This means that the ambition, the farsightedness, the drive to do better and still better, the living energy of creative men are to be throttled and suppressed—for the sake of men who have “thought enough” and “learned enough” and do not wish to be concerned with the future nor with the bothersome question of what their jobs depend on.
Alone on a desert island, bearing sole responsibility for his own survival, no man could permit himself the delusion that tomorrow is not his concern, that he can safely rest on yesterday’s knowledge and skills, and that nature owes him “security.” It is only in society—where the burden of a man’s default can be passed to the shoulders of a man who did not default—that such a delusion can be indulged in. (And it is here that the morality of altruism becomes indispensable, to provide a sanction for such parasitism.)
The claim that men doing the same type of job should all be paid the same wages, regardless of differences in their performance or output, thus penalizing the superior worker in favor of the inferior—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The claim that men should keep their jobs or be promoted on grounds, not of merit, but of seniority, so that the mediocrity who is “in” is favored above the talented newcomer, thus blocking the newcomer’s future and that of his potential employer—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The claim that an employer should be compelled to deal with a specific union which has an arbitrary power to exclude applicants for membership, so that the chance to work at a certain craft is handed down from father to son and no newcomer can enter to threaten the established vested interests, thus blocking progress in the entire field, like the guild system of the Middle Ages—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The claim that men should be retained in jobs that have become unnecessary, doing work that is wasteful or superfluous, to spare them the difficulties of retraining for new jobs—thus contributing, as in the case of railroads, to the virtual destruction of an entire industry—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The denunciation of capitalism for such “iniquities” as allowing an old corner grocer to be driven out of business by a big chain store, the denunciation implying that the economic well-being and progress of the old grocer’s customers and of the chain store owners should be throttled to protect the limitations of the old grocer’s initiative or skill—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The court’s decree, under the antitrust laws, that a successful business establishment does not have a right to its patents, but must give them, royalty-free, to a would-be competitor who cannot afford to pay for them (General Electric case, 1948)—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The court’s edict convicting and blocking a business concern for the crime of farsightedness, the crime of anticipating future demand and expanding plant capacity to meet it, and of thereby possibly “discouraging” future competitors (ALCOA case, 1945)—this is the legal penalizing of growth, this is the penalizing of ability for being ability—and this is the naked essence and goal of the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as best to further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the productive process, whatever their level of ability. But it is not geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality.
When one considers the spectacular success, the unprecedented prosperity, that capitalism has achieved in practice (even with hampering controls)—and when one considers the dismal failure of every variety of collectivism—it should be clear that the enemies of capitalism are not motivated, at root, by economic considerations. They are motivated by metaphysical considerations—by a rebellion against the human mode of survival, a rebellion against the fact that life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action—and by the dream that, if only they can harness the men who do not resent the nature of life, they will make existence tolerable for those who do resent it.
(August 1963)
17. Racism
by Ayn Rand
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)—the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)—the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law—the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history—all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”
The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.
Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race—is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.
Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).