The Journals of Ayn Rand (76 page)

“We permit it, and we have suffered this long, for one essential reason: the generosity of the creator. It is our nature that we wish to give, prodigally, recklessly, because we know that the source—our creative energy—is inexhaustible. Being self-sufficient, we cannot conceive of dependence, so we are modest in relation to others, we never think that we are indispensable to them or superior, because we do not consider
them
indispensable or superior to us. We act as equals toward equals—and an exchange between equals is a proper, natural activity. We are glad to give because our creation is a discovery or embodiment of truth, and when others respond to truth we welcome their response, we are happy—not because of the good it does
them,
not because their approval gives us pleasure or is of any importance to us—but because their response is a victory for truth, and what we welcome is their entrance into
our
world, into that world which we know to be good and true.

“We see no danger in giving—we think we’re giving to men as rich as we are; we think of it as gifts, not alms. And whenever we come up against an inferior—that he is an inferior is the hardest thing for us to believe; we see the evidence and we think it is a misunderstanding or a temporary misfortune that has affected the man; then we throw ourselves to the rescue, we give, we help, we let him lean on us and bleed us, we carry him—‘why not?’ we say, we are so strong, we have so much to spare. We are incapable of conceiving of the parasite’s mind, so we can never understand him. We are incapable of hatred and malice. We will not accuse him without cause or reason—and we can’t find the cause, since we can’t understand him.

“So we become helpless and bewildered before him. We never accuse him, no matter what he does to us. He yells that we are selfish, cruel, tyrannical by reason of the very abundance and magnificence of our talents. And we almost come to believe this. ”Almost“—because no power on earth can really make us believe this; we are the men of truth, we cannot fall that far into lying; and since our talents, our creative energy, are our sacred possessions, the source of our joy in living, we cannot commit so great a sacrilege against them.

“We allow ourselves to become torn. In a vague, unstated, indefinable way, we begin to feel that we must atone for something, make amends to someone, pay someone for something in some manner. What? We don’t know. We can never know. We refuse to admit to ourselves the truth in a clear statement: that we are being damned for the best within us, and that the creature making the accusation is small, inferior, and truly evil. We are generous, and we do not pronounce such a judgment upon a fellow human being. Hatred and anger are unnatural to us; contempt for a human being is totally unnatural to us, perhaps impossible—because we think and act as if we were dealing with men, and it is not proper to despise men, we are worshippers of man, because
we
are men and this is the logical implication of our self-reverence. One’s opinion of mankind comes from one’s opinion of oneself, which is the only first-hand knowledge of man one can have. The man who respects himself, will carry the respect to his species, to others. The man who despises himself, with good reason, carries the contempt, the malice, the hatred, the suspicion to all humanity. We, the creators, cannot conceive of this. We are bewildered by the parasite’s malice—we do not even recognize it as malice, because we don’t really know malice.

“But so long as, for any reason, we do not recognize the truth—we are bound to fail and to suffer, in the whole sphere and in all our actions where we have left this truth unrecognized. Our generosity is a good motive? Nothing is good if it motivates lying, falsehood, or evasion. There is no morality except an unbending, absolute recognition of the truth, in relation to everything; an absolute will to find, face, and grasp the truth, to the utmost of our capacity, then to act upon it. Nothing is moral but this cold, ruthless,
rational
pursuit.

“But we have not faced or recognized the truth about the parasites—so we fail, we’re helpless, we’re disarmed, and they’ve got us. Did they win over us? No, we won the battle for them.
They
rule the world? No, we handed it over to them. The guilt is ours, but not in the way they think; in the exactly opposite way. The guilt is that we have refused to see the truth about us and about them.

“What makes a man a parasite? Nothing and no one but himself. We do not classify him as an inferior—he classifies himself. He is the only one who can. What is the specific action of doing this? The recognition by a man, stated or unstated in his mind (and I think it is usually stated), that he is the creature and the product of others, dependent upon them for the content of his soul. The negation by a man of his primary human attribute (his essential attribute, the one and only attribute that makes him human): his independent rational judgment. This is all that’s necessary; the rest—all the evils, corruptions, perversions—follow automatically.

“When a man rejects his independent rational judgment he has rejected himself as an entity, as a man, as an end in himself. Whatever happens to him from then on can be nothing but failure and tragedy; he is functioning against his own nature, he is acting against the laws of his own survival. And by the very fact that he is a man (or was born to be and can’t be anything else), some last conscious remnant of [his betrayal] makes him hate himself.

“He does not know why he has this deep conviction of his own inferiority, of his basic worthlessness, of his being essentially contemptible. He runs, by every means possible, from admitting this conviction to himself, but he knows it’s there. He says, in effect, ”I
feel
it.“ He ascribes every possible cause to it—his feeling of helplessness against the universe of which he knows so little, his fear of others, his envy of them, his knowledge that he’ll never be able to equal their achievements, that he doesn’t possess their talents, or that they’ll surely fail to recognize his own. All of it is evasion, beside the point, and a consequence, not a cause. He despises himself because he has willfully negated his nature as a man.

