Ecology as a social principle . . . . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men's return to "nature," to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
[(1974) "The Lessons of Vietnam," Ayn Rand Letter, III, 25, 1.]
Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In "nature," the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.
[(1971) "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," Return of the Primitive, 288.]
City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is whole-sale death.
[(1971) "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," Return of the Primitive, 282.]
If you consider, not merely the length, but the kind of life men have to lead in the undeveloped parts of the world—"the quality of life," to borrow, with full meaning, the ecologists' meaningless catch phrase—if you consider the squalor, the misery, the helplessness, the fear, the unspeakably hard labor, the festering diseases, the plagues, the starvation, you will begin to appreciate the role of technology in man's existence.
Make no mistake about it: it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy. To quote again form the Newsweek survey: "What worries ecologists is that people now upset about the environment may ultimately look to technology to solve everything. . ." This is repeated over and over again; technological solutions, they claim, will merely create new problems.
[(1971) "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," Return of the Primitive, 279.]
The enemies of the Industrial Revolution—its displaced persons—were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God—for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God's will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist—by the divine will of inanimate matter.
The demand to "restrict" technology is the demand to restrict man's mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away.
[(1971) "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," Return of the Primitive, 285.]
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