Key ideas: Published in 1963. “‘What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?’… This is the psychological confession implied in such questions and in many issues of the same kind… it reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out.” (Ayn Rand)
Certain questions, which one frequently hears, are not philosophical queries, but psychological confessions. This is particularly true in the field of ethics. It is especially in discussions of ethics that one must check one’s premises (or remember them), and more: one must learn to check the premises of one’s adversaries.
For instance, Objectivists will often hear a question such as: “What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?”
The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are “their brothers’ keepers” and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others. The questioner is ignoring or evading the basic premises of Objectivist ethics and is attempting to switch the discussion onto his own collectivist base. Observe that he does not ask: “Should anything be done?” but: “What will be done?”—as if the collectivist premise had been tacitly accepted and all that remains is a discussion of the means to implement it.
Once, when Barbara Branden was asked by a student: “What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?”—she answered: “If you want to help them, you will not be stopped.”
This is the essence of the whole issue and a perfect example of how one refuses to accept an adversary’s premises as the basis of discussion.
Only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help others; society—as an organized political system—has no rights in the matter at all.
On the question of when and under what conditions it is morally proper for an individual to help others, I refer you to Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. What concerns us here is the collectivist premise of regarding this issue as political, as the problem or duty of “society as a whole.”
Since nature does not guarantee automatic security, success and survival to any human being, it is only the dictatorial presumptuousness and the moral cannibalism of the altruist-collectivist code that permits a man to suppose (or idly to daydream) that he can somehow guarantee such security to some men at the expense of others.
If a man speculates on what “society” should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men’s lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them, to set their goals or to plan the “distribution” of their efforts. …
This is the psychological confession implied in such questions and in many issues of the same kind
At best, it reveals a man’s psycho-epistemological chaos; it reveals a fallacy which may be termed “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction” and which consists of substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—in this case, substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of “ethics.” Thus, a man may reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.
More often, however, that psychological confession reveals a deeper evil: it reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out.
Humility and presumptuousness are always two sides of the same premise, and always share the task of filling the space vacated by self- esteem in a collectivized mentality. The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends. The more neurotic he is or the more conscientious in the practice of altruism (and these two aspects of his psychology will act reciprocally to reinforce each other), the more he will tend to devise schemes “for the good of mankind” or of “society” or of “the public” or of “future generations” —or of anything except actual human beings.
Hence the appalling recklessness with which men propose, discuss and accept “humanitarian” projects which are to be imposed by political means, that is, by force, on an unlimited number of human beings. If, according to collectivist caricatures, the greedy rich indulged in profligate material luxury, on the premise of “price no object”—then the social progress brought by today’s collectivized mentalities consists of indulging in altruistic political planning, on the premise of “human lives no object.”
The hallmark of such mentalities is the advocacy of some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs or means. Out of context, such a goal can usually be shown to be desirable; it has to be public, because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to shroud the issue of means—because the means are to be human lives.
“Medicare” is an example of such a project
“Medicare” is an example of such a project. “Isn’t it desirable that the aged should have medical care in times of illness?” its advocates clamor. Considered out of context, the answer would be: yes, it is desirable. Who would have a reason to say no? And it is at this point that the mental processes of a collectivized brain are cut off; the rest is fog. Only the desire remains in his sight—it’s the good, isn’t it?—it’s not for myself, it’s for others, it’s for the public, for a helpless, ailing public …
The fog hides such facts as the enslavement and, therefore, the destruction of medical science, the regimentation and disintegration of all medical practice, and the sacrifice of the professional integrity, the freedom, the careers, the ambitions, the achievements, the happiness, the lives of the very men who are to provide that “desirable” goal—the doctors.
After centuries of civilization, most men—with the exception of criminals—have learned that the above mental attitude is neither practical nor moral in their private lives and may not be applied to the achievement of their private goals. There would be no controversy about the moral character of some young hoodlum who declared: “Isn’t it desirable to have a yacht, to live in a penthouse and to drink champagne?”—and stubbornly refused to consider the fact that he had robbed a bank and killed two guards to achieve that “desirable” goal.
There is no moral difference between these two examples; the number of beneficiaries does not change the nature of the action, it merely increases the number of victims. In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.
It is men’s views of their public or political existence that the collectivized ethics of altruism has protected from the march of civilization and has preserved as a reservoir, a wildlife sanctuary, ruled by the mores of prehistorical savagery. If men have grasped some faint glimmer of respect for individual rights in their private dealings with one another, that glimmer vanishes when they turn to public issues—and what leaps into the political arena is a caveman who can’t conceive of any reason why the tribe may not bash in the skull of any individual if it so desires.
