Something of a long primmer first. And keep in mind two things while reading this; one, this was written over 40 years ago, so some passages will sound antiquated, and that will be addressed in due corse. And two, as a result of the non-contemporariness as well as that I did not write this, I do not agree with all of the points therein on the basis of my own logical reasoning in addition to scientific discoveries that have either occurred since the writing of this or were ignored by the author altogether.
"A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life - an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture's dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and style.
Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.
Today, we live in the age of envy.
"Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefor, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare to admit it to themselves. Mankind has lived with it, has observed its manifestations and, to various extents, has been ravaged by it for countless centuries, yet has failed to grasp its meaning and to rebel against its exponents.
Today, that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of out life and culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it, it is almost explicitly confessed by its most brazen exponents - yet men continue evade its existence and are particularly afraid to name it, as primitive people were once afraid to pronounce the name of the devil.
That emotion is: hatred of the 'good' for being 'good.'
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the 'good' with which one does not agree. For instance, if a child resents some conventional type of obedient boy who is constantly held up to him as an ideal to emulate, this is not hatred of the 'good:' the child does not regard that boy as good, and his resentment is the product of a clash between his values and those of his elders (though he is too young to grasp the issue in such terms). Similarly, if an adult does not regard altruism as good and resents the adulation bestowed upon some "humanitarian," this is a clash between his values and those of others, not the hatred of the 'good.'
Hatred of the 'good' for being 'good' means the hatred of that which one regards as 'good' by one's own (conscious or unconscious) judgement. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the 'good.' If a man regards intelligence as a virtue, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the 'good.'
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor factor in this issue (although rational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not to human vices, but toward human virtues.
To be exact the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. it is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one's automated response to values is hatred.
In any specific instance, this type of hatred is heavily enmeshed in rationalizations. The most common one is: "I don't hate him for his intelligence, but for his conceit!" More often than not, if one asks the speaker to name the evidence of the victim's conceit, he exhausts such generalities as: "He is insolent... he is stubborn... he's selfish," and ends up with some indeterminate accusation which amounts to: "He's intelligent and he knows it." Well, why shouldn't he know it? Blank out. Should he hide it? Blank out. From who should he hide it? The implicit, but never stated answer is: "From people like me."
Yet such haters accept and even seem to admire the spectacle of conceit put on for their benefit by a man who shows off, boasting about his alleged virtues or achievements, blatantly confessing a lack of self-confidence. This, of course, is a clue to the nature of the hatred. The haters seem unable to differentiate conceptually between "conceit" and a deserved pride, yet they seem to know "instinctively," i.e., by means of their automized sense of life.
Since very few men have fully consistent characters, it is often hard to tell, in a specific instance, whether a given man is hated for his virtues or for his actual flaws. In regard to one's own feelings, only a rigorously conscientious habit of introspection can enable one to be certain of the nature and causes of one's emotional responses. But introspection is the mental process most frequently avoided by the haters, which permits them a virtually unlimited choice of rationalizations. In regard to judging the emotional responses of others, it is extremely difficult to tell their reasons in a specific case, particularly if it involves complex personal relationships. It is, therefor, in the broad, impersonal field of responses to strangers, to casual acquaintances, to public figures or to events that have no direct bearing on the haters' own lives that one can observe the hatred of the 'good' in pure, unmistakable form.
Its clearest manifestation is the attitude of a person who characteristically resents someone's success, happiness, achievement or good fortune - and experiences pleasure at someone's failure, unhappiness or misfortune. This is pure, "nonvenal" hatred of the 'good' for being the 'good:' the hater has noting to lose or gain in such instances, no practical value at stake, no existential motive, no knowledge except the fact that a human being has succeeded or failed. The expressions of this response are brief, casual, as a rule involuntary. But if you have seen it, you have seen the naked face of evil.
Do not confuse this response with that of a person who resents someone's unearned success, or feels pleased by someone's deserved failure. These responses are caused by a sense of justice, which is and entirely different phenomenon, and its emotional manifestations are different: in such cases a person expresses indignation, not hatred - or relief, not malicious gloating.
... What endows such a creature with a quality of abysmal evil is the fact that it has the awareness of values and is able to recognize them in people. If it were merely amoral, it would be indifferent; it would be unable to distinguish virtues from flaws. But it does distinguish them - and the essential characteristic of its corruption is the fact that its mind's recognition of a value is transmitted to its emotional mechanism as hatred, not as love, desire or admiration.
Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/ or keep. Values are a necessary of man's survival, and wider of any living organism's survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide a man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction "value," apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one - it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.
A community of values - of some sort of values - is a necessity of any successful relationship among living beings. If you were training an animal, you would not not hurt it every time it obeyed you. If you were bringing up a child, you would not punish him whenever he acted properly. What relationship can you have with hating creatures, what element do they introduce into social relationships? If you struggle for existence and find success brings you, not approval and appreciation, but hatred, if you strive to be moral and find that your virtue brings you, not the love, but the hatred of your fellow-men, what becomes of your own benevolence? Will you be able to generate or to maintain a feeling of good will toward your fellow-men?
