The Journals of Ayn Rand (107 page)

And
above all, above absolutely all,
he must not lose the commitment to reason—because if he does,
everything crashes.
If he does, he is a screaming pain in the midst of terror and chaos. His essence, as a being, is his consciousness—not his body, because the body without consciousness is just inanimate matter. Whether he has a soul or is a material being with the attribute of consciousness, in either case his distinctive, essential attribute is consciousness, not matter.
And his consciousness is his reason.
When he renounces that, he has renounced himself, his essence, his nature—and the result can be nothing but horror and self-destruction.

Of course, he cannot renounce reason completely. If he did, he would have to go insane or simply perish. The tricky secret (and key) of man’s nature is that he can be nothing except reasonable, but he cannot be reasonable automatically, i.e., unconsciously.
He has to be reasonable by a conscious decision or effort of his reason
(and that effort has to be exercised continuously throughout his life—in general, as basic conviction, and specifically, as applied to each concrete instance, moment, event or action of his life).

This is the turning point, the decisive point in a man’s spiritual development. This is the point where most men fail. Yes, this mistake is always open to man’s correction in later life, since he remains essentially rational, but is merely acting against his nature, therefore he can retrace his steps and go back to the proper conviction. But the correction becomes harder and harder each year, because the further he goes along the road of irrationalism, the more harm he has done to himself and his thinking capacity, the more suffering he has endured, and the more painful and frightening an attitude of honest rationality becomes to him. (He is then afraid of having to damn himself factually, irrevocably, of having to pronounce himself evil without evasions or loopholes.)

The joke of it is that his only essential evil is the irrationalist attitude, and that no crime which he has committed in the past and which he is afraid to consciously acknowledge is as evil as his persisting in irrationalism. It’s irrationalism that made his original guilt possible—the guilt and the crime were the consequence of it, but the
irrationalism
was the root and the cause,
the only basic evil.

The manner in which man remains “irrationally rational” is that he gets caught in his emotional mechanism.
His emotions proceed from his reason,
i.e., from his convictions (and these convictions were made consciously at some time, but may have been forgotten or deliberately evaded), and they proceed logically, following all the implications of his convictions. ([The process is] subconscious and automatic.
The conscious
is the field of free choice,
the subconscious
is automatic; but it is
the conscious
that determines the content of
the subconscious,
the premises which a man has accepted.) So the irrationalist is at the mercy of his emotions, with all the errors, contradictions, conflicts, evil that are contained in them, since they come logically (consistently) from mistaken premises.

But the irrationalist holds his emotions (or “instincts,” “hunches,” “revelations,” “extra-sensory perceptions,” etc.) above his reason; he fights his reason with them. And of course, he’s done for. Whatever he does, he will achieve nothing but suffering, in one form or another, he will always be frustrated and fail in whatever it is specifically that he thinks he wants in his own twisted, self-contradictory manner. His whole trend will be toward suffering and self-destruction, since he is acting against himself, against his own nature.

He will survive, achieve his purposes and achieve happiness only to the extent to which he continues to act rationally, even against his own stated and accepted premise of irrationalism (and he must remain rational to some extent or cease to exist altogether). To the extent to which he indulges in the irrational, he is working toward his own misery and moving toward his own destruction.
That
is the contradiction and civil war within him.

The net, total result is still basic misery—because
one cannot be part-rational or unintentionally, unconsciously rational. Here is an issue that demands perfection. No basic or long-range happiness is possible except to a man who is totally, completely, absolutely, consciously committed to reason.

What most irrationalists do consciously is, of course, to “limit” reason; they don’t deny it outright, or at least not often, even in their conscious convictions and statements. But that “limit” or “part-time” is enough to do the damage of basic and complete misery for them (with just a few moments of joy as guilty, uncertain points of relief from the chronic misery). You cannot be “part-insane,” just as you cannot be part-pregnant, or part-cancerous, or part-honest, or part-dead.
These are examples of absolutes.

Without going into greater detail now, I must mention only that the real cause of a man going into irrationalism (and then on to mysticism, altruism, the malevolent universe, second-handedness and all the other spiritual diseases) is
always an act of self-condemnation,
that is, of judging oneself evil by one’s own standard of values. The accusation of others will not do it, it might make a man hate others or the universe, but not himself—and that is not so disastrous or dangerous to his future. The teachings or values of others will be only details or contributing factors, but not decisive. The decisive act of catastrophe is a man’s self-condemnation, i.e., his realization that he has done something which he himself has defined as evil by his own standards of value; therefore he then considers himself as evil.

How can he do that at all, since no man will do that which he actually and completely believes to be evil?
He can do it only by suspending his reason, his conscious rational judgment,
at the time of and for the issue when he commits the action which he later judges as evil.
This
is the essence of the only evil act man can really do—that act of shutting off his conscious rational judgment, which is
not automatic.
(This is a point which I must state in greater detail—but
that’s
the heart of the problem of man’s morality.)

After this act of original, initial evil, a man [may] proceed to perpetuate that evil, to become an irrationalist—in order not to face his own judgment on himself, since no man can pronounce himself absolutely and irrevocably evil, and continue to exist. Is the way to morality and self-respect open to him? Yes—always—so long as he is alive and sane. But the
only
way is return to a
conscious [policy] of rationality,
to his own essence and nature as man,
to himself.

