"There are only two means by
which men can deal with one another: guns or
logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know
that they cannot win by means of logic, have
always resorted to guns."
-
excerpts from
Faith and Force: The
Destroyers of the Modern World
by Ayn Rand
(A lecture delivered at Yale
University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn
College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia
University on May 5, 1960.
Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden
Institute in 1967,
and now included as a chapter in the book,
Philosophy: Who Needs It )
_____
[...]
... The three values which
men held for centuries and which have now
collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism,
altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural power --
died at the time of the Renaissance.
Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died in
World War II. As to altruism -- it has never
been alive. It is the poison of death in the
blood of Western civilization, and men survived
it only to the extent to which they neither
believed nor practiced it. But it has caught up
with them -- and that is the killer which they
now have to face and to defeat. That is the
basic choice they have to make. If any
civilization is to survive, it is the morality
of altruism that men have to reject.
... Yes, this is an age of moral
crisis. ... Your moral code has reached its
climax, the blind alley at the end of its
course. And if you wish to go on living, what
you now need is not to return to morality, but
to discover it.
What is morality? It is a code of values
to guide man's choices and actions -- the
choices which determine the purpose and the
course of his life. It is a code by means of
which he judges what is right or wrong, good or
evil.
What is the morality of altruism? The
basic principle of altruism is that man has no
right to live for his own sake, that service to
others is the only justification of his
existence, and that self-sacrifice is his
highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good
will or respect for the rights of others. These
are not primaries, but consequences, which, in
fact, altruism makes impossible. The
irreducible primary of altruism, the basic
absolute, is self-sacrifice -- which means:
self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial,
self-destruction --- which means: the self as a
standard of evil, the selfless as the standard
of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as
whether you should or should not give a dime to
a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is
whether you do or do not have the right to exist
without giving him that dime. The issue is
whether you must keep buying your life, dime by
dime, from any beggar who might choose to
approach you. The issue is whether the need of
others is the first mortgage on your life and
the moral purpose of your existence. The issue
is whether man is to be regarded as a
sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will
answer: "No." Altruism says: "Yes."
Now there is one word -- a single word --
which can blast the morality of altruism out of
existence and which it cannot withstand -- the
word: "Why?" Why must man live for the sake of
others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal?
Why is that the good? There is no earthly
reason for it -- and, ladies and gentlemen, in
the whole history of philosophy no earthly
reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit
moralists to get away with it. It was
mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the
irrational that has always been called upon to
justify it -- or, to be exact, to escape the
necessity of justification. One does not
justify the irrational, one just takes it on
faith. What most moralists -- and few of their
victims -- realize is that reason and altruism
are incompatible. And this is the basic
contradiction of Western civilization: reason
versus altruism. This is the conflict that had
to explode sooner or later.
The real conflict, of course, is reason
versus mysticism. But if it weren't for the
altruist morality, mysticism would have died
when it did die -- at the Renaissance -- leaving
no vampire to haunt Western culture. A
"vampire" is supposed to be a dead creature that
comes out of its grave only at night -- only in
the darkness -- and drains the blood of the
living. The description, applied to altruism,
is exact.
Western civilization was the child and
product of reason -- via ancient Greece. In all
other civilizations, reason has always been the
menial servant -- the handmaiden -- of
mysticism. You may observe the results. It is
only Western culture that has ever been
dominated -- imperfectly, incompletely,
precariously and at rare intervals -- but still,
dominated by reason. You may observe the
results of that.
The conflict of reason versus mysticism is
the issue of life or death -- of freedom or
slavery -- of progress or stagnant brutality.
Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of
consciousness versus unconsciousness.
Let us define our terms. What is reason?
Reason is the faculty which perceives,
identifies and integrates the material provided
by man's senses. Reason integrates man's
perceptions by means of forming abstractions or
conceptions, thus raising man's knowledge from
the perceptual level, which he shares with
animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone
can reach. The method which reason employs in
this process is logic -- and logic is the art of
non-contradictory identification. What is
mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of
allegations without evidence or proof, either
apart from or against the evidence of one's
senses and one's reason. Mysticism is the claim
to some non-sensory, non-rational,
non-definable, non-identifiable means of
knowledge, such as "instinct," "intuition,"
"revelation,' or any form of "just knowing."
