The Journals of Ayn Rand (69 page)

Yet all too often industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers or exploiters. One such picture may be taken as non-political or accidental. A constant stream of such pictures becomes pernicious political propaganda: it creates hatred for all businessmen in the mind of the audience, and makes people receptive to the cause of Communism.

While motion pictures have a strict code that forbids us to offend or insult any group or nation—while we dare not present in an unfavorable light the tiniest Balkan kingdom—we permit ourselves to smear and slander American businessmen in the most irresponsibly dishonest manner.

It is true that there are vicious businessmen—just as there are vicious men in any other class or profession. But we have been practicing an outrageous kind of double standard: we do not attack individual representatives of any other group, class or nation, in order not to imply attack on the whole group; yet when we present individual businessmen as monsters, we claim that no reflection on the whole class of businessmen was intended.

It’s got to be one or the other. This sort of double standard can deceive nobody and can serve nobody’s purpose except that of the Communists.

It is the
moral
—(no, not just political, but
moral
)—duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.

In a free society—such as America—wealth is achieved through production, and through the voluntary exchange of one’s goods or services. You cannot hold production as evil—nor can you hold as evil a man’s right to keep the result of his own effort.

Only savages and Communists get rich by force—that is, by looting the property of others. It is a basic American principle that each man is free to work for his own benefit and to go as far as his ability will carry him; and that his property is his—whether he has made one dollar or one million dollars.

If the villain in your story happens to be rich—
don’t
permit lines of dialogue suggesting that he is the typical representative of a whole social class, the symbol of all the rich. Keep it clear in your mind
and in your script
that his villainy is due to his own personal character—not to his wealth or class.

If you do not see the difference between wealth honestly produced and wealth looted—you are preaching the ideas of Communism. You are implying that all property and all human labor should belong to the State. And you are inciting men to crime: if all wealth is evil, no matter how acquired, why should a man bother to earn it? He might as well seize it by robbery or expropriation.

It is the proper wish of every decent American to stand on his own feet, earn his own living, and be as good at it as he can—that is, get as rich as he can by honest exchange.

Stop insulting him and stop defaming his proper ambition. Stop giving him—and yourself—a guilt complex by spreading unthinkingly the slogans of Communism.
Put an end to that pernicious modern hypocrisy: everybody wants to get rich and almost everybody feels that he must apologize for it.

If you denounce the profit motive, what is it that you wish men to do? Work without reward, like slaves, for the benefit of the State?

An industrialist has to be interested in profit. In a free economy, he can make a profit
only
if he makes a good product which people are willing to buy. What do you want him to do? Should he sell his product at a loss? If so, how long is he to remain in business? And at whose expense?

Don’t
give to your characters—as a sign of villainy, as a damning characteristic—a desire to make money. Nobody wants to, or should, work without payment, and nobody does—except a slave. There is nothing dishonorable about a pursuit of money in a free economy, because money can be earned only by productive effort.

If what you mean, when you denounce it, is a desire to make money dishonestly or immorally—then say so. Make it clear that what you denounce is dishonesty,
not
money-making. Make it clear that you are denouncing evil-doers,
not
capitalists. Don’t toss out careless generalities which imply that there is no difference between the two.
That
is what the Communists want you to imply.

America was made by the idea that personal achievement and personal success are each man’s proper and moral goal.

There are many forms of success: spiritual, artistic, industrial, financial. All these forms, in any field of honest endeavor, are good, desirable and admirable. Treat them as such.

Don’t
permit any disparagement or defamation of personal success. It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.

It is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State.

America is based on the ideal of man’s dignity and self-respect. Dignity and self-respect are impossible without a sense of personal achievement. When you defame success, you defame human dignity.

America is the land of the self-made man. Say so on the screen.

Failure, in itself, is not admirable. And while every man meets with failure somewhere in his life, the admirable thing is his courage in
overcoming it
—
not
in the fact that he failed.

Failure is no disgrace—but it is certainly no brand of virtue or nobility, either.

It is the Communist’s intention to make men accept misery, depravity and degradation as their natural lot in life. This is done by presenting every kind of failure as sympathetic, as a sign of goodness and virtue—while every kind of success is presented as a sign of evil. This implies that only the evil can succeed under our American system—while the good are to be found in the gutter.

Don’t
present all the poor as good and all the rich as evil. In judging a man’s character, poverty is no disgrace—but it is no virtue, either; wealth is no virtue—but it is certainly no disgrace.

Don’t
present sympathetic studies of depravity. Go easy on stories about murders, perverts and all the rest of that sordid stuff. If you use such stories,
don’t
place yourself and the audience on the side of the criminal,
don’t
create sympathy for him,
don’t
give him excuses and justifications,
don’t
imply that he “couldn’t help it.”

