Key ideas: “I said that the best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story. A detective seeks to discover the truth about a crime. A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual crime. A detective knows what to look for, or what clues to regard as significant. A philosophical detective must remember that all human knowledge has a hierarchical structure; he must learn to distinguish the fundamental from the derivative, and in judging a given philosopher’s system, he must look—first and above all else—at its fundamentals. If the foundation does not hold, neither will anything else.” (Ayn Rand).
(An address given to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974.)
Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in your mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do?
You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don’t look, you won’t have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no return is possible; so long as you don’t know it, you are free to believe what you wish—and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope.
You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don’t know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you be sure that they won’t mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the instruments.
Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.
You are never heard from again.
This is fantasy, you say? You would not act like that and no astronaut ever would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on earth.
Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man’s every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe that they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It’s self-evident. What should I do? Here, they are not too sure—but the usual answer is: whatever everybody does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy—and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.
They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three unanswered questions—and that there is only one science that can answer them: philosophy.
Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. …
The nature of your actions—and of your ambition—will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics—the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—the basic branch of philosophy. …
The extent of your self-confidence—and of your success—will be different, according to which set of answers you accept. These answers are the province of epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which studies man’s means of cognition.
These two branches are the theoretical foundation of philosophy. The third branch—ethics—may be regarded as its technology. Ethics does not apply to everything that exists, only to man, but it applies to every aspect of man’s life: his character, his actions, his values, his relationship to all of existence. Ethics, or morality, defines a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the course of his life.
Just as the astronaut in my story did not know what he should do, because he refused to know where he was and how to discover it, so you cannot know what you should do until you know the nature of the universe you deal with, the nature of your means of cognition—and your own nature.
Before you come to ethics, you must answer the questions posed by metaphysics and epistemology:
Depending on the answers, you can proceed to consider the questions posed by ethics:
The answers given by ethics determine how man should treat other men, and this determines the fourth branch of philosophy: politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system. As an example of philosophy’s function, political philosophy will not tell you how much rationed gas you should be given and on which day of the week—it will tell you whether the government has the right to impose any rationing on anything.
The fifth and last branch of philosophy is esthetics, the study of art, which is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.
Now some of you might say, as many people do: “Aw, I never think in such abstract terms—I want to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems—what do I need philosophy for?” My answer is: In order to be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems—i.e., in order to be able to live on earth. …
Now ask yourself: if you are not interested in abstract ideas, why do you (and all men) feel compelled to use them? The fact is that abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes—and that without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab- bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.
But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. …
You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t.
A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it’s set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power.
He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both. Emotions are not tools of cognition. The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. …
Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self- confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired— even the proper posture of his body.
My [lecture at West Point was] devoted to a brief presentation of an enormous subject: “Philosophy: Who Needs It.” I covered the essentials, but a more detailed discussion of certain points will be helpful to those who wish to study philosophy (particularly today, because philosophy has been abolished by the two currently fashionable schools, Linguistic Analysis and Existentialism).
I said that the best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story. A detective seeks to discover the truth about a crime. A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual crime.
A detective knows what to look for, or what clues to regard as significant. A philosophical detective must remember that all human knowledge has a hierarchical structure; he must learn to distinguish the fundamental from the derivative, and in judging a given philosopher’s system, he must look —first and above all else—at its fundamentals. If the foundation does not hold, neither will anything else. …
The layman’s error, in regard to philosophy, is the tendency to accept consequences while ignoring their causes—to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as “self-evident” or as an irreducible primary, while negating its preconditions. Examples can be seen all around us, particularly in politics.
That attitude, of course, is not confined to philosophy: its simplest example is the people who scream that they need more gas and that the oil industry should be taxed out of existence.
As a philosophical detective, you must remember that nothing is self- evident except the material of sensory perception—and that an irreducible primary is a fact which cannot be analyzed (i.e., broken into components) or derived from antecedent facts. You must examine your own convictions and any idea or theory you study, by asking: Is this an irreducible primary—and, if not, what does it depend on? You must ask the same question about any answer you obtain, until you do come to an irreducible primary: if a given idea contradicts a primary, the idea is false.
This process will lead you to the field of metaphysics and epistemology—and you will discover in what way every aspect of man’s knowledge depends on that field and stands or falls with it. …
Assuming this base, let me give you an example of what a philosophical detective would do with some of the catch phrases I cited in [“Philosophy: Who Needs It”].
“It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” What is the meaning of the concept “truth”: Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means:
The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.
“Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” Bertrand Russell’s gibberish to the contrary notwithstanding, that pronouncement includes itself; therefore, one cannot be sure that one cannot be sure of anything.
The pronouncement means that no knowledge of any kind is possible to man, i.e., that man is not conscious.
Furthermore, if one tried to accept that catch phrase, one would find that its second part contradicts its first: if nobody can be certain of anything, then everybody can be certain of everything he pleases—since it cannot be refuted, and he can claim he is not certain he is certain (which is the purpose of that notion).
What is a theory? It is a set of abstract principles purporting to be either a correct description of reality or a set of guidelines for man’s actions.
Correspondence to reality is the standard of value by which one estimates a theory. If a theory is inapplicable to reality, by what standards can it be estimated as “good”? If one were to accept that notion, it would mean:
The purpose of that catch phrase is to invalidate man’s conceptual faculty.
Logic is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification. Logic has a single law, the Law of Identity, and its various corollaries. If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality. If so, then: a. things are not what they are; b. things can be and not be at the same time, in the same respect, i.e., reality is made up of ontradictions. If so, by what means did anyone discover it? By illogical means. (This last is for sure.)
The purpose of that notion is crudely obvious. Its actual meaning is not: “Logic has nothing to do with reality,” but: “I, the speaker, have nothing to do with logic (or with reality).” When people use that catch phrase, they mean either “It’s logical, but I don’t choose to be logical” or: “It’s logical, but people are not logical, they don’t think—and I intend to pander to their irrationality.” …
When people hear the catch phrase: “It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today,” they usually think of man-made issues or customs, such as: “Men fought duels yesterday, but not today” or: “Women wore hoop skirts yesterday, but not today” or: “We’re not in the horse-and-buggy age any longer.”
The proponents of that catch phrase are seldom innocent, and the examples they give are usually of the above kind. So their victims—who have never discovered the difference between the metaphysical and the man-made—find themselves, in helpless bewilderment, unable to refute such conclusions as: “Freedom was a value yesterday, but not today” or: “Work was a human necessity yesterday, but not today” or: “Reason was valid yesterday, but not today.”
Now observe the method I used to analyze those catch phrases. You must attach clear, specific meanings to words, i.e., be able to identify their referents in reality. This is a precondition, without which neither critical judgment nor thinking of any kind is possible.
All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase—or any abstract statement—as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: “Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!” and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean.
Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it—for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud. The old saying of plain con men holds true for intellectual ones: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own. …
Since an emotion is experienced as an immediate primary, but is, in fact, a complex, derivative sum, it permits men to practice one of the ugliest of psychological phenomena: rationalization.
Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one’s emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications—in order to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself.
The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion and, ultimately, the destruction of one’s cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.
Philosophical catch phrases are handy means of rationalization. They are quoted, repeated and perpetuated in order to justify feelings which men are unwilling to admit.
If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: “How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?”—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.
The nonsense is never accidental, if you observe what subjects it deals with. The elaborate structures in which it is presented are never purposeless. You may find a grim proof of reality’s power in the fact that the most virulently rabid irrationalist senses the derivative nature of emotions and will not proclaim their primacy, their sovereign causelessness, but will seek to justify them as responses to reality—and if reality contradicts them, he will invent another reality of which they are the humble reflectors, not the rulers. …
A morality that cannot be practiced is an unlimited cover for any practice. Altruism is the rationalization for the mass slaughter in Soviet Russia—for the legalized looting in the welfare state—for the power-lust of politicians seeking to serve the “common good”—for the concept of a “common good”—for envy, hatred, malice, brutality—for the arson, robbery, highjacking, kidnapping, murder perpetrated by the selfless advocates of sundry collectivist causes—for sacrifice and more sacrifice and an infinity of sacrificial victims.
When a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an “ideal,” but a rationalization.
The essentials are: in metaphysics, the Law of Identity—in epistemology, the supremacy of reason—in ethics, rational egoism—in politics, individual rights (i.e., capitalism)—in esthetics, metaphysical values.
If you reach the day when these essentials become your absolutes, you will have entered Atlantis—at least psychologically; which is a precondition of the possibility ever to enter it existentially.
God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
This remarkable statement is attributed to a theologian with whose ideas I disagree in every fundamental respect: Reinhold Niebuhr. But— omitting the form of a prayer, i.e., the implication that one’s mental- emotional states are a gift from God—that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity; but the achievement of that attitude involves philosophy’s deepest metaphysical-moral issues.
I was startled to learn that that statement has been adopted as a prayer by Alcoholics Anonymous, which is not exactly a philosophical organization. … that organization deserves credit for discovering that such a prayer is relevant to the problems of alcoholics—that the misery of confusion on those issues has devastating consequences and is one of the factors driving men to drink —i.e., to seek escape from reality. This is just one more example of the way in which philosophy rules the lives of men who have never heard or cared to hear about it.
Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and—never attempting to learn the difference—in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.
God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Observe what philosophical premises are implicit in that advice and are required for an attempt to live up to it.
This leads to the basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy: the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.
The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward.
The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).
The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.
As far as can be observed, infants and savages do not grasp it (they may, perhaps, have some rudimentary glimmer of it). Very few men ever choose to grasp it and fully to accept it. The majority keep swinging from side to side, implicitly recognizing the primacy of existence in some cases and denying it in others, adopting a kind of hit- or-miss, rule-of-thumb epistemological agnosticism, through ignorance and/or by intention—the result of which is the shrinking of their intellectual range, i.e., of their capacity to deal with abstractions.
To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity. … Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.
