Do you wonder what is left of a young mind after an intellectual training of this sort? Do you wonder why your childen leave college as neurotic nonentities, ready for any witch doctor to knock over?

  Since, in fact, no consciousness can hold on to a zero, there is a specific purpose in all of this mystical claptrap: the nearest thing to “causeless knowledge” is an irrational wish—and your teachers’ revolt against causal perception is the desire to place above reality and reason those nameless wishes of theirs which they know to be contrary to both.

  The closest approach, in practice, to the theory of “things in themselves” is as follows: if you steal your neighbor’s wallet, your action in itself and as it is is a crime; but since you wanted his wallet and held your wish as superior to reason, you blank out the nature of your action and continue to regard yourself as honest, by telling yourself and others that there’s no such thing as objective reality and you would not be able to know it if there were.

  Undated

  [The following are some topics covered in an early draft of Galt’s speech. AR identifies the number of handwritten pages on each topic.]

  The Epistemology of Evil

  Definition of two kinds of mystics: 1 page.

  Their “sixth sense”: 1 page.

  Identifications by means of the zero: 2 pages.

  Their “superior” world and “somehow”: 1 page.

  Their secret—the wish: 1 page.

  Escape from the law of identity: 3 pages.

  Reversing existence and consciousness; mechanics of “the wish”: 6 pages.

  Escape from the law of causality: 5 pages.

  Who pays for the orgy?—under both mystics: 8 pages.

  Modem mystics; the blank-out (“motion” and “change”—the industrialist and the law of identity—“proof” of existence—axioms—montage of examples): 9 pages.

  The savage and the baby (sensory perception): 7 pages.

  The modem attack on the senses—“things in themselves”: 8 pages.

  Summary: the destruction of knowledge (“faith” and “the collective”): 5 pages.

  Return to pre-language and blank-outs about the mind: 5 pages.

  The present economic “grabbing” and blank-outs: 5 pages.

  Power lust: 9 pages.

  The mystic psychology of a dictator: 19 pages.

  The conspiracy against life and man: 9 pages.

  Undated

  [The following passages were cut from Galt’s speech. AR put them in a folder marked: “Discards from Atlas Shrugged (which I like). ”]

  You have heard it said that this is a time of moral crisis. You have mouthed the words yourself. You have wailed against evil and at each of its triumphs you have cried for more victims as your token of virtue. Listen, you, the symbol of whose morality is a sacrificial oven, you who feel bored by what you profess to be good, and tempted by what you profess to be evil, you who claim that virtue is its own reward and spend your life running from such rewarding, you who resent and despise those you hold to be saints, and envy those you hold to be sinners, you who proclaim that one must die for virtue, but dread having to live for it—listen—I am the first man who has ever loved virtue with the whole of my mind and being, the man who never sought another love, knowing that no other love is possible, and thus the man who rose to put an end to your obscenity of sacrificing good to evil.

  Only the man who is morally fit to live on a desert island is morally fit to live in society—the man who knows that man’s life depends on production and production depends on man’s mind, that he must live by his own effort and think through his own brain, that if he chooses to live by means of force or fraud, by mooching, extorting or plundering the products of the minds of others, he is choosing to abandon his human status—to exist as something other than a man, yet to let his life depend on those who choose the existence of rational beings; he is trying to switch to them the death which would have been his on that island, he is living by the mind of his victims, by the virtue of those whom he destroys—he is choosing death as his standard of value, and he will reach it through an agony as sure as, but more ugly than, starvation on a desert island. Yet your code of morality was designed to foster this breed of the subhuman, to destroy the men who think and to turn the earth into that desert island. You have succeeded.

  If you preach that man must hold the pursuit of his own happiness as evil and must seek self-sacrifice as his moral goal, you are asking that he twist himself into a monstrosity that takes pleasure in his own pain and finds pain in his own pleasure, that enjoys his suffering and despises his joy, that strives for his own frustration, that holds desires only to renounce them, fights battles only to lose, seeks wounds as victories and sores as medals, [like] a machine set in reverse, with its gauges switched from life to death, with death as its goal and its standard of value—a monstrosity that fights against itself and crashes in a final, bloody heap, leaving a trail of destruction behind it.

  That as a moral ideal? That as a code of love for man?

  The mystics, who preach self-sacrifice, who preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value, who claim that they despise the body and worship the spirit—do not grant to man’s spirit the importance they grant to his body. They know that if a human body were to reject the function of maintaining its existence, it would cease to live and would turn into a mass of corruption, carrying the poison of death to those who did not avoid its contact. Yet they do not expect a life-rejecting human spirit to become an agent of infection—and they let it loose upon the world as the death-carrier which it has been through all the ages. Do you preach that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.