Reason is the perception of reality, and
rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.
Mysticism is the claim to the perception of
some other reality -- other than the one in
which we live -- whose definition is only that
it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to
be perceived by some form of unnatural or
supernatural means.
You realize, of course, that epistemology
-- the theory of knowledge -- is the most
complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be
covered exhaustively in a single lecture. So I
will not attempt to cover it. I will say only
that those who wish a fuller discussion will
find it in
Atlas Shrugged.
For the purposes of tonight's discussion, the
definitions I have given you contain the essence
of the issue, regardless of whose theory,
argument or philosophy you choose to accept.
I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which
perceives, identifies and integrates the
material provided by man's senses. Mysticism is
the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge.
In Western civilization, the period ruled
by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the
Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the
nature of that period and the state of human
existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke
the rule of the mystics. "Renaissance" means
"rebirth." Few people today will care to remind
you that it was a rebirth of reason -- of man's
mind.
In the light of what followed -- most
particularly, in the light of the industrial
revolution -- nobody can now take faith, or
religion, or revelation, or any form of
mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to
existence, not in the way it was taken in the
Middle Ages. This does not mean that the
Renaissance has automatically converted
everybody to rationality; far from it. It means
only that so long as a single automobile, a
single skyscraper or a single copy of
Aristotle's Logic remains in existence, nobody
will be able to arouse men's hope, eagerness and
joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their
minds and rely on mystic faith. This is why I
said that mysticism, as a cultural power, is
dead. Observe that in the attempts at a mystic
revival today, it is not an appeal to life, hope
and joy that the mystics are making, but an
appeal to fear, doom and despair. "Give up,
your mind is impotent, life is only a foxhole,"
is not a motto that can revive a culture.
Now, if you ask me to name the man most
responsible for the present state of the world,
the man whose influence has almost succeeded in
destroying the achievements of the Renaissance
-- I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the
philosopher who saved the morality of altruism,
and who knew that what it had to be saved from
was -- reason.
This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a
known historical fact that Kant's interest and
purpose in philosophy was to save the morality
of altruism, which could not survive without a
mystic base. His metaphysics and his
epistemology were devised for that purpose. He
did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic
-- few of them have, since the Renaissance. He
announced himself as a champion of reason -- of
"pure" reason.
There are two ways to destroy the power of
a concept: one, by an open attack in open
discussion -- the other, by subversion, from the
inside; that is: by subverting the meaning of
the concept, setting up a straw man and then
refuting it. Kant did the second. He did not
attack reason -- he merely constructed such a
version of what is reason that it made mysticism
look like plain, rational common sense by
comparison. He did not deny the validity of
reason -- he merely claimed that reason is
"limited," that it leads us to impossible
contradictions, that everything we perceive is
an illusion and that we can never perceive
reality or "things as they are." He claimed, in
effect, that the things we perceive are not
real, because we perceive them.
A "straw man" is an odd metaphor to apply
to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous
construction as Kant's system of epistemology.
Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was -- and
the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that
followed, skepticism about man's ability ever to
know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to
human consciousness, because it was not a human
consciousness that Kant's robot represented.
But philosophers accepted it as such. And while
they cried that reason had been invalidated,
they did not notice that reason had been pushed
off the philosophical scene altogether and that
the faculty they were arguing about was not
reason.
No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely
did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone
could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current
philosophies -- such as Pragmatism, Logical
Positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics
who announce happily that you cannot prove that
you exist -- you will find that they all grew
out of Kant.
As to Kant's version of the altruist
morality, he claimed that it was derived from
"pure reason," not from revelation -- except
that it rested on a special instinct for duty, a
"categorical imperative" which one "just knows."
His version of morality makes the Christian one
sound like a healthy, cheerful, benevolent code
of selfishness. Christianity merely told man to
love his neighbor as himself; that's not
exactly rational -- but at least it does not
forbid man to love himself. What Kant
propounded was full, total, abject selflessness:
he held that an action is moral only if you
perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no
benefit from it of any kind, neither material
nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your
action is not moral any longer. This is the
ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself
into a "shmoo" -- the mystic little animal of
the Li'l Abner comic strip, that went around
seeking to be eaten by somebody.
