
beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are
traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns
what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does
not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for
his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul
as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for
material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit, his
love, his friendship, his esteem, except in payment and in trade for
human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he
receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have,
throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt,
while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret
motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread, a man of
justice.  
 Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men?
None, except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and
to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and
theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them
except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary
choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own
self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with
theirs. When they don't, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go
their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but
logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my
reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain
from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices:
from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is
the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let
reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am
wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.  
 Whatever
may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not,
the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction
or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may
initiate, do you hear me? no man may start, the use of physical
force against others.  
 To interpose the threat of physical
destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate
and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his
own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own
sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of
force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider
than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.  
 Do
not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of
your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality
ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational
animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own
character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason, as no
advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right' to
destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and
wrong: the mind.  
 To force a man to drop his own mind and to
accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism,
with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument, is
to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man
that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him
that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does
not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he
does. You place him in a world where the price of his life is the
surrender of all the virtues required by life, and death by a
process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will
achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning
argument in a society of men.  
 Be it a highwayman who confronts a
traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,' or a
politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your
children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is:
‘Your mind or your life', and neither is possible to man without
the other.  
 If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is
the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the
mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right
to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open
to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to
deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who
think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction
upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me
by force, I answer him, by force.  
 It is only as retaliation
that force may be used and only against the man who starts its
use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I
merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had
the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it
only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by
killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no
values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.  
 In
the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your
death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum
of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can't
have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or
submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an
industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our
motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as
your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for
rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting
ours.  
 You who are worshippers of the zero, you have never
discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding
death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,' intelligence is not
‘the absence of stupidity,' light is not ‘the absence of
darkness,' an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.' Building
is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and
waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to
abstain from demolishing, and now you can no longer say to me, the
builder; ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying
your production.' I am answering in the name of all your victims:
Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of
negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is
impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from
us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage
over life.  
 You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of
happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment We exist for
the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear
is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life
that we wish to live.  
 You, who have lost the concept of the
difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal
power, and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical', you
do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the
existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your
days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you
dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater
your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save
you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to
grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing:
that yours is the Morality of Death.  
 Death is the standard of
your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running,
since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or
from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for
once, there is no place to run, stand naked, as you dread to
stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a
moral code.  
 Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction
is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as
evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as
impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of
virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands
that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of
evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the
good: the good is that which he is not.  
 It does not matter who
then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul,
a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose
rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him, it does
not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to
crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence
to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a
value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.  
 The name of
this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.  
 A sin without volition
is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that
which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of
morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change
it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is
amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a
mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of
nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a
mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence
exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice
and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be
matched. Yet that is the root of your code.  
 Do not hide behind
the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a
tendency to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game
with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of
playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision
is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If
the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at both; if it is
not of his choice, his will is not free.  
 What is the nature of
the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils
man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their
myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he
acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of
good and evil, he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his
bread by his labor, he became a productive being. He was sentenced
to experience desire, he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment
The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness,
joy, all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices
that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it
is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his
nature as man. Whatever he was, that robot in the Garden of Eden,
who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without
love, he was not man.  
 Man's fall, according to your teachers,
was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by
their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's
man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.  
 They call it a
morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.  
 No, they say,
they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien
object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they
only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say,
against his pain, and they point at the torture rack to which
they've tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite
directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

 They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They
have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies
engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures,
contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to
injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but
his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth, and
that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of
patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which
leads into the freedom of the grave.  
 They have taught man that he
is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A
body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a
ghost, yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of
a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some
evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that
everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable
exists.  
 Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was
designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order
to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the
mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body
moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic
revelations, he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle
between a robot and a Dictaphone.  
 And as he now crawls through
the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer
him the help of a morality that proclaims that he'll find no solution
and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him,
is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of
perceiving the non-existent, and if he is unable to understand it,
that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness
impotent.  
 As products of the split between man's soul and body,
there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics
of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists
and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without
existence and those who believe in existence without
consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their
revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they
posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes
are alike, and so are their aims: in matter, the enslavement of
man's body, in spirit, the destruction of his mind.  
 The good,
say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is
that he is beyond man's power to conceive, a definition that
invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of
existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society, a thing
which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a
super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general
except yourself. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be
subordinated to the will of God. Man's mind, say the mystics of
muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's standard of
value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose
standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted
on faith. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the
pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man's right of
judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of
man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a
purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His
reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the
grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on
earth, to his great-grandchildren.  
 Selfishness, say
both, is man's evil. Man's good, say both, is to give up his
personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man's
good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice, cry both, is the
essence of morality, the highest virtue within man's reach.

 Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the
victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your
mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you're drowning, and if
there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to
those fading sparks which had been yourself, use it now. The word
that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.' Use the last of your
strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a
chance.  
  ‘Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the
worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice' does not mean the
rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for
the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which
you value in favor of that which you don't.  
 If you exchange a
penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar
for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years
of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the
sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to
your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your
neighbor's child and let your own die, it is.  
 If you give money
to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless
stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is
not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own
discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of
moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to
yourself, that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.  
 If you
renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you
love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your
own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers,
it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men
you hate, that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.

