The Journals of Ayn Rand (119 page)

6. Everybody has to spend as much as they did in the “basic year.” (Freedom from privation.)

7. All wages, prices, dividends and interest rates are frozen as in the “basic year.” (Freedom from future.)

Their main cry is to “end instability”—to “achieve security.”

This will end “wasteful competition”—“we’ll close all research departments, we won’t have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market, we won’t have to waste money just to keep up with over-ambitious competitors.”

Their attitude is, in effect: things are getting worse and worse, to hell with progress if we can only remain as we are; we can exist now, but we won’t be able to if things continue going down, so let’s hold still. They are rolling down the slope of an abyss—and want to [stop] themselves by hanging on to a branch on the way.

Wesley Mouch acts like a cornered rat—his sole recourse is to get angry, with the petulant anger of an offended tyrant, as if the country’s troubles are an affront to him and people better do something, since he’s angry. He’s become used to the fact that people seeking favors are afraid of his anger—and he’s beginning to feel that his anger is the solution to everything, his anger is omnipotent, all he has to do is get angry. But the basic element in his anger is a rat’s fear. He keeps screaming “I’ve got to have wider powers! ... I’ve got to have
power!”
like an injured party, as if the guilt for everything is on those who haven’t given him the power. Wesley Mouch is the zero at the meeting point of opposing forces. (He is resentful of Mr. Thompson—he knows that Thompson has the power to kick him out, but won’t because Mouch has balanced the forces skillfully and Thompson is too dumb and too busy to break through the mesh.)

The white obelisk monument in the window. When they decide to pass the “emergency directive,” Taggart rises and pulls the blinds down over the white obelisk.

This is the scene of “nothing is anything—there are no absolutes—there are no principles—we must act pragmatically on the emergency of the moment.” Men without mind or morals running amuck on power—since what logic, morality or justice is possible under the unlimited rule of the “public good”?

The overall mood of the scene:
fear.
Fear of the public, of their own victims. “Can we get away with it?” This is where we see the power of the moral sanction—which these bastards know and dread, without acknowledging it in so many words. The public could have thrown them all off like tics—by moral means, by refusing to accept their actions as just. It is the victims who are making their own destruction possible.

 

 

The disaster is made possible by the illusion of the old morality, on which people rely, even though it is not there any longer, they count on it after they have destroyed it. The old morality, which created discipline and confidence among the employees of a railroad, was the principle of rationality and of self-interest based on reason and rights: every man knew that the purpose of the railroad and of everyone connected with it was to run trains well, that this was in their common interest, that every man could expect a good performance from every other man, and that objective truth was the criterion and standard of justice.

If anyone tried to be a vicious exception and to pass the buck, he would be exposed and penalized, because the principle of objective truth was the standard, and the objective fate of the railroad enforced this standard upon the owners. Therefore, trusting this principle, everyone still trusts his superiors and carries out their orders; and the passengers do not even imagine that the railroad employees can have any motive other than to move them safely; they take this motive and safety for granted—with no thought of what it is based on.

But
now,
the purpose of the railroad is
not
the objective success of an objective performance—as it is not the purpose of the whole society and of its present economic system.
Now,
one lives, not by the objective result of one’s effort, but by means of and at the expense of other men. Therefore, every man on the railroad has only one interest: to gain an advantage over others, to protect the
appearance
of his performance in the eyes of authority, to be
judged
right,
not
to be right, and this at the expense of others. Therefore, every man has to fear and distrust all the others. Their interests now clash: one man’s loss is another man’s gain. The fate of the passengers means nothing to the railroad men, since it is not by the fate of the passengers, not by the performance of the train, that they are to be judged (and rewarded).

This is how, functioning on the dead hulk of a morality which they have destroyed, counting upon it when they have made it impossible, men come to the spectacle of a great physical machinery (the railroad)—built for safety [on the basis of] a moral principle (individualism)—becoming the tool of a dreadful destruction, instead. This is what the material shell will do, when its soul has been destroyed. This is all the good that the seizure of material wealth, without the mind, will do for the looters.

 

 

The last one must be the most vicious insult to businessmen, applying unmistakably to Ellis Wyatt.

The man who said: “Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?”

The man who said that man exists for the good of society and has no other right or justification for existence.

The man who said that majority will is law—“society can do anything it pleases.”

The man who said that an individual’s conscience doesn’t matter; an individual has no right to any conscience, it’s just a luxury for prosperous times, not for emergencies—“In an emergency, society hasn’t time to bother about individual consciences.”

The man who said that there is no individual achievement, that individual effort does not count nor matter, that everything is done collectively.

The man who said that men are vicious morons unfit for freedom, that their natural instincts, if left alone, are to lie and murder—therefore, lies and murder are the only proper means to rule them and keep them in order.

The man who said that rewards and persuasion do not work, but punishments and fear do.

The man who saw no difference between the power of money and the power of a gun.

