Karen Armstrong’s Theology

When honestly facing internal inconsistencies in mysticisms like Christianity, its spinmeisters i.e. theologians like Karen Armstrong resort to ridiculous ideas. On Fresh Air a few weeks ago she said,

1. God is no being at all.

compare the above with this statement

2. No being at all is God.

Number 1 is sophisticated theology. Number 2 is crude atheism. Yet both are logically equivalent. If you put them in to predicate calculus they are the same.

At this point I am beginning to what I call the transparency of theology. It is like a magicians card trick where you can see the cards up his sleeve. Fortunately Richard Dawkins has already answered Karen Armstrong. He wrote:

If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.

Is Christian Morality Objective? Part II: The Lessons of Jesus: Imperatives Without Reason

The gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry detail the moral teachings of Christianity’s primary figurehead. These teachings can be found throughout the gospel stories in Jesus’ sermons, prayers and parables, which are attempts to illustrate certain principles by situational example.

One of the most consistent yet glaring disappointments found in biblical morality, including the teachings of Jesus, is the fact that its precepts are asserted without reason. Just as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5) are asserted without any appeal to reason (e.g., we are not told why one should not steal; we are just told not to), Jesus offers the vast majority of his moral teachings without supporting arguments (i.e., without an appeal to reason) and without reference to any reality-based needs of man they are intended to satisfy. This fact alone disqualifies them from being categorized as part of an objective moral theory, since the development of an objective theory of morality cannot neglect the vital role which reason plays in the foundation of morality and the tie of moral principle to reality. Nor can it ignore the fact that morality and moral principles are not self-sufficient, irreducible primaries which are true “just because” someone says so; moral principles are dependent on prior philosophical foundations (e.g., metaphysics and epistemology), as recognized by Objectivism. [1]

Many religious apologists have attempted to provide reasons for biblical teachings where the Bible itself provides none. Thus today, outside the Bible, we find the assertion of biblical moral teachings as buttressed by theological interpolation which enjoys the benefit of modern philosophical developments. These interpolations are often fortified by groping conjecture about what the authors of those moral teachings may have had in mind when they were first formulated and recorded. The occasion of such extra-biblical interpolation and conjecture, however, does not overturn the fact that the surviving ancient writings pertaining to Jesus and other biblical characters failed to offer any reasoning for many of their moral teachings. Indeed, many of those extra-biblical attempts to invigorate biblical moral teachings with injections of rationalizing supports simply beg important questions. [2]

For instance, one of the primary themes which Christian apologists may emphasize in their defenses of Judeo-Christian morality is the supposedly unchanging character of its foundation: the Judeo- Christian God. An unchanging moral code is one thought to be absolute, apparently regardless of that code’s particular virtues or failings, and therefore superior to the fluctuating and “situationalistic” attitudes often encountered in secular doctrines, which are summarily labeled as “conventional” or “relativistic.” As apologist Erwin Lutzer argues, “If God’s moral revelation is rooted in His nature, it is clear that those moral principles will transcend time. Although specific commands may change from one era to another, the principles remain constant.” [3]

Certainly, the reservation that “specific commands may change from one era to another” is offered to cover the fact that many of the moral teachings found in the New Testament actually represent a dissembling of the Hebraic teachings found in the Old Testament. [4] By reference to those principles which “remain constant,” however, Lutzer no doubt means the one primary principle which underlies all biblical moral teaching, which is: God’s demands are inviolable, and man must do whatever God says, or suffer for eternity. And this “principle” – essentially a threat against man’s right to exist for his own life, a threat against man for using his own independent reason – is the guiding precept of all Christian morality, which will always “remain constant.” The supposed validity of such a principle is simply taken for granted.

That religious ethics proceeds on the basis of threat is undeniable. The question “Why should I obey God?” will ultimately yield the answer “Because if you do not, you will go to hell.” [5] But this tactic makes certain general assumptions about man’s character which are untenable.

For instance, if man must be threatened in order to conduct himself morally, what does this say about his nature? It likely assumes that man will not conduct himself morally out of his own self- interest – which suggests that the moral is inherently against his self-interest, or at least that morality and self-interest are inherently opposed to or incompatible with one another, even though many Christians claim that following “God’s moral plan for man” is in man’s best interest. Of course, the “interest” in their mind is not in terms of living life on earth, but in terms of what supposedly lies beyond the grave after one’s death. This of course only begs the question: If it were the case that Judeo-Christian moral teaching is in man’s best interest, then why would there be any need for the Bible’s threat of eternal torment for “disobedience”? Blank out.

The hint of truth that makes this approach to morality so appealing to religious persons is the fact that man requires a standard to guide his choices and actions, and that his actions have certain consequences. But rather than providing a moral code which motivates one’s choices and actions by the legitimate rewards he can rationally earn and enjoy during his life, Christian morality instead reverses this motivation, and compels men to act out of fear of certain punishment. This is not a values-based form of morality, but a sanction-based form of morality.

By sanction I mean “a physical or psychological means of coercion or intimidation used for the purpose of motivating obedience to a principle of action.” [6] The question here is one of motivation: what determines or guides one’s actions? On a sanction-based form of morality, one’s actions are determined by threats of punishment for failure to perform the expected action. On a values-based form of morality, one’s actions are determined by one’s choice to live and to identify and acquire those values which his life requires. On a sanction-based form of morality, the goal is compliance with someone’s demands, while on a values-based form of morality the goal is the enjoyment of life. These distinctions are not merely a matter of perspective; it is not a mere question of whether the glass is half full or half empty as if one approach were somehow complementary to the other. Rather, the sanction-based approach constitutes a thorough and systematic process of undermining man’s ability – to the point of psycho-cognitive paralysis – to value his own life for its own sake and to govern his choices and actions according to the objective standard of his life’s requirements.

This approach to morality – that man must be threatened into conducting himself morally – completely ignores man’s nature as a being of volitional rationality. Indeed, such a view of morality cannot proceed from the recognition that man is capable of rationality; a sanction-based form of morality is endorsed in spite of man’s potential rationality, i.e., to thwart his rationality and replace it with a mystical code of divine whims. A code of morality which is based on man’s rational nature stresses the importance of values to his life: if a goal is in man’s own best interest, then it is the value of that goal to his life – not the fear of threats – which will motivate him to that action which enables him to achieve that goal. But a mystic code is to be followed regardless of its consequences in the individual’s life. What Rand said of the New Left applies equally to the religious: “They are not pulled by a goal, but pushed by the panic of mindless terror.” [7] This should be of no surprise when we consider the fact that the Bible that “fear is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7).

The life-based nature of man’s rational values is ignored when apologists such as Lutzer claim that “God’s moral revelation was given for our benefit.” When attempting to support this claim, Lutzer argues

Though in the short run it may sometimes appear that biblical moral standards are too restrictive, we can be sure that such injunctions are for our benefit because of His love for us. After all, in the long run God knows best since because of His omniscience, He can calculate all the consequences. [8]

 

Here, Lutzer’s argument merely repeats the conclusion he attempts to secure, and nowhere does he show how “biblical moral standards” are beneficial to man. Moreover, we already know that the idea that an immortal God can love man or anything else is incoherent. [9] So this assumption cannot be used as a premise in an argument which is said to be sound.

By acknowledging that “in the short run it may sometimes appear that biblical moral standards are too restrictive,” Lutzer is actually referring to the fact that biblical morality is completely opposed to man’s self-interest (i.e., the virtue of selfishness) and his guilt-free enjoyment of his own life (i.e., his happiness). Religious leaders throughout history have always come down against man’s enjoyment of his own life, and that is at least on of the reasons why “it may sometimes appear that biblical moral standards are too restrictive.” [10]

This is nowhere so apparent as in the Bible’s attitudes against man’s capacity for sexual enjoyment. According to Jesus, for instance, it is morally wrong for a man even to gaze at the beauty of an attractive woman (qv. Matt. 5:28). Paul goes so far as to say that men who are single should “seek not a wife” (I Cor. 7:27), though he gives no reason, not even a bad reason, why they should practice what he preaches. And for those men who are married, Paul says that “he that standeth stedfast [sic] in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin [i.e., refrain from sexual intercourse], doeth well.” (I Cor. 7:37). [11] Again, regardless of interpretation, Paul does not say why, but effectually leaves any “reasoning” for his arbitrary injunctions to later theological interpolation. [12]

Another problem with this approach to morality is closely related to the one already discussed. For if man must obey commandments in order to be moral, then obviously this means that man cannot discover a moral code through his use of reason, because he needs to be told what to do rather than figure it out (i.e., discover and identify his life’s needs by means of reason) for himself. [13] This of course makes man completely dependent on those issuing the commandments, which are the priests and mystics. [14] This naturally elevates dependence as such to the status of a moral virtue, which of course is an egregious affront to man’s life.

This is the call for man to surrender his mind (i.e., his ability to reason), which is his chief value to begin with. For if he surrenders his mind, how can he determine that his life requires values and that he needs to identify and pursue those values, that he’s been duped by mystical indoctrination [15], or that his rights have been violated? Man needs an intact mind in order to determine these things, but if the code of morality to which he subscribes compels him to surrender his mind, then naturally he surrenders his ability to make these determinations. Clearly, blind obedience to arbitrary commandments cannot substitute for reason and objective values. Commands are appropriate for machines (e.g., computers) and dogs, not for men. However, it is no mere coincidence that commands are preferred by those who intend to rule others.

So far, we can see that the denial of man’s rational nature [16], can only lead to a code of “morality” which works against his mind, and therefore against his values. The Bible nowhere defines the concept ‘value’, nor does it acknowledge the crucial role which values play in man’s moral choices and actions. Instead of value, which is profoundly selfish in nature (of value to whom?) [17], the Judeo-Christian view of morality relies on unreasoned commandments, commandments which do not take into account man’s genuine moral needs, nor his rational purpose, which is to live and to enjoy his life. Indeed, because biblical teaching nowhere defines morality systematically, nor does it explain why man should be moral (other than to flee arbitrary threats), its teachings can only amount to a moral code opposed to his existence. According to such a view taken seriously, life is nothing more than a nightmare existence spent on the run from the wrath of the all-seeing ruling consciousness. Fittingly, the only time values are mentioned in illustration of moral principle, is when believers are expected to sacrifice them. [18]

Consequently, as I have argued before, there are many problems with the claim that Judeo-Christian morality is objective in nature. Many (in fact, the vast majority) of the Bible’s moral teachings are offered as self-sufficient primaries, without rational support, without concern for integrating them into the sum of one’s knowledge without contradiction, without reference to an objective theory of values, without relating morality to man’s nature and need for morality. My analysis of Jesus’ teachings which shall follow in future essays will demonstrate not only that Jesus gives no argument for the teachings which his believers try to pass off as moral, but also that those teachings are incongruent with man’s objective moral needs.

Footnotes

[1] See particularly Ayn Rand’s “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, pp. 117-192; “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 13-35; and “The Good” in Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, pp. 206-249.
[2] Additionally, there are no doubt many sects within the fundamentalist movement today which view extra-biblical sources with suspicion. Consequently, they do not accept many of the reasons which some theologians and apologists provide in support of biblical teachings, and may even consider such attempts to be tampering infringement of otherwise divinely authoritative law. This only underscores the fact that there is no unity or unanimity among the many often rivalrous denominations of Christian theism.

[3] Measuring Morality: A Comparison of Ethical Systems.

[4] One source puts it quite explicitly:

Throughout the Church Age, there have been many religious institutions and groups that have advocated the keeping of certain Old Testament laws. The two most popular O.T. laws today are tithing and sabbath keeping. Some groups take the concept so far as to wear fringes on their underwear! We realize that there is nothing wrong with someone setting aside money or time to the Lord, but there is something wrong with using Old Testament laws as the basis for doing so. Christians are to rely on the Holy Spirit for our direction and not the Mosaic Law. (The Old Covenant Compared to the New Covenant, emphasis added.)

 

Most Christians in the so-called “mainstream” of western society do not, for instance, advocate that practitioners of witchcraft be executed for their “iniquity,” even though Exodus 22:18 states “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Some Christians, however, such as those who identify themselves as “Reconstructionists,” do advocate a full embrace of the Mosaic laws as provided in the Old Testament and, in the words of Walter Olson, “reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown” by the New Testament reforms. (An Invitation to A Stoning: Getting Cozy with Theocrats, Reason Magazine, Nov. 1998.)

[5] Many apologists are likely to take exception at my characterization of this tactic as a threat. Indeed, they will affirm that this is the operative tactic underlying Christian teachings, but instead prefer to call it a “warning.” This blatant equivocation fails, see: An Aborted Rise to Challenge.

[6] George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 298.
[7] Ayn Rand, “From a Symposium,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 98.
[8] Measuring Morality: A Comparison of Ethical Systems.
[9] I make this argument in my essay Why an Immortal God Cannot Value.

[10] It should be noted that, by “man’s enjoyment of his own life,” I am not referring to simple, fleeting pleasures, but to the Objectivist conception of happiness as an end in itself. “Happiness is the successful state of life… [a] state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” (Atlas Shrugged, p. 932.)

