Rand, Ayn – For the New Intellectual

a. The first of these two principles represents one’s basic rejection of the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology. It means that one must differentiate between one’s thoughts and one’s emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one’s own considered judgment from one’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. Those who claim that they cannot do it are merely confessing that they have never learned how to use their mind and are incapable of perceiving, judging or evaluating reality. This may be a psychological problem, but it becomes an intellectual fraud when such persons enter a philosophical discussion and demand consideration for their ideas. No discussion, co-operation, agreement or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.

b. This second principle represents one’s basic rejection of Attila’s psycho-epistemology. To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man—the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction—is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect. Perhaps the most obscene legacy of altruism among modern intellectuals is their axiomatic acceptance of brute force and of somebody’s sacrifice as a normal and necessary part of a human society, and their refusal to consider the possibility of a non-sacrificial, non-compulsory co-existence and co-operation among men. Observe that they cannot conceive of “selfishness” except in terms of sacrificing others to oneself, and they cannot conceive of anyone who does not regard such sacrificing as to his own interest This, of course, is a psychological confession about the nature of their own desires and about the Attila in their souls. When they declare that they see no difference between economic power and political power—which means: no difference between an employer and a holdup man, no difference between the United States and Soviet Russia—they are confessing a Witch Doctor’s abject fear of reality, which makes them equate a Producer with an Attila.

One would suppose that any man who makes claim to the title of moralist, humanitarian or intellectual would spend his life trying to devise—as an ideal—a social system where no man or group of men may initiate the use of physical force against others or demand the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. But when one remembers that such a system was devised and did exist less than a hundred years ago, one knows how to evaluate the brutes and thugs of the spirit who refuse to consider it possible.[2]

So long as men believe that the initiation of physical force by some men against others is a proper part of an organized society—hatred, violence, brutality, destruction, slaughter and the savage gang warfare of group against group are all they can or will achieve. When physical force is the ultimate arbiter, men are driven to connive, conspire and gang up on one another in order to destroy rather than be destroyed; the best perish, but the Attilas rise to the top. It might be understandable that primitive, savage tribes could not conceive of a way of life without resort to physical violence—and the bloody chaos of tribal warfare was all they achieved, as those who remained on that level still demonstrate today. But when men propose to live in an industrial civilization by the moral concepts of those jungle savages, with nuclear missiles and H-bombs at their disposal—they deserve the catastrophes they ask for. Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of physical force against individual men, in any form whatever. Let no man posture as an advocate of freedom if he claims the right to establish his version of a good society where individual dissenters are to be suppressed by means of physical force. Let no man posture as an intellectual if he proposes to elevate a thug into the position of final authority over the intellect—or if he equates the power of physical compulsion with the power of persuasion—or if he equates the power of muscles with the power of ideas.

No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.

If men of good will wish to come together for the purpose of upholding reason and establishing a rational society, they should begin by following the example of the cowboys in Western movies when the sheriff tells them at the door to a conference room: “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside.”

Those who will accept the “basic minimum” of civilization, the two principles stated above, will have made the first step toward the building of a new culture in the wide-open spaces of today’s intellectual vacuum. There is an ancient slogan that applies to our present position: “The king is dead—long live the king!” We can say, with the same dedication to the future: “The intellectuals are dead—long live the intellectuals!”—and then proceed to fulfill the responsibility which that honorable title had once implied.

We the Living

This novel was published in 1936 and reissued in 1959. Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it. The story takes place in Soviet Russia. The excerpt below is the speech of Kira Argounova to Andrei Taganov, in the following context: Kira has been having a love affair with Andrei in order to obtain money to save the life of Leo Kovalensky, the man she loves; Andrei, an idealistic young Communist, who is profoundly in love with her, was beginning to discover the importance of personal values, when, in the course of arresting Leo for a political crime, he learns the truth about Kira’s relationship to both of them.

“No, you didn’t know. But it was very simple. And not very unusual. Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your Red cities and see how many oases like this you can find. He wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren’t many of them, so they don’t count with you. The doctor said he was going to die. And I loved him. You’ve learned what that means, too, haven’t you? He didn’t need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list. …

“You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one sees it, but I do, I can’t help it, I see it, you must see it, too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what? Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn’t even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just flesh. Human flesh. And they—it—had been registered and numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if they’re registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are cobblestones to you. And diamonds—they’re useless, because they sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it’s too hard on the eyes, and it’s too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian future. You don’t pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses in the world, but of those you’ve never learned. That is why you had sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why couldn’t one aristocrat die—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to answer. I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you—he did it first! …

“That’s the question, you know, don’t you? Why can’t one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don’t understand that, do you? You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that’s what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn’t it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair—well then, why don’t you say that one’s own life doesn’t really matter? … You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You’ve had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don’t you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It’s still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It’s nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn’t it? Don’t you have something greater—greater is the word your comrades use—left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov? …

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