 A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full
surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must
seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no
admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the
faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course
of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no
value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no
reward, if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved
the ideal of moral perfection.  
 You are told that moral perfection
is impossible to man, and, by this standard it is. You cannot
achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your
person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal
zero which is death.  
 If you start, however, as a passionless
blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject
and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It
is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to
give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To
achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love
it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor
it can give you, you must feel the twist of every knife as it
slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of
your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds
out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.  
 Do not remind
me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no
other. Neither are you.  
 If you wish to save the last of your
dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice': that term
brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child
rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the
child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother
whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve
and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for
his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a
slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing. If a
man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he
is the sort of man who has no convictions.  
 Sacrifice could be
proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice, no values, no
standards, no judgment, those whose desires are irrational whims,
blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature,
whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender
of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.  
 The creed of
sacrifice is a morality for the immoral, a morality that declares
its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can't impart to men any
personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers
of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own
confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only
subject them to constant punishment.  
 Are you thinking, in some
foggy stupor, that it's only material values that your morality
requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values?
Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human
desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are
you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the
service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not
share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose
opposed to your own, else your gift is not a sacrifice.  
 Your
morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your
values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in
material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose
actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite, yet
that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from
matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another, the
man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another, the man
who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the
support of another, the man who holds high standards of
craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of
trash, these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who
believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into
material reality.  
 Do you say it is the spirit that such men have
renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You
are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your
consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you
become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to
evil.  
 And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty
that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy,
serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider
evil, surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject,
renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become
a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.  
 It is your
mind that they want you to surrender, all those who preach the creed
of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they
demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they
promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this
earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own
wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others', end up by
saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must
sacrifice them to the convictions of others.' 
 This much is true:
the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes
no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment
of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your
logic, your reason, your standard of truth, in favor of becoming a
prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest
number.  
 If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to
the question: 
 What is the good? , the only answer you will
find is ‘The good of others' The good is whatever others wish,
whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought
to feel. ‘The good of others' is a magic formula that transforms
anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral
glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a
continent Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a
principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no
success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others, all you
need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your
own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the
‘non-good for me.' 
 Your code, which boasts that it upholds
eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional,
the relative and the subjective, your code hands out, as its version
of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it,
it's evil; if others wish it, it's good; if the motive of your action
is your welfare, don't do it; if the motive is the welfare of others,
then anything goes.  
 As this double-jointed, double-standard
morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy
camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the
only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only
servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest
are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors
never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your
sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right
is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are
‘non-you.' 
 For those of you who might ask questions, your code
provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own
happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the
only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way
to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the
only way to protect your life is to protect all men except
yourself, and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own
fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find
your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in
existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.  
 You who
have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the
questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge
what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. You know it, not
in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you
flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a
principle too vicious to name.  
 I, who do not accept the unearned,
neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you
evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your
own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by
others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of
eating a cake is a value, why is it an unmoral indulgence in your
stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others?
Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so?
Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it
away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral
for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you
give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does
virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are
good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?  
 The
answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not
evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not
immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it,
unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is
not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by
right.  
 Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of
your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but
moral to live by the effort of others, it is immoral to consume your
own product, but moral to consume the products of others, it is
immoral to earn, but moral to mooch, it is the parasites who are the
moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the
existence of the parasites is an end in itself, it is evil to profit
by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice, it is evil to
create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the
blood of others.  
 Your code divides mankind into two castes and
commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything
and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the
riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard
determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The
passkey is lack of value.  
 Whatever the value involved, it is your
lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don't lack it. It is
your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to
satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a
need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of
mankind.  
 If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you
fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just
or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your
misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune
that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its
nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage
on all of existence.  
 If you heal your pain by your own effort,
you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act
of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or
food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue,
your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no
loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a
sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of
mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral
transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster
to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and
immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a
moral right.  
 A morality that holds need as a claim, holds
emptiness, non-existence, as its standard of value; it rewards an
absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering,
disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw, the zero.  
 Who
provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for
being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that
ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your
virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your
faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that
the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the
independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man
of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the
man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to
sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those
you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept
your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve
these virtues.  
 Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you
sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the
standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must
labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of
a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach
his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a
beggar and a sucker.  
 You fear the man who has a dollar less than
you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral
defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that
dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally
defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a
source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or
demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is
rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others, you
struggle to evade, as ‘theory,' the knowledge that by the moral
standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life,
there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone
somewhere on earth, and you give up the problem in blind resentment,
you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired,
that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by
avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if
self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is
all that you retain within your soul, and so does every other man,
as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality
has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