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. (Ibid., p. 939.)

 

The connection man’s need for morality and his achievement of happiness as a goal in itself is the concept of moral value. This kind of joy is therefore not possible on a sanction-based form of morality which hinges on one’s fears rather than his values.

[11] This teaching of Paul’s seems in principle to conflict with Jesus’ teaching in Matt. 5:32, which states: “whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery.” If Paul thinks it’s good for a man to remain married, yet decree “in his heart that he will keep his virgin,” does that not also drive his wife to “commit adultery” as Jesus cautioned? Indeed, if she wanted to enjoy her life (and I know of no pleasure in life greater than sexual enjoyment), she would surely have to seek out that enjoyment in a partner outside her marriage. Paul would have done well to have restrained himself from writing on these matters until after the Gospel according to Matthew was written, edited, re-edited and published in its final form.

[12] In an effort to supply reason where none was originally provided, some commentators have argued that Paul’s injunctions against marriage acts were reasonable because Paul was expecting Jesus to return at any moment. Hence, the time was short and serious believers, intent on fulfilling Jesus’ “Great Commission” to preach the gospel to the world, had more important things to do with their dwindling time on earth than enjoying the earthly pleasures of marriage. Needless to say, Paul’s expectations seem to have been disappointed.

[13] What facts in reality, for instance, tell us that is it wrong to “seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Deut. 14:21)? What facts in reality tell us that a man whose testicles have been damaged or “his privy member cut off” should not be allowed to “enter into the congregation of the Lord” (Deut. 23:1)? What facts in reality tell us that, in an attempt “to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets [i.e., his genitals],” that her hand should be cut off and no one should pity here (Deut. 25:11-12)? (See other examples in Donald Morgan’s list of the Biblical Precepts: Questionable Guidelines.) Obviously, the facts of reality do not tell us these things. Rather, in many of these cases, it appears that someone’s jealousy tells us these things, and men are expected to obey them in order to appease the jealous.

[14] Arguments claiming that we learn these commandments from God directly beg the question, for still we must listen to the claims of men if we are to grant the notion that a God exists any validity at all and in order to determine which God is the “real” God, and which are the false gods. Besides, if we could learn of “God’s will” by some direct, revelatory means (as Paul apparently learned about Jesus – cf. Gal. 1:11-12), then why is it so important that believers “study to show [themselves] approved unto God… rightly dividing the word of truth” (II Tim. 2:15)? The whole point of religious morality is that morality is supernatural in nature – and therefore its transmission to men must occur ultimately by means of revelation and man’s “knowledge” of this revelation must come ultimately by faith. A morality which is natural (i.e., based on man’s nature as a living organism and its moral implications) is one which man can discover by means of reason. Faith in revelations need not apply. It is no surprise, then, that religious apologists hold that their oughts cannot be derived from what is, since their morality is wholly arbitrary, i.e., without basis in the facts of reality.

[15] Even mystics who fear losing believers to competing “false Christs” must be concerned about this potential problem.

[16] For the Bible nowhere defines man in the Aristotelian sense as the “rational animal,” nor does it treat him as such, and nor are its doctrines compatible with the rational view of man.

[17] I am assuming the Objectivist view of the concept ‘value’, which is “that which one acts to gain and/or keep” (Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 15). See also the short article on Values at Importance of Philosophy.com and my essay Is Christian Morality Objective?

[18] For instance, in Mark 10:17-22, a young wealthy man approaches Jesus asking “what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” When the wealthy man tells Jesus that he has followed the commandments which Jesus prescribes from his youth, Jesus then says that he must sell all his belongings and give the proceeds to the poor. The episode is followed by Jesus’ condemnation of values in verses 23-25, saying “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” Wealth enables men to achieve independence from others, and Jesus apparently perceived such independence as a threat to his mind-negating devotional scheme.

Is Christian Morality Objective? Part I: Introductory Treatise on Morality

Christian apologists since the Enlightenment have inflated their inventories of unusual and untenable claims about their religious ideals in order to protect them from critical scrutiny. One of the most recklessly untenable claims which finds its supporters among a broad spectrum of modern Christian apologetics, is the claim that Christian morality in particular is objective and that no moral system which denies the existence or sovereignty of Christian theism can be objective. As one who has a deep familiarity with the Christian moral code and the moral code of the philosophy of Objectivism which rejects all mysticism (including Christian theism), I wonder how today’s apologists can defend the view that Christian morality is objective when its foundations as given particularly in the New Testament run contrary to objective morality. In this series I will examine the code of Christian morality as given in the New Testament by the religion’s founders and submit its principles to the question of whether or not they can be said to be objective or not. Before doing so, it is important to clarify those working definitions which will be assumed in my assessment of Christian moral principles. In this paper, the first installment in my indictment of the Christian morality, I will clarify what I mean by objective morality from the standpoint of Rational Philosophy, which is Objectivism. This clarification is by no means offered as a complete explication on the objective moral system, but rather only an introduction to some of the chief issues concerned, as well as to the contrast between the Christian morality and the objective morality.

What is Morality, and Does Man Need It?

By ethics or morality (used interchangeably in this essay), I mean: “A code of values to guide man’s choices and actions, the choices and actions which determine the purpose and the course of his life.” [1] Thus morality is concerned with the choices which man the individual makes, and the actions he takes in regard to himself. Morality is therefore a private matter concerned with the individual’s personal affairs in distinction to the branch of philosophy known as politics, which is the application of moral principles to interpersonal relationships.
Morality deals with general questions such as: What should I value, and why? What goals should I pursue in life, and why? From these, more specific questions are generated: Should I develop my mind and productive ability, and if so, why? Should I pursue an education, and why? Should I get a job and seek gainful employment, and why? Should I save my income or squander it with abandon? Etc. It is only after many of these questions, primarily those general questions about morality, have been answered that an objective treatment of politics can be engaged. [2]

Since morality is “a code of values which guides man’s choices and actions,” an objective theory of morality must take into account general aspects of man’s identity in order to define and shape that code of values. Since man is a being of volitional rationality, Objectivism holds that man’s uncoerced volition is of central importance to an objective theory of morality. “A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.” [3] The moral is the chosen, not the coerced, just as the moral is the understood, not the obeyed. Thus, an objective code of morality naturally dispenses with the use of any species of threats, either in the form of physical coercion or psychological sanction.

What is Objectivity, and How Does It Relate to Morality?

To be objective is to “adhere [volitionally] to reality by following certain rules of method, a method based on facts and appropriate to man’s form of cognition” [4]. Reality is the realm of existence, and man’s means of discovering it is his sense-perception, and his means of identifying and integrating what he perceives is reason. Defining an objective code of morality requires that certain relevant facts (i.e., data of reality) be objectively identified and integrated. Thus, an objective moral code is a rational moral code whose reference is the facts of reality and whose purpose is to serve man (as opposed to religion, which treats morality as something which man must serve or “live up to”).

Man requires morality, not because somebody (either a priest or a deity) says he needs it, but because he faces a fundamental alternative: existence or non-existence. Since man continually faces the possibility of his own death, his life requires that he act, and this means he needs values. Why should he act? Because he will die if he does not. What guides his choices and actions? A code of values, i.e., morality. This implies necessarily that man’s highest value is his own life, because it is ultimately his own life which provides the standard of his actions and for which he must act. In light of this, we recognize that objective morality is profoundly selfish in nature, since man’s own life (i.e., his self) is the primary beneficiary of his own actions.

Three Primary Theories of the Good

The objective theory of the good, according to Ayn Rand, is:

The… theory [that] holds that the good is neither an attribute of ‘things in themselves’ nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value… The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man – and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man” [5].

Thus, the objective theory of the good, since it stems from “an evaluation from the facts of reality,” is rooted in the law of identity. The objective theory of the good, like knowledge, is also hierarchical in nature, since the evaluation of the facts of reality proceeds “according to a rational standard of value.” The objective theory of the good identifies that standard – man’s life – and therefore “that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man.” It is because of this standard and the relation of aspects of reality that we can identify that food is good for man because it is his source of nutrition, and poison is bad for him because it can kill him. The fact that food is good for man and poison is not good is not something which men invent, but discover about reality. Throughout all its application, the objective theory of the good is completely consistent to the fact that existence exists and that to exist is to have a specific identity (i.e., the law of identity).

The objective theory of the good is generally contrasted against two competing theories, which Objectivism holds to be invalid and therefore unsuitable for man. Those theories are the intrinsic and the subjective theories of the good.

The intrinsic theory of the good, is: “The… theory [that] holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors or subjects involved.” [6] Thus, whether or not something is good for man according to the objective theory of the good, according to the intrinsic theory of the good something is good “just because” – either because one says it is regardless of its objective relation to man, or because one thinks God says it is good, regardless of its relation to man. Food can be bad for man (such as when he is commanded to fast), and poison can actually be permissible (such as when Jesus says his followers can ingest it and suffer no harm; cf. Mark 16:18). It is obvious that such a view of the good can only be valid on the assumption, implicit or explicit, of the primacy of consciousness view of metaphysics (i.e., of reality), since it is not the facts of reality which are important to make the evaluation that something is good, but the decrees of the ruling consciousness taken as solemnly unquestionable.
The subjectivist theory of the good, is: “The… theory [that] holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, ‘intuitions,’ or whims, and that it is merely an ‘arbitrary postulate’ or an ‘emotional commitment’.” [7] This view is similar to the intrinsic theory of the good in that what is said to be good ultimately has nothing to do with the facts of reality, but is dependent on the creative functions of consciousness. But where the intrinsic theory of the good might justify its idea of the good on the commandments and decrees of a cosmic form of consciousness, the subjective theory affirms that something is good based on personal whim. Thus, food can be good for man on Tuesdays, but poison can be good on Wednesdays. It differs in respect to the intrinsic theory in that the intrinsic theory at least attempts to affirm an unchanging standard, even if that standard is not complicit with the facts of reality. The subjective theory, by contrast, dispenses with any standard other than that whim is in charge and capable of rewriting its own evaluations whenever it feels like it.

The contrast between these various theories should be apparent. Only one of these theories, the objective theory, indicates the crucial role of an objective standard of value in the determination of what is good or morally proper to man. The intrinsic theory, which includes religious forms of morality [8], does not identify the crucial role of values in man’s life, and indeed cannot, for it is not the achievement of values that motivates moral behavior according to this view. Instead, one is told that certain actions or things are good “just because,” and compliance with intrinsic moral principles is to be motivated as if those principles were irreducible primaries, not rationally supported guidelines. The subjective theory of values is more or less a catchall to include those systems which neither identify the crucial role of values in man’s life, nor hold that things or actions are “good in themselves” as such, regardless of their benefit or injury to oneself or to others.

The objective theory of the good defines ‘value’ as “that which one acts to gain and keep,” and ‘virtue’ as “the action by which one gains and keeps it.” [9] Rand argues that the “concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.” [10]

The Core Principles of Objective Morality

The objective theory of the good finds its basis in the objective view of reality and the epistemology of reason. The objective view of reality is the view that existence exists independent of consciousness. Consistent with this view is the recognition that man must discover the facts of reality by looking outward, i.e., beyond himself. This means: man must rely on his senses as his first means of contact with the facts of reality. Thus, reason is “the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.” [11] The cognitive method or means by which reason enables man to identify and integrate what his senses tell him about reality is logic, which is the “art of non- contradictory identification. [12]

The view that man has the capacity to identify reality naturally presupposes that man is capable of the certainty that his consciousness is valid and that it has a vital purpose: to enable him to live. These facts must be made explicitly clear in the development of an objective view of morality, as Rand pointed out:

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. [13]

In other words, man must discover from his activity in reality those actions and choices which make his life possible. “A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs this knowledge in order to live.” [14] While the intrinsic theory of he good holds that men can acquire this knowledge through some mystical means (e.g., “divine revelation”), and the subjective theory of the good holds that men can arbitrarily make up this knowledge as he goes, the objective theory of the good recognizes that man has a specific nature and that only a specific course of actions – a course which he cannot evade or alter by his own whim or by praying that some ruling consciousness can alter – can make living his life possible.

The objective view of man recognizes that he is an integrated being: man is both matter and consciousness welded into one unit. This means that the idea that the dichotomizing of standards for man’s body against those of his mind is invalid, just as the soul-body dichotomy is invalid. Therefore, this dichotomy is rejected in the development of the objective theory of the good with the recognition that man’s existential needs are just as valid as his philosophical and psychological needs, for the same reason and for the same purpose. The soul-body dichotomy is only compatible with a view of the good which dispenses with the objective view of man.

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost – yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists. [15]

Certainly, this view of man cannot be compatible with the objective view of reality and the epistemology of reason as pointed out above. Consequently, it also cannot be integrated with the objective theory of the good, for the same reasons. The objective theory of the good is for man, not against him. Any philosophical theory which poses as being for man but is revealed upon examination to be against him, is a fraud in pious dressing.

