The Journals of Ayn Rand (59 page)

For self-reverence: we must begin with love for the conception of man as a rational entity, free to create himself—and then we must live up to it.

To start his code of ethics, man must recognize himself for what he is: an independent entity. On that basis he can demand his own happiness. (His happiness and all the means to it must be created by himself.)

If, by the altruistic code, a man is evil if he is happy, but good if he makes others happy, then those others are either: 1) evil because they are happy, therefore a man is good by making others evil, or 2) good because they are happy not through their own efforts but through an unearned gift. In this last case they are considered good because they have not acted in accordance with man’s nature, which demands that he produce what he consumes.

Nature demands just one thing of man: “Make sense”—“Use your rational faculty”—“Don’t expect me to be what I am not.”

 

 

The rational faculty is an attribute of the individual.

There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.

A thought held by many men is not held “in common.” It is held by each individual man in his own individual mind. If three men think that “Life is desirable,” the idea is not broken up into three separate parts, one held by each man—one man holding the concept of “life,” another the concept of “is,” the third the concept of “desirable”—and the three parts uniting somewhere in the ether to form a complete idea held collectively.

We may multiply to infinity the number of men involved or the complexity of the idea they hold—and the fact remains the same.

An idea, simple or complex, cannot be held in half by two men, working together as a Siamese-twin unit or collective. A man cannot say in reference to his ideas: “I’ve only got the nouns and the adverbs—my brother Joe’s got the verbs and the adjectives—we think kinda like a team.” An idea is not a jig-saw puzzle whose pieces can be scattered among various participants, while a mystical super-entity-the collective—puts the picture together, with none of them seeing or grasping the whole. An idea, an intelligible mental conception, is held in its entirety in the mind of one man. Another man may hold the same idea—in its entirety and in his own mind.

A scientist who has arrived at a complicated scientific theory is not the repository of a collective thought composed of contributions by Aristotle, Roger Bacon and on down; his own mind has grasped, understood and passed judgment upon a great many ideas presented to him by a great many men through the ages, has eliminated some of them, has accepted others, and has reached a conclusion, which constitutes a rational conviction. If his mind has not done that, but merely contains an undigested junk heap of unrelated information, such content is not thought, nor is it related to thought, nor is it related to the process of a human mind, but to the process and content of a dictaphone [
a machine, now obsolete, to record dictated material
].

Different men may hold knowledge of different facts, which, when put together, lead to new ideas and a wider knowledge. But such putting together can be done only by a rational process in the mind of one man who assimilates the new knowledge supplied to him by others, relates it to the fact that he knows, forms conclusions and produces a new, coherent, intelligible whole. Any of the other men involved may perform the same process. But each has to perform it alone, in his own mind, rationally grasping every step in the process if he is to grasp the whole. If none of the men has performed the process and none has grasped the whole—there is no whole. There is no new idea born. There is no collective brain for it to be born in.

An agreement reached by a group of men, in which separate men have contributed separate parts, is not a collective thought. It is the result of thought, the product, the secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason, the process of observing, considering, passing judgment—had to be performed by each man alone. If one of the men involved corrected his own conclusion because of the convincing evidence presented by another man, he has done so by an independent act of his own reasoning mind; if he has not performed such an act, but has merely agreed, blindly and without judgment—what he has done is not an act of thinking, nor is the final agreement a thought in his mind, nor has he contributed anything to any agreement or thought, nor will that final agreement reached by others do him any good.

Men may share their
knowledge,
not their thinking. Knowledge is not thinking; it is the
result
of thinking, the product of the process of thought. The process of thought is one activity—among many others—that cannot be performed collectively.

That which man produces can be shared but not that which made him capable of producing it. A man can chop up a pile of wood and divide among other men the logs he has cut—but not the strength of his arm. A man can perform a rational process and offer to others the conclusions he has reached—but not the power of his brain. All the functions of man’s body and mind are private, personal, individual. They cannot be shared or transferred.

We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No amount of love and self-sacrifice will enable a man to use his lungs to breathe for another man. No quantity of G.P.U. agents will enable a man to think through the brain of another.

Any consultation among men, any exchange of thoughts, is only an exchange of products. Every man involved must perform an independent process of reason before he can accept or reject an idea. No possible effort by the others can give him anything of value without that basic capacity of his own. The product is secondary—the capacity primary. A thought cannot be imparted to a man incapable of thinking. The rational faculty is like a broadcasting station: its product cannot be transmitted to those who lack a receiving set.

The rational faculty can neither be shared nor added. It does not grow by addition. It has a singular, but no plural. Men can unite their physical force, but not their brain power. Two young boys can join their strength to lift a weight, and their combined strength will equal approximately that of an adult man. Two half-wits do not equal one intelligent man. Nor do two intelligent men united produce an entity of double intelligence. The combined physical power of a group of ten average men is ten times that of each member of the group. The combined mental power of a group often average men is exactly that of the most intelligent member of the group—and no higher. The rational faculty has no plural.

