October 4, 1949

  For Rearden and Dagny

  He told her that: he feels contempt for her; she is a bitch, as vile an animal as he is; he wants no pretense about love, devotion, or respect, no shred of honor to hide behind; he will have her at the price of his self-respect.

  Show him learning the opposite: that his admiration and respect for her are the source of his sexual desire; that his desire is for the possession of the highest woman he knows and is the expression of his greatest self-respect; that he loves her, i.e., she is the most important and precious person to him, as a person, not only as “a lay”; that instead of abasement, their affair gives him a feeling of elevation, it raises his self-respect, not destroys it; that he feels love, respect, devotion, admiration for her, all the real moral emotions, the ones expressing recognition of value.

  His other sensual capacities: love of good clothes, good cars, good furniture (as in his office), good jewelry for Dagny, other “self-indulgent” luxuries for both of them, the jade vase in his office.

  Jealousy of the other man in her life.

  (So far, I have shown: that he makes her wear the bracelet of Rearden Metal; that he wants to leave his “official” life and go away with her and is happy with her; their understanding and respect for each other; that he turns against Lillian when she indirectly calls Dagny a gutter bitch; that he turns against Mayor Bascom when he insults Dagny; that he takes pleasure in Dagny’s greatness, that that arouses his sexual desire; that he takes pleasure in the thought of Dagny and another man, which is an unconscious acknowledgment that sex, as such, is great and beautiful, not evil and degrading.)

  The incident of the ruby pendant: he learns that enjoyment of material luxury is an expression of spiritual values—the pendant would be meaningless to him on another woman (it would be meaningless on the most beautiful naked woman, if she were only a beautiful body); it would be meaningless if he had not earned it, if it had been given to him or if he had inherited it. It is not only that he wants her to have the pendant—he wants her to have it as a gift from him. Would it mean the same to him if she just happened to have the pendant? No. Would he enjoy giving it to some woman who craved it desperately, but who meant nothing to him? Hell, no.

  He looks at her as a painting, but he wants the “painting,” and all it implies, in real life: the hopeless yearning versus the man of reality and action.

  Tie their scene to his groping for the moral issue—to the nature of mistaken morality, of wrong moral values. And tie his feeling for her to his feeling for his work.

  He tells Dagny he would like her to be his kept woman; she laughs, saying that she’d like it for a month or two, but asks: would he like her, just as she is, if she were nothing but a kept woman? “You couldn’t be!” “No, I couldn’t. But if I were, would you like it?” “I’d be bored to death.” He stops short, understanding the implications.

  Rearden’s problem about sex is: he was bitterly disillusioned in his early experiences, and he resented the fact that he felt a violent physical desire that seemed to be independent of and in contradiction to his rational will and spiritual code of values. He concluded that sex is purely physical, and as such he hated it—it was a surrender of his will, a degrading necessity that held such an immense power over him, created such a violent desire, yet had no spiritual meaning.

  He learns that the capacity of sex is physical, a mechanism for the use and expression of his spirit, the means of expressing in physical form one’s greatest celebration of life, of joy, of one’s highest self-exaltation and one’s highest moral values in regard to man—that is, in regard to himself and the woman of his choice. He learns that sex is the means and form of translating spiritual admiration for a human being into physical action—just as productive activity is the translation of spiritual values into physical form, just as all life is a process of conceiving a spiritual purpose, based on one’s spiritual code of values, then giving it a material form—which is the proper, moral, and complete cycle for man’s existence, for the relation of man’s spirit to physical matter. The spirit sets the purpose and uses matter as its tool, as material; the spirit gives form to matter. Just as pure “spirituality,” divorced from physical action, is evil hypocrisy—so is the materialism which attempts to have matter give man purpose, value, and satisfaction. Just as “Platonic love” is evil hypocrisy—so is purely physical sex, which is an evil destruction of one’s values.

  He thinks that his guilt is that while admiring Dagny as the highest woman, he wants to degrade her by making her a tool for the satisfaction of his physical need. He thinks it’s evil that his response to the highest is sexual desire. He learns that that is precisely the high, moral quality of his desire for her. His desire is a response to his highest values. He learns that evil consists of the attitude of other men who are attracted, not by the highest, but by the lowest they know—by a mere body, with no regard for a woman’s character, or by a woman they consciously despise, this giving them a sense of their own elevation by contrast; the rotten self-fraud of men with an inferiority complex, men who try to acquire self-esteem by triumph over a woman they have estimated as worthless.

  The wrap of blue fox, and the roadside restaurant in winter.

  The conversation about the “kept woman”: the realization that they are much more capable of enjoying this than the drunken “playboy” at the next table. Dagny remembers the “reversal” at her first ball. He remembers her words at his party.

  The flowers.

  The cup carved of chalcedony.