It is Kant's version of altruism that is
generally accepted today, not practiced -- who
can practice it? -- but guiltily accepted. It
is Kant's version of altruism that people, who
have never heard of Kant, profess when they
equate self-interest with evil. It is Kant's
version of altruism that's working whenever
people are afraid to admit the pursuit of any
personal pleasure or gain or motive -- whenever
men are afraid to confess that they are seeking
their own happiness -- whenever businessmen are
afraid to say that they are making profits --
whenever the victims of an advancing
dictatorship are afraid to assert their
"selfish" rights.
The ultimate monument to Kant and to the
whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia.
If you want to prove to yourself the power
of ideas and, particularly, of morality -- the
intellectual history of the nineteenth century
would be a good example to study. The greatest,
unprecedented, undreamed of events and
achievements were taking place before men's eyes
-- but men did not see them and did not
understand their meaning, as they do not
understand it to this day. I am speaking of the
industrial revolution, of the United States and
of capitalism. For the first time in history,
men gained control over physical nature and
threw off the control of men over men -- that
is: men discovered science and political
freedom. The creative energy, the abundance,
the wealth, the rising standard of living for
every level of the population were such that the
nineteenth century looks like fiction-Utopia,
like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab
progression of most of human history. If life
on earth is one's standard of value, then the
nineteenth century moved mankind forward more
than all the other centuries combined.
Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone
appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the
causes of that historical miracle?
They did not and have not. What blinded
them? The morality of altruism.
Let me explain this. There are,
fundamentally, only two causes of the progress
of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes
which you will find at the root of any happy,
benevolent, progressive era in human history.
One cause is psychological, the other
existential -- or: one pertains to man's
consciousness, the other to the physical
conditions of his existence. The first is
reason, the second is freedom. And when I say
"freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such
as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or
"freedom from the necessity of earning a
living." I mean "freedom from compulsion --
freedom from rule by physical force." Which
means: political freedom.
These two -- reason and freedom -- are
corollaries, and their relationship is
reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins;
when men are free, reason wins.
Their antagonists are: faith and force.
These, also, are corollaries: every period of
history dominated by mysticism, was a period of
statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. Look at
the Middle Ages -- and look at the political
systems of today.
The nineteenth century was the ultimate
product and expression of the intellectual trend
of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which
means: of a predominantly Aristotelian
philosophy. And, for the first time in history,
it created a new economic system, the necessary
corollary of political freedom, a system of free
trade on a free market: capitalism.
No, it was not a full, perfect,
unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism --
as it should have been. Various degrees of
government interference and control still
remained, even in America -- and this is what
led to the eventual destruction of capitalism.
But the extent to which certain countries were
free was the exact extent of their economic
progress. America, the freest, achieved the
most.
Never mind the low wages and harsh living
conditions of the early years of capitalism.
They were all that the national economies of the
time could afford. Capitalism did not create
poverty -- it inherited it. Compared to the
centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the
living conditions of the poor in the early years
of capitalism were the first chance the poor had
ever had to survive. As proof -- the enormous
growth of the European population during the
nineteenth century, a growth of over 300
percent, as compared to the previous growth of
something like 3 percent per century.
Now why was this not appreciated? Why did
capitalism, the truly magnificent benefactor of
mankind, arouse nothing but resentment,
denunciations and hatred, then and now? Why did
the so-called defenders of capitalism keep
apologizing for it, then and now? Because,
ladies and gentlemen, capitalism and altruism
are incompatible.
Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to
your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in the same man or in the same
society.
Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify
capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or
the "general welfare" or "service to society" or
the benefit it brings to the poor. All these
things are true, but they are the by-products,
the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not
its goal, purpose or moral justification. The
moral justification of capitalism is man's right
to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing
himself to others nor sacrificing others to
himself; it is the recognition that man -- every
man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the
ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving
anyone's need.