  Do you think they are taking you back to the dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is the era of the pre-human. Consider what feat of intelligence was performed by the nameless genius who was first to identify the fact that man possesses a mind. Consider what tremendous mental power was spent on the invention of language, what span of centuries had to be traveled from the first inarticulate sounds that named immediate objects to the words that conveyed abstractions. The greatest achievement in communication was not the wireless telegraphy nor transatlantic radio, but the feat of the genius who grasped and taught to others the concept of identifying reality in words of objective meaning. These are the achievements which your teachers now seek to negate and to destroy, by refusing to identify them and pretending that neither mind nor words have ever been discovered. Their goal is to take you back, not to the age of pre-science, but the age of pre-language.

  A man of self-confidence knows the nature of knowledge; he knows that existence exists, that reality cannot be faked, that a mind cannot be forced. He knows that nothing can be accomplished by ruling a herd one has reduced to the level of morons and liars. He is unable to fool himself about the loathsome spectacle of men who have to act under compulsion; he is unable to regard the role of a ruler as anything but personal infamy. It takes a mystic to reach so low a stage of self-deception as to derive any value or pleasure from the extorted motions faked by others—extorted by and faked under the threat of a gun.

  You accept the morality of selflessness—but observe that you are unable to live except by taking yourself as the standard of value—a depraved, irrational, contradictory self, blindly seeking its own pleasure, struggling by corrupted means to comply with the law of existence. You profess to damn matter, but you lie and cheat to get rich; you profess to value chastity, but seek pleasure from whores; you profess to hold an altruist as your moral ideal, yet make no move to reach his rank, though it is in your power—but the man of ambition, of selfish achievement, is the man you envy, and you scramble to obtain his rank without earning it, though you profess to consider him immoral.

  You believe that your heart is superior to reason, that man must live by his feelings, not his mind—as if hatred, fear and envy were not feelings, as if a man of unbridled emotions would become a paragon of virtue—as if the dope fiend who robs a store, the woman who murders in a fit of jealous rage, the sadist who indulges his craving for torture were exponents of coldly impersonal logic, while the surgeon who performs a brain operation were a man directed by his feelings.

  You believe that security is superior to freedom—as if a livelihood earned by your effort voluntarily traded for the effort of others, with your body and property protected from seizure, were a state of precarious uncertainty—but the state of being bound, gagged and fed by the mercy of an arbitrary ruler, who possesses the power to cut off your food, to rob, to torture, to murder you at whim, were a state of peaceful security.

  A mystical morality makes it impossible for you to pass moral judgment. You cannot judge by an incomprehensible standard, be it God or society or anything outside reason. When you are told: “Do not try to understand what is good, believe it,” you become unable to estimate any value, action, person or event, or to make any firm choice.

  If you cannot judge, you will not think. The aim of every action, mental or physical, is to achieve a value, to further your life. Why think, if you cannot reach any conclusion, if you cannot appraise the value of any choice? Every thought implies a value judgment. If you cannot value, you cannot think. You may know that giving poison to a man will kill him, but why consider it, if you cannot know whether it is right or wrong to kill him?

  If you cannot think, you will act on the spur of the emotions of the moment. The creed of expediency is the worship of emotions. Emotions, in fact, are the summary of your philosophical premises—and destruction will follow from the contradictions in your premises if you act blindly on your emotions. All emotions are appraisals, inexorably based on the rule of “What’s in it for me?” but you have no way of judging what should be in it for you, what is your self-interest—and your destruction follows from such blind choices.

  Your morality disarms you and protects itself from your mind by making a virtue of imperfection: humility is a virtue, pride is a sin. It gives you a blank check on evil and forces you to give a blank check to others. If you cannot be proud of yourself, you cannot condemn any depravity. The man who is unable to praise himself is unable to blame anything on anyone.

  You create your character or destroy it by the same means which create or destroy all your values: by the act of thinking or non-thinking. Your self is your mind, and its constant choice is the act of self-affirmation or self-denial, of perceiving or refusing to perceive, the act of being or non-being by which your mind, like a pilot-light within you, goes on or off. This act is your primary choice, it is your will, the only will you have, your only choice, from which all other choices proceed.

  Just as you possess a pair of legs, but must learn to use them, and the ability to walk becomes automatic, but the decision to walk does not, and you will not walk without a decision to cross the room, the street or the world—so you possess a brain, but must learn to use it, and the ability to think becomes automatic, but the decision to think does not.

