Personally, I think it could have been condensed quite a bit. I seem to recall that many of the points made were repetitive and did not further her argument much. It has been a few years since I've read the book, though I may have to dust it off and read it again! Loved the book and left me with a different lens to look at our contemporary life with. However, like R. Apr 11, PM.
I know it's long, but you have to read it; it's essential. Don't be afraid of it! I don't recall how long it was, but three hours sounds about right. Fortunately audiobooks have an option for accelerated playback. The narrator, Scott Brick, is excellent one of my favorite readers.
Even so, I found it repetitive and tedious. Had I read it I am pretty sure I would have skimmed and skipped some. While I think such a long winded speech is relevant for the dystopian universe of Atlas Shrugged, it would never fly in real life.
If you have a message, it is best to be cogent and to the point. To me, those are most helpful. While they were not essential, I found them contributing to my appreciation and understanding of the story. Skip it. Its an eye glazing, mind numbing experience. I had to read Galts speach several times to get it. I read it twice. The first time because it was part of the story.
The second time, because it was plain from the first reading that it was absolutely relevant. Apr 14, AM. While I loved the themes in Atlas Shrugged and think it is an important piece of fiction, Ayn Rand was a bit of a blowhard and Atlas Shrugged would have benefited from a harsh editing.
Although I did not skip John Galt's speech it's sort of the soul of the entire book! I remember I began to skim through it about half way through. The speech, and the book itself could have been half as long and would have been improved in my opinion.
In the Atlas Society, they had this to say, which goes a long way in explaining why she could not bear to cut it down I suppose. I thought, with a feeling of dread, that it would take at least three months. Well, it took two years. However one feels about Rand's philosophy, her keen mind cutting through all the dross makes the speech well worth the effort in my view. Apr 15, AM. So if you read the speech, did the two years Rand spent writing this chapter, result in you buying what she was selling?
Unlike the rest of the book the speech is equal parts anti-socialism and anti-religion. I can't buy that America would be better off without the impact of our religious heritage. I don't buy a more selfish, less religious America would be an improvement. I skipped it. Read the masterpiece twice, but I admit, I can't get through the speech.
I've given it a valiant try, but I want to say, "I get the point already. I skipped it when i read but if you EVER decide to do any sort of paper or study on Atlas Shrugged or even Ayn Rand, that speech is the perfect place to find quotes.
So i ended up reading it while writing my paper tryingt i find the quotes i need. I understand why she put it, especially when you consider the enormous impact it had on the Objectivist community.
Definitely read it. Apr 15, PM. Read it the first time around. After that just sort of skimmed. I'm a bad boy! Started it then skipped it. Seemed like she was just basically giving a synopsis of what the entire story was already showing you.
Apr 16, AM. I'm with John - first time, read it, loved it She'd have never gotten away with that these days, as a writer! But remember, the novel for her, was only a vehicle for her philosophy. That said, I'd say she did pretty darned well as a novelist! The modern mystics of muscle attack reason through skepticism, denying the validity of the axioms of reason.
Axioms are statements that identify the bases of knowledge. These bases include or imply that things exist and are what they are, that they act according to their natures, that facts are absolute, that sense-perception is valid.
In denying these truths, the mystics of muscle would reduce man's consciousness to the level of a baby or a primitive tribe. While the mystics of spirit claim that faith is superior to reason, the mystics of muscle claim that reason is merely faith, and substitute collective opinion for objective knowledge. They even deny the existence of the mind. Their motive is to reverse cause and effect, to demand goods without producing them, to control the producers and to redistribute their wealth.
The mystics of muscle and of spirit have had the same motive throughout history: to undercut your mind and to rule you by force. Having surrendered their own judgment to avoid clashes with others, they regard the judgments of others as a power superior to reason, believing that others have a mysterious link with reality. To control reality, they must therefore control others, seeking obedience at all costs. Their goal is to control the consciousness of others as a means of getting control over reality.
Death is the only state that satisfies the mystics' desire for exemption from identity and causality. Poverty, suffering, destruction, and death are the consequences of their moral code -- and the real motive of the code. Mystics have defaulted on the responsibility to think, act, and produce; they feel envious hatred toward, and wish to destroy, those who have not defaulted.
Galt describes how he grasped the nature of the Morality of Death -- and what to do about it. Since evil is irrational, it can succeed only with the consent and aid of the rational. The Morality of Death is perpetuated by the sanction of its victims -- the men of reason and ability. The strike is the withdrawal of that sanction. The Morality of Death counts on the producers to think and produce, while denying them the honor they deserve or the freedom they require.
