The Journals of Ayn Rand (78 page)

For Dagny’s first meeting with Galt: When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man’s face. She thought: I know what this is. This is the world as I thought it would be when I was sixteen. Now it is beginning—and the rest of it was just somebody’s senseless joke. She smiled, as to a fellow-conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all that she would never have to take seriously again. And the man smiled back, in exactly the same way.

(“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” “No, we never had to.”)

John Galt (probably in broadcast): “I am the first man of ability who has refused to feel guilty.”

The story of the worker who remembers the factory meeting, about twelve years ago, when a slave-labor measure was [passed], and a young man got up to leave the meeting. He was an unknown young engineer. He stood alone against the hundreds, yet he made them afraid. He said: “I’m going to put an end to this, once and for all.” As he turned to go, someone asked: “How?” He answered: “I’m going to stop the motor of the world.” Then he walked out. No one’s heard of him since. The factory is long since closed. But... “You see, his name was John Galt.”

 

 

 

Philip H.
—the insane malice toward me; the dependence on M., yet his desire to crush her and hold her down. (This for James Taggart and the industrialist’s wife.)

Linda L.
—the teachers who refused her a scholarship she had earned and gave it to a less deserving girl “because she needed it more, while Linda could take care of herself.” This is the deliberate, specific rewarding of mediocrity and penalizing of competence. (For the policy of James Taggart and others of his kind.)

The school policy
of grading papers according to [effort] and not according to an objective standard. This is the most essentially vicious and corrupt measure ever devised; it is based on the premise of “to each according to his needs” (at whose expense?) and on the denial of an objective reality, which, in effect, amounts to training children for insanity. It is a denial of the simple fact that a man’s need will
not
grow his food, only a man’s ability will. It is a denial of the fact that results come from causes, that the achievement (or production) of the able man will be in proportion to and the result of his
ability and effort,
that the equal effort of a man of lesser ability will
not
[result in equal] achievement regardless of how the lesser one feels about it, that this is a fact of nature—and that the lesser one had better act accordingly, rather than attempt to harness the better man to an equality which is contrary to nature, reality and justice. (To carry out such an attempt the inferior man must accept the principle of slavery, with himself as master and the better man as slave. What is rewarded here? Incompetence. This is pure moral corruption.) This method is the total triumph of the irrational.

Walter
[Abbott]—the sensitive, poetic kind of writer who spends his time writing bloody thrillers; he thinks this is all he has a chance at. That is his form of being on strike.

Pat
—a person wrecked by a fierce sense of injustice, which she has never analyzed or defined as such. Knowing that she is right and that right
must
be recognized, yet getting no recognition, she has turned to a violent hatred of the world, to an exaggerated pride, to assuring herself too much that she is not hurt by the world—in order not to admit how badly hurt she is. And this is because she will not examine the exact nature of the reasons and motives of those who have hurt her. Also, she has turned to an insane arbitrariness—“I am right because I’m right”—since she has given up the hope of proving rightness in rational terms and having it understood or recognized. (In her particular case, the acceptance of the irrational has a great deal to do with this and with her failure. But that aspect does not concern me here, except to note an interesting question: did she accept the irrational early, because of observing what seemed to be the failure of the rational in the world, and being afraid to face such a universe—or did she accept the irrational first, through some personal fear or feeling of shortcoming, and this destroyed her whole proper life, which should have been that of a great rational thinker? I believe this last.)

The above arbitrariness has turned to hurting those whom she likes, by some peculiar multiple-inversion, like this: the irrational people have hurt her; the rational are the ones whom she needs and likes, the ones who speak her language and with whom she can deal; but she is fiercely determined to avenge herself; she knows that she cannot reach her enemies, the irrational ones, by her proper weapon, the mind; so she turns upon her friends, upon the rational ones, wreaking upon them the very thing she should hate, the thing which has hurt
her
—
the irrational.

This is a frightening kind of “collective judgment,” of revenge against the world—taking the world as a whole and trying to avenge oneself against its best for what has been done by its worst. It denies the whole conception of individual guilt and individual responsibility. One might say that this is extreme individualism—holding oneself alone against the world as a solid outside unit. But the error here is in considering the world as a “solid unit,” in denying individualism as a basic absolute of man’s nature, in actually considering the world as a
collective,
with collectivism as the natural law of the universe, and oneself as a noble but doomed outsider, a freak, a kind of Byronic damned, who is damned heroically because he will not accept reality which is evil. (Pat has hinted just that.) This is the same mistake as thinking that an individualist is a man who recognizes only his own rights.
An individualist must recognize man as an individualist.

