The Journals of Ayn Rand (124 page)

Authors: Ayn Rand

BOOK: The Journals of Ayn Rand

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The address to the men of the mind:
do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. It is you who have made them possible. Set your own terms and code. Put an end to the use of your virtues for your own torture. Learn to understand the nature of your enemies: they do seek death and universal destruction. Yours is the code of Life. Fight for it. There is no other.

July 30, 1953

[The following seems to be a revision of the above outline, beginning with morality.]

Outline of Galt’s Speech

You have achieved your moral ideal. It is your morality that has destroyed the world.

What is morality?
Man—reason—need of a code—man’s only choice: to think or not to think—the essence of thinking: A is A—the standard of value: man’s survival as man,
life
as the value. It is on a desert island that you would need morality most.

What is your morality?
The morality of death—the anti-man, anti-mind, anti-existence. Mysticism and force—mind and body. Whatever your code, reason is your common enemy. The conspiracy against the mind. We have withdrawn. (I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default.) Now look at your morality and your world.

The Morality of Death.
The standard of value outside of man;
original sin;
life as guilt, the mind as guilt, every virtue needed to support life as guilt, the moral versus the practical,
joy
as guilt.
Sacrifice:
the total immorality of its meaning—the
zero
as the consistent standard of value.

The consequences of the contradiction
(personal): the botched, half-living creatures scared to think—all the consequences of the morality of death—the worship of emotions—“wishes” versus reality.
Man’s need of self-esteem:
his chronic fear, his knowledge that he is his own destroyer—all his virtues are called vices, all his vices are called virtues—the dread that evil is practical (since
life
is evil).

The creed of the unearned:
the real purpose of all mystics: the unearned in spirit; the rebellion against a stable reality, against the
absolute
of reality; the anti-cause-and-effect; the desire to reverse cause and effect. But the escape from reality, in any form whatever, is the desire for non-existence.

The consequences of the contradiction
(social): the defenders of freedom are now mystics, and the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason; the idea that morality and absolutes
must
be mystical; the attitude toward “desires” and man’s psychology which savages had toward physical nature.
The constant oppositions:
mind and body, the moral and the practical, theory and practice, reason and emotions, security and freedom, yourself and others, selfishness and charity, private interests and public interests, the “having and eating your cake” principle. A “social” or mystical morality is self-defeating by definition, it
has
to make man immoral—but try to consider all those concepts with reason as the standard and you’ll see that there are no contradictions where no element of mysticism, of the irrational, has been introduced.

The constant demands for the impossible:
the desire to have men survive while being irrational. “Public welfare”: who is the public?—failure as [conferring] the right to the title of “public.”

The destruction of America:
the country of reason; what has been done to it? America’s self-sacrifice to the vilest savages—which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?—why America could not survive on the morality of altruism.

The Morality of Life:
Life as the standard—thinking as the only basic virtue—joy as the purpose—man existing for his own sake and for the pursuit of his own happiness—no duty, no temptation—evil as non-practical-the pattern of traders—justice, not mercy—no sacrifice, no initiation of force, no obedience to force.

Politics:
Man’s rights. The proper function of government regarding force.

Economics:
Property (the profit-motive, the dollar-sign). How free enterprise worked: the spiritual benefit given by the inventors. The separation of State and economics.

(I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default. What I have done, too, is merely an act of identification. The extent to which you have lived and found joy is the extent to which you have acted on my morality.)

The address to the men of the mind:
To the best within you. Do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. Set your own terms.

Yours is the code of life. Fight for it. There is no other. When Life is once more the value
—then,
we’ll return. The strikers’ oath.

September 28, 1953

When we say that nobody actually believes in God, it is true, if by “belief” we mean the equivalent of a rational conviction. But the trick, the psychological “gimmick,” of mystics is the fact that they do not “
believe
” in reality, either. What we mean by a rational conviction has no equivalent in their consciousness. No, they do not “believe” in God in the same way as they “believe” in food, money or their material existence—but their material existence has no full reality for them, either—and
that
is some special state of consciousness, that is the root of the faking, the pretense, the going through an act, the unreality which I sense about most people and which I hate more than anything else, that is the form of their Death Premise, as if they do not merely wish to destroy existence, but have never even permitted existence to exist.

January 9, 1954

The Morality of Death

Metaphysics:
the worship of the zero; the rebellion against a stable reality, against absolutes, which is the wish for non-existence.
Epistemology:
the “sixth sense,” the definitions by means of the negative, the modern mystics and relativists, the “stolen concepts,” the worship of emotions, the mixture of existence and consciousness, the anti-cause-and-effect, the creed of the unearned.

Morality:
mind and body; the placing of the standard of value outside of man; original sin; life, mind and joy as guilt; the opposition of the moral and the practical;
sacrifice:
the total immorality of its meaning, the zero as the standard of value. (It is evil to produce, it is good to mooch.)

The purpose of that morality:
the sacrifice of the good to the evil, the conspiracy against ability and the mind—what the strikers are on strike against. (You need us? It is the generosity of the good that makes the evil possible.)

The Consequences of the Morality of Death
Personal:

Man’s need of self-esteem: life or death. Their sense of guilt and fear: the knowledge of their non-thinking. Fear—because they have abandoned their tool of survival. Guilt—because they know that they have done it volitionally. They are their own destroyers. (Their search for “themselves”—the
self
is the mind.)

They have given up reason—then complain that the universe is a mystery.

The conflict of the practical and the moral.

The fear that evil is practical—since
life
is evil.

(“It’s only logic.” The fortune-teller and the fortune-maker.)