  It is not values that you have to renounce, but only your fakes and pretenses: the prestige which you don’t possess, the respect which no one grants you, the love which you do not feel, the faith which you don’t believe. Get out of your snarl of deceit which has deceived no one but yourself. Get out of the dank prison of your emotions into the hard, clean sunlight of the mind. And if, in exchange for your scrap heap of borrowed slogans and undigested commandments, you are able to reach by the work of your mind no more than the first-hand conviction that water is wet and fire is hot, you will still be incomparably richer than you were and you will know the meaning of self-esteem.

  Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.

  You believe you got away with your evasions? Look again and check the addition that sums up your soul and your life. You had cheated in business, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your wife has deserted you? You had paid off a bureaucrat to destroy your competitor, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your market has vanished and your business has crashed? You extorted high wages by means of directives, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’re now condemned to jobless starvation? You had preached ideas you hated, in exchange for the favor of men you despised, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’ve now become an alcoholic? You had prospered on government subsidies, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your son has been killed in a war to bring prosperity to the natives of some jungle People’s State? You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?

  Like the criminal who plays it short range, who believes that he gets away with the unearned and does not see why his loot disappears into the pockets of any blackmailer and any criminal more ruthless than himself—so you believed that you could exist as half-producer, half-thief, and did not see what parasites you paid in exchange for your little snatch of the unearned. Every time you cheated the honest, it is the dishonest you had to pay off. Every time you resorted to force—passing a law—to destroy your superiors, it is to your inferiors that you handed the weapon by which they destroyed you in your turn. Whether you were a businessman or a worker, your blank-out consisted of believing that you were fighting and looting each other—and what you did not dare to identify was that you were looting the better men of your own profession, that any kind of collectivist action is intended to milk the better members of the collective—and as you destroyed your abler competitor or your abler fellow-worker, ten incompetents were ready to pounce upon you and to drain you dry in turn. So you’re reaping a profit you did not deserve and wonder why bureaucrats are devouring your profit. So you’ve gained security where the boss cannot fire you and no other newcomer can compete for your job—and you wonder why your wages are buying less and less, and why you live in terror of your union leaders, whose whim can condemn you to starve.

  You believed that compromise was practical, that you could not succeed on merit, that some shortcuts were needed to help you to rise, that your sins were assisting your virtues. But there is no compromise between good and evil, between reason and force, between production and looting. Your vices have devoured your virtues, your intelligence was spent on protecting your evasions, your ability on paying for your frauds, your energy on enriching the parasites who bled you—while you were gaining a penny of graft in exchange for a dollar of your own honest profit.

  When you established the right of the unearned and accepted need, the zero, as a claim, you did not see—you blindest of fools, the businessman or laborer of the compromise economy—that any man on any level who continued working, was losing in proportion to his effort and his work, and that those who gained, were gaining in proportion to their having accomplished nothing. You had connived to destroy your superior and had hoped to step into his shoes, but you did not step into his fortune, you stepped into his place under the social squeezer which you had set in motion—and when you are squeezed dry in your turn, you will find that the ultimate winner is the looter who made no compromise with working, but stuck to the absolute of robbery and murder, the “practical” hero of the short-cut, who will perish on the carcass of the last compromiser.

  Mind and Body

  Man is an entity of mind and body, an indivisible union of two elements: of consciousness and matter. Matter is that which one perceives, consciousness is that which perceives it; your fundamental act of perception is an indivisible whole consisting of both; to deny, to [separate] or to equate them is to contradict the nature of your perception, to contradict the axiom of existence, to contradict your basic definitions and to invalidate whatever concepts you might attempt to hold thereafter.

  Your consciousness is that which you know—and are alone to know-by direct perception. It is that indivisible unit where knowledge and being are one, it is your “I,” it is the self which distinguishes you from all else in the universe. No consciousness can perceive another consciousness, only the results of its actions in material form, since only matter is an object of perception, and consciousness is the subject, perceivable by its nature only to itself. To perceive the consciousness, the “I,” of another would mean to become that other “I”—a contradiction in terms; to speak of souls perceiving one another is a denial of your “I,” of perception, of consciousness, of matter. The “I” is the irreducible unit of life.

  Just as life is the integrating element which organizes matter into a living cell, the element which distinguishes an organism from the unstructured mass of inorganic matter—so consciousness, an attribute of life, directs the actions of the organism to use, to shape, to realign matter for the purpose of maintaining its existence.