Compulsory Service for High School Students

by Tom Bowden | January 01, 2000

More than two decades ago, President Nixon ended the military draft. Now a new and more insidious form of conscription is threatening Pennsylvania public school students: House Bill 1908. This bill would make “community service” a requirement for high school graduation.

Compulsory service programs, already operative in many communities, typically give students four years to complete, say, 60 hours of labor. The students must not receive any payment. They can choose whether to serve the elderly, or the poor, or the disabled, so long as they serve others rather than themselves.

The penalty for dodging the new draft is simple: no diploma.

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, angry parents and students took the local school board to court, arguing that such a mandatory service program for high school students imposed the kind of “involuntary servitude” forbidden by the United States Constitution.

But a U.S. Court of Appeals approved the Bethlehem program, holding that so long as school boards stop short of putting students in chains for disobeying — so long as the students have some alternative, even an “exceedingly bad” one — there is no involuntary servitude.

Mandatory community service for high school students presents a clear moral issue: By what right do we treat our sons and daughters as beasts of burden?

Advocates of mandatory service like to claim sole possession of the moral high ground. To them, the moral duty of unpaid service to others is an unquestionable absolute. But not all citizens concede an unchosen obligation to serve. Holding their own lives as their highest value, many reject as evil the notion that being needy confers on some people a moral claim to free labor from others.

As far back as 1943, the Supreme Court made it clear that boards of education may not dictate such fundamental moral choices. In a decision that prohibited a school board from forcing young Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, the Court said: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

School boards who hold diplomas for ransom, pending compliance with the prevailing orthodoxy of self-sacrifice, are engaging in nothing less than unconstitutional moral indoctrination.

Proponents of forced service insist that it is really for the students’ own good. For example, the Bethlehem program claimed that compulsory service helps students “develop pride in assisting others.”

But does anyone really believe that students will develop pride by succumbing to orders, abandoning their own personal projects, and serving the needs of strangers? The true source of pride is the achievement of one’s own values. Pride in oneself cannot result from wiping one’s own values out of existence.

On close scrutiny, the so-called educational purposes for community service are just so much window dressing. Any program, no matter how perverse, can be rationalized in that manner.

Suppose, for example, we want to justify a program that involves breaking students’ legs. First, we motivate the students by withholding their diplomas unless they take part. Then we encourage the students to engage in meaningful participation by choosing which of their legs is to be crushed.

Finally, we list the “educational purposes.” Not only will students’ wheelchair experiences teach them to empathize with the permanently disabled, but students will also “develop pride in their ability to overcome adversity,” through the valuable “coping skills” learned while enduring intense physical pain.

Why is it so easy to see the horror in a program that breaks students’ bones, yet so hard to see the same horror in a program that breaks students’ spirits?

Some say that students should no more be permitted to evade the community service obligation than any other part of the required curriculum, such as reading and writing.

But there is a crucial difference here. Our children must learn to read and write so they can pursue their own goals as adults, whatever those individual goals may be. Mandatory service, however, confers no such personal benefits; it only gets recalcitrant students accustomed to self-sacrifice.

Who does stand to gain from programming schoolchildren to believe that self-sacrifice equals self-interest? Who ultimately benefits when those children have become docile adults who, faced with a demand for sacrifice, no longer think to assert their individual rights?

Only those dangerous few who seek unchecked political power over others.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Blacklists Are Not Censorship

by Tom Bowden | March 23, 1999

The honorary Oscar given to Elia Kazan has generated renewed sympathy for the writers, directors, and actors whose membership in the Communist Party — revealed in the 1940s and 1950s by courageous witnesses such as Kazan — landed them on movie studio blacklists.

Such blacklists, it is said, are a form of “private censorship” that deprives people of their right to speak freely, on pain of losing their employability. “Censorship” — the American Civil Liberties Union declares — “can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups.” But by this reasoning, private individuals who simply choose not to patronize their enemies are engaging in essentially the same wrongful activity as are governments that imprison their citizens for expressing unpopular ideas.

The unspoken premise of this viewpoint is that freedom of speech includes the right to be provided with a printing press, a microphone, or a motion picture camera — at somebody else’s expense. It implies that you are not free to speak unless you can coerce others into furnishing you with the physical means of conveying your ideas.

The genuine right of free speech is simply stated: you may use your own voice and property to say what you think, and no one may use physical force to stop you. This right of free speech necessarily includes the right not to support ideas you oppose. Imagine if every speech by a civil rights leader were required by law to include the views of the Ku Klux Klan. The speaker’s right of expression would be rendered worthless, because every statement he believed to be true would be undercut by a falsehood.

This principle does not change when the speaker uses his property to spread his views. One who owns a printing press, a radio station, or a film studio has the categorical right to deny use of his property to those whose ideas he finds abhorrent.

Private actions such as boycotts or blacklists are based on the legitimate refusal to use one’s own resources to support one’s adversaries. Because no force is involved, such actions cannot censor anyone — even if the goal is to convince everyone on earth to reject a certain person or idea. A studio’s refusal to hire a movie director does not prohibit him from seeking a platform for his views elsewhere, nor does it compel other studios to refuse him employment.

There is no such thing as “private censorship.” It is only when government uses its coercive powers to inhibit speech that censorship occurs.

A recent ACLU case involving computers and the Internet shows how this confusion over the meaning of censorship continues to blight the law. The ACLU sued a Loudon County, Virginia, library that had installed a software filter on its public Internet computers. The filter’s purpose was to screen out sexually offensive material that children might see. (Because the filter worked imperfectly, it also screened out non-offensive material.)

According to the ACLU, that was censorship. The court agreed and ordered the library to stop filtering Internet transmissions. But that decision was wrong. In reality, the library’s use of an Internet filter was simply a refusal to patronize certain websites on its computers — a “blacklist,” if you will. But it was a refusal that left others free to view those sites on their computers and that left the sites’ authors free to disseminate their views elsewhere.

The library’s action was no different in principle from a refusal to subscribe to Hustler magazine. That is not censorship, and the fact that it was a public library does not change the essential nature of the action.

The notion of “private censorship” cuts the moral ground out from under the argument against genuine censorship. For if we are all victims of censorship, with our only choice being who will exercise that oppressive power, then the door is wide open to the claim that we should be censored by government — the representative of the “public interest” — rather than by private, unelected individuals.

If the decision not to patronize one’s intellectual enemies continues to be deemed censorship, actual censorship is inevitable. Now is the time, while we are still years away from such a catastrophe, to reaffirm our commitment to freedom of speech by repudiating the false concept of “private censorship.”

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Say No to the “Self-Esteem” Pushers

by Onkar Ghate | September 10, 1998

The beginning of a school year is an appropriate time to question how our schools propose to teach our children.

Today’s educators, observing widespread self-doubt and despair among the young, believe that the way to get a student to learn is to inflate his self-image. They believe that the curriculum should be designed, in the words of a resolution from the National Education Association, to “foster positive self-esteem.”

There is indeed a lack of self-esteem among our students. The real tragedy, though, is that the educators’ irrational view of “positive self-esteem” not only prevents a solution to this problem — but is itself the very cause.

Educators believe that self-esteem can be achieved by simply encouraging a child to “feel good” about himself. They continually exhort students to praise themselves — to praise themselves causelessly — by such means as chanting in class: “I am me and I am enough.”

The objective reality of the child’s life — the choices he makes, the thinking he engages in, the effort he exerts, the actions he takes — is disregarded. As one guidebook on self-esteem explains: “Children have the right to feel good about themselves exactly as they are. . . . A child’s value is unconditional. Nothing the child does, says or chooses can change it.”

Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself. It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success.

Since it is only through rational thought and action that one develops the ability to cope with reality, self-esteem results from an individual’s commitment to reason. A rational, productive person will possess self-esteem; a drug-addicted bum will not.

But in the view of our Dewey-inspired educators, logic is a “straitjacket.” Students are taught by “progressive” educators that there are no rigid principles in life, and that emotion, not reason, is one’s link to reality. Thus, if a child is somehow made to feel good about himself, he is good — irrespective of whether there exists any objective basis for that conclusion.

Of course this approach cannot work. A child who makes bad choices — who does not think but drifts in class, who shuts down his mind at the first sign of difficulty, who heads for the mall instead of exerting the effort that learning requires — will not acquire self-esteem. Constantly getting the answers wrong in class and feeling bewildered by the world outside, such a child experiences only uncertainty, helplessness and self-doubt.

How then will educators make him “feel good” about himself? By attempting to obliterate any facts that lead him to a negative estimate of himself. Accordingly, they teach him that there are never any wrong answers.

This is what gives rise to such nightmarish phenomena as inventive spelling, whereby a fourth-grader who spells “favorite” as “fffifit” is lauded by the teacher for expressing a “creative feeling.” This viewpoint infects even the most objective of disciplines, mathematics. One educator explains the root of a girl’s errors in mathematics: “She was trying to get these problems right. The alternative was to get them wrong. . . . So this is a situation within the win-lose world in which there’s no way the child can feel good about the assignment.”

