The Journals of Ayn Rand (106 page)

 

 

In connection with above: d‘Anconia’s dollar sign is a symbol of this, and also of the sanctity of the profit motive, of the morality of egoism.

For the banker (Mulligan?): he quit because of the squeeze; he was ordered (by law) to give unsound credit to some group of the needy (investment as charity, not on the ground of production, but on the ground of
need)
—and then he would be blamed as a vicious capitalist for the collapse of the bank, for the wiping out of the savings of “the little people, widows and orphans, etc.”

 

 

His acceptance and resigned indifference.

Her indignation—this is worse than Taggart’s attitude.

He thinks the decision was right, but on the basis of such morality he has no desire to go on. He says “it’s right,” but there is no life left in him.

His reasons: The world is in a terrible state and if men can’t get together, how will they solve it? The majority’s got to decide, it’s the only fair way, he had agreed to abide by the decision of the majority, they had a right to do it, but ...

He could fight nature, but he can’t fight this. (She knew that it wasn’t James Taggart who had beaten him.)

Her attitude: “Such a wrong cannot be right.” “One cannot be penalized for ability.” “We can’t live in that kind of a world.”

It is his honorable attitude, “keeping his word,” that makes the outrage possible for the parasites.

This is the good average man up against the morality of altruism. And this is a “real life” example of going on strike.

 

 

[The following are AR’s first notes on the romantic relationship between Dagny and Francisco.
]

Their relationship—like two people on a desert island. Sex as their celebration of life. The complete innocence. They are both incapable of the conception that joy is sin. They exhaust each other—“Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” His ingenuity at it. She never wore anything but slacks and plain dresses, but she had never been so feminine.

He comes to meet her secretly in New York that winter, once in a while.

The complete secrecy of their affair. Nobody suspects it, not even Eddie. Dagny’s reason for the secrecy—her hatred for people’s view of sex. Furious indignation that anyone should dare presume to lay down rules about it for her. Contempt for those who consider it sin—no desire to fight them ([or even] grant them the right to discourse about it), only to keep away, not even to brush against them, because she senses something monstrously unclean about them.

 

 

Note: Creators never act with
pain
as their motive.
This is illustrated by Dagny and Rearden. This is the principle behind the parasite’s accusation that people like Dagny and Rearden “have no feelings.”
They feel
—and much more profoundly than any lesser person or whining parasite (the parasites neither think
nor
feel)—but they are not run by their feelings, and they are not afraid of pain. Nothing they do is ever motivated by a desire to avoid pain or to be protected against it; they act on the motive of
happiness,
on the desire to get what they want, at any cost, even if pain is part of the cost.

They suffer more than any parasite could ever bear or imagine (except that it’s a different form of suffering, it’s clean, it doesn’t go all the way down nor damn the universe), but they know how to stand pain, and they don’t care too much about it, they don’t actually give it any thought, they don’t include it in their calculations or consideration of cost, they just meet it when it comes, stand it, brush it aside and then go on—
and they win.
They win over all pain, to the happiness which they want and which
they are.

The parasites
are
motivated by pain. They are the motors and the embodiments of pain. The parasites, in effect, say to the creators as an accusation, as a statement of damning sin and guilt: “But you don’t suffer—you’re not unhappy—you’ve never been unhappy.”

This is the difference between considering suffering an accident, a temporary exception—and suffering as a basic principle, a major concern, a main motive, suffering as the norm and the nature of the universe.

The progression of a man’s mental (and psychological) development.
(The progression of a man’s consciousness.)

1. He acquires factual knowledge of objects around him, of events, and therefore concludes that a universe exists and that he exists (through the evidence given to him by his senses, grasped and put in order by his reasoning mind). Here he gets the materials to grasp two things: objective reality and himself, consciousness and self-consciousness.