 The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is
more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of
your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love, the love you ought to
feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the
values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that
teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to
all men, this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to
promiscuous love for all comers.  
 As there can be no causeless
wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless
emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate
dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you
that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you
appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to
grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as
valuable as gold.  
 Observe that he does not expect you to feel a
causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at
contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear
by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the
highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that
you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless
love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the
attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the
meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.  
 Love is the
expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the
moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the
emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the
virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love
from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his
worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as
a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality
tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of
morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love
transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object,
and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the
loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells
you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy
of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe
your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it,
the more love you owe them, the more loathsome the object, the
nobler your love, the more unfastidious your love, the greater your
virtue, and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap
that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral
values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.  
 Such is
your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to
refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyard, and
the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.  
 Such was your
goal, and you've reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about
man's impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you
were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable
to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by
holding death as your standard of value?  
 The degree of your
ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet
you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn
yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a
look at them now, when you face your last choice, and if you choose
to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy
has claimed your life.  
 The mystics of both schools, who preach
the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single
sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they
possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of
consciousness superior to reason, like a special pull with some
bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from
others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense
you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole
of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to
assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that
your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of
perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both
kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender
yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior
knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you
know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence,
the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation,
destruction.  
 They claim that they perceive a mode of being
superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call
it ‘another dimension,' which consists of denying dimensions. The
mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,' which consists of denying
the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they
able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is
not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist
of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say, and
proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge, God is non-man,
heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is
non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their
definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.  
 It is
only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a
universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would
want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own
nature, escape from the necessity to know that the substance on
which it builds its private universe is blood.  
 What is the nature
of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists?
The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse
profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the
second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their
non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk
and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where
pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their
mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment
of virtue, of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill, is required
to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in
their non-material, nonprofit world, they travel from planet to planet
at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them:
‘How?', they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how' is the
concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is
‘Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards
are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions
rewards are achieved by wishing.  
 And that is the whole of their
shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all
their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling
words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language,
industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes
and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the
purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic,
matter, existence, reality, is to erect upon that plastic fog a
single holy absolute: their Wish.  
 The restriction they seek to
escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from
the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or
tantrums, that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what
their hunger, that water will not run uphill, no matter what
comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the
roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and
labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipeline counts, but their
feelings do not, that their feelings are impotent to alter the
course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action
they have committed.  
 Those who tell you that man is unable to
perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are
unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their
feelings. ‘Things as they are' are things as perceived by your
mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived
by your wishes.' 
 There is no honest revolt against reason, and
when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away
with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The
freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your
wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or
how many prayers you recite, that if you sleep with sluts, you're
not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love
your wife next morning, that you are an entity, not a series of
random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and
nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child's nightmare
where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are
interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will, that you are a
man, that you are an entity, that you are.  
 No matter how
eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher
mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for
non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

 Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed
causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in
existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a
passive effect They make their emotions their tool for perceiving
reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact
superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has
identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I
want it.' They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.' 
 They want to
cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their
consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating
existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their
consciousness, they want to be that God they created in their image
and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an
arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is
the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over
existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By
refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual
unknown.  
 Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed,
those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice
the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as
the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of
your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that
you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale
thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.  
 Whenever you
committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from
the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you
chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies
I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim
and I will be a man of reason about all else, that was the act of
subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your
mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret
underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it
dares not touch, and a censored reality is the result, a splintered
reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms
of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind
which is an emotion exempted from thought.  
 The links you strive
to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the
law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is
the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by
entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the
nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction
to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a
zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a non-entity
controlling an entity, the nonexistent ruling the existent, which is
the universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of
causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal
of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they
strive for: the reign of the zero.  
 The law of identity does not
permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality
does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you
drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself
and to others that you don't see, then you can try to proclaim your
right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that
the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that
the way to produce is to start by consuming, that all wishers have an
equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The
corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

 Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the
fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You
want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal
value, the cause, you want unearned admiration, as if admiration,
the effect, could give you virtue, the cause, you want unearned
wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the
cause, you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned
forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your
ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while
they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates
riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence,
the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your
philosophical values, the cause.  
 Who pays for the orgy? Who
causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain
unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your
pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

 We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform
the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and
discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to
produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason, were it not for
us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to
conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that
had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the
money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not
exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had
achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who
preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.  
 You, who
leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth
Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric
lights, but to destroy the generators, it is our wealth that you use
while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us,
it is our language that you use while denying the mind.  
 Just as
your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our
earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by
miracle out of non-matter, so your modern mystics of muscle omit our
existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its
own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

 For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a
protection racket, by making life on earth unbearable, then charging
you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that
make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt,
by declaring production and joy to be sins, men collecting blackmail
from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of
their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear
damnation for the sin of reason, we who thought and acted, while
they wished and prayed, we who were moral outcasts, we who were
bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime, while they
basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and
of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced
by, blank-out 
 Now we are chained and commanded to produce by
savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners, by
savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us
of the life we don't possess, if we fail to provide them with the
goods we don't produce. Now we are expected to continue running
railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after
crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running
steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal
in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that
support you in mid-air, while the tribes of your grotesque little
mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in
sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no
knowledge, no mind.  
 Dropping below the level of a savage, who
believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter
reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the
words they do not utter, and their magic tool is the blank-out, the
pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their
refusal to identify it.  
 As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so
they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty
consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects
while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots
and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to
build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think,
but to take over human thinking.  
 As they proclaim that the only
requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of
the machines, and blank out the question of who created the
factory, so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing
exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the
thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no
such concept as ‘motion.' As they proclaim their right to consume
the unearned, and blank out the question of who's to produce it, so
they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists
but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the
concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law
of identity no such concept as ‘change' is possible. As they rob an
industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power
over all of existence while denying that existence exists.  
 
