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Delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 20, 1986, and published in The Objectivist Forum, June 1986. It is reprinted in The Voice of Reason.

A specter is haunting America — the specter of religion. This, borrowing Karl Marx’s literary style, is my theme tonight.

Where do I see religion? The outstanding political fact of the 1980s is the rise of the New Right, and its penetration of the Republican party under President Reagan. The bulk of the New Right consists of Protestant Fundamentalists, typified by the Moral Majority. These men are frequently allied on basic issues with other religiously oriented groups, including conservative Catholics of the William F. Buckley ilk and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals of the Commentary magazine variety.

All these groups observed the behavior of the New Left awhile back and concluded, understandably enough, that the country was perishing. They saw the liberals’ idealization of drugged hippies and nihilistic yippies; they saw the proliferation of pornography, of sexual perversion, of noisy Lib and Power gangs running to the Democrats to demand ever more outrageous handouts and quotas; they heard the routine leftist deprecation of the United States and the routine counsel to appease Soviet Russia — and they concluded, with good reason, that what the country was perishing from was a lack of values, of ethical absolutes, of morality.

Values, the Left retorted, are subjective; no lifestyle (and no country) is better or worse than any other; there is no absolute wrong or right anymore — unless, the liberals added, you believe in some outmoded ideology like religion. Precisely, the New Rightists reply; that is our whole point. There are absolute truths and absolute values, they say, which are the key to salvation of our great country; but there is only one source of such values: not man or this earth or the human brain, but the Deity as revealed in scripture. The choice we face, they conclude, is the skepticism, decadence, and statism of the Democrats, or morality, absolutes, Americanism, and their only possible base: religion — old-time, Judeo-Christian religion.

“Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time for our country’s sake,” said Mr. Reagan in 1980. “In a struggle against totalitarian tyranny, traditional values based on religious morality are among our greatest strengths.” 1

“Religious views,” says Congressman Jack Kemp, “lie at the heart of our political system. The ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are based on the belief that each individual is created by God and has a special value in His eyes. . . . Without a common belief in the one God who created us, there could be no freedom and no recourse if a majority were to seek to abrogate the rights of the minority.” 2

Or, as the Education Secretary William Bennett sums up this viewpoint: “Our values as a free people and the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood.” 3

Politicians of America have characteristically given lip service to the platitudes of piety. But the New Right is different. These men seem to mean their religiosity, and they are dedicated to implementing their religious creeds politically; they seem to make these creeds the governing factor in the realm of our personal relations, our art and literature, our clinics and hospitals, and the education of our youth. Whatever else you say about him, Mr. Reagan has delivered handsomely one of his campaign promises: he has given the adherents of religion a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations.

This defines our subject for tonight. It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises. Is the New Right the answer to the New Left? What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism? Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism — or to something else?

In discussing these issues, I am not going to say much about the New Right as such; its specific beliefs are widely known. Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader, philosophical context. I want to ask: What is religion? and then: How does it function in the life of a nation, any nation, past or present? These, to be sure, are very abstract questions, but they are inescapable. Only when we have considered them can we go on to judge the relation between a particular religion, such as Christianity, and a particular nation, America.

Let us begin with a definition. What is religion as such? What is the essence common to all of its varieties, Western and Oriental, which distinguishes it from other cultural phenomena?

Religion involves a certain kind of outlook on the world and a consequent way of life. In other words, the term “religion” denotes a type (actually, a precursor) of philosophy. As such, a religion must include a view of knowledge (which is the subject matter of the branch of philosophy called epistemology) and a view of reality (metaphysics). Then, on this foundation, a religion builds a code of values (ethics). So the question becomes: What type of philosophy constitutes a religion?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “religion” as “a particular system of faith an worship,” and goes on, in part: “Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship.”

The fundamental concept here is “faith.” “Faith” in this context means belief in the absence of evidence. This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science. A scientist may believe in the entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he can prove their existence logically, by inference from things he does observe. A religious man, however, believes in some “higher unseen power” which he cannot observe and cannot logically prove. As the whole story of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity. The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.

Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God is not only an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man’s worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.

If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to The New York Times, a religious revival is now occurring. Will you find students eagerly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the  teachings of science? On the contrary. The students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. “Students today are more reconciled to authority,” one campus religious official notes. “There is less need for students to sit on their own mountain top” — i.e., to exercise their own independent mind and judgment. Why not? They are content simply to believe. At Columbia University, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly not to analyze, but to “sing, worship and speak in tongues.” “People are coming back to a religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture,” says a chaplain at Columbia. 4 This is absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to: not reason or logic, but faith.

“Faith” names the method of religion, the essence of its epistemology; and, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, the belief in some “higher unseen power” is the basic content of religion, its distinctive view of reality, its metaphysics. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God; some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural — in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.

According to religion, this supernatural power is the essence of the universe and the source of all value. It constitutes the realm of true reality and of absolute perfection. By contrast, the world around us is viewed as only semi-real and as inherently imperfect, even corrupt, in any event metaphysically unimportant. According to most religions, this life is a mere episode in the soul’s journey to its ultimate fulfillment, which involves leaving behind earthly things in order to unite with Deity. As a pamphlet issued by a Catholic study group expresses this point: Man “cannot achieve perfection or true  happiness in this life here on earth. He can only achieve this in the eternity of the next life after death. . . . Therefore . . . what a person has or lacks in worldly possessions, privileges, or advantages is not important.” 5 In New Delhi a few months ago, expressing this viewpoint, Pope John Paul II urged on the Indians a life of “asceticism and renunciation.” In Quebec some time earlier, he decried “the fascination the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, and records of physical strength.” Too many men, he explained in Luxembourg, “consciously organize their way of life merely on the basis of the realities of this world without any heed for God and His wishes.” 6

This brings us to religious ethics, the essence of which also involves faith, faith in God’s commandments. Virtue, in this view, consists of obedience. Virtue is not a matter of achieving your desires, whatever they may be, but of seeking to carry out God’s; it is not the pursuit of egoistic goals, whether rational or not, but the willingness to renounce your own goals in the service of the Lord. What religion counsels is the ethics of self-transcendence, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice.

What single attitude most stands in the way of this ethics, according to religious writers? The sin of pride. Why is pride a sin? Because man, in this view, is a metaphysically defective creature. His intellect is helpless in the crucial questions of life. His will has no power over existence, which is ultimately controlled by God. His body lusts after all the temptations of the flesh. In short, man is weak, ugly, and low, a typical product of the low, unreal world in which he lives. Your proper attitude towards yourself, therefore, as to this world, should be a negative one. For earthly creatures such as you and I, “Know thyself” means “Know thy worthlessness”; simple honesty entails humility, self-castigation, even self-disgust.

Religion means orienting one’s existence around faith, God, and a life of service — and correspondingly downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality.

What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval  Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.

Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the counts I mentioned. The Gods of Mount Olympus were like a race of elder brothers to man, mischievous brothers with rather limited powers; they were closer to Steven Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial visitor than to anything we would call “God.” They did not create the universe or shape its laws or leave any message of revelations or demand a life of sacrifice. Nor were they taken very seriously by the leading voices of culture, such as Plato and Aristotle. From start to finish, the Greek thinkers recognized no sacred texts, no infallible priesthood and no intellectual authority beyond the human mind; they allowed no room for faith. Epistemologically, most were staunch individualists who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own powers of sensory observation and logical thought. For detail, I refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit.

Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture. Men generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural; their energies were devoted to the joys and challenges of life. There was a shadowy belief in immortality, but the dominant attitude toward it was summed up by Homer, who has Achilles declare that he would rather be a slave on earth than “bear sway among all the dead that be departed.”

The Greek ethics followed from this base. All the Greek thinkers agreed that virtue is egoistic. The purpose of morality, in their view, is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own happiness, by means of a proper development of his natural faculties — above all, of his cognitive faculty, his intellect. And as to the Greek estimate of man — look at the statues of the Greek gods, made in the image of human strength, human grace, human beauty; and read Aristotle’s account of the virtue — yes, the virtue — of pride.

I must note here that in many ways Plato was an exception to the general irreligion of the Greeks. But his ideas were not dominant until much later. When Plato’s spirit did take over, the Greek approach had already died out. What replaced it was the era of Christianity.

Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man’s entire mental life. “I do not know in order to believe,” he said, “I believe in order to know.” In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus, Tertullian’s famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe it because it is absurd”).

As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare — a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.

What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn’t it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine’s answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by Original Sin, creatures who are, as he put it, “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous”?

What were the practical results — in the ancient world, then in the medieval — of these two opposite approaches to life?

Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a magnificent, man-glorifying art; it gave us the base of modern civilization in every field; it taught the West how to think. In addition, through its admirers in ancient Rome, which built on the Greek intellectual base, Greece indirectly gave us the rule of law and the first idea of man’s rights (this idea was originated by the pagan Stoics). Politically, the ancients never conceived a society of full-fledged individual liberty; no nation achieved that before the United States. But the ancients did lay certain theoretical bases for the concept of liberty; and in practice, both in some of the Greek city-states and in republican Rome, large numbers of men at various times were at least relatively free. They were incomparably more free than their counterparts ever had been in the religious cultures of ancient Egypt and its equivalents.

What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.

What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the feudal serf tied for life to his plot of ground, his noble overlord, and the all-encompassing decrees of the Church. Or, if you want an example closer to home, jump several centuries forward to the American Puritans, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin continent, and who proceeded to establish a theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts. Such a dictatorship, they declared, was necessitated by the very nature of their religion. You are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter; therefore, you are a servant who must act as your Creator, through his spokesmen, decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately depraved, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on your vicious impulses. And, they said, you don’t really own your property either; wealth, like all values, is a gift from heaven temporarily held in trust, to be controlled like all else, by the elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so what? You’re not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.

There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must offer an obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment either, but must be submissive in action as well. This is the reason why — as Ayn Rand has pointed out — faith and force are always corollaries; each requires the other.

The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has a value as an individual — that the individual soul is precious — is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite Original Sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power — only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy — only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.

What — or who — ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It’s all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.”

The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance. Renaissance means “rebirth,” rebirth of reason and man’s concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America’s founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.

The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway) of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian, spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man’s intellect and, correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible. “While we are under the tyranny of Priests,” he declared in 1784, “. . . it ever will be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.” 7

Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God “is supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity.” The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere, “the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants . . . has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emolument.” “It has hitherto been deemed a crime to think,” he observes, but at last men have a chance — because they have finally escaped from the “long and doleful night” of Christian rule, and have grasped instead “the unlimited power of human reason” — “reason, which is the glory of our nature.” 8

Allen and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared by all the Founding Fathers as their basic, revolutionary premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” he advises a nephew, “and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” 9 Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man’s mind comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach — in this fundamental rejection of faith — that the irreligion of the Enlightenment lies.

The consequence of this approach was the age’s rejection of all the other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles, but of impersonal natural law. In ethics: success in this life became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man’s pursuit of happiness — his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.

Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man.

Many of the Founding Fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint, known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step between Christianity and outright atheism.

This is why the religious men of the Enlightenment were scandalized and even panicked by the deist atmosphere. Here is the Rev. Peter Clark of Salem, Mass., in 1739: “The former Strictness in Religion, that . . . Zeal for the Order and Ordinances of the Gospel, which was so much the Glory of our Fathers, is very much abated, yea disrelished by too many: and a Spirit of Licentiousness, and Neutrality in Religion . . . so opposite to the Ways of God’s People, do exceedingly prevail in the midst of us.” 10 And here, fifty years later, is the Rev. Charles Backus of Springfield, Mass. The threat to divine religion, he says, is the “indifference which prevails” and the “ridicule.” Mankind, he warns, is in “great danger of being laughed out of religion.” 11 This was true; these preachers were not alarmists; their description of the Enlightenment atmosphere is correct.

This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point for point, the Founding Fathers’ argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans’ argument for dictatorship — but in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the Founding Fathers said in essence (with a large assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority, human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being — not in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, they added, the motive of man’s action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.

This, in substance, was the American argument for man’s inalienable rights. It was the argument that reason demands freedom. And this is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically different century. It required what the Enlightenment offered: a rational, secular context.

When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is what the Founding Fathers did in one crucial respect. All men, said Jefferson, are endowed “by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God. Despite Jefferson’s eminence, however, his statement (along with its counterpart in Locke and others) is intellectually unwarranted. The principle of individual rights does not derive from or depend on the idea of God as man’s creator. It derives from the very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from the requirements of man’s mind and his survival. In fact, as I have argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically. Through all the centuries of the Dark and Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a Creator; but it was only when religion began to fade that the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerged as an historical, nation-shaping force. What then deserves the credit for the new development — the age-old belief or the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protector of human liberty — God or reason?

My answer is now evident. America does rest on a code of values and morality — in this, the New Right is correct. But, by all the evidence of philosophy and history, it does not rest on the values or ideas of religion. It rests on their opposite.

You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.

The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.

This is why, so far, Communism has been unable to win out in the West. Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion — in faith, sacrifice, humility, and, therefore, servility. We are still too rational, too this-worldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny. We are still being protected by the fading remnants of our Enlightenment heritage.

But we will not be so for long if the New Right has its way.

Philosophically, the New Right holds the same fundamental ideas as the New Left — its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice — and therefore it has to lead to the same result in practice: dictatorship. Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction. The New Rightists themselves announce it openly. While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is statism.

The outstanding example of this fact is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion even in the first trimester of pregnancy. A woman, in this view, has no right to her own body or even, the most consistent New Rightists add, to her own life; instead, she should be made to sacrifice at the behest of the state, to sacrifice her desires, her life goals, and even her existence in the name of a mass protoplasm, which is at most a potential human being, not an actual one. “Abortion,” says Paul Weyrich, executive director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, “is wrong in all cases. I believe that if you have to choose between new life and existing life, you should choose new life. The person who has had an opportunity to live at least has been given that gift by God and should make way for a new life on earth.” 12

Another example: men and women, the New Right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private, in accordance with their own choice and values; the law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion. And: children, we are told, should be indoctrinated with state-mandated religion at school. For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the Book of Genesis as a scientific theory on par with or even superior to the theory of evolution. And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children’s throats. Is this not, contrary to the Constitution, a state establishment of religion, and of a controversial, intellectual viewpoint? Not at all, says Jack Kemp. “If prayer is said aloud,” he explains, “it need be no more than a general acknowledgment of the existence, power, authority, and love of God, the Creator.” 13 That’s all — nothing controversial or indoctrinating about that!

And: when the students finally do leave school, after all the indoctrination, can they be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly? No, says the New Right. Adults should not be free to write, publish, or to read, according to their own judgment; literature should be censured by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as against what is obscene.

Is this a movement on behalf of Americanism and individual rights? Is it a movement consistent with the principles of the Constitution? 