The greatest danger in this issue is men's inability - or worse: unwillingness - to fully identify it.
Evil as the hating creatures are, there is something still more: those who try to appease them.
It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgement they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values, debase their own character - for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil. An obsequious pandering to the vanity of some alleged superior, such as a king, for the sake of some practical advantage, is bad enough. But pandering to the vanity of one's inferiors - inferior specifically in regard to the value involved - is so shameful an act of treason to one's values that nothing can be left thereafter of the person who commits it, neither intellectually nor morally, and nothing ever is.
If men attempt to play up to those they admire, and fake virtues they do not possess, it is futile, but understandable, if not justifiable. But to fake vices, weaknesses, flaws, disabilities? To shrink one's soul and stature? To play down - or write down, or speak down, or think down?
Observe just one social consequence of this policy: such appeasers do not hesitate to join some cause or other appealing for mercy; they never raise their voices in the name of justice.
Cowardice is so ignoble an inner state that men struggle to overcome it, in the face of real dangers. The appeaser chooses a state of cowardice where no danger exists. To live in fear is so unworthy a condition that men have died on barricades, defying the tyranny of the mighty. The appeaser chooses to live in chronic fear of the impotent. Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under pressure of a frown on any vacant face. Men have refused to sell their souls in exchange for fame, fortune, power, even their own lives. The appeaser does not sell his soul: he gives it away for free, getting nothing in return.
The appeaser's usual rationalization is: "I don't want to be disliked." By whom? By the people he dislikes, despises and condemns...
...Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgement, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.
Tactfulness is consideration extended only to rational feelings. A tactful man does not stress his success or happiness in the presence of those who have suffered failure, loss or unhappiness; not because he suspects them of envy, but because he realizes that the contrast can revive and sharpen their pain. He does not stress his virtues in anyone's presence: he takes for granted that they are recognized. As a rule, a man of achievement does not flaunt his achievements, neither among equals nor inferiors nor superiors; he does not evaluate himself - or others - by a comparative standard. His attitude is not: "I am better than you," but: "I am good."
If, however, he encounters an envious hater who gets huffy, trying to ignore, deny or insult his achievements, he asserts them proudly. In answer ti the hater's stock question: "Who do you think you are?" - he tells them.
It is the pretentious mediocrity - the show-off, the boaster, the snooty posturer - who seeks, not virtue or value, but superiority. A comparative standard is his only guide, which means that he has no standards and that he has a vested interest in reducing others to inferiority. Decent people, properly resent a show-off, but the haters and enviers do not: they recognize him as a soul mate.
Offensive boasting or self-abasing appeasement is a false alternative. As in all human relationships, the guidelines of proper conduct are: objectivity and justice. But this is not what men are taught or were taught in the past.
"use your head - but don't let anyone know it. Set your goals high - but don't admit it. Be honest - but don't uphold it. Be successful - but hide it. Be great - but act small. Be happy - but God help you if you are!" Such are the moral injunctions we gather from the cultural atmosphere in which e grow up - as men did in the past, throughout history.
The appeasement of evil - of an unknowable, undefinable, inexplicable evil - has been the undertow of mankind's cultural stream all through the ages. In primitive cultures (and even in ancient Greece) the appeasement took the form of the belief that the gods resent human happiness or success because these are the prerogatives of the gods to which men must not aspire. Hence the superstitious fear of acknowledging one's good fortune - as, for instance, the ritual of parents wailing that their newborn son is puny, ugly, worthless, for fear that a demon would harm him if they admitted their happy pride in his health and looks. Observe the contradiction: Why attempt to deceive an omnipotent demon who would be able to judge the infant's value for himself? The intention of the ritual, therefore, is not: "Don't let him know that the infant is good," but: "Don't let him know that you're happy!"
Men create gods - and demons - in their own likeness; mystic fantasies, as a rule, are invented to explain some phenomenon for which men find no explanation. The notion of gods who are so malicious that they wish men to live in chronic misery, would not be conceived or believed unless men sensed all around them the presence of some inexplicable malevolence directed specifically at their personal happiness.
Are the haters of the good that numerous? No. The actual haters are a small, depraved minority in any age or culture. The spread and perpetuation of this evil are accomplished by those that profiteer on it.
The profiteers are men with a vested interest in mankind's psychological devastation, who burrow their way into positions of moral-intellectual leadership. They provide the haters with unlimited means of rationalization, dissimulation, excuse and camouflage, including ways of passing of vices for virtues. They slander, confuse and disarm the victims. Their vested interest is power-lust. Their stock-in-trade is any system of thought or belief aimed at keeping men small.
