The victim of the intellectuals’ most infamous injustice was the businessman.
Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like the Witch Doctor’s, their secret vision (almost their feared and envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force, fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever ask what made it possible (they had been taught that causality is an illusion and that only the immediate moment is real). They took it as their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired only by force—and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder, with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.
With their eyes still fixed on the Middle Ages, they were maintaining this in the midst of a period when a greater amount of wealth than had ever before existed in the world was being brought into existence all around them. If the men who produced that wealth were thieves, from whom had they stolen it? Under all the shameful twists of their evasions, the intellectuals’ answer was: from those who had not produced it. They were refusing to acknowledge the industrial revolution (they are still refusing today). They were refusing to admit into their universe what neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit: the existence of man, the Producer.
Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.
Ignoring the existence of the faculty they were betraying, the faculty of discrimination, the intellect they refused to identify the fact that industrial wealth was the product of man’s mind: that an incalculable amount of intellectual power, of creative intelligence, of disciplined energy, of human genius had gone into the creation of industrial fortunes. They could not afford to identify it, because they could not afford to admit the fact that the intellect is a practical faculty, a guide to man’s successful existence on earth, and that its task is the study of reality (as well as the production of wealth), not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a special monopoly on the “unknowable.”
The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism—the morality that damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment on earth—provided the intellectuals with the means to make a virtue of evasion. It gave them a weapon that disarmed their victims; it gave them an automatic substitute for self-esteem, and a chance at an unearned moral stature. They proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer—and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.
But while the intellectuals regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to behave: he was impervious to their power. The businessman was as bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no defense, and—knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not his role—he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals’ attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but had no use for Immanuel Kant. That which today is called “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman’s only form of philosophy. The businessman asked for proof and expected things to make sense—an expectation that kicked the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of the “noumenal” world.
To understand the course the intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive their mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold on the other’s secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two blackmailers, who count on each other’s fear.
The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist society—as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any universe he cares to recognize. He has no means to deal with innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his living—who takes pride in his work and in the value of his product—who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless ambition to do better and still better and ever better—who is willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements—who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible—who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions—who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt.
What the businessman offered to the intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of ideas.
To live by the work of one’s mind, to offer men the products of one’s thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one’s ideas and to rely on nothing but objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has “to judge, accept or reject on his own—is a task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic “elite.” A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector, by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by suppression, by censorship.
Having accepted the philosophy and the psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the intellectuals rebelled against the “commercialism” of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality.
Just as Attila, since the Renaissance, was looking for a Witch Doctor of his own, so the intellectuals, since the industrial revolution, were looking for an Attila of their own. The altruist morality brought them together and gave them the weapon they needed. The field where they found each other was Socialism.
It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.
Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafes, basement beer joints and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government, and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who would gain control of the government’s machinery. They extolled the State as the “Form of the Good,” with man as its abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases, the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.