Key ideas: This is the first of Ayn Rand’s lectures at the Ford Hall Forum. It was delivered on March 26, 1961. “I am speaking here today on the assumption that I am addressing an audience consisting predominantly of “liberals” —that is: of my antagonists. Therefore, I must begin by explaining why I chose to do it.” (Ayn Rand)
I am speaking here today on the assumption that I am addressing an audience consisting predominantly of “liberals” —that is: of my antagonists. Therefore, I must begin by explaining why I chose to do it.
The briefest explanation is to tell you that in the 1930s I envied the “liberals” for the fact that their leaders entered political campaigns armed not with worn-out bromides, but with intellectual arguments. I disagreed with everything they said, but I would have fought to the death for the method by which they said it: for an intellectual approach to political problems.
Today, I have no cause to envy the “liberals” any longer.
For many decades, the “liberals” had been the representatives of the intellect in America, if not in the content of their ideas, then at least in form, method, and professed epistemology. They claimed that their views were based on reason, logic, science; and even though they were glorifying collectivism, they projected a manner of confident, distinguished intellectuality—while most of the so-called “conservatives,” allegedly devoted to the defense of individualism and capitalism, went about apologetically projecting such a cracker-barrel sort of folksiness that Li‘l Abner would have found it embarrassing; the monument to which may still be seen in the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange, in a costly display of statistical charts and models proudly entitled: THE PEOPLE’S CAPITALISM.
Today, the two camps are moving closer and merging. Just as the Republican and Democratic parties are becoming indistinguishable, so are their respective intellectual spokesmen. And while the “conservatives” are lumbering toward the Middle Ages, in quest of a philosophical base for their views—the “liberals,” always the avant- garde, have outdistanced them and are now galloping, on the same quest, toward India of the fifth century B.C., the original source of Zen Buddhism.
What social or political group today is the home of those who are and still wish to be the men of the intellect? None. The intellectuals—in the strict, literal sense of the word, as distinguished from the mystics and the neo-mysties—are now homeless refugees, left behind by a silent collapse they have not had the courage to identify. They are the displaced persons of our culture, who are afraid to discover that they have been displaced by the monster whom they themselves had released: by the primordial proponents of brute force.
As an advocate of reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism, I seek to address myself to the men of the intellect—wherever such may still be found—and I believe that more of them may be found among the former “liberals” than among the present “conservatives.” I may be wrong; I am willing to find out.
The terms “liberal” and “conservative” are two of the emptiest sounds in today’s political vocabulary: they have become rubber words that can be stretched to fit any meaning anyone cares to give them—words that can be used safely by any speaker who wants to be misunderstood in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people. Yet at the same time, everyone seems to understand these two words in some foggy, sub-verbal manner, as if they were the code signals of a dark, secret guilt, hiding an issue no one cares to face.
When an entire culture is guilty of evasion on so enormous a scale, the first thing to do, if one does not choose to be an evader, is to identify the issue that people are afraid to see. What is it that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have now come to hide?
Well, observe a curious sequence in our intellectual trends. In the popular, political usage of today, the term “liberal” is generally understood to mean an advocate of greater government control over the country’s economy, or, loosely, an advocate of socialism—while the term “conservative” is generally understood to mean an opponent of government controls, or an advocate of capitalism. But this was not the original, historical meaning of the two terms, or their use in the nineteenth century.
Originally, the term “liberal” meant an advocate of individual rights, of political freedom, of laissez-faire capitalism, and an opponent of the authoritarian state—while the term “conservative” meant an advocate of the state’s authority, of tradition, of the established political order, of the status quo, and an opponent of individual rights.
It has been observed many times that the term “liberal” today means the opposite of its nineteenth-century meaning.
This would not have been too disastrous intellectually if the two terms had been merely reversed and had exchanged their original meanings. But what is significant— ominously significant—is the fact that certain groups are now attempting to switch the term “conservative” back to its nineteenth-century meaning, to palm it off on the public by imperceptible degrees, never bringing the issue fully into the open, hoping that people will gradually come to believe that a “conservative” is an advocate of authority, but of traditional authority.