Observe the nature of some of mankind's oldest legends.
Why were the men of Babel punished? Because they attempted to build a tower to the sky.
Why did Phaethon perish? Because he attempted to drive a chariot of the sun.
Why was Icarus smashed? Because he attempted to fly.
Why was Arachne transformed into a spider? Because she challenged a goddess to a competition of weaving - and won it.
"Do not aspire - do not venture - do not rise - ambition is self-destruction." drones this ancient chorus through the ages - through all the ages, changing its lyrics, but not its tune - all the way to the Hollywood movies in which the boy who goes to seek a career in the big city becomes a wealthy, but miserable scoundrel, while the small-town boy who stays put wins the girl next door, wins over the glamorous temptress.
There is and was abundant evidence to show that the curse of an overwhelming majority of men is passivity, lethargy and fear, not ambition and audacity. But men's well-being is not the motive of that chorus.
Toward the end of World War II, newspapers reported the following: when Russian troops moved west and occupied foreign towns, the Soviet authorities automatically executed any person who had a bank account of $100 or a high-school educations; the rest of the inhabitants submitted. This is a physical dramatization of the spiritual policy of mankind's moral-intellectual leaders: destroy the tops, the rest will give up and obey.
Just as a political dictator needs specially indoctrinated thugs to enforce his orders, so his intellectual road-pavers need them to maintain their power. Their thugs are the haters of the good; the special indoctrination is the morality of altruism.
It is obvious - historically, philosophically and psychologically - that altruism is an inexhaustible source of rationalizations for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions. It is not difficult to grasp the meaning of the tenet that the good is an object of sacrifice - and to understand what a blanket damnation of anything living is represented by an undefined accusation of "selfishness."
But here is a significant phenomenon to observe: the haters and enviers - who are the most vociferous shock troops of altruism - seem to be subconsciously impervious to the altruist criterion of the good. The touchy vanity of these haters - which flares up at any suggestion of their inferiority to a man of virtue - is not aroused by any saint or hero of altruism, whose moral superiority they profess to acknowledge. Nobody envies Albert Schweitzer. Whom do they envy? The man of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of independence.
If anyone ever believed (or tried to believe) that the motive of altruism is compassion, that its goal is the relief of human suffering and the elimination of poverty, the state of today's culture now deprives him of any foothold on self-deception. Today, altruism is running amuck, shedding its tattered rationalizations and displaying its soul.
Altruists are no longer concerned with material wealth, not even with its "redistribution," only with its destruction - but even this is merely a means to an end. Their savage fury is aimed at the destruction of intelligence - of ability, ambition, thought, purpose, justice; the destruction of morality; the destruction of values qua values.
The last fig leaf of academic pretentiousness is the tag used to disguise this movement: egalitarianism. It does not disguise, but reveals.
Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. if the word "equality" is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated by about a century or more: the United States of American has made it an anachronism - by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. "Equality," in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by manmade institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied by others. The rise of capitalism swept away all the castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.
But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word "equality."
They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality - the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. it is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight - by means of man-made institutions.
Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be "redistributed," they seek to deprive men of their consequences - of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.
It is not equality before the law they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy at the top - the aristocracy of non-value.
Observe the nature of various methods to used to accomplish this goal.
Since equal pay for unequal performance is to obvious an injustice, the egalitarians solve the problem by forbidding unequal performance. (See the policy of many labor unions.)
Since some men are able to rise faster than others, the egalitarians forbid the concept of "merit" and substitute the concept of "seniority" as the basis of promotions. (See the state of modern railroads.)
Since the expropriation of wealth is a somewhat discredited policy, the egalitarians place limits on the use of wealth and keep shrinking them, thus making wealth inoperative. It is "unfair," they cry, that that only the rich can obtain the best medical care - or the best education - or the best housing - or any commodity in short supply, which should be rationed, not competed for - etc., etc. (See any newspaper editorial.)
Since some women are beautiful and others are not, the egalitarians are fighting to forbid beauty contests and television commercials using glamorous models. (See Women's Lib.)
Since some students are more intelligent and study more conscientiously than others, the egalitarians abolish the system of grades based on the objective value of a student's scholastic achievement, and substitute for it a system of grading "on a curve" based on a comparative standard: a set of number grades, ranging from A's to failures, is given to each class, regardless of the students' individual performances, with the "distribution" of grades calculated on the relative basis of the collective performance of the class as a whole. Thus a student may get an A or an F for the same work, according to weather he happens to be in a class of morons or child prodigies. No better way could be devised to endow a young man with a vested interest in the inferiority of others and with fear and hatred of their superiority. (See the state of modern education)
Observe the fact that all these methods do not provide the inferiors with any part of the virtues of their superiors, but merely frustrate and paralyze the virtues. What, then, is the common denominator and the basic premise of these methods? Hatred of the good for for being good.
