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"There are only two means by
which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or
persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have
always resorted to guns." - (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. [...] ... The three values which
men held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism,
collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural power -- died at the
time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died
in World War II. As to altruism -- it has never been alive. It is
the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it
only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. But
it has caught up with them -- and that is the killer which they now have to
face and to defeat. That is the basic choice they have to make. If any
civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to
reject. ... Yes, this is an age of
moral crisis. ... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind
alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what
you now need is not to return to morality, but to discover it. What is the morality of
altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to
live 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 the 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. The real conflict, of
course, is reason versus mysticism. But if it weren't for the altruist
morality, mysticism would have died when it did die -- at the Renaissance --
leaving no vampire to haunt Western culture. A "vampire" is
supposed to be a dead creature that comes out of its grave only at night --
only in the darkness -- and drains the blood of the living. The description,
applied to altruism, is exact. Western civilization was
the child and product of reason -- via ancient Greece. In all other
civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant -- the handmaiden --
of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western
culture that has ever been dominated -- imperfectly, incompletely,
precariously and at rare intervals -- but still, dominated by reason.
You may observe the results of that. The conflict of reason
versus mysticism is the issue of life or death -- of freedom or slavery -- of
progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the
conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness. 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. For
the purposes of tonight's discussion, the definitions I have given you
contain the essence of the issue, regardless of whose theory, argument or
philosophy you choose to accept. 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. "Renaissance" means
"rebirth." Few people today will care to remind you that it
was a rebirth of reason -- of man's mind. In the light of what
followed -- most particularly, in the light of the industrial revolution --
nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of
mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it
was taken in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance
has automatically converted everybody to rationality; far from it. It
means only that so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a
single copy of Aristotle's Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to
arouse men's hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch
their minds and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that
mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead. Observe that in the attempts
at a mystic revival today, it is not an appeal to life, hope and joy that the
mystics are making, but an appeal to fear, doom and despair. "Give
up, your mind is impotent, life is only a foxhole," is not a motto that
can revive a culture. 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. A "straw man" is
an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous
construction as Kant's system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw
man is what it was -- and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that
followed, skepticism about man's ability ever to know anything, were not, in
fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human
consciousness that Kant's robot represented. But philosophers accepted
it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they
did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene
altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason. 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 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
compulsion -- 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. The nineteenth century was the
ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend of the Renaissance
and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly Aristotelian
philosophy. And, for the first time in history, it created a new
economic system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of
free trade on a free market: capitalism. No, it was not a full,
perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism -- as it should have
been. Various deggrees of government interference and control still
remained, even in America -- and this is what led to the eventual destruction
of capitalism. But the extent to which certain countries were free was
the exact extent of their economic progress. America, the freest,
achieved the most. Never mind the low wages
and harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were
all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism
did not create poverty -- it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of
precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early
years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to
survive. As proof -- the enormous growth of the European population
during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to
the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century. Now why was this not
appreciated? Why did capitalism, the truly magnificent benefactor of
mankind, arouse nothing but resentment, denunciations and hatred, then and
now? Why did the so-called defenders of capitalism keep apologizing for
it, then and now? Because, ladies and gentlemen, capitalism and
altruism are incompatible. Make no mistake about it --
and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot
coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who
attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good"
or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the
benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are
the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal,
purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism
is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to
others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man --
every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a
sacrificial animal serving anyone's need. There is a tragic, twisted
sort of compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in spite of all their
irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of
men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally
right and will not oppose the morality they have
accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not
oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves.
The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers -- and
mankind's tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have
accepted destroys them by means of the best within them. So long as altruism was
their moral ideal, men had to regard capitalism as immoral; capitalism
certainly does not and cannot work on the principle of selfless service and
sacrifice. This was the reason why the majority of the
nineteenth-century intellectuals regarded capitalism as a vulgar,
uninspiring, materialistic necessity of this earth, and continued to long for
their unearthly moral ideal. From the start, while capitalism was
creating the splendor of its achievements, creating it in silence,
unacknowledged and undefended (morally undefended), the intellectuals were
moving in greater and greater numbers towards a new dream: socialism. Just as a small
illustration of how ineffectual a defense of capitalism was offered by its
most famous advocates, let me mention that the British socialists, the
Fabians, were predominantly students and admirers of John Stuart Mill and
Jeremy Bentham. The socialists had a
certain kind of logic on their side; if the collective sacrifice of all to
all is the moral ideal, then they wanted to establish this ideal in practice,
here and on this earth. The arguments that socialism would
not and could not work, did not stop them: neither has altruism ever worked,
but this has not caused men to stop and question it. Only reason can
ask such questions -- and reason, they were told on all sides, has nothing to
do with morality, morality lies outside the realm of reason, no rational
morality can ever be defined. The fallacies and
contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed and refuted
time and time again, in the nineteenth century as well as today. This
did not and does not stop anyone; it is not an issue of economics, but of
morality. The intellectuals and the so-called idealists were determined
to make socialism work. How? By that magic means of all irrationalists:
somehow. It was not the tycoons of
big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who
reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the
absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to
control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time,
it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the
name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the
same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of
whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government. There are only two means by
which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or
persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have
always resorted to guns. Well, ladies and gentlemen,
the socialists got their dream. They got it in the twentieth century
and they got it in triplicate, plus a great many lesser carbon copies; they
got it in every possible form and variant, so that now there can be no
mistake about its nature: Soviet Russia -- Nazi Germany -- Socialist England. This was the collapse of the modern
intellectuals' most cherished tradition. It was World War II that
destroyed collectivism as a political ideal. Oh, yes, people still
mouth its slogans, by routine, by social conformity and by default -- but it
is not a moral crusade any longer. It is an ugly, horrifying reality --
and part of the modern intellectuals' guilt is the knowledge that they have
created it. They have seen for themselves the bloody slaughterhouse
which they had once greeted as a noble experiment -- Soviet Russia.