Man’s volition is an attribute of his consciousness (of his rational faculty) and consists in the choice to perceive existence or to evade it. To perceive existence, to discover the characteristics or properties (the identities) of the things that exist, means to discover and accept the metaphysically given. Only on the basis of this knowledge is man able to learn how the things given in nature can be rearranged to serve his needs (which is his method of survival).
The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power —and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.”
“Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before. (This is true of any human product, scientific or esthetic: man’s imagination is nothing more than the ability to rearrange the things he has observed in reality.)
The best and briefest identification of man’s power in regard to nature is Francis Bacon’s “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” In this context, “to be commanded” means to be made to serve man’s purposes; “to be obeyed” means that they cannot be served unless man discovers the properties of natural elements and uses them accordingly.
For example, two hundred years ago, men would have said that it is impossible to hear a human voice at a distance of 238,000 miles. It is as impossible today as it was then. But if we are able to hear an astronaut’s voice coming from the moon, it is by means of the science of electronics, which discovered certain natural phenomena and enabled men to build the kind of equipment that picks up the vibrations of that voice, transmits them, and reproduces them on earth. Without this knowledge and this equipment, centuries of wishing, praying, screaming and foot- stamping would not make a man’s voice heard at the distance of ten miles. …
But man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter.
Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess.
But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness.
His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them.
He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow.
Man’s faculty of volition as such is not a contradiction of nature, but it opens the way for a host of contradictions—when and if men do not grasp the crucial difference between the metaphysically given and any object, institution, procedure, or rule of conduct made by man.
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.
Man is not omniscient or infallible: he can make innocent errors through lack of knowledge, or he can lie, cheat and fake. The man-made may be a product of genius, perceptiveness, ingenuity—or it may be a product of stupidity, deception, malice, evil. One man may be right and everyone else wrong, or vice versa (or any numerical division in between).
Nature does not give man any automatic guarantee of the truth of his judgments (and this is a metaphysically given fact, which must be accepted). Who, then, is to judge? Each man, to the best of his ability and honesty. What is his standard of judgment? The metaphysically given.
The metaphysically given cannot be true or false, it simply is—and man determines the truth or falsehood of his judgments by whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality.
The metaphysically given cannot be right or wrong—it is the standard of right or wrong, by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices.
The metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be. Nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice.
To rebel against the metaphysically given is to engage in a futile attempt to negate existence. To accept the man-made as beyond challenge is to engage in a successful attempt to negate one’s own consciousness. Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.
Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different.
For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls. …
Observe that the philosophical system based on the axiom of the primacy of existence (i.e., on recognizing the absolutism of reality) led to the recognition of man’s identity and rights.
But the philosophical systems based on the primacy of consciousness (i.e., on the seemingly megalomaniacal notion that nature is whatever man wants it to be) lead to the view that man possesses no identity, that he is infinitely flexible, malleable, usable and disposable. Ask yourself why.
A major part of the philosophers’ attack on man’s mind is devoted to attempts to obliterate the difference between the metaphysically given and the man-made. The confusion on this issue started as an ancient error (to which even Aristotle contributed in some of his Platonist aspects); but today it is running deliberately and inexcusably wild.
The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects:
What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one’s power, as one’s own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one’s mind dictates.
The only means of “changing” men is the same as the means of “changing” nature: knowledge—which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors.
“To know the difference” means that one must never accept man-made evils (there are no others) in silent resignation, one must never submit to them voluntarily—and even if one is imprisoned in some ghastly dictatorship’s jail, where no action is possible, serenity comes from the knowledge that one does not accept it.
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion—which is the policy of savages, who rule men by force and plead with nature by prayers, incantations and bribes (sacrifices). It does not work and has not worked in any human society in history. Yet this is the policy to which modern philosophers are urging mankind to revert— as they have reverted to the notion of the primacy of consciousness. They urge a passive, mystic, “ecological” submission to nature—and the rule of brute force for men. …
The philosophers’ denial of the Law of Identity permits them to evade man’s identity and the requirements of his survival. It permits them to evade the fact that man cannot survive for long in a state of nature, that reason is his tool of survival, that he survives by means of man-made products, and that the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually). On the axiom of the primacy of existence, intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it is such a society’s deadliest enemy.
Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality. As just one example of the extent to which today’s culture is dominated by the primacy of consciousness, observe the following:
To them, men’s decisions are an absolute; reality’s demands are not.
The climax of that trend, the ultimate cashing-in on the package-deal of the metaphysical and the man-made, is the egalitarian movement and its philosophical manifesto, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. This obscenely evil theory proposes to subordinate man’s nature and mind to the desires (including the envy), not merely of the lowest human specimens, but of the lowest non-existents—to the emotions these would have felt before they were born—and requires that men make lifelong choices on the premise that they are all equally devoid of brains.
The fact that a brain cannot project an alteration of its own nature and power, that a genius cannot project himself into the state of a moron, and vice versa, that the needs and desires of a genius and a moron are not identical, that a genius reduced to the existential level of a moron would perish in unspeakable agony, and a moron raised to the existential level of a genius would paint graffiti on the sides of a computer, then die of starvation—all this does not enter the skulls of men who have dispensed with the Law of Identity (and, therefore, with reality), who demand “equal results” regardless of unequal causes, and who propose to alter metaphysical facts by the power of whims and guns.
This is being preached, touted and demanded today. There can be no intellectual—or moral—neutrality on such an issue. The moral cowards who try to evade it by pleading ignorance, confusion or helplessness, who keep silent and avoid the battle, yet feel a growing sense of guilty terror over the question of what they can or cannot change, are paving the way for the egalitarians’ atrocities, and will end up like the derelicts whom Alcoholics Anonymous is struggling to help.
The least that any decent man can do today is to fight that book’s doctrine—to fight it intransigently on moral grounds. A proposal to annihilate intelligence by slow torture cannot be treated as a difference of civilized opinion.
The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit—i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as “enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background —“the empiric element in experience.”
To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development—on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects—and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.)
Such a mind can grasp the scandals of a village or a province or (at secondhand) a nation; it cannot grasp the concepts of “world” or “universe”—or the fact that their events are not “scandals.”
The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.
The two cardinal questions, the prime movers of a human mind —“Why?” and “What for?”—are alien to an anti-conceptual mentality. If asked, they elicit nothing beyond the conventionally accepted answers. The answers are usually some equivalent of “Such is life” or “One is supposed to.” Whose life? Blank out. Supposed—by whom? Blank out.
The absence of concern with the “Why?” eliminates the concept of causality and cuts off the past. The absence of concern with the “What for?” eliminates long-range purpose and cuts off the future. Thus only the present is fully real to an anti-conceptual mentality. Something of the past remains with it, in the form of stagnant bits of a random chronicle, like a kind of small talk of memory, without goal or meaning. But the future is a blank; the future cannot be grasped perceptually. …
In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders.
This works, up to a certain point—i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. …
A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.
This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is—because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind’s whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred.
The best illustration of an anti-conceptual mentality is a small incident in a novel published years ago, whose title, unfortunately, I do not remember. A commonplace kind of blonde goes out on a date with a college boy; when she is asked later whether she had a good time, she answers: “No. He was awfully boring. He never said anything I’d ever heard before.”
The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes—by the same kind of “finite” world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is “finite” in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say “finite,” they mean “perceptual.”
Within the limits of their rules (which are usually called “traditions”), the inhabitants of such worlds are free to function—i.e., to deal with concretes without worrying about consequences, to deal with results without bothering about causes, to deal with “facts” as discrete phenomena, unhampered by the “intangibles” of theory—and to feel safe. Safe from what? Consciously, they would answer “Safe from outsiders.” Actually, the answer is: safe from the necessity of dealing with fundamental principles (and, consequently, safe from full responsibility for one’s own life).
It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links.
If his professed beliefs—i.e., the rules and slogans of his group—are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror.
The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.
“Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection—from the dreaded realm of abstract thought. By whom are those rules established? In theory, by tradition. In fact, by those who happen to be the leaders of his group; the way it stands in his mind is: by those who know the mysteries he does not have to know.
Thus, his survival depends on the substitution of men for ideas—and on the subordination of the metaphysical to the man-made.
Thus, his survival depends on the substitution of men for ideas—and on the subordination of the metaphysical to the man-made. The metaphysical is beyond his grasp—laws of nature cannot be grasped perceptually—but man-made rules are absolutes that protect him from the unknowable, psychologically and existentially. The group comes to his rescue if he gets into trouble—and he does not have to earn their help, it is given to him automatically, it is not at the precarious mercy of his own virtues, flaws or errors, it is his by grace of the fact that he belongs to the group.
As an example of the principle that the rational is the moral, observe that the anti-conceptual is the profoundly anti-moral.
The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group—not to ideas, but to people; not to the group’s beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group’s members and leaders.
Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders.
Thus a physical qualification—the accident of birth in a given village or tribe—takes precedence over morality and justice. (But the physical is only the most frequently apparent and superficial qualification, since such groups reject the nonconforming children of their own members. The actual qualification is psycho-epistemological: men bound by the same concretes.)
This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested. It has resisted the rise of civilization and has manifested itself in countless forms throughout history. Its symptom is always an attempt to circumvent reality by substituting men for ideas, the man-made for the metaphysical, favors for rights, special pull for merit—i.e., an attempt to reduce man’s life to a small back-yard (or rat hole) exempt from the absolutism of reason. (The driving motive of these attempts is deeper than power-lust: the rulers of such groups seek protection from reality as anxiously as the followers.) …
Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed. …
The disintegration of philosophy reversed this trend. Tribalism is a product of fear, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects man’s power of survival: reason.
As philosophy slithered into the primitive swamp of irrationalism, men were driven— existentially and psychologically—into its primordial corollary: tribalism.
Existentially, the rise of the welfare state broke up the country into pressure groups, each fighting for special privileges at the expense of the others—so that an individual unaffiliated with any group became fair game for tribal predators.