But most of these examples are merely the older and quieter manifestations of a premise which, once introduced into a culture, grows geometrically, pushing the haters forward and creating new haters where none had existed before. Look at today's stampede.
Pressure-group warfare is an inexorable result of a mixed economy and follows the the course of its philosophical progression: it starts with economic groups and leads to an explosion of anti-intellectual, anti-ideological gang warfare. Anything and everything may serve as a rallying point for a new pressure group today, provided it is someone's weakness.
Weakness of any sort - intellectual, moral, financial or numerical - is today's standard of value, criterion of rights and claim to privileges. The demand for an institutionalized inequality is voiced openly and belligerently, and the right to a double standard is proclaimed self-righteously.
Since numerical superiority has a certain value, at least in practical politics, the same collectivists who once upheld the vicious doctrine of unlimited majority rule, now deny the majority - in any given issue - the special privileges they grant to any group that claims to be a minority.
Racism is an evil and primitive form of collectivism. Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority - but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one's culture is superior to all others simply because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority - but as "ethnic" pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority - but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian tepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.
"Tolerance" and "understanding" are regarded as unilateral virtues. In relation to any given minority, we are told, to tolerate and understand the minority's values and customs - while the minority proclaims that its soul is beyond the outsiders' comprehension, that no common ties or bridges exist, that it does not propose to grasp one syllable of the majority's values, customs or culture, and will continue hurling racist epithets (or worse) at the majority's faces.
Nobody can pretend any longer that the goal of such policies is the elimination of racism - particularly when one observes that the real victims are the better members of these privileged minorities. The self-respecting small home owners and shop owners are the unprotected and undefended victims in every race riot. The minority's members are expected by their egalitarian leaders to remain a passive herd crying for help (which is a precondition of the power to control a pressure group). Those who ignore the threats and struggle to rise through individual effort and achievement are denounced as traitors. Traitors - to what? To a physiological (racial) collective - to the incompetence or unwillingness or lethargy or malingering of others. If the exceptional men are black, they are attacked as "Uncle Toms." But the status of privileged minority is not confined to the blacks, it extends to all racial minorities - on one condition - and some of the most offensive herds are white.
That condition - the deeper issue involved, of greater importance to the egalitarians than mere numerical weakness - is the primitive nature of a given minority's traditions, i.e., its cultural weakness.
It is primitive cultures we are asked to study, to appreciate and to respect - any sort of culture except our own. A piece of pottery copied from generation to generation is held up to us as an achievement - a plastic cup is not. A bearskin is an achievement - synthetic fiber is not. An oxcart is an achievement - an airplane is not. A potion of herbs and snake oil is an achievement - open-heart surgery is not. Stonehenge is an achievement - the Empire State Building is not. Black magic is and achievement - Aristotle's Organon is not. And there is a more repulsive spectacle than a television broadcast presenting, as news, any two-bit group of pretentious, self-conscious adolescents, out of old vaudeville, performing some Slavonic folk dance on a street corner, in the shadow of New York's skyscrapers - I have not discovered it yet.
Why is Western civilization admonished to admire primitive cultures? Because they are not admirable. Why is a primitive man exhorted to ignore Western achievements? Because they are. Why is the self-expression of a retarded adolescent to be nurtured and acclaimed? Because he has noting to express. Why is the self-expression of a genius to be impeded and ignored? Because he has...
...If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (no equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop - or by razing the mountains. The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man's stature and actions; but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual's achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society. The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms). Yet it is the second method that the altruist-egalitarians are pursuing. The greater the evidence of their policy's consequences, i.e., the greater the spread of misery, of injustice, of vicious inequality throughout the world, the more frantic their pursuit - which is one demonstration of the fact that there is no such thing as a benevolent passion for equality and that the claim to it is only a rationalization to cover a passionate hatred of the good for being the good.
(To be concluded in our next issue)"
-Ayn Rand. "The Age of Reason", The Objectivist, Vol. 10, Number 7, July 1971.
The next "part" in this series will consist of my critique/ modernization of this essay. Part 3 will conclude the original essay. And Part 4 will be my critique/ modernization of the second half of Rand's essay.
Cheers.
"A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life - an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture's dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and style.
Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.
Today, we live in the age of envy.
"Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefor, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare to admit it to themselves. Mankind has lived with it, has observed its manifestations and, to various extents, has been ravaged by it for countless centuries, yet has failed to grasp its meaning and to rebel against its exponents.
Today, that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of out life and culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it, it is almost explicitly confessed by its most brazen exponents - yet men continue evade its existence and are particularly afraid to name it, as primitive people were once afraid to pronounce the name of the devil.
That emotion is: hatred of the 'good' for being 'good.'
