The Renaissance—the rebirth of man’s mind—blasted the rule of the Witch Doctor sky-high, setting the earth free of his power. The liberation was not total, nor was it immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural influence of mysticism—of avowed mysticism—was broken. Men could no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were seeing the achievements of science.
The Renaissance did not dethrone Attila at once: he clung to his fading power a while longer, building his absolute monarchies on the remnants of his crumbling feudal state. But once again, as in the Greco-Roman era, Attila was ineffectual when left on his own. He was mentally helpless and scared, unable to cope with the tide of liberation sweeping the world. He ran blindly amuck in the practice of his only skill and purpose, that of material extortion, bringing nations to ragged poverty by his constant wars and levies, taxing away the last of his subjects’ possessions. But when it came to intellectual issues, he kept appeasing the advocates of freedom, he assumed the role of their pupil, protector and “patron of the arts,” lapsing occasionally into frantic bursts of censorship “and persecution, then returning to the role of “enlightened monarch.” Attila, like any bully and like many animals, feels confident only when he smells fear in his opponents—and it is not fear that thinkers project when they fight for the freedom of the mind. “The divine right of kings” was not much of a weapon against men who were discovering the rights of man.
The industrial revolution completed the task of the Renaissance: it blasted Attila off his throne. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom.
The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America. The moral code implicit in its political principles was not the Witch Doctor’s code of self-sacrifice. The political principles embodied in its Constitution were not Attila’s blank check on brute force, but men’s protection against any future Attila’s ambition.
The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of their intellect.
A society based on and geared to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, a society dominated by a philosophy of reason, has no place for the rule of fear and guilt. Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one’s thinking—the right to live by one’s own independent judgment Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
The unprecedented social system whose fundamentals were established by the Founding Fathers, the system which set the terms, the example and the pattern for the nineteenth century—spreading to all the countries of the civilized world—was capitalism.
To be exact, it was not a full, perfect, totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America, as deadly cracks in the system’s foundations. But during the nineteenth century, the world came close to economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. The degree of any given country’s economic freedom was the exact degree of its progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.
Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit It replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—the businessman and the intellectual.
Capitalism demands the best of every man—his rationality—and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity.
In this complex pattern of human co-operation, two key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman.
The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street The intellectual’s specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called “humanities,” but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But in the racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the entire economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all the others, men need a knowledge wider than their particular specialties, they need those who can point the way to the better mousetrap—or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the better view of existence. The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable, precise and objective as the printing presses and the television sets that carry their voices.
The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor’s economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.
It is on this fundamental division of labor and of responsibility that the intellectual has defaulted. His twin brother, the businessman, has done a superlative job and has brought men to an unprecedented material prosperity. But the intellectual has sold him out, has betrayed their common source, has failed in his own job and has brought men to spiritual bankruptcy. The businessman has raised men’s standard of living—but the intellectual has dropped men’s standard of thought to the level of an impotent savage.