“Were he actually incapable of being an independent rational entity, there would have been no feeling of hatred, evil, misery in him from this negation; he could have no conception of what he had betrayed and no uneasiness about it; a creature cannot hate itself for being what it is. It cannot exist in perpetual pain; pain is a warning of disorder, of the improper, physically or spiritually. A creature born as a physical freak, incapable of survival, would not survive; and such time as it had, would be spent in constant pain, the warning that something is improper, the sign of
the misfit
in the most basic, essential sense. Man survives through his mind, i.e., his spirit. If his spirit were doomed, by its essence and nature, to constant pain, to hatred of himself, he would not survive. If it was proper for a parasite to be a parasite, if he was by nature incapable of independent rational judgment, he would be happy in that state, happy on his own terms. He would go on copying the motions and repeating the ideas of others, as his natural function, like a monkey. A monkey does not hate itself, nor those it imitates. The misery of the parasite is the proof he was not intended to be a parasite; he was not doomed to it by the cruelty of nature—he did it to himself.

“What caused him to do it? That does not matter to us too much. Fear—laziness—the desire to escape the responsibility of rationality—the belief in a malevolent universe and, from that, the conviction that if he learns the truth about the universe he will discover the evil and disasters [surrounding] him, therefore he must avoid knowledge of the truth, therefore he must get rid of his means of knowledge, i.e., his reason—the half-digested teachings of others to which he succumbed in childhood before he had begun to think, the whole vicious mess of irrationalism, altruism, and collectivism—all of that can be and is the cause of his pronouncing the verdict of parasite on himself and rejecting his nature as man. These are his reasons, but what concerns us here are the results as they affect us, the results of our relation with the parasite.”

 

 

“In what manner do we allow the parasite to rule us, and what happens when he does? He rules us by the break we allow him to make within us. We accept him as an equal, i.e., a rational being. Then we are torn by the awful spectacle of the irrational around us. We find ourselves in a world we cannot understand, we are helpless and lost.
We have allowed him to create around us the kind of world he lives in, or imagines, or fears: the senseless, malevolent universe.
We begin to doubt the power of the human mind, the reality or practicality of truth, the possibility of good or justice. We suspect that we might be living in an insane chaos, but
that
is a supposition with which we cannot exist or function. Yet we
must
function, that is the basic law of our nature, and so we are caught in a civil war within ourselves and
we
become objects of perpetual suffering, made so by that very thing which is our life source, our happiness, the moving force of man’s survival—our spiritual independence and creative energy. And when we suffer within ourselves in this essential, primary way, we cannot function at our best—and we are disarmed. The parasite has us where he wants us: functioning only enough to support him, but not enough to be happy, to be strong, to shake him off and get forever out of his reach.

“We become like the parasite in every respect save our work.
That
neither he nor any form of suffering nor even our own will can corrupt.
That
remains untouched. In the sphere of our work we remain ourselves, functioning as we should, true to our nature. But in every other sphere—in our private lives, in our relations with men and the world—we adopt the methods and convictions of the parasite, we are just what he is: torn, uncertain, self-contradictory, vicious, lying, evasive—because we’re doing the same thing, running from the truth, trying to escape from something we don’t want to face. And in such a role, we are, perhaps, more evil than the parasites—if there can be degrees in such a matter. It is then we who poison the world, we who make it evil, we who work for our own destruction. This [applies to] anyone who does not live up to his highest capacity, who betrays his own talent and makes of it his own torture rack. How have we done this? By admitting the parasite into our own soul. By allowing him to be a major concern within us.

“What happens when he rules us?
The kind of vicious world you see, in which the best has been turned into a source of evil, in which competence is the source of failure, life energy is the source of destruction, and the capacity for joy is the source of the most terrible suffering.
In this kind of corrupted world, the parasite can survive comfortably without reproach, he can enjoy it, he can exploit us and he can rule.

“Withdraw the tools. Put yourself apart. Cut every spiritual connection with the parasite, every emotional tie, and every practical cooperation. Cooperation with them on their terms (those of collectivism) is not cooperation, but surrender—the voluntary offer to be beaten. Stop it. Face them for what they are.
And let them learn what you are. ”

“Carry to your personal life the same principles on which you function in your creative life. All of you live on the premise of one kind of universe when you work—and of quite a different kind in every part of your existence outside of work.”

The above is the actual secret, key and definition of Roark. He was the embodiment of the perfect man acting consistently on the right moral principle. That moral principle
(the mortality of independence)
is most eloquently obvious in creative work, and actually in every kind of work; this is proper, since work (creation, production, achievement, purposeful activity) is man’s primary and greatest function. But the same principle applies to all of a man’s life and activities—personal, social, emotional, etc. Roark functioned consistently and consciously on that principle.

The actual case of the genius is often the tragedy of [an internal] civil war: the principles of the creator in his work, the principles of the second-hander in every other aspect of his life. Why? All the reasons Galt states above, plus the fact that no consistent morality of the creator had ever been formulated. This is what has made geniuses so tortured and so tragic, when they should have been the ecstatic representatives of humanity. The world is responsible for torturing them? Yes—but that torture would be easy to bear, if the genius had not brought upon himself the torture within. It is he who does the world’s dirty work against himself. Otherwise, the pain would go only down to a certain point—and the genius would triumph, essentially, even if locked in a jail cell. The world is responsible for the [external] torture of the genius—and as a cause or source of the much greater torture which he imposes on himself by his wrong conception of the world.