Its strategy is to induce moral guilt in the men of reason and ability. The strikers refuse to accept guilt for their ability. Galt is doing by conscious design what men of ability had done throughout the ages: withdrawing their talents from the world.
He is teaching the producers their own value. Without the victims whom Galt has withdrawn, the Morality of Death and those who embrace it will collapse of their own irrationality.
If you retain the wish to live, you must examine your values and your life in order to avert self-destruction. Altruism creates a clash between the moral and the practical by setting the standards of morality in opposition to the requirements of living.
It thus deprives you of practical guidance, moral certainty, and the capacity for happiness, dignity, and self-esteem. There are moral absolutes, and moral judgment is a necessity. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute. It is absurd to believe, as political conservatives do, that collectivism is based on reason and science while freedom, production, and trade must be accepted on faith.
This absurdity is a rationalization to avoid questioning the moral code of self-sacrifice. People refuse to question that code because their self-esteem is tied to it.
As a being with free will, man, by nature, needs self-esteem and moral self-approval; but men have tied their self-esteem to a morality that undercuts it. Their fear and guilt spring from the awareness of having willfully abandoned reason and having refused to think for themselves. The myths of paradise reflect the spirit of childhood: the joyous, fearless, independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. It is not too late to begin again: Accept the fact that your mind works by choice, not automatically, and that your life depends on choosing to think.
Learn to trust your mind and to act by your own independent reason, not on the basis of authority. Seek moral perfection in the unbreached exercise of rationality. Learn to distinguish errors of knowledge from moral evil. Choose happiness as your moral purpose and give it your full commitment.
Learn to value yourself by rejecting humility as a virtue and seeking pride. Give help to others when deserved, but not on the basis of need alone, or when demanded as a right. In betraying these requirements of life and happiness, you have sacrificed your virtues to your vices within your soul.
In society, you have sacrificed the best men to the worst. But now the best men have refused to submit to the rule of force and brutality. The strikers are avenging the spirit of America. America was founded on reason and individualism, on the inviolate supremacy of man's right to exist and achieve.
It cannot survive on an altruist moral basis. The strike will end only when the morality of sacrifice is abandoned and the country can be rebuilt on the moral premise that each individual is an end in himself. Individual rights are not gifts from God or society. They are conditions required by man's nature for his proper survival. Without property rights, individuals could not translate their other rights into reality. All property and wealth are created by man's mind and labor, and they would cease to exist without the due recognition of their source: individual intelligence.
The only proper purpose of government is to protect rights; a government's only proper functions are: the police; the armed forces; and the courts, to settle disputes by objective law. Government must not initiate force against people.
Productive men cannot function long-range if they are subject to the capricious edicts of rulers. In a society of trade, there is no conflict of interests among men at different levels in the pyramid of ability. The most talented people, who make new discoveries and invent new products and technologies, contribute the most to others; while those at the bottom, who are engaged in mere physical labor, benefit the most. Producers require freedom to act on their minds, take risks, trade with others, earn and keep their profits.
In rejecting this demand as unfair, you have created instead a society of brutality and plunder, in which gangs battle for control of the government and the power to extort wealth. Stop supporting your own destroyers through the sanction you give them. Do not try to live on your enemies' terms or to win a game when they're setting the rules.
For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.
But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country—of the world, thought the chief engineer—sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.
In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy.
You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you?
That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach.
I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? There are values higher than the mind, you say? I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine.
It is mine that they chose to follow. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim.
Do not cry that you own us. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics.
We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.
We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you. A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? But your game is up, because now we know it, too. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.
Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom—while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? I am the man who has asked that question. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame.
Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it.
He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.
Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and-self-generated action.
If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies.
But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.
Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess.
A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him t9 perform.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice: he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality.
A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man.
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.
But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.
But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil. I have removed your means of survival—your victims. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented.
I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something.
If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement.
I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses.
The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms.
All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist.
An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal.
It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment.
Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power—right or wrong?
You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper.
To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.
Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.
Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others.
We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect.
The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice. None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason.
I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic.
I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate— do you hear me?
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it.
Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment: you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.
That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him—by force. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.
He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it Will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality.
We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.
Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking.
The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing. I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.
Stop running, for once—there is no place to run—stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.
Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral.
To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice.
It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape.
If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a mortal being.
He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness; joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.
These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives. 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 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 gorgeous jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations-he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.
Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent—and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.
Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelation, the other to their reflexes. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.
His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren. You have a chance. If you achieve the 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 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 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. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.
If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.
You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body, It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.
I am concerned with no other. Neither are you. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.
For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil. By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment. And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires.
Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced?
To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter.
The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash —these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.
Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake.
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