The man who believed that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good purpose,” who believed that he had the right to use force upon others for the sake of his own idea of a “good purpose,” which did not even have to be an idea, only a “feeling,” not even knowledge, only a “good intention.”

The man who said that “poverty is so horrible that I don’t care if we use force, compulsion or murder so long as it’s for the poor.”

The man who said that the able must be penalized in favor of the parasite.

The man who said: “Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system.”

The man who said that there is no mind, there is no logic and men do not live by reason.

The man who said that there are no principles, no rights, no morality, no absolutes—and the practical way to live is to act on the expediency of the moment.

The man who “could not take sides” because he had to think of his children.

The man who was against Directive [10-289], but would not “be quoted” publicly.

The man who wanted controls to stifle a competitor.

The man who wanted the government to guarantee him a job.

The man who wrote sniveling little obscenities about the evil of businessmen.

The man who belonged to “The Friends of Progress” because it was fashionable.

Main philosophic points:

Personal types:

Figure out (define the principle and the standard of moral guilt) who is more evil: Lillian or Ferris? Ferris or Toohey?

Lillian has two elements of truth in her: knowledge of Rearden’s greatness and evaluation of it as great. Then she acts against both.

Ferris has only one element of truth: knowledge of Rearden’s greatness. He does not evaluate this greatness as valuable or important. He acts against only one element of truth in him.

Toohey knows many more elements of truth than Lillian or Ferris, and acts against all of them.

Yet I have the impression that Lillian is more vicious than Toohey, and Ferris is more vicious than Lillian.
Why?

There are two aspects involved here: one, the element of truth in a person, in the sense of correct perception; in this sense, Toohey is the best of the three. The second aspect is the acting against one’s own knowledge of the good, the doing of evil consciously; in this sense, Toohey is morally the guiltiest of the three.

Obviously, the issue here is between faults of knowledge and moral faults. By knowledge here I mean knowledge of fundamentals that would affect a person’s essential character, such as Lillian’s reaction to Rearden. I do not mean plain factual information or errors of information or lack of factual knowledge, such as is acquired in schools; I mean a fundamental perception.
Define this
and get at the principle and standard of evaluation involved here.
It is important.

In connection with it: the capacity for enjoyment is a virtue, the result of truth, of right premises. Toohey, Lillian, Ferris, Taggart, and Mouch are all incapable of any sort of enjoyment. They have no terms in which they could actually enjoy anything. Toohey’s power lust gives him no enjoyment—neither does Lillian’s sense of power nor her malice—neither does Taggart’s pleasure in any failure of Dagny’s or Rearden’s. Orren Boyle is, perhaps, capable of some enjoyment, in the momentary form of some crude orgy. The others cannot even do that.
Why?
It is not merely a matter of intelligence; Orren Boyle is dumber than the others, but Mouch is even dumber than Boyle—yet Mouch is totally devoid of any capacity for or sense of enjoyment.
Define
the exact principle involved here.

Note:
this line of thought started with the idea that a former friend who admires me will act more viciously toward me, if he goes bad, than would a person indifferent toward me in the first place, one who sees no special value in me. This is an example of the inability of eliminating a truth once a person has seen it—and with the growth of an evil trait, this truth can take a terrible form, become corrupted into a greater evil, in action, than if the person had never seen it in the first place. This is an example to analyze carefully in relation to the difference between truth (or virtue) as a trait of character (as the
created
personality), and the truth or virtue of an action (as a moral or immoral action, particularly in relation to the essence of immorality: the doing of conscious evil).

The reason why people who start out with many virtues and a few flaws grow progressively worse, with the flaws winning, is the fact that an evil cannot remain stationary: it must either be eliminated entirely or it will grow (like “a few” controls in a free economy). The question I ask myself here is: but what, then, happens to the virtues, which I consider indestructible (in the sense that a truth, once perceived, cannot be eliminated and replaced by an error)?
Define this.

The difference between an error of knowledge and a moral error is that in the first case, a man does not suspend his consciousness (his reason), he is exercising it fully and he merely lacks all the necessary information; in the second case, he acts
against
his reason, he
does not want
to know and, therefore, he is guilty of the basic, cardinal sin (which, perhaps, is the one essential sin that embraces and contains all the others): the sin of suspending his consciousness, which amounts to suspending life or destroying the essence of life. In the first case, a man remains open to new knowledge, open to the possibility of correcting his error. In the second case, the man has closed the door to knowledge, therefore closed it to correction, and therefore his error (and his evil) will grow worse and worse.

 

 

[Francisco:] “If you had left TT then [twelve years ago], what would have become of it?”

[Dagny:] “Some botched form of existence, if any. Someone else would have been willing to bear the torture in order to keep it running.”

“Why were you willing to bear that torture?”

“Because I loved the railroad, I loved my work—and the torture was the price I had to pay for it.”