Atlas Shrugged: Select Commentary on Galt's Speech
Potential Apprentice Jop
September 4, 2017
[unfinished]
[This initial effort was aborted, see The Standard of Death for our second attempt.]
The Gentle Reader may be forgiven if he believes our website title should hint about, if not our supposed obsession with Cancer Geminis, then, at least, our actual obsession with the Garden of Delights.
We believe that knowledge is foundational, that is, it is raised upon what has been established. Hence, we question the prudence of reading the incident in the Garden without analysing the implications and hastley continue reading the remainder of the text, whether the Genesis or the Bible. Therefore, we frequently return to the Garden, although we have written an oratorio and several detailed papers; provided one continually questions the text, the Garden is gift that keeps on giving.
This essay focuses on John Galt’s speech in “Atlas Shrugged” that explicitly discusses the events, and implications, pertaining to the Garden. We recommend that the Gentle Reader familiarize himself with the entire speech.
We believe that knowledge is foundational, that is, it is raised upon what has been established. Hence, we question the prudence of reading the incident in the Garden without analysing the implications and hastley continue reading the remainder of the text, whether the Genesis or the Bible. Therefore, we frequently return to the Garden, although we have written an oratorio and several detailed papers; provided one continually questions the text, the Garden is gift that keeps on giving.
This essay focuses on John Galt’s speech in “Atlas Shrugged” that explicitly discusses the events, and implications, pertaining to the Garden. We recommend that the Gentle Reader familiarize himself with the entire speech.
“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical ... that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by … a supernatural power ….”
“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…”
“And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.”
“Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason — ... there’s no reason to be moral.”
“[I]t 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.”
“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you ... call ‘human nature,’ ... is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.
We are presented with the fact without any evidence or argument.
"Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.”
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.
A "code of values" may be understood as a "hierarchy of values".
‘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.”
Adam chose to eat the fruit, so there must be some value to the knowledge of good and evil.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence —and it pertains ... to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional ….
Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist…”
The indestructible nature of matter is an ancient philosophical concept.
“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.”
Adam learns the nature of good and evil.
“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.”
Adam has no automatic course of action, only the guidance from the Lord God.
“An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge.”
Although we know the tragic outcome of the events in the Garden, it is strange to realize that Adam had no instinct of self preservation.
“And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that ... [y]our fear of death is not a love of life …"
"Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.”
We presume Adam thought about whether he should or should not eat the fruit, as the tree "was pleasant to the eyes". The aspect that distinguishes humanity from animal is our ability to think, yet thinking is not automatic. Therefore, there should be various levels or degrees of humanity: those who reason most of the time, those who reason some of the time, and those who never reason.
“Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
We cannot understand this statement as man's engagement in wars and conflicts, since the intention of war is the destruction of another, not oneself. Therefore, this statement must refer to Adam in the garden.
“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.”
Was Adam rational or suicidal?
“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.”
If man does not choose to be man, then we must designate another name: "not yet man", "hardly human", or "sub human".
“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
The hierarchy of values is not, and cannot be, a "code of morality".
“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.
We assume this "standard of value" is the man who thinks or reasons most of the time, in contrast to those who rarely reason.
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”
We wonder what, if anything, is proper to an irrational being.
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a ... thug or a … mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement …”
The "life of a thinking being" is a strange expression.
Achievement can be understood as gaining the knowledge of good and evil.
Achievement can be understood as gaining the knowledge of good and evil.
“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose."
Purpose is "the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists."
"If existence on earth is your goal, [then] 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.”
What is proper to a mature man may not be proper for an immature human being.
“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 …”
“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 … the role of ... seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the ... nature of life, 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 ... 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.”
Man's nature requires that he live in a certain manner, yet nature does not for man to think.
“Sweep aside those … who … proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They ... claim … [that] man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature ...
“Sweep aside those … who ... preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. 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.”
Since the woman did not die, Adam concluded that the eating the fruit would not be fatal.
“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else— … the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that … drags itself through ...years ... of unthinking self-destruction.”
"[Y]ou must live as a man" and "you do not have to live as a man" are found in proximity.
“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice.”
“No, you do not have to be a man...
We wonder if there is a distinction in the author's mind between "living" as a man and "being" a man.
“I brought them [those on strike], not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.”
The “name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code … is … that existence exists.”
“Existence exists —and the act of grasping that statement implies ... that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing ... 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.”
“If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.”
If reality does not exist, then we cannot be conscious of reality and we will allow the Gentle Researcher to ponder the significance of that possible insight into our reality.
