There is still, however, an implicit American view of man and life, embodied in the character and fundamental attitudes of most of the people, a view which sets Americans to this day apart from other nations, and on a collision course with their country’s intellectual leadership.
The people, as a rule, respect common sense, think that science can solve men’s problems, and believe that answers to basic questions can be found. The intellectual leadership regards these attitudes as superficial, naive, and “simplistic.”
The people admire material wealth, practical success, technological innovation. The intellectuals dismiss such values as “middle-class” and say that machines are destroying the globe. The people admire self-reliance, productiveness, and the other virtues of the so-called “work ethic.” The intellectuals say that these virtues are impossible, unnecessary, antisocial, and/ or “Puritan compulsiveness.” The people feel goodwill toward the human race, believe that men can achieve their goals on earth, and hold that happiness is possible. The intellectuals regard this as self-deception, as a refusal to face the impotence or ugliness of man and the “tragic” nature of life.
The people approve of personal ambition, are eager to pursue their own happiness, think that a man should not live on handouts but should earn what he gets, and reject the insistent demands for self-immolation. The intellectuals denounce this—every element of it—as selfish and therefore vicious.
The people, despite some increasing lip service to religion, are still fundamentally secular in their ideas and concerns. The intellectuals either describe this as “vulgar American materialism,” or claim that unthinking, “Bible-belt” mentalities are the real indicator of the nation’s essence. The people reject the Marxist view of life and do not spend their time cursing “class enemies.” The intellectuals regard the people (including organized labor) as exploiters of a neo-proletariat: “the young, the poor, the black, and the women.” The people (like all people on earth) reject “modern culture.” The intellectuals explain this as “philistinism” and “tradition-worship.”
The people hotly reject the proliferating manifestations of the welfare state, from soaring welfare rolls to forced busing to sexual quotas. The intellectuals condemn this as unfeeling, racist, “sexist.” The people respect the Founding Fathers and want less government interference in their lives. The intellectuals dismiss this as an anachronism, while explaining that the Founding Fathers were really religious mystics at heart (the conservative interpretation) or “communitarians” who valued society above liberty (a recent “revisionist” viewpoint).1 The people love the United States, are proud of its historic achievements, and insist that the country he able to defend itself against Communist aggression. The intellectuals equate American patriotism with sordid nationalism, American history with “imperialistic greed,” and American self-defense with “paranoia” and/or with warmongering militarism.
The Germans of the Weimar period were increasingly frustrated, angry, disgusted with “the system,” and ready for change. So are Americans. The Germans, following their intellectuals, were disgusted with what they regarded as reason and freedom, and they were ready for Hitler. The Americans are disgusted with unreason and statism; but they are directionless. Without intellectual guidance, they do not know what went wrong with their system or how to prevent the country’s disintegration and collapse.
Thus, by default—despite the profound difference between Americans and the pre-Hitler Germans—the similarities between the two nations, the similarities between their intellectuals and the social trends they shape, are growing.
The most ominous aspect of the trend is that, if it is not reversed, it will ultimately change the character of the American people. It has already begun to do so.
The philosophy that shapes a nation’s culture and institutions tends, other things being equal, to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by creating the conditions and setting the requirements of men’s daily life, it increasingly establishes itself as an unquestioned frame of reference in most people’s minds. A society shaped by altruism, for instance—a society of chronic, politically enforced man-eat-man policies in the name of “the public welfare”—leads many of its victims to feel that safety lies in flaunting public service, that selfishness (the “selfishness” of others, who are draining them) is a threat, and that the solution is to urge and practice greater selflessness. A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal indepen- dence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant. A society shaped by irrationalism—a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist cul· ture—leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e., that their own mind is inadequate, and that they need guidance from some higher power.
Thus corrupt ideas, once institutionalized, tend to be continually reinforced (the same would hold true of rational ideas); and unphilosophical men, however decent their own unidentified premises might be, eventually succumb. Across a span of generations they gradually relinquish any better heritage. In part, they are yielding to the explicit ideological promptings of their teachers and their universities. In part, they are adapting resignedly to what they have come to accept from their own experience as the facts or necessities of life.
The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely.
If the United States continues to go the way of all Europe, the people’s rebellion against the present intellectual leadership will be perverted, and rechanneled into an opposite course.
Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught. All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative to today’s intellectuals; mindless activism as the alternative to vacillating “moderation”; Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism; female inferiority as the alternative to Women’s Lib; racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice in behalf of warring pressure groups; and government controls for the sake of the middle class, as the alternative to government controls for the sake of the rich or the poor.
The type of mentality produced by these choices—activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian—would have been familiar in the Weimar Republic.
If it happens here, the primary responsibility will not belong to the people, who still reject such a mentality and are groping for a better kind of answer. The responsibility will belong to those who banished from the schools all knowledge of the original American system, and who would have finally convinced the nation that men’s only choice is a choice of dictatorships.
No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed. No one can know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation’s spirit and system of government. No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly—or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a foreign war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs.
What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country’s present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular. The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.
If the political trend of the world remains unchanged, the same fate—collapse and ultimate dictatorship—is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously in process of decline or disintegration. (The Commu
nist countries and the so-called “third world” have long since fallen, or never risen to anything.) A European dictatorship need not be identical to an American one; dictatorships can vary widely in form, according to a given people’s special history, traditions, and crises; in form, but not in essence.
Most of the East is gone. The West is going.
The following statement was made by a German intellectual after the Nazis fell from power. In the early days of Hitler’s regime, he recalled, anyone troubled by the Nazi practices and concerned about Germany’s future was shrugged off as an alarmist.
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. 2
One can “know, or surmise, the end” by knowing what cause produces what effect, i.e., what factor determines the fate of nations.