‘We know that we know nothing,' they chatter, blanking out the fact
that they are claiming knowledge, ‘There are no absolutes,' they
chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an
absolute, ‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you're
conscious,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes
existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the
existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it,
and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such
concepts as the proved and the unproved.  
 When a savage who has
not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is
asking you to prove it by means of non-existence, when he declares
that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it
by means of unconsciousness, he is asking you to step into a void
outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both, he
is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

 When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and
he doesn't choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out
the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the
only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound no theories and
die.  
 An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of
knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a
statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular
speaker chooses to identify it or not An axiom is a proposition that
defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use
it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does
not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory
without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from
it, let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence
of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or
verbs, let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the
validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data
he obtained by sensory perception, let the head-hunter who does not
choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using
logic, let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no
foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from
under his building, not yours, let the cannibal who snarls that the
freedom of man's mind was needed to create an industrial civilization,
but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin,
not a university chair of economics.  
 Do you think they are taking
you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than
any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science,
but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the
concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depend: the
concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human
consciousness, and you will know the purpose of their creed.  
 A
savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is
real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby's, at the stage
when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has
not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the
world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move, and the
birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps
flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a
curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the
other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he
grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he
has, and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps
that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is
real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is
not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are
real, but it is not a city, it is a city's reflection, the day when
he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any
given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic
knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with
the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to
integrate, the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive
him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs
of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or
to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his
mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature,
the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must
identify the things that he perceives, that is the day of his birth
as a thinker and scientist.  
 We are the men who reach that day;
you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who
never does.  
 To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible
miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is
possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational
horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed
with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims,
while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his
control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an
omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they
can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at
any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they
choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not
attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he
spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his
wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when
they do, taking the blame when they don't, offering them sacrifices in
token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling
on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and
of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his
words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening, he
wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his
view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man,
part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

 His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is
the world to which they want to bring you.  
 If you wonder by what
means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you
will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be
certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever,
that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he's
incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard
of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their
answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there's only faith: your
belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another's
faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of
faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in revelations; the belief
that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith,
no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's
foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon, truth is
whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except
yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no
objective facts, there are only people's arbitrary wishes, a man who
seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an
old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes
around taking public polls, and if it weren't for the selfish greed
of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in
obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York
City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the
world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid
its existence.  
 For centuries, the mystics of spirit have
proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny
the existence of reason. Their heirs and product, the mystics of
muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they
proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against
believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that
nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they
proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies
of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt
against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no
mind.  
 If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the
switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait
for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch
taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that
your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then
refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of
mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are
not? Are, brother? Where did you get that old-fashioned term?' 
 If
you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate
consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that
a concept such as ‘mind' has ever existed. Observe the twists of
undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left
floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the
recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.' Your consciousness, they
tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,' ‘reactions,' ‘experiences,'
‘urges,' and ‘drives', and refuse to identify the means by
which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are
performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you
listen. Words have the power to ‘condition' you, they say and
refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change
your, blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a
process of, blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is
engaged in the activity of, blank-out. A psychologist helping a
neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means
of, blank-out. An industrialist, blank-out, there is no such
person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,' like a tree, a rock or a
mud puddle.  
 The problem of production, they tell you, has been
solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for
your ‘reflexes' to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who
solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the
solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What
caused it? Nothing has causes.  
 They proclaim that every man born
is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the
contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum
sustenance', his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on
his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom?
Blank-out Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the
technological benefits created in the world. Created, by whom?
Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists
now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the
unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.'
Supplied, by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as
professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that
their social theories were based on the unpractical assumption that
man was a rational being, but since men are not rational, they
declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it
possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while
defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray
mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of
mankind, and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one
questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a
gun. Enforce, on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless
incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the
message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher
standard of living. Demand, of whom? Blank-out.  
 And to
forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a
jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate
obscenity of explaining man's industrial progress, skyscrapers,
cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains, by declaring that man
is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.' 
 Did
you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax
of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics,
of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you,
snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit
and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your
body, you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity
than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell
them, that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured
elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry
his burdens, they expect man to continue to produce electronic
tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar
telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back
for incentive.  
 Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To
undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose
throughout the ages, and power, the power to rule you by force, has
always been their only lust.  
 From the rites of the jungle witch
doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted
the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural
for stagnant stretches of centuries, to the supernatural doctrines
of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their
hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked
eighteen hours to earn, to the seedy little smiling professor who
assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no
means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that
supernatural force: Society, all of it is the same performance for
the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has
surrendered the validity of its consciousness.  
 But it cannot be
done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you
deserve it.  
 When you listen to a mystic's harangue on the
impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not
his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be
shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior
certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is
the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a
mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he
considers omnipotent is, yours.  
 A mystic is a man who
surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of
others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his
own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others,
with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to
so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational
faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know' and
‘They say,' he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit
rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in
the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His
surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of
understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which
he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be,
through some means forever denied to him.  
 From then on, afraid to
think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings
become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he
clings to them with ferocious possessiveness, and whatever thinking
he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the
nature of his feelings is terror.  
 When a mystic declares that he
feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all
right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the
universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has
surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to
cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness
of others. ‘They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he
cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting
their unaccountable consent. ‘They' are his only means of
perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he
feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the
consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed
that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.  
 Every
dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A
mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them
to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his
wishes, his whims, as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He
wants to deal with men by means of faith and force, he finds no
satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and
reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers
precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men
possess some power more potent than reason, and only their causeless
belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a
proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he
lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires
an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective
reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men's means of
perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between
existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he
orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.  
 Just as the
mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by
others, just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas
created by others, so he falls below the level of a lunatic who
creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of
lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.  
 There is only
one state that fulfills the mystic's longing for infinity,
non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible
causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects
reality rejects existence, and the feelings that move him from then
on are hatred for all the values of man's life, and lust for all the
evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering,
of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of
triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other
reality exists.  
 No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be
it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as
‘The People,' no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some
supernatural dimension, in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is
death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