The distinguishing characteristic of such tribal mentality is: the axiomatic, the almost “instinctive” view of human life as the fodder, fuel or means for any public project.
The examples of such projects are innumerable: “Isn’t it desirable to clean up the slums?” (dropping the context of what happens to those in the next income bracket)—“Isn’t it desirable to have beautiful, planned cities, all of one harmonious style?” (dropping the context of whose choice of style is to be forced on the home builders)—“Isn’t it desirable to have an educated public?” (dropping the context of who will do the educating, what will be taught, and what will happen to dissenters) —“Isn’t it desirable to liberate the artists, the writers, the composers from the burden of financial problems and leave them free to create?” (dropping the context of such questions as: which artists, writers and composers?—chosen by whom?—at whose expense?—at the expense of the artists, writers and composers who have no political pull and whose miserably precarious incomes will be taxed to “liberate” that privileged elite?)—“Isn’t science desirable? Isn’t it desirable for man to conquer space?”
And here we come to the essence of the unreality—the savage, blind, ghastly, bloody unreality—that motivates a collectivized soul.
The unanswered and unanswerable question in all of their “desirable” goals is: To whom? Desires and goals presuppose beneficiaries. Is science desirable? To whom? Not to the Soviet serfs who die of epidemics, filth, starvation, terror and firing squads—while some bright young men wave to them from space capsules circling over their human pig-sties. And not to the American father who died of heart failure brought on by overwork, struggling to send his son through coUege—or to the boy who could not afford college—or to the couple killed in an automobile wreck, because they could not afford a new car—or to the mother who lost her child because she could not afford to send him to the best hospital—not to any of those people whose taxes pay for the support of our subsidized science and public research projects.
Science is a value only because it expands, enriches and protects man’s life. It is not a value outside that context. Nothing is a value outside that context. And “man’s life” means the single, specific, irreplaceable lives of individual men.
The discovery of new knowledge is a value to men only when and if they are free to use and enjoy the benefits of the previously known. New discoveries are a potential value to all men, but not at the price of sacrificing all of their actual values. A “progress” extended into infinity, which brings no benefit to anyone, is a monstrous absurdity. And so is the “conquest of space” by some men, when and if it is accomplished by expropriating the labor of other men who are left without means to acquire a pair of shoes.
Progress can come only out of men’s surplus, that is: from the work of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to venture out in pursuit of the new. Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.
It is only to the frozen unreality inside a collectivized brain that human lives are interchangeable—and only such a brain can contemplate as “moral” or “desirable” the sacrifice of generations of living men for the alleged benefits which public science or public industry or public concerts will bring to the unborn.
Soviet Russia is the clearest, but not the only, illustration of the achievements of collectivized mentalities. Two generations of Russians have lived, toiled and died in misery, waiting for the abundance promised by their rulers, who pleaded for patience and commanded austerity, while building public “industrialization” and killing public hope in five-year installments. At first, the people starved while waiting for electric generators and tractors; they are still starving, while waiting for atomic energy and interplanetary travel.
That waiting has no end—the unborn profiteers of that wholesale sacrificial slaughter will never be bom—the sacrificial animals will merely breed new hordes of sacrificial animals—as the history of all tyrannies has demonstrated—while the unfocused eyes of a collectivized brain will stare on, undeterred, and speak of a vision of service to mankind, mixing interchangeably the corpses of the present with the ghosts of the future, but seeing no men.
Such is the status of reality in the soul of any Milquetoast who looks with envy at the achievements of industrialists and dreams of what beautiful public parks he could create if only everyone’s lives, efforts and resources were turned over to him.
All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.
The next time you encounter one of those “public-spirited” dreamers who tells you rancorously that “some very desirable goals cannot be achieved without everybody’s participation,” tell him that if he cannot obtain everybody’s voluntary participation, his goals had jolly well better remain un-achieved—and that men’s lives are not his to dispose of.
And, if you wish, give him the following example of the ideals he advocates. It is medically possible to take the corneas of a man’s eyes immediately after his death and transplant them to the eyes of a living man who is blind, thus restoring his sight (in certain types of blindness). Now, according to collectivized ethics, this poses a social problem. Should we wait until a man’s death to cut out his eyes, when other men need them? Should we regard everybody’s eyes as public property and devise a “fair method of distribution”? Would you advocate cutting out a living man’s eye and giving it to a blind man, so as to “equalize” them? No? Then don’t struggle any further with questions about “public projects” in a free society. You know the answer. The principle is the same.