Today, the only nation still capable of saving itself, and thereby the world, is the United States. It can do so by only one means.
The Constitution cannot stop the trend. A constitution, however noble, cannot withstand the death or eclipse of its animating principle.
Religion cannot stop the trend. It helped to cause it.
The demonstrated practicality of the original American system cannot stop the trend. Practicality as such does not move nations.
The profound differences between America and Germany—the differences in history, institutions, heroes, national character, starting premises—cannot stop the trend. After a century, a crucial similarity began to develop between the two countries, the similarity of basic ideas; and this one similarity is gradually overriding, subverting, or negating the differences, and consigning their remnants to the dead end of the unappreciated, the undefended, the historically impotent.
There is only one antidote to today’s trend: a new, pro-reason philosophy. Such a philosophy would have to offer the nation for the first time a full statement and an unbreached defense of the fundamental ideas of America.
“Most of us,” said the German intellectual quoted above, looking back at the Hitler years,
did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?3
Do you want to think about “fundamental things”? In America, there is still time.
What fundamental truths did the Nazis and the American collectivists and all their sources in the history of philosophy struggle to evade and annihilate?
The answer is contained in two concepts, with everything they include, lead to, and presuppose: reason and egoism. These two, properly understood and accepted, are the immovable barrier to any attempt to establish totalitarian rule.
Obedience is the precondition of totalitarianism. The preconditions of obedience are fear and guilt; not merely the existential fear created by terroristic policies, but the deeper, metaphysical fear created by inner helplessness, the fear of a living creature deprived of any means to deal with reality; not merely the guilt of committing some specific crime, but the deeper, metaphysical guilt of feeling that one is innately unworthy and immoral.
Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt. More precisely: reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; egoism does not permit him to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal. But a man indoctrinated with the notion that reason is impotent and self-sacrifice is his moral duty, will obey anyone and anything.
If sacrifice is equated with virtue, there is no stopping the advance of the totalitarian state. “It goes on and will go on,” said Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, “so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it.”
“The world,” said Roark, “is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” It was true in 1943, when The Fountainhead was published. It is just as true and much more obvious today. 4
A full system of philosophy advocating reason and egoism has been defined in our time by Ayn Rand. It is the philosophy of Objectivism, presented in detail in Atlas Shrugged, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and The Virtue of Selfishness. It is the antidote to the present state of the world. (All further quotations, unless otherwise identified, are from the works of Ayn Rand.)5
Most philosophers have left their starting points to un- named implication. The base of Objectivism is explicit:
“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.” 6
Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.
The third axiom at the base of knowledge—an axiom true, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—is the Law of Identity. This law defines the essence of existence: to be is to be something, a thing is what it is; and leads to the fundamental principle of all action, the law of causality. The law of causality states that a thing’s actions are determined not by chance, but by its nature, i.e., by what it is.
It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms. Existence is the first axiom. The universe exists independent of consciousness. Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but “Nature, to be cornmanded, must be obeyed” (Francis Bacon). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.” 7
The philosophic source of this viewpoint and its major advocate in the history of philosophy is Aristotle. Its opponents are all the other major traditions, including Platonism, Christianity, and German idealism. Directly or indirectly, these traditions uphold the notion that consciousness is the creator of reality. The essence of this notion is the denial of the axiom that existence exists.
In the religious version, the deniers advocate a consciousness “above” nature, i.e., superior, and contradictory, to existence; in the social version, they melt nature into an indeterminate blur given transient semi-shape by human desire. The first school denies reality by upholding two of them. The second school dispenses with the concept of reality as such. The first rejects science, law, causality, identity, claiming that anything is possible to the omnipotent, miracle-working will of the Lord. The second states the religionists’ rejection in secular terms, claiming that anything is possible to the will of “the people.”
Neither school can claim a basis in objective evidence. There is no way to reason from nature to its negation, or from facts to their subversion, or from any premise to the obliteration of argument as such, i.e., of its foundation: the axioms of existence and identity.
Metaphysics and epistemology are closely interrelated; together they form a philosophy’s foundation. In the history of philosophy, the rejection of reality and the rejection of reason have been corollaries. Similarly, as Aristotle’s example indicates, a pro-reality metaphysics implies and requires a pro-reason epistemology.
Reason is defined by Ayn Rand as “the faculty that identifies and integrates
the material provided by man’s senses.”8
Reason performs this function by means of concepts, and the validity of reason rests on the validity of concepts. But the nature and origin of concepts is a major philosophic problem. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality, and one can define objective principles to guide man’s process of cognition. If concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge, and man is helplessly blind.
This is the “problem of universals,” on which Western philosophy has foundered.
Plato claimed to find the referent of concepts not in this world, but in a supernatural dimension of essences. The Kantians regard concepts (some or all) as devoid of referents, i.e., as subjective creations of the human mind independent of external facts. Both approaches and all of their variants in the history of philosophy lead to the same essential consequence: the severing of man’s tools of cognition from reality, and therefore the undercutting of man’s mind. (Although Aristotle’s epistemology is far superior, his theory of concepts is intermingled with remnants of Platonism and is untenable.) Recent philosophers have given up the problem and, as a result, have given up philosophy as such.
Ayn Rand challenges and sweeps aside the main bulwark of the anti-mind axis. Her historic feat is to tie man’s distinctive form of cognition to reality, i.e., to validate man’s reason.
According to Objectivism, concepts are derived from and do refer to the facts of reality.
The mind at birth (as Aristotle first stated) is tabula rasa; there are no innate ideas. The senses are man’s primary means of contact with reality; they give him the precondition of all subsequent knowledge, the evidence that something is. What the something is he discovers on the conceptual level of awareness.
Ominous Parallels Page 34