 Destruction is the only end that the mystics' creed has ever
achieved as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and
if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their
doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred
by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls
is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse
that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice
are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their
ends.  
 You who're depraved enough to believe that you could adjust
yourself to a mystic's dictatorship and could please him by obeying
his orders, there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will
reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and
destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to
believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his
extortions, there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is
your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it
in, and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his
mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he
desires is his own.  
 You who are innocent enough to believe that
the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for
material plunder, the mystics' scramble for spoils is only a screen
to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a
means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living
beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their
swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is
escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose
it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not
want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate
existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the
object of his hatred is himself.  
 You who've never grasped the
nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided
idealists', may the God you invented forgive you!, they are the
essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by
devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is
not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the
mind, which means: against life and man.  
 It is a conspiracy
without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment
who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding
the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the
reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for
achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever
preached the superiority of the ‘heart' over the mind.  
 It is a
conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with
living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are
drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other
corners, a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who
pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes
pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who,
to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of
competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes
pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes
pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure
in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the
castration of all pleasure, and all their intellectual
munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue
will transform vices into virtue. Death is the premise at the root of
their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice, and
you are the last of their victims.  
 We, who were the living
buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there
to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer
willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the
moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been
living on borrowed time, and I am the man who has called in the
loan.  
 I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended
to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to
live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid
of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your
lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew
it.  
 Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an
inventor. I was one of a profession that came last in human history
and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An
inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?' of the universe and lets nothing
stand between the answer and his mind.  
 Like the man who
discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil,
I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of
the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object
of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I
completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a
fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have
raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and
would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you
spend at earning your living.  
 Then, one night at a factory
meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my
achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life
were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and
depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my
ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less
able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence
for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their
incompetence.  
 Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw
what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to
be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality, and that
my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent, that
evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real, and that the only
weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve
it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless
dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a
slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my
self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan, so
throughout the world and throughout men's history, in every version
and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities
of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of
reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the
blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of
destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for
their own values, the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a
point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is
needed for evil to win, and that no manner of injury done to him by
others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I
could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my
mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.' 
 I quit that
factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and
to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to
refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.  
 If you
want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted
your world, stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness
unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would
achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no
one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how
much your mind would be able to discover, ask yourself how many
independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life
and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you
learned from others, ask yourself whether you would be able to
discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be
able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an
electronic tube, then decide whether men of ability are exploiters
who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you
produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to
enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her
shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a
bowl, hour after hour, century by century, then let them ask
themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making' will provide
them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and
vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who
provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.' 
 Take a look around you,
you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men's means of
production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a
mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered
the industrial age, and you cling to the morality of the barbarian
eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the
muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves,
to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you
grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and
smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers
who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for
public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for
public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the
answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.' 
 You proclaim
yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose
to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you
cannot equal You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet
propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you
need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule
us by force, and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical
nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any
lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

 You propose to establish a social order based on the following
tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to
run the lives of others, that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but
fit to become an omnipotent ruler, that you're unable to earn your
living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge
politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you
have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over
achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic
industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would
be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.  
 This
idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence, the
congenital dependent, is your image of man and your standard of
value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It's
only human,' you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage
of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human' mean
the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward,
the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the
producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure, as if
‘to feel' were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were
human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but
virtue were not, as if the premise of death were proper to man, but
the premise of life were not.  
 In order to deprive us of honor,
that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded
us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture
that claims to be non-profit, and damn the men who made the profits
that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public
interest' any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the
public interest to provide any services for those who do the
paying. ‘Public benefit' is anything given as alms; to engage in
trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare' is the welfare of
those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no
welfare. ‘The public,' to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any
virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you
require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or
as part of the human race.  
 What blank-out permitted you to hope
that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan
it as an ideal society, when the ‘No' of your victims was
sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any
insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to
plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you
are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that
has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of
our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and
failures, guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the
life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live.  
 Did you want
to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to
regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my
virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the
first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who
wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them alive. I am the
first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they
learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would
have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would
let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability, and if human
survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

 I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout
history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence
who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the
meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to
think, but not to share his thoughts, the man who chooses to spend
his yean in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the
fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality,
refusing to bring it into a world he despises, the man who is
defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started,
the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a
fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has
not found, they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike
against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of
their own, they abandoned the quest to know, in the darkness of
their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of
the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to
you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their
mind, and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never
learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered
their love.  
 The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era
of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and
lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works
of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to
keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of
stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence,
working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but
scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to
produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final
authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate
sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a
club. The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over
sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief
bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind
performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished
again.  
 But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of
the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We,
the men of reason, will survive.  
 I have called out on strike the
kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them
the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I
have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim
it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of
Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of
humanity's brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of
matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known
that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

 You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic
who claims supernatural visions, you, who scramble like vultures for
plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a
fortune-maker, you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem
any posturing artist as exalted, the root of your standards is that
mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death,
which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he
keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude
concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical
needs, who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from
sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or
the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of
physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who
sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the
triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the
shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