Pragmatism lobotomized the country’s intellectuals: John Dewey’s theory of “Progressive” education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with “social adjustment.” It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities. (See my article “The Comprachicos” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.)
Observe that today’s resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower classes—of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant—but of the intellectuals, the college-educated “elitists” (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs—hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women’s Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children—which are not tribes, but shifting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal “protection.”
The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (mass demonstrations), not action—in chanting, not arguing—in demanding, not achieving—in feeling, not thinking—in denouncing “outsiders,” not in pursuing values—in focusing only on the “now,” the “today” without a “tomorrow”—in seeking to return to “nature,” to “the earth,” to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don’t see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.
Most of those embryonic tribal gangs are leftist or collectivist. But as a demonstration of the fact that the cause of tribalism is deeper than politics, there are tribalists still further removed from reality, who claim to be rightists.
They are champions of individualism, they claim, which they define as the right to form one’s own gang and use physical force against others—and they intend to preserve capitalism, they claim, by replacing it with anarchism (establishing “private” or “competing” governments, i.e., tribal rule). The common denominator of such individualists is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas—i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.
There is a crucial difference between an association and a tribe. Just as a proper society is ruled by laws, not by men, so a proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group.
It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)—not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition.
When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.
This requires a high degree of conceptual development and independence, which the anti-conceptual mentality is desperately struggling to avoid. But this is the only way men can work together justly, benevo-lently and safely. There is no way for men to survive on the perceptual level of consciousness.
I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis.
There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man’s consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty.
It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies.
But the development of a man’s consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice.
What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon—a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for the effortless “safety” of an animal’s consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.
For years, scientists have been looking for a “missing link” between man and animals. Perhaps that missing link is the anti-conceptual mentality.
Ralph Adams Cram had a similar hypothesis. Why we do not behave like Human Beings:
Also see Albert Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluos Man where he talks about Cram’s theory.Some years ago I wrote a certain essay called “Why we do not Behave like Human Beings.” I still hold that its major premises are sound. The explanation of the more than bestial actions of individuals, groups, and mobs, from time to time, and of the fact that these exhibitions of brutal savagery have shown no lessening in point of frequency and vehemence during the period of human history, is that the basic mass of humanity never changes in character, intelligence and capacity. This is the mass man whose quality Senor Ortega has so completely analyzed.
Out of this matrix of raw material, in every place and age, men in their fullness rise and play their part on the social level, but the basic mass remains always the same. They that thus appear are men in the real sense of the word, not “supermen.” It is the fecund but, as a whole, static mass that are, properly speaking, sub-men. The line that separates man and sub-man, as this is drawn by biologists and anthropologists, is drawn at the wrong place.
It is not the knack of walking upright, developing a thumb and fabricating tools that transforms pithecanthropus erectus into homo sapiens, but the achievement (or bestowal) of certain factors of personality: power of reflection, conscience, the recognition and acceptance of moral sanctions, and a full and operative self-consciousness.
In [“The Missing Link”], I discussed the anti-conceptual mentality and its social (tribal) manifestations. All tribalists are anti-conceptual in various degrees, but not all anti-conceptual mentalities are tribalists. Some are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics).
Ethics is a conceptual discipline; loyalty to a code of values requires the ability to grasp abstract principles and to apply them to concrete situations and actions (even on the most primitive level of practicing some rudimentary moral commandments).
The tribal lone wolf has no firsthand grasp of values. He senses that this is a lack he must conceal at any price—and that this issue, for him, is the hardest one to fake. The whims that guide him and switch from moment to moment or from year to year, cannot help him to conceive of an inner state of lifelong dedication to one’s chosen values. His whims condition him to the opposite: they automatize his avoidance of any permanent commitment to anything or anyone.
Without personal values, a man can have no sense of right or wrong. The tribal lone wolf is an amoralist all the way down. …
The abdication and shriveling of the self is a salient characteristic of all perceptual mentalities, tribalist or lone-wolfish. All of them dread self-reliance; all of them dread the responsibilities which only a self (i.e., a conceptual consciousness) can perform, and they seek escape from the two activities which an actually selfish man would defend with his life: judgment and choice.
They fear reason (which is exercised volition-ally) and trust their emotions (which are automatic)—they prefer relatives (an accident of birth) to friends (a matter of choice)—they prefer the tribe (the given) to outsiders (the new)—they prefer commandments (the memorized) to principles (the understood)—they welcome every theory of determinism, every notion that permits them to cry: “I couldn’t help it!”
Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho- epistemological: the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality.
The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value—they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice—they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea.
From Ayn Rand Lexicon:
“What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is 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.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self- abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selffess as a standard of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist zuithnut giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”Dear Comrade Spassky:
I have been watching with great interest your world chess championship match with Bobby Fischer. I am not a chess enthusiast or even a player, and know only the rudiments of the game. I am a novelist- philosopher by profession.
But I watched some of your games, reproduced play by play on television, and found them to be a fascinating demonstration of the enormous complexity of thought and planning required of a chess player —a demonstration of how many considerations he has to bear in mind, how many factors to integrate, how many contingencies to be prepared for, how far ahead to see and plan. It was obvious that you and your opponent had to have an unusual intellectual capacity.
Then I was struck by the realization that the game itself and the players’ exercise of mental virtuosity are made possible by the metaphysical absolutism of the reality with which they deal. The game is ruled by the Law of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Causality. Each piece is what it is: a queen is a queen, a bishop is a bishop—and the actions each can perform are determined by its nature: a queen can move any distance in any open line, straight or diagonal, a bishop cannot; a rook can move from one side of the board to the other, a pawn cannot; etc. Their identities and the rules of their movements are immutable— and this enables the player’s mind to devise a complex, long-range strategy, so that the game depends on nothing but the power of his (and his opponent’s) ingenuity.
This led me to some questions that I should like to ask you.
Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment—when, after hours of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent—an unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your country—and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected, not to play, but to live.
Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge—so that, at a crucial moment, your queen turned suddenly from White to Black, becoming the queen of your opponent, and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.
Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork—i.e., if you were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best? Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist, range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent’s knight at the price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity required for man’s survival.
Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind you, with a gun pressed to your back—a man who would not explain or argue, his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is the practical policy under which men live—and die—in your country. ….
Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged, but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the winner, but to the loser—if winning were regarded as a symptom of selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in order to give others a chance? Would you and your opponent try playing not to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?
You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to think of such questions—and I know the answers. No, you would not be able to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess. …
Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are just as immutable (more so)—but her rules and their applications are much, much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply them, i.e., in order to play well—so each man has to use his own mind in order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and of life. His name was Aristotle.
Would you have wanted to escape into chess, if you lived in a society based on Aristotelian principles? It would be a country where the rules were objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you would gain rewards for your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves. Such a social system could not be devised, you say? But it was devised, and it came close to full existence—only, the mentalities whose level was playing jacks or craps, the men with the guns and their witch doctors, did not want mankind to know it. It was called Capitalism.
(A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960; at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960; and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.)
If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world, I will say that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial problems—and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief that no answers are possible. …
Consciously or subconsciously, intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer.
What is morality? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices which determine the purpose and the course of his life. It is a code by means of which he judges what is right or wrong, good or evil.
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is 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.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means: self-immolation, self- abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”
Now there is one word—a single word—which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand—the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it —and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it—or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible. And this is the basic contradiction of Western civilization: reason versus altruism. This is the conflict that had to explode sooner or later.
Let us define our terms. What is reason? Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as “instinct,” “intuition,” “revelation,” or any form of “just knowing.”
Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.
Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality—other than the one in which we live— whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.
You realize, of course, that epistemology—the theory of knowledge—is the most complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be covered exhaustively in a single lecture. So I will not attempt to cover it. I will say only that those who wish a fuller discussion will find it in Atlas Shrugged.
I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge.
In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics. “Renais-sance” means “rebirth.” Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason—of man’s mind. …
Now, if you ask me to name the man most responsible for the present state of the world, the man whose influence has almost succeeded in destroying the achievements of the Renaissance—I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the philosopher who saved the morality of altruism, and who knew that what it had to be saved from was—reason.
This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a known historical fact that Kant’s interest and purpose in philosophy was to save the morality of altruism, which could not survive without a mystic base. His metaphysics and his epistemology were devised for that purpose. He did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic—few of them have, since the Renaissance. He announced himself as a champion of reason—of “pure” reason.
There are two ways to destroy the power of a concept: one, by an open attack in open discussion—the other, by subversion, from the inside; that is: by subverting the meaning of the concept, setting up a straw man and then refuting it.
Kant did the second. He did not attack reason—he merely constructed such a version of what is reason that it made mysticism look like plain, rational common sense by comparison. He did not deny the validity of reason—he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to impossible contradictions, that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed, in effect, that the things we perceive are not real, because we perceive them. …
No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.
As to Kant’s version of the altruist morality, he claimed that it was derived from “pure reason,” not from revelation—except that it rested on a special instinct for duty, a “categorical imperative” which one “just knows.” His version of morality makes the Christian one sound like a healthy, cheerful, benevolent code of selfishness. Christianity merely told man to love his neighbor as himself; that’s not exactly rational—but at least it does not forbid man to love himself.
What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself into a “shmoo”—the mystic little animal of the Li’l Abner comic strip, that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody.
It is Kant’s version of altruism that is generally accepted today, not practiced—who can practice it?—but guiltily accepted. It is Kant’s version of altruism that people, who have never heard of Kant, profess when they equate self-interest with evil. It is Kant’s version of altruism that’s working whenever people are afraid to admit the pursuit of any personal pleasure or gain or motive—whenever men are afraid to confess that they are seeking their own happiness—whenever businessmen are afraid to say that they are making profits—whenever the victims of an advancing dictatorship are afraid to assert their “selfish” rights.
The ultimate monument to Kant and to the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia.
If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality—the intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The greatest, unprecedented, undreamed of events and achievements were taking place before men’s eyes—but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the United States and of capitalism.