If semantic corruption becomes accepted on that wide a scale, if the political switch pulled on us becomes a choice between twentieth-century statist “liberals” and nineteenth-century statist “conservatives,” what political system will be silently obliterated by that switch? What political system is being destroyed by stealth, without letting people discover that it is being destroyed? Capitalism.
It is the very scale and virulence of the evasion that should make every rational person pause and consider the issue. Those who do, will discover that the historical, political, and economic case for capitalism has never been refuted—and that the only way the statists can hope to win is by never allowing it to be discussed.
This is the issue hidden under the foggy sloppiness of today’s political terms. Most people are not consciously aware of it; what they do sense, however, is that they haven’t a leg to stand on as far as their political views are concerned, whether they’re “liberals” or “conservatives”—that they have no philosophical base, no moral justification, no principles to uphold, no policy to offer.
Observe the intellectual disintegration of today’s political discussions, the shrinking of issues and debates to the level of single, isolated, superficial concretes, with no context, with no reference to any fundamental principles, no mention of basic issues, no proofs, no arguments, nothing but arbitrary assertions of “for” or “against.”
As an example, observe the level on which the last presidential campaign was fought [Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960]. Did the candidates discuss foreign policy? No—just the fate of Quemoy and Matsu [two islands between China and Taiwan]. Did they discuss socialized medicine? No—just the cost and the procedure of medical aid to the aged. Did they discuss government control of education? No—just who should pay the teachers’ salaries: the federal government or the states.
What most people are evading today is the realization that under the lip service they are paying to an anti-totalitarian crusade, they have accepted all the basic premises of a totalitarian philosophy—and the rest is only a matter of time and degree. They do not know how they came to accept it—and most of them do not want to accept it—but they see no alternative and they are too frightened, too bitterly discouraged to seek it.
Whose job is it to offer an alternative? Who provides a country with ideas, with knowledge, with political theories? The intellectuals. But it is the intellectuals who have brought us to this state—and are now deserting under fire; that is, giving up the task of intellectual leadership at a time when they are needed most.
When intellectual disintegration reaches such absurd extremes as, on one side, the claim of some “conservatives” that the United States of America was the product of tradition worship, and, on the other side, the use of a political designation such as “a totalitarian liberal”—it is time to stop and to realize that there are no intellectual sides any longer, no philosophical camps and no political theories, nothing but an undifferentiated mob of trembling statists who haggle only over how fast or how slowly we are to collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship, whose gang will do the dictating, and who will be sacrificed to whom.
It is the “non-totalitarian liberals” and the “non-traditional conservatives” that I seek to address. Both are homeless refugees today, because neither had a firm philosophical foundation under his political home. Those homes were jerry-built astride a deadly fissure; the fissure has opened wide and has swallowed all the cheap little platform planks. Let them go—and let us start rebuilding the foundations.
The fissure had many philosophical names: soul versus body—mind versus heart—liberty versus equality—the practical versus the moral. But all of these false dichotomies are merely secondary consequences derived by the mystics from one real, basic issue: reason versus mysticism—or, in political terms, reason and freedom versus faith and force.
Let me define my terms: reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies, and integrates the material provided by man’s senses; mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, supernatural means of knowledge.
Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom. The rest of human history was dominated by mysticism of one kind or another; that is, by the belief that man’s mind is impotent, that reason is futile or evil or both, and that man must be guided by some irrational “instinct” or feeling or intuition or revelation, by some form of blind, unreasoning faith. All the centuries dominated by mysticism were the eras of political tyranny and slavery, of rule by brute force—from the primitive barbarism of the jungle—to the pharaohs of Egypt—to the emperors of Rome—to the feudalism of the Dark and Middle Ages—to the absolute monarchies of Europe—to the modern dictatorships of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and all their lesser carbon copies.
The Industrial Revolution, the United States of America, and the politico-economic system of capitalism were the product and result of the intellectual liberation achieved by the Renaissance and of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophical influence, which lasted, in spite of a Platonist counterrevolution, through the centuries known as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. With so illustrious a start, how did the United States descend to its present level of intellectual bankruptcy?