Man, as an integrated being, requires a morality which is geared specifically to his nature, to his needs as a rational being. This is precisely what the Objectivist ethics, as discovered and identified by Ayn Rand, provides for man. The facts of man’s nature – that he continually faces the alternative of life vs. death, that he requires food, shelter, warmth, a rational means of knowledge – underscore man’s unalterable need for values. As she eloquently points out,

since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought – or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. [16]

Man’s primary value is: his own life. Without it, he cannot value anything, and should he exist while pretending that some other object can replace that distinctive value (e.g., “God” or “society”), he undermines his ability to live to the degree that he is consistent to that pretense. Such a view simply ignores the fact that it is the nature of his being as such which dictates what he must value in order to make living his life possible.

The cardinal values of the objective theory of the good are: reason, purpose and self-esteem. “Reason as his only tool of knowledge – Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve – Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.” [17] Their corresponding virtues are: rationality, productiveness and pride.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over the act of perceiving it, which is thinking – that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action – that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise – that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality – that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind – that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness. [18]

Morality is thus the application of man’s reason to the problem of his existence. As his only guide to action, reason as a value and rationality as its corresponding virtue enable man to use his mind in solving real problems – whether it be determining which things in a jungle are edible and safe for human consumption, or choosing a profession – as opposed to false or arbitrary problems, such as those which occupy theology students. [19] The application of rationality to legitimate problems which man faces in living his life is the subject of productive work.

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live – that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values – that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others – that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human – that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay – that your work is the process of achieving your value, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live. [20]

The result of productive work are the values which one produces. Since values are not readily available to man in nature for man simply to consume, man has no choice about the fact that the achievement of values requires his productive effort. But this effort is not possible without at least some estimation of one’s own worthiness of it. And this brings us to the cardinal virtue of pride.

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned – that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character – that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind – that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so much he acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining – that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul – that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create [in himself - AT], but must create by choice – that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself, and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others. [21]

Together, rationality, productiveness and pride make man’s life qua man a vital possibility. But without these, man has no means of ensuring his primary value, which is his own life. With these core values, against the backdrop of a free society (i.e., a society in which coercion and the initiation of force are banned from interpersonal relationships), one has the basic equipment to lead a moral life.

The political corollary to the objective theory of the good is the recognition of man’s right to exist for his own sake. Just as man requires the freedom to use his mind, he requires the freedom to act, to pursue his values, and to achieve his happiness. A society which is built on the premise that man has a duty to sacrifice himself to others is a society which condemns men to lifelong slavery. In order to guard against such unspeakable injustice, man requires a society of individual rights.

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action – which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) [22]

As defined here, a political doctrine defending man’s rights defends man’s rational self-interest in social contexts. This means that an individual’s activity with others is engaged by choice, not by psychological coercion or the use of force. It is only the recognition of the principle that man has the right to exist for his own sake which will protect men against coercion and force, and which will allow an individual to pursue those values which make his life worth living.

“Rights” are a moral concept – the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others – the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context – the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. [23]

Mystical philosophy, by contrast, cannot develop an objective doctrine of individual rights, because according to mysticism, men are duty-bound to each other’s needs and desires. The collectivization of men into a herd (or flock) is the political result of the ethics of sacrifice applied to man’s relationship with others. Just as some men expect others to accept their irrational and untenable assertions in the realm of knowledge, those same men will expect others to forfeit their right to property in the realm of morality. The pursuit of the unearned, which is integral to any political theory stemming from the ethics of sacrifice, is the political counterpart to mysticism in epistemology. The desire for the unearned in certainty can only lead to the desire for the unearned in values. Just as knowledge and certainty cannot be the product of one’s “unaided” mind – but must be absorbed via revelations of the ruling consciousness, man’s values – more specifically, the products of the producers – must be appropriated (by coercion or force) from those who produce and redistributed (by divine commandment or popular vote) to those who claim need to them. Thus, the men of ability become enslaved, either by the State, or by the Church, to those who relinquish their minds and neglect their opportunities in life to develop productive ability.

In their establishment of the “right” to the pursuit of the unearned, mystics of every stripe will attempt to conceal the objective concept of man’s individual rights by replacing it with a cheap anti- concept as their alternative. [24] The obliteration of the essentials of man’s individual rights have been so effectively obliterated that most people these days do not recognize public policy designed specifically to rob them of those rights. This fraud begins with the destruction of the concept of individual rights, and from their destroys the reasoning supporting the defense of those rights. We see this so frequently today with the notion of “human rights” or “civil rights” that few dare to question it.

The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of the soul versus the body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.” [25]

If men evade or reject the objective theory of the good, they forfeit their capacity to establish a society of freedom. Without a society of freedom, the individual has no independence from others, and thus must survive by mooching off others, or by allowing others to mooch off himself. This is a choice all men face, but which so many evade as they run to embrace the non-thought, the zero- worship and the ethical suicide of Christianity.

Christian Morality and Brief Reasons Why It is Not Objective

We have already seen good reasons to consider that Christian morality assumes the intrinsic theory of the good, as defined above. Christians themselves may object to this classification, but the facts of the matter will bear this out. As you recall, the intrinsic theory “holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors or subjects involved”

Numerous items of the Christian view of morality can readily be identified as a perfect fit with this definition. For instance, the Christian deity itself is claimed to be “inherently good,” and that His actions and commandments are “inherently good,” regardless of their relationship to man. God’s actions may make Him appear to be a murdering tyrant [26], but even though such actions work against the lives of the human beings involved, those actions are still asserted as morally right, since they are actions chosen by God, and God is inherently good.

But the marriage between Christian morality and the intrinsic view of the good does not stop there. It is held to be intrinsically good for men to be obedient to the will of God, even if this obedience leads them to despair, depression or even death (as in the case of the model Christian himself, Jesus, in the case of his willing obedience to be crucified). While crucifixion is hardly enjoyable and as such could hardly be considered “good” for man (at least for the one being crucified!), the obedience of a commandment from God which leads to crucifixion would be considered good, since complicity with God’s will is said to honor God’s inherent goodness. (And honoring God’s inherent goodness, we are told, is good, even if it includes your suffering and painful death.)

Since the Bible commands its believers to rely on faith, it is summarily opposed to reason and man’s reliance on it. The repudiation of reason is certainly consistent with a form of morality which expects men to take the commandments of a ruling consciousness as unquestionable moral prescriptions.

Biblical doctrine is explicitly opposed to man’s pride. [27] The Bible can hardly be said to engender one’s “inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think” for himself. Indeed, the Bible commands men instead to “trust in God with all [his] heart; and lean not unto [his] own understanding.” (Prov. 3:5) And indeed, reading the Bible will hardly generate a conviction that one is worthy of anything except eternal punishment. Instead, the Bible turns man’s capacity for pride into the source of his guilt, and consequently destroys his capacity for self-esteem.

Injunctions against man’s selfishness are always accompanied, either implicitly or explicitly, by slogans and maxims extolling the anti-virtue sacrifice. [28] Sacrifice is “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue.” [29] Thus, since objective morality is concerned with the individual’s achievement of his values, and not their surrender or forfeiture, sacrifice is literally immoral. One cannot surrender something he does not have or has not already achieved or acquired. Christian morality, by contrast, in its condemnation of man’s self-interest (i.e., his selfishness) and its repudiation of the objective theory of the good, is concerned with their surrender, i.e., sacrifice. Given the principles of the values-based morality, Christianity is thus immoral.

Christianity’s injunctions against man’s selfishness are well known. Selfishness is literally concern with one’s own interests. An action is selfish in nature when one is the primary beneficiary of his own action. Instead of action which benefits oneself, Judeo-Christian morality extols the morality of self- sacrifice as a basic absolute. A Christian believer is taught that he cannot please God and himself at the same time, that he cannot “serve two masters.” [30] If the believer wants to please God, he must obey the moral precepts of the Bible and, in so doing, sacrifice himself. Paul wrote to the budding Roman church, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” [31] Heading one list of vices condemned as paramount sins, Paul mentions “lovers of their own selves” and “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” [32]

Modern secondary sources do not hesitate to mince words in their condemnation of man’s selfishness. The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary, for instance, declares that “sin in its nature is egotism and selfishness. Self is put in the place of God.” [33] Religious moral systems attempt to vilify man’s selfishness by divorcing it from what is taught to be regarded as the good. Man’s selfishness and the good, claim the religious, are ultimately antithetical and mutually exclusive. TheCatholic Encyclopedia’s entry on egoism attempts to make this point when it states:

[The] good is to be sought for its own sake chiefly, and in its train follows happiness as, if the expression may be permitted, an automatic consequence. Hence in pursuing the moral good, I am implicitly pursuing my own happiness. This self-realization is not egoism; for egoism makes self the centre, the beginning and the end of action. On the other hand, the virtuous man sub-ordinates himself to the moral good, which in the last analysis is identified with God.

Just how is happiness supposed to follow as “an automatic consequence,” and exactly whose happiness is that which follows? Exactly what makes something a moral good, and to whom is it said to be good, and why, when one’s own self is disqualified from being the standard of good? This is the intrinsic theory of the good in explicit terms, and it is questions such as these which its defenders resist addressing in terms of essentials. Furthermore, note that one’s happiness cannot be sought for its own sake as a final goal, but must be anticipated to follow somehow (automatically?) when one is allegedly “pursuing the moral good.” This is precisely how “the good” and the objective theory of value are divorced from one another in religious moral teaching.

The attack against the virtue of selfishness always includes the obfuscation of the objective theory of the good, either by mischaracterizing it or by treating an irrationally defined species of egoism as such (e.g., hedonism or whim-based selfishness as opposed to rational selfishness) as exhaustively representative of the objective theory of the good proper. [34] This means the objective theory of the good simply does not get a just hearing. When it is desired to stifle men’s discovery of the objective theory of the good, its detractors have no choice but to destroy the objective theory of value, which of course draws on mystical premises, namely the primacy of consciousness view of reality, metaphysical subjectivism and mystical (i.e., faith-based) epistemology. Of value to whom and why? is not the kind of question intrinsicists are likely to answer in very clear terms.

This is irrescindably evident in statements such as the “good is to be sought for its own sake chiefly,” which we saw above. For in such declarations it is irrevocably implied that that which is called “good” is considered “good” regardless of its value to man, for it is “good” just because. Man’s needs for living his life are thus ultimately irrelevant to the good, particularly if this “good” is said to be “good” with or without man’s benefiting from his pursuit of it. This default is only sealed when one attempts to argue that man benefits automatically, through some means, while these means are left ambiguous and unidentified.

Moreover, if one’s own happiness – which is a value to one’s self (i.e., selfish) – is a moral good, why can it not be a primary value, and why can it not be the final goal of man’s moral actions? Because, we are told, in the hierarchy of values implicit in statements such as we find in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the good (i.e., God) overshadows all values, including man’s happiness, which he must regard as a gift of grace (i.e., unmerited and unearned), not as a product of his own making. Indeed, this repugnant and hateful slap at man is only compounded when we discover that the church’s position, however it defines its terms, is that “true happiness is to come not now, but hereafter.”[35] Such a view can only cheapen man’s life on earth, and as such can only pertain to a morality which essentially holds man’s death as his primary value.

Does this sound like a morality fit for man’s life? Indeed it is not!

The proper resolution to these unnecessary and destructive problems is to root the foundations of one’s philosophy in objectivity and to recognize that man is not guilty by virtue of his existence. If existence exists independent of consciousness, as we discover when we look at reality and see that it does not obey our whims, and if we recognize that man is not guilty simply by virtue of his existence qua man, as Christianity essentially holds, then we should see that man is indeed capable of living a happy life.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like a sadist – or self-torture, like a masochist – or life beyond the grave, like a mystic – or mindless “kicks,” like the driver of a hotrod car – his alleged happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moment’s relief from their chronic state of terror. [36]

Man’s pursuit of happiness, as Ayn Rand defines it here (finally, an objective definition of this crucial concept), is a profoundly selfish enterprise. To condemn man’s selfishness is to condemn his capacity for living a happy life. Man’s happiness is to be stifled and suppressed, as ultimately, since it is selfish in nature, it is man’s chief source of guilt according to the Christian worldview. Paul wants believers to be so obsessedly absorbed into the Bible’s fear program and mindful of coming peril, that he even advises that “they who rejoice, [to behave] as though they rejoiced not.” [37]

Many who would contend that selfishness is evil while implicitly or explicitly treating happiness as a value (which in such a case ‘happiness’ would now be a stolen concept), will attempt to dichotomize man’s pursuit of his own life in distinction to his pursuit of happiness. This can only result in causing unnecessary psychological discord and an inconsistent approach to values in general, which can only incubate guilt in believers. Man’s pursuit of life and his pursuit of happiness are not to be dichotomized. But man’s life and his happiness are not opposite goals, as Ayn Rand explains:

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself – the kind that makes one think: “This is worth living for” – what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself. [38]

It is this state of achievement – that is, the success of achieving one’s own values, which those who condemn man’s reason, selfishness and pride intend to destroy in men when they expect him to accept the claim that the good is beyond the grave; that the good is divorced from man’s life needs and values; that the good must be distinguished from that which is practical as opposed to that which is “spiritual”; that the good is something which cannot be earned, something which one cannot achieve through his own rationally productive effort, but something that men should instead passively wait for in the self-deceiving pretense of the hope for a supernatural form of consciousness to distribute it among men without concern for merit (cf. “divine grace”); that the good is ultimately beyond “this reality” and attainable only by the sacrifice of one’s happiness in “this life.” Instead of reasons why men have the right to pursue their own happiness, as the Declaration of Independence acknowledges, Christian morality and similar mystical constructs feed men excuses to evade the moral responsibility of living in the guise of answering to a “higher power” which they cannot comprehend or even prove exists. The cost is man’s life and happiness.