“The Constitution establishes freedom for religion,” says Mr. Kemp, “not from it” — a sentiment which is shared by President Reagan and by the whole New Right. 14 What then becomes of intellectual freedom? Are meetings such as this evening’s deprived of Constitutional protection, since the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under “freedom for religion”? And what happens when one religious sect concludes that the statements of another are subversive to true religion? Who decides, which, if either, should be struck down by the standard of “freedom for religion, not from it”? Can you predict the fate of free thought, and of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” if Mr. Kemp and associates ever get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress?

What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans all over again, but without their excuse of ignorance. We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans, who live not before the Founding Fathers’ heroic experiment in liberty, but after it.

The New Right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American revolution.

But, you may say, aren’t the New Rightists the champions of property rights and capitalism, as against the economic statism of the liberals? They are not. Capitalism is the separation of the state and economics, a condition that none of our current politicians or pressure groups even dreams of advocating. The New Right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare-state mixed economy created by the New Deal and its heirs; our conservatives now merely haggle on the system’s fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike. In this matter, the New Right is moved solely by the power of tradition. These men do not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism by freezing the economic status quo. And even in regard to this highly limited goal, they are disarmed and useless.

If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first drafts of the [1986] pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops, men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the New Right. The bishops recommended a giant step in the direction of socialism. They ask for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor, at home and abroad. They ask for it on a single basic ground: consistency with the teachings of Christianity.

Some of you may wonder here: “But if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don’t they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity, which makes everyone richer?” If you think about it, however, you will see that, valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it.

Can they praise the profit motive — while extolling selflessness? Can they commend the passion to own material property — while declaring that worldly possessions are not important? Can they urge men to practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning — while upholding as the human model the lilies of the field? Can they celebrate the self-assertive risk-taking of the entrepreneur — while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth? Can they glorify and liberate the creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth — while elevating faith above reason? The answers are obvious. Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the New Right, no religion, by its nature can appeal to or admire the capitalist system; not if the religion is true to itself. Nor can any religion liberate man’s power to create new wealth. If, therefore, the faithful are concerned about poverty — as the Bible demands they be — they have no alternative but to counsel redistribution of whatever wealth already happens to have been produced. The goods, they have to say, are here. How did they get here? God, they reply, has seen to that; now let men make sure that His largess is distributed fairly. Or, as the bishops put it: “The goods of this earth are common property and . . . men and women are summoned to faithful stewardship rather than to selfish appropriation or exploitation of what was destined for all.” 15

For further details on this point, I refer you to the bishops’ letter; given their premises, their argument is unanswerable. If, as the New Right claims, there is scriptural warrant for state control of men’s sexual activities, then there is surely much more warrant for state control of men’s economic activities. The idea of the Bible (or the “Protestant ethic”) as the base of capitalism is ludicrous, both logically and historically.

Economically, as in all other respects, the New Right is leading us, admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents. By virtue of the movement’s essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country — and, therefore, of Communism in the world at large. When a free nation betrays its own heritage, it has no heart left, no conviction by means of which to stand up to foreign aggressors.

There was a flaw in the intellectual foundation of America from the start: the attempt to combine the Enlightenment approach in politics with the Judeo-Christian ethics. For a while, the latter element was on the defensive, muted by the eighteenth-century spirit, so that America could gain a foothold, grow to maturity, and become great. But only for a while. Thanks to Immanuel Kant, as I have discussed in my book The Ominous Parallels, the base of religion — faith and self-sacrifice — was re-established at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, all of modern philosophy embraced collectivism, in the form of socialism, Fascism, Communism, welfare statism. By now, the distinctive ideas at the base of America have been largely forgotten or swept aside. They will not be brought back by an appeal to religion.

What then is the solution? It is not atheism as such — and I say this even though as an Objectivist I am an atheist. “Atheism” is a negative; it means not believing in God — which leaves wide open what you do believe in. It is futile to crusade for a negative; the Communists, too, call themselves atheists. Nor is the answer “secular humanism,” about which we often hear today. This term is used so loosely that it is practically contentless; it is compatible with a wide range of conflicting viewpoints, including, again, Communism. To combat the doctrines that are destroying our country, out-of-context terms and ideas such as these are useless. What we need is an integrated, consistent philosophy in every branch, and especially in the two most important ones: epistemology and ethics. We need a philosophy of reason and of rational self-interest, a philosophy that would once again release the power of man’s mind and the energy inherent in his pursuit of happiness. Nothing less will save America or individual rights.

There are many good people in the world who accept religion, and many of them hold some good ideas on social questions. I do not dispute that. But their religion is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem. Do I say that therefore there should now only be “freedom for atheism”? No, I am not Mr. Kemp. Of course, religions must be left free; no philosophic viewpoint, right or wrong, should be interfered with by the state. I do say, however, that it is time for patriots to take a stand — to name publicly what America does depend on, and why that is not Judaism or Christianity.

There are men today who advocate freedom and who recognize what ideas lie at its base, but who then counsel “practicality.” It is too late, they say, to educate people  philosophically; we must appeal to what they already believe; we must pretend to endorse religion on strategic grounds, even if privately we don’t.

This is a counsel of intellectual dishonesty and of utter impracticality. It is too late indeed, far too late for a strategy of deception which by its nature has to backfire and always has, because it consists of confirming and supporting the very ideas that have to be uprooted and replaced. It is time to tell people the unvarnished truth: to stand up for man’s mind and this earth, and against any version of mysticism or religion. It is time to tell people: “You must choose between unreason and America. You cannot have both. Take your pick.”

If there is to be any chance for the future, this is the only chance there is.

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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.

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This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 14, 1985, more than twenty years after Ayn Rand’s talk to the New Jersey doctors, and was published in The Objectivist Forum, April-June 1985. I wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance given to me in the preparation of this lecture by my brother, Dr. Michael Peikoff, who is a surgeon in Nevada.

One day, when you are out of town on a business trip, you wake up with a cough, muscle aches, chills, and a high fever. You do not know what it is, you start to panic, but you do know one action to take: you call a doctor. He conducts a physical exam, takes a history, administers lab tests, narrows down the possibilities; within hours, he reaches a diagnosis of pneumonia and prescribes a course of treatment, including antibiotics. Soon you begin to respond, you relax, the crisis is over. Or: you are getting out of your car, you fall and break your leg. It is a disaster, but you remain calm, because you can utter one sentence to your wife: “Call the doctor.” He proceeds to examine your leg for nerve and blood-vessel injury, he takes X rays, reduces the fracture, puts on a cast; the disaster has faded into a mere inconvenience, and you resume your normal life. Or: your child comes home from school with a stabbing pain in the abdomen. There is only one hope: you call the doctor. He performs an appendectomy — the child recovers.

We take all this completely for granted, as though modern drugs, modern hospitals, and modern doctors were facts of nature, which always had been there and which always will be there. Many people today take for granted not only the simpler kinds of medical intervention, but even the wonder cures and wonder treatments that the medical profession has painstakingly devised — like the latest radiation therapy for breast cancer, or the intricate delicacy of modern brain surgery, or such a breathtaking achievement as the artificial-heart implants performed by Dr. William C. DeVries. Most of us expect that the doctors will go on accomplishing such feats routinely, steadily removing pain and thus enhancing the quality of our life, while adding ever more years to its quantity.

