Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World
by Ayn Rand
(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.
Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967,
and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It
_____
morality
...
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 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 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 degrees 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 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.
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.
__
For a critical analysis of Ayn Rands view of morality, see
The Fallacy of Ayn Rand's Version of Morality
Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. A champion of the individual, she wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as "a philosophy for living on earth". She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for six books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Her most notable works are "The Fountainhead" published 1943 and "Atlas Shrugged" published in 1957. Every book published in her lifetime is still in print with sales totalling more than twenty million copies. Ayn Rand died at her home on March 6, 1982.