The Journals of Ayn Rand (108 page)

 

 

 

[AR made the following notes on the scene in which Dagny speaks to Dr. Stadler about the State Science Institute’s condemnation of Rearden Metal.
]

The great mind—and the great conceit; not showoffishness, but the actual conviction that practically everyone else is some sort of vicious, helpless animal. His attitude is: “I could teach them to live so much better than they do.... Persuade them? How can I? They have no mind and are not open to reason. There’s nothing anyone can do except force them. That’s all they understand.” (“But I know that I’m right—and I’ve seen so much stupidity in my life!”)

His contempt for industrialists—“Oh, yes, the men who make gadgets and are interested in nothing but the dollar.” Contempt for applied science and material production. Yet—he wants unlimited funds and multi-million-dollar cyclotrons. His cynicism: “Oh, no, you can’t expect industrialists to support science.” (“Who is supporting you now?” “Society.”)

He is completely indifferent to the “practical” side of the [State Science] Institute. He is very satisfied with his “abstract” isolation. Dr. Ferris “takes care” of everything—and he prizes Ferris for this reason. (He thinks Ferris is his servant—he doesn’t know that it’s the other way around.) The Institute was established for Dr. Stadler, on his endorsement and agreement, on the glory of his name. But it is Dr. Ferris who established it, who “put it through” the legislature. Ferris is the “Washington man” of the Institute. (“Washington” leaves Dr. Stadler strictly alone—and kowtows to him as to an idol. So he doesn’t think that politicians are “difficult” or “a problem.” Does he like dealing with them at all? “Oh, dear me, no—but what can one do in this world? One has to accept some sort of ugliness.” (He [prefers] politicians to businessmen.)

He is uneasy with Dagny—he wants to enjoy her visit, to be the brilliant man to an appreciative audience, as he used to be with her—but he can’t. There are a few sharp little touches of annoyance, impatience, evasion in his manner. [...]

August 12, 1947

If man forms his own
character through the basic premises
he accepts (his character being the result and consequence of the premises), does this mean that he has no permanent character at all, no fixed entity, since it is subject to and open to constant change? No.
Here
is the permanence of man’s entity: those of his basic premises which are
true
cannot change (since premises come from convictions about observed reality); it is only the mistaken premises which are open to change, are constantly challenged by reality and should be changed. The “fluidity” or impermanence of his character corresponds to the number of mistaken premises he holds; to the extent of such mistakes, he lacks “
entity
” or is not a complete, perfect, integrated entity, therefore, does not actually exist completely. His permanence, his full reality, his existence depend upon his right premises. The
perfect
man would hold nothing but the
right premises.

This process is the key to the secret of man’s character and of the incompleteness of his existence. This is the process of man creating himself, becoming man—the illustration of: “Being a man is given to him, remaining a man is not.” (“Everything is something.” Everything that exists
must
be an entity. Physical objects are set as entities by nature.
Only man
has to create himself; his body is only the means; his essential entity is his soul—and that he must create himself.
There
is the god-like aspect of man. What is his starting point, his tool for creating himself? The rational mind. All the rest is only a development of it, a matter of remaining true to his rational mind.)

When I say that a man holds a
true
premise, I mean that he holds it with complete rational conviction, as far as his knowledge goes. Therefore, such a premise cannot be changed in his mind; further knowledge would only amplify it—it cannot contradict or destroy it. The case of a man who had a right premise, then dropped it because of some erroneous new conclusion, is not relevant here: such a case merely means that the man did not hold or understand the right premise, or any part of it, in the first place. My statement here applies only to
actual,
full, rational conviction about a basic premise—not to a psychological illusion of conviction, nor to any sort of “faith,” nor to any partially, provisionally accepted hypothesis.

An important point here: the “acting on the most likely hypothesis” rule applies to and is proper only in relation to the specific and the concrete, such as any one person, event or course of action,
but not to basic premises.
In regard to basic premises, no halfway is possible;
anything short of absolute conviction is worthless,
is no conviction at all. (In connection with this, I must define the nature and content of basic premises.)

Both Lillian and Stacey want Rearden to succumb to an affair with a mistress. Their motives and attitudes are basically identical, both being expressions of the parasite, but they are two different variations of the same theme, about equally vicious.

Lillian
wants to see Rearden’s strict moral purity broken, so that she can torture him through his own guilt, so that she can feel the satisfaction of seeing a great man degraded, and so that she can assume moral superiority over him, thus becoming the representative of morality. Therefore, Lillian’s game includes an over-stressed, over-grim recognition of morality—in order to hold Rearden through his guilt at having betrayed the moral code.

Stacey
wants to see Rearden abandoning morality so that she and he can be united like gangsters or criminal conspirators against the moral world, a kind of relationship expressed by a wise wink at each other. She wants him to become immoral in her way, to hold morality as a convenient hypocrisy with which to fool others, but to acknowledge that he and she know better, are wiser than that—in fact, are rotters and satisfied with it. This, in effect, would also hold him through guilt—the guilt of being self-confessedly and boastfully evil. Thus Stacey’s scheme includes morality only as the thing to defy; she and Rearden would be bound together, not within and by morality, but
against
it.

Of the two women, Lillian is smarter: she knows that Rearden is essentially great and pure, that his essence cannot be changed, that she can merely make him suffer through his recognition of his own sin. Stacey thinks that sensual indulgence can actually turn Rearden into a rotter, become his essence and make him pleased with, not tortured by, depravity, in the same way that she is.

It is important to stress
and make clear how wrong both women are: on their malevolent, parasite’s premise, they can expect a man’s happiness (as represented by sex, its highest expression) to become the means of his degradation, of evil, of torture and of their acquiring power over him. The truth is that happiness (in the real sense of the word) cannot do this and cannot be used in this way. It is and does the opposite: it is both the means and the expression of man’s elevation, of his good, his joy, his freedom,
and his independence.

That is what Rearden learns from his affair with Dagny. Any suffering involved for him in that affair (and only superficially, never tragically or essentially) came only from the fact of his own error about the nature of the relationship and his right to it; it came only from his own ignorance and mistake —
not
from anything done by Lillain or Stacey. Only
he
made his suffering possible—they, the parasites,
could not
make him suffer—and he set himself free of the suffering, when he understood the truth.

This is a very important point
—an important illustration of the theme, of the fact that any evil done to a good man is done only because, and to the extent to which, he permits it. (Rearden permitted it by accepting the parasite’s view of morality, happiness, and sex.)

Regarding
Rearden and
Lillian: In their sex life, she held her impotence as virtue, his desire as vice. This is impotence held
as
superior to life energy.

 

 

[AR prepared the following list of questions prior to visiting three steel companies. Short answers to some of the questions were added after her interviews.
]