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 creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined.
Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the causes of that historical miracle?
They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism.
Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century—the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential—or: one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence.
The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulson—freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.
These two—reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.
Their antagonists are: faith and force. These, also, are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. Look at the Middle Ages—and look at the political systems of today.
Now, if you want to know what my philosophy, Objectivism, offers you—I will give you a brief indication. I will not attempt, in one lecture, to present my whole philosophy. I will merely indicate to you what I mean by a rational morality of self-interest, what I mean by the opposite of altruism, what kind of morality is possible to man and why.
I will preface it by reminding you that most philosophers—especially most of them today—have always claimed that morality is outside the province of reason, that no rational morality can be defined, and that man has no practical need of morality. Morality, they claim, is not a necessity of man’s existence, but only some sort of mystical luxury or arbitrary social whim; in fact, they claim, nobody can prove why we should be moral at all; in reason, they claim, there’s no reason to be moral.
I cannot summarize for you the essence and the base of my morality any better than I did it in Atlas Shrugged. So, rather than attempt to paraphrase it, I will read to you the passages from Atlas Shrugged which pertain to the nature, the base and the proof of my morality.
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. . .
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.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what Objectivism offers you.
There are many examples of Kantianism ravaging the field of today’s politics in slower, but equally lethal, ways. Observe the farce of inflation versus “compassion.” The policies of welfare statism have brought this country (and the whole civilized world) to the edge of economic bankruptcy, the forerunner of which is inflation—yet pressure groups are demanding larger and larger handouts to the nonproductive, and screaming that their opponents lack “compassion.”
Compassion as such cannot grow a blade of grass, let alone of wheat. Of what use is the “compassion” of a man (or a country) who is broke—i.e., who has consumed his resources, is unable to produce, and has nothing to give away?
If you cannot understand how anyone can evade reality to such an extent, you have not understood Kantianism. “Compassion” is a moral term, and moral issues—to the thoroughly Kantianized intellectuals—are independent of material reality. The task of morality—they believe—is to make demands, with which the world of material “phenomena” has to comply; and, since that material world is unreal, its problems or shortages cannot affect the success of moral goals, which are dictated by the “noumenal” real reality.
Concepts are the products of a mental process that integrates and organizes the evidence provided by man’s senses. (See my Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. ) Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science. …
It is The Miracle Worker by William Gibson and it tells the story of how Annie Sullivan brought Helen Keller to grasp the nature of language. …
Annie Sullivan, her young teacher (superlatively portrayed by Anne Bancroft), is fiercely determined to transform this creature into a human being, and she knows the only means that can do it: language, i.e., the development of the conceptual faculty. But how does one communicate the nature and function of language to a blind-deaf-mute? The entire action of the play is concerned with this single central issue: Annie’s struggle to make Helen’s mind grasp a word—not a signal, but a word.
The form of the language is a code of tactile symbols, a touch alphabet by means of which Annie keeps spelling words into Helen’s palm, always making her other hand touch the objects involved. Helen catches on, in part, very rapidly: she learns to repeat the signals into Annie’s palm, but with no relation to the objects, she learns to spell many words, but she does not grasp the connection of the signals to their referents, she thinks it is a game, she is merely mimicking motions at random, without any understanding. (At this stage, she is learning “language” as most of today’s college students are taught to use it—as a totally non- observational set of motions denoting nothing.)
When Helen’s father compliments Annie on the fact that she has taught Helen the rudiments of discipline, Annie, discouraged, answers: “. . . to do nothing but obey is—no gift, obedience without understanding is a— blindness, too.”
Annie’s determination leads her through as heroic a struggle as has ever been portrayed on the stage. She has to fight the doubts, the weary resignation, of Helen’s parents; she has to fight their love and pity for the child, their accusations that she is treating Helen too severely; she has to fight Helen’s stubborn resistance and uncomprehending fear, which grows into obvious hatred for the teacher; she has to fight her own doubts, the moments of discouragement when she wonders whether the achievement of the goal she has set herself is possible: she does not know what to do, in the face of one disappointment after another, she does not know whether an arrested human mind can be reached and awakened— it has never been done before. Her only weapon is to go on, hour after hour, day after day, endlessly pulling Helen’s hand to touch the objects they encounter (to gain sensory evidence) and spelling into her palm “C- A-K-E . . . M-I-L-K . . . W-A-T-E-R . . .” over and over again, without any results.
Helen’s older half-brother, James, skeptical of Annie’s efforts, remarks that Helen might not want to learn, that maybe “there’s such a thing as— dullness of heart. Acceptance. And letting go. Sooner or later we all give up, don’t we?
Annie. Maybe you all do. It’s my idea of the original sin.
“James. What is?”
“Annie. Giving up.
“James. You won’t open her.
Why can’t you let her be? Have some—pity on her, for being what she
is—
“Annie. If I’d ever once thought like that, I’d be dead!”
In today’s world, many physically healthy but intellectually crippled people (particularly college students) need Annie Sullivan’s help, which they can use if they have retained the capacity to grasp (not merely look at and repeat, but grasp) the full meaning of two statements of Annie Sullivan:
Addressed to Helen’s father: “. . . words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words? With them she can think, have ideas, be reached, there’s not a thought or fact in the world that can’t be hers. . . . And she has them already . . . eighteen nouns and three verbs, they’re in her fingers now, I need only time to push one of them into her mind! One, and everything under the sun will follow.”
Addressed to Helen, who cannot hear her: “I wanted to teach you—oh, everything the earth is full of, Helen, everything on it that’s ours for a wink and it’s gone, and what we are on it, the—light we bring to it and leave behind in—words, why, you can see five thousand years back in a light of words everything we feel, think, know—and share, in words, so not a soul is in darkness, or done with, even in the grave. And I know, I know, one word and I can—put the world in your hand—and whatever it is to me, I won’t take less!”
To my knowledge, The Miracle Worker is the only epistemological play ever written. It holds the viewer in tensely mounting suspense, not over a chase or a bank robbery, but over the question of whether a human mind will come to life. Its climax is magnificent:
after Annie’s crushing disappointment at Helen’s seeming retrogression, water from a pump spills over Helen’s hand, while Annie is automatically spelling “W-A-T-E- R” into her palm, and suddenly Helen understands. The two great moments of that climax are incommunicable except through the art of acting: one is the look on Patty Duke’s face when she grasps that the signals mean the liquid—the other is the sound of Anne Bancroft’s voice when she calls Helen’s mother and cries: “She knows!” …
I suggest that you read The Miracle Worker and study its implications. I am not acquainted with William Gibson’s other works; I believe that I would disagree with many aspects of his philosophy (as I disagree with much of Helen Keller’s adult philosophy), but this particular play is an invaluable lesson in the fundamentals of a rational epistemology….
I suggest that you consider what an enormous intellectual feat Helen Keller had to perform in order to develop a full conceptual range (including a college education, which required more in her day than it does now), then judge those normal people who learn their first, perceptual-level abstractions without any difficulty and freeze on that level, and keep the higher ranges of their conceptual development in a chaotic fog of swimming, indeterminate approximations, playing a game of signals without referents, as Helen Keller did at first, but without her excuse. Then check on whether you respect and how carefully you employ your priceless possession: language.
And, lastly, I suggest that you try to project what would have happened if, instead of Annie Sullivan, a sadist had taken charge of Helen Keller’s education. A sadist would spell “water” into Helen’s palm, while making her touch water, stones, flowers and dogs interchangeably; he would teach her that water is called “water” today, but “milk” tomorrow; he would endeavor to convey to her that there is no necessary connection between names and things, that the signals in her palm are a game of arbitrary conventions and that she’d better obey him without trying to understand.
If this projection is too monstrous to hold in one’s mind for long, remember that this is what today’s academic philosophers are doing to the young—to minds as confused, as plastic and almost as helpless (on the higher conceptual levels) as Helen Keller’s mind was at her start.
One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term “duty.”
An anti-concept is an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The term “duty” obliterates more than single concepts; it is a metaphysical and psychological killer: it negates all the essentials of a rational view of life and makes them inapplicable to man’s actions.
The legitimate concept nearest in meaning to the word “duty” is “obligation.” The two are often used interchangeably, but there is a profound difference between them which people sense, yet seldom identify.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged Edition, 1966) describes the difference as follows:
Duty, obligation refer to what one feels bound to do. Duty is what one performs, or avoids doing, in fulfillment of the permanent dictates of conscience, piety, right, or law: duty to one’s country; one’s duty to tell the truth, to raise children properly. An obligation is what one is bound to do to fulfill the dictates of usage, custom, or propriety, and to carry out a particular, specific, and often personal promise or agreement: financial or social obligations.
From the same dictionary: “Dutiful—Syn. 1. respectful, docile, submissive . . .”
An older dictionary is somewhat more open about it: “Duty—1. Conduct due to parents and superiors, as shown in obedience or submission . . .” “Dutiful—1. Performing, or ready to perform, the duties required by one who has the right to claim submission, obedience, or deference . . .” (Webster’s International Dictionary, Second Edition, 1944.)
The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.
Here’s an even older dictionary that even more open about it;
–>Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) –>Dutiful
It is obvious that that anti-concept is a product of mysticism, not an abstraction derived from reality. In a mystic theory of ethics, “duty” stands for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God’s will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc., their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict.
Who in hell can have the right to claim that sort of submission or obedience? This is the only proper form—and locality—for the question, because nothing and no one can have such a right or claim here on earth.
The arch-advocate of “duty” is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. “Duty,” he holds, is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is devotion to duty for duty’s sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such devotion is a moral action (i.e., an action performed without any concern for “inclination” [desire] or self-interest)…
(Kant’s theories are, of course, mysticism of the lowest order [of the “noumenal” order], but he offered them in the name of reason. The primitive level of men’s intellectual development is best demonstrated by the fact that he got away with it.)
“Duty” destroys reason: it supersedes one’s knowledge and judgment, making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one’s actions.
