Metaphysics

  Existence exists. A is A.

  Epistemology

  Mind and body. The nature of reason—the evidence of the senses, integrated by his mind according to the rules of logic. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. The nature of abstractions. Thinking is volitional—it is not an automatic process. The root of “free will”—you have no choice about what reality is, but you have the choice of knowing what it is or not. The mind is man’s tool of survival. Life is given to you, survival is not. To survive, you must think; you must discover the means and methods of survival proper to man; you have no arbitrary freedom about it—you cannot survive “at random,” you must learn what is necessary for your survival as man.

  Morality

  The need of morality for a being of free will—a being who must survive by means of choice—a rational being who must think and must choose to think. The process of reason is: Yes or No? Right or Wrong? This is the process of thinking and of every action a man takes as a result of his thinking. Truth (perception of reality) is the standard of value for his thinking. He needs a standard of value to guide the actions he’ll take as a result of his knowledge, to estimate the choices he’ll make: his existence as man is his standard of value—as man, because he can exist in no other way, yet he has to maintain his status as man and his existence by his own will and choice.

  The Morality of Life

  Thinking as the only basic virtue, from which all others proceed; non-thinking as the only basic vice. The recognition of reality or the non-recognition; existence or non-existence; life or non-life; entity or zero. The responsibility of saying “It is.” Joy and pain as the barometer of life or death. The function of pain in one’s body—the pain in one’s spirit. Emotions proceed from reason. Emotions as the summary of a man’s philosophy. Emotions are based on your estimates, and your estimates on your basic premises, on your moral code.

  Joy is the purpose of the Life Morality. When man’s life is the standard and reason the judge, no contradictions are possible, no “destructive” joy, no “hangovers”—and no desire “to have your cake and eat it, too,” no desire for the irrational. Life is the value, pursuit of happiness is the goal; man exists for his own sake and for his own happiness. The same code applies to all men: there is no clash of interests if no man expects another to live for him, if no man expects the unearned. There is no sacrifice in human relationships—only the pattern of traders. Men trade value for value, in matter and in spirit.

  The virtues of the Life Morality: thinking—therefore rationality, the refusal to go against your own consciousness and judgment, the refusal to fake reality; independence—the refusal to submit to the authority of others, to place another’s judgment above your own; honesty—which is only another name for rationality, the loyalty to reality, the “being true to truth”; purposefulness (productiveness)—the choice of your life purpose and the achievement of it; happiness—which is possible only as the result of virtue, as the full integration of your reason and action; self-esteem—which means pride, self-value—which means the conscious practice of your moral code, the living up to your values, the creation of your own character. (Errors of knowledge versus moral errors; in the realm of morality, nothing counts but perfection.) (Man’s need of an ideal.)

  The vices of the Life Morality: non-thinking-which means the evasion of knowledge, the placing of anything whatever above your own mind, any form of mysticism, of faith, or denial of reality; dependence—the placing of others above yourself in any manner whatever, either as authority or as love; aimlessness—the non-integrated life; pain—the submission to it or acceptance of it; humility—the acceptance of one’s moral imperfection, the willingness to be imperfect, which means: the indifference to moral values and to yourself, i.e., self-abnegation; the initiation of force—as the destruction of the mind, as the method contrary to man’s form of survival, as the anti-man and anti-life.

  The Morality of Death

  Such moralities place the standard of value outside of man and of reality, e.g., God, the hereafter, the needs of the soul as opposed to the body. By definition, they are impossible to man; the “good” is the opposite of life. The result is such evils as the opposition of soul and body, of theory and practice, of the moral and the practical. All of it is a rebellion against reality. You cannot fake reality. The desire for a non-stable reality is the desire for non-existence (A is A).

  The morality of sacrifice: the sacrificing of virtue to vice, of the good to the evil, of value to non-value, of a positive to a negative, of achievement to need, of ability to inability—the lack, the flaw, the absence, the zero as the consistent standard and the ultimate goal. Life is a sin, under this morality, because everything required by life is a sin. Joy is a sin, pain is a virtue. The death principle throughout it all. The creed of the unearned.

  The worship of emotions—but emotions are only your “stale thinking.” The demand for unearned love—they do not expect causeless fear, but they do demand causeless love.

  The “strong” and the “weak”—so you expect men to survive while being irrational?

  The conspiracy against life, ability and the mind. The paradox of the defenders of freedom resting their case on mysticism, while the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason—the paradox of all absolutes being mystical or non-existent; the absolute of reason is denied by all. Which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?

  Politics

  Man’s rights—inherent in the need of his survival as man. No initiation of force. No sacrifice of man to man. No compulsion. No subordination of one man’s mind to that of another. Voluntary transactions. The trader principle. The proper function of government—retaliation by force against those who initiate force, and nothing else.

