The Journals of Ayn Rand (86 page)

A simple example of this reversal is the man who wants a big, beautiful, luxurious house—without realizing that the [value] of such a house depends on what he wants to do in it. What if it’s big—but he has nothing to do in the rooms and all that space is wasted? What if it’s beautiful—if he has no standards, understanding, or appreciation of beauty? What if it’s luxurious—when luxury is the lavish satisfaction of desires, and he has no desires? The material is only an answer to a spiritual need, an expression of it, a tool of it. Otherwise—it’s meaningless. Without a purpose in his activity, without standards of judgment, without desires—the man might as well live in a rotting shack (or not live at all). He won’t acquire these spiritual possessions from the house—the house had to come from them, be an answer to them.

(Sex is a very eloquent and complex example of that, too. Think it over in detail sometime.)

The parasite thinks that the material will give him, not only the happiness he lacks, but also the capacity for happiness which he has discarded. And not understanding (or not admitting to himself) the source of material wealth, he thinks that he can acquire wealth second-hand, through others (as he expects to find virtue, happiness, or importance through others). (He is not a second-hander because he wants to be fed by others; he wants to be fed by others because he is a second-hander; the spiritual reversal, or crime, was first.)

From this [reversal], the parasite acquires two qualities: first, an exaggerated greed for material wealth, with no purpose for which to use it, wealth as an end in itself, and not as the means to an end (which is all that material wealth can be); second, the conviction that the way to get wealth is through others, that his activity must be directed toward the human, not the objective, productive aspect. (This is the source of: “A creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. A parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.”
[This quote is from Roark’s speech.])

This is why the parasite wants, not to make, but to “take over.” This is why he is concerned not with merit, but with pull; not with actual performance, but with faking a performance for someone else’s eyes. That is why he sees no necessity to produce anything—but only the necessity of convincing someone that he’s gone through the motions, so that he gets paid. That is why he doesn’t think it necessary to do a good job, but only to please the boss; and it doesn’t matter whether he fools the boss into thinking it was a good job—he aims to please the boss through means
not connected
with the job, such as personal flattery or social charm; he even thinks that the safe way to please the boss is one
unrelated
to the job, to the actual performance and result; wealth, he thinks, is acquired through these side-means, through any means, except production.

How—in view of this attitude—he manages to escape facing the implication that somebody else produces the wealth he wants to expropriate, by quite different methods, is an interesting question. Of course, he never quite escapes it. Hence his miserable uneasiness and uncertainty. Hence, also, the disgusting, undefined, untenable theories (they are really shouted slogans, not theories) about wealth being a matter of natural resources (forgetting who and what made resources out of matter that was useless per se), about wealth and success being just a matter of luck, and all the variations of determinism. (Under determinism, nothing has to be explained too clearly: other men produce wealth in some unstated manner, because they’re predetermined, or conditioned, that way; he, the parasite, isn’t; he’s predetermined to his method, and it’s all a matter of fate, nothing can be changed, it works that way because it has to work that way, so it’s quite all right.) Besides, irrationalism helps him to avoid the implications and the contradiction. A “contradiction” is a rational conception; an irrationalist doesn’t have to make sense.

Now, then, the parasite concentrates his ambitions and activities on getting material wealth. He may invent all sorts of minor spiritual justifications to cover up his material parasitism, but these are secondary; the parasitical convictions are not accepted in order to permit him to loot; the desire to loot was the result of the original parasitical conviction, the primary spiritual act of second-handedness. And since no “existence through others” is possible, the nearest a parasite can come to it is to exploit others materially, getting physical sustenance or unearned wealth from them, expropriating the results of their work, enslaving them.

[As part of the] proof that the parasite’s primary motive is not material:
material wealth never gives him any happiness and he doesn’t know what to do with it if he gets it.

It is not a paradox that the creator, who is not primarily concerned with material wealth, can and does enjoy it when he has it, and the parasite, who places wealth first, goes to pieces with it.

This is why the successful parasites, the Peter Keatings, are completely miserable when they reach success; this is why [so many] celebrities turn to drink, dope, or dissipation at the height of their success; this is [the source of] the vicious talk about success being only a disappointment, and the striving is better than the achievement, and the striving is all there is to do, we must always strive, never succeed, and “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” etc.

Of course, the parasite’s kind of success is the deadliest disaster for him. (Since the goal is improper, its achievement can only be disastrous.) He has hunted wealth as a substitute for his inner entity; he has thought that he would get a spiritual life out of his material possessions, that he would get virtue, happiness, inner satisfaction, all the spiritual values which he lacks. He discovers that he doesn’t get any of it; that he has not escaped from himself nor found a substitute for himself. He has nowhere else to seek and nothing to do. He is in a blind alley. From this point on, the parasite goes to pieces.

This is why those who preach “selflessness” spiritually are so inordinately concerned with material wealth—why the collectivists think that material “security” is the supreme ideal that will solve everything, while the individualist, who defends a system of private property and so-called greed, attaches little importance to material wealth, can do without it and is not afraid of poverty; he is the man who
makes
wealth and he knows its exact meaning.

Therefore, the “material parasite” and the “spiritual parasite” are interrelated aspects of the same thing, different stages of the same disease (and the two stages are never quite separate—one is merely more pronounced than the other in any particular man at any particular time). The “material parasite” seems somewhat more pleasant, more healthy, than the spiritual one; at least he is active, though in his own disgusting way; he works at being a parasite—like Peter Keating. The spiritual corruption and second-handedness are there, of course, but total disintegration has not yet set in. When Peter Keating succeeds he reaches the stage of P.H. or M.F., who were born with money, and he discovers what they have already discovered—the impotence of material wealth in regard to their problem. Then he goes to pieces, as they did in the first place. Then he turns to their neuroses, their purposeless existence, and their malice toward the whole universe. They are merely advanced stages of his disease.