Erase the concept of truth — these educators maintain — and a child will never discover that he is thinking or acting wrongly. If he is taught that anything he does is right because he feels it, he will always “feel good” about himself. For this reason a Minnesota Education Association’s guide to self-esteem tells students: “Express your beliefs . . . as your point of view — not as the ‘truth.’”

Today’s child lacks self-esteem precisely because modern educators encourage him to dispense with his mind, and to indulge his feelings. Self-doubt is the inevitable result, as the child realizes that he lacks the tool by which to comprehend reality.

Yet, to solve the problem they themselves have created, educators propose to continue the same anti-reason, emotionalist approach to teaching.

There is certainly a crisis of self-esteem among America’s students. But don’t look to the modern pushers of pseudo self-esteem for the remedy. Their ideas are the disease.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial

by Leonard Peikoff | December 25, 1996

Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as “materialistic”; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.

In fact, Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling.

Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth’s return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations — they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can’t stop ’em, join ’em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus’ birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.

Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: “Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?”

Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science — all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market.

For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Puritans called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale.

Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5). In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick’s physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids’ stockings, then goes back to the North Pole.

Of course, the Puritans denounced Santa as the Anti-Christ, because he pushed Jesus to the background. Furthermore, Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice — Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones.

All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness.

America’s tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate — and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

About The Author

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff, author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the foremost authority on Rand’s philosophy. Learn more at his website.

Health Care Is Not a Right

by Leonard Peikoff | December 11, 1993


Delivered under the auspices of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine at a Town Hall meeting on the Clinton Health Plan, Red Lion Hotel, Costa Mesa, California, December 11, 1993.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen:

Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea — which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical — it does not work — but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice. So I’m going to leave it to other speakers to concentrate on the practical flaws in the Clinton health plan. I want to focus on the moral issue at stake. So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan — not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it — to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.

What is morality in this context? The American concept of it is officially stated in the Declaration of Independence. It upholds man’s unalienable, individual rights. The term “rights,” note, is a moral (not just a political) term; it tells us that a certain course of behavior is right, sanctioned, proper, a prerogative to be respected by others, not interfered with — and that anyone who violates a man’s rights is: wrong, morally wrong, unsanctioned, evil.

Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at McDonald’s, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights — and only these.

Why only these? Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want — not to be given it without effort by somebody else.

The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.

To take one more example: the right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: the right to the pursuit — to a certain type of action on your part and its result — not to any guarantee that other people will make you happy or even try to do so. Otherwise, there would be no liberty in the country: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness. Your “right” to happiness at their expense means that they become rightless serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at others’ expense means that they become rightless.

That is why the U.S. system defines rights as it does, strictly as the rights to action. This was the approach that made the U.S. the first truly free country in all world history — and, soon afterwards, as a result, the greatest country in history, the richest and the most powerful. It became the most powerful because its view of rights made it the most moral. It was the country of individualism and personal independence.

Today, however, we are seeing the rise of principled immorality in this country. We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. We are seeing the complete destruction of the concept of rights. The original American idea has been virtually wiped out, ignored as if it had never existed. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men’s actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country’s founding documents — rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part of the recipient.

You are entitled to something, the politicians say, simply because it exists and you want or need it — period. You are entitled to be given it by the government. Where does the government get it from? What does the government have to do to private citizens — to their individual rights — to their real rights — in order to carry out the promise of showering free services on the people?

The answers are obvious. The newfangled rights wipe out real rights — and turn the people who actually create the goods and services involved into servants of the state. The Russians tried this exact system for many decades. Unfortunately, we have not learned from their experience. Yet the meaning of socialism (this is the right name for Clinton’s medical plan) is clearly evident in any field at all — you don’t need to think of health care as a special case; it is just as apparent if the government were to proclaim a universal right to food, or to a vacation, or to a haircut. I mean: a right in the new sense: not that you are free to earn these things by your own effort and trade, but that you have a moral claim to be given these things free of charge, with no action on your part, simply as handouts from a benevolent government.

How would these alleged new rights be fulfilled? Take the simplest case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it. What would happen under such a moral theory?

Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops — it’s all free, the government pays. The dishonest barbers are having a field day, of course — but so are the honest ones; they are working and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart’s desire, which is a millionaire’s worth of special hair care and services — the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control. Suddenly directives erupt: we must limit the number of barbers, we must limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a barber should be allowed to split. A new computerized office of records filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems, are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards are established to assess every stylist’s work, both the dishonest and the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good or too busy or too unbusy. Etc. In the end, there are lines of wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by bored, hog-tied haircutters some of whom remember dreamily the old days when somehow everything was so much better.

Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care cooperatives organized by the government? — having them engage in managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut insurance from companies controlled by the government?

If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what else can possibly happen — it is already starting to happen — under the idea of health care as a right? Health care in the modern world is a complex, scientific, technological service. How can anybody be born with a right to such a thing?

Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.

You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their work, not to turn others into sacrificial, rightless animals laboring to fulfill your needs.

Some of you may ask here: But can people afford health care on their own? Even leaving aside the present government-inflated medical prices, the answer is: Certainly people can afford it. Where do you think the money is coming from right now to pay for it all — where does the government get its fabled unlimited money? Government is not a productive organization; it has no source of wealth other than confiscation of the citizens’ wealth, through taxation, deficit financing or the like.

But, you may say, isn’t it the “rich” who are really paying the costs of medical care now — the rich, not the broad bulk of the people? As has been proved time and again, there are not enough rich anywhere to make a dent in the government’s costs; it is the vast middle class in the U.S. that is the only source of the kind of money that national programs like government health care require. A simple example of this is the fact that the Clinton Administration’s new program rests squarely on the backs not of Big Business, but of small businessmen who are struggling in today’s economy merely to stay alive and in existence. Under any socialized program, it is the “little people” who do most of the paying for it — under the senseless pretext that “the people” can’t afford such and such, so the government must take over. If the people of a country truly couldn’t afford a certain service — as e.g. in Somalia — neither, for that very reason, could any government in that country afford it, either.

Some people can’t afford medical care in the U.S. But they are necessarily a small minority in a free or even semi-free country. If they were the majority, the country would be an utter bankrupt and could not even think of a national medical program. As to this small minority, in a free country they have to rely solely on private, voluntary charity. Yes, charity, the kindness of the doctors or of the better off — charity, not right, i.e. not their right to the lives or work of others. And such charity, I may say, was always forthcoming in the past in America. The advocates of Medicaid and Medicare under LBJ did not claim that the poor or old in the ’60’s got bad care; they claimed that it was an affront for anyone to have to depend on charity.

But the fact is: You don’t abolish charity by calling it something else. If a person is getting health care for nothing, simply because he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether or not President Clinton calls it a “right.” To call it a Right when the recipient did not earn it is merely to compound the evil. It is charity still — though now extorted by criminal tactics of force, while hiding under a dishonest name.

As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call “medical care” a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).

I would like to clarify the point about socialized medicine enslaving the doctors. Let me quote here from an article I wrote a few years ago: “Medicine: The Death of a Profession.” [The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought.]

In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor’s mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor’s function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him.

What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: ‘The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t — and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital — and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick — after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.’ Would you like your case to be treated this way — by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal government agencies? If you were a doctor could you comply with all of it? Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.

In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority — or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally or, as so many are doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field.

The Clinton plan will finish off quality medicine in this country — because it will finish off the medical profession. It will deliver doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.

The only hope — for the doctors, for their patients, for all of us — is for the doctors to assert a moral principle. I mean: to assert their own personal individual rights — their real rights in this issue — their right to their lives, their liberty, their property, their pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence applies to the medical profession too. We must reject the idea that doctors are slaves destined to serve others at the behest of the state.

I’d like to conclude with a sentence from Ayn Rand. Doctors, she wrote, are not servants of their patients. They are “traders, like everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.”

The battle against the Clinton plan, in my opinion, depends on the doctors speaking out against the plan — but not only on practical grounds — rather, first of all, on moral grounds. The doctors must defend themselves and their own interests as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation. If they can do it, all of us will still have a chance. I hope it is not already too late. Thank you.

About The Author

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff, author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the foremost authority on Rand’s philosophy. Learn more at his website.

On Moral Sanctions

by Peter Schwartz | May 18, 1989

(This is written as an addendum to [“Fact and Value”], in order to amplify some points about the principle of not sanctioning evil.)

Evil is not self-sustaining. That which stands defiantly opposed to reality cannot survive on its own. Its enduring existence requires the acquiescence of the good. Existentially, the irrational survives parasitically, by feeding off the rational; intellectually, an irrational idea gains influence fraudulently, by covering itself with a veneer of rationality. (The practice of Marxism, for example, gains material sustenance from the productive free world; the theory of Marxism gains acceptance by declaring that it seeks to eradicate unfair exploitation, not that it desires to impose totalitarian enslavement.) The weapon necessary to defend against evil is justice: the unequivocal identification of the evil as evil. This means the refusal to grant it, by word or by deed, any moral respectability. It is by scrupulously withholding from the irrational even a crumb of a moral sanction — by rejecting any form of accommodation with the irrational — by forcing the irrational to stand naked and unaided — that one keeps evil impotent.

