The Journals of Ayn Rand (118 page)

Man’s consciousness is not material—but neither is it an element
opposed
to matter. It is the element by which man
controls
matter—but the two are part of one entity and one universe—man cannot
change
matter, he can control it only by understanding it and shaping it to his purpose. (The distinction between “entity” and “action”—between noun and verb. The essence of
being.)

Man’s soul or spirit is
his consciousness
—here, now, on earth. The ruling element, the control, the free-will element of his consciousness is his
reason.
The rest—his emotions, his memory, his desires, his instincts—
all
are determined by his thinking, by the kind of conclusions he has made and the kind of premises he has accepted.

The man of spirit is the man of the mind. He
is the man who is not the slave, but the ruler of matter.
He
is the man who makes it possible for mankind to survive.
He
is the creative man.

The morality of the mind—to be true to truth. The great courage, integrity and responsibility that it requires. The only cardinal sin is the denial or suspension of one’s reason—the refusal to face reality, identify it and make rational connections. No man can go against his own mind—and that is why he cannot submit to force. The greatest field where this morality is needed and expressed is the field of material production.

All material production is an achievement of the spirit—of the mind. Every human creation has to start in the mind and be given form in matter—whether it’s a work of art or a commercial gadget. Every spiritual value of man has to be expressed in material form or action. What is a virtue, if man does not practice it or act upon it? The great courage and virtue of the producers.

The hatred for the producers is the hatred for man, for life and for this earth. Those who despise material producers are motivated by the desire for man’s destruction. They are the men of death.

The desire for the unearned in matter is only a consequence and an expression of a deeper, more vicious aim: the desire for the unearned in spirit. Those who want to seize the material wealth produced by others actually want the virtues of the producers, and they want to obtain them unearned and undeserved: unearned respect, unearned love, unearned admiration. They hope to obtain it by reversing man’s standard of values, by regarding all the virtues of life and of this earth as sins, and their opposites—the qualities based on and leading to death—as virtues.

The victims—the producers, the men of this earth—have accepted this monstrously evil reversal for too long. It has always been supported by force—the brute force of the organized destroyers—but the producers have submitted and obeyed, because they were disarmed morally; they had accepted the destroyers’ morality and never found their own.

The power of the “moral sanction.” It is not enough to be neutral about one’s productive talent; one must hold it as one’s highest, proudest virtue.

The free enterprise system—the system based on the morality of the producers—is now being destroyed because the producers have never [identified] their proper morality.

America versus India: which country [represents] the triumph of spirit over matter?

The present struggle is a conspiracy against the mind, a conspiracy against ability.

The men of production must set themselves free of the
guilt
which has been attached to them for centuries. Do not accept the destroyers’ morality. Do not submit to force. You do not need your exploiters. They need
you.
Let them try to get along without you. Do not give them that which they cannot force out of you, which they cannot obtain without your consent: your living power—the power of your love for life—your mind. Put an end to the use of your virtues for your own torture—and of your love of life as a tool of destruction and death. We are on strike against the morality of death. We are fighting for the morality of man, of life and of this earth.

 

 

1. The exact nature, cause, appearance and progression of accident? “Charge hangs up” in a blast furnace (can be from wrong ore).

2. The exact action needed to prevent disaster and the danger to the rescuers?

3. When alarm rings—who is supposed to answer it? Who should have taken care of accident, instead of Rearden?

4. Would coke ovens be operated late in the evening—about 8 p.m.? Yes. Do you call it a “door”? Yes.

5. Is it “structural shapes” that Danagger would get for his coal mines? If so, how much? Or is there a more essential thing which he could get direct from Rearden?

6. Is 500 tons of Rearden Metal (equivalent to 1,000 tons of steel) about right for the “quota”?

7.
For Mr. Ward’s harvesters:
how many would a modest sized plant put out in a year? How much steel would he need? 2,000-3,000 harvesters at about 1-2 tons per unit.

8. Is it “Purchasing Manager” of steel mills? Is line correct: “We’ll make it up on
volume”?
Tonnage.

The overall point: the sanction of the victim.

The looters try (e.g., through Bertram Scudder) to use the trial to discredit Rearden in the eyes of the public, to destroy his popularity, which is due to Rearden Metal. The looters are worried over the fact that the public, in gloomy silence, realizes the value and the productivity of the industrialists—as exemplified in the history of Rearden Metal.

