by Tom Pratt
The Morality of Reason
Galt then proceeds to show that this cannot be true to life or morality in the world we have been given. Man cannot survive in this reality without his mind, like an animal born with instincts and tools in his physical make-up suited to that survival. Man can only survive as himself by the use of his mind. “Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.” (p. 1012) Reason, furthermore, is volitional, that is chosen. One does not think automatically as if it were a mechanical process or the instinct born into the nature of an animal. Man is a being of “volitional consciousness…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.’” (p. 1012)
It follows that such a being does not follow a behavior pattern automatically. He/she chooses to behave according to a code of values. “‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.” (p. 1012) Here Galt states clearly the fundamental “value” at the heart of Atlas Shrugged:
There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of “Life” that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. (pp. 1012-1013)
Contrary to what most would contend, Galt says, it is not an instinctual behavior to love life. To love life is not the automatic response of self-preservation that unerringly knows what to do to survive, for it requires knowledge. It is not desire to live, because desire cannot supply the knowledge necessary to life. It cannot be equated with fear of death, for this is not the same as desire for life or a love of it. Man has the power to both enhance and improve his life and to destroy it (unlike an animal), and destruction has been his choice throughout most of history.
Like a latter-day prophet the voice on the radio waves exhorts:
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. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value. 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. (pp. 1013-1014)
The essence of this code is that man cannot attempt to live as anything other than what he is without contradicting the nature of existence itself. This is the attempt to deny that “A is A” and that “Either-Or” is a choice that must be made and that the “Law of Non-Contradiction” will not permit two formulations of the same reality to occupy the same space and time. In Atlas Shrugged, of course, the argument is over whose “reason” or whose judgment is to be followed. Galt answers emphatically, “Yours,” for “No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.” (p. 1017) It follows that moral integrity is the property of the individual and does not exist apart from individual choice, least of all as a kind of collective wisdom or received “moral instinct.” It is not “social.” Consequently, “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, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.” (p. 1017) Galt says this is man’s basic virtue, accepting the responsibility of thinking. On the other hand the fundamental nature of evil (“the source of all 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.’” (pp. 1017-1018) This right and obligation of the individual to formulate or accept as valid a moral code the negation of life, for “When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’” (p. 1018)
Galt then juxtaposes this obligation of the individual to reason through to moral conclusions the notions of commandment and faith. It would at first appear that Rand is using his voice to throw out religious claims, and this is probably her own intent. However, it is clear that the language she/he is using treats commandment as a forced response, not a proposition to be weighed and accepted or rejected, a rational process. If a “commandment” requires a “forced response,” then it cannot be “moral.” If is to be obeyed without understanding, it is not “moral.” The same goes for the “mysticism” she attaches to “faith.” This is the sense of obligation to accept as fact something as true to reality simply because someone said it was so. Such “mysticism” naturally bypasses the mind in favor of outside authority, producing and unthinking “morality.” From this array of premises flows the summary statement about the nature of life and living:
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and conscious
ness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. (p. 1018)
It follows from this that such a person will not live frivolously, indolently, or in dissipation, because it is inconsistent with the very nature of life itself. Such is the morality that comes from reason. The person who holds unswervingly to such a creed does not kowtow to received opinion or majoritarian morality simply because it is hard to swim against the tide, for he knows that reality will vindicate his rightness and goodness. As Galt sees it virtue of this type is productive of life—a key distinction, for virtue is not an end in itself but the means to life. He insists that even in his present situation, as an outcast from society and one hunted by the government, he has achieved the goal of his living:
Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live. (p. 1021)
Happiness
That goal, strangely enough, is what he and Rand call “happiness”—a theme which we have previously addressed. It is here that true happiness as it is intended in the rational life is discussed at length. It is not to be achieved (and it is achieved, not received) by the pursuit of whims of emotion and the faking of reality, the pursuit of “whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge.” It cannot be had in the fortune you did not earn or the love you do not deserve (because you have hidden your corruption like James Taggart). “Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.” (p. 1022)
Such a person does not expect someone else to live for his or her happiness any more than he will do so. “Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others.” (p. 1022) Galt is bold to call the symbol of such relationships “the Trader.” In keeping with Rand’s refusal to divide the material from the spiritual, Galt refers to this as being a trader of the spirit, and then explains: “A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect.” (p. 1022) In this light, “selfish” takes on a very nuanced meaning, for this “pleasure” is something produced by “virtue”—the search for and the production of the highest values of the mind and body. When Galt finds men and women of this same mindset he enters into relationships of mutual benefit and pleasure. When he does not, he simply goes about his own purposeful existence. He does not force anyone into his way of thinking or acting.
I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. (pp. 1022-1023)
The coercion of the use of the mind for the profit of others, especially the “common good,” pervades the narrative of Atlas Shrugged and is the driving incentive of the men of the mind to have a go at changing the world. But it is a peculiarly non-violent approach that Galt has taken. His ultimatum is “our work or your guns.” He will not tolerate both. “You can choose either; you can’t have both.” He goes on to explain that the ones with the guns have ruled through the fear of death. If the men of the mind return, they will offer life to those who receive them back gladly. Once again the theme of “life” predominates:
You have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not “the absence of pain,” intelligence is not “the absence of stupidity,” light is not “the absence of darkness,” an entity is not “the absence of a nonentity.” Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: “Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.” I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. (p. 1024)
The Morality of Death
What follows is an exploration of the “Morality of Death” to which the purveyors of fear and coercion are committed. Once again it is pertinent to note that Rand’s perceptions of what this morality entails are based on premises that go undefended here. The “Morality of Death” is so denominated because, “Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.” (p. 1025) Here is Galt’s declaration at length:
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a “tendency” to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free. (p. 1025)
It is paramount at this point to make no mistake about what Galt/Rand is saying here. We quote this passage extensively to be fair and to prepare for our later analysis of this take on human existence. Here we find the premises that lead to the analysis of the source of the evils being denounced throughout Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s other writings:
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he beca
me a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man.