The Journals of Ayn Rand (123 page)

 

 

1. The complete chaos, the blind, random chance, the arbitrary senselessness, the total lack of logic and reason in
production
—and the steady, inexhaustible logic in the progression of
destruction.
(Men are still achieving their ideas—hold the premises of destruction and you’ll get it.)

2. The futile and horrible rushing to save the needy at the expense of the able—the last of the country’s wealth is going to support the incompetent in the emergency of the moment. The incompetent perish and the wealth goes down the drain with them, while the competent, who could have survived, are immolated the minute before, i.e., their chance of survival is destroyed to let the incompetent last that one minute longer—the range of the moment, which keeps getting shorter and shorter. The revolting obscenity of acting on the cult of need, of taking need as claim and motive. The “brothers’ keepers” see themselves being eaten alive, with the “brothers” making their work impossible and making more demands at the same time—the final, naked insolence of the cannibalistic parasite who yells that “you’re morally evil because I starve, look at my misery, it is your moral failure and sin—do something!—how do I know what?—it’s your problem and responsibility, you’ve got the mind, I haven‘t, you’re my keeper, I have the right of misery, incompetence and helplessness!” (Give examples of this along the whole range—both public and private, both for industries and for personal, family relations.)

3. The grotesque preposterousness of the “world planners”—such as the “soybean project,” the power-hungry incompetents, each with a plan of his own to rule the economy of the nation, each getting a little bit of his plan into action, at a devastating cost. Here we have soybeans, TV sets, etc. manufactured for the pleasure of the masters and the planners—while the country is starving. Here material goods follow the pattern of the men who are still left—the senseless and non-essential goods are manufactured, the essential ones vanish. The motives here are an almost inextricable mixture of corruption and humanitarianism—some projects are undertaken for pure Cuffy Meigs-like looting, others for a Eugene Lawson-like vicious hysteria of giving away and saving the needy of the immediate split-second. (Show that the motive makes no difference.)

14

 

 

Existence exists. A is A.

Mind and body. The nature of reason—the evidence of the senses, integrated by his mind according to the rules of logic.
Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
The nature of abstractions.
Thinking is volitional
—it is not an automatic process. The root of “free will”—you have no choice about what reality is, but you have the choice of
knowing
what it is or not. The mind is man’s tool of survival. Life is given to you, survival is not. To survive, you must think; you must discover the means and methods of survival proper to man; you have no arbitrary freedom about it—you cannot survive “at random,” you must learn what is necessary for your survival as man.

The need of morality for a being of free will—a being who must survive by means of choice—a rational being who must think and must
choose
to think. The process of reason is: Yes or No? Right or Wrong? This is the process of thinking and of every action a man takes as a result of his thinking. Truth (perception of reality) is the standard of value for his thinking. He needs a standard of value to guide the actions he’ll take as a result of his knowledge, to estimate the choices he’ll make:
his existence as man is his standard of value
—as man, because he can exist in no other way, yet he has to maintain his status as man and his existence by his own will and choice.

Thinking as the only basic virtue, from which all others proceed; non-thinking as the only basic vice. The recognition of reality or the non-recognition; existence or non-existence; life or non-life; entity or zero. The responsibility of saying “It
is.”
Joy and pain as the barometer of life or death. The function of pain in one’s body—the pain in one’s spirit. Emotions proceed from reason. Emotions as the summary of a man’s philosophy. Emotions are based on your estimates, and your estimates on your basic premises, on your moral code.

Joy is the purpose of the Life Morality. When man’s life is the standard and reason the judge, no contradictions are possible, no “destructive” joy, no “hangovers”—and no desire “to have your cake and eat it, too,”
no desire for the irrational.
Life is the value, pursuit of happiness is the goal; man exists for his own sake and for his own happiness. The same code applies to all men: there is no clash of interests if no man expects another to live for him, if no man expects the unearned. There is no sacrifice in human relationships—only the pattern of
traders.
Men trade value for value, in matter and
in spirit.

The virtues of the Life Morality: thinking
—therefore rationality, the refusal to go against your own consciousness and judgment, the refusal to fake reality;
independence
—the refusal to submit to the authority of others, to place another’s judgment above your own;
honesty
—which is only another name for rationality, the loyalty to reality, the “being true to truth”;
purposefulness
(productiveness)—the choice of your life purpose and the achievement of it;
happiness
—which is possible only as the result of virtue, as the full integration of your reason and action;
self-esteem
—which means pride, self-value—which means the conscious practice of your moral code, the living up to your values, the creation of your own character. (Errors of knowledge versus moral errors; in the realm of morality, nothing counts but
perfection.)
(Man’s need of an ideal.)

The vices of the Life Morality: non-thinking-which
means the evasion of knowledge, the placing of anything whatever above your own mind, any form of mysticism, of faith, or denial of reality;
dependence
—the placing of others above yourself in any manner whatever, either as authority or as love;
aimlessness
—the non-integrated life;
pain
—the submission to it or acceptance of it;
humility
—the acceptance of one’s moral imperfection, the willingness to be imperfect, which means: the indifference to moral values and to yourself, i.e., self-abnegation;
the initiation of force
—as the destruction of the mind, as the method contrary to man’s form of survival, as the anti-man and anti-life.

Such moralities place the standard of value outside of man and of reality, e.g., God, the hereafter, the needs of the soul as opposed to the body. By definition, they are impossible to man; the “good” is the opposite of life. The result is such evils as the opposition of soul and body, of theory and practice, of the moral and the practical. All of it is a rebellion against reality. You cannot fake reality. The desire for a non-stable reality is the desire for non-existence (A is A).

The morality of sacrifice: the sacrificing of virtue to vice, of the good to the evil, of value to non-value, of a positive to a negative, of achievement to need, of ability to inability—the lack, the flaw, the absence, the zero as the consistent standard and the ultimate goal. Life is a sin, under this morality, because everything required by life is a sin. Joy is a sin, pain is a virtue. The death principle throughout it all.
The creed of the unearned.

The worship of emotions
—but emotions are only your “stale thinking.” The demand for unearned love—they do not expect causeless fear, but they do demand causeless love.

The “strong” and the “weak”—so you expect men to survive while being irrational?

The conspiracy against
life,
ability and the mind.
The paradox of the defenders of freedom resting their case on mysticism, while the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason—the paradox of all absolutes being mystical or non-existent; the absolute of reason is denied by all. Which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?

Man’s rights
—inherent in the need of his survival as man. No initiation of force. No sacrifice of man to man. No compulsion. No subordination of one man’s mind to that of another. Voluntary transactions. The trader principle. The proper function of government—retaliation by force against those who initiate force,
and nothing else.

Man’s right to his own property, to the product of his labor, rests on the law of cause and effect. You cannot have the result, if you destroy the source. You cannot have the product of a man’s mind, except on
his
terms. How free enterprise worked—the benefit given to others by inventors and innovators, the inestimable benefit of an idea. The relationship of the “weak” and the “strong”: the strong (intellectually strong, which is the only strength possible in a free, non-force economy) raise the value of the weak’s time by delegating to them the tasks already known and thus being free to pursue new discoveries. Proper mutual trade to mutual advantage. The interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, provided nobody seeks the unearned.