I am not sure I want to use this—it belongs in the novel about the mind. [
AR thought of writing a novel showing the primacy of reason over emotions, but it eventually became obvious that this theme was included in
Atlas Shrugged.] I might use only the first part, the terrible bitterness created by injustice; not the second part, not the revenge through the irrational.

Frank Lloyd Wright
—a man who is a Roark in his professional life, and a Keating in his private life. How does one get to that? Strangely enough, in this case: a lack of self-confidence, personal uncertainty. It seems as if all forms of conceit are sure signs of the exact opposite. Whatever one chooses to express, or achieve, through social means is the denial of that very thing within oneself. If the method is that of the second-hander, this negation is unavoidable. For instance, to make a point of impressing one’s superiority upon others is to attach importance to their recognition of one’s superiority; if one attaches importance to it, one needs it. Why does one need it? Either as confirmation or as proof of one’s own greatness; therefore, one’s own conviction of that greatness is either uncertain or totally lacking. If one merely wished to find the understanding and appreciation of friends, one would not exhibit conceit toward them, nor stress one’s superiority. One can’t wish to have inferiors as friends; nor is the appreciation of inferiors of any sensible value. Therefore, conceit exhibited toward people can only mean a desire to establish superiority by comparison; if so, the primary determinant of superiority is not in oneself, but in others, not in what one can do, but in what they can’t do; therefore, one’s conviction of superiority has no real basis, no objective standards, no proof, no reality.

Apparently, FLW was hurt and frightened early in life by the hostility and stupidity of people toward his work. Then here was where the principle of collectivism entered: if people stood in the way of his work, it was people that he had to conquer to break his way through. Therefore, people became a crucial objective—and an enemy. On the one hand, he became extremely concerned to win them, to impress them, to get their recognition. On the other, since they are the enemy, he became convinced that he must deal with them on their own terms—through deceit, lying, flattery and rudeness, high-pressure, etc. He concluded that the terms applying to his work—honesty, beauty, intelligence, purposeful clarity, courage, directness—all of that could not apply to his dealings with people, since they were the enemies of his work whom he had to defeat. This is granting a crucial or decisive power to others, actually granting them superiority, at least in what he thinks are the regrettable practical matters, by adopting their terms and methods. (If one must deal with the collective—deal on your own terms, not on theirs. You’ve accepted the supremacy of the collective and defeated yourself when you accept their terms.)

Here there is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of individualism and of the rational. First, people do
not
hold the decisive power over you, no matter what they do or how you have to deal with them. Second, you can’t expect to achieve anything through cheating—you only get what you asked for, a fake something that doesn’t actually exist. (This might explain FLW’s [
constant
] trouble with clients. Sure, he lies or flatters them into giving him the commission. Then he pays for it by cases such as Aline Barnsdall, or all the abandoned and rushed buildings. Those clients who lasted as a proper source of satisfaction to him were not snared by lies, but by whatever honest argument appealed to the best, the honest or the intelligent within them.)

Most importantly and profoundly, there is again a misunderstanding and fear of the rational. He does not know that his own judgment—exercised to the extreme of his capacity and honesty—is the only criterion of the rational upon which he can act, possible errors included. He does not know that the number of others has nothing to do with the truth of an issue. He sees the majority disagreeing with him about his work. He presumes that they are rational beings, like himself, with rational reasons for their opinions. But nothing on earth will make him change his convictions about his work (and rightly so). Then what happens? He can say one of three things: “to hell with my own convictions”—“to hell with the collective”—or “to hell with reason” (because it is reason that tells him the dilemma is unsolvable, contradictory, and he must take a stand). He says: “To hell with reason” (as most of them do). Note how often he makes cracks at reason-the stuff about the sunrise not being logical—yet how everything about his work is based on reason, on function, on purpose.

In the clash between a man and the collective, the loser is reason
(for most men). A man cannot give up himself—and he dreads to give up the collective, because he doesn’t understand it. So he thinks the safe thing is to give up reason; then the dilemma is not irreconcilable—then nothing is irreconcilable, since nothing has to be logical or make any kind of precise sense. (Then the world can dissolve into a kind of haze of overlapping shadows without edges or definitions.
And it does.)
Actually, of all three choices, giving up reason is the most dreadful and the most fatal. It amounts to giving up all three, and everything: all of life, the whole universe (or the ability to recognize the existence of a universe). The first choice is impossible (to give up oneself). This third choice is monstrous and impossible; but it takes a long time to work out its implications, particularly since no man can actually function on such a choice, since he remains rational to the extent that he exists at all, since he only lapses into the irrational occasionally, when he needs escape—and so it is a poison that works slowly, in a prolonged agony. Only the second choice (to give up the collective) is possible—and moral.