There is a tragic, twisted sort of
compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in
spite of all their irrationalities,
inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the
majority of men will not act, in major issues,
without a sense of being morally right
and will not oppose the morality they have
accepted. They will break it, they will cheat
on it, but they will not oppose it; and when
they break it, they take the blame on
themselves. The power of morality is the
greatest of all intellectual powers -- and
mankind's tragedy lies in the fact that the
vicious moral code men have accepted destroys
them by means of the best within them.
So long as altruism was their moral ideal,
men had to regard capitalism as immoral;
capitalism certainly does not and cannot work on
the principle of selfless service and
sacrifice. This was the reason why the majority
of the nineteenth-century intellectuals regarded
capitalism as a vulgar, uninspiring,
materialistic necessity of this earth, and
continued to long for their unearthly moral
ideal. From the start, while capitalism was
creating the splendour of its achievements,
creating it in silence, unacknowledged and
undefended (morally undefended), the
intellectuals were moving in greater and greater
numbers towards a new dream: socialism.
Just as a small illustration of how
ineffectual a defense of capitalism was offered
by its most famous advocates, let me mention
that the British socialists, the Fabians, were
predominantly students and admirers of John
Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.
The socialists had a certain kind of logic
on their side; if the collective sacrifice of
all to all is the moral ideal, then they wanted
to establish this ideal in practice, here and on
this earth. The arguments that socialism
would not and could not work, did not stop them:
neither has altruism ever worked, but this has
not caused men to stop and question it. Only
reason can ask such questions -- and reason,
they were told on all sides, has nothing to do
with morality, morality lies outside the realm
of reason, no rational morality can ever be
defined.
The fallacies and contradictions in the
economic theories of socialism were exposed and
refuted time and time again, in the nineteenth
century as well as today. This did not and does
not stop anyone; it is not an issue of
economics, but of morality. The intellectuals
and the so-called idealists were determined to
make socialism work. How? By that magic means
of all irrationalists: somehow.
It was not the tycoons of big business, it
was not the working classes, it was the
intellectuals who reversed the trend toward
political freedom and revived the doctrines of
the absolute State, of totalitarian government
rule, of the government's right to control the
lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases.
This time, it was not in the name of the "divine
right of kings," but in the name of the divine
right of the masses. The basic principle was
the same: the right to enforce at the point of a
gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to
seize control of the machinery of government.
There are only two means by which men can
deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or
persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win
by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the socialists
got their dream. They got it in the twentieth
century and they got it in triplicate, plus a
great many lesser carbon copies; they got it in
every possible form and variant, so that now
there can be no mistake about its nature: Soviet
Russia -- Nazi Germany -- Socialist England.
This was the collapse of the modern
intellectuals' most cherished tradition. It was
World War II that destroyed collectivism as a
political ideal. Oh, yes, people still mouth
its slogans, by routine, by social conformity
and by default -- but it is not a moral crusade
any longer. It is an ugly, horrifying reality
-- and part of the modern intellectuals' guilt
is the knowledge that they have created it.
They have seen for themselves the bloody
slaughterhouse which they had once greeted as a
noble experiment -- Soviet Russia. They have
seen Nazi Germany -- and they know that "Nazi"
means "National Socialism." Perhaps the worst
blow to them, the greatest disillusionment, was
Socialist England: here was their literal dream,
a bloodless socialism, where force was not used
for murder, only for expropriation, where lives
were not taken, only the products, the meaning
and the future of lives, here was a country that
had not been murdered, but had voted itself into
suicide. Most of the modern intellectuals, even
the more evasive ones, have now understood what
socialism -- or any form of political and
economic collectivism -- actually means.
Today, their perfunctory advocacy of
collectivism is as feeble, futile and evasive as
the alleged conservatives' defense of
capitalism. The fire and the moral fervor have
gone out of it. And when you hear the liberals
mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or
that it was all Stalin's fault, or that
socialism never had a real chance in England, or
that what they advocate is something that's
different somehow -- you know that you are
hearing the voices of men who haven't a leg to
stand on, men who are reduced to some vague hope
that "somehow my gang would have done it
better."
The secret dread of modern intellectuals,
liberals and conservatives alike, the
un-admitted terror at the root of their anxiety,
which all of their current irrationalities are
intended to stave off and to disguise, is the
un-stated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the
full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of
the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not
corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way
altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If
service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal,
and if the "selfishness" of human nature
prevents men from leaping into sacrificial
furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a
mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator
should not push them in at the point of bayonets
-- for their own good, or the good of humanity,
or the good of posterity, or the good of the
latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no
reason that they can name to oppose any
atrocity.
The value of a man's life? His right
to exist? His right to pursue his own
happiness? These are concepts that belong to
individualism and capitalism -- to the
antithesis of the altruist morality.
Twenty years ago the conservatives were
uncertain, evasive, morally disarmed before the
aggressive moral self-righteousness of the
liberals. Today, both are uncertain, evasive,
morally disarmed before the aggressiveness of
the communists. It is not a moral
aggressiveness any longer, it is the plain
aggressiveness of a thug -- but what disarms the
modern intellectuals is the secret realization
that a thug is the inevitable, ultimate and only
product of their cherished morality.
I have said that faith and force are
corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead
to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is
contained in the very nature of mysticism.
Reason is the only objective means of
communication and of understanding among men;
when men deal with one another by means of
reason, reality is their objective standard and
frame of reference. But when men claim to
possess supernatural means of knowledge, no
persuasion, communication or understanding are
impossible. Why do we kill wild animals in the
jungle? Because no other way of dealing with
them is open to us. And that is the state to
which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state
where, in case of disagreement, men have no
recourse except to physical violence. And more:
no man or mystical elite can hold a whole
society subjugated to their arbitrary
assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of
force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: "It's
so, because I say so," will have to reach for a
gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all
materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not
matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of
revelations or in favor of conditioned
reflexes. The basic premise and the results are
the same.
Such is the nature of the evil which modern
intellectuals have helped to let loose in the
world -- and such is the nature of their guilt.
- - - - -
Since "challenge" is your slogan, I will
say that if you are looking for a challenge, you
are facing the greatest one in history. A moral
revolution is the most difficult, the most
demanding, the most radical form of rebellion,
but that is the task to be done today, if you
choose to accept it. When I say "radical," I
mean it in its literal and reputable sense:
fundamental. Civilization does not have to
perish. The brutes are winning only by
default. But in order to fight them to the
finish and with full rectitude, it is the
altruist morality that you have to reject.
Now, if you want to know what my
philosophy, Objectivism, offers you -- I will
give you a brief indication. I will not
attempt, in one lecture, to present my whole
philosophy. I will merely indicate to you what
I mean by a rational morality of self-interest,
what I mean by the opposite of altruism, what
kind of morality is possible to man and why. I
will preface it by reminding you that most
philosophers -- especially most of them today --
have always claimed that morality is outside the
province of reason, that no rational morality
can be defined, and that man has no practical
need of morality. Morality, they claim, is not
a necessity of man's existence, but only some
sort of mystical luxury or arbitrary social
whim; in fact, they claim, nobody can prove why
we should be moral at all; in reason, they
claim, there's no reason to be moral.
I cannot summarize for you the essence and
the base of my morality any better than I did it
in
Atlas Shrugged.
So, rather than attempt to paraphrase it, I will
read to you the passages from Atlas
Shrugged
which pertain to the nature, the base and the
proof of my morality.
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival.
Life is given to him, survival is not. His body
is given to him, its sustenance is not. His
mind is given to him, its content is not. To
remain alive he must act, and before he can act
he must know the nature and purpose of his
action. He cannot obtain his food without a
knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it.
He cannot dig a ditch -- or build a cyclotron --
without a knowledge of his aim and of the means
to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
"But to think is an act of choice. The key
to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,'
the open secret you live with, yet dread to
name, is the fact that man is a being of
volitional consciousness. Reason does not work
automatically; thinking is not a mechanical
process; the connections of logic are not made
by instinct. The function of your stomach,
lungs or heart is automatic; the function of
your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your
life, you are free to think or to evade that
effort. But you are not free to escape from
your nature, from the fact that reason is your
means of survival -- so that for you, who are a
human being, the question 'to be or not to be'
is the question 'to think or not to think.'
"A being of volitional consciousness has no
automatic course of behavior. He needs a code
of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that
which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the
action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value'
presupposes an answer to the question: of value
to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a
standard, a purpose and the necessity of action
in the face of an alternative. Where there are
no alternatives, no values are possible.
"There is only one fundamental alternative
in the universe: existence or non-existence --
and it pertains to a single class of entities:
to living organisms. The existence of inanimate
matter is unconditional, the existence of life
is not: it depends on a specific course of
action. Matter is indestructible, it changes
its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is
only a living organism that faces a constant
alternative: the issue of life or death. Life
is a process of self-sustaining and
self-generated action. If an organism fails in
that action, it dies; its chemical elements
remain, but its life goes out of existence. It
is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the
concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a
living entity that things can be good or evil.
"A plant must feed itself in order to live;
the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs
are the values its nature has set it to pursue;
its life is the standard of value directing its
actions. But a plant has no choice of action;
there are alternatives in the conditions it
encounters, but there is not alternative in its
function: it acts automatically to further its
life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
"An animal is equipped for sustaining its
life; its senses provide it with an automatic
knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It
has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade
it. In conditions where its knowledge proves
inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives,
it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety
and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore
its own good, unable to decide to choose the
evil and act as its own destroyer.
"Man has no automatic code of survival.
His particular distinction from all other living
species is the necessity to act in the face of
alternatives by means of volitional choice. He
has no automatic knowledge of what is good for
him or evil, what values his life depends on,
what course of action it requires. Are you
prattling about an instinct of
self-preservation? An instinct of
self-preservation is precisely what man does not
possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and
automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an
instinct. A desire to live does not give you
the knowledge required for living. And even
man's desire to live is not automatic: your
secret evil today is that that is the desire you
do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love
for life and will not give you the knowledge
needed to keep it. Man must obtain his
knowledge and choose his actions by a process of
thinking, which nature will not force him to
perform. Man has the power to act as his own
destroyer -- and that is the way he has acted
through most of his history
[...]
"Man has been called a rational being, but
rationality is a matter of choice -- and the
alternative his nature offers him is: rational
being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man --
by choice; he has to hold his life as a value --
by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by
choice; he has to discover the values it
requires and practice his virtues -- by choice.
"A code of values accepted by choice is a
code of morality.
"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me
now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is
left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of
the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a
morality of reason, a morality proper to man,
and Man's Life is its standard of value.
"All that which is proper to the life of a
rational being is the good; all that which
destroys it is the evil.
"Man's life, as required by his nature, is
not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting
thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a
thinking being -- not life by means of force or
fraud, but life by means of achievement -- not
survival at any price, since there's only one
price that pays for man's survival: reason.
"Man's life is the standard of morality,
but your own life is its purpose. If existence
on earth is your goal, you must choose your
actions and values by the standard of that which
is proper to man -- for the purpose of
preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the
irreplaceable value which is your life."
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what
Objectivism offers you.
And when you make your choice, I would like
you to remember that the only alternative to it
is communist slavery. The "middle-of-the-road"
is like an unstable, radioactive element that
can last only so long -- and its time is running
out. There is no more chance for a
middle-of-the-road.
The issue will be decided, not in the
middle, but between the two consistent
extremes. It's Objectivism or communism. It's
a rational morality based on man's right to
exist -- or altruism, which means: slave labor
camps under the rule of such masters as you
might have seen on the screens of your TV last
year. If that is what you prefer, the choice is
yours.
- - - - -
I hope this may not be fully true here, but
I have met too many young people in
universities, who have no clear idea, not even
in the most primitive terms, of what capitalism
really is. They [your elders] do not let you
know what the theory of capitalism is, nor how
it worked in practice, nor what was its actual
history.
- - - - -
The real danger is that communism is an
enemy whom they [our so-called intellectual
leaders] do not dare to fight on moral grounds,
and it can be fought only on moral grounds.
This then, is the choice. Think it over.
Consider the subject, check your premises, check
past history and find out whether it is true
that men can never be free. It isn't true,
because they have been. Find out what made it
possible. See for yourself. And then if you
are convinced -- rationally convinced -- then
let us save the world together. We still have
time.
To quote Galt once more, such is the choice
before you. Let your mind and your love of
existence decide.
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