The Journals of Ayn Rand Read online

  It has to begin with pride in self, with that which constitutes man—the reasoning mind. The rights or application of the mind is unlimited, except for the right to deny itself—if a mind denies itself, it cannot enjoy the rights which belong only to it. To deny itself means to deny the mind’s essential [nature as] an individual entity. The mind can conclude anything it wishes—except that [it may] impose its will by force upon other minds.

  The root of the desire to abase man—as in the idea of smallness before nature.

  Altruism as a weapon of exploitation. The creators are disarmed. They have the genius, the life gift. But the second-handers have virtue.

  If it is good to suffer for others, a true altruist has to make others suffer for still others—thus he is doing them good by making them virtuous. If anyone thinks that this sounds fantastic in theory, look at the way it works out just like that in practice and ask yourself why. There is and can be no other explanation. (If it is good to sacrifice oneself for others, then one makes these others vicious by making them accept one’s sacrifice—since the giver is virtuous and the receiver evil. Thus the altruist achieves virtue at the expense of the virtue of others—is this altruism? But it can mean nothing else. Logically, one would have to land in some such silly situation as the Japanese exchange of gifts.)

  No relation of man to man is possible without a moral principle. If there is no such principle, brute force is the only recourse and the only form of relationship. But in any relation between men the unstated and accepted principle [of altruism] is that each must sacrifice himself to the other. Each must attempt to achieve not his own advantage but that of the other man. Both know this to be impossible. No definition [of a moral principle] can be made this way—and no deal. So both drop all moral considerations whatever (“business is business, morality has nothing to do with it”) and both attempt to squeeze all they can out of the other, to sacrifice him to oneself—as the only alternative to an impossible self-sacrifice. No decent or fair relation among men is possible on the basis of altruism. Only when one begins with the principle that the other man does not exist for one’s sake, that the other has a legitimate and moral right to his own advantage, only then is a fair relation possible. Never demand of another man that which would constitute his sacrifice to you. Never grant him that which would constitute your sacrifice to him.

  Never initiate the use of force against another man. Never let his use of force against you remain unanswered by force.

  Love as exception-making. The vicious implications of the idea of “loving everybody.” Not love—but a benevolent neutrality as your basic attitude to your fellow men. The rest must be earned by them. Justice, not mercy.

  Remove the idea of altruism from your mind—then look at the collectivists. See these shabby, sordid men of horror for what [they are], without the aura of virtue that idea gave them. What, but that idea, could make men tolerate and accept that horror?

  What kind of a person are you? What do you see when you think of “man”—a hero or an Okie? This question is the decisive one—it holds everything. The style of a soul. (If you’re confused, try this. It will tell you everything. Then try to untangle it.) (The worm who wrote to Pat about the Wright brothers—the deliberate belittling of greatness.) We do not attempt to acquire the virtues of heroes—we attempt to give heroes our vices. [“Pat ” refers to Isabel Paterson, author of The God of the Machine and a friend of AR’s in the 1940s.]

  [In regard to] the Passive Man—stress obedience and following. The first desire of the Active Man—to do things alone and in his own way. The first desire of the Passive Man—to obey and not to be responsible. [The Active Man wants] neither to impose himself upon others nor to be imposed upon. Best results and most moral method of action—alone, not together. Tests of school children. Hollywood scenarios. Mob actions—lynchings. Cooperation, not collectivism. Government’s only duty—protect individual rights for individuals, not create encroachments for pressure groups. There can be no individual action without productive or economic freedom. There can be no such freedom without property rights. The “body” and “soul” of human rights. Who can rule best—the one or the many? Neither. As little ruling as possible. Then—go to the Capitalist System.

  September 4, 1943

  The Moral Basis of Individualism

  I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

  I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

  It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

  —HOWARD ROARK, The Fountainhead

  Foreword

  Mankind is committing suicide.

  The peculiarity of the present world disaster is that every group of men in every country is the originator of its own destruction. Men are not fighting one another for self-preservation. They are each fighting all for the right to annihilate oneself as fast as possible.

  Intellectuals, such as Trotsky, worked to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia; they have been murdered by that dictatorship. Industrialists, such as [Fritz] Thyssen, and church leaders, such as [Martin] Niemoller, worked to bring about the Nazi regime in Germany; they have been exterminated. [The preceding two sentences were crossed out.] American labor union leaders caused the creation of Labor Boards; these are now the instruments through which labor union leaders are being sent to jail. Republicans who decry the New Deal usurpation of power are now advocating the passage of a labor conscription act which would give the New Deal its last, winning step toward total power over this country. Conservatives, anxious to preserve capitalism, are supporting this measure which would turn citizens into serfs—which would be the end of capitalism, for it cannot function through serfs. Leaders of racial minorities are advocating the destruction of the American system of government—which is the only system that ever has or can protect a racial minority. Intellectuals have embraced, en masse and in toto, the doctrine of collectivism—under which the intellectual professions are the least possible and the first to go. Name a group of men and you are naming that group’s murderers.