Even the addition of men’s physical power is possible only in a few instances of its many applications—such as in lifting weights or in destroying and smashing things. If a group of men were lined up and ordered to run a race together, as a collective, maintaining a united front or unbroken line throughout—their combined speed would not equal the sum of their individual speeds, nor even the speed of the fastest man among them,
but that of the slowest.
Their collective effort would not lift them to the level of the best, but reduce them to the level of the worst. The lowest common denominator is always just that—the lowest.

If a group of men were ordered to solve an intellectual problem together, as a collective, acting in unison, taking no step without common assent and understanding—their combined effort would not equal the capacity of the best brain among them, but of the dullest. And, as a matter of fact, the actual result—if any—would be somewhere below the result produced by the dullest one working on his own; because, left alone, he would be unhampered.

Thousands of years ago, one man, somewhere in a forgotten jungle, looked at trees and thought of gathering their branches into the shape of a hut for shelter. Others saw his work and copied it. Their descendants inherited the hut. One among them thought of planting posts upright to support horizontal beams. The hut became a house. The post-and-lintel house became the Parthenon. Men discovered the principle of the arch—and the Parthenon became the Pantheon. Men discovered the principle of the flying buttress—and the Pantheon became the Rheims Cathedral. Men learned to make structural steel—and the Rheims Cathedral became the Empire State Building. But all through the process, what men inherited from other men was only the product of their thinking. The moving force in the process—the determining force—was man’s rational faculty that took the product as material, used it and originated the next step.

In each new step, the achievement was not that of the originator’s predecessors;
their
achievement had been there before; the part of a newly created object which constituted an achievement was not that which had been known before, but that which had not been known; not what the achievement was based on, but what had been added to that base. It was not the inventor of the hut who made the skyscraper possible—he made the hut possible; nor was it the designer of the Parthenon, nor any of the men who left their achievements to their heirs. The skyscraper was made possible by the thought of the man who designed it—to the exact extent to which the thought was new, i.e., his own.

In any period of mankind’s progress, the credit for what is done does not belong to a collective achievement of the past. First, it was not a
collective
achievement, not the group production of a group working as a group—but an aggregate of single, specific achievements by single, individual men. Second, even if viewed vaguely and inaccurately as a “collective achievement” in the sense of representing a sum, the past achievements in any period are just that:
past.
They are done, finished, completed—inert. What is done from then on, what is added to them, what is discovered, defined, invented, created for the first time in what constitutes the achievement. The credit belongs to the man who made the new step.

No matter how many steps were taken to reach any stage in the development of any particular human product, no matter how many men perfected single details—each step was the work, the creation and the achievement of some one individual man. Someone had to think of it.

If several men thought of it simultaneously, as when inventors make similar discoveries independently of one another, it still remains true that each had to arrive at his conclusion through a rational process of his own. An argument such as “If Columbus hadn’t discovered America, somebody else would have,” is pointless and meaningless. Yes, somebody else would have—if he had acted as Columbus did, i.e., if he had ventured out on an untried journey guided by an idea of his own, unshared and unsanctioned by the majority of his contemporaries. It is of no importance how many men could have equaled the achievement of Columbus and discovered America. The fact remains that he did and they didn’t.

The usual cry of mediocrities about [what] they could have invented if someone else hadn’t beaten them to it can be answered simply by pointing to the inexhaustible potentialities still open and unexplored in every field of human endeavor. Let them design a new safety-pin before they start whining about how the Wright brothers beat them to [the discovery of the airplane].

It would be pointless to debate whether one man actually thought of making a hut all by himself, or whether the first hut represented a long series of steps invented by many men in succession. The process of achievement remains the same: a single man making a new step, in some cases a small, imperceptible step—in others, a gigantic leap forward. We do not know the authors of mankind’s first achievements because their names have not been recorded. But we do know from recorded history that no achievement, great or small, has ever burst upon mankind spontaneously out of nowhere and nobody—nor, as fools believe, out of everywhere and everybody. It came from some one man.

We can also observe that the development of every particular sphere of man’s creative activity has not been an even, microscopic succession of contributions, like a procession of ants each adding a grain of dust to the common line. In every sphere—art, literature, music, science, invention, philosophy—the line of progress has shot from mountain peak to mountain peak, from one single burst of light to another, from a key name marking a turning point to another key name at the threshold of a new direction. The valleys, the candle drops and the modest footsteps between such points were filled by many men, each elaborating some one detail of the giant’s heritage. The accomplishments of these modest men are not to be despised; they were authentic contributions and they must be given their value—but no more than their value. It is not out of their collected efforts that the basic, crucial, epoch-making achievements have come. It is these great, single achievements that gave them a field in which to work, each to the extent of his own talent.

If anyone wishes to claim that the greater the achievement the more men were required to reach it, the history of every creative profession will prove the exact opposite: the greater, the more primary, the more cardinal the achievement—the fewer men were responsible for it. Only the sphere of polishing, elaborating, pressing seams and ironing wrinkles involved many small contributions by many different men. The design of an in-built ashtray
is
a contribution to the appearance and comfort of an automobile; it is not the same kind of contribution as that made by the man who designed the internal combustion engine. The automobile is not their collective product on equal terms.