 

 

March 22, 1947

Note (be sure and use this): the parasites’ conception of equality is actually not “to make even,” but
“to get even with
”—that is, to get even with a man for the fact of his ability.

 

 

Make use of:
“Clearance,”
“Right
of Way,” “Stop, Look, Listen” signs.

Note that men
must
run to destruction if they ignore the danger signals along the way. One of the obvious danger signals of a civilization’s collapse is the falling off of production, of wealth, a falling standard of living, a growing poverty (since the material
does
come from the spiritual and is its expression). But men ignore that because, in their spiritual confusion and growing depravity, they begin to take poverty, discomfort and self-denial as
signs of virtue,
as signs of strength or courage or future success (as England is blabbering now). This is quite logical—since the morality of altruism is the morality of death and has to lead to self-destruction.

 

 

The tunnels of TT are like the catacombs of the early Christians in Rome—the power of the spirit hiding from the world that is destroying it while being fed by it, the power of the trains and of the mind that made them, the power of John Galt who has to hide as the lowest, most despised kind of worker there. And the sign of the dollar is like the sign of the cross—the secret symbol of the heroes and martyrs.

 

 

The strikers’ oath:
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I shall never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine.”

 

 

 

Dagny-Francisco romance
—its actual nature and meaning, the build-up to it, the four years when she is his mistress. The nature of her feeling for him, what he means to her—and of his feeling for her.

Francisco’s genius and purposefulness
—incidents to show what he was and where he is going—show him as the kind of man who could not become a playboy—show his religious zeal for d‘Anconia Copper—show his worship of purpose and his contempt for drifters. (Particularly, show the period when he is manager of the New York office of d’Anconia Copper, at [age] 20-23. He is as swift and efficient at a business desk as he was at ballgames or tennis. He drives his business as he drove a car.)

Francisco would despise the conventional, the established, the safe, the routine—and look for the new, the difficult, the different, the unusual.

He would despise repeating and memorizing—he would want to think, discover, create. He wants the
created,
not the repeated—he would write an essay on his own ideas, rather than a report on somebody else’s thinking, such as an analysis of some classic. It is the accepted, ready-made, arbitrary
standards
that he won’t accept. He’ll make his own standards.

With all his wealth, he is not interested in ready-made playthings such as gadgets, cars, etc. He wants to make things. He wants the
self made,
not the
ready-made.

For Francisco:
A brilliant, ambitious, violently active, impatient, religiously purposeful, self-willed boy—who
could not
become a drifter.

For Dagny:
What he represents in her life is the entity of pure joy—the joy of ability.

 

[There are few notes on Francisco’s character. The explanation seems to be given in a comment that AR made in 1961: “Francisco, more than anyone else, seems to have been Minerva in my mind
—
he came in ready made. ”]

 

 

 

[AR made the following notes for the party scene in which Francisco introduces himself to Rearden.
]

The essential issue of the strike.

Francisco’s approach—the key questions.

Rearden’s failure.

The essential issue is: you
support the parasites, you make it possible for them to destroy you and the world, you are responsible for their actions because you grant them a virtue they don’t possess, you don’t realize your own importance and their impotence, you act on their terms, not being completely clear about your own.

Rearden’s failure is: his generosity,
he wants to protect lesser people, he grants them virtue—
his over-confidence,
he thinks he can win and produce under any and all conditions—
his vitality,
he wants to live, work, function, ignoring everything around him, thus not seeing that he is his own destroyer. [...]

Possibility:
Dagny sees Francisco as the personification of the kind of gaiety the party could have been. He sees her as truly feminine—what the others can’t see. (What she wants Rearden to see. Rearden does, of course.)

 

 

For Galt’s speech: “What is the objective test of whether a man is a parasite or not, who determines that? Each man himself. If you think that it is proper (or possible) to work under compulsion, to take orders from others, and you feel you would be willing to do it—you are a parasite. If you think that there are no achievements, no distinctions, no ability or genius among men, that one man’s work is as good as another‘s, that all men are interchangeable—you are a parasite who knows nothing about the nature of work. (And you have merely described yourself—and classified yourself thereby.)”

 

 

Incident when his mother wants Rearden to give Philip a job at the mills. Rearden refuses with implacable, icy anger—his mills come first, he will never do
this
for his family. That is precisely what they hate him for. His attitude is that he would give Philip a job only if he deserved it; the fact that Philip is a relative has nothing to do with it. His mother’s attitude is that that is what makes him cruel and heartless: if he loved his brother, he’d give him a job the brother didn’t deserve,
that
is what she would consider true affection, generosity and brotherhood. If the brother
deserves
the job, there is no virtue in giving it to him—that’s just selfishness.
Virtue is to give the undeserved.

While Dagny and Rearden battle alone against tremendous public opposition, staking everything they own on their judgment, with rational truth as their only motive—the “writer” (who has talked about the artist’s pure, “non-commercial” search for truth, about the artist’s spiritual concerns and scorn for the material) is having fits of panic over the future public reception of his latest book, is grabbing every opinion and adjusting the book accordingly, is wondering whether he should make his thesis and ending the exact opposite of what they are now—which would go over better?—and is sniveling about the thousand dollar authentic Mandarin coat now selling for a bathrobe, which he wants.