I want to recommend to your attention a very interesting book, which provides the material, the historical evidence, for the answer to that question. I hasten to state that the conclusions I have drawn are my own, not the author‘s, that I disagree with the author’s viewpoint and I believe that he would probably disagree with mine. But the book is a remarkable, scholarly, well-documented record of the history of America’s intellectual life. One may disagree with a writer’s interpretation of the facts, but first one must know the facts—and in this respect, the book is of enormous value. This book is The Decline of American Liberalism by Professor Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Professor Ekirch himself is a “liberal”—though not of the totalitarian variety. He offers no solution for the present state of liberalism and no explanation of its decline. His thesis is only that liberalism is declining and that our culture is moving toward “an increasingly illiberal future.”
Let me give you Professor Ekirch’s definition of liberalism:
Professor Ekirch is an historian and has given an accurate description.
But what a philosopher would observe is that that description holds a clue to the disaster which has wrecked Western civilization and its intellectuals. Observe that the “liberals”—in the nineteenth century as well as today—held “a collection of ideas or principles” which had never been translated into a “well-defined political or economic system.” This means that they held certain values and goals, with no knowledge of how to implement them in reality, with no understanding of what practical actions would achieve or defeat their goals. With so vulnerable an intellectual equipment, could they be a match for the primordial forces of totalitarian mysticism? They could not and were not. It is they, the intellectuals, who betrayed their own liberal ideals, defeated their own goals, paved the way for their own destroyers—and did not know it, until it was too late.
They did not know that the political and economic system they had never defined—the only system that could achieve a limited representative government, as well as the intellectual and economic freedom of the individual—the ideal system—was laissez-faire capitalism.
The guilt of the intellectuals, in the nineteenth century, was that they never discovered capitalism—and they have not discovered it to this day.
If you want to know the philosophical and psychological causes of the intellectuals’ treason against capitalism, I will refer you to the title essay of my book For the New Intellectual. In the brief space of today’s discussion, I have to confine myself to a mere indication of the nature and the consequences of that treason.
The fundamental principle of capitalism is the separation of State and Economics—that is: the liberation of men’s economic activities, of production and trade, from any form of intervention, coercion, compulsion, regulation, or control by the government. This is the essence of capitalism, which is implicit in its theory and in the operation of a free market—but this is not the way most of its advocates saw it, and it is not the way it was translated into practice.
The term “laissez-faire capitalism,” which one has to use today in order to be understood, is actually a redundancy: only an economy of total “laissez faire” is capitalism; anything else is a “mixed economy,” that is, a mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government compulsion, of individualism and collectivism.
A full, perfect system of capitalism has never yet existed in history. Various degrees of government intervention and control remained in all the mixed, semi-free economies of the nineteenth century, undercutting, hampering, distorting, and ultimately destroying the operations of a free market. But during the nineteenth century, mankind came close to economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. Observe the results. Observe also that the degree of a country’s freedom from government control was the degree of its progress. America was the freest and achieved the most.
When two opposite principles are operating in any issue, the scientific approach to their evaluation is to study their respective performances, trace their consequences in full, precise detail, and then pronounce judgment on their respective merits. In the case of a mixed economy, the first duty of any thinker or scholar is to study the historical record and to discover which developments were caused by the free enterprise of private individuals, by free production and trade in a free market—and which developments were caused by government intervention into the economy. It might shock you to hear that no such study has ever been made. To my knowledge, no book dealing with this issue is available. If one wants to study this question, one has to gather information from random passages and references in books on other subjects, or from the unstated implications of known but unanalyzed facts.
Those who undertake such a study will discover that all the economic evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated, and made possible not by private enterprise, not by free trade on a free market, but by government intervention into the economy, by government controls, favors, subsidies, franchises, and special privileges.
The villains were not the private businessmen who made fortunes by productive ability and free trade, but the bureaucrats and their friends, the men who made fortunes by political pull and government favor. Yet it is the private businessmen, the victims, who took the blame, while the bureaucrats and their intellectual spokesmen used their own guilt as an argument for the extension of their power.