Some may choose to defend their condemnation of man’s selfishness by claiming that a selfish person necessarily, by definition, is one who feeds off others, as if parasitically sapping their life worth dry. But this view neglects the fact that the ethics of sacrifice always breeds two kinds of persons: those who sacrifice their values to others, and those who collect on those sacrifices. Can one expect that men should accept as a duty the commandment that they should sacrifice their values to others and there not be someone ready to collect those sacrifices? The affirmation of the ethics of sacrifice conjoined with the condemnation of those who subsist on the sacrifices of others ignores the fact that the collectors of sacrifice need those who are willing to sacrifice their values as much as those who sacrifice their values need someone ready to collect them. Those who sacrifice their values do so primarily for the momentary relief from the chronic guilt they have accepted as a primary condition of living. Thus, it is not merely the exchange of sacrifices which takes place in this neurotic dialogue, but the reinforcement of the psychological sanctions motivating such forfeiture of value.

Additionally, mystics may attempt the cheap trick of arguing that God is the collector of man’s sacrifices, choosing instead to refer to God in this capacity as the recipient of man’s tribute or object of his worship. But this is clearly an idle and empty route, for what value can one give to a perfect, immortal and indestructible being? Does one sacrifice to a rock? Of course not; a rock could have no use for man’s values; a rock can neither value nor endure loss. For the same essential reason, the idea that an immortal and indestructible God could value anything is necessarily incoherent. [39] Besides, if God were omnipotent, and has virtually unlimited creative ability (able to zap into existence entire universes and the such), then God could easily provide his own values for his own needs, as if ‘need’ and ‘value’ could apply to such a being.

The answer of course is for us to discover the objective theory of the good and for the individual to declare his independence from others and for him to produce his own values – not at the expense of others, but at his own expense, and not to allow others to mooch off him in their hopes that he, as a producer, will sacrifice his product (i.e., his values) to them at his own expense. Those who allow others to mooch off themselves naturally will expect to mooch off others as well. This breeds unnecessary dependence on others, which can only work against man’s life because it deceives men into thinking they can exist by evading the responsibility of living. The objective theory of the good not only stresses the value of the individual’s independence from others, it is the only moral doctrine which makes it possible.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it – that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life – that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and existence. [40]

And here we come full circle, from cause to effect, and from effect tracing back to its cause. The commandment for men to sacrifice their values is the commandment that men should sacrifice their minds. The commandment that men should believe as the priests dictate them to believe, is the commandment that men should subjugate their minds and disable their capacity to reason for themselves. The condemnation of selfishness is the ruse of cheating man from his own vital happiness. To hold sacrifice as a virtue is to negate man’s ability to lead his life independent of others, just so that those who seek the unearned may profit at his expense. This is the morality of the moocher, the ethics of the parasite, the code of the evader and the doctrine of the mystic, all in one shabby tomb crowned with the symbol of the cross, a symbol not of death as such, but a symbol of slow suffering and agony. As such, there could be no more appropriate symbol for Christianity than an instrument of torture and execution.

Concluding Remarks

These are the concepts and their respective definitions which will be assumed in my assessment of the claim that Christian morality is objective in nature. Already it should be clear from the definitions I have given that this claim cannot true, but rather that Christian morality is intrinsic in nature. But I am willing to be patient with my readers, and to show systematically, going through the verses of the Bible themselves, why Christian morality as defined particularly in the New Testament cannot be considered objective, but is indeed a product of a false view of reality, the primacy of consciousness metaphysics, and therefore wholly unfit for man.

Notes
[1] Ayn Rand, Glossary of Objectivist Definitions, ed. Allison T. Kunze and Jean F. Moroney, s.v. ‘ethics’; see also Rand’s essay “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 13; and, Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 206.
[2] Footnote: The dependence of political principles on moral principles is rarely understood or acknowledged by many thinkers. Political principles – that is, principles guiding one’s interactions with others, how they treat and conduct themselves in relation to others – are often treated as primaries which cannot be questioned. Political theory, at least at the interpersonal level (as opposed to the societal level) is quite often supplanted in place of a doctrine of morality, and even mistakenly referred to as morality proper. This practice leaves political principles without an objective basis, and also leaves the individual clueless on how he should conduct his own life in relation to his own values, and why. These mistakes are avoided in Objectivism.
[3] Ayn Rand, “Galt’s Speech,” For the New Intellectual, p. 122. [4] Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p.117. [5] “What is Capitalism?” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 22. [6] Ibid., p. 21. [7] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[8] See for instance Erwin Lutzer’s Measuring Morality: A Comparison of Ethical Systems which affirms that “God’s moral revelation has intrinsic value,” which is a contradiction in terms according to rational philosophy. If the supposed value of God’s moral revelation is intrinsic, which means: the value of God’s moral revelation is a value in and of itself (which means: without reference to man), then it is not of value to man. Can this supposed revelation be a value to God? Again, not if its value is supposedly intrinsic. Besides, we already know that an immortal being such as God cannot value to begin with, as I demonstrate in my essay Why an Immortal God Cannot Value. Clearly, if we grant Lutzer’s claim legitimacy, then God’s alleged moral revelation is of no value to anyone.
[9] Rand, “Galt’s Speech,” For the New Intellectual, p. 121.
[10] Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 15.
[11] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 20.
[12] Ayn Rand, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 62.
[13] “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 121.
[14] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 22. [15] “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 170. [16] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 28. [17] Rand, “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 128. [18] Ibid.
[19] I urge theology students who may be reading this to honestly ask themselves: What legitimately necessary goal do all your efforts to develop so-called “theories” and “doctrines” pertinent to god-belief accomplish?
[20] Ibid., p. 130. [21] Ibid. [22] Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 93. [23] Ibid.
[24] By “anti-concept” I mean “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate.” (Ayn Rand, “Credibility and Polarization,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 1, 1.)
[25] Ayn Rand, “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 183. [26] For a small sampling of this, see Donald Morgan’s Bible Atrocities.
[27] For instance, see Proverbs 8:13; 11:12; 13:10; 14:3; 16:18; 29:23; Mark 7:22; I John 2:16.
[28] If ‘virtue’ is that action by which one achieves and/or preserves his values, then an ‘anti-virtue’ is the action by which those values are forfeited and destroyed. It is in this context that I consider both ’selflessness’ and ’sacrifice’ to be anti-virtues.
[29] Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 44. This definition isolates the essentials involved in the concept ’sacrifice’ far better than others I have found. Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary, for instance, defines ’sacrifice’ as: “forfeiture of something valuable for something else.” This definition neglects to identify the relationship of that “something else” to the “something valuable” being forfeited; it does not tell us that value being forfeited is of higher value than the one which is not being sacrificed. This source also defines ’sacrifice’ as “A loss,” which – although sacrifice results in a net loss to the one who sacrifices something – also gives only part of the story. For this does not take into account that the sacrifice of values is a loss chosen by the one who sacrifices something.
[30] Cf. Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13.
[31] Romans 12:1.
[32] II Timothy 3:2, 4.
[33] S.v. ’sin’.
[34] Cf. the fallacy of frozen abstraction.
[35] Quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry for ‘happiness’.
[36] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 28.
[37] I Cor. 7:30. Compare this urgency to suppress one’s emotions with passages commanding men to rejoice: Romans 12:15; I Cor. 13:6; Phil. 3:1, 4:4; I Peter 4:13; etc. Attempting to integrate these instructions – both to rejoice and to conduct oneself “as though [he] rejoiced not” – can only stifle man’s capacity for rationally-achieved happiness, not liberate it. Such slantradictions as I call them are designed especially to cause confusion in the minds of believers, and ultimately guilt, when all one needs to do is declare his own independence and pursue the non-contradictory joy, which Rand extolled. (Cf. “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 132.)
[38] Ibid., p. 29. [39] See particularly my essay Why an Immortal God Cannot Value. [40] “This is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual, p. 128.

Why An Immortal God Cannot Value And Therefore Cannot Love or Know Purpose

The Argument from Moral Values for the Non-Existence of the Christian God

Most theistic religions assert a God (or gods) that is the source of existence. Many also claim that this same being is the source of morality and of moral values. Such claims are commonly issued by apologists for Christianity. But these assertions lead us to ask many provocative questions. For instance, can the Christian God have moral values? Can the Christian God love? Can the Christian God have a purpose?

These are the questions that will be considered in this essay by analyzing the concepts against the claims made by Christians about the nature of their God. in this essay, I will examine whether or not a being defined as the Christians define their God, if such a being were to exist, could value, love and/or place before itself any purpose at all. Essentially, the question boils down to: Can the Christian God have a moral nature?

An Eternal, Immortal God?

Christians claim that their God is immortal. I Timothy 1:17 states: “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” (Underscore added; see also Deut. 33:27, Isaiah 57:15 and Heb. 9:14.) ‘Eternal’ means ‘out of time,’ ‘not constrained by time’ or ‘inapplicable to time.’ ‘Immortal’ means non-mortal, which means, ‘does not or cannot die.’ An ‘eternal, immortal’ being, then, is a being which allegedly has always existed, which will exist forever without end, which will never die. Such a being is therefore indestructible and unaffected by its environment in any adverse way. This is the idea of the Christian God.

Now there is no example in nature of an ‘eternal, immortal’ entity that is also a living being. All forms of life on earth, whether they are primitive single-celled paramecia or bacteria, plant life, lesser invertebrates, reptiles, birds, mammals or man, have a typical life expectancy which they only rarely outlive. And even should an animal or other living being outlive its life expectancy, it will surely die sometime thereafter. That is the nature of all living beings: eventually the activity of life ceases and another takes its place among the living. [1]

Therefore, the assertion of an ‘eternal, immortal’ life form, being an outstanding claim, is without natural precedent or justification. “So be it!” says the apologist, “That’s the nature of God! He is supernatural! He is the way He is, and He shall always be so!” The intention at this point of my essay is to grant the apologist his wishes for an ‘eternal, immortal’ God for the time being, for the purpose of demonstrating the incongruity of the claim that God can value, love and act purposefully. Indeed, in many places (most notably in the New Testament), the Bible asserts that this immortal being called “God” is capable of loving both individuals and entire nations, as these online Bible search results demonstrate.

Is the assertion of an eternal, immortal being incongruous with the concepts value, purpose and love? Yes, it is. Why is this, do you ask? This is the central question under consideration in this essay, and the answer constitutes the main content of my present argument.

A Conspicuous Dearth of Definitions

The first thing that must be done at this point is to clarify the concepts in question, namely value, purpose and love. Without this clarification, without the proper identification of one’s terms, no rationality can proceed. In this sense, rationality is crucially dependent on one’s volition: We can only employ and reason consistently with proper definitions if we choose to; one cannot be forced to use reason in his cognition. Thus, without the proper exercise of one’s volitional faculties, one is doomed to arbitrary choices, and the results of such default can only be irrational.

Where shall we look for concise and objective definitions for these terms? Our first inclination might be to consult religious sources to acquire familiarity of what definitions religious doctrines themselves presume. In the case of Christianity, we should then seek our definitions in the Bible. But, sadly, concise and objective definitions are not to be found in the Bible, for the Bible gives definitions to precious few words at all. The meanings of the words used in biblical writings are commonly presumed without any attempt to identify in explicit terms what those definitions are. Instead, they must be inferred by context and usage.

For instance, I once asked a believer how the Bible defines the concept ‘truth’. He cited John 14:6, which states, “Jesus saith unto him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’” Clearly this is unworkable if we are to equate the concept ‘truth’, which is an abstraction, with Jesus, which is (allegedly) an entity. Such verses, far from offering definitions of key terms, simply presume their meaning and the reader’s knowledge of their meaning. The statement “Jesus is truth” has no more meaning than “Jesus is blaff” if we do not have a prior understanding of what ‘truth’ means. This is the evasion of definition, not the fulfillment thereof.

We run into the same dead end when we look for definitions of concepts such as ‘value’, ‘love’ and ‘purpose’ in the Bible. And when this failing is pointed out (why a text should be held as an authoritative guide on life and knowledge when it does not even articulate its own definitions is never explained), we are told that the Bible is not a dictionary. If apologists are happy with this conclusion, then why would they go to the trouble of claiming that verses like John 14:6 offer definitions of important terms?