  The crystal glasses—and the way he holds the glass when she serves him the drink.

  In contrast to his love of luxury: the way he enjoys nature, a sensual enjoyment, his body stretched on the ground in slacks and short-sleeved shirt. It is, of course, not a contrast, but the same thing—spiritual enjoyment of material nature.

  Rearden as the man who is the master of physical nature, whose spirit is the master of matter—in factory, countryside, or luxury.

  The evening when, on his way to her apartment, he feels loathing for the whole world, the shrinking feeling that he doesn’t want to touch anything : he has no sexual desire, no trace of it; then the sight of her against the city brings back his feeling of the world, the world in which he wants to act and work, and with that his sexual desire returns. It is an act of celebration—and he feels consciously that it is a great achievement of hers, a value, not a degrading sin, when he feels her experiencing pleasure and knows that she is capable of it, that she is celebrating life as he is.

  The incident when he has an affair with her in her office—the deliberate contrast and “impropriety” of it.

  His “sadistic” touches of this kind.

  The way he runs his fingertips down the skin of her arm—here an example of the fact that he never indulges in the physical as such, i.e., merely as contact—the purely physical in this sense is meaningless to both of them—it is not the contact that arouses pleasure in them, it is the contact when it is an expression of their spiritual attitude toward each other at that particular moment. (Such as: their first affair as result of the train ride and the triumph which it represents; the way he takes her the next morning; their first scene in her apartment, the broken shoulder-strap.)

  October 6, 1949

  Philosophy of Sex and Morality

  Note: The reason why people consider sexual desire insulting to a woman is, in the deepest sense, the fact that to most people sex is an evil, low, degrading aspect of man’s life. Since most people, in their philosophical premises, have damned themselves and life on earth, their sex desires and actions are an expression of evil (this is clearest in the case of desire for a woman consciously estimated as one’s inferior). On such a premise, sexual desire is insulting to the woman who is the object of it. Conventionally, the man is supposed to redeem this insult by the so-called higher, spiritual implications of marriage; but, if marriage is not involved, sexual desire is supposed to be insulting.

  The twisted element of truth here is that sex has to have a high spiritual base and source, and that without this it is an evil perversion. But the actual relation of sex and spirit is not the way they believe: they believe that sex is evil as such, and that the spiritual aspects of marriage serve to redeem or excuse it, or make it a pardonable weakness which has no tie with and is opposed to the spiritual elements of the relationship. They do not suspect the essential, unbreakable tie between sex and spirit—which is the tie between body and soul.

  On the right philosophical premise about sex, on my premise, it is a great compliment to a woman if a man wants her. It is an expression of his highest values, not of his contempt. In this sense, a husband would feel honored if another man wanted his wife; he would not let the other man have her—his exclusive possession is the material form of her love for him—but he would feel that the other man’s desire was a natural and proper expression of the man’s admiration for his wife, for the values which she represents and which he saw in her.

  It is on the above ground that Galt feels no jealousy and no resentment of Francisco and Rearden in Dagny’s past. His reaction when he hears about Dagny’s affair with Rearden is simple, non-malicious envy—merely the shock of learning that another man has what he himself so desperately wants. It is also the shock of the possibility, which he has kept in mind all these years, that Dagny may love another man and he, Galt, may never have her, not even after she joins the strike. But it is not the conventional fury against the thought that another man degrades Dagny by possessing her.

  Note how dreadful the general attitude on sex is: since all [the accepted] philosophies damn man, his life, and the earth—men’s attitude on sex is a degrading, ugly, corrupting evil, in all the many variations. And this is another proof that sex is the expression of one’s entire philosophy and attitude toward life. Since most people’s philosophy is a hodgepodge of contradictory bits, so is their attitude on sex. But man cannot exist without a basic philosophy, from which all his actions, emotions and desires will come.

  The cheap little schools of “free love” attempt to glorify sex on a silly sort of materialistic basis—simply glorifying physical joy, considering themselves “vital as animals.” They are unable to discover a moral, spiritual premise to justify sex—so they try to enjoy it without any morality, and, of course, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t bring them any sort of spiritual happiness, and not even much satisfaction.

  This is the same mistake as that of the materialists who—in protest against mystical morality—declare that existence on earth has nothing to do with and requires no morality. This attitude merely drives people back to church, to mystical morality—and people drag themselves back to it regretfully, reluctantly, knowing that it is unsatisfactory, that it cannot work—but knowing also that they cannot exist without some form of morality, some code of values. This is another example of the vicious cutting of man in two—and setting his spirit against his body.

  My most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.

  (No wonder the advocates of religion are so insistent that “there can be no morality without religion.” They seem to know their danger point. There’s my main job.)

  The basic issue, of course, is the standard of values. Good and evil—why? By what standard? Their standard is an arbitrary, “revealed,” unprov able “categorical imperative”—as they jolly well have to admit—and it rests on their conception of God, and is then translated into indefensible nonsense in regard to conduct on this earth. (For instance, why should charity please God as the highest virtue? Why should He be that unjust?) The standard supposedly is in another dimension, opposite and contradictory in nature to ours—yet we are supposed to live by it on earth, in this dimension. A rational morality starts with a standard of values (of good and evil) based on man, his life, and the earth; it starts with the fact that values are possible and necessary only to a being of free will who has to function through choice and purpose.

  If any school of morality considers morality a social, not an individual, matter—i.e., a code for the relation of man to man, and not for man’s own conduct in regard to himself—then, of course, it will necessarily be a collectivist [theory] and it will not work. This is true of any religious morality or of any attempt at a “social” morality, like communism.

  Both above schools of “morality” have this in common: that they begin by placing the standard of their code of values outside of man: God is the standard in one case, “society” in the other. But since man is the entity, the unit under discussion for whom the code of morality is being proposed, the proper standard of values has to begin with him.

  Most blatantly obvious, in theory and in observable practice, is the fact that man’s moral code has to apply primarily to his own private conduct in relation to himself and his life—and that only on the basis of the right code toward himself will he or can he observe any sort of moral code toward others. Conventionally, it is thought that a man on a desert island needs no moral code. That is where he would need it the most. The proper code, of course, is: rational control of himself and his actions, a rational view of reality (identifying facts for what they are, to the best of his knowledge and capacity, being true to truth), the rational choice of his purpose and the action to achieve it.

  Conventionally, both the religious and the social schools of morality make it appear that moral behavior is an obligation which man owes to others, but not to himself—that he has no selfish interest in morality—in fact, that his selfish interests are actually opposed to his moral code, but he must observe it as a sacrifice for and to others. Thus he is a sacrificial animal to God or to society—sacrifice, suffering, renunciation of happiness on earth are made [the essence] of his moral code. He must live for God, or society, or humanity, or the poor, or whatever; he is always taken as a means to some end—but he is never taken as an end in himself.

  But we can see all around us that the men who are immoral toward others are first of all and more profoundly immoral toward themselves. The criminal or fraud or con-man is the irresponsible man who exists without a purpose, wastes his life and hurts himself more than he harms others. The liar is not “honest with himself, but dishonest with others”—he does not fake reality for others, while having a clear, honest grasp of it for himself; he is the one who fakes reality for himself, in his own mind, much more dreadfully and disastrously than he can ever fake it for others; he is the man who has renounced the rational identification of facts, the “being true to truth”—he is the neurotic full of complexes and in dread of ever facing reality.

  Incidentally, if morality were merely a social matter, a code for the relation of man to man, then a plausible case could be made for taking “society” (or the collective) as the basis of moral values, for letting “society” choose the terms of the code, for the precept that “the good is whatever is good for society,” or for the idea that society itself needs no moral code—that the majority may do anything it pleases, since it physically can do it—that whatever the majority decrees, that is moral.

  A good example here as to why a society or a man needs a moral code is the difference between what a man can do or may do. A man can cut his own throat—but he may not do it, if his purpose is to live. Society can become collectivist and destroy itself—but it may not do it, if its purpose is to exist, or prosper, or achieve happiness for any of its members. (Here again—the relation of morality and purpose is clear.)

  Incidentally, it is debatable whether a majority can do anything it pleases, even in the crudest physical terms. Those who think it, think simply of a wild mob overrunning an individual or a small, opposing minority—simply in terms of physical numbers and physical force. But even this is not true: one man with a machine gun can defeat a mob. This is an example of “force” versus “mind and force.” Man cannot do anything by sheer physical force—his muscles have to be guided by his mind, his mind has to set the purpose of his actions—and right there is the illustration of why a majority is actually helpless as such, if its physical numbers are the only criterion of its strength. If it’s asked: but what about a numerical majority with a vicious leader or with a vicious idea?—then the answer is: on those terms, the question of the mind is involved, and then the man with the right idea will win, regardless of numbers; he will win, even if his following is much smaller than that of the evil leader—and he will also win even in the minds of the enemy’s following, to the extent of their intelligence.

  Note for Francisco and Rearden

  It is Francisco who tells Rearden what people’s attitude on sex is: the quest for self-esteem, when sex should be an expression of self-esteem.

  This is the scene when, after their unfinished conversation at the mills, Rearden comes to Francisco’s suite at the Wayne-Falkland. Rearden asks how a man of Francisco’s intelligence can find any sort of satisfaction in the life of a playboy, in running after countless cheap women who have nothing but beauty. Francisco tells him that he has never touched any of those women—why the women keep up the pretense—and that he has loved only one woman in his life and still loves her.