  Economics

  Man’s right to his own property, to the product of his labor, rests on the law of cause and effect. You cannot have the result, if you destroy the source. You cannot have the product of a man’s mind, except on his terms. How free enterprise worked—the benefit given to others by inventors and innovators, the inestimable benefit of an idea. The relationship of the “weak” and the “strong”: the strong (intellectually strong, which is the only strength possible in a free, non-force economy) raise the value of the weak’s time by delegating to them the tasks already known and thus being free to pursue new discoveries. Proper mutual trade to mutual advantage. The interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, provided nobody seeks the unearned.

  The address to the men of the mind: do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. It is you who have made them possible. Set your own terms and code. Put an end to the use of your virtues for your own torture. Learn to understand the nature of your enemies: they do seek death and universal destruction. Yours is the code of Life. Fight for it. There is no other.

  July 30, 1953

  [The following seems to be a revision of the above outline, beginning with morality.]

  Outline of Galt’s Speech

  You have achieved your moral ideal. It is your morality that has destroyed the world.

  What is morality? Man—reason—need of a code—man’s only choice: to think or not to think—the essence of thinking: A is A—the standard of value: man’s survival as man, life as the value. It is on a desert island that you would need morality most.

  What is your morality? The morality of death—the anti-man, anti-mind, anti-existence. Mysticism and force—mind and body. Whatever your code, reason is your common enemy. The conspiracy against the mind. We have withdrawn. (I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default.) Now look at your morality and your world.

  The Morality of Death. The standard of value outside of man; original sin; life as guilt, the mind as guilt, every virtue needed to support life as guilt, the moral versus the practical, joy as guilt. Sacrifice: the total immorality of its meaning—the zero as the consistent standard of value.

  The consequences of the contradiction (personal): the botched, half-living creatures scared to think—all the consequences of the morality of death—the worship of emotions—“wishes” versus reality. Man’s need of self-esteem: his chronic fear, his knowledge that he is his own destroyer—all his virtues are called vices, all his vices are called virtues—the dread that evil is practical (since life is evil).

  The creed of the unearned: the real purpose of all mystics: the unearned in spirit; the rebellion against a stable reality, against the absolute of reality; the anti-cause-and-effect; the desire to reverse cause and effect. But the escape from reality, in any form whatever, is the desire for non-existence.

  The consequences of the contradiction (social): the defenders of freedom are now mystics, and the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason; the idea that morality and absolutes must be mystical; the attitude toward “desires” and man’s psychology which savages had toward physical nature. The constant oppositions: mind and body, the moral and the practical, theory and practice, reason and emotions, security and freedom, yourself and others, selfishness and charity, private interests and public interests, the “having and eating your cake” principle. A “social” or mystical morality is self-defeating by definition, it has to make man immoral—but try to consider all those concepts with reason as the standard and you’ll see that there are no contradictions where no element of mysticism, of the irrational, has been introduced.

  The constant demands for the impossible: the desire to have men survive while being irrational. “Public welfare”: who is the public?—failure as [conferring] the right to the title of “public.”

  The destruction of America: the country of reason; what has been done to it? America’s self-sacrifice to the vilest savages—which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?—why America could not survive on the morality of altruism.

  The Morality of Life: Life as the standard—thinking as the only basic virtue—joy as the purpose—man existing for his own sake and for the pursuit of his own happiness—no duty, no temptation—evil as non-practical-the pattern of traders—justice, not mercy—no sacrifice, no initiation of force, no obedience to force.

  Politics: Man’s rights. The proper function of government regarding force.

  Economics: Property (the profit-motive, the dollar-sign). How free enterprise worked: the spiritual benefit given by the inventors. The separation of State and economics.

  (I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default. What I have done, too, is merely an act of identification. The extent to which you have lived and found joy is the extent to which you have acted on my morality.)

  The address to the men of the mind: To the best within you. Do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. Set your own terms.

  Yours is the code of life. Fight for it. There is no other. When Life is once more the value—then, we’ll return. The strikers’ oath.

  September 28, 1953

  When we say that nobody actually believes in God, it is true, if by “belief” we mean the equivalent of a rational conviction. But the trick, the psychological “gimmick,” of mystics is the fact that they do not “believe” in reality, either. What we mean by a rational conviction has no equivalent in their consciousness. No, they do not “believe” in God in the same way as they “believe” in food, money or their material existence—but their material existence has no full reality for them, either—and that is some special state of consciousness, that is the root of the faking, the pretense, the going through an act, the unreality which I sense about most people and which I hate more than anything else, that is the form of their Death Premise, as if they do not merely wish to destroy existence, but have never even permitted existence to exist.