The Bible barely even mentions the word ‘value’, even though its authors had optimum occasion to address this crucial philosophical concern had they considered it important. My copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible lists seven passages which use the term ‘value’ [2]; four passages which use the term ‘valued’ [3]; and one passage containing the word ‘valuest’. [4] Neither passage offers a definition of this term, but instead assumes the reader’s understanding of the term and some hint of its moral meaning, even though this meaning is never explicitly identified. For instance, the passage in Job 28 extols the incomparability of the value of wisdom with that of gold. However, it is never explained why gold should command such unanimous agreement among men as to its value. This is simply assumed, which makes for very careless philosophy.

Additionally, I have consulted supplemental sources in addition to the Bible in order to find definitions of the terms ‘value’, ‘love’ and ‘purpose’. For instance, The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary [5] lacks entries for both ‘value’ and ‘purpose’, but includes an entry for ‘love’. In the entry for ‘love’ it states that love is “[c]hiefly represented in the Scriptures as an attribute of God and as a Christian virtue. Its consideration, therefore, belongs to both theology and ethics.” But does the Bible Dictionary offer a definition of ‘love’? If it does, it certainly is not very clearly stated. The entry twice equates love with “affection,” and also with “feeling” and “tender and passionate attachment, a sentiment of [man's] nature excited by qualities in another person or thing that command our affection.” But this still does not define ‘love’ in terms of essentials. It also states that love is “a virtue of such efficacy that it is said to be the fulfilling of the law.” But if this were the case, what would one need the law for in the first place?

Furthermore, the entry for ‘love’ in Unger’s nowhere mentions the role of values in determining what and why man loves or should love. This is a glaring omission, for how can one pontificate on love without reference to values? Sadly, Unger’s aligns itself with the tired, worn-out anti-man tradition of disparaging man’s capacity for love. For the same entry states that love “is the antithesis of selfishness.” But love is irrescindably selfish in nature. According to whose values-hierarchy does one love anything? Certainly, one loves according to his own values-hierarchy. Whose emotions are affected when one achieves or loses an important value? One’s own emotions. According to Rand, a so-called selfless love in the context of personal relationships, “would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you.” [6] The view of love which Rand describes here is perfectly compatible with religious ideas which condemn man’s selfishness as evil.

At the same time, Unger’s offers the contradiction that the “contention… that true Christian love should be disinterested, that we must love God exclusively on account of His perfection, so that if He did not bless us, but were to cast us off, we would love Him still, finds no support in the Scriptures.” But if it is the case that love “is the antithesis of selfishness,” then how could love not be disinterested? Unger’s does not say, nor does it appear ready to recognize its own contradictions.

Next, I looked at the online Catholic Encyclopedia, specifically under entries beginning with the letter ‘v’, to find its definition of ‘value’. Amazingly, there was no listing for this so crucial philosophical term. How peculiar that those who have so highly placed themselves in charge of matters of morality should fail to discuss the very unit of that branch of philosophy!

Similarly, although the Catholic Encyclopedia does include an entry for ‘love’, it fails to include an entry for ‘purpose’ (see entries beginning with the letter ‘p’). While the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia consider the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘truth’ to be important philosophical and/or theological terms meriting respective entries, it is to be inferred by their absence that the terms ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ must figure quite loosely at best in Catholic philosophy. The same inference can be made for Christianity proper, for its primary sources’ default in the same.

Rational Definitions

Fortunately, we have a rational philosophy, Objectivism, which is most careful when it comes to the vital need of definition. The vital need fulfilled by definitions is the comprehensibility of the meaning of our speech and writing, of the words we use, and consequently, any points we try to make. But while the Bible holds man’s understanding in low regard (cf. Proverbs 3:5 et al.), Objectivism holds that definitions are “the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.” [7] In tandem with this, Objectivism holds that the “truth or falsehood of all of man’s conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.” [8] Given Objectivism’s unique and refreshing willingness to insist on clear definitions, one should not object to consulting Objectivist sources for definitions of important terms when other sources default in this regard, as we saw above.

Objectivism holds that life as such is the root of morality. According to Objectivism,

[t]here 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. [9]

Since man is a living organism, he faces the alternative which Rand mentions above. Man exists, and can cease to exist. “Like other organisms,” writes Objectivist Eyal Mozes, “man needs to act in order to survive; but unlike other organisms, man does not take the needed actions automatically. Man must choose to act to sustain his own life, and find out how to do so. That is why man needs morality.” [10]

According to Objectivism, morality is a “code of values to guide man’s choices and actions.” [11] Since man faces the fundamental alternative of existence versus non-existence, he must act in order to live. Thus, just as he requires a code of principles to guide his thinking, which is reason, he also requires a code of values which guides his choices and actions.

Miss Rand defines ‘value’ as

that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible. [12]

This definition assumes alternatives open to choice. For instance, one may value spending one’s evenings after a day at work taking a course on computer programming instead of whiling away his evenings in front of a television. This presupposes that one values one activity over the other, which means, broadly speaking: value as such depends on those capable of valuing. Thus, value presupposes conscious living beings which are aware of alternative goals and capable of choosing between them.

In conjunction with this view of ‘value’, ‘love’ is defined as “an emotion proceeding from the evaluation of an existent as a positive value and as a source of pleasure.” [13] Thus, love is directly harmonious with one’s values. One loves something because he determines that something to be of benefit to him for some reason.

For instance, if one values his own skills and the fulfilling rewards they make possible in his life, he likely loves his ability and the values he earns with that ability. In the case of the person spending his evenings after work taking courses in computer programming, he does so because he values the education he is learning and the values which that education may make possible for him to achieve in the future. Since he likely recognizes that the achievement of values is not guaranteed by his efforts, his love for those values and the joy they bring to his life supplies him with the motivation necessary to invest his energy in pursuing an education in his “off hours.” This is indisputably and profoundly selfish, for he is the primary benefaciary of his own actions, and he invests in maximizing the value-achieving potential of his actions. [14]

With the same care for essentials, Dr. Leonard Peikoff defines ‘purpose’ as “conscious goal-directedness in every aspect of one’s existence where choice applies.” [15] It is with the purpose of attaining a chosen goal or accomplishing a chosen objective that one acts. Purposeful action in this sense is that action which one sets in motion in order to achieve, maintain or preserve his values. For animate beings, the ultimate objective of that purpose is expected to achieve is life. Without life, purpose is not possible, just as values are not possible without life. [16]

The Objectivist concept of purpose coherently integrates the nature of a living being’s need for goal-directed action and the need to choose between alternatives, just as the concepts of ‘value’ and ‘love’ above do. If there is no fundamental alternative, what could possibly guide such choices and actions, and what goal can such action be directed in achieving?

The assertion of the concept ‘purpose’ assumes that its achievement and fulfillment are possible, at least within the general context of reality. It is arbitrary to speak of a goal which by its nature is said never to be achievable. If something is by nature never achievable, then what qualifies it as a goal? And if it does not qualify as a goal, what is the purpose of pursuing it? Thus, when the Bible speaks of an “eternal purpose” (Eph. 3:11), we are right to ask: What did its authors have in mind? And if an “eternal purpose” is a purpose which by its very nature can never be fulfilled, why should anyone attempt to pursue it?

The Heart of the Matter

The essential premise to keep in mind is the fact that value, love and purpose can only apply to a certain class of entities, namely living entities. In each case, we see how the meanings of these concepts presuppose certain conditions which belong only to this class of entities. We do not say that non-living things can value or love, or that they can engage in purposive action apart from the context of their relationship to living beings which control them (such as a machine designed to achieve a certain goal for those who produced it and/or manage it). It is only the class of living entities which faces the alternative of existence or non-existence, and only these entities which can generate their own action to make their existence possible.

“But God is a living being!” claim the religionists in their objection to perceived molestation of their age-held beliefs. “God is living, He is a living being, He is the source of life itself! He alone is the Creator of life, and therefore the Author of value, love and purpose!” Such claims will be asserted in the face of facts that contradict their mystical nature.

But if ‘god’ is immortal – i.e., if ‘god’ cannot die, then how can it be said that ‘god’ is a living being? The concept ‘life’ can only be meaningful if in fact the entity to which it is applied faces the alternative life vs. death. If this is not the case with ‘god,’ then the term life is misapplied.

Of central importance here is the fact that the concepts ‘value,’ ‘love,’ and ‘purpose’ can only apply to living beings which face the alternative life vs. death. This is because, as Ayn Rand writes, “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.” [17] Thus, it must be pointed out that ‘value’ finds its meaning in ‘life’.

Objectivist Tara Smith confirms the truth of this position when she argues that the

nature of value can be fully appreciated only by understanding what gives rise to value… Thus it is crucial to understand what renders something valuable… Rand observes that life gives rise to the very concept of value. The alternative of life or death is what allows and what necessitates the pursuit of values. The quest for life makes the idea of value intelligible and imposes the need to identify values and to act to achieve them. Thus, it is life that mandates human beings’ adherence to a moral code. Life is the end of value and establishes the standard of value. As such, it is the source of moral obligations, which are prescriptions for how to achieve that end. [18]

Indeed, if man did not face the fundamental alternative of life or death, or existence vs. non-existence, Objectivism argues that he would have no need or capacity for values. In fact, Smith argues, “Humans are not alone in seeking values. To the extent that plants and animals act to acquire certain objects – for example, growing toward the sunlight or scurrying to find nuts – they are also pursuing values.” [19] In other words, since both plants and animals are living entities, and consequently face the same fundamental alternative which man faces, namely live vs. death, they too require values as well, even though they do not possess the cognitive faculties needed to form the concept ‘value’ itself. Life as such, therefore, is the metaphysical precondition which makes values possible.

But a rock, for instance, does not pursue values because it does not face the same alternative, life vs. death. A rock neither generates its own action, nor is any action it is caused to do goal-directed in nature (that is, in relation to itself). A rock does not need nutrients in order to exist, nor does it need shelter or warmth. Why is this? Because it is not living, because it does not face the same alternative as living entities.

Similarly, a being which is said to be immortal by definition would not face this fundamental alternative, just as the rock does not. If an entity does not face this fundamental alternative, even if one wants to argue that this entity is conscious, it still could not value. As Rand argues:

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; It could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals… Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. [20]

If God does not face a fundamental alternative as man does (i.e., if God does not face the alternative existence vs. non-existence), then God cannot be said to possess the metaphysical precondition which makes values possible. And if God does not possess the metaphysical precondition that makes values possible (i.e., the fundamental alternative existence vs. non-existence), then God cannot know value at all. Such a being could know no loss, especially if such a being were also omnipotent, which means that there would be nothing that is impossible to such a being.

In regard to the notion of an immortal agent of value, Tara Smith asks,

If a person were assured of going on forever, what sense could it make to regard some states of affairs as better than others? I am not merely imagining a person’s life being extended by decades or centuries. Rather, imagine his life being literally endless. He is indestructible and will live for all eternity. Whatever the person did this afternoon, he would have an infinite amount of time to do other thing things. He would incur no loss by choosing one activity rather than some other…. Whatever a destruction-proof robot or immortal being does is not sustaining its existence since that is already guaranteed. Where survival is inherently assured and death is impossible, then, we are no longer talking about life. Rand’s robot is not a living being; that is why she calls it a robot. [21]

The Christian God, then, essentially resembles the indestructible robot in the example which Rand provides. Like the indestructible robot, the Christian God is said to be “immortal, indestructible…, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed.” Like Rand’s robot, the Christian God “would have nothing to gain or to lose,” nor could the Christian God “regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests.”

How, then, can Christians claim that their immortal, indestructible, and unchanging God be capable of valuing anything? Certainly, they cannot claim this, if they assume objectively defined terms. And if the Christian God could not value anything, then it could not love anything, nor could it be capable of pursuing any purpose. Since the very notion of the Christian God denies the genetic roots of the concepts ‘value’, ‘love’ and ‘purpose’, any attempt to assert the Christian God as capable of these virtues reduces to conceptual fallacy. In particular, such attempts would commit the fallacy of the stolen concept, which renders invalidates such ambitions.

Therefore, since God is immortal, it does not face the fundamental alternative of existence vs. non-existence. And since it does not face this fundamental alternative, it cannot value. And since it cannot value, it cannot have a code of values, and thus cannot be a moral being. Neither can it love, nor can it have a purpose. Thus, because of its own internal incoherence, the notion of the Christian God is invalid. Such a being cannot exist.

Possible Objections and Counter-Positions

Religious apologists will no doubt attempt to raise objections against the argument from moral values for the non-existence of the Christian God. Below I consider what I consider to be the most common objections I’ve encountered.