“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, … —existence and consciousness —are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action ..., in any part of your knowledge ...
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.”
We may state that we know what we have experienced.
“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. Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”
“Whatever you choose to consider, … the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, … it cannot freeze and burn at the same time.”
“All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have … 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."
We will not state the obvious implication of this sentence.
"The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason …”
Man has “evidence”, not proof, of existence.
Man’s “senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.”
The supposition that man can learn the nature of reality is not without some merit, yet we cannot know if what we learn is ultimately true.
“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists.”
We may state that we recall many experiences.
“Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist.”
“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.”
Based upon this definition of valid concepts, we may say that there are only a handful of non contradictory concepts available to man.
“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking …”
This advice is only helpful to those who think and reason.
“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist …
Does the "Great Leprechaun of the Universe" exist? If not, why not?
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.”
Reason is the only standard of truth, so it seems that one can reason that the "Great Leprechaun of the Universe" does not exist, alternately, once can reason that the "Great Leprechaun of the Universe" does exist.
“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. Your mind is your only judge of truth —and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal.”
Few people would declare that the events in the Garden touch upon reality; for example, a talking serpent with legs. Reality is not the realm of opinions.
“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason —man’s reason is his moral faculty.”
Adam’s reason, or moral faculty, is contrasted with the declaration of the Lord God that Adam will die if he eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
“A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? “
“It is the answers to ... questions that gave you everything you have —and the answers came from … a mind of ... 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, ... —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."
It seems that the woman was moral and rational and, as a consequence, noble and heroic. Responsibility is "the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something". It is odd to write that "the fact of being accountable" is to thinking.
“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 …”
“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And … the source of all his evils, is … the willful ... refusal to think … ; not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”
“Non-thinking is ... a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out …”
“This ... is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking …”
“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.”
“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”
As Apprentice Denver observed, the choice is between a life in obedience to revelation or a life devoted to reason.
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 ...
“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it …”
“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness …”
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value …”
“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature …”
“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 …”
“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 …”
“His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.”
“Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it … 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 … depends on your standard of value.”
“Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.”
“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, … —you will reach it.”
“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 … 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 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 …”
“ Just as he [the trader] 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 … 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 ... and to all of existence: rationality.”
“I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason. I seek ... 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.”
“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."
We suggest that only immature minds can be forced; usually through guilt and fear.
"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.”
When we observe that men behave as "irrational animals" by our senses, it seems unreasonal to treat them as mature or rational men.
We are less concerned about forcing an immature mind, than having behavior conform to certain standards of civility.
We are less concerned about forcing an immature mind, than having behavior conform to certain standards of civility.
“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.”
Of course, since the majority of people are not rational, few individuals act for their own interests.
“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.”
“I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason.”
Yet, can the author "claim the sanction of reason" in one section, but deny reason in other section, or should we agree that "no advocate of contradictions can claim it [reason]."
“I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. 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 seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.”
“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 ...
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 … who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power ...—you do not wish to live, and only [the] fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. The purpose of your struggle is not to know ... that yours is the Morality of Death.”
“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal…”
“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 ... 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.”
While there is no requirement of “proof” for reality and existence, proof is demanded for man’s “depravity”.
“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his … tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by … the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence ..., 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 … [a] contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.
If man is evil by birth, [then] he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, [then] he can be neither good nor evil ...
We are unable to follow why men, if they are born evil, are unable to change, nor do we understand why the lack of will renders man neither good nor evil.
To hold ... a fact not open to his choice [man’s sin] 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.
We agree that people must be held accountable for their crimes, and if there is no crime, there is no punishment.
To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.
The default setting for man is "guilty".
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.”
“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.”
Free will "is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded". Unimpeded means "not obstructed or hindered".
“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 ... became a rational being.”
The tree was of the “knowledge of good and evil”. The implication of this omission is man cannot be burdened with concepts of good and evil and be rational. This is in implicit contradiction to the statement that morality is rational.
“It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being.
He was sentenced to ... became a productive being.
He was sentenced to experience desire …
The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness; joy— all the cardinal values of his existence.”
The cardinal values of the mature man are listed.
“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 … who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love —he was not man.”
Adam was to keep the garden (possibly meaning labor) and he lonely before the formation of the woman (possibly meaning love). We do not know if Adam was mindless when the Lord God gave the commandment or if Adam lacked values.
“Man’s fall ... was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues … are his Sin. His evil ... is that he’s man. His guilt ... is that he lives.”
“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. They seek to help him ... against his pain —and they point at the torture rack ... 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 … conflict, … 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 ... which leads into the freedom of the grave.”
