The Journals of Ayn Rand (126 page)

A mystical morality makes it impossible for you to pass moral judgment.
You cannot judge by an incomprehensible standard,
be it God or society or anything outside reason. When you are told: “Do not try to understand what is good,
believe it,”
you become unable to estimate any value, action, person or event, or to make any firm choice.

If you cannot judge, you will not think. The aim of every action, mental or physical, is to achieve a value, to further your life. Why think, if you cannot reach any conclusion, if you cannot appraise the value of any choice?
Every thought implies a value judgment.
If you cannot value, you cannot think. You may know that giving poison to a man will kill him, but why consider it, if you cannot know whether it is right or wrong to kill him?

If you cannot think, you will act on the spur of the emotions of the moment. The creed of expediency is the worship of emotions. Emotions, in fact, are the summary of your philosophical premises—and destruction will follow from the contradictions in your premises if you act blindly on your emotions. All emotions are appraisals, inexorably based on the rule of “What’s in it for me?” but you have no way of judging what
should
be in it for you, what is your self-interest—and your destruction follows from such blind choices.

Your morality disarms you and protects itself from your mind
by making a virtue of imperfection:
humility is a virtue, pride is a sin. It gives you a blank check on evil and forces you to give a blank check to others. If you cannot be proud of yourself, you cannot condemn any depravity. The man who is unable to praise himself is unable to blame anything on anyone.

You create your character or destroy it by the same means which create or destroy all your values: by the act of thinking or non-thinking. Your
self
is your
mind,
and its constant choice is the act of self-affirmation or self-denial, of perceiving or refusing to perceive, the act of
being or non-being
by which your mind, like a pilot-light within you, goes on or off. This act is your primary choice, it is your
will,
the only will you have, your only choice, from which all other choices proceed.

Just as you possess a pair of legs, but must learn to use them, and the ability to walk becomes automatic, but the decision to walk does not, and you will not walk without a decision to cross the room, the street or the world—so you possess a brain, but must learn to use it, and the ability to think becomes automatic, but the decision to think does not.

It is not values that you have to renounce, but only your fakes and pretenses: the prestige which you don’t possess, the respect which no one grants you, the love which you do not feel, the faith which you don’t believe. Get out of your snarl of deceit which has deceived no one but yourself. Get out of the dank prison of your emotions into the hard, clean sunlight of the mind. And if, in exchange for your scrap heap of borrowed slogans and undigested commandments, you are able to reach by the work of your mind no more than the first-hand conviction that water is wet and fire is hot, you will still be incomparably richer than you were and you will know the meaning of self-esteem.

Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.

You believe you got away with your evasions? Look again and check the addition that sums up your soul and your life. You had cheated in business, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your wife has deserted you? You had paid off a bureaucrat to destroy your competitor, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your market has vanished and your business has crashed? You extorted high wages by means of directives, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’re now condemned to jobless starvation? You had preached ideas you hated, in exchange for the favor of men you despised, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’ve now become an alcoholic? You had prospered on government subsidies, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your son has been killed in a war to bring prosperity to the natives of some jungle People’s State? You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?

Like the criminal who plays it short range, who believes that he gets away with the unearned and does not see why his loot disappears into the pockets of any blackmailer and any criminal more ruthless than himself—so you believed that you could exist as half-producer, half-thief, and did not see what parasites you paid in exchange for your little snatch of the unearned. Every time you cheated the honest, it is the dishonest you had to pay off. Every time you resorted to force—passing a law—to destroy your superiors, it is to your inferiors that you handed the weapon by which they destroyed you in your turn. Whether you were a businessman or a worker, your blank-out consisted of believing that you were fighting and looting each other—and what you did not dare to identify was that you were looting the better men of your own profession, that any kind of collectivist action is intended to milk the better members of the collective—and as you destroyed your abler competitor or your abler fellow-worker, ten incompetents were ready to pounce upon you and to drain you dry in turn. So you’re reaping a profit you did not deserve and wonder why bureaucrats are devouring your profit. So you’ve gained security where the boss cannot fire you and no other newcomer can compete for your job—and you wonder why your wages are buying less and less, and why you live in terror of your union leaders, whose whim can condemn you to starve.

You believed that compromise was practical, that you could not succeed on merit, that some shortcuts were needed to help you to rise, that your sins were assisting your virtues. But there is no compromise between good and evil, between reason and force, between production and looting. Your vices have devoured your virtues, your intelligence was spent on protecting your evasions, your ability on paying for your frauds, your energy on enriching the parasites who bled you—while you were gaining a penny of graft in exchange for a dollar of your own honest profit.

When you established the right of the unearned and accepted need, the zero, as a claim, you did not see—you blindest of fools, the businessman or laborer of the compromise economy—that any man on any level who continued working, was losing in proportion to his effort and his work, and that those who gained, were gaining in proportion to their having accomplished nothing. You had connived to destroy your superior and had hoped to step into his shoes, but you did not step into his fortune, you stepped into his place under the social squeezer which
you
had set in motion—and when you are squeezed dry in your turn, you will find that the ultimate winner is the looter who made no compromise with working, but stuck to the absolute of robbery and murder, the “practical” hero of the short-cut, who will perish on the carcass of the last compromiser.