1. “God may be immortal and indestructible, but He can value, love and know purpose anyway.”This species of objection will usually attempt to rely on some argumentation which is designed to replace objective definitions with plastic definitions which can be molded at whim in order both to satisfy atheological criticism of god-belief as well as dispel it at the same time.For instance, one might assert that we need not assume a fundamental alternative as the basis of values, but instead that certain objects have inherent value, i.e., value apart from moral agents. This is essentially the intrinsic theory of values, which does not persevere under objective scrutiny. [22] The intrinsic theory of values is basically the attempt to acontextualize values from man’s nature; i.e., the attempt to dissociate values from a values-hierarchy, and consequently from a knowledge-hierarchy. Objectivism insists that all knowledge is hierarchical in nature, and consequently that values are hierarchical as well. If every instance of value were itself a primary that could be asserted without reference to a fundamental standard, one may have room to argue for this view of moral values. But since such views cannot adequately answer such fundamental questions as, Of value to whom? and Of value for what? – and since such views evade the rational integration of knowledge with values, of epistemology and morality, and the fact that the necessities of life give rise to values, they cannot properly be called values.

   Therefore, any objection taking this route is merely an attempt to evade the objective theory of values and the facts of reality (e.g., the fact that moral values have objective identity).

2. “It does not matter if God is immortal and indestructible, God is the basis of all value, and therefore of love and purpose, and one cannot assert these latter concepts without presupposing the existence of the Christian God in the first place.”
   This would-be objection smacks of so-called “presuppositionalist” apologetics, a scheme of theistic defenses which argue that Christian theism supplies the ontological and epistemological pre-conditions of all intelligibility, including the intelligibility of moral codes. Though presuppositionalism has not shown itself to endure sustained criticism [23], this approach to defending Christian theism is gaining more and more popularity, and thus such an objection may likely be encountered.

   The problem with this objection, however, is that the notion of ‘god’ is completely superfluous in the context of man’s capacity to value, love and choose moral purposes. As the definitions and arguments I supply above amply demonstrate, the basis of man’s capacity for moral value is first and foremost the fact that he faces a fundamental, metaphysical alternative, namely existence vs. non-existence. Regardless of one’s god-beliefs or lack thereof, the fact that man must act in order to sustain his life is indisputable. Asserting that the Christian God is the foundation of man’s moral nature as such, or of moral values as such, simply begs the question, and ignores those principles which I identify above. Such an objection, if engaged, is properly identified as an evasion of the objective theory of values and of man’s nature as a rational being.

3. “I don’t care, I admit that my definitions may not be objective, but I still believe God can value and act in his own interests regardless of what reason tells me.”
   This strategy is properly identified as the “whole faith” strategy, since it blatantly rejects rationality and objectivity, and asserts its desired conclusions in opposition to reason regardless of its resulting cognitive fallout. Such a position may not be intellectually honest, but it is at least consistent with the rudiments of the religious view of the world. The religious view of the world has historically condemned man’s ability to comprehend or at the very least relegated it to an inferior and undesirable position (cf. Proverbs 3:5). Additionally, this same view of the world has historically enshrined the incomprehensible by compelling men to accept that which is absurd and nonsensical as knowledge of reality.
4. “God acts to his own pleasure.”
   Some Christian defenders may claim that God is capable of pleasure. But pleasure as opposed to what? If God is perfect as they claim, then how can God experience displeasure, disappointment, dejection, or frustration? As soon as the believer makes an attempt to explain away one contradiction (e.g., an immortal being which can value), he entraps himself in another (e.g., a perfect being which can be displeased). [24] More problems result. If God is perfect, how can it be man’s responsibility to please God? If God is perfect, how can the imperfect please or satisfy the imperfect? Indeed, why should the perfect need to be pleased in the first place? Instead of answers, such questions typically bring us evasions. What possible good could any of this accomplish? Blank out.

   Far from producing genuine points of contention which themselves endure scrutiny, such ploys are properly identified as mere evasive tactics. From biblical philosophy’s nonchalance in matters of defining crucial philosophic terms, we can rightly infer nonchalance in crucial philosophic disciplines, particularly in epistemology and morality.

In Conclusion, A Syllogism

The above points can all be generally boiled down to a simple syllogism:

Premise 1: Only rational beings that face the fundamental alternative of existence vs. non-existence can value, love and pursue purpose.

Premise 2: All definitions of the Christian God assert that God is immortal, which means that it does not face this fundamental alternative.

Conclusion: Therefore, God cannot value, love or pursue purpose.

Above we saw that value presupposes a conscious entity which faces the fundamental alternative between existence and non-existence, and that love is this conscious entity’s emotional response to those values which make its life possible and enjoyable. We also saw that purpose can only apply to those conscious beings which face fundamental alternatives and which are capable of acting on behalf of achieving and/or maintaining one over the other. In light of this, we see that neither of these concepts, ‘value’, ‘love’ or ‘purpose’, can be asserted apart from this fundamental alternative, since all three genetically presuppose this alternative. Consequently, the religious assertion of an immortal and eternal being which can value, love and pursue purpose commits the fallacy of the stolen concept.

If one’s assertions are founded upon stolen concepts, those assertions are consequentially invalid. The idea of the Christian God asserts concepts while denying their genetic roots. Therefore, the idea of the Christian God is invalid. Such a being cannot exist.

Notes

[1] Ironically, these facts more than justify the religionists’ assertion that ‘God is incomprehensible’ for they maintain that God is living, yet it knows not death itself. However, if this be the case, how then can the religionist claim to know that ‘God is eternal and immortal?’ Of course, the religionist will claim that this ‘knowledge’ was revealed to the believer through ‘divinely inspired’ scripture, which only begs the question.

[2] See Lev. 27:8 (x2), 12; Job 13:4; Matt. 10:31; 27:9; Luke 12:7.

[3] See Lev. 27:16; Job 28:16, 19; Matt. 27:9.

[4] See Lev. 27:12.

[5] Merrill Unger, ed., Chicago: The Moody Press, 1988; 1392 pages.

[6] “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.

[7] Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” The Romantic Manifesto, p. 77.

[8] Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 63, italics in original.

[9] Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, (New York: Signet, 1961), p. 121; Atlas Shrugged, 931.

[10] Life as the Standard of Value.

[11] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics, The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 13. I have tried to find a concise definition of ‘morality’ in the Bible on many occasions, and have been disappointed in every instance. Indeed, my concordance does not even contain an entry for the word ‘morality’, suggesting strongly to me that the Bible nowhere defines this crucial concept. Yet its defenders pose as champions of morality in every area of life, as if their religious doctrines were authoritative on the matter. Morality consists of obedience to God, they will say. But this does not answer any of man’s practical needs, such as the role of values or why man should even choose to be moral in the first place. It is my conviction that such intellectual default as this sufficiently incriminates Christianity as a worldview.

[12] Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 15.

[13] Rand, “Concepts of Consciousness,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 34.

[14] I have commonly heard people refer to such circumstances as an instance of sacrifice. For instance, a fellow who spent the last two months taking courses after working hours might call the time he spent in those classes a “sacrifice.” But this may or may not be the case, and ultimately depends on what that person values more, whether or not his time spent in the evening classes is really a sacrifice. “Sacrifice is the surrender of a higher value for the sake of a lesser one or a nonvalue (Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 44). If this person valued his evenings in front of a television more than he valued the education he was seeking and the values that education promises to make possible to him, then taking the courses would constitute a sacrifice for this individual, because the evenings in classes are taken at the expense of what he values more, which is an evening in front of the television. If, on the other hand, he valued his education and the values it promises to make possible to him in the future more than he values an evening of television, then taking the courses would not constitute a sacrifice, because he would not be pursuing a lesser value at the expense of a greater value. For a rational man, such investment is not a sacrifice.

[15] “Productiveness as the Adjustment of Nature to Man,” Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 298.

[16] Objectivists hold that their fundamental purpose in life is to live and to enjoy their lives. This is a purpose which one accepts by choice. Objectivists do not regard obedience to the will of others, be they men or alleged supernatural beings, as such to qualify as a legitimately moral purpose. To what end should one obey the will of others? Whose ends are to benefit from action resulting from such obedience? Why should one consider those ends important? Important to whom? Etc. Questions like these are never adequately answered by altruistic or pietistic systems of morality. Indeed, even these views cannot entirely escape man’s fundamentally selfish nature, even though they condemn his selfishness as his primary failing and consequently deem him immoral, depraved or even evil as such. The contradiction between Christian ethics and its condemnation of man’s selfishness, as we saw in Unger’s above, is clearly demonstrated when one asks Christians why one should obey Christian moral doctrine. “So you can please God,” they will say. Why should one want to please God? “So that you will escape torment and enjoy eternal joy and peace,” they will ultimately admit. Even though these goals are arbitrary, eternal joy and peace as the ultimate goals of Christian morality presuppose the satisfaction of personal ambition as the primary motivation for the Christian view of morality. Yet the satisfaction of personal ambition itself is condemned when they condemn man’s selfishness as the primary root of his evil.

[17] For the New Intellectual, 121; Atlas Shrugged, 931.

[18] Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 85.

[19] Ibid., 118n.

[20] “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 16.

[21] Viable Values, pp. 87-88, 89.

[22] Footnote: The intrinsic theory of values

holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory which divorces the concept ‘good’ from beneficiaries, and the concept of ‘value’ from valuer and purpose – claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself. (Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism?” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 21.)

See also Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (New York: Meridian, 1991), pp. 245-248.

[23] Eventually I will be publishing my own critical analyses of presuppositionalism on my website. See also some critical arguments against presuppositionalism already published on the Secular Web.

[24] See also Smith, Viable Values, pp. 87-90.

A Perfect Being?

Most religions, especially western religions, regard their god to be perfect, i.e., whole, entire and without flaw or error, indeed incapable of any fallibility whatsoever. This characteristic is normally asserted without a lot of reasoning as to why that must be so (apart from any reasoning as to why one should accept the claim that a god exists to begin with), but is endorsed virtually unanimously by the church (particularly in the case of Christianity).

But the deeper questions that the attribution of perfection to god evokes usually go unanswered, possibly because they go unasked. What does it mean for a being to be perfect? What would be the expected consequences of a being that can be said to be perfect? How does the attribute ‘perfection’ integrate with other attributes claimed to be possessed by God, such as purpose, omnipotence and omniscience? Or, does integration of these concepts even matter when it comes to defining such a being as God?

God, according to western traditions, is said to be the creator of the universe. As a creator, and as a perfect creator, would it not be expected that perfection follows from perfection? If god has all these absolute superlative traits – omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc., would it not be corollary that whatever proceeds from this perfect being would also be perfect itself?

Perfection vs. purpose:

One of the most neglected questions in regard to religious attributions to the notion god is the matter of purpose. Christians are notorious for their constant bleating about God’s plan, or purpose. Just what this purpose is, and how the concept purpose can be legitimately integrated with the notion of an immortal, perfect being, is a mystery. Many theologians have thrown up their hands in confession to their inability to harmonize this conundrum, yet instead of questioning its validity, proceed to insist that men accept it as knowledge anyhow.

When the question of purpose is measured against the attribute perfection, however, the degree of this dilemma is amplified to its fullest extent. For generally the same reasons that the concept purpose cannot be integrated with immortality, there are serious and insurmountable problems which the apologist faces when trying to ascribe purposefulness to a perfect being. Perfection entails entirety, wholeness, the absence of lack, completeness in every sense, in every context, at all times. A perfect being is free of any privation whatsoever, and therefore lacks nothing, and, consequently, wants and needs nothing. Without need or desire, there can be no purpose. Without an appetite, whether for sustenance or for pleasure, for instance, a man has no need to eat, and therefore, eating at that time would serve no purpose. A perfect being does not have all its needs already satisfied; on the contrary, by definition, a perfect being would have no needs whatsoever to satisfy.

Christians may argue that God’s purpose is to create. However, this argument does not explain anything, but merely postpones resolving the essential problem. Why would a perfect being create anything? We already recognize that a perfect being cannot suffer need of any nature whatsoever, so to posit creation as the purpose of a perfect being is unjustified. Insofar as God, an allegedly perfect being, would be concerned, any creative activity in which it might engage itself must necessarily be without purpose, arbitrary, in a word, pointless. However, many Christians might counter that God creates for his pleasure, which infers that the satisfaction of God’s pleasure is his ultimate purpose. But this position would necessarily imply that God can enjoy pleasure, but, since he must create in order to enjoy that pleasure, that he is not perpetually satisfied, as he must act in order to make that pleasure a reality. In other words, any assertion entailing that God’s ultimate purpose is the satisfaction of his pleasure, and that God indeed acts to experience pleasure (e.g., the creation of the universe), strongly suggests that God responds to stimulus, can experience the opposite of pleasure, which is pain, and that God indeed needs pleasure. If God must act in order to enjoy pleasure, would that not mean that it would be his displeasure should he refrain from action, creative or otherwise?