 Unless you learn the answers to these questions, and learn to
stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man's
mind, you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and
will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of
your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and
have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to
switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living
power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the
worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent
reality defeated you, you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not
pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal, you will perish as
fodder for the haters of man.  
 But to those of you who still
retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one's life, I am
offering the chance to make a choice. Choose whether you wish to
perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on
the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your
life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take
an inventory of your mind.  
 Since childhood, you have been hiding
the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to
seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not
say it even to yourself, that you're devoid of those moral
‘instincts' which others profess to feel. The less you felt, the
louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in
dread of ever letting them discover your own self, the self that you
betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in
the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and
your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread
of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same
unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you
all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty
freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only
to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake,
none having the courage to break the vicious circle.  
 No matter
what dishonorable compromise you've made with your impracticable
creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism,
half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the
root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical
are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror
of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical,
whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds,
achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever
profits you, is evil, and if the good, the moral, is the
impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures
you and brings you loss or pain, then your choice is to be moral or
to live.  
 The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove
morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no
relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat,
that man's existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and
anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which
descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned
by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come
to believe that actual evils are the practical means of
existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good' was
self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical;
forgetting that the practical ‘evil' was production, you believe
that robbery is practical.  
 Swinging like a helpless branch in the
wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil
or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a
sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy,
your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented
by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you
admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you
hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed
when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound
to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

 Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom,
of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher
of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow
standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your
pleasures, and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless
slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race,
since pleasure cannot be moral.  
 If you identify your actual
belief, you will find a triple damnation, of yourself, of life, of
virtue, in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe
that morality is a necessary evil.  
 Do you wonder why you live
without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you
wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable
questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you
spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices,
such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private
profit or public good?  
 Do you cry that you find no answers? By
what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of
perception, your mind, then complain that the universe is a
mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked
against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn
existence for making no sense.  
 The fence you have been straddling
for two hours, while hearing my words and seeking to -escape
them, is the coward's formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we
don't have to go to extremes!' The extreme you have always struggled
to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and
that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code
that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all
ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as
approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any
principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any
road. By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has
forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments
impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment A code that
forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the
identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned.

 The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees,
who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes
responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now
spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an
absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human
life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece
of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it
vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.  
 There are two
sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but
the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some
respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of
choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the
truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is
willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the
blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who
dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to
jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to
meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it
is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil,
it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which
drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting
rubber tube.  
 You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been
playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is
yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil
acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding
purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by
scoundrels, and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing,
bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising
evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you
that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to
them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral
judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are
right, you hasten to assure them that you're certain of nothing. When
they shout that it's immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure
them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe's
People's States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you
don't treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a
difference of opinion, you cringe and hasten to assure them that you
are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some
pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich, you apologize
and beg him to be patient and promise him you'll give it all away.

 You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when
you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was
‘only a compromise': you conceded it was evil to live for yourself,
but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded
that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for
your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your
community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting
this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of
the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your
country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who
has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

 At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of
weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason
and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the
muscle-mystics of the People's States proclaim that they're the
champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that
faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your
destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants
of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children,
you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the
ideas that created this country, that there is no rational
justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that
they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith,
that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to
reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to
torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must
resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of
remaining irrational, that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes
were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines,
concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable
manner of existence, that the industrial revolution was the revolt
of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is
known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the
same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People's States
will surpass this country in material production, since they are the
representatives of science, but that it's evil to be concerned with
physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity, you
declare that the looters' ideals are noble, but they do not mean them,
while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to
accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and
that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one's wealth
away. Then you wonder why your children join the People's thugs or
become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters' conquests
keep creeping closer to your doors, and you blame it on human
stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

 You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters' fight
against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are
unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that
most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they
keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call
materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same
dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by
swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the
soul and vice versa, that they keep running from your colleges to
the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of
India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the
mind.  
 You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith'
in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a
stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code, that the
looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality
you're half-obeying, half-evading, that they practice it the only
way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial
furnace, that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only
way they can be opposed; by refusing to become a sacrificial animal
and proudly asserting your right to exist, that in order to fight
them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that
you have to reject.  
 You blank it out, because your self-esteem is
tied to that mystic ‘unselfishness' which you've never possessed or
practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the
thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher
than self-esteem, but you've invested it in counterfeit
securities, and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you
are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of
self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem,
which you're unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality,
not yours; it's the objective token of my code, it is my proof within
your own soul.  
 By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but
has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery
that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of
self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional
consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to
maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong
in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil,
means to be unfit for existence.  
 Every act of man's life has to
be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that
the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure
he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of
finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his
only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his
fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the
service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard
contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

 Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority
and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his
inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more
fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man
can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil;
should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape
it, if he's chosen an irrational standard, he will fake, evade,
blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of
happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of
self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk
discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the
worst is true.  
 It is not any crime you have ever committed that
infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures,
errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade
them, it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal
deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of
suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your
chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they
don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their
cause, not from your ‘selfishness,' weakness or ignorance, but from
a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have
abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have
done it volitionally.  
 The self you have betrayed is your mind;
self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. The ego you seek,
that essential ‘you' which you cannot express or define, is not
your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge
of your supreme tribunal whom you've impeached in order to drift at
the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.' Then
you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for
a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen
and lost.  
 Observe the persistence, in mankind's mythologies, of
the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of
Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always
behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the
race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense, not as
firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless
longing, that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood,
before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and
to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of
existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness
facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost,
which you seek, which is yours for the taking.  
 Some of you will
never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single
moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a
moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its
sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I, I am only the
man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who
knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and
to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment 
 That
choice is yours to make. That choice, the dedication to one's
highest potential, is made by accepting the fact that the noblest
act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of
grasping that two and two make four.  
 Whoever you are, you who
are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty
to help you understand, the choice is still open to be a human
being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the
face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare:
‘I am, therefore I'll think.' 
 Accept the irrevocable fact that
your life depends upon your mind. Admit that the whole of your
struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate
quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional
consciousness, a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive
action, for intuitive certainty, and while you called it a longing
for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an
animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

 Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know
so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the
little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge
and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from
the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not
omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience, that
your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you
infallible, that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths
accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct
it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from
error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the
fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and
effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his
nature, his morality, his glory.  
 Discard that unlimited license
to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect By what
standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in
the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But
perfection is not to be ganged by mystic commandments to practice the
impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not
open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not,
and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached
rationality, not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and
relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the
acceptance of reason as an absolute.  
 Learn to distinguish the
difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An
error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to
correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of
an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the
conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful
evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which
you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you
refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make
every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any
breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to
know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent
depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and
seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel
it', or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It's
only logic,' which means: ‘It's only reality.' The only realm
opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.  
 Accept the
fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose
of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless
self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is
the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your
values. Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the
kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to
assume, and the anxious stateness of your days is the monument to
your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for
happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who
deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to
existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a
flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice
which you call a virtue: humility, learn to value yourself, which
means: to fight for your happiness, and when you learn that pride is
the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.  
 As a
basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal
any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your
life is his property, and loathsome as such claim might be, there's
something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's
ever proper to help another man? No, if he claims it as his right or
as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes, if such is your own desire
based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his
struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against
suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on
the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational
record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is
still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to
help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his
suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim, is to
accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues
is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him
is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be
it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned,
a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle
to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation
of your world was made.  
 Do not say that my morality is too hard
for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the
unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the
values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept
sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the
worst. Look around you: what you have done to society, you had done it
first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal
wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason
you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to
your future, to your country, to yourself.  
 We, whom you are now
calling, but who will not answer any longer, we had lived among you,
but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we
were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented, and it became,
in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero
in your soul, and you failed to know me when I passed you in the
street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which
you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you
were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover
one without the other.  
 When you failed to give recognition to
man's mind and attempted to rule human beings by force, those who
submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don't
submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the
disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to
annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the
thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a
pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than
submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d'Anconia
and Ragnar Danneskjöld, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my
fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?  
 It was the
three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of
us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned
soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality, on the
inviolate supremacy of man's right to exist, but you dreaded to
admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in
history, you looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the
presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a
highway or a bridge, you kept damning this country as immoral and
its progress as ‘material greed,' you kept offering apologies for
this country's greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to
decaying Europe's idol of a leprous, mystic bum.  
 This
country, the product of reason, could not survive on the morality
of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by
men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that
divorced man's soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic
doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on
earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the
ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its
youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness
was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one
or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn't. You
let them infect you with the worship of need, and this country
became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul,
while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in
silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the
industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the
victims I have avenged?  
 Neither he nor the rest of us will return
until the road is clear to rebuild this country, until the wreckage
of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A
country's political system is based on its code of morality. We will
rebuild America's system on the moral premise which had been its
foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your
frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic
morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to
the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are
his by inalienable right 
 You who've lost the concept of a right,
you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights
are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the
claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary
whim, the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional
law, but the law of identity. A is A, and Man is Man. Rights are
conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper
survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his
mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work
for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth
is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature
forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that
attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which
means: is anti-life.  
 Rights are a moral concept, and morality
is a matter of choice. Men are free not to choose man's survival as
the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape
from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists
for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body,
when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational
have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your
societies in history, but you've evaded the knowledge of the cause. I
am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity,
which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the
irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just
as man can't succeed by defying reality, so a nation can't, or a
country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by
the generosity of victims.  
 Just as man can't exist without his
body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's
rights into reality, to think, to work and to keep the
results, which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of
muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of ‘human rights'
versus ‘property rights,' as if one could exist without the other,
are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul
versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a
slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The
doctrine that ‘human rights' are superior to ‘property rights'
simply means that some human beings have the right to make property
out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the
incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their
betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as
human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.' 
 The
source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and
all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor. As you
cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without
its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to
work: those who're able to think, will not work under compulsion;
those who will, won't produce much more than the price of the whip
needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind
except on the owner's terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any
other policy of men toward man's property is the policy of criminals,
no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it
short-range and starve when their prey runs out, just as you're
starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical' if
your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to
robbery illegal.  
 The only proper purpose of a government is to
protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical
violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent
of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against
those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a
government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army,
to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your
property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle
disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a
government that initiates the employment of force against men who had
forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed
victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate
morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and
switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest
enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested
with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of
the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality
the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please
to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.  
 Only a
brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree
to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to
accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person
at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the
physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice,
reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders, not
masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do
not live or work with any form of the non-objective.  
 So long as
men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and
believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable
demons, no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only
when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were
they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan
their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed
modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision,
back into the power of unknowable demons, the unpredictable power of
the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will
not invest the effort of one summer if he's unable to calculate his
chances of a harvest But you expect industrial giants, who plan in
terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake
ninety-nine-year contracts, to continue to function and produce, not
knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will
descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their
effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a
day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision
extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to
grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will
not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of
inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched
mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him
and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and
succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.  
 Look past
the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men
of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your
livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of
voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work?
Nothing but the productive effort of your mind, if you lived on a
desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less
your physical labor would bring you, and you could spend your life
on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with
bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a
rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an
incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not
only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds
who exist in the world around you.  
 When you work in a modern
factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the
productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work
of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who
saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of
the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the
levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you
spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who
discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the
work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend
your time denouncing.  
 The machine, the frozen form of a living
intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by
raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith
in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would
consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of
effort How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for
Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check
was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were
the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith
is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank
Rearden.  
 Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or
willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines
the degree to which he'll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no
further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than
physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own
contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further
value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an
idea in any field of rational endeavor, the man who discovers new
knowledge, is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material
products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is
only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of
men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising
the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the
value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to
the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting
his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual
advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the
degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don't seek or
expect the unearned.  
 In proportion to the mental energy he spent,
the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of
his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he
makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a
janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous
payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of
him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of
ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid
contributes the most of all those below him, but gets nothing except
his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to
add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to
himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing
to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their
brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition' between the strong
and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of
‘exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.  
 Such was
the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What
did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave
us free to function, free to think and to work as we choose, free
to take our own risks and to bear our own losses, free to earn our
own profits and to make our own fortunes, free to gamble on your
rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose
of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and
on your mind's ability to see it, free to count on your intelligence
and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind. Such was the
price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. You decided to
call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and
provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars,
should own our palaces and yachts, you decided that you had a right
to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not
want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your
gun. Our answer to that, was: ‘May you be damned!' Our answer came
true. You are.  
 You did not care to compete in terms of
intelligence, you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did
not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production, you
are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful
plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value
for value, you have now established an unselfish society where they
trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where
men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law,
which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from
their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them
clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified
good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and
political power, between the power of money and the power of
guns, no difference between reward and punishment, no difference
between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear,
no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference
now.  
 Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a
limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest
among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank
out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into
cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of
science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure
knowledge', the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge
has no practical purpose on this earth, who reserve their logic for
inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men
requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their
souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there
is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge' or any sort of
‘disinterested' action, since they scorn the use of their science
for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the
service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for
looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the
intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on
this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me,
Dr. Robert Stadler?  
 But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I
am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred
of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘, to the order of others.'
If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio
tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong
with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules
and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it
does concern and who're making an effort to know. Those who're making
an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.  
 I
am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of
their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop
supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible
by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your
sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies'
terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules. Do not seek
the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those
who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their
team to recoup what they've taken by helping them rob your
neighbors. One cannot hope to maintain one's life by accepting bribes
to condone one's destruction. Do not struggle for profit success or
security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is
not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand;
the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably
helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to
bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for
existence.  
 Do not attempt to rise on the looters' terms or to
climb a ladder while they're holding the ropes. Do not allow their
hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living
ambition. Go on strike, in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill
in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not
share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune,
with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their
ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra
penny to support the looters' state. Since you're captive, act as a
captive, do not help them pretend that you're free. Be the silent,
incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey, but do
not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish,
or a plea, or a purpose. Do not help a holdup man to claim that he
acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to
pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not
help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their
secret terror, the terror of knowing they're unfit to exist; remove it
and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.  
 If you
find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do
so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with
their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who
accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human
existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by
the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will
repair: the standard of Life and Reason.  
 Act as a rational being
and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for
a voice of integrity, act on your rational values, whether alone in
the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as
the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind's
rebirth.  
 When the looters' state collapses, deprived of the best
of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the
mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving
robber gangs fighting to rob one another, when the advocates of the
morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal, then and on
that day we will return.  
 We will open the gates of our city to
those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines,
orchards, markets and inviolate homes. We will act as the rallying
center for such hidden outposts as you'll build. With the sign of the
dollar as our symbol, the sign of free trade and free minds, we
will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages
who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who
choose to join us, will join us; those who don't, will not have the
power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men
who carried the banner of the mind.  
 Then this country will once
more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational
being. The political system we will build is contained in a single
moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting
to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his
rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his
only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not
be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in
time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for
guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of
paying with one life for the errors of another.  
 In that world,
you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in
your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty
which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid
of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has
stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with
the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the
arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live
in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and
reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system
of existence where objective reality is the standard and the
judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and
weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will
be provided for your evil. What you'll receive from men will not be
alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value:
justice. And when you'll look at men or at yourself, you will feel,
not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.

 Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a
struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle
and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue
the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do
you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to
precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where
the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win
bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a
struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady
ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in
your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the
world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full
sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the
choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

 The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might
still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by
their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My
brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the
enemies you're serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your
endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love, the endurance
that carries their burdens, the generosity that responds to their
cries of despair, the innocence that is unable to conceive of their
evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn
them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives
as theirs, the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that
they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the
world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to
the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to
this earth, leave them, don't exhaust the greatness of your soul on
achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me ... my
love?  
 In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this
world to those who are its worst In the name of the values that keep
you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the
cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do
not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright
posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited
roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in
the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet,
the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely
frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to
reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you
desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

 But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break
with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a
sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for
the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight
for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational
mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of
knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the
battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any
joy that has ever existed on this earth.  
 You will win when you
are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my
battle, and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall
now repeat it to the hearing of the world: 
 I swear, by my life
and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another
man, nor ask another man to live for mine. 

THE END.


A SIGNET BOOK

SIGNET Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc., 375
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Copyright © 1961, by Ayn Rand All rights reserved under International
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Excerpts from books by Ayn Rand were reprinted by permission of the
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Copyright. 1943, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Copyright © 1968 by Ayn
Rand.

Cassell and Company, Ltd.. London: The Fountainhead and We the Living.

Caxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell. Idaho: Anthem, Copyright, 1946, by
Pamphleteers, Inc.

Random House, Inc.. New York: We the Living, Copyright, 1936, © 1959,
by Ayn Rand O'Connor; Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. 

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