So there is no essential difference between the two types of parasite, not in what they do if they succeed, nor in their ultimate goal and fate.

There is one more stage for the parasite, the third and final stage, which they do not always reach (some may die before they reach it or succeed in avoiding it all their lives). This is their real hell and their real retribution. It is the stage when a parasite discovers—or is forced to face—the truth about himself.

His whole, twisted, tortuous, miserable performance has been a search for personal value; he wanted personal virtue—but he tried every possible substitute for virtue; he ran from the realization of his own worthlessness or inferiority, and he has spent his life trying to fool himself about that, in every way possible, including the attempted denial of any value, virtue, or objective reality. In his stage of spiritual parasitism, he was still fighting against any realization of the truth—hence his malice, his mysticism, his collectivism, etc. But if and when some event forces him to see the truth—to see himself as he really is—to see and admit to himself, in full, his own
evil-that
is probably the worst thing a human being can go through. This is Peter Keating after Toohey’s speech. This is James Taggart after the priest’s refusal. In that stage, there’s literally nothing left of the parasite—not even the activity of malice. Then it’s total indifference—the passive—the Nirvana.

I suspect that a parasite who reaches this stage either goes insane, commits suicide, or soon dies from a lack of the will to live. (He doesn’t know that he actually discarded that will long ago in his first act of second-handedness, when he discarded his rational faculty, man’s means of survival; now the ultimate consequences have caught up with him in the only form that was possible, the form he asked for: self-destruction.)

Since success is the worst punishment for a parasite (the success of a man functioning on the principle of destruction
has to
be destruction), the worst thing the creators could possibly do to the parasites is precisely what John Galt does: let the parasites succeed, turn the world over to them—and let them see what happens.

Of course, the parasite’s greatest wish (in practice) is to exploit and enslave the creator, but the wish is a contradiction in terms: the creator cannot be enslaved, he cannot function that way; what we see in actual life is only his miserable struggle for the scraps of freedom he tears out of the parasites’ hands, and he functions only to the extent of those scraps. So the parasite’s wish, in factual terms, is to destroy the creator. To enslave the creator is to destroy him. (“The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.”)

Therefore, John Galt grants the parasite his wish: he removes the creators. He doesn’t destroy them, of course, but they do not exist as far as the parasite is concerned; they take no part in his world, they contribute nothing, they do not interfere with him or oppose him. He gets what he wanted—a world without creators. Then the horror follows—the destruction of the world—the logical consequences of the parasite’s principle of death; and the parasite’s inner horror must match, if not surpass, the horror of the world’s material collapse. (This is for the last scene with James Taggart and the priest.)

The parasite could exist only so long as he had the creators to lean on, to be fed by, to exploit; in this sense, the creators were responsible for him—by permitting him to do it. This is just like totalitarian economics that can exist only on the energy stolen from the free economies, who thus create their own Frankenstein monsters. This is what John Galt wants the creators to understand and to stop.

This, then, is the meaning of John Galt’s strike.
This
must be
shown
clearly, explicitly, and unmistakably (in detail, in more and broader ways than just the disintegration of James Taggart).

Dietrich Gerhardt-as
the composer on the pattern of Shostokovitch (but
not
of that nature), who, by dealing with his enemies, helps to perpetuate their hold on him, to perpetuate his own slavery and precipitate his own destruction (this last, in symbol, through the destruction of a woman he loves, a singer, or of a talented young composer-protégé).

James Taggart’s
hysterical fear of Galt—before he even sees him or hears of him, just fear of
someone like Galt,
from his own knowledge that such a person must exist, his knowledge that
this
is what is missing in the world and
this
is the retribution that will come some day. Taggart’s insane, irrational attempts to avoid that day—and the climax is when he comes face to face with Galt. (That is Galt’s place in
his
life.) (Taggart hates the expression
“Who
is John
Galt?
”—instinctively, without reason.)

As a possibility:
the scene where James Taggart finds Dagny in her garret,
scrubbing the floor. (He’s had detectives looking for her.) He finds that he cannot beg, bribe, or force her back—that he has nothing to offer her. He wants something from her—he has nothing to give in return. The position of any parasite—the exploitation made possible only by the generosity of the creator. And Dagny is cured of that. (This scene can show the
exact
nature of charity.) Dagny tells him that the cleanliness of her floor means more to her than the millions of bushels of wheat in the stomachs of the millions of people who need the train to get the wheat. What do those people intend to do to her with the energy they’ll get from the wheat she gives them?

For the politicians:
Do not name their exact political positions. Keep it vague and general—as it deserves. They are nonentities and their titles or jobs do not matter—all that matters, the essence of it, is that they are useless, faceless mediocrities, parasites and exploiters—as exemplifying the kind of government they represent. Therefore, avoid the honorable connotations attached to such a title as “President of the United States” by another era and a different principle of government. All you have is “Head of the State” or “Washington Officials.” The Head of the State is known and referred to throughout as just “Mr. Parker” (or Mr. Smith, or Mr. Johnson, or the most typically undistinguished name you can find). So are the other officials: always Mr. so-and-so, and
no first name.
The anonymity of mediocrity.