Current events provide a telling illustration of this principle. There is a bizarre affair being held in Iran: a government-sponsored book fair. Even more bizarre is the fact that some Western publishers were planning to participate in it. A spokesman for McGraw-Hill, defending his company’s involvement in the fair, maintained that, while he certainly opposed Khomeini’s policies, “there should be no sanctions on knowledge.” The chairman of the British Society of Authors said: “I was in favor of sending publishers to Russia in the Stalinist era and to South Africa today and now to Iran. How can you persuade that regime to change unless you open it to outside views and influences?” This is an eloquent example of evil being morally sanctioned by its very victims.

Here are publishers and authors, whose existence depends upon the freedom of expression, willing to cooperate with a totalitarian theocracy, one which censors unauthorized ideas and which offers a $5 million bounty for the death of the author Salman Rushdie for his criticism of Islam. And their cooperation consists in joining with their censors in a public display of books. Can it be anything but self-destructive for them to help the Iranian government engage in the grotesque pretense that it regards the free mind — which a book fair represents — as a value? Their protection against medieval barbarism rests upon their convincing the world that Iran poses an undiluted danger to civilization. Yet here are publishers and writers themselves announcing, in effect, that Khomeini’s atrocities may simply be the product of honest ignorance and may well be voluntarily reversed once his regime is exposed to rational argument. Who could possibly take seriously a call for economic boycotts or military retaliation against Iran, when Khomeini’s primary victims are so ready to engage in commercial and intellectual intercourse with him? Their verbal disagreements with Khomeini’s views are embarrassingly irrelevant. If by their actions they show how lightly they take their own rhetorical protests, why should others take them any differently?

The identical reasoning applies to trafficking with Libertarians.

In “On Sanctioning the Sanctioners,” I gave two examples of evils being sanctioned by those, such as David Kelley, who profess to be advocates of reason, honesty and justice. The first example pertained to the open or tacit support they have given to arbitrary, gratuitous attacks against Ayn Rand (such as those in Barbara Branden’s biography). These smears represent unjust assaults upon a profound value, and should be denounced, not tolerated — as should the sanctioners of those assaults.

Apparently, this point was well understood, since none of the responses I received to the article even mentioned this issue. It was the second example — that of Libertarianism — which generated a great deal of critical comment. So I will expand on that subject to clarify what may still remain unclear.

IS LIBERTARIANISM AN EVIL DOCTRINE? Yes, if evil is the irrational and the destructive. Libertarianism belligerently rejects the very need for any justification for its belief in something called “liberty.” It repudiates the need for any intellectual foundation to explain why “liberty” is desirable and what “liberty” means. Anyone from a gay-rights activist to a criminal counterfeiter to an overt anarchist can declare that he is merely asserting his “liberty” — and no Libertarian (even those who happen to disagree) can objectively refute his definition. Subjectivism, amoralism and anarchism are not merely present in certain “wings” of the Libertarian movement; they are integral to it. In the absence of any intellectual framework, the zealous advocacy of “liberty” can represent only the mindless quest to eliminate all restraints on human behavior — political, moral, metaphysical. And since reality is the fundamental “restraint” upon men’s actions, it isnihilism — the desire to obliterate reality — that is the very essence of Libertarianism. If the Libertarian movement were ever to come to power, widespread death would be the consequence. (For elaboration, see my essay “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty.”)

Justice demands moral judgment. It demands that one objectively evaluate Libertarianism, and act in accordance with that evaluation. It demands that one identify Libertarianism as the antithesis of — and therefore as a clear threat to — not merely genuine liberty, but all rational values. And it demands that Libertarianism, like all such threats, be boycotted and condemned.

Moral judgment, and not some pragmatic calculation of losses and gains, is what must precede any decision about whom to associate with. As Dr. Peikoff makes clear (in his lecture “Why Should One Act on Principle?” and, much more extensively, in his forthcoming book on Objectivism), there cannot be any “cost-benefit analysis” of justice versus injustice, or of not sanctioning versus sanctioning evil (or of the alleged pro’s and con’s of any proper moral principle). The moral is the practical. No matter what the short-range appearances may be, there are no real “benefits” in acting unjustly, and no “losses” in acting justly. There can be no value in pretending that the irrational is rational. The moral principles of Objectivism identify the kind of action — the only kind of action — that is in accord with the demands of reality and therefore beneficial to man’s life. If an action is consonant with moral principles, then and only then can the question of costs versus benefits legitimately arise. Only then can various alternative courses offer genuine advantages and disadvantages that need to be compared. But the immoral — the unjust, the dishonest, the irrational — is by its nature the anti-life and can offer no value.

Thus, the “benefits” of speaking to Libertarian groups are as nonexistent as the “benefits” of exhibiting books at an Iranian fair. The Libertarian movement is not some innocuous debating club. It is a movement that embraces the advocates of child-molesting, the proponents of unilateral U.S. disarmament, the LSD-taking and bomb-throwing members of the New Left, the communist guerrillas in Central America and the baby-killing followers of Yassir Arafat. These views have all been accepted under the Libertarian umbrella (and remain accepted under it by everyone who still calls himself a Libertarian). It is these types of vermin that one is lifting into respectability whenever one sanctions Libertarianism — or whenever one maintains that ideas can be analyzed without being evaluated.

Does this restrict the options open to Objectivist speakers? Certainly. Objectivism is a restrictive philosophy. It holds that the irrationalities of today’s culture should not be aided. However, this fact does not require Objectivist thinkers to communicate only with those already in basic agreement. Ayn Rand, after all, somehow managed to convey her ideas to many millions without having to violate her principle of not sanctioning evil. Aside from the books and articles to be written, there are countless non-Objectivist audiences that speakers can profitably address. There are college and high school students. There are numerous professional groups, such as medical or legal associations. And there are those with mixed ideologies, who hold mistaken but not necessarily irrational views, such as various conservative or liberal groups. There may be nothing wrong in cooperating or debating with those who merely hold mistaken views (as long as one makes clear what one disagrees with); there is nothing wrong in implying that they are moral. It is the irrational that ought not be granted a moral sanction; it is the irrational that should not be addressed as though it were open to reason.

IT IS PARTICULARLY HARMFUL to speak under the patronage of an organization that epitomizes Libertarianism, such as Laissez-Faire Books. This is a book store that is the major source of Libertarian literature in the world; it is a division of Libertarian Review, Inc.; its editor is a well-known Libertarian speaker and writer; it advertises itself as offering the largest selection of books on “liberty” — a term it defines according to the contradictory criteria of Libertarianism. (The fact that it carries Objectivist as well as Libertarian literature does not make it any less Libertarian. Such eclecticism is quintessential Libertarianism; the subjectivist, after all, does not abide by rigid standards. One of Libertarianism’s goals is in fact to incorporate Objectivism into its “united front” ideology.)

The evil of Libertarianism is in no way mitigated by the fact that some, or many, of its followers do not understand its essence and its implications. This phenomenon pertains to all ideologies (honest and dishonest alike). There are Islamic fundamentalists who do not see that their philosophy leads to the murder of dissenters, there are Marxists who do not see that their philosophy leads to totalitarian enslavement, there are Kantians who do not see that their philosophy leads to nihilism. This does not alter the inherent irrationality of their viewpoints (any more than the rationality of a correct viewpoint is diminished by those who fail to comprehend it). Nor are these deluded individuals absolved from responsibility for in fact abetting the spread of destructive ideas.

If one wishes to reach those who have been defrauded by Libertarianism, it cannot be done by speaking under the auspices of the defrauders. It cannot be done even if one’s topic is why Objectivism offers the proper foundation for genuine liberty. Such a talk grants Libertarianism precisely the moral sanction it seeks and thrives on. Libertarians will readily listen to a talk on Objectivism and liberty — and the next day they will invite someone to speak on why the Bible is the only basis for liberty — and the next week they will hear someone argue why only skepticism and amoralism can validate liberty, etc. They lap this up. It is all entirely consistent with Libertarianism. It is consistent with the philosophy that philosophies and reasons are irrelevant to a belief in “liberty.” By speaking under the roof of an organization dedicated to purveying Libertarianism, one concedes that Libertarianism does in fact value liberty (and is simply confused about the proper means — i.e., Objectivism — by which to gain that end). Once that fatal concession is made, Libertarianism has obtained the basic moral sanction its survival requires.

The contradiction, then, is this: The handful of Libertarians who may be open to reason need to be told that Libertarianism as such is anti-liberty and that Libertarian organizations should be boycotted. But this cannot be conveyed via a talk which is itself sponsored by a Libertarian organization.