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the 'good' with which one does not agree. For instance, if a child resents some conventional type of obedient boy who is constantly held up to him as an ideal to emulate, this is not hatred of the 'good:' the child does not regard that boy as good, and his resentment is the product of a clash between his values and those of his elders (though he is too young to grasp the issue in such terms). Similarly, if an adult does not regard altruism as good and resents the adulation bestowed upon some "humanitarian," this is a clash between his values and those of others, not the hatred of the 'good.'
Hatred of the 'good' for being 'good' means the hatred of that which one regards as 'good' by one's own (conscious or unconscious) judgement. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the 'good.' If a man regards intelligence as a virtue, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the 'good.'
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor factor in this issue (although rational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not to human vices, but toward human virtues.
To be exact the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. it is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one's automated response to values is hatred.
In any specific instance, this type of hatred is heavily enmeshed in rationalizations. The most common one is: "I don't hate him for his intelligence, but for his conceit!" More often than not, if one asks the speaker to name the evidence of the victim's conceit, he exhausts such generalities as: "He is insolent... he is stubborn... he's selfish," and ends up with some indeterminate accusation which amounts to: "He's intelligent and he knows it." Well, why shouldn't he know it? Blank out. Should he hide it? Blank out. From who should he hide it? The implicit, but never stated answer is: "From people like me."
Yet such haters accept and even seem to admire the spectacle of conceit put on for their benefit by a man who shows off, boasting about his alleged virtues or achievements, blatantly confessing a lack of self-confidence. This, of course, is a clue to the nature of the hatred. The haters seem unable to differentiate conceptually between "conceit" and a deserved pride, yet they seem to know "instinctively," i.e., by means of their automized sense of life.
Since very few men have fully consistent characters, it is often hard to tell, in a specific instance, whether a given man is hated for his virtues or for his actual flaws. In regard to one's own feelings, only a rigorously conscientious habit of introspection can enable one to be certain of the nature and causes of one's emotional responses. But introspection is the mental process most frequently avoided by the haters, which permits them a virtually unlimited choice of rationalizations. In regard to judging the emotional responses of others, it is extremely difficult to tell their reasons in a specific case, particularly if it involves complex personal relationships. It is, therefor, in the broad, impersonal field of responses to strangers, to casual acquaintances, to public figures or to events that have no direct bearing on the haters' own lives that one can observe the hatred of the 'good' in pure, unmistakable form.
Its clearest manifestation is the attitude of a person who characteristically resents someone's success, happiness, achievement or good fortune - and experiences pleasure at someone's failure, unhappiness or misfortune. This is pure, "nonvenal" hatred of the 'good' for being the 'good:' the hater has noting to lose or gain in such instances, no practical value at stake, no existential motive, no knowledge except the fact that a human being has succeeded or failed. The expressions of this response are brief, casual, as a rule involuntary. But if you have seen it, you have seen the naked face of evil.
Do not confuse this response with that of a person who resents someone's unearned success, or feels pleased by someone's deserved failure. These responses are caused by a sense of justice, which is and entirely different phenomenon, and its emotional manifestations are different: in such cases a person expresses indignation, not hatred - or relief, not malicious gloating.
Superficially, the motive of those who hate the
good is taken to be envy. A dictionary definition of envy is: "1. a
sense of discontent or jealousy with regard to another's advantages, success,
possessions, etc. 2. desire for an advantaged position possessed by
another." (The Random House Dictionary, 1968.) The same
dictionary adds the following elucidation: "To envy is to
feel resentful because someone else possesses or has achieved what one wishes
oneself to possess or to have achieved."
This covers a great many emotional responses,
which come from different motives. In a certain sense, the second
definition is the opposite of the first, and the more innocent of the two.
For example, if a poor man experiences a moment's
envy of another man's wealth, the feeling may mean nothing more than a
momentary concretization of his desire for wealth; the feeling is not directed
against that particular rich person and is concerned with the wealth, not the
person. The feeling, in effect, may amount to: "I wish I had an
income (or a house, or a car, or an overcoat) like his." The result
of this feeling may be an added incentive for the man to improve his financial
condition.
The feeling is less innocent, if it involves personal resentment and amounts to: "I want to put on a front, like this man." The result is a second-hander who lives beyond his means, struggling to "keep up with the Joneses."
The feeling is still less innocent, if it amounts to:
"I want this man's car (or overcoat, or diamond shirt studs, or
industrial establishment)." The result is a criminal.
But these are still human beings, in various
stages of immorality, compared to the inhuman object whose feeling is: "I hate
this man because he is wealthy and I am not."
Envy is part of this creature's feeling, but only
the superficial, semirespectable part; it is the tip of an iceberg showing
nothing worse than ice, but with the submerged part consisting of a compost of
rotting living matter. The envy, in this case, is semirespectable because
it seems to imply a desire for material possessions, which is a human being's
desire. But, deep down, the creature has no such desire: it does not want to be
rich, it wants the human being to be poor.