Man “is a hopeless misfit made of two elements ... 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 nonexistent, that only the unknowable exists.”
“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 …”
The suggestion that man had reason is without evidence.
“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, ... he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth."
It seems that man cannot recover his natural ability to reason.
"Real existence … 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: … 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 revelation, the other to their reflexes.
Might is right.
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 … 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 ... 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 … must be subordinated to the will of God.
Man’s mind … must be subordinated to the will of Society.
Man’s standard of value ... 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 ... 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 … is to become … [a] zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
His reward ... will be given to him beyond the grave.
His reward ... will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.
“Selfishness … is man’s evil. Man’s good … is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice … is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.
“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’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
“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 renounce all personal desire 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, … no value ..., 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 … 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. 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 ...
It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds ... 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 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 value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice.
By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.
“Are you thinking … 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 ...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 ...
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 ... to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory ...
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-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind … one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity.
You are the only outcast who has no right to wish to 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 … : 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 ... as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guilty 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?
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 demand ...
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 —non-existence —as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defeat: 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 ... 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.
"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 ... 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 face 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 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 ... 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 the 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 stockyard, 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 so 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 non-material, 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 water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and … 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 our wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through ... 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.
“[T]he 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 the 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 ... 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 casual 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. All 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 non-entity 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 ... 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 to 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 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 ... our world, gibbering … 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 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. ... 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 not 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 non-existence —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 witch-doctor 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 state when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perception 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 [the savage] 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—…
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 ... 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 face 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 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 ... 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 the 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 stockyard, 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 so 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 non-material, 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 water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and … 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 our wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through ... 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.
“[T]he 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 the 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 ... 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 casual 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. All 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 non-entity 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 ... 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 to 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 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 ... our world, gibbering … 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 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. ... 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 not 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 non-existence —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 witch-doctor 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 state when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perception 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 [the savage] 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—…
Introduction
The Gentle Reader may be forgiven if he believes our website title should hint about, if not our supposed obsession with Cancer Geminis, then, at least, our actual obsession with the Garden of Delights.
We believe that knowledge is foundational, that is, it is raised upon what has been established. Hence, we question the prudence of reading the incident in the Garden without analysing the implications and hastley continue reading the remainder of the text, whether the Genesis or the Bible. Therefore, we frequently return to the Garden, although we have written an oratorio and several detailed papers; provided one continually questions the text, the Garden is gift that keeps on giving.
This essay focuses on John Galt’s speech in “Atlas Shrugged” that explicitly discusses the events, and implications, pertaining to the Garden. We recommend that the Gentle Reader familiarise himself with the entire speech.
We believe that knowledge is foundational, that is, it is raised upon what has been established. Hence, we question the prudence of reading the incident in the Garden without analysing the implications and hastley continue reading the remainder of the text, whether the Genesis or the Bible. Therefore, we frequently return to the Garden, although we have written an oratorio and several detailed papers; provided one continually questions the text, the Garden is gift that keeps on giving.
This essay focuses on John Galt’s speech in “Atlas Shrugged” that explicitly discusses the events, and implications, pertaining to the Garden. We recommend that the Gentle Reader familiarise himself with the entire speech.
part the first
“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical ... that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by … a supernatural power ….”
“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…”
“And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.”
“Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason — ... there’s no reason to be moral.”
“[I]t 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.”
“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you ... call ‘human nature,’ ... 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.”
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘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.”
Adam chose to eat the fruit, so there must be some value to the knowledge of good and evil.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence —and it pertains ... to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, …. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist…”
The indestructible nature of matter is an ancient philosophical concept.
“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.”
Adam learns the nature of good and evil.
“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.”
Adam has no automatic course of action, only the guidance from the Lord God.
“An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge.”
It is strange to state that Adam had no instinct of self preservation.
“And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that ... [y]our fear of death is not a love of life …
Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.”
We presume Adam thought about whether he should or should not eat the fruit.
“Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
Adam in the garden.
“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.”
Was Adam rational or suicidal?
“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.”
“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.”
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a ... thug or a … mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement …”
Achievement can be understood as gaining the knowledge of good and evil.
“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, [then] 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 …”
“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 … the role of ... seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the ... nature of life, 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 ... 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 … who … proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They ... claim … [that] man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature ...
“Sweep aside those … who ... preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. 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.”
Since the woman did not die, Adam concluded that the eating the fruit would not be fatal.
“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else— … the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that … drags itself through ...years ... of unthinking self-destruction.”
“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice.”
