The Journals of Ayn Rand (115 page)

Whenever money is in the wrong hands, in the hands of those who have not earned it, in the hands of grafters and looters (whenever one can get richer by dishonesty than by honesty)—it is the sure sign that that society is evil, that it is corrupt and in the process of destruction.

[Note added later:
Paper money—a check on an account which the bureaucrat does not own.

Money is the symbol of virtue. It cannot be made by nor will it stay in unclean hands. The highest virtues are required to make money—or to keep it. Men without courage, without pride, without the highest moral sense of and for their money (the men who apologize for their money)—are not able to keep it. They are the natural prey of looters.

Now, in the first real country of money in history—the country of production and achievement—men have come to regard money as the savages did. Throughout history, money was made by the producers and seized by the looters. Men have continued, in every different form, to exploit and despise the producers and exalt the looters. Now the one country of money is proclaiming the looter’s standards; its men of honor are the looter, the moocher and the beggar. Unless and until it accepts money as its highest, noblest standard—it is doomed to the destruction it is asking for and deserves.

Tears, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice, there is no other.

(When money ceases to be the tool—then men become the tools of the looters.)

(“You damn money and you all want it. So you damn yourselves.”)

(“When you denounce money, it’s always the heir-parasite or the crook that you denounce. What about the man who made the money? You denounce the parasite of the unearned—and, as cure, you wish everybody to become parasites of the unearned.”)

The nature of money:

Sociology:

History:

The idea that “art” and “entertainment” are opposites—that art is serious and dull, while entertainment is empty and stupid, but enjoyable—is the result of the non-human, altruistic morality. That which is good must be unpleasant. That which is enjoyable is sinful. Pleasure is an indulgence of a low order, to be apologized for. The serious is the performance of a duty, unpleasant and, therefore, uplifting. If a work of art examines life seriously, it must necessarily be unpleasant and unexciting, because such is the nature of life for man. An entertaining, enjoyable play cannot possibly be true to the deeper essence of life, it
must
be superficial, since life is not to be enjoyed. (Why can’t a man like Graham Greene, for instance, write an “art” story which is also entertaining? Because his philosophical premises are false to life and could not be expressed
in action,
in plot, which means:
in reality.)

Such is the credo of all the modern intellectuals who divide literature into “art” and “entertainment.” This school of thought will have two kinds of representatives in practice, both equally disgusting: the intellectual who will be bored by the best kind of plot story because “if it has suspense, it can’t be serious”; and the intellectual who will reject any element of seriousness in a story as “high-brow,” declaring ostentatiously: “Me—I don’t believe in ‘messages,’ I’m for
entertainment”
and hold that the burlesque theater is the highest form of art. These [two types] are, basically, the “saint” (of altruism) and the cynic who takes pride in wishing “to go to hell,” to be daringly evil.

Why does this school of thought always fail at the box office? Why doesn’t the public agree with these intellectuals? Because the public has not been corrupted by any serious acceptance of the essence of the altruist morality; the public thinks of altruism as some sort of innocent form of good will and charity to one’s fellow men.
The public does not believe that enjoyment is evil.
The public has never accepted the depravity of “if I enjoy this, it’s no good” and “if I enjoy anything, I’m no good.”

Incidentally, the intellectual
does not
enjoy anything; the dutiful form of boredom he [feels for] his chosen “art” works is certainly not enjoyment, but a kind of masochistic satisfaction in liking it because he’s supposed to like it, a form of quest for self-esteem on the pattern of: “There, I’m virtuous if I approve of this dull mess I’m supposed to like; I can’t
really
like it, but my trying to is my step toward virtue.” (Contrast the public enthusiasm for a hit play in the old days with the “sophisticated,” “we-don‘t-go-to-extremes” attitude of “smart” New Yorkers today.)

Test: do you enjoy a book or play for its own sake?—or do you “enjoy” it as a means to an end, the end being that self-conscious sense of acquiring some virtue from it?
Joy is an end in itself.
My pattern of enjoyment is:
I’m good,
and if this thing has given me enjoyment, then it is good. Their pattern is: I’m no good and if this thing has made me better, then it is good.

My pattern holds joy as its own end, man’s end. Their pattern holds joy and man as a means to an end—the end being God or the supernatural, since they hold that man exists “for God” (or for others, or for the universe, or for anything but himself). Any man’s enjoyment is based on his standard of values. I can enjoy an entertaining story because my standard of values holds man as a noble being and joy as his proper aim in life.
They
cannot enjoy an entertaining story because
their
standard of values holds man as depraved and joy as evil; therefore, they get to the paradox of
enjoying only the unenjoyable. There’s
another example of the use of the paradox. Man cannot escape from joy, as the altruists and mystics want him to; he can only pervert it into horror and sadomasochism.

This is an illustration of the morality of altruism in practice. So they preach that joy is evil? Well, they do achieve this much: their disciples lose the capacity of enjoyment altogether. And since joy is the means, the advancer and protector of life, the joyless creatures are ready for destruction; they have, in fact, destroyed themselves and their capacity for life. There’s altruism and its ultimate goal—destruction.

 

 

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.