The existence of Objectivism is widely known throughout the Libertarian movement. It is certainly not difficult for any of its members to seek information about it outside the confines of Libertarianism, where there are writers and speakers available to enlighten them. If an Objectivist wants to communicate something worthwhile to such people, there is one absolutely vital lesson they need to be taught and one indispensable method of teaching it. The lesson is that if they truly want a rational foundation for defining and defending liberty, they should renounce Libertarianism and its “tolerance,” and should instead adopt Objectivism, where there is no tolerance for the irrational. And an essential method of imparting this lesson is by not speaking to Libertarian groups — by demonstrating that Objectivism consistently refuses to cooperate with and to sanction its antithesis — by showing, in other words, that we practice what we preach.

About The Author

Peter Schwartz

Distinguished Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

The Intellectual Activist, Volume V, Number 1 (May 18, 1989)

Copyright © 1989 The Intellectual Activist, Inc.

Fact and Value

by Leonard Peikoff | May 18, 1989

I agree completely with “On Sanctioning the Sanctioners,” Peter Schwartz’s article in the last issue of TIA. That article has, however, raised questions in the mind of some readers. In particular, David Kelley, one of the persons whom the article implicitly criticizes, has written an articulate paper in reply, identifying his own philosophy on the relevant topics. He has sent a copy of this paper to me and to many other individuals.

In my judgment, Kelley’s paper is a repudiation of the fundamental principles of Objectivism. His statements make clear to me, in purely philosophic terms and for the first time, the root cause of the many schisms that have plagued the Objectivist movement since 1968. The cause goes to the essentials of what Objectivism is. I have, therefore, decided to interrupt my book on Objectivism in order to name this cause once and for all.

In the following, I am presupposing a basic knowledge of Ayn Rand’s ideas. I am writing to and for Objectivists, whether or not they have seen Kelley’s paper.

The fundamental issue raised by Kelley concerns the relationship between the true and the good. What kind of thing, Kelley asks, can be true or false, and what kind good or evil? In other words (my words): what is the relationship between fact and value? Kelley takes a definite stand on this issue, one which leads him, logically, to uphold “tolerance” as “a virtue in the cognitive realm,” and to accuse Schwartz and others like him (myself and Ayn Rand presumably included) of “zealotry,” “hysteria,” “non-intellectuality,” “malevolence,” “closed-mindedness” and the like.

Let me begin by summarizing, without reference to Kelley, the essence of the Objectivist view on the relationship between fact and value.

Objectivism holds that value is objective (not intrinsic or subjective); value is based on and derives from the facts of reality (it does not derive from mystic authority or from whim, personal or social). Reality, we hold — along with the decision to remain in it, i.e., to stay alive — dictates and demands an entire code of values. Unlike the lower species, man does not pursue the proper values automatically; he must discover and choose them; but this does not imply subjectivism. Every proper value-judgment is the identification of a fact: a given object or action advances man’s life (it is good): or it threatens man’s life (it is bad or an evil). The good, therefore, is a species of the true; it is a form of recognizing reality. The evil is a species of the false; it is a form of contradicting reality. Or: values are a type of facts; they are facts considered in relation to the choice to live.

In the objective approach, since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth. As Ayn Rand states the point in “The Objectivist Ethics”: “Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every ‘is’ implies an ‘ought.’” Evaluation, accordingly, is not a compartmentalized function applicable only to some aspects of man’s life or of reality; if one chooses to live and to be objective, a process of evaluation is coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition.

This applies even to metaphysically given facts (as distinguished from man-made facts). Metaphysically given facts, Miss Rand points out, cannot as such be evaluated. Sunlight, tidal waves, the law of gravity, et al. are not good or bad; they simply are; such facts constitute reality and are thus the basis of all value-judgments. This does not, however, alter the principle that every “is” implies an “ought.” The reason is that every fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man’s self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action. In relation to the goal of staying alive, the fact demands specific kinds of actions and prohibits others; i.e., it entails a definite set of evaluations. For instance, sunlight is a fact of metaphysical reality; but once its effects are discovered by man and integrated to his goals, a long series of evaluations follows: the sun is a good thing (an essential of life as we know it); i.e., within the appropriate limits, its light and heat are good, good for us; other things being equal, therefore, we ought to plant our crops in certain locations, build our homes in a certain way (with windows), and so forth; beyond the appropriate limits, however, sunlight is not good (it causes burns or skin cancer); etc. All these evaluations are demanded by the cognitions involved — if one pursues knowledge in order to guide one’s actions. Similarly, tidal waves are bad, even though natural; they are bad for us if we get caught in one, and we ought to do whatever we can to avoid such a fate. Even the knowledge of the law of gravity, which represents a somewhat different kind of example, entails a host of evaluations — among the most obvious of which are: using a parachute in midair is good, and jumping out of a plane without one is bad, bad for a man’s life.

Just as there can be no dichotomy between mind and body, so there can be none between the true and the good. Even in regard to metaphysically given facts, cognition and evaluation cannot be sundered. Cognition apart from evaluation is purposeless; it becomes the arbitrary desire for “pure knowledge” as an end in itself. Evaluation apart from cognition is non-objective; it becomes the whim of pursuing an “I wish” not based on any “It is.”

THE SAME PRINCIPLE applies in regard to man-made facts — which brings us to the virtue of justice. Justice is an aspect of the principle that cognition demands evaluation; it is that principle applied to human choices and their products. Since man is volitional, evaluation of the man-made is of a special kind: it is moral evaluation.

The virtue of justice is necessary, at root, for the same reason that evaluation in relation to any fact is necessary: the character and behavior of other men are facts, which have effects on one’s own well-being. To an individual in a division-of-labor society, it makes a life-or-death difference whether he is surrounded by producers or parasites, honest men or cheats, independent men or power-lusters. Just as one must distinguish between good and bad in relation to the realm of nature, so one must distinguish between good and bad in relation to the realm of man.

In Objectivist terms, this means a single fundamental issue: in the human realm, one must distinguish the rational from the irrational, the thinkers from the evaders. Such judgment tells one whether a man, in principle, is committed to reality — or to escaping from and fighting it. In the one case, he is an ally and potential benefactor of the living; in the other, an enemy and potential destroyer. Thus the mandate of justice: identify the good (the rational) and the evil (the irrational) in men and their works — then, first, deal with, support and/or reward the good; and, second, boycott, condemn and/or punish the evil. (One aspect of this second policy is the principle of not granting to evil one’s moral sanction.)

Evaluation, though it is essential in every field of cognition, is especially urgent in regard to the man-made. When, through the default of the better men, evil (evasion) wins out in a human society, man’s life is thereby doomed, however great the scientific knowledge at the time and however beneficent the conditions of physical nature. By contrast, when, through the scrupulous justice of the better men, the good (the mind) wins out, there is virtually no form of ignorance or natural disaster that men cannot successfully combat.

Justice — being an aspect of the principle that every cognition demands an evaluation — requires moral judgment of men and their works across-the-board, with no areas of life excepted or exempted. In Ayn Rand’s words (from “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?”): “one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly.” How does one reach a moral evaluation of a person? “A man’s moral character,” Miss Rand writes in “The Psychology of Psychologizing,” “must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions…” (The word “statements” here denotes a broad, somewhat overlapping category. All morally revealing statements imply the speaker’s premises or ideas, even if they do not explicitly assert them; but some statements do assert them — just as some statements are themselves actions: e.g., a declaration of war.)

Now let us consider what is involved in judging a man’s actions morally. Two crucial, related aspects must be borne in mind: existence and consciousness, or effect and cause. Existentially, an action of man (as of sunlight) is good or bad according to its effects: its effects, positive or negative, on man’s life. Thus creating a skyscraper is good, murdering the architect is bad — both by the standard of life. But human action is not merely physical motion; it is a product of a man’s ideas and value-judgments, true or false, which themselves derive from a certain kind of mental cause; ultimately, from thought or from evasion. Human action is an expression of a volitional consciousness. This is why human action (as against sunlight) is morally evaluated. The skyscraper’s creator, one infers in pattern, functioned on the basis of proper value-judgments and true ideas, including a complex specialized knowledge; so he must have expended mental effort, focus, work; so one praises him morally and admires him. But the murderer (assuming there are no extenuating circumstances) acted on ideas and value-judgments that defy reality; so he must have evaded and practiced whim-worship; so one condemns him morally and despises him.

Both these aspects, I repeat, are essential to moral judgment. An action without effects on man’s life (there are none such) would be outside the realm of evaluation — there would be no standard of value by which to assess it. An action not deriving from ideas, i.e., from the cognitive/evaluative products of a volitional mental process, would be the reflex of a deterministic puppet or of an animal; it could not be subject to moral judgment.