This is particularly clear in the much more
virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values
or virtues: hatred of a man (or a woman) because he (or she) is beautiful or
intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the
creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to
develop or to use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice
honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the
disfigurement or the mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the
misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not
desire the value: it desires the value's destruction...
Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/ or keep. Values are a necessary of man's survival, and wider of any living organism's survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide a man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction "value," apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one - it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.
A community of values - of some sort of values - is a necessity of any successful relationship among living beings. If you were training an animal, you would not not hurt it every time it obeyed you. If you were bringing up a child, you would not punish him whenever he acted properly. What relationship can you have with hating creatures, what element do they introduce into social relationships? If you struggle for existence and find success brings you, not approval and appreciation, but hatred, if you strive to be moral and find that your virtue brings you, not the love, but the hatred of your fellow-men, what becomes of your own benevolence? Will you be able to generate or to maintain a feeling of good will toward your fellow-men?
The greatest danger in this issue is men's inability - or worse: unwillingness - to fully identify it.
Evil as the hating creatures are, there is something still more: those who try to appease them.
It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgement they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values, debase their own character - for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil. An obsequious pandering to the vanity of some alleged superior, such as a king, for the sake of some practical advantage, is bad enough. But pandering to the vanity of one's inferiors - inferior specifically in regard to the value involved - is so shameful an act of treason to one's values that nothing can be left thereafter of the person who commits it, neither intellectually nor morally, and nothing ever is.
If men attempt to play up to those they admire, and fake virtues they do not possess, it is futile, but understandable, if not justifiable. But to fake vices, weaknesses, flaws, disabilities? To shrink one's soul and stature? To play down - or write down, or speak down, or think down?
Observe just one social consequence of this policy: such appeasers do not hesitate to join some cause or other appealing for mercy; they never raise their voices in the name of justice.
Cowardice is so ignoble an inner state that men struggle to overcome it, in the face of real dangers. The appeaser chooses a state of cowardice where no danger exists. To live in fear is so unworthy a condition that men have died on barricades, defying the tyranny of the mighty. The appeaser chooses to live in chronic fear of the impotent. Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under pressure of a frown on any vacant face. Men have refused to sell their souls in exchange for fame, fortune, power, even their own lives. The appeaser does not sell his soul: he gives it away for free, getting nothing in return.
The appeaser's usual rationalization is: "I don't want to be disliked." By whom? By the people he dislikes, despises and condemns...
...Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgement, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.
Tactfulness is consideration extended only to rational feelings. A tactful man does not stress his success or happiness in the presence of those who have suffered failure, loss or unhappiness; not because he suspects them of envy, but because he realizes that the contrast can revive and sharpen their pain. He does not stress his virtues in anyone's presence: he takes for granted that they are recognized. As a rule, a man of achievement does not flaunt his achievements, neither among equals nor inferiors nor superiors; he does not evaluate himself - or others - by a comparative standard. His attitude is not: "I am better than you," but: "I am good."
If, however, he encounters an envious hater who gets huffy, trying to ignore, deny or insult his achievements, he asserts them proudly. In answer ti the hater's stock question: "Who do you think you are?" - he tells them.
It is the pretentious mediocrity - the show-off, the boaster, the snooty posturer - who seeks, not virtue or value, but superiority. A comparative standard is his only guide, which means that he has no standards and that he has a vested interest in reducing others to inferiority. Decent people, properly resent a show-off, but the haters and enviers do not: they recognize him as a soul mate.
Offensive boasting or self-abasing appeasement is a false alternative. As in all human relationships, the guidelines of proper conduct are: objectivity and justice. But this is not what men are taught or were taught in the past.
"use your head - but don't let anyone know it. Set your goals high - but don't admit it. Be honest - but don't uphold it. Be successful - but hide it. Be great - but act small. Be happy - but God help you if you are!" Such are the moral injunctions we gather from the cultural atmosphere in which e grow up - as men did in the past, throughout history.
The appeasement of evil - of an unknowable, undefinable, inexplicable evil - has been the undertow of mankind's cultural stream all through the ages. In primitive cultures (and even in ancient Greece) the appeasement took the form of the belief that the gods resent human happiness or success because these are the prerogatives of the gods to which men must not aspire. Hence the superstitious fear of acknowledging one's good fortune - as, for instance, the ritual of parents wailing that their newborn son is puny, ugly, worthless, for fear that a demon would harm him if they admitted their happy pride in his health and looks. Observe the contradiction: Why attempt to deceive an omnipotent demon who would be able to judge the infant's value for himself? The intention of the ritual, therefore, is not: "Don't let him know that the infant is good," but: "Don't let him know that you're happy!"
Men create gods - and demons - in their own likeness; mystic fantasies, as a rule, are invented to explain some phenomenon for which men find no explanation. The notion of gods who are so malicious that they wish men to live in chronic misery, would not be conceived or believed unless men sensed all around them the presence of some inexplicable malevolence directed specifically at their personal happiness.