Those of you who have read Atlas Shrugged will recognize the difference between a businessman such as Hank Rearden, the representative of capitalism, and a businessman such as Orren Boyle, the typical product of a mixed economy. If you want an historical example, consider the career of James Jerome Hill, who built the Great Northern Railroad without a penny of federal help, who was responsible, practically single-handedly, for the development of the entire American Northwest, and who was persecuted by the government all his life, under the Sherman Act, for allegedly being a monopolist. Consider it, then compare it to the career of the famous California businessmen known as “The Big Four,” who built the Central Pacific Railroad on federal subsidies, causing disastrous consequences and dislocations in the country’s economy, and who held a thirty-year monopoly on railroad transportation in California, by means of special privileges granted by the state legislature which made it legally impossible for any competing railroad to exist in the state.
The difference between these two types of business career has never been identified in the generally accepted view of capitalism. By imperceptible degrees—first, through the default of capitalism’s alleged defenders, then through the deliberate misrepresentations and falsifications of its enemies—the gradual rewriting of our economic history has brought us to the stage where people believe that all the economic evils of the last two centuries were caused by the free- enterprise element, the so-called “private sector,” of our mixed economy, while the economic progress of these two centuries was the result of the government’s actions and interventions. People are now told that America’s spectacular industrial achievements, unmatched in any period of history or in any part of the globe, were due not to the productive genius of free men, but to the special privileges handed to them by a paternalistic government. The fact that much more autocratic governments, with much wider privilege-dispensing powers and policies, did not achieve the same results anywhere else on earth is blanked out by the proponents of this theory.
The only counterpart of this theory’s grotesque inversion and monstrous injustice is the mystics’ doctrine that man must give credit to God for all his virtues, but must place the blame for all his sins upon himself. Incidentally, the philosophical motive and purpose in both these instances is the same.
If you want a contemporary demonstration of the respective merits and performances of a free economy and of a controlled economy—a demonstration that comes as close to an historical laboratory experiment as one could hope to see—take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East Germany.
No politico-economic system in history had proved its value so eloquently or had benefited mankind so greatly as capitalism—and none has ever been attacked so savagely and blindly. Why did the majority of the intellectuals turn against capitalism from the start? Why did their victims, the businessmen, bear their attacks in silence? The cause of it is that primordial evil which, to this day, men are afraid to challenge: the morality of altruism.
Altruism has been men’s ruling moral code through most of mankind’s history. It has had many forms and variations, but its essence has always remained the same: altruism holds that man 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.
The philosophical conflict which, since the Renaissance, has been tearing Western civilization and which has reached its ultimate climax in our age is the conflict between capitalism and the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are philosophical opposites; they cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.
The moral code which is implicit in capitalism had never been formulated explicitly. The basic premise of that code is that man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself, and that men must deal with one another as traders, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit. This, in essence, is the moral premise on which the United States of America was based: the principle of man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness.
This is what the philosophers and the intellectuals of the nineteenth century did not and could not choose to identify, so long as they remained committed to the mystics’ morality of altruism. If the good, the virtuous, the morally ideal is suffering and self-sacrifice—then, by that standard, capitalism had to be damned as evil. Capitalism does not tell men to suffer, but to pursue enjoyment and achievement, here, on earth —capitalism does not tell men to serve and sacrifice, but to produce and profit—capitalism does not preach passivity, humility, resignation, but independence, self-confidence, self-reliance—and, above all, capitalism does not permit anyone to expect or demand, to give or to take the unearned. In all human relationships—private or public, spiritual or material, social or political or economic or moral—capitalism requires that men be guided by a principle which is the antithesis of altruism: the principle of justice.
So long as the intellectuals of the nineteenth century held altruism as their moral code, they had to evade the actual nature and meaning of capitalism—and thus come gradually to lose and to betray all of their initial goals and ideals.
There were two crucial errors—or evasions—in the liberals’ view of capitalism, from which all the rest of their debacle proceeded. One was their attitude toward the businessman; the other, their attitude toward the use of physical force.
Since wealth, throughout all the centuries of stagnation preceding the birth of capitalism, had been gained by conquest, by physical force, by political power, the intellectuals took it as their axiom that wealth can be acquired only by force—and refused to break up their mental package deal, to differentiate between a businessman and a feudal baron.