THE SAME FACTORS apply in regard to the other main branch of moral judgment: judging a man’s conscious convictions or ideas. In judging an idea morally, one must (as in the action case) determine, through the use of evidence, whether the idea is true or false, in correspondence with reality or in contradiction to it. Then, in exact parallel to the case of action, there are two crucial aspects to be identified: the mental process which led to the idea, and the existential results to which the idea itself leads (which means in its case: the kind of action that flows from it). In judging an idea morally, it is not relevant whether its results are enacted by the idea’s originator or by his later followers. The existential issue here is: what kind of effects — pro-life or anti-life — will this idea have by its very nature, if and when men start to act on it?

Just as every “is” implies an “ought,” so every identification of an idea’s truth or falsehood implies a moral evaluation of the idea and of its advocates. The evaluation, to repeat, comes from the answer to two related questions: what kind of volitional cause led people to this idea? and, to what kind of consequences will this idea lead in practice?

Let me pause to indicate certain ramifications involved in answering the first of these questions. The general principle here is: truth implies as its cause a virtuous mental process; falsehood, beyond a certain point, implies a process of vice. The proper understanding of this principle, however, requires some discussion.

It is possible for a man to embrace an idea blindly, on faith from others or simply by his own whim, without the effort of understanding or integrating it. In such a case, the idea, no matter what its content, reflects negatively on the individual. For Objectivism, an idea thus embraced is not “true” (or “false”). In relation to such a mind, the idea is without cognitive status; it is the arbitrary, and is analogous to the sounds emitted by a parrot. The true qua true, by contrast, does imply a process of understanding and integration, and therefore some degree of effort, focus, work. The degree of the effort may differ, of course, according to circumstances, such as whether one is the originator of the true idea or has learned it from others.

Now we must note that falsehood does not necessarily imply vice; honest errors of knowledge are possible. But such errors are not nearly so common as some people wish to think, especially in the field of philosophy. In our century, there have been countless mass movements dedicated to inherently dishonest idease.g., Nazism, Communism, non-objective art, non-Aristotelian logic, egalitarianism, nihilism, the pragmatist cult of compromise, the Shirley MacLaine types, who “channel” with ghosts and recount their previous lives; etc. In all such cases, the ideas are not merely false; in one form or another, they represent an explicit rebellion against reason and reality (and, therefore, against man and values). If the conscientious attempt to perceive reality by the use of one’s mind is the essence of honesty, no such rebellion can qualify as “honest.”

The originators, leaders and intellectual spokesmen of all such movements are necessarily evaders on a major scale; they are not merely mistaken, but are crusading irrationalists. The mass base of such movements are not evaders of the same kind; but most of the followers are dishonest in their own passive way. They are unthinking, intellectually irresponsible ballast, unconcerned with logic or truth. They go along with corrupt trend-setters because their neighbors demand it, and/or because a given notion satisfies some out-of-context desire they happen to feel. People of this kind are not the helplessly ignorant, but the willfully self-deluded.

EVEN IN REGARD to inherently dishonest movements, let me now add, a marginal third category of adherent is possible: the relatively small number who struggle conscientiously, but simply cannot grasp the issues and the monumental corruption involved. These are the handful who become Communists, “channelers,” etc. through a truly honest error of knowledge. Leaving aside the retarded and the illiterate, who are effectively helpless in such matters, this third group consists almost exclusively of the very young — and precisely for this reason, these youngsters get out of such movements fast, on their own, without needing lectures from others; they get out as they reach maturity. Being conscientious and mentally active, they see first-hand what is going on in their movement and they identify what it means; so their initial enthusiasm turns to dismay and then to horror. (Andrei in We the Living may be taken as a fictional symbol here.) The very honesty of such individuals limits their stay in the movement; they cannot tolerate for long the massiveness of the evil with which they have become involved. Nor, when such youngsters drop out, do they say to the world belligerently: “Don’t dare to judge me for my past, because my error was honest.” On the contrary — and here I speak from my own personal experience of honest errors that I committed as a teenager — the best among these young people are contrite; they recognize the aid and comfort, inadvertent though it be, which they have been giving to error and evil, and they seek to make amends for it. They expect those who know of their past creeds and allegiances to regard them with suspicion; they know that it is their own responsibility to demonstrate objectively and across time that they have changed, that they will not repeat their error tomorrow in another variant, that their error was innocent.

We need not pursue the issue of honest errors any further. As one of his examples of an intellectually honest man, to whom others should show “tolerance” and “benevolence,” David Kelley offers not a groping teenager, but “an academic Marxist,” i.e., an adult who devotes his life to the job of teaching unreason, self-sacrifice and slavery to generations of young minds. When I speak of truth and falsehood in what follows, therefore, I am presupposing a definite (adult) context. I am speaking of truth qua truth (not of the arbitrary) — and of falsehood on the kind of scale and issues that preclude honest, short-lived errors.

Now let me return to the issue of evaluating an idea morally, and of doing so by means of identifying its cause and its effects. The crucial point is that such evaluation is not something arbitrarily added to the judgment of true and false; on the contrary, it is logically implicit in such judgment. Implicit in saying that a certain idea is true is a positive moral estimate of the mental processes that led to it (a credit to the individual for having worked to grasp reality), and a positive estimate of the existential results to come (a true idea will have to yield pro-life results when men act on it). The same applies mutatis mutandis to false ideas. Implicit in saying that an idea contradicts the facts of reality is a negative estimate of the processes that led to it, and also of the effects the idea will have in practice, which have to be harmful. If one’s ideas are tied to reality at all and if one is guided by life as the standard, there is no way to identify an idea’s truth or falsehood without in some form also making such evaluations.

There is only one basic issue in philosophy and in all judgment, cognitive and evaluative alike: does a man conform to reality or not? Whether an idea is true or false is one aspect of this question — which immediately implies the other aspects I mentioned: the relation to reality of the mental processes involved and of the actions that will result. Truth is a product of effort and leads in action to value(s); hence, one says, the true idea is not only true: it is also good. Falsehood, assuming it reaches a certain scale, is a product of evasion and leads to destruction; such an idea is not only false; it is also evil.

An employee, to take a relatively modest positive example, offers a man an idea for improving the operation of his business. His idea, the boss concludes after weighing the evidence, takes into account all the relevant facts; he’s right. So far, this is pure cognition, the outcome of which is expressed in a statement like: “I agree with you.” But no decent person, whether he knows philosophy or not, would stop there; he would not say unemotionally, like a dead fish: “Your idea is correct. Good day.” On the contrary, precisely because the new idea represents a new grasp of reality, the moral kind of boss is enthusiastic, i.e., he evaluates the idea. He cannot avoid seeing two things: this employee of mine had to innovate, struggle, think to reach the idea when no one else did, and: the idea will cut my costs, increase my customers, double my profits. The boss, accordingly, is excited, he likes his employee, he praises him, he rewards him. He not only says about the idea: “true.” As an inevitable corollary, he says about it: “good.” That “good” is the evaluation or the “ought”; it represents the practice of justice and the tie to life.

NOW TAKE THE CASE of Ayn Rand, who discovered true ideas on a virtually unprecedented scale. Do any of you who agree with her philosophy respond to it by saying “Yeah, it’s true” — without evaluation, emotion, passion? Not if you are moral. A moral person (assuming he understands philosophy at all) greets the discovery of this kind of truth with admiration, awe, even love; he makes a heartfelt positive moral evaluation. He says: Objectivism is not only true, it is great! Why? Because of the volitional work a mind must have performed to reach for the first time so exalted a level of truth — and because of all the glorious effects such knowledge will have on man’s life, all the possibilities of action it opens up for the future. And this latter applies whether Ayn Rand herself actualized these possibilities or left that feat (as she had to) to the generations still to come.

There are degrees in this issue; there are modest attainments and enormous ones; but the differences pertain only to measurement. The principle in all such cases is the same: correspondence to reality (and its causes and effects) deserves and must be given a positive moral evaluation.

The same kind of analysis applies to the negative cases. An employee comes up, say, with a stupid suggestion, which flies in the face of the facts. The boss inevitably thinks not just “false,” but “bad.” Which latter means: the man must have been out-of-focus, plus: look at the grief his idea would cause in practice. Such an idea, the boss has to feel, cannot be tolerated. No rational man can tolerate — i.e., abide, stand, or put up with — that which he sees to be false, not in his own life, mind or actions, not when he has any alternative in the matter. Since dedication to reality is the essence of the moral and of the practical, the false qua false is precisely the intolerable. (In what form a boss should express his intolerance to his employee depends on the full context.)

Now consider the case of Kant, whom I take to be the negative counterpart of Ayn Rand. To anyone capable of understanding Kant’s ideas, the first thing to say about them is: “false.” But implicit in the all-embracing war on reality they represent is a second verdict: “wicked.” The cause of such ideas has to be methodical, lifelong intellectual dishonesty; the effect, when they are injected into the cultural mainstream, has to be mass death. There can be no greater evasion than the open, total rejection of reality undertaken as a lifetime crusade. And only evasion on this kind of scale, evasion as the motor of an entire philosophic system, makes possible and necessary all the atrocities of our age. (For details, see The Ominous Parallels.)