America’s medical system is the envy of the globe. The rich from every other country, when they get sick, do not head for Moscow or Stockholm or even London anymore; they come here. And in some way, despite the many public complaints against the medical profession, we all know this fact; we know how good our doctors are, and how much we depend on their knowledge, skill, and dedication. Suppose you had to go on a six-month ocean voyage with no stops in port, with ample provisions and sailors, but with only one additional profession represented on board, and you could decide which it would be. Would you ask for your lawyer to come along? your accountant? your congressman? Would you dare even to ask for your favorite movie star? Or would you say: “Bring a doctor. What if something happens?” The terror of having no answer to this question is precisely what the medical profession saves us from.

I am not saying that all doctors are perfect — they are not; or that they all have a good bedside manner — they do not; or that the profession is free from flaws — like every other group today, the medical profession has its share of errors, deficiencies, weaknesses. But these are not my subject tonight, and they do not alter two facts: that our doctors, whatever their failings, do give us the highest caliber health care in world history — and that they live a grueling existence in order to do so.

I come from a medical family, and I can tell you what a doctor’s life is like. Most of them study nonstop for years in medical school and then work nonstop until they die. My own father, who was a surgeon, operated daily from 7 A.M. until noon and then made hospital rounds; from 2 to 6 P.M., he held office hours. When he came home for dinner, if he did, the phone never stopped ringing — it was nurses asking instructions, or doctors discussing emergency cases, or patients presenting symptoms. When he got the chance, usually late at night or on Sundays after rounds, he would read medical journals (or write for them), to keep abreast of the latest research. My father was not an exception. This is how most doctors, in any branch of medicine, live, and how they work.

The profession imposes not only killing hours, but also continuous tension: doctors deal all the time with crisis — with accidents, diseases, trauma, disaster, the imminence of death. Even when an ailment is not a mortal threat, the patient often fears that it is, and he must be reassured, nursed through the terror, even counseled psychologically by the physician. The pressure on the doctor never lets up. If he wants to escape even for the space of a single dinner on the town, chances are that he cannot: he will probably get beeped and have to rush to the emergency room just as the entree is being served.

The doctor not only has to live and work in such a pressure cooker, he has to think all the time — clearly, objectively, scientifically. Medicine is a field that requires a vast body of specialized theoretical knowledge; to apply it properly to particular cases, the doctor must regularly make delicate, excruciatingly complex decisions. Medical treatment is not usually a cut-and-dried affair, involving a simple, self-evident course of action; it requires the balancing of countless variables; it requires clinical judgment. And the doctor must not only exercise such judgment — he must do it fast; typically, he has to act now. He cannot petition the court or his client or any employer for a postponement. He faces daily, hourly, the merciless timetable of nature itself.

What I personally admire most about doctors is the fact that they live this kind of life not out of any desire for altruistic self-sacrifice, but selfishly — which is the only thing that enables them to survive it. They love the field, most of them; they find the work a fascinating challenge in applied science. They are proud men, most of them, with an earned pride in their ability to observe, evaluate, act, cure. And, to their credit, they expect to be rewarded materially for their skill; they want to make a good living, which is the least men can offer them in payment for their achievements. They make that living, as a rule, by standing on their own, not as cogs in some faceless, government-subsidized enterprise, but as entrepreneurs in private practice. The doctors are among the last of the capitalist breed left in this country. They are among the last of the individualists that once populated this great nation.

If I knew nothing about today’s world but the nature of our politicians and the philosophy represented by the medical profession, I would predict an inevitable, catastrophic clash between the two: between the government and the doctors. On purely theoretical grounds, I would predict the destruction of the doctors by the government, which in every field now protects and rewards the exact opposite of thought, effort, and achievement.

This catastrophe is actually taking place. It will affect your future as well as that of the doctors.

To understand what is happening in medicine today, we must go back to the beginning, which in this case is 1965, the year when Medicare and Medicaid were finally pushed through Congress by Lyndon Johnson. Medicare covers most of the medical expenses of those over sixty-five, whatever their income. Medicaid is a supplemental program for the poor of any age.

Those of us who opposed the Johnson plan argued at the time that government intervention in medicine is immoral in principle and would be disastrous in practice. No man, we claimed, has a right to medical care; if he cannot pay for what he needs, then he must depend on voluntary charity. Government financing of medical expenses, we argued, even if it is for only a fraction of the population, necessarily means eventual enslavement of the doctors and, as a result, a profound deterioration in the quality of medical care for everyone, including the aged and the poor.

The proponents of Medicare were unmoved by any arguments. Altruistic service to the needy, they said, is man’s duty. It is degrading, they said, for the elderly to be dependent on private charity; a “means test” is incompatible with human dignity. Besides, they added, the government would not dream of asking for any control over the doctors or over their methods of patient care. All we want the state to do, they said, is pay the bills.

It is now twenty years later. Let us look at what actually happened.

The first result of the new programs should have been self-evident. Suppose we apply the same principle to nutrition. Suppose President Johnson had said: “It is unfair for you to have to pay for your own food and restaurant bills. Men have a right to eat. Washington, therefore, will pick up the tab.” Can you project the results? Can you imagine the eating binges, the sudden mania for dining out, the soaring demand for baked peacock tongues and other gourmet delicacies? Do you see Lutèce and the “21” Club becoming nationally franchised and starting to outdraw McDonald’s? Why not? The eaters do not have to pay for it. And the food industry, including its most sincere members, is ecstatic; now that the money is pouring from Washington into the grocery chains and the restaurants, they can give every customer the kind of luxury treatment once reserved for millionaires. Everybody is happy — except that expenditure on food becomes so great a percentage of our GNP, and the drain on the federal treasury becomes so ominous, that every other industry starts to protest and soon even the bureaucrats begin to panic.

This is what happened to medical spending in the United States. The patients covered by the new programs no longer had to pay much attention to cost — that was the whole purpose of the programs. And the health-care professionals at first were generally delighted. Now, many of them felt, the sky is the limit, and they proceeded to build hospitals, purchase equipment, and administer tests accordingly. Medical expenditures in the U.S. were 4.3% of GNP in 1952; today they are about 11% and still rising. Medicare expenditures doubled from 1974 to 1979, doubled again by 1984, and are expected to double again by 1991, at which time, according to current estimates, the Medicare program will be bankrupt. Something, the government recognized, has to be done; we are going broke because of the insatiable demand for medical care.

The government did not decide to cancel its programs and return to a free market in medicine — when are disastrous government programs ever canceled? Instead, it did what governments always do: it decided to keep the programs but impose rigid controls on them. The first step was a campaign to force hospitals not to spend much on Medicare patients, no matter what the effects on the health of those patients.

We will no longer, officials said, pay hospitals a fee for each service they render a Medicare patient. That method of payment, they said, simply encourages spending. Instead, we will pay according to a new principle, DRGs. DRGs represent the first major assault by the government against the doctors and their patients. It is not yet the strangulation of the medical profession. But it is the official dropping of the noose around their necks.

DRG means “diagnosis-related group.” According to this approach, the government has divided all ailments into 468 possible diagnoses, and has set in advance a fixed, arbitrary fee for each: it will pay a hospital only what it claims is the average cost of the ailment. For example, for a Medicare patient in the Western Mountain region who is admitted to a hospital with a heart attack and finally recovers enough to go home, the government now pays the hospital exactly $5,094 — no more and no less. And it pays this amount no matter what the hospital does for the patient, no matter how long his stay or how short, no matter how many services he requires or how few. If the patient costs the hospital more than the government payment, the hospital loses money on him. If he costs less, the hospital makes a profit.

