Ominous Parallels (41 page)

A man cannot think if he places something—anything—above his perception of reality. He cannot follow the evidence unswervingly or uphold his conclusions intransigently, while regarding compliance with other men as his moral imperative, self-abasement as his highest virtue, and sacrifice as his primary duty. He cannot use his brain while surrendering his sovereignty over it, i.e., while accepting his neighbors as its owner and term-setter.

Men learn from others, they build on the work of their predecessors, they achieve by cooperation feats that would be impossible on a desert island. But all such social relationships require the exercise of the human faculty of cognition; they depend on the solitary individual, “solitary” in the primary, inner sense of the term, the sense of a man facing reality firsthand, seeking not to crucify himself on the cross of others or to accept their word as an act of faith, but to understand, to connect, to know.

Man’s mind requires selfishness, and so does his life in every aspect: a living organism has to be the beneficiary of its own actions. It has to pursue specific objects—for itself, for its own sake and survival. Life requires the gaining of values, not their loss; achievement, not renunciation; self-preservation, not self-sacrifice. Man
can
choose to value and pursue self-immolation, but he cannot survive or prosper by such a method.

Moral selfishness does not mean a license to do whatever one pleases, guided by whims. It means the exacting discipline of defining and pursuing one’s
rational
self-interest. A code of rational self-interest rejects every form of human sacrifice, whether of oneself to others or of others to oneself. The ethics of rational self-interest upholds the exercise of one’s mind in the service of one’s life, and all of the specific value-choices and character attributes which such exercise entails. It upholds the virtues of rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. It does not advocate “survival at any price.”

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.
¹²

Reason is an attribute of the individual. Thought is a process performed not by men, but by man—in the singular. No society, committee, or “organic” group can do it. What a group can do in this regard is only: to leave the individual free to function, or to stop him.

The basic
political
requirement of Man’s Life is freedom.

“Freedom” in this context means the power to act without coercion by others. It means an individual’s power to act according to his own judgment, while respecting the same right in others. In a free society, men renounce a lethal method of dealing with disagreements: the initiation of physical force.

Force is the antonym and negation of thought. Understanding is not produced by a punch in the face; intellectual clarity does not flow from the muzzle of a gun; the weighing of evidence is not mediated by spasms of terror. The mind is a cognitive faculty; it cannot achieve knowledge or conviction apart from or against its perception of reality; it cannot be forced.

The proper political system, in essence—the system which guards the freedom of man’s mind—is the original American system, based on the concept of inalienable individual rights. “[T]he source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man.
Rights
are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival.”
¹³

The Founding Fathers were right about the fact that rights are political, not economic, i.e., that they are sanctions to act and to keep the products of one’s action, not unearned claims to the actions or products of others. And they were right about the fact that the proper function of government is the protection of man’s rights.

Man’s rights, Ayn Rand observes, can be violated only by physical force (fraud is an indirect form of force). A political system based on the recognition of rights is one that guards man against violence. Men therefore deal with one another not as potential killers, but as sovereign traders, according to their own independent judgment and voluntary consent. This kind of system represents the methodical protection of man’s mind and of his self-interest, i.e., of the function and purpose on which human life depends.

Government is the agency that holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. In a free society the government uses force only in retaliation, against those who start its use. This involves three main functions: the police; the military; and the courts (which provide the means of resolving disputes peacefully, according to objective rules).

The government of a free society is prohibited from emulating the criminals it is created to apprehend. It is prohibited from initiating force against innocent men. It cannot inject the power of physical destruction into the lives of peaceful citizens, not for any purpose or in any realm of endeavor, including the realm of production and trade.

This means the rejection of any dichotomy between political and economic freedom. It means the separation of state and economics. It means the only alternative to tyranny that has ever been discovered: laissez-faire capitalism.

Historically, capitalism worked brilliantly, and it is the only system that will work. Socialism in every variant has led to disaster and will again whenever it is tried. Yet socialism is admired by mankind’s teachers, while capitalism is damned. The source of this inversion is the fact that freedom is selfish, rights are selfish, capitalism is selfish.

It is true that freedom, rights, and capitalism are selfish. It is also true that selfishness, properly defined, is the good.

There is no future for the world except through a rebirth of the Aristotelian approach to philosophy. This would require an Aristotelian affirmation of the reality of existence, of the sovereignty of reason, of life on earth—and of the splendor of man.

Aristotle and Objectivism agree on fundamentals and, as a result, on this last point, also. Both hold that man can deal with reality, can achieve values, can live
non
-tragically. Neither believes in man the worm or man the monster; each upholds man the thinker and therefore man the hero. Aristotle calls him “the great-souled man.” Ayn Rand calls him Howard Roark, or John Galt.

In every era, by their nature, men must struggle: they must work, knowingly or not, to actualize some vision of the human potential, whether consistent or contradictory, exalted or debased. They must, ultimately, make a fundamental choice, which determines their other choices and their fate. The fundamental choice, which is always the same, is the epistemological choice: reason or non-reason.

