From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!" — "Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!" — "Don't argue, obey!" — "Don't try to understand, believe!" — "Don't rebel, adjust!" — "Don't stand out, belong!" — "Don't struggle, compromise!" — "Your heart is more important than your mind!" — "Who are you to know? Your parents know best!" — "Who are you to know? Society knows best!" — "Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!" — "Who are you to object? All values are relative!" — "Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"
Men would shudder if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival — yet that was what they did to their children. (p.910, NY: Signet, 1996)
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You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behaviour imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God's purpose or your neighbour's welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door — but not to serve your life or pleasure. 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.
For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors — between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason — that in reason there's no reason to be moral.
Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your moralists have stood united.
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The key to what you so recklessly call "human nature", the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. 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. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think'.
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Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. 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.
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A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. ... All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil. Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug, or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being — not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement — not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.
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To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. 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.
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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.
Rand says that the fact that something is is indicated by the senses rather than the mind, but if that is the case, the mind must also say that there is something beyond the senses, and therefore that "is-ness" (existence) is dualistic. I would never, for this reason, say that existence exists, because existence is that attributed to something by contrast with something else. — KJ
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Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours.
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...man's reason is his moral faculty. ... A rational process is a moral process. 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, or more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
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Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think — not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment — on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is'. Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person.
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The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action.
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A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. ... To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. ... His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.
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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.
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.... all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness. But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.
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At the crossroads of the choice between 'I know' and 'They say,' [the mystic] chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him. From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness — and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.
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When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
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...there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win — and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.
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The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for the truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.
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You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself.
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Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness — a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty — and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man. Do not say you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience — that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible — that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.