They have seen Nazi Germany -- and they know that "Nazi" means
"National Socialism." Perhaps the worst blow to them, the
greatest disillusionment, was Socialist England: here was their literal
dream, a bloodless socialism, where force was not used for murder, only for
expropriation, where lives were not taken, only the products, the meaning and
the future of lives, here was a country that had not been murdered, but had
voted itself into suicide. Most of the modern intellectuals, even the
more evasive ones, have now understood what socialism -- or any form of
political and economic collectivism -- actually means. Today, their perfunctory
advocacy of collectivism is as feeble, futile and evasive as the alleged
conservatives' defense of capitalism. The fire and the moral fervor
have gone out of it. And when you hear the liberals mumble that Russia
is not really socialistic, or that it was all Stalin's fault, or that
socialism never had a real chance in England, or that what they advocate is
something that's different somehow -- you know that you are hearing the
voices of men who haven't a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some
vague hope that "somehow my gang would have done it better." The secret dread of modern
intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the
root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are
intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet
Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of
altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only
way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and
self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human
nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no
reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator
should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or
the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest
bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to
oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to
exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts
that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the
altruist morality. Twenty years ago the
conservatives were uncertain, evasive, morally disarmed before the aggressive
moral self-righteousness of the liberals. Today, both are uncertain,
evasive, morally disarmed before the aggressiveness of the communists.
It is not a moral aggressiveness any longer, it is the plain aggressiveness
of a thug -- but what disarms the modern intellectuals is the secret
realization that a thug is the inevitable, ultimate and only product of their
cherished morality. I have said that faith and
force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of
brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of
mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of
understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason,
reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when
men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion,
communication or understanding are impossible. Why do we kill wild
animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is
open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind --
a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to
physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole
society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without
the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: "It's so,
because I say so," will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later.
Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter
whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of
conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same. Such is the nature of the
evil which modern intellectuals have helped to let loose in the world -- and
such is the nature of their guilt. - - - - - Since "challenge"
is your slogan, I will say that if you are looking for a challenge, you are
facing the greatest one in history. A moral revolution is the most
difficult, the most demanding, the most radical form of rebellion, but that
is the task to be done today, if you choose to accept it. When I say
"radical," I mean it in its literal and reputable sense:
fundamental. Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are
winning only by default. But in order to fight them to the finish and
with full rectitude, it is the altruist morality that you have to reject. 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 not 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 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 himm 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. And when you make your
choice, I would like you to remember that the only alternative to it is
communist slavery. The "middle-of-the-road" is like an
unstable, radioactive element that can last only so long -- and its time is
running out. There is no more chance for a middle-of-the-road. The issue will be decided,
not in the middle, but between the two consistent extremes. It's
Objectivism or communism. It's a rational morality based on man's right
to exist -- or altruism, which means: slave labor camps under the rule of
such masters as you might have seen on the screens of your TV last
year. If that is what you prefer, the choice is yours. - - - - - I hope this may not be
fully true here, but I have met too many young people in universities, who
have no clear idea, not even in the most primitive terms, of what capitalism
really is. They [your elders] do not let you know what the theory of
capitalism is, nor how it worked in practice, nor what was its actual
history. - - - - - The real danger is that communism
is an enemy whom they [our so-called intellectual leaders] do not dare to
fight on moral grounds, and it can be fought only on moral grounds. This then, is the
choice. Think it over. Consider the subject, check your premises,
check past history and find out whether it is true that men can never be
free. It isn't true, because they have been. Find out what made
it possible. See for yourself. And then if you are convinced --
rationally convinced -- then let us save the world together. We still
have time. To quote Galt once more,
such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence
decide. ______________ |
|
"The
meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is
not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual
'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for
the arrested moral development of mankind." -- Ayn Rand |
|
"Ethics
is not a mystic fantasy -- nor a social convention -- nor a
dispensible, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any
emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity
of man's survival -- not by the grace of the supernatural nor of
your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature
of life." -- Ayn Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness |
|
"There
was a time when Christians took faith as seriously as Mid-Eastern Muslims
currently do: the Medieval Era." -- Wayne Dunn, here |
|
"So
long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial
fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by
force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no
peace within a nation and no peace among nations." -- Ayn Rand in The Roots of War |
|
Also see: "The
non-capitalist nations of the Communist and 3rd Worlds are brutal dictatorships,
often wracked by bloody, internecine tribal warfare, in which the principles
of individual rights and liberty are utterly unknown. Crucially, the rational
mind is repudiated in these societies in favor of tribalism, faith and
unremitting brute force. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that
millions of individuals subsist in the most abysmal poverty in these
countries – a destitution undreamed of in the capitalist world for almost 2
centuries." -- Andrew Bernstein "The
Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the
implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private
good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the
implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet
Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of
Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any
variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral
(NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to
hell." -- Rick Gaber This short story excerpt provides a stunning picture of
how altruism destroys peoples' lives. |
http://freedomkeys.com/faithandforce.htm