Since men’s grasp of reason and their versions of non-reason differ from era to era, according to the extent of their knowledge and their virtue, so does the specific form of the choice, and its specific result.

In the ancient world, after centuries of a gradual decline, the choice was the ideas of classical civilization or the ideas of Christianity. Men chose Christianity. The result was the Dark Ages.

In the medieval world, a thousand years later, the choice was Augustine or Aquinas. Men chose Aquinas. The result was the Renaissance.

In the Enlightenment world, four centuries later, the founders of America struggled to reaffirm the choice of their Renaissance ancestors, but they could not make it stick historically. The result was a magnificent new country, with a built-in self-destructor.

Today, in the United States, the choice is the Founding Fathers and the foundation they never had, or Kant and destruction. The result is still open.

“Various approaches,” writes a contemporary historian, have been made to the “problem of the rise of National Socialism in Germany.”

Political and constitutional historians have sought the solution in the weaknesses of the Weimar Constitution, in its party structure and in its political leadership. Others urge the importance of economic factors and find the answer to the rise of Hitler in the inflation of the early twenties, or in the long German tradition of state socialism. Intellectual historians have pointed to the peculiar nature of the German mind and the continuity of a stream which has had many sources: Luther, Fichte, Hegel, von Treitschke, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Moeller van den Bruck. More recently, social psychologists—amateur and professional—have discovered that National Socialism is explicable only in psychopathological terms. Thus the Germans have become, variously: sadomasochists, paranoids, the victims of a big brother fixation, or the inevitable consequence of forced toilet training.

I have no serious quarrel with any of these major interpretations, provided that they are all brought into focus. For I am persuaded that here, as elsewhere in history, no one-line interpretation can give an adequate explanation of so complex a social phenomenon. Confronted by such a barrage of evidence from so many different sides, I am perfectly willing to fall back to the safety of a badly worn but well-tested cliché: it was a little of all of these things.
¹⁴

The above explains why Nazism has not been explained. Today’s intellectuals are, in effect, as unaware of the science of philosophy as were their ancestors in the era before Thales.

The quote implies that Nazism is a product of chance—of the accidental conjunction of a grab bag of concrete, disconnected evils. But the evils do have a connection, an attribute in common. There is a human discipline that can explain all of them. There is a reason why all those Hitler-inviting concretes occurred in the same country at the same time; it is the same reason why none was present in the United States during the Enlightenment.

The reason lies in the discipline concerned with fundamentals, because these subsume all derivatives and all social concretes. Philosophy is the factor that moves a nation, shaping every realm and aspect of men’s existence, including their values, their psychology, and, in the end, the headlines of their daily newspapers.

Most people regard the social system under which they live as a given not open to question or challenge. Then, unwittingly, step by step, they carry the system to its logical conclusion—which they regard as a product not of abstract theory, but of practical necessity.

The men moved by “practicality” as against “theory” are still moved by theory, but it is theory they have not learned to acknowledge, theory in the form of the social facts, problems, crises, trends, to which that theory has given birth and reality.

The direct source of a nation’s economic trends is its political trends. The source of its political trends is its cultural trends. The source of the source of all the sources and all the trends is: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics.

The faculty of reason makes philosophy possible, but the converse is also true: philosophy is the implementation of reason, which makes its application and triumph in every area of human existence possible, or impossible. Philosophy is that which ultimately creates the creators among men, with their shining, life-giving achievements, or which unleashes the destroyers, who wreck it all. Philosophy is that which explains why one society adopts a weak constitution and another a strong one; why one reaches bankruptcy and another abundance; why one is aroused by Moeller van den Bruck and another by Thomas Jefferson; why one embraces “paranoia” or concentration camps, and another the rights of man.

The complexity of a human society does not make it unintelligible, not even when it is a society torn by contradictions and in process of collapse—unless one views the collapse without benefit of philosophy. Such a procedure means: viewing the symptoms of a disease without knowing that they
are
symptoms, or that they have a unifying cause.

No doctor would ascribe a case of bubonic plague to the accidental onset at the same time of fever, chills, prostration, swellings in the groin, etc. None would say that, given “such a barrage of evidence from so many different sides,” no “one-line interpretation” can be adequate. If any doctor did say it, he would not be entrusted for long with the care of men’s bodies.

In the humanities and social science departments of our universities, the counterparts of such a doctor are being paid to shape men’s minds.

The intellectuals are ignorant of philosophy’s role in history—because of philosophy. Having been taught by philosophers for generations that reason is impotent to guide action, they regard the mind and its conclusions as irrelevant to life. Having been taught that philosophy is a game, with no answers to offer, they do not look to it for answers. Having been taught that there is no system to connect ideas and no causality to connect events, they do not look for system or causality, but treat social developments as random, unrelated occurrences. Having been taught that abstractions have no basis in reality, they brush them aside and focus only on concretes, whether of the moment or of the century.