by Tom Pratt
Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man. Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body. They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other.
They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists. (p. 1025- 1026)
The terrible dichotomy Galt describes here has its dread consequences in the struggle for meaning in man’s existence. He sees two sides at war over the spoils produced by man’s mind, when it is free from this torture chamber. These two parties (for lack of a better word) or “teachers” as he calls them both hold man in thrall to the Morality of Death: “the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes.” (p. 1027) Man in this condition cannot be said to actually “live” in any meaningful sense for “he is the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.” (p. 1027) Such a state leads to a monstrous distortion of the “good” by the push-pull of outside forces. Consequently man’s mind must be subordinated unthinkingly to either “God’s will” or “Society,” as quoted in the lines above. The standards of value(s) are either to be accepted “on faith” or “must be obeyed as a primary absolute.” Both leave man as “an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.” (p. 1027) Man’s “reward” is either an ethereal existence “beyond the grave” or a blessing to passed along “to his great-grandchildren.”
Sacrifice and Selfishness
At this point the voice of Galt (Can this possibly escape a comparison to the voice speaking from Horeb?) intones a long discussion of the clash between the meaning of the terms “selfishness” and “sacrifice.” It is clear from the thousand or so pages the reader has absorbed up to this point that terminology is everything in ferreting out meaning and intent in the context of the novel. Words do not always carry their common referents in Atlas Shrugged. For those who are not well-versed in this issue, the necessity of such re-tooling of the language comes from the deliberate intention of the political left to distort language usage so as to import effects into the conversation that would otherwise be thought unacceptable.[33] In the world created by “newspeak,” as it is called in 1984, “sacrifice” takes on a completely new garb:
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t. If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve a career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is. If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full. If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice. (p. 1028)
In the world of Atlas Shrugged this standard leads to a renouncing of “self” that includes the renunciation of the individual right to make moral judgments apart from the collective because he/she has no right to such independence. “Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.” (p. 1030) Galt then makes it clear he understands this renunciation to be a sacrifice of one’s mind to that of others with this consequence: “Those who start out by saying, ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’…You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.” (p. 1030)
Such an immoral use of the language, from Galt’s perspective, must be submitted to intensive questioning:
“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil? (p. 1031)
The answer to these questions is supplied throughout the novel and specified here. It involves an upside down rationalization of the system that takes from the producers and gives to the looters and moochers who are considered somehow more worthy than the producers:
No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right. Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to m
ooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others. (p. 1031)
This sense of the moral is behind the creedal statement, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” In practice such a morality becomes a monstrosity:
Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker. You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man? (p. 1033)
Love and Objectivity
This last is the indictment of the would-be utopian planners of economies in the mold of those which are collapsing around the world in Atlas Shrugged. It was the death of the Twentieth Century Motor Company and the fate of all societies which have tried it in the past. They depended on the love of men and women for their fellows without discrimination or cause or reason. And if it was not forthcoming voluntarily the planners and societal governors have always been prepared to use coercion and the fear of it to produce the supposed beneficial results, as if the one can exist without the other. Galt says that cannot be possible in the world of human existence, for “Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.” (p. 1034) Just as fear is produced by cause (otherwise it is considered paranoia), love is produced by cause as well, unless the language and the value has been corrupted. Once again Galt rescues language from this abyss:
Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment; that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection. (p. 1034)
Those who have been reduced to this state of mind cannot be expected to make choices in love or sexuality that exalt human nature or life, they can only debase it. Love cannot be emptied of objective value and filled with subjectivism any more than building a skyscraper can. It is wishing instead of creating. Galt switches us quickly between the realms of subjectivist feelings and “faith” to the world of productivity and objective values. Once again we are in Rand’s Aristotelian world of non-contradiction where A is A and the choice is Either-Or. For once one accepts some wish as reality in one area one soon finds the compromise has contaminated all things it touches. “Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind.” (p. 1037) A simple and ancient axiom applies: “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” The opposite also applies: “You cannot eat your cake before you have it.”
Love without cause in Rand’s thought is no more possible than the existence of rail line and airplanes and industrial plants without cause. This perception of reality is a rejection of objectivity and in the speech of John Galt looks a lot like what is today called post-modernism. Galt asserts that creating such a “reality” is in fact a mission of the men of muscle, those who would control the masses by taking from them the ability to think for themselves.
“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your—blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of—blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of—blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.[34] The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes. (p. 1043)
And finally, to sew it up in a neat package: “And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress—skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains—by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’” (p. 1044)
What could possibly possess those who concoct such a plot? “Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages—and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.” (p. 1044) Furthermore, “Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason.” (p. 1045) Such men and women find fulfillment in the coercion of others, in the e
nslavement of their labors, in the directing of the minutiae of their lives. They cannot be bought off by money nor assuaged by any accretion of power for their lust for it is endless. Stating the horror of it Galt asserts: “You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it up—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own. (p. 1046) The ages of history reveal the truth:
“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends. (p. 1046)
The Sanction of the Victim
It is but a short step from the realization to which we have now come to the conclusion that such men of muscle require one thing from their victims: compliance, or in the language of Rand and Galt, “the sanction of the victims.” That consists in the willingness to go on producing and inventing and creating in vague guiltiness for having achieved some good that now belongs to everyone more than it does to the producer. Galt taught the strikers what the game was all about: “When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’” (p. 1049) Twelve years before he had walked out on such a scheme. Now the others have. Galt invites the world to consider what it would find outside if they had never existed:
