"Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your
moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their schemes and
systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to
learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. 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.
"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call
'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact
that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work
automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic
are not made by instinct. 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.'
"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior.
He needs a code of values to guide his actions. '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.
"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.
"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the
chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life
is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of
action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is
no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it
cannot act for its own destruction.
"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with
an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or
evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions
where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it
acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is
unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as
its own destroyer.
"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from
all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives
by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good
for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it
requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An
'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an
instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for
living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil
today is that (hat is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a
love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must
obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which
nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own
destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
"A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not
survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to
break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted.
But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
"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.
"AH 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.
"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose.
If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values
by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving,
fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
"Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will
destroy it- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of
his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a
metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the
fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction,
capable of nothing but pain.
"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the
achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find
happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your
values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an
ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of
others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the
nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own
sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
"But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of
irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random
manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free
to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration
is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose
of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and
live. "Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the
profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no
values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man
is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they
have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living
species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that
a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of
smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any
way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there's no practical reason
why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind
throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.
"Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity
and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life
as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb
man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of selfpreservation
that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to
be moral is the man who desires to live.
"No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you
choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your
mind.
"No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But
you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living
death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit
for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows
nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of
unthinking self-destruction.
"No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone
had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on
existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to
sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.
"No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there
any longer. I have removed your means of survival—your victims.
"If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them
quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am
making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how
great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a reevaluation,
but only an identification of their values.
"We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a
single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours
is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.
"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.
"If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with
nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness
conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could
identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If
that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not
consciousness.
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and
consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible
primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge
and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your
life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know
the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain
the same: that it exists and that you know it. "To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence,
it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific
attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the
greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept
of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You
have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it:
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an
action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the
same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot
freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in
simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters
that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders1 attempt to evade the
fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all
the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact
that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you
forget that Man is Man.
"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only
means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and
integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to
give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to
his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must
be learned by his mind.
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man
perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his
touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the
object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that
the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the
molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind
consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish
the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that
existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe;
neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole.
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction
into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to
confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to
abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is
merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human
consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of
reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of
truth.
"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The
answer is: Yours. 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.
"You who speak of a 'moral instinct' as if it were some separate endowment
opposed to reason—man's reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a
process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or
Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Is a man's wound to be disinfected in order to save his life—right or wrong? Does
the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic
power—right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you
everything you have—and the answers came from a man's mind, a mind of
intransigent devotion to that which is right.
"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.
"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that
which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only
will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices
you make and determines your life and your character.
"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed.
And his basic vice, the source of all his 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.'
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an
attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped
out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,’
you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are
negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'—he is
declaring: 'Who am I to live?'
"This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking
or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
"To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing
his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing
his actions is death.
"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no
morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it
most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a
rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth
without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring
his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality
will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only
coin noble enough to buy it.
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only
moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a 'moral commandment' is a
contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the
understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no
commandments.
"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom:
existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from
these. 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 consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness,
pride.
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that
nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of
perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one's only judge of values
and one's only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no
compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's
consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking
reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a
short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention
is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's
consciousness.
"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the
responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no
substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—
that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the
subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an
authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his
say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your
existence.
"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your
consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot
fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two
attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach
between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his
convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not
sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind
shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are
practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to
existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of
being true to one's own consciousness.
"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can
have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by
fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an
act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you
become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their
evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness
become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as
a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a
fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty
is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most
profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the
reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character
of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all
men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect
for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a
process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and
treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty
chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a
rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for
their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an
honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt
from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your
admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place
any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and
defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the
pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men
for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse
to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of
your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the
fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which
man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring
knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea
into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values—that
all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative
if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned
from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as
your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—
that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to
become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to
settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is
to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that
your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition
for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but
your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take
you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no
purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to
crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a
stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader
prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man
who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—
that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any
killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find
outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you
choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power
in the same direction.
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value
and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements
open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your
own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions
are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce
the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the
values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a
being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live
requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no
automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the
image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born
able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of
self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all
things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to
achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that
the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and
rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile
impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value
which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your
existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.
"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 Me 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.
"This wish—which you share, yet submerge as an evil—is the only remnant of
the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own
happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve
it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or
sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and
happiness is the goal and the reward of life.
"Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as
signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life
or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and
suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of
that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving
you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to
feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good
or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire
or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your
nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity
is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills
it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode
your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine
which you, the driver, have corrupted.
"If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible
as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for
a fortune or a love you don't deserve, for a loophole in the law of
causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the
opposite of existence—you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that
life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel:
it brought you where you wanted to go.
"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.
Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might
blindly attempt to indulge. 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. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who
desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and
finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
"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. Just as there are no contradictions in my
values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no
conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned
and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make
sacrifices nor accept them.