Whoever understands the Critiques, yet urges “toleration” of Kant (or his ilk), or tells us to practice cognition on his ideas but not moral evaluation, has rejected self-preservation as a goal. He has rejected the principle of justice and the entire realm of moral value. He has said that man’s life or death should not be a ruling concern in anyone’s mind.

In the final issue of The Objectivist, Ayn Rand described Kant as “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” She said it knowing full well that, apart from his ideas, Kant’s actions were unexceptionable, even exemplary. Like Ellsworth Toohey, he was a peaceful citizen, a witty lecturer, a popular dinner guest, a prolific writer. She said it because of what Kant wrote — and why — and what it would have to do to mankind. She held that Kant was morally much worse than any killer, including Lenin and Stalin (under whom her own family died), because it was Kant who unleashed not only Lenin and Stalin, but also Hitler and Mao and all the other disasters of our disastrous age. Without the philosophic climate Kant and his intellectual followers created, none of these disasters could have occurred; given that climate, none could have been averted.

IN SOME CONTEXTS, a man is properly held blameless for an unreasonable idea, so long as he himself does not act on it. For example: if I conclude that, though you are innocent of any wrongdoing, your death would be a wonderful thing, but I then remind myself of your rights, hold myself in check and refrain from killing you, I may be free of blame and can even be given a certain moral credit: “He kept his idea within his own mind,” one could say, “he did not allow it to lead to the destruction of the innocent; to that extent, in actual practice, he was moved by the recognition of reality.” But this kind of analysis does not exonerate the philosophic advocate of unreason. In regard to him, one cannot say: “He implicitly advocates murder, but does not himself commit it, so he is morally innocent.” The philosopher of irrationalism, though legally innocent of any crime, is not “keeping his ideas within his own mind.” He is urging them on the world and into actual practice. Such a man is moved not by the recognition of reality, but by the opposite: by the desire to annihilate it. In spiritual terms, he is guilty of a heinous crime: he is inciting men to commit murder on a mass scale. Advocacy of this kind is a form of action: it represents an entire life spent on subverting man’s mind at its base. Can anyone honestly hold that such advocacy pertains not to “action,” but merely to the world of “ideas,” and therefore that verdicts such as “good” and “evil” do not apply to it?

Yet such is the essence of David Kelley’s viewpoint. “Truth” and “falsity,” he says, apply primarily to “ideas”; “good” and “evil,” to “actions, and to the people who perform them.” In regard to evil, he says, we must not be tolerant; but in regard to ideas, moral judgment is a mistake. In the cognitive realm, he says, the virtue to be practiced in regard to all comers, no matter what their viewpoint, is “tolerance” and “benevolence,” i.e., cool, open-minded, friendly discussion among civilized moral equals. Stalin, in this view, has killed people, so he is evil and intolerable; but Kant or “an academic Marxist” — he is merely a thinker of a different school, with whom one happens to disagree (and from whom, Kelley adds, we might even learn something “if we are willing to listen”). In regard to Kant and his academic progeny, therefore, moral judgment is inapplicable and even “hysterical.”

Kelley adds that if, after a discussion, a particular intellectual proves to be “not open to reason,” then we no longer have to be tolerant of him. But a man’s viewpoint as such, he insists, no matter what its content, does not justify such a negative verdict. What then does or ever could? If the content of a man’s ideas, even when they are openly at war with reason and reality, does not necessarily indicate a process of evasion on his part, how can we ever know that a man who disagrees with us after a discussion is being irrational? How can we know that he is not merely “honestly mistaken” still? Kelley does not address such questions, because the only answer to them is: on Kelley’s premises, one never can know that a man is being irrational and, therefore, one never does pronounce moral judgment.

Kelley’s viewpoint is an explicit defense of a dichotomy between fact and value, or between cognition and evaluation, and thus between mind and body. If ideas cannot be judged morally in terms of their causes and effects, why and how can a man’s actions — his bodily movements — be judged morally? No answer. If justice is a crucial virtue, how can the base and ruler of man’s life — his mind and its intellectual products — be outside of justice’s domain? No answer. If value-judgments do not flow inexorably from the judgment of truth or falsehood, if the “ought” does not flow inexorably from the “is,” where do value-judgments come from and on what are they based? No answer. What then is left of the objectivity of values, and thus of the whole Objectivist ethics, politics, esthetics? Nothing.

FOR DECADES, onetime advocates of Objectivism who have turned into champions of “tolerance” (or “kindness” or “compassion”) have leveled a specific accusation against Ayn Rand and against anyone else who pronounces moral judgment. (Kelley a few years ago accused Ayn Rand and me of it to my face, and I broke off all relations with him.) The accusation is that we are “dogmatic moralizers” or “angry emotionalists.” Up to now, I could explain these attacks only psychologically, in terms of the attackers’ cowardice or psychopathology. But now I understand the basic cause; I see the attacks’ philosophic meaning. In the minds of the “tolerance”-people, there are only two possibilities in regard to moral judgment: moralizing or emotionalism, dogma or whim, i.e., intrinsicism or subjectivism.

Such people literally have no concept of “objectivity” in regard to values. Their accusations, therefore, are expressions of their own actual philosophy and inner state. The typical (though not invariable) pattern in this kind of case is that the accuser started out in Objectivism as a dogmatist, cursing or praising people blindly, in obedience, as he thought, to his new-found “authorities.” Then at last his pent-up resentment at this self-made serfdom erupts — and he becomes an angry subjectivist, denouncing the “excessive anger” of those who make moral judgments. The swing from intrinsicism to subjectivism, however, is not a significant change; these philosophies are merely two forms in which the notion of “non-objective value” rules a man’s brain.

The intellectual corruption involved here goes deeper. The good, as I have been stressing, derives from facts; i.e., “objective value” is a logical consequence of “objective truth.” The man whose ideas are tied to reality, I have said, cannot avoid grasping at least their obvious value-implications. The man who can (or wants to) avoid it does so only through one means: his ideas are cut off from reality. In regard to theoretical issues, his very process of cognition is corrupted: it is rationalistic, floating, detached from fact.

To such a person, intellectual discussion is a game; ideas are constructs in some academic or Platonic dimension, unrelated to this earth — which is why, to him, they are unrelated to life or to morality. Inside this sort of mind, there is not only no concept of “objective value”; there is no objective truth, either — not in regard to intellectual issues. What this sort knows is only the floating notions he happens to find congenial, out of context, at and for the moment. Ideas severed from evaluation, in short, are ideas severed from (objective) cognition; i.e., from reason and reality. (Those who know formal logic will recognize that the last sentence is merely the contrapositive of my main point in this article: if cognition implies evaluation, then non-evaluation implies non-cognition.)

The absence or rejection of the concept of “objectivity” on this profound a level means the rejection not only of Ayn Rand’s ethics, but also of her epistemology: it is the rejection of her view of truth, of her theory of concepts, of her fundamental position on the proper relationship between a volitional consciousness and existence. In methodological terms, it is the rejection of her view of logic, which demands that one integrate every idea with perceptual data and with all one’s other ideas, including one’s code of moral values. To tear values from facts and concepts from percepts is to explode any such integration and thus to defy the essence of the philosophy which demands it. Such is the result of trying to combine Objectivism with “tolerance” (or with “compassion” or “kindness” in the Brandens’ sense).

“Tolerance,” as used by Kelley, is a concept (or anti-concept) out of the modern liberals’ world-view; it is a further expression of the philosophy of subjectivism; it conveys the notion that one must be fair to one’s opponents by means of not judging them, by being “open-minded” and saying, in effect: “Who am I to know? Maybe I have something to learn from this person.” The term means, in essence, “fairness through skepticism.” So crude a package-deal does not need much analysis. (In a political context, the term could be taken to mean that no one may initiate governmental force against others. But the proper concept to identify such a political condition is “rights” or “freedom,” not “tolerance.”)

IN HIS LAST PARAGRAPH, Kelley states that Ayn Rand’s philosophy, though magnificent, “is not a closed system.” Yes, it is. Philosophy, as Ayn Rand often observed, deals only with the kinds of issues available to men in any era; it does not change with the growth of human knowledge, since it is the base and precondition of that growth. Every philosophy, by the nature of the subject, is immutable. New implications, applications, integrations can always be discovered; but the essence of the system — its fundamental principles and their consequences in every branch — is laid down once and for all by the philosophy’s author. If this applies to any philosophy, think how much more obviously it applies to Objectivism. Objectivism holds that every truth is an absolute, and that a proper philosophy is an integrated whole, any change in any element of which would destroy the entire system.

In yet another expression of his subjectivism in epistemology, Kelley decries, as intolerant, any Objectivist’s (or indeed anyone’s) “obsession with official or authorized doctrine,” which “obsession” he regards as appropriate only to dogmatic viewpoints. In other words, the alternative once again is whim or dogma: either anyone is free to rewrite Objectivism as he wishes or else, through the arbitrary fiat of some authority figure, his intellectual freedom is being stifled. My answer is: Objectivism does have an “official, authorized doctrine,” but it is not dogma. It is stated and validated objectively in Ayn Rand’s works.