Here is a fictional story now in process of becoming reality around the country. A man suffering from severe chest pains is taken by ambulance to the hospital. He receives certain standard tests, including a cardiogram, then is moved to the Intensive Care Unit, where his vital signs are continuously monitored. His doctor thinks that in this instance a further test, an angiogram, is urgently indicated; this test would outline the arteries of the heart and indicate if one is about to close off, an event that could be fatal. The hospital administrator protests: “An angiogram is expensive. It costs up to $1,000, about 20% of our total fee for this man, and who knows what else he’s still going to cost us? You can’t prove this test is necessary. Let’s wait and see.” The test is not given. Maybe the patient lives, maybe not. Several days later, the administrator comes to the doctor: “You’ve got to get this man out of the ICU. It’s costing almost $800 per day, and he’s been here now for five days. What with everything else, we’ve already spent almost the whole payment we get for him.” The doctor thinks that the patient still desperately needs the specialized nursing available only in the ICU. The administrator overrules him. “There’s an area of judgment here,” he says. “We’ll just have to take a bit of a chance on this case.”

Or: the doctor decides that the patient is an excellent candidate for remedial heart surgery. A bypass operation, he thinks, would probably prolong the man’s life considerably while relieving him of pain. But the man, after all, is elderly and the operation would involve a lengthy hospital stay. “Let’s try a more conservative treatment first,” the administrator says, “let’s give him some medication and wait and see.” Again, maybe the patient lives, maybe not.

Let us say that he lives and is moved to a bed in the regular ward. He still feels very weak, and the doctor does not think he is anywhere near ready to be discharged. But the $5,094 has long since been spent, and the administrator starts to wonder aloud: “Maybe this man could manage somehow at home. In any event, he’s eating us alive — get him out of here.” Maybe the patient will survive at home, maybe not.

Do you see the thrust of the system? If the hospital does relatively little for the patient, it makes money; if it provides an extensive range of services, it loses heavily. The best case from its viewpoint is for the patient to die right after admission: the hospital still gets the full fee. The worst case is for him to survive with complications and require a lengthy stay — which is why some hospitals are refusing to admit patients they fear will linger on too long.

I do not mean to suggest that our hospitals are now callously withholding urgently needed treatment from Medicare patients. Today’s hospitals and doctors do have integrity; most are continuing to do their best for the patient. The point is that they have to do it within the DRG constraints. The issue is not simply: treat the patient or let him die. The issue is: treat him how? At what cost? With what range of services, specialists, and equipment? With what degree of safety or of risk? This is the area where there is enormous room for alternatives in the quality of medical treatment. And this is the area that is now in the process of being slashed across the board for Medicare patients, the very people singled out by the liberals in the 1960s as needing better medical care.

To revert to our nutrition analogy: it is as though the government socialized eating out, paying restaurants only what it computed to be the average cost per meal. There would then be a powerful incentive for restaurants to cut corners in every imaginable way — to serve only the cheapest foods in the smallest amounts in the cheesiest settings. What do you think would happen to the nation’s eaters — and its chefs — under such a setup? How long could the chefs preserve their dedication to preparing haute cuisine, when the restaurant owners, in self-preservation, were forced to fight them at every step and to demand junk food instead?

There is now a new and deadly pressure on the doctors, which continuously threatens the independence and integrity of their medical judgment: the pressure to cave in to arbitrary DRG economies, while blanking out the effects on the patient. In some places, hospitals are offering special financial incentives to the physician whose expenditure per patient averages out to be relatively low. For example, the hospital might subsidize such a doctor’s office rent or purchase new equipment for him. On the other hand, a doctor who insists on quality care for his Medicare patients and thereby drives up costs is likely to incur the hospital’s displeasure. In the extreme case, the doctor risks being denied staff privileges, which means cutting off his major source of livelihood. Thanks to DRGs, a new conflict is in the offing, just starting to take shape: the patient vs. the hospital. To put it another way, the conflict is: doctors vs. hospitals — doctors fighting a rearguard action to maintain standards against hospitals that are forced by the government to become cost-cutting ogres. How would you like to practice a profession in which half your mind is devoted to healing the patient, while the other half is trying to appease a hospital administrator who himself is trying to appease some official in Washington?

Medicare patients are not a small group. Because of their age, they constitute a significant part of most doctors’ practice. Medicare patients now make up about fifty percent of all hospital admissions in the U.S.

The defenders of DRGs answer all criticisms by saying that costs simply must be cut. Even under complete capitalism, they say, doctors could not give unlimited treatment to every patient. This is true, but it ignores two crucial facts. It is because of government programs that medical prices have soared to the point of being out of reach for masses of patients. This was not true in the days of private medicine. The average American a generation ago could afford quality, in medicine as in every other area of life, without courting bankruptcy. Even if a patient could not afford it, at least, in the pre-welfare-state era, he was told the truth: as a rule, he was told about the treatment options available, and it was up to him, in consultation with his doctor, to weigh the possibilities and decide how to cut costs. But under the present system, the hospital not only has to cut services drastically — it is to its interest to conceal this fact from the patient. If he or his family ever learns that the angiogram he is not going to have, or the heart surgery, would make all the difference to the outcome of his case, he would immediately protest, insist on the service, even threaten to launch a malpractice suit. The system is rigged to squeezing every drop of quality out of medical care, so long as the patient does not understand what is happening. The patient does not know medicine; he relies on the doctor’s integrity to tell him what services are available and necessary in his case — yet, increasingly, the hospitals must try to batter down that integrity. They must try to make the doctor keep silent and not tell the patient the full truth.

The Medicare patient is no longer a free man to be accorded dignity and respect, but a puppet on the dole, to be manipulated accordingly — while the doctor is being transformed from a sovereign professional into a mere appendage and accessory, a helpless tool in a government-orchestrated campaign of shoddy quality and deception.

The government’s takeover of medical practice is not confined to public patients; it is starting to extend into the private sector as well. This brings me to the HMOs, which are now mushrooming all over the country.

HMO means “health-maintenance organization.” It could also have been called BBM, for “bargain-basement medicine.” In this setup, a group of doctors, perhaps with their own hospital, offers prepaid, all-inclusive medical care at a cheap rate. For a fixed payment in advance, a payment substantially less than a regular doctor would charge, the patient is guaranteed virtually complete coverage of his medical costs, no matter what they are. The principle here is the same as that of the DRG system: if the patient’s costs exceed his payment, the HMO loses money on him; if not, it makes a profit.

Although HMOs are privately owned, the spread of these organizations is wholly caused by government. There were very few HMOs in the days of private medicine. As part of the government’s campaign to lower the cost of medical care, however, Washington has decided to throw its immense weight behind HMOs, even going so far as to advertise nationally on their behalf and to give them direct financial subsidies.

How do HMOs achieve their low rates? In essence, by the DRG method — the method of curtailing services. In this case, however, the cuts in quality are more sweeping, inasmuch as the HMO embraces every aspect of medical care, not merely hospital costs. As a rule, HMO doctors do not have personal patients, nor does the patient have a choice of doctors or even necessarily see the same one twice — that is too expensive. The patient sees whoever is on duty when he shows up; the doctor gives up the luxury of following a case from beginning to end. Nor does the doctor have much time to spend with a given patient — HMOs are generally understaffed to save money; typically, there are long waiting lines of patients. Further, the doctor must obtain prior authorization of any significant expenditure from a highly cost-conscious administrator. The doctor may detect a possible abdominal tumor and request a CAT scan — in effect, an exquisitely detailed, 3-D X ray. But if the administrator says to him: “It costs a lot. I don’t think it’s necessary,” the doctor is helpless. Or he may find that the patient has an aneurysm, a weakening of an artery that is like a time bomb waiting to go off, and he may want to operate to remove it. But the administrator can reply: “These cases often go years without rupturing. Let’s wait awhile.” like the doctor under DRGs, the HMO doctor ultimately has to obey: he either keeps his costs within the dictated parameters, or he is out of work.