  There must be a reason for a suicidal mania that has infected a whole world, particularly when the suicide is not conscious or willing, when the victims are thrashing about in wild despair, wondering who is destroying them, swatting at everyone in sight, dragging their brothers along as they race down into the abyss and scream that someone is pushing them.

  It is generally recognized that mankind has achieved, since its rise from savagery, a miraculous progress in the realm of its material culture—and none whatever in the realm of its ethics. Our homes are superior to the cave of the Neanderthal man, but our morals are no better than his—worse, if anything, for we do not have his excuse of ignorance. There is no act of inhumanity which he perpetrated and which we do not perpetrate, except that he did not possess our exquisite means of perpetrating it and he could never equal our present scale. In a recently published book (The Spirit of Enterprise by Edgar M. Queeny), the author—intent upon a hymn to human progress—spends five pages describing man’s material triumphs. Then he adds: “Our morals have come a long way, too. The mere thought of a feast on a loose piece of human flesh, which to the Bushmen brings mouth-watering longing, is to us horrid and nauseating.” This is all he can offer, without equivocation, for ten thousand years of man’s spiritual growth. And even this claim is open to question, because cannibalism occurred in Soviet Russia in the famines of 1921 and 1933, and God only knows or can bear the sight of what is occurring in Europe now.

  Why has man displayed such magnificent capacity for progress in the material realm and yet remained stagnant on the level of savagery in his spiritual stature? This discrepancy has been recognized, decried, deplored, denounced by everyone. It has never been explained. Countless explanations of evil and remedies for it have been offered through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them cured or explained anything.

  Yet that which mankind holds as its moral ideal has been known and accepted for centuries. The basic principle of men’s morality has not changed since the beginning of recorded history. Under their superficial differences of symbolism, ritual and metaphysical justification, all great ethical systems from the Orient up, all religions, all human schools of thought have held a single moral axiom: the ideal of selflessness. That which proceeds from love of self is evil, that which proceeds from love of others is good. Self-sacrifice, self-denial and self-renunciation have ever been considered the essence of virtue. In no other matter has mankind held to such total unity, so completely and for so long. Altruism is the doctrine which holds that man must live for others and place others above self. Humanity has proclaimed its moral ideal unanimously. It has never been questioned. It has always been the ideal of altruism. [Later in this chapter, AR notes that the cultures of ancient Greece and capitalist America were at least partial exceptions to this rule.]

  This ideal has never been reached. In spite of its statement and restatement, in every land, in every age, in every language, in spite of its professed acceptance by all, mankind’s history has not been a growing record of benevolence, justice and brother-love, but an accelerating progression of horror, cruelty, and shame. Baffled, men have accepted the explanation that man is essentially evil; man is weak and imperfect; he doesn’t want to do good. The noble ideal of altruism is never quite to be achieved, only approximated; man is immoral by nature.

  But look back at mankind’s record. Every major horror of history was perpetrated—not by reason of and in the name of that which men held as evil, that is, selfishness—but through, by, for and in th
e name of an altruistic purpose. The Inquisition. Religious wars. Civil wars. The French Revolution. The German Revolution. The Russian Revolution. No act of selfishness has ever equaled the carnages perpetrated by disciples of altruism. Nor has any egotist ever roused masses of fanatical followers by enjoining them to go out to fight for his personal gain. Every leader gathered men through the slogans of a selfless purpose, through the plea for their self-sacrifice to a high altruistic goal: the salvation of others’ souls, the spread of enlightenment, the common good of their state.

  It is said that self-seeking hypocrites used these virtuous sentiments to delude their followers and achieve personal ends. Doubtless, there have been such and a great many of them. But they never caused the bloody terrors caused by the purest “idealists.” The worst butchers were the most sincere. Robespierre asked and wished nothing for himself. Lenin asked and wished nothing for himself. But the record of Attila is that of an amateur compared to theirs. At the apex of every great tragedy of mankind there stands the figure of an incorruptible altruist. Yet, after every disaster men have said: “The ideal was right, but Robespierre was the wrong man to put it into practice,” (or Torquemada, or Cromwell, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin) and have gone on to try it again.

  But what is one to think of creatures who are willing, century after century, to bear every form of agony, every kind of martyrdom, for the sake of that which they consider as their moral ideal? Are they creatures devoid of moral instinct? Is not the determination to act according to one’s conception of right, no matter what the price, precisely the attribute of a high moral sense? Men have been robbed, enslaved, tortured, slaughtered in the name of altruism. They have accepted, forgiven, and borne it, because their ideal demanded it of them. The price they have paid in unspeakable suffering should have granted them, at least, a badge of virtue.

  But the nature of their ideal has robbed them even of this earned honor.

