The Journals of Ayn Rand (125 page)

[The following passages were cut from Galt’s speech. AR put them in a folder marked: “Discards from
Atlas Shrugged
(which I like).
”]

You have heard it said that this is a time of moral crisis. You have mouthed the words yourself. You have wailed against evil and at each of its triumphs you have cried for more victims as your token of virtue. Listen, you, the symbol of whose morality is a sacrificial oven, you who feel bored by what you profess to be good, and tempted by what you profess to be evil, you who claim that virtue is its own reward and spend your life running from such rewarding, you who resent and despise those you hold to be saints, and envy those you hold to be sinners, you who proclaim that one must die for virtue, but dread having to live for it—listen—I am the first man who has ever loved virtue with the whole of my mind and being, the man who never sought another love, knowing that no other love is possible, and thus the man who rose to put an end to your obscenity of sacrificing good to evil.

Only the man who is morally fit to live on a desert island is morally fit to live in society—the man who knows that man’s life depends on production and production depends on man’s mind, that he must live by his own effort and think through his own brain, that if he chooses to live by means of force or fraud, by mooching, extorting or plundering the products of the minds of others, he is choosing to abandon his human status—to exist as something other than a man, yet to let his life depend on those who choose the existence of rational beings; he is trying to switch to them the death which would have been his on that island, he is living by the mind of his victims, by the virtue of those whom he destroys—he is choosing
death
as his standard of value, and he will reach it through an agony as sure as, but more ugly than, starvation on a desert island. Yet your code of morality was designed to foster this breed of the subhuman, to destroy the men who think and to turn the earth into that desert island. You have succeeded.

If you preach that man must hold the pursuit of his own happiness as evil and must seek self-sacrifice as his moral goal, you are asking that he twist himself into a monstrosity that takes pleasure in his own pain and finds pain in his own pleasure, that enjoys his suffering and despises his joy, that strives for his own frustration, that holds desires only to renounce them, fights battles only to lose, seeks wounds as victories and sores as medals, [like] a machine set in reverse, with its gauges switched from life to death, with death as its goal and its standard of value—a monstrosity that fights against itself and crashes in a final, bloody heap, leaving a trail of destruction behind it.

That
as a moral ideal?
That
as a code of love for man?

The mystics, who preach self-sacrifice, who preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value, who claim that they despise the body and worship the spirit—do not grant to man’s spirit the importance they grant to his body. They know that if a human body were to reject the function of maintaining its existence, it would cease to live and would turn into a mass of corruption, carrying the poison of death to those who did not avoid its contact. Yet they do not expect a life-rejecting human spirit to become an agent of infection—and they let it loose upon the world as the death-carrier which it has been through all the ages. Do you preach that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.

Do you think they are taking you back to the dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is the era of the pre-human. Consider what feat of intelligence was performed by the nameless genius who was first to identify the fact that man possesses a
mind.
Consider what tremendous mental power was spent on the invention of language, what span of centuries had to be traveled from the first inarticulate sounds that named immediate objects to the words that conveyed abstractions. The greatest achievement in communication was not the wireless telegraphy nor transatlantic radio, but the feat of the genius who grasped and taught to others the concept of identifying reality in words of objective meaning. These are the achievements which your teachers now seek to negate and to destroy, by refusing to identify them and pretending that neither mind nor words have ever been discovered. Their goal is to take you back, not to the age of pre-science, but the age of pre-language.

A man of self-confidence knows the nature of knowledge; he knows that existence exists, that reality cannot be faked, that a mind cannot be forced. He knows that nothing can be accomplished by ruling a herd one has reduced to the level of morons and liars. He is unable to fool himself about the loathsome spectacle of men who have to act under compulsion; he is unable to regard the role of a ruler as anything but personal infamy. It takes a mystic to reach so low a stage of self-deception as to derive any value or pleasure from the extorted motions faked by others—extorted by and faked under the threat of a gun.

You accept the morality of selflessness—but observe that you are unable to live except by taking
yourself
as the standard of value—a depraved, irrational, contradictory self, blindly seeking its own pleasure, struggling by corrupted means to comply with the law of existence. You profess to damn matter, but you lie and cheat to get rich; you profess to value chastity, but seek pleasure from whores; you profess to hold an altruist as your moral ideal, yet make no move to reach his rank, though it is in your power—but the man of ambition, of selfish achievement, is the man you envy, and you scramble to obtain his rank without earning it, though you profess to consider him immoral.

You believe that your heart is superior to reason, that man must live by his feelings, not his mind—as if hatred, fear and envy were not feelings, as if a man of unbridled emotions would become a paragon of virtue—as if the dope fiend who robs a store, the woman who murders in a fit of jealous rage, the sadist who indulges his craving for torture were exponents of coldly impersonal logic, while the surgeon who performs a brain operation were a man directed by his feelings.

You believe that security is superior to freedom—as if a livelihood earned by your effort voluntarily traded for the effort of others, with your body and property protected from seizure, were a state of precarious uncertainty—but the state of being bound, gagged and fed by the mercy of an arbitrary ruler, who possesses the power to cut off your food, to rob, to torture, to murder you at whim, were a state of peaceful security.