“No, you do not have to be a man...
“I brought them [those on strike], not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.”
The “name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code … is … that existence exists.”
“Existence exists —and the act of grasping that statement implies ... that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing ... 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.”
“If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
If reality does not exist, then we cannot be conscious of reality.
“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, … —existence and consciousness —are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action ..., in any part of your knowledge ... 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.”
We may state that we know what we have experienced.
“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. Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”
“Whatever you choose to consider, … the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, … it cannot freeze and burn at the same time.”
“All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have … 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. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason …”
Man has “evidence”, not proof, of existence.
Man’s “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. His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists.”
We have many experiences.
“Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist.”
“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.”
We may say that there are a handful of non contradictory concepts available to man.
“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking …”
“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exists … Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.”
“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. Your mind is your only judge of truth —and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal.
Few people would declare that the events in the Garden touch upon reality; for example, a talking serpent with legs.
“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason —man’s reason is his moral faculty.”
Adam’s reason, or moral faculty, is contrasted with the declaration of the Lord God.
“A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? “
“It is the answers to ... questions that gave you everything you have —and the answers came from … a mind of ... 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, ... —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.
Adam was moral and rational and, as a consequence, noble and heroic.
“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 …”
“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And … the source of all his evils, is … the willful ... refusal to think … ; not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”
“Non-thinking is ... a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out …”
“This ... is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking …”
“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.”
“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”
As Apprentice Denver observed, the choice is between a life in obedience to revelation or a life devoted to reason.
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 ...
“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it …”
“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness …”
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value …”
“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature …”
“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 …”
“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 …”
“His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.”
“Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it … 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 … depends on your standard of value.”
“Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.”
“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, … —you will reach it.”
“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 … 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 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 …”
“ Just as he [the trader] 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 … 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 ... and to all of existence: rationality.”
“I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason. I seek ... 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.”
“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.”
We are less concerned about forcing an immature mind, than having behavior conform to certain standards of civility.
“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.”
Of course, the majority of people are not rational.
“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.
“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. 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 seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.”
“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 ...
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 … who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power ...—you do not wish to live, and only [the] fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. The purpose of your struggle is not to know ... that yours is the Morality of Death.”
“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal…”
“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 ... 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.”
While there is no requirement of “proof” for reality and existence, proof is demanded for man’s “depravity”.
“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his … tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by … the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence ..., 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.”
part the second
“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and … [a] contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.
If man is evil by birth, [then] he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, [then] he can be neither good nor evil ...
To hold ... a fact not open to his choice [man’s sin] 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.”
“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 ... became a rational being.”
The tree was of the “knowledge of good and evil”. The implication of this omission is man cannot be burdened with concepts of good and evil and be rational.
“It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being.
He was sentenced to ... became a productive being.
He was sentenced to experience desire …
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 … who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love —he was not man.”
Adam was to keep the garden (labor) and he lonely before the formation of the woman (love). We do not know if Adam was mindless when the Lord God gave the commandment or if Adam lacked values.
“Man’s fall ... was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues … are his Sin. His evil ... is that he’s man. His guilt ... is that he lives.”
“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. They seek to help him ... against his pain —and they point at the torture rack ... 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 … conflict, … 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 ... which leads into the freedom of the grave.”
Man “is a hopeless misfit made of two elements ... 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 nonexistent, that only the unknowable exists.”
“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 …”
The suggestion that man had reason is without evidence.
Part the third
conclusion
“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, ... he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence … 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: … 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 revelation, 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 … 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 ... 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 … must be subordinated to the will of God.
Man’s mind … must be subordinated to the will of Society.
Man’s standard of value ... 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 ... 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 … is to become … [a] zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
His reward ... will be given to him beyond the grave.
His reward ... will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.
“Selfishness … is man’s evil. Man’s good … is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice … is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.
“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’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
“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 renounce all personal desire 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, … no value ..., 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 … 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. 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 ...
It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds ... 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 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 value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice.
By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.
“Are you thinking … 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 ...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 ...
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.
“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: … 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 revelation, 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 … 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 ... 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 … must be subordinated to the will of God.
Man’s mind … must be subordinated to the will of Society.
Man’s standard of value ... 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 ... 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 … is to become … [a] zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
His reward ... will be given to him beyond the grave.
His reward ... will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.
“Selfishness … is man’s evil. Man’s good … is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice … is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.
“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’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
“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 renounce all personal desire 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, … no value ..., 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 … 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. 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 ...
It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds ... 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 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 value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice.
By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.
“Are you thinking … 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 ...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 ...
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.