  January 9, 1954

  The Morality of Death

  Metaphysics: the worship of the zero; the rebellion against a stable reality, against absolutes, which is the wish for non-existence. Epistemology: the “sixth sense,” the definitions by means of the negative, the modern mystics and relativists, the “stolen concepts,” the worship of emotions, the mixture of existence and consciousness, the anti-cause-and-effect, the creed of the unearned.

  Morality: mind and body; the placing of the standard of value outside of man; original sin; life, mind and joy as guilt; the opposition of the moral and the practical; sacrifice: the total immorality of its meaning, the zero as the standard of value. (It is evil to produce, it is good to mooch.)

  The purpose of that morality: the sacrifice of the good to the evil, the conspiracy against ability and the mind—what the strikers are on strike against. (You need us? It is the generosity of the good that makes the evil possible.)

  The Consequences of the Morality of Death

  Personal:

  Man’s need of self-esteem: life or death. Their sense of guilt and fear: the knowledge of their non-thinking. Fear—because they have abandoned their tool of survival. Guilt—because they know that they have done it volitionally. They are their own destroyers. (Their search for “themselves”—the self is the mind.)

  They have given up reason—then complain that the universe is a mystery.

  The conflict of the practical and the moral.

  The fear that evil is practical—since life is evil.

  (“It’s only logic.” The fortune-teller and the fortune-maker.)

  Social:

  The defenders of freedom are mystics, while its enemies claim to represent reason.

  The contradictions between: soul and body, mind and heart, the moral and the practical, yourself and others, security and freedom, public interest and private interest, human rights and property rights.

  The principle of expropriation throughout society—every man is rewarded in proportion to his flaws, and penalized in proportion to his virtues.

  The evil of the “middle-of-the-roaders ”: they place their best in the service of their worst, and destroy their best in the same way as they destroy the best men in society. (The cost of their compromises: the death of their children as result of their government subsidy.)

  What the men of the mind had given them—the pyramid of ability.

  What they must do: stand on the judgment of your mind—you don’t know much?—don’t discard that which you know. Reason is an absolute.

  Errors of knowledge versus moral errors. Perfection. (“Benefit of the doubt.”)

  Traders—help to others on the basis of values, not flaws, not need.

  The single axiom: the evil of force. Good men will not work under compulsion. The obscenity of using force “for their own good.”

  “Some of you will never know who is John Galt.”

  The moments when they do know who is John Galt.

  The damnation of Stadler. (The man who places his mind in the service of evil, while he is able to know better, but does not care.)

  Undated

  [The following note critiques the Kantian idea that “things in themselves” are unknowable. AR cut this topic from Galt’s speech. Later, she covered it in the title essay of For the New Intellectual.]

  Notes for [Galt‘s] Speech

  Metaphysics: “Things in Themselves ”

  Walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that knowledge is impossible to man and that his consciousness has no validity whatever. A savage does not know the nature of his means of perception; your teachers go him one better: they know and they disqualify man’s consciousness on the ground that its means are specific and knowable.

  You can know nothing, they tell you, because you perceive only that which your senses can perceive; your sight is made possible by light rays, your hearing is made possible by sound waves—therefore, your knowledge is not valid, since your consciousness works through these means and no others, since it is itself and can be nothing else, since it cannot step outside itself to verify its knowledge. Your knowledge is not valid, they tell you, because your perceptions are not causeless. You cannot know, they tell you, whether the things you perceive are real, because you have no consciousness other than your own and do not know what some other sort of consciousness might see. No matter how much you learn, they tell you, you will always be limited by the fact that you can learn only that which you can learn; you will never be able to know that unlimited zero—the things defined as “not that which you can know” seen by a consciousness defined as “not yours.”

  You listen to them and you blank out the fact that this argument denies the validity of any form of consciousness whatever: if you were the omniscient God of their invention, you would still know only that which your means of knowledge perceived, whatever such means would be, unless—and this is the core of their mystic inventions—God were not “limited” by being an entity and his means of perception were causeless. God’s knowledge would be valid, they tell you, because it would be unaccountable, God would know everything, because he would know it by means of nothing, while you can know nothing, because you know it by means of something. You are blind, they tell you, because you have eyes, and deaf, because you have ears; true sight and true hearing would have neither.

  You are blind, they tell you, because you can never know “things in themselves” or “things as they are,” which means: “things as they are not perceived by you,” things as they are apart from your consciousness and apart from any consciousness. By this concept, reality is that which no one perceives, the moment it is perceived it ceases to be real—existence is outside the bounds of any consciousness, to know it you must know it without consciousness, the moment you’re conscious, it ceases to exist, the moment you’re conscious, you are unconscious. Knowledge is impossible to you, they tell you, because the moment you are A, you’re no longer able to be non-A, the moment you are an entity, you are no longer able to be a zero—and the zero is the only thing that’s certain, omniscient, omnipotent and real.