Are the haters of the good that numerous? No. The actual haters are a small, depraved minority in any age or culture. The spread and perpetuation of this evil are accomplished by those that profiteer on it.
The profiteers are men with a vested interest in mankind's psychological devastation, who burrow their way into positions of moral-intellectual leadership. They provide the haters with unlimited means of rationalization, dissimulation, excuse and camouflage, including ways of passing of vices for virtues. They slander, confuse and disarm the victims. Their vested interest is power-lust. Their stock-in-trade is any system of thought or belief aimed at keeping men small.
Observe the nature of some of mankind's oldest legends.
Why were the men of Babel punished? Because they attempted to build a tower to the sky.
Why did Phaethon perish? Because he attempted to drive a chariot of the sun.
Why was Icarus smashed? Because he attempted to fly.
Why was Arachne transformed into a spider? Because she challenged a goddess to a competition of weaving - and won it.
"Do not aspire - do not venture - do not rise - ambition is self-destruction." drones this ancient chorus through the ages - through all the ages, changing its lyrics, but not its tune - all the way to the Hollywood movies in which the boy who goes to seek a career in the big city becomes a wealthy, but miserable scoundrel, while the small-town boy who stays put wins the girl next door, wins over the glamorous temptress.
There is and was abundant evidence to show that the curse of an overwhelming majority of men is passivity, lethargy and fear, not ambition and audacity. But men's well-being is not the motive of that chorus.
Toward the end of World War II, newspapers reported the following: when Russian troops moved west and occupied foreign towns, the Soviet authorities automatically executed any person who had a bank account of $100 or a high-school educations; the rest of the inhabitants submitted. This is a physical dramatization of the spiritual policy of mankind's moral-intellectual leaders: destroy the tops, the rest will give up and obey.
Just as a political dictator needs specially indoctrinated thugs to enforce his orders, so his intellectual road-pavers need them to maintain their power. Their thugs are the haters of the good; the special indoctrination is the morality of altruism.
It is obvious - historically, philosophically and psychologically - that altruism is an inexhaustible source of rationalizations for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions. It is not difficult to grasp the meaning of the tenet that the good is an object of sacrifice - and to understand what a blanket damnation of anything living is represented by an undefined accusation of "selfishness."
But here is a significant phenomenon to observe: the haters and enviers - who are the most vociferous shock troops of altruism - seem to be subconsciously impervious to the altruist criterion of the good. The touchy vanity of these haters - which flares up at any suggestion of their inferiority to a man of virtue - is not aroused by any saint or hero of altruism, whose moral superiority they profess to acknowledge. Nobody envies Albert Schweitzer. Whom do they envy? The man of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of independence.
If anyone ever believed (or tried to believe) that the motive of altruism is compassion, that its goal is the relief of human suffering and the elimination of poverty, the state of today's culture now deprives him of any foothold on self-deception. Today, altruism is running amuck, shedding its tattered rationalizations and displaying its soul.
Altruists are no longer concerned with material wealth, not even with its "redistribution," only with its destruction - but even this is merely a means to an end. Their savage fury is aimed at the destruction of intelligence - of ability, ambition, thought, purpose, justice; the destruction of morality; the destruction of values qua values.
The last fig leaf of academic pretentiousness is the tag used to disguise this movement: egalitarianism. It does not disguise, but reveals.
Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. if the word "equality" is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated by about a century or more: the United States of American has made it an anachronism - by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. "Equality," in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by manmade institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied by others. The rise of capitalism swept away all the castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.
But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word "equality."
They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality - the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. it is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight - by means of man-made institutions.
Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be "redistributed," they seek to deprive men of their consequences - of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.
It is not equality before the law they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy at the top - the aristocracy of non-value.
Observe the nature of various methods to used to accomplish this goal.
Since equal pay for unequal performance is to obvious an injustice, the egalitarians solve the problem by forbidding unequal performance. (See the policy of many labor unions.)
Since some men are able to rise faster than others, the egalitarians forbid the concept of "merit" and substitute the concept of "seniority" as the basis of promotions. (See the state of modern railroads.)
Since the expropriation of wealth is a somewhat discredited policy, the egalitarians place limits on the use of wealth and keep shrinking them, thus making wealth inoperative. It is "unfair," they cry, that that only the rich can obtain the best medical care - or the best education - or the best housing - or any commodity in short supply, which should be rationed, not competed for - etc., etc. (See any newspaper editorial.)
Since some women are beautiful and others are not, the egalitarians are fighting to forbid beauty contests and television commercials using glamorous models. (See Women's Lib.)