“Duty” destroys values: it demands that one betray or sacrifice one’s highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command—and it transforms values into a threat to one’s moral worth, since the experience of pleasure or desire casts doubt on the moral purity of one’s motives.
“Duty” destroys love: who could want to be loved not from “inclination,” but from “duty”?
“Duty” destroys self-esteem: it leaves no self to be esteemed.
A Kantian sense of “duty” is inculcated by parents whenever they declare that a child must do something because he must. A child brought up under the constant battering of causeless, arbitrary, contradictory, inexplicable “musts” loses (or never acquires) the ability to grasp the distinction between realistic necessity and human whims—and spends his life abjectly, dutifully obeying the second and defying the first. In the full meaning of the term, he grows up without a clear grasp of reality.
As an adult, such a man may reject all forms of mysticism, but his Kantian psycho-epistemology remains (unless he corrects it). He continues to regard any difficult or unpleasant task as some inexplicable imposition upon him, as a duty which he performs, but resents; he believes that it is his “duty” to earn a living, that it is his “duty” to be moral, and, in extreme cases, even that it is his “duty” to be rational.
In reality and in the Objectivist ethics, there is no such thing as “duty.” There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of “duty”: the Law of Causality.
The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”
Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.
Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice:“—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.
In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality—specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.
In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal.
Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he could be cheating, but himself.
If he becomes discouraged by difficulties, he reminds himself of the goal that requires them, knowing that he is fully free to reconsider—to ask: “Is it worth it?”—and that no punishment is involved except the renunciation of the value he desires. (One seldom gives up in such cases, unless one finds that it is rationally necessary.)
In similar circumstances, a Kantian does not focus on his goal, but on his own moral character. His automatic reaction is guilt and fear—fear of failing his “duty,” fear of some weakness which “duty” forbids, fear of proving himself morally “unworthy.” The value of his goal vanishes from his mind, drowned in a flood of self-doubt. He might drive himself on in this cheerless fashion for a while, but not for long. A Kantian seldom carries out or undertakes important goals: they are a threat to his self- esteem.
This is one of the crucial psychological differences between the principle of “duty” and the principle of final causation. A disciple of causation looks outward, he is value-oriented and action-oriented, which means: reality-oriented. A disciple of “duty” looks inward, he is self-centered, not in the rational-existential, but in the psychopathological sense of the term, i.e., concerned with a self cut off from reality; “self- centered” in this context means: “self-doubt-centered.”
Accepting no mystic “duties” or unchosen obligations, he is the man who honors scrupulously the obligations which he chooses. The obligation to keep one’s promises is one of the most important elements in proper human relationships, the element that leads to mutual confidence and makes cooperation possible among men.
Yet observe Kant’s pernicious influence: in the dictionary description quoted earlier, personal obligation is thrown in almost as a contemptuous footnote; the source of “duty” is defined as “the permanent dictates of conscience, piety, right, or law”; the source of “obligation,” as “the dictates of usage, custom, or propriety”—then, as an afterthought: “and to carry out a particular, specific, and often personal promise or agreement.” (Italics mine.) A personal promise or agreement is the only valid, binding obligation, without which none of the others can or do stand.
The acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of “duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late.
The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
In Atlas Shrugged, and in many subsequent articles, I said that the advocates of mysticism are motivated not by a quest for truth, but by hatred for man’s mind; that the advocates of altruism are motivated not by compassion for suffering, but by hatred for man’s life; that the advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man; that their three doctrines come from the same root and blend into a single passion: hatred of the good for being the good; and that the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability. …
The major ideological campaigns of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis are usually preceded by trial balloons that test the public reaction to an attack on certain fundamental principles. Today, a new kind of intellectual balloon is beginning to bubble in the popular press—testing the climate for a large-scale attack intended to obliterate the concept of justice.
The new balloons acquire the mark of a campaign by carrying, like little identification tags, the code words: “A New Justice.” This does not mean that the campaign is consciously directed by some mysterious powers. It is a conspiracy, not of men, but of basic premises—and the power directing it is logic: if, at the desperate stage of a losing battle, some men point to a road logically necessitated by their basic premises, those who share the premises will rush to follow.
Since my capacity for intellectual slumming is limited, I do not know who originated this campaign at this particular time (its philosophical roots are ancient). The first instance that came to my attention was a brief news item over a year ago. Dr. Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands, who had received a Nobel Prize in Economic Science, spoke at an international conference in New York City and suggested “that there be a tax on personal capabilities. ‘A modest first step might be a special tax on persons with high academic scores,’ he said.” We reprinted this item in the “Horror File” of The Objectivist (June 1971). The reaction of my friends, when they read it, was an incredulously indignant amusement, with remarks such as: “He’s crazy!”
But it is not amusing any longer when a news item in The New York Times (January 2, 1973) announces that Pope Paul VI “issued a call today for a ‘new justice.’ True justice recognizes that all men are in substance equal, the Pontiff said. . . . ‘The littler, the poorer, the more suffering, the more defenseless, even the lower a man has fallen, the more he deserves to be assisted, raised up, cared for, and honored. We learn this from the Gospel.’”
Observe the package-deal: to be “little,” “poor,” “suffering,” “defenseless” is not necessarily to be immoral (it depends on the cause of these conditions). But “even the lower a man has fallen” implies, in this context, not misfortune but immorality. Are we asked to absorb the notion that the lower a man’s vices, the more concern he deserves—and the more honor?
Another package-deal: to be “assisted,” “raised up,” “cared for” obviously does not apply to those who are great, rich, happy or strong; they do not need it. But—“to be honored”? They are the men who would have to do the assisting, the raising up, the caring for—but they do not deserve to be honored? They deserve less honor than the man who is saved by their virtues and values?
In Atlas Shrugged, exposing the meaning of altruism, John Galt says:
“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. . . . To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.”
What is an abstract ethical suggestion in the Pope’s message, becomes specific and political in a brief piece that appeared in the Times on January 20, 1973—“The New Inequality” by Peregrine Worsthorne, a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph of London. In addition to altruism, which is its base, this piece was made possible by two premises:
Those who ignore or evade the crucial importance of these distinctions will find Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne ready to welcome them at the end of their road.
… The current social “malaise,” he explains, is caused by “the increasing evidence that this assumption [about a just society] should be challenged. The ideal of a meritocracy no longer commands such universal assent.”
“Meritocracy” is an old anti-concept and one of the most contemptible package-deals. By means of nothing more than its last five letters, that word obliterates the difference between mind and force: it equates the men of ability with political rulers, and the power of their creative achievements with political power.
There is no difference, the word suggests, between freedom and tyranny: an “aristocracy” is tyranny by a politically established elite, a “democracy” is tyranny by the majority— and when a government protects individual rights, the result is tyranny by talent or “merit” (and since “to merit” means “to deserve,” a free society is ruled by the tyranny of justice).
Mr. Worsthorne makes the most of it. His further package-dealing becomes easier and cruder.
“It used to be considered manifestly unjust that a child should be given an enormous head-start in life simply because he was the son of an earl, or a member of the landed gentry. But what about a child today born of affluent, educated parents whose family life gets him off to a head-start in the educational ladder? Is he not the beneficiary of a form of hereditary privilege no less unjust than that enjoyed by the aristocracy?”
What about Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Commodore Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, Sr. or, in politics, Abraham Lincoln, and their “enormous head-start in life”? On the other hand, what about the Park Avenue hippies or the drug-eaten children of college-bred intellectuals and multi-millionaires?
Mr. Worsthorne, it seems, had counted on “universal public education” to level things down, but it has disappointed him. “Family life,” he declares, “is more important than school life in determining brain power. . . . Educational qualifications are today what armorial quarterings were in feudal times. Yet access to them is almost as unfairly determined by accidents of birth as was access to the nobility.” This, he says, defeats “any genuine faith in equality of opportunity”—and “accounts for the current populist clamor to do away with educational distinctions such as exams and diplomas, since they are seen as the latest form of privilege which, in a sense, they are.”
It’s 2025, fifty two years later, but socialists and altruists are still trying:
San Francisco Public Schools Convert F’s to C’s, B’s to A’s in Equity Push.
Homework and classroom participation will no longer influence a student’s final grade. Students will be assessed primarily on a final exam, which they can retake multiple times. Attendance and punctuality will not affect academic standing… the new system will be modeled in part on the San Leandro Unified School District, where students can earn an A with a score as low as 80 percent and pass with a D at just 21 percent.
— newsweek.com
This means that if a young student (named, say, Thomas Hendricks), after days and nights of conscientious study, proves that he knows the subject of medicine, and passes an exam, he is given an arbitrary privilege, an unfair advantage over a young student (named Lee Hunsacker) who spent his time in a drugged daze, listening to rock music. And if Hendricks gets a diploma and a job in a hospital, while Hunsacker does not, Hunsacker will scream that he could not help it and that he never had a chance.
Volitional effort? There is no such thing. Brain power? It’s determined by family life—and he couldn’t help it if Mom and Pop did not condition him to be willing to study. He is entitled to a job in a hospital, and a just society would guarantee it to him. The fate of the patients? He’s as good as any other fellow—“all men are in substance equal”—and the only difference between him and the privileged bastards is a diploma granted as unfairly as armorial quarterings! Equal opportunity? Don’t make him laugh!
Socialists, Mr. Worsthorne remarks, have used “the ideal of equality of opportunity” as “a way of moving in the right, that is to say the Left, direction.” They regarded it as “the thin end of the egalitarian wedge.”
Then, suddenly, Mr. Worsthorne starts dispensing advice to the Right —which the Left has always insisted on doing (and with good reason: any “rightist” who accepts it, deserves it). His advice, as usual, involves a threat and counts on fear. “But there is a problem here for the Right quite as much as for the Left. It seems to me certain that there will be a growing awareness in the coming decades of the unfairness of existing society, of the new forms of arbitrary allocation of power, status and privilege. Resentment will build up against the new meritocracy just as it built up against the old aristocracy and plutocracy.”