2. He discovers that he has the capacity of choice. First, he grasps objects, entities—then that these entities
act,
i.e., move or change. (It may seem to be almost simultaneous, but actually he must grasp “entity” before he can grasp “acting entity.”) The same [applies to] himself: first he gains self-consciousness, then he learns that this self can act
(or must act)
and that he must do it through choice. (Such as: if he is hungry, he must ask for food, or cry for it, or go and get it, but he must
do
something, choose what to do, and choose to do it.) Why does he get the conception of the necessity to act?
That
is his nature as man—he must preserve his life through his own action and that action is not automatic; he must preserve his life through
conscious choice.

3. Now that he knows that he can choose (and must choose), can have desires and can achieve them—he is ready to start forming his conscious convictions about the universe, about himself and about what he intends to do. (These convictions, or basic principles, are already implied in the above process. But now he must state them.)

These three steps are the essence of the process. But now man must remain convinced consciously of the validity of what he’s learned in that process. It implies:
free will, self-confidence
(confidence in one’s own judgment),
self-respect
(the conviction that the preservation of his life and the achievement of his happiness are values, are
good),
and a
benevolent universe
in which he can achieve happiness (if he remains realistic, that is, true to reality observed by his
reason).
If his desires are derived from and based on reality correctly observed—they
will be achievable
in this universe. All his desires come from reality, but the wrong ones are due to his mistakes in judgment; if he realizes the mistake, a contradiction or an inherent impossibility, he will
not
continue to desire these objects; he won’t damn the universe for not giving him the irrational or impossible.

Here it must be noted that his self-respect starts as a general axiom, but specifically must be achieved by him. This is in accordance with the nature of man: that part where value is possible, the field of choice, the field of morality, is open to him. First, he must value himself as a man; then his self-respect must be based on living up to the standards of value, the morality, proper to man.

Another interesting point to be noted here: man is given his entity as clay to be shaped, he is given his body, his tool (the mind) and the mechanism of consciousness (emotions, subconscious, memory) through which his mind will work. But the rest depends on him. His
spirit,
that is, his own essential character, must be created by him. (In this sense, it is almost as if he were born as an abstraction, with the essence and rules of that abstraction (man) to serve as his guide and standard—but he must make himself
concrete
by his own effort, he
must create himself.)
Specifically, he is born as an entity: man. But his field of action and emotion is open to his choice. He must survive, preserve himself and achieve happiness through choice, and the choice must be made by his reason, i.e., by his reason learning about and judging objective reality (both the world around him and himself). So he must have a code of values by which he must choose (he cannot choose without values, and he cannot have values where no choice is involved or possible).

The basic standard by which he establishes his code of values is man’s survival and happiness. This means man’s survival as man, i.e., in a way proper to man, which is the only way he can actually survive or be happy; mere physical, animal survival, at the price of his standards, will give him misery. Happiness, essentially, is the emotion naturally accompanying man’s proper survival.

Thus man develops his moral code—with the Ideal Man, man at his highest possibility, as the final goal of the code.
Then he will base his self-respect, his valuation of himself, on how well he lives up to that code.

And that is how he creates his spiritual entity, his character—by the convictions he’s made. If they’re honest, but mistaken convictions (or, rather, limited), he will be an average good man. If they’re honest and correct—he will be a great man. His reason is the tool and the creator of his character. (Here, the degree of his intelligence might affect his stature as a man. But not his moral value—that, in proportion to his abilities, is the same for all men.)

But now is where the danger starts. The above are the basic, essentially needed convictions. If he loses any one of them, he’s done for—he ceases acting according to his nature as a man, he starts going against himself, which means, toward self-destruction. He must not lose the conviction of free will—if he does, he loses the capacity to desire, i.e., to choose a purpose, to act purposefully as a man must. He must not lose self-confidence—if he does, he becomes incapable of thought, judgment or action. He must not lose self-respect—if he does, he becomes incapable of morality, of the desire to be
good,
because he has lost the only possible base of man’s proper morality: self-preservation in the most essential sense of the word. (Here, altruism helps to ruin him.) He must not lose the conviction of a benevolent universe—if he does, none of the rest will make any sense.