The kind of doctor who is willing or eager to practice medicine under these conditions represents a new breed, new at least in quantity. There is a generation of utterly unambitious young doctors growing up today, especially conspicuous in the HMOs, doctors who are the opposite of the old-fashioned physician in private practice — doctors who want to escape the responsibility of independent thought and judgment, and who are prepared to abandon the prospect of a large income or a private practice in order to achieve this end. These doctors do not mind the forfeit of their professional autonomy to the HMO administrator. They do not object to practicing cut-rate medicine with faceless patients on an assembly-line basis, so long as they themselves can escape blame for any bad results and cover their own tracks. These are the new bureaucratic doctors, the MDs with the mentality, and the fundamental indifference to their job, of the typical post-office clerk.

I hasten to add that there are better doctors in the HMOs (and that some HMOs are better than others). As a rule, however, these better doctors are mercilessly exploited. Being conscientious, they put in longer hours than necessary, trying to make up for the chronic understaffing. They do not give in meekly to arbitrary decrees on cost, but fight the administrator when they feel their own judgment is right. Increasingly, their professional life becomes a series of such fights, which makes them the heavies, hard to get along with and guilty of costing the HMO money — while their lesser colleagues capitulate to the system, do as they are told, and take things easy. Time after time, the better men step in to bail out such colleagues, struggling to correct their errors, clean up their messes, rescue their patients. At a certain point, however, the better doctors get fed up.

An HMO doctor in California, a qualified internist and a highly conscientious woman, told me the following story. “I was looking through a pile of cardiograms one day,” she said, “and I saw one that was clearly abnormal. I knew that the man should be taken by ambulance to the emergency room for retesting and possible hospitalization. Then I thought: it’s late Friday afternoon, and it’s going to take an hour and a half, and I’m not being paid for the extra work, and who will know if I wait until Monday? I was tempted for a minute to drop the whole thing and go home, but then the remnants of my conscience made me get up wearily and telephone the patient. This sort of thing,” she concluded, “happens all the time and not just to me, and often the doctor does simply look the other way.” Do you see what happens under a system in which the doctor is penalized for his virtue or, at the least, is deprived of any incentive, spiritual or material, including pride in his judgment and payment for his work? Would you like your cardiogram to be in a pile on this new breed’s desk? Yours is next — all of ours are.

The debased standards inherent in government medicine are now spreading to the whole of medical practice in the United States. The new medicine is not restricted to Medicare patients or to HMO members; it is soon going to engulf private doctors as well, even when they see their own private, paying patients. There are many reasons for this. The most obvious is the pressure from the health-insurance companies, such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Hospitals now are charging higher rates to private patients in order to recoup their losses from Medicare cases. As a result, the private insurance companies are demanding that a DRG-type system be imposed uniformly, on all patients. They want private insurance policies from now on to pay only according to arbitrary, preset rates, just as Medicare does now, which would put the total of medicine in this country — all patients, all doctors, all ailments — into the same category as the heart-attack patient we discussed earlier. His fate would become everyone’s, and the standards of American medicine would simply collapse.

If this demand of the insurance companies surprises you, remember that there are no truly private health-insurance companies in the U.S. today. What we have in this field is a government-protected, government-regulated cartel. And what the cartel wants is not more freedom, but more money through government favors, including stiffer government controls over medical costs.

The end of the Medicare road is complete socialized medicine.

Now you can see the absurdity of the claim that state payment of medical bills will not affect the freedom of physicians or the quality of patient care. State funding necessarily affects and corrupts every private service. Communism, in fact, is essentially nothing more than state funding. The Soviets pretty much leave doctors and everyone else free to dream or fantasize within their own skulls; all the government does is fund everything, i.e., take over the physical means of every citizen’s existence. The enslavement of the country, and thus the collapse of all standards, follows as a matter of course.

Now let me backtrack to answer an objection. I have been maintaining that the cause of our soaring health-care costs is government funding of medical care. Many observers, however, claim that the cause is the rapid advances in medical technology, such as CAT scanners or the latest, most sophisticated disease-detecting instruments, the magnetic resonance imaging or MRI machines. These people want to limit such technology or even abolish it.

Technology by itself does not drive up costs; it generally reduces costs as it improves the quality of life. The normal pattern, exemplified by the automobile and computer industries, is that a new invention is expensive at first, so that only a few can afford it. But inventors and businessmen persevere, aiming for the profits that come from a mass market. Eventually, they discover cheaper and better methods of production. Gradually, costs come down until the general population can afford to buy. No one is bankrupted, everyone gains.

The source of today’s national bankruptcy in the field of medicine is not technology, but technology injected into the field by government decree, apart from supply and demand. State-of-the-art medical treatment — including new inventions or procedures that are still prohibitively expensive, such as liver transplants and long-term kidney dialyses — is now being financed by the government for the total population in the name of egalitarianism. The result is the unbelievable expenditures, far beyond most people’s capacity to afford, which are made routinely in our hospitals. These expenditures are particularly evident in regard to the terminally ill, who almost always fall under the umbrella of some government-supported insurance program. It has been estimated that 1% of our GNP is now spent on the dying in their last weeks of life. Or: one-­half of a man’s lifetime medical expenses occur now in the last six months of his life.

In a free society, you personally would have to make a choice: do you want to defer consumption, cancel vacations, forgo pleasures year after year, so as to extend your life in the ICU by a few months at the end? If you do, no one would interfere under capitalism. You could hoard your cash and then have a glorious spree in the hospital as you die. I would not care to do this. It does not bother me that some billionaire can live months longer than I by using machinery that I cannot begin to afford. I would rather be able to make ends meet, enjoy my life, and die a bit sooner. But in a free society, you are not bound by my decision; each man makes and finances his own choice. The moral principle here is clear-cut: a man has a right to act to sustain his life, but no right to loot others in the process. If he cannot afford some science-fiction cure, he must learn to accept the facts of reality and make the best of it.

In a free society, the few who could afford costly discoveries would, by the normal mechanism, help to bring the costs down. Gradually, more and more of us could afford more and more of the new technology, and there would be no health-cost crisis at all. Everyone would benefit, no one would be crushed. The terminally ill would not be robbing everyone else of his life, as is happening now, thanks to government intervention; the elderly would not be devouring the substance of the young.

You may wonder if I have now covered, at least in essence, the ways in which government is wrecking the practice of medicine. I have barely scratched the surface. For example, I have not even mentioned the formal introduction of the principle of collectivism into medical practice-of committee-medicine as against individual judgment. This is exemplified by the flourishing PROs in our hospitals, the Professional Review Organizations, which act to oversee and strengthen the various DRG controls. PROs are committees of doctors and nurses established by the government to monitor the treatment of Medicare patients, and especially to cut its cost — committees with substantial power to enforce their arbitrary judgments on any dissenting doctor. These committees are the equivalent in the Medicare system of the HMO administrators, and have potentially the same kind of all-encompassing power to forbid hospital stays (along with the associated tests and surgical procedures), even when the admitting doctor thinks they are required.