“Objectivism” is the name of Ayn Rand’s achievement. Anyone else’s interpretation or development of her ideas, my own work emphatically included, is precisely that: an interpretation or development, which may or may not be logically consistent with what she wrote. In regard to the consistency of any such derivative work, each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence. The “official, authorized doctrine,” however, remains unchanged and untouched in Ayn Rand’s books; it is not affected by any interpreters.

The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence state the “official” doctrine of the government of the United States, and no one, including the Supreme Court, can alter the meaning of this doctrine. What the Constitution and the Declaration are to the United States, Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s other works are to Objectivism. Objectivism, therefore, is “rigid,” “narrow,” “intolerant” and “closed-minded.” If anyone wants to reject Ayn Rand’s ideas and invent a new viewpoint, he is free to do so — but he cannot, as a matter of honesty, label his new ideas or himself “Objectivist.”

Objectivism is not just “common sense”; it is a revolutionary philosophy, which is a fact we do not always keep in mind. Ayn Rand challenges every fundamental that men have accepted for millennia. The essence of her revolution lies in her concept of “objectivity,” which applies to epistemology and to ethics, i.e., to cognition and to evaluation. At this early stage of history, a great many people, though bright and initially drawn to Ayn Rand, are still unable (or unwilling) fully to grasp this central concept. They accept various ideas from Ayn Rand out of context, without digesting them by penetrating to the foundation; thus they never uproot all the contradictory ideas they have accepted, the ones which guided the formation of their own souls and minds. Such people are torn by an impossible conflict: they have one foot (or toe) in the Objectivist world and the rest of themselves planted firmly in the conventional world. People like this do not mind being controversial so long as they are fashionable or “in”; i.e., so long as they can be popular in their subculture, or politically powerful or academically respectable; to attain which status, they will “tolerate” (or show “compassion” for) whatever they have to.

The real enemy of these men is not Ayn Rand; it is reality. But Ayn Rand is the messenger who brings them the hated message, which, somehow, they must escape or dilute (some of them, I think, never even get it). The message is that they must conform to reality 24 hours a day and all the way down.

THIS, I FINALLY SEE, is the cause of all the schisms which have plagued the Objectivist movement through the years, from the Brandens in 1968 on through David Kelley, and which will continue to do so for many years to come. The cause is not concrete-bound details — not differences in regard to love affairs or political strategy or proselytizing techniques or anybody’s personality. The cause is fundamental and philosophical: if you grasp and accept the concept of “objectivity,” in all its implications, then you accept Objectivism, you live by it and you revere Ayn Rand for defining it. If you fail fully to grasp and accept the concept, whether your failure is deliberate or otherwise, you eventually drift away from Ayn Rand’s orbit, or rewrite her viewpoint or turn openly into her enemy.

The most eloquent badge of the authentic Objectivist, who does understand Ayn Rand’s philosophy, is his attitude toward values (which follows from his acceptance of reason). An Objectivist is not primarily an academician or a political activist (though he may well devote his professional life to either or both pursuits). In his soul, he is essentially a moralist — or, in broader terms, what Ayn Rand herself called “a valuer.”

A valuer, in her sense, is a man who evaluates extensively and intensively. That is: he judges every fact within his sphere of action — and he does it passionately, because his value-judgments, being objective, are integrated in his mind into a consistent whole, which to him has the feel, the power and the absolutism of a direct perception of reality. Any other approach to life comes from and pertains to another philosophy, not to Objectivism.

Now I wish to make a request to any unadmitted anti-Objectivists reading this piece, a request that I make as Ayn Rand’s intellectual and legal heir. If you reject the concept of “objectivity” and the necessity of moral judgment, if you sunder fact and value, mind and body, concepts and percepts, if you agree with the Branden or Kelley viewpoint or anything resembling it — please drop out of our movement: drop Ayn Rand, leave Objectivism alone. We do not want you and Ayn Rand would not have wanted you — just as you, in fact, do not want us or her. As a matter of dignity and honor, tell yourself and the world the exact truth: that you agree with certain ideas of Ayn Rand, but reject Objectivism.

It is perhaps too early for there to be a mass movement of Objectivists. But let those of us who are Objectivists at least make sure that what we are spreading is Ayn Rand’s actual ideas, not some distorted hash of them. Let us make sure that in the quest for a national following we are not subverting the integrity of the philosophy to which we are dedicated. If we who understand the issues speak out, our number, whether large or small, is irrelevant; in the long run, we will prevail.

If we engage in quality-control now, refusing to sanction the rewriters of Objectivism whatever the short-term cost and schisms, the long-range result will be a new lease on life for mankind. If we don’t, we are frauds in the short-term and monsters long-range.

Let us not cohabit with or become alchemists in reverse, i.e., men who turn the gold of Ayn Rand into lead.

Paraphrasing Marx: in demanding intellectual consistency, we have nothing to lose but our deluders — and we have the world to win.

About The Author

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff, author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the foremost authority on Rand’s philosophy. Learn more at his website.

The Intellectual Activist, Volume V, Number 1 (May 18, 1989)

Copyright © 1989 Leonard Peikoff.

Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech

by Leonard Peikoff | 1989

The following article appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times in 1989.

Ayatollah Khomeni’s attack on Salman Rushdie and his publishers represents religious terrorism. Americans oppose the Ayatollah’s death-decree, but our government is doing nothing to combat it.

President George H.W. Bush has issued a limp condemnation coupled with the vague statement that Iran would be held “accountable” if American interests are harmed. But two California bookstores have already been bombed, a New York weekly newspaper has been demolished by firebombing, at least 178 threats of death or destruction have been received by booksellers nationwide, major American publishers (primarily Viking) are barricaded at ruinous cost behind an army of private security guards — and every American author, speaker, and reader must wonder if and when he will become a target of armed Islamic fundamentalists with orders to kill heretics.

Has Bush become the new Jimmy Carter? Carter wrung his hands and did nothing while Iran held Americans hostage. This time Iran is attempting to hold our minds hostage.

A religious motive does not excuse murder, it makes the crime more dangerous. It took the West centuries to move from medieval mysticism to the Enlightenment, and thereby discover the only safeguard against endless, bloody, religious warfare: the recognition of man’s inalienable right to think and speak as he chooses. Civilization depends on reason; freedom means the freedom to think, then act accordingly; the rights of free speech and a free press implement the sovereignty of reason over brute force. If civilized existence is to be possible, the right of the individual to exercise his rational faculty must be inviolable.

The ultimate target of the Ayatollah, as of all mystics, is not a particular “blasphemy,” but reason itself, along with its cultural and political expressions: science, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution. If the assault succeeds, the result will be an Age of Unreason — a new Dark Ages. As Ayn Rand wrote in Philosophy: Who Needs It, in her prescient 1960 essay “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”:

The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death — of freedom or slavery — of progress or stagnant brutality. . . . Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding is possible.

Many people have denounced the Ayatollah’s threats, but have then undercut their own stand by offering apologies to those whose “sensibilities” the book has “offended.” No apology is necessary. No creed, Islamic or otherwise, which leads to “holy terror” can demand respect from civilized men.

Whether Rushdie’s book in particular is good or evil, noble or depraved, is now irrelevant. Once death is threatened, there is only one issue to discuss and defend: an individual’s right to speak, whether anyone or everyone likes what he says or not. “Blasphemy” violates no one’s rights. Those who feel insulted do not have to listen to or read the insults. In defending religious liberty, Jefferson observed that “the operations of the mind” must not be made “subject to the coercion of the laws,” adding:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

If blasphemy is the issue, we submit that a religious dictator inciting murder is blasphemy against the sanctity of human life. It is said that Rushdie’s book impugns the faith of believers. So does science. It is said that the book is offensive to the values of the Ayatollah’s followers. So is the United States of America.

Why has the outrage felt by the American public not been translated into a call for action against Iran? The protests from both the Right and the Left in this country ring hollow because both groups have betrayed the philosophic ideas necessary to act.

Conservatives have become dominated by religionists, who openly base their views on mystical dogma and want the government to impose their dogmas by force which is just what the Ayatollah is doing. Homegrown fundamentalists are in no position to lead a crusade for free thought. Can these groups maintain that it is wrong to ban Rushdie, but right to ban Darwin?

All of us owe a debt of gratitude to liberal groups like PEN and the Author’s Guild for their courageous condemnation of the Ayatollah’s threats. But these groups do not offer principled opposition, either — because of their philosophic commitment to collectivism and cultural relativism. Liberals characteristically hold that individual rights must be sacrificed to the “public good,” and that Western civilization is no better than the “culture” of tribal savages. Those who counsel appeasement as a principle of foreign policy will not and cannot demand action against the Ayatollah.