The Right, he claims, must “devise new ways of disarming this resentment, without so curbing the high-flyers, so penalizing excellence, or so imposing uniformity as to destroy the spirit of a free and dynamic society.”
Observe that he permits himself to grasp and cynically to admit that such an issue as the penalizing of excellence is involved, but he regards it as the Right’s concern, not his own—and he does not object to penalizing virtue for being virtue, provided the penalties do not go to extremes. This—in an article written as an appeal for justice.
Mr. Worsthorne has a solution to offer to the Right—and here comes the full flowering of altruism’s essence and purpose, spreading out its petals like a hideous jungle plant, the kind that traps insects and eats them. The purpose is not to burn sacrificial victims, but to have them leap into the furnaces of their own free will:
What will be required of the new meritocracy is a formidably revived and reanimated spirit of noblesse oblige, rooted in the recognition that they are immensely privileged and must, as a class, behave accordingly, being prepared to pay a far higher social price, in terms of taxation, in terms of service, for the privilege of exercising their talents.
Who granted them “the privilege of exercising their talents”? Those who have no talent. To whom must they “pay a higher social price”? To those who have no social value to offer. Who will impose taxation on their productive work? Those who have produced nothing. Whom do they have to serve? Those who would be unable to survive without them.
“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.” (Atlas Shrugged.)
“This [the ‘social price’] is not an easy idea for a meritocracy to accept,” Mr. Worsthorne concludes. “They like to think that they deserve their privileges, having won them by their own efforts. But this is an illusion, or at any rate a half truth. The other half of the truth is that they are terribly lucky and if their luck is not to run out they must be prepared to pay much more for their good fortune than they had hoped or even feared.”
I submit that any man who ascribes success to “luck” has never achieved anything and has no inkling of the relentless effort which achievement requires. I submit that a successful man who ascribes his own (legitimate) success in part to luck is either a modest, concrete- bound represser who does not understand the issue—or an appeaser who tries to mollify the resentment of envious mediocrities. (For the nature of such resentment, see my article “The Age of Envy” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) …
The new “theory of justice” demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with. ….
If a natural fact is neither just nor unjust, by what mental leap does it become a moral problem and an issue of justice? Why should those “favored by nature” be made to atone for what is not an injustice and is not of their making? …
Anyone who proposes to reduce mankind to the level of its lowest specimens, cannot claim benevolence as his motive. Anyone who proposes to deprive men of aspiration, ambition or hope, and sentence them to stagnation for life, cannot claim compassion as his motive. Anyone who proposes to forbid men’s progress beyond the limit accessible to a cripple, cannot claim love for men as his motive. Anyone who proposes to forbid to a genius any achievement which is not of value to a moron, cannot claim any motive but envy and hatred.
Observe that it has never been possible to preach an evil notion on the basis of reason, of facts, of this earth. The advocates of man-destroying theories have always had to step outside reality, to seek a mystic base or sanction. Just as religionists had to invoke the myth of Adam’s sin in order to propagate the notion of man’s prenatal guilt—just as Kant had to rely on a noumenal world in order to destroy the world that exists— just as Hegel had to call on the Absolute Idea, and Marx had to call on Hegel—so today, on the grubby scale of our shrinking culture, those who want to deprive man of his right to life are proclaiming the rights of the fetus, and those who want to deny all rights to the man of ability, are demanding that he atone for what he did not earn before he was a fetus and for nature’s prenatal unfairness to the Mongolian idiot next door.
Observe also that an honest theoretician does not try to present his ideas in the guise of their opposites. But Kant’s philosophy is presented as “pure reason”—altruism is presented as a doctrine of “love”— communism is presented as “liberation”—and egalitarianism is presented as “justice.”
“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature . . . that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly . . . that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil . . . 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. . . .” (Atlas Shrugged.)
Mr. Rawls’s book is entitled A Theory of Justice, and yet, curiously enough, Mr. Cohen never mentions Mr. Rawls’s definition of “justice”— which, I suspect, may not be Mr. Cohen’s fault.
In Atlas Shrugged, in the sequence dealing with the tunnel catastrophe, I list the train passengers who were philosophically responsible for it, in hierarchical order, from the less guilty to the guiltiest. The last one on the list is a humanitarian who had said: “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.” Today, a “scientific” volume of 607 pages is devoted to claiming that this constitutes justice. …
Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows:
if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the improvable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason. …
If you wish to know the actual motive behind the egalitarians’ theories —behind all their maudlin slogans, mawkish pleas, and ponderous volumes of verbal rat-traps—if you wish to grasp the enormity of the smallness of spirit for the sake of which they seek to immolate mankind, it can be presented in a few lines:
“‘When a man thinks he’s good—that’s when he’s rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he’s done.’
“‘But if a man knows that what he’s done is good?’
“‘Then he ought to apologize for it.’
“‘To whom?’
“‘To those who haven’t done it.’” (Atlas Shrugged.)
The classic example of vicious irresponsibility is the story of Emperor Nero who fiddled, or sang poetry, while Rome burned. An example of similar behavior may be seen today in a less dramatic form. There is nothing imperial about the actors, they are not one single bloated monster, but a swarm of undernourished professors, there is nothing resembling poetry, even bad poetry, in the sounds they make, except for pretentiousness—but they are prancing around the fire and, while chanting that they want to help, are pouring paper refuse on the flames. They are those amorphous intellectuals who are preaching egalitarianism to a leaderless country on the brink of an unprecedented disaster.
Egalitarianism is so evil—and so silly—a doctrine that it deserves no serious study or discussion. But that doctrine has a certain diagnostic value: it is the open confession of the hidden disease that has been eating away the insides of civilization for two centuries (or longer) under many disguises and cover-ups. Like the half-witted member of a family struggling to preserve a reputable front, egalitarianism has escaped from a dark closet and is screaming to the world that the motive of its compassionate, “humanitarian,” altruistic, collectivist brothers is not the desire to help the poor, but to destroy the competent. The motive is hatred of the good for being the good—a hatred focused specifically on the fountainhead of all goods, spiritual or material: the men of ability.
The mental process underlying the egalitarians’ hope to achieve their goal consists of three steps:
Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians’ defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes—or equal rewards for unequal performance.
As an example, I shall quote from a review by Bennett M. Berger, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego (The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1974). The review discusses a book entitled More Equality by Herbert Gans. I have not read and do not intend to read that book: it is the reviewer’s own notions that are particularly interesting and revealing. …
Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality. Its weapon is slow, silent, invisible, and men perceive it only by its consequences—by the gutted ruins and the moans of agony it leaves in its wake. The name of the weapon is: inflation.
Inflation is a man-made scourge, made possible by the fact that most men do not understand it. It is a crime committed on so large a scale that its size is its protection: the integrating capacity of the victims’ minds breaks down before the magnitude—and the seeming complexity—of the crime, which permits it to be committed openly, in public. For centuries, inflation has been wrecking one country after another, yet men learn nothing, offer no resistance, and perish—not like animals driven to slaughter, but worse: like animals stampeding in search of a butcher.
If I told you that the precondition of inflation is psycho-epistemological —that inflation is hidden under perceptual illusions created by broken conceptual links—you would not understand me. That is what I propose to explain and to prove.
If I told you that the precondition of inflation is psycho-epistemological —that inflation is hidden under perceptual illusions created by broken conceptual links—you would not understand me. That is what I propose to explain and to prove.
Let us start at the beginning. Observe the fact that, as a human being, you are compelled by nature to eat at least once a day. In a modern American city, this is not a major problem. You can carry your sustenance in your pocket—in the form of a few coins. You can give it no thought, you can skip meals, and, when you’re hungry, you can grab a sandwich or open a can of food—which, you believe, will always be there.
But project what the necessity to eat would mean in nature, i.e., if you were alone in a primeval wilderness. Hunger, nature’s ultimatum, would make demands on you daily, but the satisfaction of the demands would not be available immediately: the satisfaction takes time—and tools. It takes time to hunt and to make your weapons. You have other needs as well. You need clothing—it takes time to kill a leopard and to get its skin. You need shelter—it takes time to build a hut, and food to sustain you while you’re building it. The satisfaction of your daily physical needs would absorb all of your time. Observe that time is the price of your survival, and that it has to be paid in advance.
Would it make any difference if there were ten of you, instead of one? If there were a hundred of you? A thousand? A hundred thousand? Do not let the numbers confuse you: in regard to nature, the facts will remain inexorably the same. Socially, the large numbers may enable some men to enslave others and to live without effort, but unless a sufficient number of men are able to hunt, all of you will perish and so will your rulers.
The issue becomes much clearer when you discover agriculture. You can survive more safely and comfortably by planting seeds and collecting a harvest months later—on condition that you comply with two absolutes of nature: you must save enough of your harvest to feed you until the next harvest, and, above all, you must save enough seeds to plant your next harvest. You may run short on your own food, you may have to skimp and go half-hungry, but, under penalty of death, you do not touch your stock seed; if you do, you’re through.
Agriculture is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully: time and savings.
Once you grasp these, you have grasped the three essentials of human survival: time-savings-production. You have grasped the fact that production is not a matter confined to the immediate moment, but a continuous process, and that production is fueled by previous production. The concept of “stock seed” unites the three essentials and applies not merely to agriculture, but much, much more widely: to all forms of productive work. Anything above the level of a savage’s precarious, hand-to-mouth existence requires savings. Savings buy time.
If you live on a self-sustaining farm, you save your grain: you need the saved harvest of your good years to carry you through the bad ones; you need your saved seed to expand your production—to plant a larger field. The safer your supply of food, the more time it buys for the upkeep or improvement of the other things you need: your clothing, your shelter, your water well, your livestock and, above all, your tools, such as your plow. You make a gigantic step forward when you discover that you can trade with other farmers, which leads you all to the discovery of the road to an advanced civilization: the division of labor. Let us say that there are a hundred of you; each learns to specialize in the production of some goods needed by all, and you trade your products by direct barter. All of you become more expert at your tasks—therefore, more productive—therefore, your time brings you better returns.