Nor have I yet mentioned CONs, or Certificates of Need. Since the government regards anything new in the field of medicine as potentially expensive, a hospital today is prohibited from growing in any respect, whether we speak of more beds or new technology, unless the administrator can prove “need” to some official. Since “need” in this context is undefined and unprovable, the operative criterion is not “need” at all, but pull, political pull. Under this program, the government [in 1984] denied Sloan-Kettering, the famous New York cancer hospital, permission to purchase an MRI machine, because another New York hospital already had one. Later, the government backed down in the face of the resulting public uproar. But what about the hospitals that do not enjoy such fame or contacts, and that are inexplicably denied the right to acquire a crucial diagnostic tool? So far, the freeze on them is only partly effective. Doctors are still allowed to purchase new equipment for their own offices, which hospital patients now often use. But the government is fighting to close this loophole; it is on the verge of decreeing that private doctors in their own offices out of their own funds cannot purchase new equipment without a government certificate of “need.” Here again you can see how your care will be affected, even if you are not a Medicare patient. If your doctor or hospital is not allowed to have the equipment, you cannot benefit from it either. It isn’t there. It doesn’t exist.

Nor have I mentioned the hundreds of other government interventions in medicine. In the space of a year, state legislatures alone recently enacted almost three hundred pieces of health-cost containment legislation. One hospital in New York now reports to ninety-nine separate regulatory agencies.

And I have not yet touched on what is perhaps the worst crisis in the field of medicine today, the one most demoralizing to the doctors: the malpractice crisis. This crisis illustrates dramatically, in yet another form, the lethal effects of government intervention in the field of medicine.

Medical malpractice suits have trebled in the past decade. There are now [1985] about sixteen lawsuits for every hundred doctors. In addition, awards to plaintiffs average around $330,000 and are steadily climbing. The effect of this situation on physicians is unspeakable. First, I have been told, there is fear, chronic fear, the terror of the next attorney’s letter in the mail. Then there is the agony of drawn-out legal harassment, including endless depositions and a protracted trial. There is the exhaustion of feeling that one lives in a malevolent universe, in which every patient is a potential enemy. Always, there is the looming specter: a career-destroying verdict. And whatever the verdict, win or lose, there is the fact that all the doctors, innocent and guilty alike, are paying for it. They are paying for the exorbitant awards in the form of unbelievable insurance premiums — over $100,000 per year per physician in some places.

In response to this situation, doctors are forced to engage wholesale in “defensive medicine,” i.e., the performing of unnecessary tests or procedures solely in order to build a legal record and thereby prevent the patient from suing later. For example, I heard about the case of a man falling and bumping his head slightly. Since there was no evidence of any head injury, there was no basis, in the doctor’s judgment, to order an expensive series of skull X rays. But if he does not order it, he takes a chance: if months or even years later, the man should develop mysterious headaches, the doctor might be sued. He might be charged retroactively with negligence, since he omitted a test that might have shown something that might have enabled him to prevent the headaches. So the doctor has no choice; he has to order the tests to protect himself. By a conservative estimate, defensive medicine now accounts for one­-third of all health-care costs.

Since the medical profession did not suddenly turn evil or irresponsible in the last several years, we must ask what is the cause of the soaring lawsuits. The most immediately apparent answer lies in the law, which has now lost any pretense at rationality. The standards of liability are corrupt. Negligence, in any rational sense of the term, is no longer the legal standard. Today’s standard demands of the doctor not responsible care, but omniscience and omnipotence.

For example, if a doctor prescribes a drug that is safe by every known test, and years later it is discovered to have side effects undreamed of at the time, the doctor can be sued. Was he negligent? No, merely not omniscient. If he treats a patient with less than the most expensive technology, whether the patient can afford it or not, he can be sued. “You open yourself to a malpractice suit,” says an attorney in the field, “if you even give the appearance of letting financial considerations conflict with good patient care.”1 Or: if a baby has a birth defect that can be ascribed to the trauma of labor, the obstetrician can be sued for not having done a Caesarian, even though there were no advance indications in favor of one — because, as one obstetrician puts it, people assume “that anything less [than perfection] is due to negligence.”2 This last statement actually reveals the operative principle of the law today, not of some crackpot left-wing radical, but of the law: the patient is entitled to have whatever he wishes, regardless of cost or means; it makes no difference what doctors know, or whether the money exists; the patient’s desire is an absolute, the doctor is a mere serf expected to provide all comers with an undefined “perfect care” somehow.

Do you see where this idea comes from? It is the basic principle that underlies and gave birth to Medicare. “You the patient,” Washington said in the 1960s, “need do nothing to earn your medical care or your cures. From now on you need merely wish, and the all-powerful government will do the rest for you.” Well, now we see the result. We see the rise of a generation of patients (and lawyers) who believe it, who expect treatment and cures as a matter of right, simply because they wish it, and who storm into court when their wish is frustrated.

The government not only inculcates such an attitude, but makes it seem financially feasible as well, because Washington has poured so much money into the field of medicine for so long. How else could anyone afford the defensive tests, or the inflated medical prices necessary to help pay for the incredible malpractice awards? They could not have been afforded in a free-market context. In the days of private medicine, there was no malpractice crisis; there was neither the public psychology nor the irresponsible funding that it requires. But now, thanks to government, there is both. And there is also a large enough corps of unscrupulous lawyers who are delighted to cash in on the disaster, lawyers who are eager to extort every penny they can from conscientious, bewildered, and in most cases utterly innocent doctors — while grabbing off huge contingency fees for themselves in the process.

The only solution to the malpractice crisis is a rational definition of “malpractice,” which would restrict the concept severely, to cases of demonstrable negligence or irresponsibility, within the context of objective definitions of these terms, taking into account the knowledge and the money available at the time. But this approach is impossible until the government gets its standards and its cash out of the medical business altogether.

We are all kept alive by the work of man’s mind — the individual minds that still retain the autonomy necessary to think and to judge. In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment, as I have said, 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 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, 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 ninety-nine different government agencies and lawyer squads? If you were a doctor, could you comply with all of it? Could you plan for or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies and squads 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 he gives up and quits the field.

Now you can understand why Objectivism holds that mind and force are opposites — and why innovation always disappears in totalitarian countries — and why doctors and patients alike are going to perish under socialized medicine if its invasion of this nation is not reversed.

Conservatives sometimes observe that government, by freezing medical fees, is destroying the doctors’ financial incentive to practice. This is true enough, but my point is different. With or without incentive, the doctors are being placed in a position where they literally cannot function — where they cannot think, judge, know what to do, or act on their conclusions. Increasingly, for a man who is conscientious, today’s government is making the practice of medicine impossible.

The doctors know it, and many have decided what to do about it. In preparation for this talk, I spoke to or heard from physicians around the country. I wanted to learn their view of the state of their profession. From New York to California, from Minnesota to Florida, the response was almost always the same: “I’m getting out of medicine.” “I can’t take it any more.” “I’m putting every cent I can into my pension plan. In five years, I’ll retire.”

Such is the reward our country is now offering to its doctors, in payment for their life-saving dedication, effort, and achievements.

As to talented newcomers rising to replace the men who quit, I want to point out that medical-school enrollments are dropping. Bright students today, says the president of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, are “discouraged by the perception of growing government regulation of medicine.”3 Note that it is bright students about whom he speaks. The other kind will always be in ample supply.