Social:

The defenders of freedom are mystics, while its enemies claim to represent reason.

The contradictions between: soul and body, mind and heart, the moral and the practical, yourself and others, security and freedom, public interest and private interest, human rights and property rights.

The principle of expropriation throughout society—
every
man is rewarded in proportion to his flaws, and penalized in proportion to his virtues.

The evil of the
“
middle-of-the-roaders
”
:
they place their best in the service of their worst, and destroy their best in the same way as they destroy the best men in society. (The cost of their compromises: the death of their children as result of their government subsidy.)

What the men of the mind had given them—the pyramid of ability.

What they must do: stand on the judgment of your mind—you don’t know much?—don’t discard that which you know. Reason is an absolute.

Errors of knowledge versus moral errors. Perfection. (“Benefit of the doubt.”)

Traders—help to others on the basis of values, not flaws, not
need.

The single axiom:
the evil of force.
Good men will not work under compulsion. The obscenity of using force “for their own good.”

“Some of you will never know who is John Galt.”

The moments when they do know who is John Galt.

The damnation of Stadler. (The man who places his mind in the service of evil, while he is
able
to know better, but does not care.)

Undated

[The following note critiques the Kantian idea that “things in themselves” are unknowable. AR cut this topic from Galt’s speech. Later, she covered it in the title essay of
For the New Intellectual.]

Notes for [Galt‘s] Speech
Metaphysics: “Things in Themselves
”

Walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that knowledge is impossible to man and that his consciousness has no validity whatever. A savage does not know the nature of his means of perception; your teachers go him one better: they know and they disqualify man’s consciousness on the ground that its means are specific and knowable.

You can know nothing, they tell you, because you perceive only that which your senses can perceive; your sight is made possible by light rays, your hearing is made possible by sound waves—therefore, your knowledge is not valid, since your consciousness works through these means and no others, since it is itself and can be nothing else, since it cannot step outside itself to verify its knowledge. Your knowledge is not valid, they tell you, because your perceptions are not
causeless.
You cannot know, they tell you, whether the things you perceive are real, because you have no consciousness other than your own and do not know what some other sort of consciousness might see. No matter how much you learn, they tell you, you will always be limited by the fact that you can learn only that which you can learn; you will never be able to know that unlimited zero—the things defined as
“not
that which you can know” seen by a consciousness defined as
“not
yours.”

You listen to them and you blank out the fact that this argument denies the validity of any form of consciousness whatever: if you were the omniscient God of their invention, you would still know only that which your means of knowledge perceived, whatever such means would be, unless—and this is the core of their mystic inventions—God were not “limited” by being an entity and his means of perception were
causeless.
God’s knowledge would be valid, they tell you, because it would be unaccountable, God would know everything, because he would know it by means of nothing, while you can know nothing, because you know it by means of something. You are blind, they tell you, because you have eyes, and deaf, because you have ears; true sight and true hearing would have neither.

You are blind, they tell you, because you can never know
“things in themselves”
or “
things as they are,
” which means: “things as they are
not
perceived by you,” things as they are apart from your consciousness and apart from
any
consciousness. By this concept, reality is that which no one perceives, the moment it is perceived it ceases to be real—existence is outside the bounds of any consciousness, to know it you must know it without consciousness, the moment you’re conscious, it ceases to exist, the moment you’re conscious, you are unconscious. Knowledge is impossible to you, they tell you, because the moment you are A, you’re no longer able to be non-A, the moment you are an entity, you are no longer able to be a zero—and the
zero
is the only thing that’s certain, omniscient, omnipotent and
real.

Do you wonder what is left of a young mind after an intellectual training of this sort? Do you wonder why your childen leave college as neurotic
nonentities,
ready for any witch doctor to knock over?

Since, in fact, no consciousness can hold on to a zero, there is a specific purpose in all of this mystical claptrap: the nearest thing to “causeless knowledge” is an
irrational wish
—and your teachers’ revolt against causal perception is the desire to place above reality and reason those nameless wishes of theirs which they know to be contrary to both.

The closest approach, in practice, to the theory of “things in themselves” is as follows: if you steal your neighbor’s wallet, your action
in itself
and
as it is
is a crime; but since you
wanted
his wallet and held your wish as superior to reason, you blank out the nature of your action and continue to regard yourself as honest, by telling yourself and others that there’s no such thing as objective reality and you would not be able to know it if there were.

Undated

[The following are some topics covered in an early draft of Galt’s speech. AR identifies the number of handwritten pages on each topic.]

The Epistemology of Evil

Definition of two kinds of mystics: 1 page.

Their “sixth sense”: 1 page.

Identifications by means of the zero: 2 pages.

Their “superior” world and “somehow”: 1 page.

Their secret—the
wish:
1 page.

Escape from the law of identity: 3 pages.

Reversing existence and consciousness; mechanics of “the wish”: 6 pages.

Escape from the law of causality: 5 pages.

Who pays for the orgy?—under both mystics: 8 pages.

Modem mystics; the blank-out (“motion” and “change”—the industrialist and the law of identity—“proof” of existence—axioms—montage of examples): 9 pages.

The savage and the baby (sensory perception): 7 pages.

The modem attack on the senses—“things in themselves”: 8 pages.

Summary: the destruction of knowledge (“faith” and “the collective”): 5 pages.

Return to pre-language and blank-outs about the mind: 5 pages.

The present economic “grabbing” and blank-outs: 5 pages.

Power lust: 9 pages.

The mystic psychology of a dictator: 19 pages.

The conspiracy against life and man: 9 pages.