The looters have tried to counteract it by a barrage of screaming about “greed, selfishness, the profit motive.” It has not worked. The public attitude is a glum, impassive silence. People say obediently: “Yeah, Rearden was after nothing but his own proiit”—but there is no condemnation in it, no anger or indignation; they say it without conviction—they have begun to doubt that that’s evil—they have no conviction about anything, neither in approval nor disapproval—they feel nothing but a gray, hopeless apathy. This worries the looters. They try—by means of the trial—to whip up hatred for the industrialists, for the rich, to make men like Rearden the goats and blame the national emergency on them—“they prevent the national plans from working, they break the regulations and thus stand in the way of the prosperity that the plans would certainly have given us otherwise.”

It does not work. Rearden’s attitude blows it up completely. They want Rearden’s admission that the “planning” and the controls are good, but that he selfishly ignored them. They want him to apologize for his action. He doesn’t. They wanted an industrialist’s endorsement of the public value of controls. They wanted it to be a debate over the “public good.” If he claimed that his action was for the “public good”—they would have had him, because nobody would believe it. They would have had the moral sanction. This is what he doesn’t do.

Dagny says: “Hank, that we should have come to do business like criminals!” He answers: “The real evil is our accepting it as being criminal. Ask yourself why plain highwaymen and robbers have never been a grave problem to mankind, but legal looters have made the whole of human history into a tragedy and a procession of horrors.”

[AR copied the following quote from Will Cuppy, critic and humorist for the New York
Herald Tribune:] “If the insects do win and set up a government, how will they manage, without us to raise crops for them? Do they intend to exterminate mankind or will they let a few of us remain in some minor capacity, such as planting apple trees for the Codling Moth and cotton for the Boll Weevil?”

For Rearden:
He is asked to contribute Rearden Metal for a slum playground. He asks: “What is more important—to give the slum a playground or to give Ellis Wyatt his pipeline?”

 

 

Regulations are imposed in the name of safety “for passengers and employees.” First, the miserable condition of the equipment—which is due to lack of money, rising costs and wages, no permission to raise rates, low profits—causes accidents. Then, the accidents are used as an excuse for “safety” controls.

The purpose of controls is to eliminate the necessity of judgment
(!) and to eliminate the competition, for the parasites, of the men capable of judgment. (The
“freezing”
of judgment.
This
is for “the moratorium on brains.”)

For the tunnel catastrophe:
Government Board reinstates employees (with back pay!) who have been discharged for serious infractions of basic safety rules. (See p. 9 of Union Pacific Pamphlet.) Here—the pull of the labor leader who keeps “his men,” in exchange for control of union’s votes, etc.

 

 

[
AR made the following notes for the scene in which the parasites discuss Directive 10-289.]

Stress the fact that the parasites lean on need, weakness, incompetence as the base and justification for all of their schemes. Show the “death principle” in practical application. [...]

Above all
—show the hatred of ability and of the mind. The conspiracy against ability. The attempt to eliminate the necessity of judgment. The “freezing” of judgment. The attempt to substitute a mechanical security, an automatic routine, for the risk and responsibility of exercising one’s own judgment. The attempt to seize “the motions” of the able, to copy them, and to forbid the able to advance, forbid them to make any new “motions” which would destroy the “security” of the aping robots.

The directive is known as “Directive No. 289.” It requires Mr. Thompson to declare a state of total emergency—in the name of “total stability.”

In the scene: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Mr. Weatherby, James Taggart, Orren Boyle, Dr. Ferris, and the labor leader (Fred Kinnan).

1. Everybody is attached to their jobs—cannot quit or be fired. (Freedom from worry.)

2. The industrialists are forbidden to quit—if they do, their property will be nationalized. (Freedom from risk.)

3. No more inventions and new products for the duration of the emergency. (Freedom from speculation.)

4. All patents and copyrights are taken over—to be used equally by everybody “for the public good.” Patents and copyrights are to be signed over to the nation “voluntarily” as a patriotic emergency gift. (Freedom from greed.)

5. Everybody is to produce the same amount as in the “basic year”—no more and no less. Over- or under-production is to be fined. (Freedom from exploitation.)