I quote from my book For the New Intellectual:
“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 paychecks 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.”
The intellectuals refused to identify the fact that the source of industrial wealth is man’s mind, that the fortunes made in a free economy are the product of intelligence, of ability. This led them to the modern version of the ancient soul-body dichotomy: to the contradiction of upholding the freedom of the mind, while denying it to the most active exponents of creative intelligence, the businessmen—the contradiction of promising to liberate man’s mind by enslaving his body. It led them to regard the businessman as a “vulgar materialist” or a brute or a Babbitt [this is a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s novel], as some sort of inferior species born to serve them—and to regard themselves as some sort of elite born to rule him, to control his life, and dispose of his product. The shabby monument to this premise was the idea of divorcing production from distribution, of assuming the right to distribute that which one has not produced. The only way to implement an idea of that kind, the next step in their moral descent, was the intellectuals’ alliance with the thug, with the advocate of rule by brute force: the totalitarian collectivist.
The intellectuals’ second error—their attitude toward the use of force —is a corollary of the first. So long as they refused to identify the nature of free trade and of a social system based on voluntary, uncoerced, unforced, non-sacrificial relationships among men, so long as the moral cannibalism of the altruist code permitted them to believe that it is virtuous and right to sacrifice some men for the sake of others—the intellectuals had to embrace the political creed of collectivism, the dream of establishing a perfect altruist society at the point of a gun. They projected a society where all would be sacrificed to that conveniently undefinable idol “the public good,” with themselves in the role of judges of what that “good” might be and of who would be “the public” at any given moment—an ideal society to be achieved by means of physical force; that is, by means of the political power of the state, by means of a totalitarian dictatorship.
The rest is history—the shameful, sordid, ugly history of the intellectual development of the last hundred and fifty years.
In the realm of political theory, the switch from the liberalism of the nineteenth century to the collectivism of the twentieth was accomplished when people began to accept the Marxist view of the nature of government—the view that a government is and has to be the agent of the economic interests of some class or another, and that the sole political issue is: which class will seize control of the government to force its own interests on all other groups or classes. Thus capitalism came to be regarded as an economic system in which government coercion is used for the benefit of the businessmen, the employers, or the rich in general. This served as a justification for the “liberals,” the socialists, or any other collectivists when they proposed to use government coercion for the benefit of the workers, the employees, or the poor in general. And thus the existence, the possibility, the historical record, and even the theory of a noncoercive society were wiped out of people’s minds and out of public discussion.
In the early years of American capitalism, the government’s intervention into the country’s economy was minimal; the government’s role was predominantly confined to its proper function: that of a policeman and arbiter charged with the task of protecting the individual citizen’s rights and property. (The most notorious exception to that rule existed only in the agrarian, non-industrial, non-capitalist states of the South, where the state governments upheld the institution of slavery.)
The attempts to obtain special economic privileges from the government were begun by businessmen, not by workers, but by businessmen who shared the intellectuals’ view of the state as an instrument of “positive” power, serving “the public good,” and who invoked it to claim that the public good demanded canals or railroads or subsidies or protective tariffs. It is not the great industrialists of America, not men like J. J. Hill, who ran to government for special favors, but random adventurers with political pull or, later, those pretentious types, indoctrinated by the intellectuals, who dreamed of statism as a “manifest destiny.”
It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions that began the revolt against freedom, the demand for greater and greater government power and, ultimately, for the return to an absolute, totalitarian state; it was the intellectuals. For a detailed history of the steps by which the intellectuals of Germany led it toward totalitarianism, culminating in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, I will refer you to a brilliant book entitled Omnipotent Government by Professor Ludwig von Mises. For a detailed history of the intellectuals’ role in America, I will refer you to The Decline of American Liberalism by Professor Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., which I mentioned earlier.
Professor Ekirch shares many of the errors of the “liberals.” He seems to regard capitalism as a system of government coercion for the benefit of the rich; he seems to ascribe America’s progress to government intervention into the economy; he does not question the government’s right to initiate the use of physical force for an alleged “good purpose”; he certainly does not challenge the morality of altruism. But he is too honest and conscientious an observer not to be disturbed by certain symptoms of the totalitarian spirit in the history of the “liberals”—and he offers the evidence, without identifying its full, philosophical implications.