If you preach that a depraved person “couldn’t help it,” you are destroying the basis of all morality. You are implying that men cannot be held responsible for their evil acts, because man has no power to choose between good and evil; if so, then all moral precepts are futile, and men must resign themselves to the idea that they are helpless, irresponsible animals.
Don’t
help to spread such an idea.

When you pick these stories for their purely sensational value, you do not realize that you are dealing with one of the most crucial philosophic issues. These stories represent a profoundly insidious attack on all moral principles and all religious precepts. It is a basic tenet of Marxism that man has no freedom of moral or intellectual choice; that he is only a soulless, witless collection of meat and glands, open to any sort of “conditioning” by anybody. The Communists intend to become the “conditioners.”

There is too much horror and depravity in the world at present. If people see nothing but horror and depravity on the screen, you will merely add to their despair by driving in the impression that nothing better is possible to men or can be expected of life, which is what the Communists want people to think. Communism thrives on despair. Men without hope are easily ruled.

Don’t
excuse depravity.
Don’t
drool over weaklings as conditioned “victims of circumstances” (or of “background” or of “society”), who “couldn’t help it.” You are actually providing an excuse and an alibi for the worst instincts in the weakest members of your audience.

Don’t
tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an
American
kind of man, for a change.

“The common man” is one of the worst slogans of Communism—and too many of us have fallen for it, without thinking.

It is only in Europe—under social caste systems where men are divided into “aristocrats” and “commoners”—that one can talk about defending the “common man.” What does the word “common” mean in America?

Under the American system, all men are equal under the law. Therefore, if anyone is classified as “common”—he can be called “common” only in regard to his personal qualities. It then means that he has no outstanding abilities, no outstanding virtues, no outstanding intelligence. Is
that
an object of glorification?

In the Communist
doctrine, it is.
Communism preaches the reign of mediocrity, the destruction of all individuality and all personal distinction, the turning of men into “masses,” which means an undivided, undifferentiated, impersonal, average,
common
herd.

In the American doctrine, no man is
common.
Every man’s personality is unique—and it is respected as such. He may have qualities which he shares with others; but his virtue is not gauged by how much he resembles others—
that
is the Communist doctrine; his virtue is gauged by his personal distinction, great or small.

In America, no man is scorned or penalized if his ability is small. But neither is he praised, extolled and glorified for the
smallness
of his ability.

America is the land of the
uncommon man.
It is the land where man is free to develop his genius—and to get its just rewards. It is the land where each man tries to develop whatever quality he might possess and to rise to whatever degree he can, great or modest. It is
not
the land where one is taught that one is small and ought to remain small. It is
not
the land where one glories or is taught to glory in one’s mediocrity.

No self-respecting man in America is or thinks of himself as “little,” no matter how poor he might be.
That,
precisely, is the difference between an American working man and a European serf.

Don’t ever use any lines about “the common man” or “the little people.” It is not the American idea to be either “common” or “little.”

This point requires your careful and thoughtful attention.

There is a great difference between free cooperation and forced collectivism. It is the difference between the United States and Soviet Russia. But the Communists are very skillful at hiding the difference and selling you the second under the guise of the first. You might miss it. The audience won’t.

Cooperation
is the free association of men who work together by voluntary agreement, each deriving from it his own personal benefit.

Collectivism
is the forced herding together of men into a group, with the individual having no choice about it, no personal motive, no personal reward, and subordinating himself blindly to the will of others.

Keep this distinction clearly in mind—in order to judge whether what you are asked to glorify is American cooperation or Soviet collectivism.

Don’t
preach that everybody should be and act alike.

Don’t
fall for such drivel as “I don’t wanna be dif‘rent—I wanna be just like ever’body else.” You’ve heard this one in endless variations. If ever there was an un-American attitude, this is it. America is the country where every man wants to be
different
—and most men succeed at it.

If you preach that it is evil to be different—you teach every particular group of men to hate every other group, every minority, every person, for being different from them; thus you lay the foundation for racial hatred.

Don’t preach that all mass action is good, and all individual action is evil. It is true that there are vicious individuals; it is also true that there are vicious groups. Both must be judged by their specific actions—and not treated as an issue of “the one” against “the many,” with the many always right and the one always wrong.

Remember that it is the Communists’ aim to preach the supremacy, the holy virtue of the group—as opposed to the individual. It is not America’s aim. Nor yours.

This is part of the same issue as the preceding point.

The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man.

Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state.
Don’t
help the Communists to teach men to acquire these attitudes.

Don’t
fall for the old Communist trick of thinking that an independent man or an individualist is one who crushes and exploits others—such as a dictator. An independent man is one who stands alone and respects the same right of others, who does not rule or serve, who neither sacrifices himself nor others. A dictator—by definition—is the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collective of men.

Don’t
permit the snide little touches that Communists sneak into scripts—all the lines, hints and implications which suggest that something (a person, an attitude, a motive, an emotion) is evil because it is independent (or private, or personal, or single, or individual).