The response of many commentators has been to place the blame, incredibly, on American businessmen: in particular, on the booksellers, such as Waldenbooks, who are damned for trying to protect the safety of their employees and customers. It is not the responsibility of private citizens to risk their lives in defying a foreign power when our government, whose duty it is to protect our lives, turns a blind eye on an historic crime.

Terrorism unpunished is terrorism emboldened. The Ayatollah has already broadened his attacks; he is now threatening death to anyone who criticizes Islam. If he is not stopped, who can predict where the next threat to our publishers and bookstores will come from? From Palestinian terrorists offended by a pro-Israeli book? From the kind of anti-abortion or animal-rights groups that now bomb clinics or trash research laboratories? Do we want a country in which people are afraid to walk into bookstores, because raids on such stores have become an uncontested form of protest?

The clear and present danger is that writers and publishers will begin, as a desperate measure of self-defense, to practice self-censorship — to speak, write, and publish with the implicit thought in mind: “What group will this offend and to what acts of aggression will I then be vulnerable?” The result would be the death of the First Amendment and the gradual Finlandization of America. Is the land of the free and the home of the brave to become the land of the bland and the home of the fearful?

In contrast to both the religious right and the relativist left, [we] uphold the necessity for government action in the present crisis — government action to protect the rights of Americans to their lives, safety, and freedom. A nation that allows the agents of a foreign power to terrorize its citizens with impunity on their own soil has lost the will to survive.

We call for three specific actions:

(1) Police and other government security protection must be given on request to any publisher, bookstore, or other victim who has received a demonstrable threat in connection with the Rushdie affair. It is a monstrous injustice for such victims to be bled dry by security costs while the government neglects its proper duty.

(2) In light of the Ayatollah’s decree and the record of his followers, their incitement to murder constitutes a criminal act, which must be punished. If the inciters are foreign nationals, they should be deported.

(3) The United States government (alone or with allies) should take military action against Iran, until the Iranian government rescinds the Ayatollah’s death decree. The Ayatollah’s threat against American lives is an act of war. It calls for reprisals. Targets should include the known training camps where Iranian terrorists are being schooled and bred.

Force used in self-defense, retaliatory force striking back at those who initiate violence, is a moral necessity. To adopt a pacifist stance — or to engage in infinite behind-the-scenes “negotiations” that lead nowhere — is to surrender the world to brutality. Timid half-measures are worse than none; one does not respond to murder merely by withdrawing ambassadors or cutting back on trade. One cannot appeal to reason in dealing with those who reject it. Force is the only language intelligible to those who live by force.

The only life the Ayatollah has a right to declare forfeit is his own.

About The Author

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff, author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the foremost authority on Rand’s philosophy. Learn more at his website.

Lexicon excerpts on Religion

by Ayn Rand | 1988

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z

BUY THE BOOK

Religion

PLAYBOY
Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND
Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very — how should I say it? — dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.

Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964

Excerpt from Lexicon, "Religion"

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call [man’s] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain — and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 137

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive — a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. . . . Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. . . . Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . . . The purpose of man’s life . . . is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 139

The kind of sense of life that produced the [papal] encyclical “Populorum Progressio” . . . was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.

The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind — hence hatred for man — hence hatred for life and for this earth — hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth — and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.

“Requiem for Man,”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 304

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism — the same goal, global rule by force — the same enemy, man’s mind.

There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.

“Requiem for Man,”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 316

Is there any difference between the encyclical’s philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: “Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism,” The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: “The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul’s newest encyclical yesterday as ‘the church’s definitive answer to Marxism.’ . . . ‘The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,’ Father Murray said. `Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism — humanism that recognizes man’s religious nature.’”

Amen.

So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism — and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.

And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress — and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side — then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.

“Requiem for Man,”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 314

[There is one] possibly misleading sentence . . . in Roark’s speech: “From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind.”

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark’s and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics — not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction “ethics,” the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself . . .

Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

“Introduction to The Fountainhead,”
The Objectivist, March 1968, 4

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.

“The Chickens’ Homecoming,”
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 46

The ideology that opposes man’s enjoyment of his life on earth and holds sex as such to be evil — the same ideology that is the source and cause of anti-obscenity censorship [is]: religion.

For a discussion of the profound, metaphysical reasons of religion’s antagonism to sex, I refer you to my article “Of Living Death” (The Voice of Reason), which deals with the papal encyclical on contraception, “Of Human Life.” Today, most people who profess to be religious, particularly in this country, do not share that condemnation of sex — but it is an ancient tradition which survives, consciously or subconsciously, even in the minds of many irreligious persons, because it is a logical consequence implicit in the basic causes and motives of any form of mysticism.

“Thought Control,”
The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 1, 3

Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy — an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality — many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man’s existence.

“Philosophy and Sense of Life,”
The Romantic Manifesto, 25

In mankind’s history, art began as an adjunct (and, often, a monopoly) of religion. Religion was the primitive form of philosophy: it provided man with a comprehensive view of existence. Observe that the art of those primitive cultures was a concretization of their religion’s metaphysical and ethical abstractions.

“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,”
The Romantic Manifesto, 20

It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man’s mind.

Leonard Peikoff, “‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’”
The Objectivist Forum, April 1981, 12

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z

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About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

Ayn Rand, “Religion,” The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: Meridian, 1988).


POV: Ayn Rand excerpts on Religion

by Ayn Rand | 1988 | The Ayn Rand Lexicon


ARI’s Point of View on Religion and a Free Society


In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the most important issue in human life is the supremacy and absolutism of reason. This leads Rand to reject any form of faith or belief in the supernatural, including God, as well as religious moral teachings, which order man to obey authority rather than to pursue his own rational interests.

Politically, Rand argues that reason leads to freedom and that faith — belief in the absence of or contrary to evidence — leads to force. A man who understands that reason is an absolute will demand his inalienable right to think and live for himself. On the other hand, Rand writes, anyone “who resorts to the formula: ‘It’s so, because I say so,’ will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later.”

The following passages on religion are taken from the Ayn Rand Lexicon, a compilation of key statements from Rand (and from a few other authorized Objectivist texts) on several hundred topics in philosophy and related fields. Although these passages are not intended to provide a systematic or exhaustive treatment of Rand’s views on religion, they touch on many key issues and indicate her unique perspective.

ARI, guided by our mission to advance the philosophy of Objectivism, upholds reality, reason and the morality of rational egoism, and opposes any attempt to base morality on faith or to inject religion into government.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z

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Ayn Rand Excerpts on Religion

PLAYBOY
Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND
Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very — how should I say it? — dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.

Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand,  Playboy, March 1964

 

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand, Playboy, March 1964

 

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call [man’s] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain — and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 137

 

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive — a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. . . . Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. . . . Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . . . The purpose of man’s life . . . is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 139

 

The kind of sense of life that produced the [papal] encyclical “Populorum Progressio” . . . was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.

The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind — hence hatred for man — hence hatred for life and for this earth — hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth — and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.

“Requiem for Man,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 304

 

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism — the same goal, global rule by force — the same enemy, man’s mind.

There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.

“Requiem for Man,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 316

 

Is there any difference between the encyclical’s philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: “Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism,” The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: “The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul’s newest encyclical yesterday as ‘the church’s definitive answer to Marxism.’ . . . ‘The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,’ Father Murray said. ‘Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism — humanism that recognizes man’s religious nature.’”

Amen.

So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism — and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.

And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress — and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side — then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.

“Requiem for Man,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 314

 

[There is one] possibly misleading sentence . . . in Roark’s speech: “From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind.”

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark’s and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics — not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction “ethics,” the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself . . .

Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

“Introduction to The Fountainhead,” The Objectivist, March 1968, 4

 

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.

“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 46

 

The ideology that opposes man’s enjoyment of his life on earth and holds sex as such to be evil — the same ideology that is the source and cause of anti-obscenity censorship [is]: religion.

For a discussion of the profound, metaphysical reasons of religion’s antagonism to sex, I refer you to my article “Of Living Death” (The Voice of Reason), which deals with the papal encyclical on contraception, “Of Human Life.” Today, most people who profess to be religious, particularly in this country, do not share that condemnation of sex — but it is an ancient tradition which survives, consciously or subconsciously, even in the minds of many irreligious persons, because it is a logical consequence implicit in the basic causes and motives of any form of mysticism.

“Thought Control,” The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 1, 3

 

Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy — an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality — many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man’s existence.

“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto, 25

 

In mankind’s history, art began as an adjunct (and, often, a monopoly) of religion. Religion was the primitive form of philosophy: it provided man with a comprehensive view of existence. Observe that the art of those primitive cultures was a concretization of their religion’s metaphysical and ethical abstractions.

“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” The Romantic Manifesto, 20

 

It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man’s mind.

Leonard Peikoff, “‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’” The Objectivist Forum, April 1981, 12

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z

BUY THE BOOK

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

Ayn Rand, “Religion,” The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: Meridian, 1988).


Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
View Article
Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
View Article