Ayn Rand on democracy:
"The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn’t like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one’s rights.
Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom . . . .
The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights."
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"the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent"
Now let us remove this from the intentional propaganda of those who feel singled out by her intellect and try desperately to "get even" with her corpse! Let us give the full speech which appeared in a work of fiction crafted to illustrate a philosophy which begins and ends with the primary of morality. This work of fiction was crafted during a time when a cold war divided humanity into two camps with irreconcilable differences--the collective versus individual rights and freedoms. I will simple interrupt the speech to make comments in brackets.
"Through all the ages, the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter - every form of iniquity: from exile to disenfranchisement to expropriation - every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad - have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness (Is this true? Of course it is. Giordano and thousands of others bear testimony) and performing the crucial act of rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which - in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders - some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. (Is that true? Of course it is) Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice - it was only by the grace of men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two makes four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction - only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human, and only the sum of such moments permitted them to continue to exist. It was the man of the mind who taught them to bake their bread, to heal their wounds, to forge their weapons and to build the jails into which they threw him. (is any of the foregoing a bad thing to say? Does it diminish humanity and civilization or does it exalt it??) He was the man of extravagant energy, and reckless generosity - who knew that stagnation is not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power - and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. This was his glory and his guilt - that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of a sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force - the mystics and the kings - the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted - and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. (Is any of this untrue? Is it hateful toward the qualities we all admire. Or is it rightfully dismissive of those who live without moral values. Those whose morality is the club and the lie?)The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach - but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust. Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. (Hitler did it, Martin Luther did it, William Craig does it.) The despoiling of ability has been the motive of every creed that preached self-sacrifice. The despoilers have always known it. We haven't. The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. (Now what does this mean? That the worship of the king or the religious priests have turned to worshiping incompetence? What does she mean by having Galt say that in his speech? Well, simply put: The world at the time was divided into communism and a mixed economy in a dangerous cold war with humanity balanced on the brink of extinction--or nearly so. The collective was being worshipped and now had a philosophy to justify it. Millions of people had been murdered. Irrational Ideas have power just as rational ideas do, and those ideas could just as easily have swept through America--as indeed they did. People like Rand tipped the balance to the rights of the individual versus the worship of the collective. History shows us how right she was. In those days I happened to read the Peking Review and I can assure you that the battle between the collective and individual rights was not mere academia. It was a matter of civilization. It only requires a groundswell of irrationality such as happened elsewhere and civilization and human rights are swept into the gutter) This is the age of the common man, they tell us - a title to which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has not managed to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we, we who must atone for the guilt of ability - we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can't produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be made to work? They know it, but it is you who don't - and they are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you not to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last - and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive - and the span of each succeeding victim will be shorter, and while you'll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread. This does not worry the looters of the moment. Their plan - like all the plans of all the royal looters of the past - is only that the loot shall last their lifetime. It has always lasted before, because in one generation they could not run out of victims. But this time - it will not last. The victims are on strike. We are on strike against martyrdom - and the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must live for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours - and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist - without our help. And, once and for all, they will learn the meaning of their creed. That creed has lasted for centuries solely by the sanction of the victims - by means of the victims acceptance of punishment for breaking a code impossible to practice. But that code was intended to be broken. It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don't, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its sinners. We have decided not to be sinners any longer. We have ceased breaking that moral code. We shall blast it out of existence forever by the one method that it can't withstand: by obeying it. We are obeying it. We are complying. In dealing with our fellow men, we are observing their code of values to the letter and sparing them all the evils they denounce. The mind is evil? We have withdrawn the works of our minds from society, and not a single idea of ours is to be used or known by men. (This is why they hate her! This is why even in her grave they attack her with apoplectic rage. They foam at the mouth as they search for words, for quotes, for any way to fool the masses) Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents. The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We do not seek to make fortunes any longer. It is evil to earn more than one's bare sustenance? We take nothing but the lowliest jobs and we produce, by the effort of our muscles, no more than we consume for our immediate needs - with not a penny nor an inventive thought left over to harm the world. It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased to burden the weak with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us. It is evil to be an employer? We have no employment to offer. It is evil to own property? We own nothing. It is evil to enjoy one's existence in this world? Their is no form of enjoyment we seek from their world, and - this was the hardest for us to attain - what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an ideal: indifference - the blank - the zero - the mark of death... We are giving men everything they've professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries. Now let them see whether they want it.
"We've heard so much about strikes, and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common. We've heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible - and what would happen to him if they walked out? Very well. I propose to show the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out."
- John Galt |