  A true premise, once accepted, leads to a greater truth and a clearer knowledge with each subsequent step deduced from it. A false premise leads to a greater falsehood and a blacker evil, until, followed to its ultimate conclusion, it brings total destruction, as it must. The spiritual tragedy of mankind has now reached this last step. The spectacle of horror which the world presents at this moment has never been equaled and cannot be surpassed. This is the end of the blind alley of men’s thinking. And there is no way out—save all the way back, to the beginning, to the first principle which permitted men to be led into this.

  The ideal of altruism has now taken its ultimate toll. We are the witnesses of its climax. We see mankind destroying itself before our eyes. We see the price it is paying. We glance back at its history and we see the price it has paid. But we look on and say: “This noble ideal is beyond human nature, because men are imperfect and evil.”

  Isn’t it time to stop and to question that noble ideal instead?

  September 6, 1943

  Axiom

  Moral law is a code of right and wrong. The moral law of man must be based on his nature as man. This is implicit by definition. That which is right and proper to man must be right and proper to man. A moral code not based on man’s nature would have to be stated like this: that which is right and proper to man is that which is improper and impossible to him. Whatever such a statement might be, it is not a statement of morality, but of total evil, by its own terms. It leaves man no choice but to acknowledge himself as evil by nature, in which case no morality is possible to him, or to destroy himself. ([Note added later:] “In order to exist I must be evil. If I do not wish to be evil, I must not exist. Existence is evil.” This is where I’ll discuss the morality of altruism.)

  What is man’s nature? The definitive factor must be that which is peculiar to man, that which distinguishes him from all other entities, objects or creatures. The attribute peculiar to man is the rational faculty. It is that which, in all known nature, is possessed only by man. ([Note added later:] Define the rational faculty here. Truth to the facts of the outside world.)

  Man exists. He is alive. He is distinguished from all other existing objects and living creatures by the faculty of reason. He is a rational being.

  Every species of living creature survives through the exercise of that attribute which is its particular, distinguishing faculty. All its other attributes are adapted to the mode of existence set by the one which is its means of survival. If it were otherwise, if two fundamental attributes of a creature, both essential to its nature and to its survival, were in irreconcilable conflict ([note added later:] nail this down)—the creature would have to perish. The attributes and nature of a bird are set by the determining factor of flight as its means of survival. The attributes and nature of a tiger are set by the determining factor of predatory hunting as its means of survival. That which in art is style, that which in music is leitmotif—the central theme, the basic principle, the determining conception which sets and rules every detail of the whole—is, in living nature, the creature’s means of survival.

  Man survives through the exercise of his rational faculty.

  That is his sole means of survival.

  Man comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force guided by instinct. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle, and no instinct to guide him. He cannot obtain sustenance for his body except through the exercise of his rational faculty. He must plant his food or hunt it. Planting requires a long, consistent process of thought—of observation and logical deduction. Hunting requires weapons; man cannot hunt with his hands, his quarries are his superiors in speed or force, and making weapons requires a process of thought. Man could not survive even as an herbivorous creature by picking fruit and berries at random. He has no instinct to tell him which plants are beneficial to him and which are a deadly poison. He can learn it only by conscious experimentation or by the observation of other living creatures who do not touch poisonous plants—a procedure which, in either case, is a process of thought.

  ([Note added later:] Here the transition from the material to the spiritual.)

  From these simplest primary necessities on through his every other need, his clothes, his shelter, his philosophy, on to his greatest achievements, from the flint and arrowhead to a modern skyscraper, everything man is and everything he has comes from a single attribute—the function of his reasoning mind. The Empire State Building was not erected by instinct.

  But it is the nature of the rational faculty that it implies choice and the possibility of error. Instinct is infallible within the limits of its sphere. Nature gives an animal both the means and the method of survival; he cannot do wrong in his method; he does what he must; if he is confronted by a fact outside the provisions of his instinct, he can do nothing and he perishes. (This can be observed in any country road: wild creatures that run from the approach of man or horse do not run from a speeding automobile; instinct has not armed them against an automobile, as it has not armed cows off railroad tracks. The formulation of an abstraction—such as the rule that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time—is not done by instinct.)

  ([Note added later:] He is given the tool; the nature of the tool sets the method of its use, but man must discover that method. Reason applies to nature—and to himself.)

  It is man’s distinction that he is given the means, but not the method of survival. He must discover the method himself. The process of discovery is a long series of steps—of observation, deduction, conclusion. The possibility of error hangs over every step. Nothing guarantees in advance the correctness of his deductions. It is up to him. One error in the process grows with each succeeding step—until, if pursued far enough, it leads to the final proof of error, to destruction. Man’s life ultimately depends upon every conclusion within his brain.

  The process of deduction is a succession of answers to questions, on a single basic pattern: “Yes” or “No.” The possibility of differentiating between a “yes” or a “no” is the capacity of choice. Choice is the ultimatum of man’s existence. The process of differentiating is an act of choice. The rational process is a succession of such acts. The first commandment of an animal’s survival is only: “Act or perish.” The act is prescribed. The first commandment of man’s survival carries a fateful responsibility: “Choose right before acting or perish.”