On a self-sustaining farm, your savings consisted mainly of stored grain and foodstuffs; but grain and foodstuffs are perishable and cannot be kept for long, so you ate what you could not save; your time-range was limited. Now, your horizon has been pushed immeasurably farther. You don’t have to expand the storage of your food: you can trade your grains for some commodity which will keep longer, and which you can trade for food when you need it. But which commodity? It is thus that you arrive at the next gigantic discovery: you devise a tool of exchange— money.
Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production.
To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money.
Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple barter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you’ll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish.
Now project what would happen to your community of a hundred hard-working, prosperous, forward-moving people, if one man were allowed to trade on your market, not by means of gold, but by means of paper—i.e., if he paid you, not with a material commodity, not with goods he had actually produced, but merely with a promissory note on his future production.
This man takes your goods, but does not use them to support his own production; he does not produce at all—he merely consumes the goods. Then, he pays you higher prices for more goods— again in promissory notes—assuring you that he is your best customer, who expands your market.
Then, one day, a struggling young farmer, who suffered from a bad flood, wants to buy some grain from you, but your price has risen and you haven’t much grain to spare, so he goes bankrupt. Then, the dairy farmer, to whom he owed money, raises the price of milk to make up for the loss—and the truck farmer, who needs the milk, gives up buying the eggs he had always bought—and the poultry farmer kills some of his chickens, which he can’t afford to feed—and the alfalfa grower, who can’t afford the higher price of eggs, sells some of his stock seed and cuts down on his planting—and the dairy farmer can’t afford the higher price of alfalfa, so he cancels his order to the blacksmith—and you want to buy the new plow you have been saving for, but the blacksmith has gone bankrupt.
Then all of you present the promissory notes to your “best customer,” and you discover that they were promissory notes not on his future production, but on yours—only you have nothing left to produce with. Your land is there, your structures are there, but there is no food to sustain you through the coming winter, and no stock seed to plant.
Would it make any difference if that community consisted of a thousand farmers? A hundred thousand? A million? Two hundred and eleven million? The entire globe? No matter how widely you spread the blight, no matter what variety of products and what incalculable complexity of deals become involved, this, dear readers, is the cause, the pattern, and the outcome of inflation.
There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production. ….
Trained in college to believe that to look beyond the immediate moment—to look for causes or to foresee consequences—is impossible, modern men have developed context-dropping as their normal method of cognition. Observing a bad, small-town shopkeeper, the kind who is doomed to fail, they believe—as he does—that lack of customers is his only problem; and that the question of the goods he sells, or where these goods come from, has nothing to do with it. The goods, they believe, are here and will always be here. Therefore, they conclude, the consumer— not the producer—is the motor of an economy. Let us extend credit, i.e., our savings, to the consumers—they advise—in order to expand the market for our goods.
But, in fact, consumers qua consumers are not part of anyone’s market; qua consumers, they are irrelevant to economics. Nature does not grant anyone an innate title of “consumer”; it is a title that has to be earned— by production. Only producers constitute a market—only men who trade products or services for products or services. In the role of producers, they represent a market’s “supply”; in the role of consumers, they represent a market’s “demand.” The law of supply and demand has an implicit subclause: that it involves the same people in both capacities. When this subclause is forgotten, ignored or evaded—you get the economic situation of today.
A successful producer can support many people, e.g., his children, by delegating to them his market power of consumer.
Can that capacity be unlimited? How many men would you be able to feed on a self- sustaining farm? In more primitive times, farmers used to raise large families in order to obtain farm labor, i.e., productive help. How many non-productive people could you support by your own effort? If the number were unlimited, if demand became greater than supply—if demand were turned into a command, as it is today—you would have to use and exhaust your stock seed. This is the process now going on in this country.
There is only one institution that could bring it about: the government —with the help of a vicious doctrine that serves as a cover-up: altruism. The visible profiteers of altruism—the welfare recipients—are part victims, part window dressing for the statist policies of the government. But no government could have got away with it, if people had grasped the other concept which the savage was unable to grasp: the concept of “credit.”
If you understand the function of stock seed—of savings—in a primitive farm community, apply the same principle to a complex industrial economy.
Wealth represents goods that have been produced, but not consumed. What would a man do with his wealth in terms of direct barter? Let us say a successful shoe manufacturer wants to enlarge his production. His wealth consists of shoes; he trades some shoes for the things he needs as a consumer, but he saves a large number of shoes and trades them for building materials, machinery and labor to build a new factory—and another large number of shoes, for raw materials and for the labor he will employ to manufacture more shoes.
Money facilitates this trading, but does not change its nature. All the physical goods and services he needs for his project must actually exist and be available for trade—just as his payment for them must actually exist in the form of physical goods (in this case, shoes). An exchange of paper money (or even of gold coins) would not do any good to any of the parties involved, if the physical things they needed were not there and could not be obtained in exchange for the money.
If a man does not consume his goods at once, but saves them for the future, whether he wants to enlarge his production or to live on his savings (which he holds in the form of money)—in either case, he is counting on the fact that he will be able to exchange his money for the things he needs, when and as he needs them. This means that he is relying on a continuous process of production—which requires an uninterrupted flow of goods saved to fuel further and further production. This flow is “investment capital,” the stock seed of industry. When a rich man lends money to others, what he lends to them is the goods which he has not consumed.
This is the meaning of the concept “investment.” If you have wondered how one can start producing, when nature requites time paid in advance, this is the beneficent process that enables men to do it: a successful man lends his goods to a promising beginner (or to any reputable producer)— in exchange for the payment of interest. The payment is for the risk he is taking: nature does not guarantee man’s success, neither on a farm nor in a factory. If the venture fails, it means that the goods have been consumed without a productive return, so the investor loses his money; if the venture succeeds, the producer pays the interest out of the new goods, the profits, which the investment enabled him to make.
Observe, and bear in mind above all else, that this process applies only to financing the needs of production, not of consumption—and that its success rests on the investor’s judgment of men’s productive ability, not on his compassion for their feelings, hopes or dreams.
Such is the meaning of the term “credit.” In all its countless variations and applications, “credit” means money, i.e., unconsumed goods, loaned by one productive person (or group) to another, to be repaid out of future production. Even the credit extended for a consumption purpose, such as the purchase of an automobile, is based on the productive record and prospects of the borrower. Credit is not—as the savage believed—a magic piece of paper that reverses cause and effect, and transforms consumption into a source of production.
Consumption is the final, not the efficient, cause of production. The efficient cause is savings, which can be said to represent the opposite of consumption: they represent unconsumed goods. Consumption is the end of production, and a dead end, as far as the productive process is concerned. The worker who produces so little that he consumes everything he earns, carries his own weight economically, but contributes nothing to future production. The worker who has a modest savings account, and the millionaire who invests a fortune (and all the men in between), are those who finance the future. The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether he is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy. …
Under the influence of today’s mind-shrinking, anti-conceptual education, most people tend to see economic problems in terms of immediate concretes: of their paychecks, their landlords, and the corner grocery store. The most disastrous loss—which broke their tie to reality—is the loss of the concept that money stands for existing, but unconsumed goods. …
The government is not a productive enterprise. It produces nothing. In respect to its legitimate functions—which are the police, the army, the law courts—it performs a service needed by a productive economy. When a government steps beyond these functions, it becomes an economy’s destroyer.
The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself—for a while—from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on.
This is known as “deficit financing.” It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods—but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production
Where does your money go? Anywhere and nowhere. First, it goes to establish an altruistic excuse and window dressing for the rest: to establish a system of subsidized consumption—a “welfare” class of men who consume without producing—a growing dead end, imposed on a shrinking production.
Then the money goes to subsidize any pressure group at the expense of any other—to buy their votes—to finance any project conceived at the whim of any bureaucrat or his friends—to pay for the failure of that project, to start another, etc.
The welfare recipients are not the worst part of the producers’ burden. The worst part are the bureaucrats—the government officials who are given the power to regulate production. They are not merely unproductive consumers: their jobs consist in making it harder and harder and, ultimately, impossible for the producers to produce. (Most of them are men whose ultimate goal is to place all producers in the position of welfare recipients.)
While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it. The process becomes global: it involves foreign aid, and unpaid loans to foreign governments, and subsidies to other welfare states, and subsidies to the United Nations, and subsidies to the World Bank, and subsidies to foreign producers, and credits to foreign consumers to enable them to consume our goods—while, simultaneously, the American producers, who are paying for it all, are left without protection, and their properties are seized by any sheik in any pesthole of the globe, and the wealth they have created, as well as their energy, is turned against them, as, for example, in the case of Middle Eastern oil.
Do you think a spending orgy of this kind could be paid for out of current production? No, the situation is much worse than that. The government is consuming this country’s stock seed—the stock seed of industrial production: investment capital, i.e., the savings needed to keep production going. These savings were not paper, but actual goods. Under all the complexities of private credit, the economy was kept going by the fact that, in one form or another, in one place or another, somewhere within it, actual material goods existed to back its financial transactions. It kept going long after that protection was breached. Today, the goods are almost gone.
A piece of paper will not feed you when there is no bread to eat. It will not build a factory when there are no steel girders to buy. It will not make shoes when there is no leather, no machines, no fuel. You have heard it said that today’s economy is afflicted by sudden, unpredictable shortages of various commodities. These are the advance symptoms of what is to come.
You have heard economists say that they are puzzled by the nature of today’s problem: they are unable to understand why inflation is accompanied by recession—which is contrary to their Keynesian doctrines; and they have coined a ridiculous name for it: “stagflation.” Their theories ignore the fact that money can function only so long as it represents actual goods—and that at a certain stage of inflating the money supply, the government begins to consume a nation’s investment capital, thus making production impossible.