Certainly there are many problems that arise when trying to reconcile the notion of a perfect being exercising any kind of purpose. While purpose presupposes an end which is yet to be achieved or to continually be achieved, an end that is either vital to the being in question, or desired by an act of volition (in the case of man), perfection strongly suggests a finality to all purpose, an end in itself. A perfect being would be a being whose ends have either already been achieved and fulfilled, or, as the case may be, a being which has never suffered need or want and therefore has never required either the pursuit or satisfaction of an end. Yet, in spite of all this, the theist maintains that his deity indeed has a purpose and that purpose is in the process of being fulfilled on a daily basis throughout the universe, and throughout the lives of human beings. We are told that this purpose is of God’s design, just as the universe is said to be God’s creation. But the assertion that a purpose or plan is in the process of being fulfilled infers that the end goal of that purpose is yet to be achieved, which is a state of imperfection, not perfection.

A Perfect Being creating Imperfection?

It is an undeniable fact that the universe is full of motion. Throughout the cosmos stars are birthing and exploding, asteroids are colliding and being pulverized, comets are disintegrating. Even on earth where there is a life supporting atmosphere, natural catastrophes are constantly reshaping the environment, ecosystems are forming and expiring, animal species are evolving and going extinct. The universe is virtually alive with self-correcting action, ever held in check by the balance of natural laws. Do these characteristics describe a perfect existence? Does this sound like a creation of a perfect being?

Essentially, the question to the theist becomes: How does imperfection arise from perfection? While it can be easily demonstrated that perfection can in fact arise from imperfection (a student achieving an A+ on a high school test should serve as adequate evidence for this), it remains to be explained how something claimed to be perfect can create something that is not perfect. If perfection is the starting point, as would be the case in theistic doctrines, especially if that state of perfection were armed with omnipotence (as Christians claim of their God), one would expect that any creative attempt that arose from that state of perfection would necessarily and unequivocally result in more perfection. Yet, the facts of reality do not support this causal chain of perpetual perfection in the least, and apologists and theologians can only grasp at additional absurdities in order to harmonize these facts with their extraordinary claims.

While the universe does offer living beings like man a suitable place for his existence, there are definitely many places quite hostile to his organism, indeed within even his own environment.

How does God’s alleged perfection conflict with his other alleged characteristics? God is said to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Can perfection be harmonized with each of these characteristics without incongruity?

Perfection and Omniscience?

A perfect God is said also to be omniscient by Christians. However, it is hard to see what purpose omniscience would serve for a perfect being. As already discussed, a perfect being would have need of nothing, or want of nothing. The concepts ‘need’ and ‘want’ are completely inapplicable in the case of a perfect being. So the question becomes, with respect to omniscience: why would God – a perfect being – have knowledge? Certainly, this knowledge could serve no purpose for God, since God as a perfect being would have no need for a purpose, and therefore no purpose to fulfill. So, such knowledge, even ‘omniscience’ or knowledge without method, cannot be necessary to God, since knowledge presupposes purpose, need and, indeed, imperfection. But the Christian insists that God possesses all knowledge, that God is omniscient, in fact, that God is necessarily omniscient. However, what purpose a perfect being could have for knowledge, complete or not, is not stated. This incoherence is further magnified by the claim that God would not be perfect unless he were also omniscient. Indeed, how could a perfect being be complete without complete knowledge? Herein lies the unresolvable paradox for the theist: A perfect being has no need to satisfy, and therefore has no need for knowledge, complete or otherwise, yet a perfect being cannot be said to be complete – and therefore perfect – without complete knowledge. By now, the arbitrary nature of the notion ‘god’ should be clear. This is why the priests insist that lay members accept their claims unquestioningly, for once a little critical thought is applied to their assertions, their arbitrary nature is easily discovered. The commandment “Believe, or go to hell,” is nothing more than an attempt to intimidate any man who would dare use his own mind.

Certainly these and many other questions would have to be addressed if the theologians of the world intend to offer a coherent idea of their alleged deity.

An Unchanging God?

A Pointed Anecdote

Christians believe that (a) their God is “unchanging.” They also believe that (b) their God is jealous, as mentioned explicitly in Exodus 20:5, and that (c) their God is also full of wrath and anger (numerous citations can be found in the Bible which support this).

If the Christian believes (a), (b) and (c) above, then according to them their God must always be jealous, angry and wrathful. (i.e., God must be pretty miserable.)

Some Christians may attempt to apologize their way out of this gloomy characterization of their God, but given (a), traits (b) and (c) must hold forever, since (a) states that God does not change. A jealous being that does not change is jealous so long as that being exists. The same can be said about God’s alleged wrath and anger. Of course, believers will say this is taken out of context, or make some other shoddy attempt to contend this, but such action would only betray the believer’s discomfort with this realization.

Now, what about when the believer gets to heaven? Since God’s nature does not change, and God is both jealous as well as angry and wrathful, what will God do with these unquenchable characteristics, jealousy, wrath and anger? Since all the sinners have already been damned to hell for eternity, and there can be no suffering greater than hell, God will necessarily need to find new objects for his vicious character traits.

Given this situation, what does the believer think will keep God from taking out his anger and wrath on the newcomers to his heavenly kingdom? After all, there’s plenty for God to be jealous about. For if believers make it to heaven through no effort of their own, then those who make it to heaven enjoy the unearned. And God in his eternal misery would no doubt become extremely jealous over the believers’ free ride – given that he must find an object to his vices. Consequently, he would likely take out his wrath and anger against those whom he had just welcomed to his paradise.

But then what will happen after God has exhausted his entire supply of saints in heaven, having sent them all to hell in his jealous, angry rages, and there’s no one left on whom to take out his fits? His jealousy, anger and rage are essentially co-eternal with God, since his character never changes, so he will never be able to escape his own misery. Apologists in clarifying God’s “omnipotence” claim that God cannot contradict his nature. That’s fine. But that means that he cannot simply wish his anger and jealousy away, for this would contradict his own character.

Would God just create more saints and sinners to destroy in his unrelenting rage? Why should he do this? He already knows the outcome, since he’s omniscience, and since he’s omniscience, he must recognize that his jealousy, wrath and anger will never go away, since God cannot change. This knowledge will likely compound God’s misery.

What is left for God to do? Certainly, any human being in this predicament would ultimately kill himself. But can God self-annihilate? This, apologists would say, would contradict his nature, and this God cannot do, they’d claim. Notwithstanding, God could learn from unquenchably miserable men and decide that suicide is the best option, and he’d only have to do it once, if he were successful. He could, after all, create a kind of cosmic Jack Kevorkian to help him do the deed (though he would probably be tempted to destroy this cosmic Jack Kevorkian before his suicide could be fully assisted to termination, since this Jack Kevorkian would be yet another object for God’s jealous rages; God would have to be extra careful not to let this happen).

Barring this, if God could not self-terminate, he would end up spending eternity in an unending, crescendoing misery, a misery which knows no end, and offers no relief. By the mystic’s own descriptions of God, which are intended to protect God from the critical scrutiny of non-believers and skeptics, the mystic has created a God who is already in the hell of its own making, a hell that never forgives, that never gives up its prisoners.

Such is the end of a jealous God.

Biblical References:
(a) – (See Mal 3:6, Ps. 119:89, Ec. 3:14, Heb. 6:17, Jas. 1:17)
(b) – (See Exodus 20:5)
(c) – (Too numerous to list)

On Transcendental Argument For The Existence Of God

We often find scenarios such as this:

• Atheist: I have no god-belief
• Theist: Okay, why is that?
• Atheist: Well, for one thing, you cannot prove that God exists.
• Theist: Certainly I can.
• Atheist: Okay, prove God exists.
• Theist: Okay. Do you believe that the laws of logic exist?
• Atheist: Sure I do. I do not think that is in dispute.
• Theist: It may not be in dispute, but I hold that your atheism cannot account for the existence of the laws of logic.

Stop right there. For one thing, the assumption that atheism as such should be held responsible for accounting for facts is fallacious. The claim that “Atheism is inadequate to explain the very reasoning processes we use to discuss the existence of God” commits the fallacy known as allegation of the neglected onus. Atheism is the absence of god-belief, and is not a positive, but a negative – “which leaves wide open what you do believe in.” [Footnote: Leonard Peikoff, "Religion Versus America," The Objectivist Forum, June, 1986, p. 14.] In other words, atheism as such is not a worldview, nor does it inform a worldview. This fact is only confirmed by the fact that there are many non-theistic philosophies which differ radically (i.e., fundamentally) from each other (such as Objectivism vs. Communism, etc.). Failure to recognize this results from the failure to recognize crucial distinctions of essential nature (such as the advocacy of the morality of rational self-interest in the case of Objectivism vis-à-vis that of altruism in Communism). Insistence on rejecting these distinctions results in a package-deal, which is a conceptual fallacy.

Going back to the debate above; And more importantly, the atheist challenged the theist to prove that God exists. After all, that is the theist’s claim, is it not? If this is what the theist claims, then he has the burden of proof to support this claim. The claim that God exists is existentially positive in nature: It asserts a positive statement about existence. Therefore, we are justified in expecting the theist to offer a positive course of argument to meet the end he is challenged to meet. The theist, in typical presuppositionalist stride, attempts immediately to shed his onus of proof, like a snake shedding his dead skin, and to turn the tables on the atheist: he now wants the atheist to contribute a positive argument for something that is apparently not in dispute between either party, and which is unproductive to the end of meeting the end which the theist is challenged to meet.

This route of debate is profoundly disingenuous. What relevance does one atheist’s ignorance of the proper foundations of the laws of logic have to do with the establishment of an existentially positive claim? It does not follow from Mr. A’s ignorance of X that Mr. B’s assertion that Y exists is true. Even if Mr. B wants to propose a relationship between X and Y (in this case, between the laws of logic and the existence of God), Mr. B still bears the prior onus of demonstrating his claim that Y exists. Only then, after he has settle this matter in question, can he then proceed to pontificate on his claim that some relationship exists between X and Y. This kind of tactic merely attempts

It is the attempt to persuade without putting forth a legitimate proof. This is the baiting nature of presuppositionalism, for it attempts to goad non-believers into accepting the believer’s questionable premises by ceasing on something which the non-believer does accept, but for which the non-believer may or may not have a ready explanation. The non-believer’s lack of a ready explanation, however, does not prove the believer’s questionable premises by any stretch. In this very sense, the transcendental argument for the existence of God, and presuppositionalism in general, are merely intricate arguments from ignorance.

The certainty of the claim that God exists, notwithstanding the incoherence of the attributes ascribed to it, does not and cannot follow from one’s ignorance of another matter.

Christian apologists claim that ” that without any foundational or overarching (transcendental) source, truth, morality, value, and meaning cannot be absolute but only relative (to oneself, one’s culture, a historical epoch, an evolutionary stage, etc.).” But how do they establish this? As an Objectivist, I do not object to the call to clarify one’s foundations. Indeed, there is nothing so crucially important to the validity of a worldview. As I see it, one has three basic alternatives when it comes to defining one’s foundations, one which is valid, the other two being invalid:

1. Existence – as Objectivism holds (“existence exsits”)
2. Non-existence – and this would be absurd, because existence exists
3. Consciousness – because philosophers want to start with a zero (non-existence) but still need to explain 1. above.

The theist refuses to start with the universe as his foundation. He gives many different reasons for this, but all these reasons are disabled by dubious assumptions. Essentially, this means he does not want to begin with the fact of existence as such. If he were willing to begin with the fact of existence as his irreducible foundation, he should have no problem embracing Objectivism fully.

The fact that many philosophers wish to begin with non-existence is evident in their theories about “space,” and in arguments such as the “first cause” argument, which posits a beginning to the universe (i.e., of existence as such). “The universe had to come from somewhere,” they chatter, remaining blind to the fact that “somewhere” implies the existence of the universe already. ‘Universe’ is the sum total of existence; if something exists, it is by definition a member of the universe. There are no existents which exist “outside” the universe. There is no “outside” the universe. To posit the need to explain the alleged beginning of the universe is to imply that one must start with the zero of “nothingness.”

But the universe indisputably exists, because existence exists. And the theist now has a problem: how does he get from the non-existence with which he implicitly wants to begin (and, incidentally, to which he wants to return), to the fact that existence does exist? How does he get from the vacuum of nothing to the plenum [Footnote: By 'plenum' I mean "an assembly attended by all members" (Webster's II New Riverside Dictionary, s.v., 'plenum'.] of the universe? Here he needs causality: the universe is the result of a prior cause. But to posit causality, he needs an agent which does the causing. One cannot posit a cause without also positing something that does the causing, just as one cannot have a dance without a dancer. And this is where we get to the notion of a God: a form of consciousness which is the source of all existence. Thus, for the theist, consciousness holds primacy over existence. This is the doctrine of metaphysical subjectivism, which assumes the validity of the primacy of consciousness, which Objectivism shows to be false.

Therefore, the claim that one needs a “transcendent” (i.e., beyond existence) principle as the foundation to logic, reasoning, cognition, conceptual thought, intelligibility, or what have you, is built on false premises, and should be rejected.

Fake Miracles

I’ve heard of couples claiming to have had miracle babies. The narration of the so-called divine miracle often goes like this:

Our first baby (was very sick after birth/a miscarriage/stillborn/died after birth). Doctors said we could not have any more babies. So we prayed to Jesus and he gave us another baby(s).