Since some students are more intelligent and study more conscientiously than others, the egalitarians abolish the system of grades based on the objective value of a student's scholastic achievement, and substitute for it a system of grading "on a curve" based on a comparative standard: a set of number grades, ranging from A's to failures, is given to each class, regardless of the students' individual performances, with the "distribution" of grades calculated on the relative basis of the collective performance of the class as a whole. Thus a student may get an A or an F for the same work, according to weather he happens to be in a class of morons or child prodigies. No better way could be devised to endow a young man with a vested interest in the inferiority of others and with fear and hatred of their superiority. (See the state of modern education)
Observe the fact that all these methods do not provide the inferiors with any part of the virtues of their superiors, but merely frustrate and paralyze the virtues. What, then, is the common denominator and the basic premise of these methods? Hatred of the good for for being good.
But most of these examples are merely the older and quieter manifestations of a premise which, once introduced into a culture, grows geometrically, pushing the haters forward and creating new haters where none had existed before. Look at today's stampede.
Pressure-group warfare is an inexorable result of a mixed economy and follows the the course of its philosophical progression: it starts with economic groups and leads to an explosion of anti-intellectual, anti-ideological gang warfare. Anything and everything may serve as a rallying point for a new pressure group today, provided it is someone's weakness.
Weakness of any sort - intellectual, moral, financial or numerical - is today's standard of value, criterion of rights and claim to privileges. The demand for an institutionalized inequality is voiced openly and belligerently, and the right to a double standard is proclaimed self-righteously.
Since numerical superiority has a certain value, at least in practical politics, the same collectivists who once upheld the vicious doctrine of unlimited majority rule, now deny the majority - in any given issue - the special privileges they grant to any group that claims to be a minority.
Racism is an evil and primitive form of collectivism. Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority - but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one's culture is superior to all others simply because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority - but as "ethnic" pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority - but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian tepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.
"Tolerance" and "understanding" are regarded as unilateral virtues. In relation to any given minority, we are told, to tolerate and understand the minority's values and customs - while the minority proclaims that its soul is beyond the outsiders' comprehension, that no common ties or bridges exist, that it does not propose to grasp one syllable of the majority's values, customs or culture, and will continue hurling racist epithets (or worse) at the majority's faces.
Nobody can pretend any longer that the goal of such policies is the elimination of racism - particularly when one observes that the real victims are the better members of these privileged minorities. The self-respecting small home owners and shop owners are the unprotected and undefended victims in every race riot. The minority's members are expected by their egalitarian leaders to remain a passive herd crying for help (which is a precondition of the power to control a pressure group). Those who ignore the threats and struggle to rise through individual effort and achievement are denounced as traitors. Traitors - to what? To a physiological (racial) collective - to the incompetence or unwillingness or lethargy or malingering of others. If the exceptional men are black, they are attacked as "Uncle Toms." But the status of privileged minority is not confined to the blacks, it extends to all racial minorities - on one condition - and some of the most offensive herds are white.
That condition - the deeper issue involved, of greater importance to the egalitarians than mere numerical weakness - is the primitive nature of a given minority's traditions, i.e., its cultural weakness.
It is primitive cultures we are asked to study, to appreciate and to respect - any sort of culture except our own. A piece of pottery copied from generation to generation is held up to us as an achievement - a plastic cup is not. A bearskin is an achievement - synthetic fiber is not. An oxcart is an achievement - an airplane is not. A potion of herbs and snake oil is an achievement - open-heart surgery is not. Stonehenge is an achievement - the Empire State Building is not. Black magic is and achievement - Aristotle's Organon is not. And there is a more repulsive spectacle than a television broadcast presenting, as news, any two-bit group of pretentious, self-conscious adolescents, out of old vaudeville, performing some Slavonic folk dance on a street corner, in the shadow of New York's skyscrapers - I have not discovered it yet.
Why is Western civilization admonished to admire primitive cultures? Because they are not admirable. Why is a primitive man exhorted to ignore Western achievements? Because they are. Why is the self-expression of a retarded adolescent to be nurtured and acclaimed? Because he has noting to express. Why is the self-expression of a genius to be impeded and ignored? Because he has...
...If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (no equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop - or by razing the mountains. The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man's stature and actions; but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual's achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society. The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms). Yet it is the second method that the altruist-egalitarians are pursuing. The greater the evidence of their policy's consequences, i.e., the greater the spread of misery, of injustice, of vicious inequality throughout the world, the more frantic their pursuit - which is one demonstration of the fact that there is no such thing as a benevolent passion for equality and that the claim to it is only a rationalization to cover a passionate hatred of the good for being the good.
(To be concluded in our next issue)"
-Ayn Rand. "The Age of Reason", The Objectivist, Vol. 10, Number 7, July 1971.
The next "part" in this series will consist of my critique/ modernization of this essay. Part 3 will conclude the original essay. And Part 4 will be my critique/ modernization of the second half of Rand's essay.
Cheers.
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