For example, he offers the following quotation from The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly, a book published in 1909, which attacked the theory of laissez faire and had an enormous influence on the so-called progressives of the time—on Theodore Roosevelt, among others:
The Promise of American Life is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial…. The automatic fulfillment of the American national Promise is to be abandoned, if at all, precisely because the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.
If you doubt the role of altruism in the destruction of capitalism, you may observe it in that quotation. And if you doubt the hatred of collectivists for the men of ability, observe it in the following passage from the same book by Croly:
The national government must step in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.
If you have been ascribing the policy of imperialism to the “selfish” individualistic ideology of capitalism and to its “greed” for conquests, here is a quotation from Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations by R. E. Osgood: “The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest, the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect.”
If you have accepted the Marxist doctrine that capitalism leads to wars, read Professor Ekirch’s account of how Woodrow Wilson, the “liberal” reformer, pushed the United States into World War I. “He seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world.” It was not the “selfish capitalists,” or the “tycoons of big business,” or the “greedy munitions-makers” who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the altruistic “liberals” of the magazine The New Republic edited by that same Herbert Croly. What sort of arguments did they use? Here is a sample from Croly: “The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”
If you still wonder about the singular recklessness with which alleged humanitarians treat such issues as force, violence, expropriation, enslavement, bloodshed—perhaps the following passage from Professor Ekirch’s book will give you some clue to their motives: “Stuart Chase rushed into print late in 1932 with a popular work on economics entitled A New Deal. ‘Why,’ Chase asked with real envy at the close of the book, ‘should Russia have all the fun of remaking a world?’”
Apparently, Mr. Stuart Chase objects to the “tyranny of words,” but not to the tyranny of men.
The record speaks for itself. Starting out as advocates of limited representative government, the “liberals” end as champions of unlimited, totalitarian dictatorship. Starting out as defenders of individual rights, they end as apologists for the bloody slaughterhouse of Soviet Russia. Starting out as apostles of human welfare, who beg for a few temporary controls to relieve the emergency of people’s poverty, they end with J. K. Galbraith, who demands controls for the sake of controls and a permanent cut of everybody’s income, not because people are too poor, but because they are too affluent. Starting out as brave champions of freedom, they end crawling on their stomachs to Moscow, with Bertrand Russell, pleading: “Give me slavery, but please don’t give me death.” Starting out as advocates of reason, confident of man’s power to achieve well-being and fulfillment on earth, they end hunched in the darkest corners of the oldest cellar, muttering that reason is impotent, and fumbling through musty pages for the occult guidance of Zen Buddhism.
Such is the end result of the altruist morality.
Now I will ask you to consider the following. The intellectual trend that has brought us to this state—the mysticism-collectivism-altruism axis—has been gaining momentum since the nineteenth century, has been winning victory after victory, and is, at present, our dominant cultural power. If truth and reality were on its side, if it represented the right philosophy for men to live by, one would expect to see a gradual improvement in the state of the world with every successive victory, one would expect an atmosphere of growing confidence, liberation, energy, vitality, and joy of living. Is this what we have seen in the past decades? Is this what we see around us today? Today, in the moment of their almost total triumph, the voices of the mystic-collectivist-altruist axis are rising in a single wail of despair, proclaiming that existence on earth is evil, that futility is the essence of life, that disaster is man’s metaphysical destiny, that man is a miserable failure depraved by nature and unfit to exist. This was not the way that the reason-individualism-capitalism axis greeted its triumphs in the nineteenth century—and this was not the view of man or the sense of life that it brought to mankind.
I quote from my book For the New Intellectual:
“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.”
Those of you who may still be “liberals,” in the original sense of that word, and who may have abandoned everything except loyalty to reason —now is the time to check your premises. If you do, you will find that the ideal society had once been almost within men’s reach. It was the intellectuals who destroyed it—and who committed suicide in the process—but the future belongs to a new type of intellectual, a new radical: the fighter for capitalism.