On closer examination, one would find that the mother had a Rhesus negative blood type, the Dad had a rhesus positive blood type, the first baby suffered from Erythroblastosis fetalis and the second baby was given Rho(D) Immune Globulin for its survival & health.

This is a classic case of faith taking all the credit for what science did.

Why do couples do it? Possible reasons include:

1. To earn brownie points in the religious community. What more do you need than to show to your community that you are so pious/virtuous that you were capable of winning favors from none less than God himself?!
2. To hide a secretly done Therapeutic abortion. The couple might have chosen to abort the fetus to save the life of the mother. But that would be considered evil by their religious community. So to mask that you would have to pretend that the second baby & what happened to the first was endorsed by God.

Source: My molecular genetics lectures at NUS.

Ravi Lies For Jesus Again

Here is a video analysis of yet another lie by Ravi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyd6om8IC4M

In the video, Ravi narrates how he bested an atheist student in a debate. But the only problem is, in one narration this “fictional” debate takes place at Harvard. And in another narration the same “fictional” debate took place at University of Nottingham.

The Source of Morality

This is the speech by John Galt (from Atlas Shrugged), on the source of morality. He is far more eloquent than I can ever hope to be and far more rational too. He beats the Christian claim on morality easily in this speech.. Rational self-interest is the source of morality.

———————————————————————————————————-

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. 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 you who have never known any  but to discover it.

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

“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 no 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 code of action, 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 (hat 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.

“A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

“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.

“AH 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.

“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness to value the failure of your values is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man every man is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

“No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man by the work and the judgment of your mind.

“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

“No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival your victims.

“If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.

“We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.

“Existence exists and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two existence and consciousness are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was no matter what his errors  the greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders1 attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow right or wrong? Is a

man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’

you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’ he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’

“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason Purpose Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness:

rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life

that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a

default of justice and only the evil can profit and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values that all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

“Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your Me in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now

saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

“This wish which you share, yet submerge as an evil is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws, A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit his love, his friendship, his esteem except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure,

which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread a man of justice.

“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men?

None except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate do you hear me? no man may start the use of physical force against others.

“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

“Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in. place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’ and neither is possible to man without the other.

“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.

That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I

do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force.

“It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

“In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

“You who are worshippers of the zero you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from. us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness.

You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

“You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical’ you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once there is no place to run

stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but

with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin, “A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is. like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge he acquired a mind and became a rational being.

It was the knowledge of good and evil he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love he was not man.

“Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin.

His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

“No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine

it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

“Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations

he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution, and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his. consciousness impotent.

“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit the destruction of his mind.

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God, Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth to his great-grandchildren.

“Selfishness say both is man’s evil. Man’s good say both is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice cry both is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

“Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ’sacrifice.’ Use the

last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

” ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’

is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself

that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

“If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice, “A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ’sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing.

If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice no values, no standards, no judgment those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values.

To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own else your gift is not a sacrifice.

“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite

yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another

the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake.

Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil

surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’ end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth

in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’ the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’

The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’

is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others  all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“Your code which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective  your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world.

You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

‘The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness nonexistence as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw the zero.

“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it Guilt is all that you retain within your soul and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.

The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not 1034 so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in Its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to ‘those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if

you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

“Such was your goal and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.

“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,’ which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm?

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

“It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.

“What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance

of one mile; in their nonmaterial, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?’ they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how’ is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.’ On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

“And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce “their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

“The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’

“There is no honest revolt against reason and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything., the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will that you are a man that you are an entity that you are.

“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

“Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’

“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the

power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

“Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind.

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

“Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

“The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Al!

actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent which is the universe of your teachers’ desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don’t see then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that “all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

“Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause

you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

“Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.

“You who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.

“Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by blank-out.

“Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don’t possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don’t produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air

while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.

“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

“As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.

“As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who

created the factory so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as ‘motion.’ As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who’s to produce it so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as ‘change’ is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.

” ‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge ‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute ‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, “When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception  let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness and you will know the purpose of their creed.

“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move and the birth of his mind is the day when

he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him.

His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself;

reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason.

Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother?

Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’

“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’

and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of blank-out. An industrialist blank-out there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

“The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.

“They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’ his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world.

Created by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’

Supplied by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand of whom? Blank-out.

“And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’

“Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body

you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens  they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages  and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

“From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries

to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

“When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is yours.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in. the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a

fear of dependence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’

he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

“From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness

and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

“When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent, ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.

A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked.

His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others just as he is a parasite in spirit, who

plunders the ideas created by others so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it, A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’

no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

“You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions

there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

“You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

“You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’ may the God you invented forgive you!

they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

“It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.

“It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue.

Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice and you are the last of their victims.

“We, who were the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time and I am the man who has called in the loan.

“I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.

“Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor.

I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

“Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.

“Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.

“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values the impotence of death.

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’

“I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.

“If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness

unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century then let them ask themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making’ will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.’

“Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men’s means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists.

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’

“You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

“This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence

the congenital dependent is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It’s only human,’ you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human’ mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure as if ‘to feel’ were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but

virtue were not  as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

“In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be nonprofit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. ‘Public benefit’ is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare’

is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. ‘The public,’ to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.

“What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the ‘No’ of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live, “Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them, alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

“I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.

“The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival,

leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.

“But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.

“I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity’s brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

“You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

“Unless you learn the answers to these questions and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man’s mind

you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.

“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice.

Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.

“Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral ‘instincts’ which others profess to feel.

The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self,

the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.

“No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain

then your choice is to be moral or to live.

“The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works.

And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good’ was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ‘evil’ was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

“Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness; you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

“Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures  and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

“If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation  of yourself, of life, of virtue in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

“Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

“Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception your mind then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are

locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

“The fence you have been straddling for two hours while hearing my words and seeking to escape them is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road.

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute.

Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.

But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing.

When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

“At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational

that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity

you declare that the looters’ ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away.

Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

“You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

“You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith’ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading

that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject, “You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

“By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

“Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

“Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it if he’s chosen an irrational standard he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

“It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think.

Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ’selfishness,’ weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

“The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential ‘you’ which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.’ Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us.

The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek which is yours for the taking.

“Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I  I am only the man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.

“That choice is yours to make. That choice the dedication to one’s highest potential is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.

“Whoever you are you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: I am, therefore I’ll think.1

“Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind.

Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal.

Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

“Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

“Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of “knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel if  or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It’s only logic’ which means: ‘It’s only reality.’ The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

“Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness not pain or mindless self-indulgence is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than, the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.

“As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim  is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.

“Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you-: what you have done to society, you had done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.

“We whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer we had lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented and it became, in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your soul and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other.

“When you failed to give recognition to man’s mind and attempted to rule human beings by force those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don’t submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?

“It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality on the inviolate supremacy of man’s right to exist but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as ‘material greed,’ you kept offering apologies for this country’s greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe’s idol of a leprous, mystic bum.

“This country the product of reason could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man’s soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn’t. You let them infect you with the worship of need and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged?

“Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A country’s political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man’s life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

“You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

“Rights are a moral concept and morality is a matter of choice.

Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.

“Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality to think, to work and to keep the results which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights,’ as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.’

“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short range and starve when their prey runs out just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical’ if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested

with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.

“So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he’s unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him,, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.

“Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time.

If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

“Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor the man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability.

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.

“Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us free to function free to think and to work as we choose free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses

free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind’s ability to see it free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind.

Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: ‘May you be damned!1 Our answer came true. You are.

“You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won

by successful production you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now, “Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure knowledge’

the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge’ or any sort of ‘disinterested’ action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?

“But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘ to the order of others.’ If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who’re making an effort to know. Those who’re making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

“I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’

terms or to win at a game where they’re setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they’ve taken by helping them rob your neighbors.

One cannot hope to maintain one’s life by accepting bribes to condone one’s destruction. Do not struggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.

“Do not attempt to rise on the looters’ terms or to climb a ladder while they’re holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike in the manner I

did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters’ state. Since you’re captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you’re free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose.

Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they’re unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.

“If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.

“Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind’s rebirth.

“When the looters’ state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal then and on that day we will return.

“We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes.

We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you’ll build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol the sign of free trade and free minds we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don’t, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.

“Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it, If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.

“In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the

guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you’ll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you’ll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.

“Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

“The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you’re serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love the endurance that carries their burdens the generosity that responds to their cries of despair the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don’t exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me . . . my love?

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I

shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. 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 you who have never known any  but to discover it.

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

“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 no 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 code of action, 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 (hat 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.

“A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

“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.

“AH 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.

“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness to value the failure of your values is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man every man is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

“No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man by the work and the judgment of your mind.

“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

“No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival your victims.

“If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.

“We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.

“Existence exists and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two existence and consciousness are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was no matter what his errors  the greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders1 attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow right or wrong? Is a

man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’

you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’ he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’

“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason Purpose Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness:

rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life

that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values that all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

“Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your Me in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now

saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

“This wish which you share, yet submerge as an evil is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws, A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit his love, his friendship, his esteem except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure,

which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread a man of justice.

“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men?

None except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate do you hear me? no man may start the use of physical force against others.

“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

“Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in. place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’ and neither is possible to man without the other.

“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.

That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force.

“It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

“In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

“You who are worshippers of the zero you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from. us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness.

You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

“You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical’ you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once there is no place to run

stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but

with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin, “A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is. like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge he acquired a mind and became a rational being.

It was the knowledge of good and evil he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love he was not man.

“Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin.

His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

“No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine

it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

“Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations

he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution, and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his. consciousness impotent.

“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit the destruction of his mind.

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God, Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth to his great-grandchildren.

“Selfishness say both is man’s evil. Man’s good say both is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice cry both is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

“Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ’sacrifice.’ Use the

last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

” ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’

is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself

that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

“If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice, “A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ’sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing.

If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice no values, no standards, no judgment those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values.

To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own else your gift is not a sacrifice.

“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite

yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another

the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake.

Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil

surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’ end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth

in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’ the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’

The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’

is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others  all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“Your code which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective  your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world.

You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

‘The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness nonexistence as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw the zero.

“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it Guilt is all that you retain within your soul and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.

The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not 1034 so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in Its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to ‘those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if

you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

“Such was your goal and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.

“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,’ which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm?

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

“It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.

“What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance

of one mile; in their nonmaterial, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?’ they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how’ is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.’ On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

“And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce “their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

“The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’

“There is no honest revolt against reason and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything., the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will that you are a man that you are an entity that you are.

“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

“Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’

“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the

power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

“Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind.

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

“Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

“The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Al!

actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent which is the universe of your teachers’ desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don’t see then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that “all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

“Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause

you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

“Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.

“You who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.

“Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by blank-out.

“Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don’t possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don’t produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air

while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.

“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

“As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.

“As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who

created the factory so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as ‘motion.’ As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who’s to produce it so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as ‘change’ is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.

” ‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge ‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute ‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, “When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception  let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness and you will know the purpose of their creed.

“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move and the birth of his mind is the day when

he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him.

His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself;

reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason.

Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother?

Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’

“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’

and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of blank-out. An industrialist blank-out there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

“The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.

“They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’ his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world.

Created by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’

Supplied by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand of whom? Blank-out.

“And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’

“Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body

you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens  they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages  and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

“From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

“When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is yours.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in. the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a

fear of dependence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’

he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

“From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness

and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

“When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent, ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.

A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked.

His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others just as he is a parasite in spirit, who

plunders the ideas created by others so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it, A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

“You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions

there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

“You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

“You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’ may the God you invented forgive you!

they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

“It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.

“It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue.

Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice and you are the last of their victims.

“We, who were the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time and I am the man who has called in the loan.

“I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.

“Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor.

I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

“Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.

“Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.

“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values the impotence of death.

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’

“I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.

“If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness

unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century then let them ask themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making’ will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.’

“Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men’s means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists.

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’

“You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

“This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence

the congenital dependent is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It’s only human,’ you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human’ mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure as if ‘to feel’ were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not  as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

“In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be nonprofit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. ‘Public benefit’ is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare’

is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. ‘The public,’ to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.

“What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the ‘No’ of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live, “Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them, alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

“I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.

“The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival,

leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.

“But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.

“I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity’s brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

“You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

“Unless you learn the answers to these questions and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man’s mind

you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.

“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice.

Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.

“Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral ‘instincts’ which others profess to feel.

The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self,

the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.

“No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain

then your choice is to be moral or to live.

“The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works.

And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good’ was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ‘evil’ was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

“Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness; you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

“Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures  and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

“If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation  of yourself, of life, of virtue in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

“Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

“Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception your mind then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are

locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

“The fence you have been straddling for two hours while hearing my words and seeking to escape them is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road.

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute.

Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.

But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing.

When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

“At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity

you declare that the looters’ ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away.

Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

“You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

“You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith‘ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading

that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject, “You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

“By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

“Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

“Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it if he’s chosen an irrational standard he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

“It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think.

Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial rea