The value of the total tangible assets of the United States at present, was estimated—in terms of 1968 dollars—at 3.1 trillion dollars. If government spending continues, that incredible wealth will not save you. You may be left with all the magnificent skyscrapers, the giant factories, the rich farmlands—but without fuel, without electricity, without transportation, without steel, without paper, without seeds to plant the next harvest.
If that time comes, the government will declare explicitly the premise on which it has been acting implicitly: that its only “capital asset” is you. Since you will not be able to work any longer, the government will take over and will make you work—on a slope descending to sub-industrial production.
Q1 2025: “US Total Tangible Assets - Assets - Balance Sheet of Nonfarm Nonfinancial Corporate Business is at a current level of 30.58T” (Source)
2025 US Debt: $37T (Source)The only substitute for technological energy is the muscular labor of slaves. This is the way an economic collapse leads to dictatorship—as it did in Germany and in Russia. And if anyone thinks that government planning is a solution to the problems of human survival, observe that after half a century of total dictatorship, Soviet Russia is begging for American wheat and for American industrial “know-how.”
A dictatorship would find it impossible to rule this country in the foreseeable future. What is possible is the blind chaos of a civil war. …
Is there any hope for the future of this country? Yes, there is. This country has one asset left: the matchless productive ability of its people. If, and to the extent that, this ability is liberated, we might still have a chance to avoid a collapse. We cannot expect to reach the ideal overnight, but we must at least reveal its name. We must reveal to this country the secret which all those posturing intellectuals of any political denomination, who clamor for openness and truth, are trying so hard to cover up: that the name of that miraculous productive system is Capitalism.
As to such things as taxes and the rebuilding of a country, I will say that in his goals, if not his methods, the best economist in Atlas Shrugged was Ragnar Danneskjöld.
This question is frequently asked by people who are concerned about the state of today’s world and want to correct it. More often than not, it is asked in a form that indicates the cause of their helplessness: “What can one person do?”
I was in the process of preparing this article when I received a letter from a reader who presents the problem (and the error) still more eloquently: “How can an individual propagate your philosophy on a scale large enough to effect the immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life in order to create the kind of ideal country which you picture?”
If this is the way the question is posed, the answer is: he can’t. No one can change a country single-handed. So the first question to ask is: why do people approach the problem this way?
Suppose you were a doctor in the midst of an epidemic. You would not ask: “How can one doctor treat millions of patients and restore the whole country to perfect health?” You would know, whether you were alone or part of an organized medical campaign, that you have to treat as many people as you can reach, according to the best of your ability, and that nothing else is possible. …
If you are seriously interested in fighting for a better world, begin by identifying the nature of the problem. The battle is primarily intellectual (philosophical), not political. Politics is the last consequence, the practical implementation, of the fundamental (metaphysical-epistemological- ethical) ideas that dominate a given nation’s culture. You cannot fight or change the consequences without fighting and changing the cause; nor can you attempt any practical implementation without knowing what you want to implement.
In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality, that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).
An intellectual movement does not start with organized action. Whom would one organize? A philosophical battle is a battle for men’s minds, not an attempt to enlist blind followers. Ideas can be propagated only by men who understand them. An organized movement has to be preceded by an educational campaign, which requires trained—self-trained— teachers (self-trained in the sense that a philosopher can offer you the material of knowledge, but it is your own mind that has to absorb it). Such training is the first requirement for being a doctor during an ideological epidemic—and the precondition of any attempt to “change the world.”
“The immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life” cannot be made singly, piecemeal or “retail,” so to speak; an army of crusaders would not be enough to do it. But the factor that underlies and determines every aspect of human life is philosophy; teach men the right philosophy—and their own minds will do the rest. Philosophy is the wholesaler in human affairs.
Man cannot exist without some form of philosophy, i.e., some comprehensive view of life. Most men are not intellectual innovators, but they are receptive to ideas, are able to judge them critically and to choose the right course, when and if it is offered. There are also a great many men who are indifferent to ideas and to anything beyond the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment; such men accept subconsciously whatever is offered by the culture of their time, and swing blindly with any chance current. They are merely social ballast— be they day laborers or company presidents—and, by their own choice, irrelevant to the fate of the world. …
If you want to influence a country’s intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action.
This does not require omniscience or omnipotence; it is the subconscious expectation of automatic omniscience in oneself and in others that defeats many would-be crusaders (and serves as an excuse for doing nothing). What is required is honesty—intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute.
When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. This does not mean that you must make philosophical speeches when unnecessary and inappropriate. You need philosophy to back you up and give you a consistent case when you deal with or discuss specific issues.
If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask “What can one do?”—the answer is “SPEAK” (provided you know what you are saying).
A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small—to your friends, your associates, your professional organizations, or any legitimate public forum. You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results—but it is of such activities that public opinion is made.
Do not pass up a chance to express your views on important issues. …
The opportunities to speak are all around you. I suggest that you make the following experiment: take an ideological “inventory” of one week, i.e., note how many times people utter the wrong political, social and moral notions as if these were self-evident truths, with your silent sanction.
Then make it a habit to object to such remarks—no, not to make lengthy speeches, which are seldom appropriate, but merely to say: “I don’t agree.” (And be prepared to explain why, if the speaker wants to know.) This is one of the best ways to stop the spread of vicious bromides. (If the speaker is innocent, it will help him; if he is not, it will undercut his confidence the next time.) Most particularly, do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked.
Do not “proselytize” indiscriminately, i.e., do not force discussions or arguments on those who are not interested or not willing to argue. It is not your job to save everyone’s soul. If you do the things that are in your power, you will not feel guilty about not doing—“somehow”—the things that are not.
Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.)
To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see “The Anatomy of Compromise” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)
he only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree. In such cases, no one may attempt to ascribe his views to the entire membership, or to use the group to serve some hidden ideological purpose (and this has to be watched very, very vigilantly).
I am omitting the most important contribution to an intellectual movement—writing—because this discussion is addressed to men of every profession. Books, essays, articles are a movement’s permanent fuel, but it is worse than futile to attempt to become a writer solely for the sake of a “cause.” Writing, like any other work, is a profession and must be approached as such. …
But that reader’s question implied a search for some shortcut in the form of an organized movement. No shortcut is possible.
It is too late for a movement of people who hold a conventional mixture of contradictory philosophical notions. It is too early for a movement of people dedicated to a philosophy of reason. But it is never too late or too early to propagate the right ideas—except under a dictatorship.
If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. But time is on our side—because we have an indestructible weapon and an invincible ally (if we learn how to use them): reason and reality.
What is the specifically American sense of life?
A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.
The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve—but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness.
He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.
A typical American can never fully grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against “being pushed around” is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the army and hears it called “service to his country,” his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.
“Isn’t my money as good as the next fellow’s?” used to be a popular American expression. It would not be popular in Europe: a fortune, to be good, must be old and derived by special favor from the State; to a European, money earned by personal effort is vulgar, crude or somehow disreputable.
Americans admire achievement; they know what it takes. Europeans regard achievement with cynical suspicion and envy. Envy is not a widespread emotion in America (not yet); it is an overwhelmingly dominant emotion in Europe.
… Initiative is an “instinctive” (i.e., automatized) American characteristic; in an American consciousness, it occupies the place which, in a European one, is occupied by obedience. …
Years ago, at a party in Hollywood, I met Eve Curie, a distinguished Frenchwoman, the daughter of Marie Curie. Eve Curie was a best-selling author of non-fiction books and, politically, a liberal; at the time, she was on a lecture tour of the United States. She stressed her astonishment at American audiences. “They are so happy,” she kept repeating, “so happy. . . .” She was saying it without disapproval and without admiration, with only the faintest touch of amusement; but her astonishment was genuine. “People are not like that in Europe. . . . Everybody is happy in America—except the intellectuals. Oh, the intellectuals are unhappy everywhere.” …
An adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But by the time he grows up, he must translate it into conceptual knowledge and conscious convictions, or he will be in deep trouble. A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it.
For close to a century, this has been America’s tragic predicament. Today, the American people is like a sleepwalking giant torn by profound conflicts. (When I speak of “the American people,” in this context, I mean every group, including scientists and businessmen—except the intellectuals, i.e., those whose professions deal with the humanities. The intellectuals are a country’s guardians.)
Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections—it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future.
For example, consider the statist trend in this country. The doctrine of collectivism has never been submitted explicitly to the American voters; if it had been, it would have sustained a landslide defeat (as the various socialist parties have demonstrated). But the welfare state was put over on Americans piecemeal, by degrees, under cover of some undefined “Americanism”—culminating in the absurdity of a President’s declaration that America owes its greatness to “the willingness for self-sacrifice.” People sense that something has gone wrong; they cannot grasp what or when. This is the penalty they pay for remaining a silent (and deaf) majority. …
But an honest man can cheat himself. His trusting innocence can lead him to swallow sugar-coated poisons—the deadliest of which is altruism. Americans accept it—not for what it is, not as a vicious doctrine of self- immolation—but in the spirit of a strong, confident man’s overgenerous desire to relieve the suffering of others, whose character he does not understand. When such a man awakens to the betrayal of his trust—to the fact that his generosity has brought him within reach of a permanent harness which is about to be slipped on him by his sundry beneficiaries —the consequences are unpredictable.
There are two ways of destroying a country: dictatorship or chaos, i.e., immediate rigor mortis or the longer agony of the collapse of all civilized institutions and the breakup of a nation into roving armed gangs fighting and looting one another, until some one Attila conquers the rest. This means: chaos as a prelude to tyranny—as was the case in Western Europe in the Dark Ages, or in the three hundred years preceding the Romanoff dynasty in Russia, or under the war lords regime in China.
A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American would rebel to the bottom of his soul. But this is all that his sense of life can do for him: it cannot solve his problems.
Only one thing is certain: a dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.
If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost it (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.
We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.
These are philosophical issues. The philosophy we need is a conceptual equivalent of America’s sense of life. To propagate it, would require the hardest intellectual battle. But isn’t that a magnificent goal to fight for?