Any government program has beneficiaries who fight to keep the program going. Who is benefiting from the destruction of the doctors? It is not the poor, A generation ago, the poor in this country received excellent care through private charity, comparatively much better care than they are going to get now under the DRG and HMO approaches. The beneficiary is not the poor, but only one subgroup among them: those who do not want to admit that they are charity cases, those who want to pretend that they are entitled to medical handouts as a matter of right. In other words, the beneficiary is the dishonest poor, who want righteously to collect the unearned and consider it an affront even to have to say “Thank you.” There is a second beneficiary: the new 9-to-5, civil-servant doctor, the kind who once existed only on the fringes of medicine, but who now basks in the limelight of being a physician and healer, because his betters are being frozen out. And there is one more kind of beneficiary: the medical bureaucrats, lobbyists, legislators, and the malpractice lawyers — in short, all the force-wielders now slithering out of their holes, gorging themselves on unearned jobs, money, fame, and/or power, by virtue of having sunk their fangs into the body of the medical profession.

Altruism, as Ayn Rand has demonstrated, does not mean kindness or benevolence; it means that man is a sacrificial animal; it means that some men are to be sacrificed to others. Our country today is a textbook illustration of her point. The competent doctors, along with their self-supporting patients, are being sacrificed — to the parasites, the incompetents, and the brutes. This is how altruism always works. This is how it has to work, by its nature.

The doctors resent today’s situation passionately. Many of them are ready to quit, but not to fight for their field — at least, not to fight in the manner that would be necessary, if they were to have a chance of winning. In part, this is because the doctors are frightened; they sense that if they speak out too loudly, they may be subject to government reprisals. Most of all, however, the doctors feel guilty. Their own professional motivation — the personal, selfish love of their field and of their mind’s ability to function — is noble, but they do not know it.

For ages they have had it pounded into them that it is wrong to have a personal motivation, wrong to enjoy the material rewards of their labor, wrong to assert their own individual rights. They have been told over and over that, no matter what their own private desires, they should want to sacrifice themselves to society. And so they are torn now by a moral conflict and silenced by despair. They do not know what to say if they quit, or how to protest their enslavement. They do not know that selfishness, the rational selfishness they embody and practice, is the essence of virtue. They do not know that they are not servants of their patients, but,
to quote Ayn Rand, “traders, like everyone else in a free society — and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.” If the doctors could hear just this much and learn to speak out against their jailers, there would still be a chance; but only if they speak out as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation.

Thereafter, in practical terms, they — and all of us — could advocate the only solution to today’s crisis: removing its primary cause. This means: closing down Medicare. Reducing Medicare’s budget is not the answer — that will simply tighten the DRG noose. The program itself must be abolished. In principle, the method is simple: phase it out in stages. Let the government continue to pay, on a sliding scale, for those who are already too old to save for their final years, but give clear notice to the younger generations that there is a cutoff age, and that they must begin now to make their own provision for their later medical costs.

Is there still time for such a step? The most I can answer is: in ten years, there won’t be — that is how fast things are moving. In ten years, perhaps even in five, our medical system will have been dismantled. Most of the best doctors will have retired or gone on strike, and the government will be so entrenched in the field that nothing will get rid of it.

If you are my age, you may sneak by with the rest of your lifespan, relying on the remnants of private medicine that still exist. But if you are in your teens, twenties, thirties, then you are too young to count on such a hope. To you in particular, I want to conclude by saying: find out what is going on in this field — don’t take my word for it — and then act, let people know the situation, in whatever way is open to you. Above all, talk to your doctor. If you agree with the Declaration of Independence, tell him that he, too, comes under it; that he, too, is a human being with a right to life; and that you want to help protect his freedom, and his income, on purely selfish grounds.

If you are looking for a crusade, there is none that is more idealistic or more practical. This one is devoted to protecting some of the greatest creators in the history of this country. It is also literally a matter of life and death — your life, and that of anyone you love. Don’t let it go without a fight.

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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.

In this 1981 lecture, Ayn Rand laments the growing political influence of the religious right, focusing especially on the incoming Reagan administration’s support for and sponsorship of such movements as the campaign against abortion rights, the advocacy of “creationism” in schools, the veneration of “family,” and the Moral Majority. Observing that American culture “has been growing progressively grayer, duller and more desolately empty,” Rand argues that the nation had entered an “Age of Mediocrity.”

This recording is 44 minutes long.

In this 1978 lecture delivered at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, Ayn Rand reviews the themes she had explored in her many presentations at the Forum since her first appearance in 1961. Introduced as the “most popular speaker the Forum has ever had,” Rand offers updates on the issues raised in those lectures, asking the question: “Have things changed since then, and, if so, in what direction?”

This recording is 86 minutes long, including Q&A.

In this 1977 lecture delivered at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, Ayn Rand examines the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics. Drawing her title from the Balkan Peninsula, where ethnic groups have splintered and warred against each other for centuries, Rand argues that the global trend toward political organization based on race, language, and religion bodes ill for the future of Western civilization.

An edited version of this talk is available in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, a book of essays by Rand and others. This recording is 89 minutes long, including Q&A.

In honor of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Ayn Rand contrasts the Founding Fathers’ principled concern for individual rights with the unprincipled views of voters and candidates in the 1976 presidential election. Rand also dissects the evils of the welfare state, focusing on Sweden as its exemplar, and calls for Americans to observe the Bicentennial by discovering and upholding the nation’s founding ideals.

This lecture is 41 minutes long.

In this 1974 lecture, Ayn Rand undertakes a multilayered analysis of inflation, explaining what inflation is and how it devastates savings and production. At a deeper level, Rand exposes thinking errors that have allowed inflation to destroy economies throughout history. Finally, she places inflation in a larger cultural context, as the inevitable price paid for coercive egalitarian measures that curtail economic production.

An edited version of this talk is available in Philosophy: Who Needs It, a book of essays by Rand. This lecture is 53 minutes long, followed by a 28-minute Q&A period.

In this 1973 talk, Ayn Rand illustrates the role of philosophy in politics and law by analyzing the ideas that led to the Supreme Court’s decisions that year in five “obscenity” cases. Arguing that those decisions “establish[ed] the legal and intellectual base of censorship” in America, Rand warns that the philosophic ideas underlying the decisions are leading to increased government control over every aspect of people’s lives.

An edited version of this talk is available in Philosophy: Who Needs It, a book of essays by Rand. This recording is 87 minutes long, including Q&A.

“National unity” is a bromide often trumpeted by politicians. In this lecture, Ayn Rand inquires into the preconditions of national unity: Can men peacefully coexist under any arbitrary terms — or are certain principles of human association necessary? Rand’s answer is that a nation can remain peacefully unified only if each individual’s life is his own, and the individual’s right to pursue his own happiness is protected against infringement.

An edited version of this talk is available in The Ayn Rand Letter, a biweekly newsletter published by Rand between 1971 and 1976. This lecture is 58 minutes long.

ARI’s Point of View on the Environmental Movement

The environmental movement is often seen as a campaign to clean up man’s environment so that we can lead healthy and happy lives. But in early 1971, less than a year after the movement kicked off its first Earth Day celebration, Ayn Rand argued that this was a façade to cover the actual ideology animating the movement.

In her analysis, the leaders of the environmental movement are motivated not by a genuine concern for human life, but by hatred — hatred for technology, for man and for man’s basic tool of survival, his mind. Obviously these are strong claims, but in her lengthy essay “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Rand explains her viewpoint with compelling evidence and locates the movement within a long line of attacks on capitalism and freedom. (This essay can be found in Return of the Primitive.)

ARI maintains that it is vital to oppose the antihuman ideology of environmentalism and to uphold the indispensible values of reason, science, technology, industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism — cornerstones of the environment in which individual human beings flourish.

Rand’s essay “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” originated as a lecture given at the Ford Hall Forum in 1970. Below is the recording of that lecture.