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nicklloydnow · 1 year ago

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“The choice to think or not is volitional. If an individual's choice is predominantly negative, the result is his self-arrested mental development, a self-made cognitive malnutrition, a stagnant, eroded, impoverished, anxiety-ridden inner life. A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one's rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa. Today, our social environment is ruled by evasion—by entrenched, institutionalized evasion—while reason is an outcast and almost an outlaw.

The brashly aggressive irrationality and anti-rationality of today's culture leaves an individual in an intellectual desert. He is deprived of conceptual stimulation and communication; he is unable to understand people or to be understood. He is locked in the equivalent of an experimental cubicle—only that cubicle is the size of a continent—where he is given the sensory stimulation of screeching, screaming, twisting, jostling throngs, but is cut off from ideas: the sounds are unintelligible, the motions incomprehensible, the pressures unpredictable. In such conditions, only the toughest intellectual giants will preserve the unimpaired efficiency of their mind, at the price of an excruciating effort. The rest will give up—usually, in college—and will collapse into hysterical panic (the "activists") or into sluggish lethargy the consensus-followers); and some will suffer from conceptual hallucinations (the existentialists).

(…)

Where—in today's culture—can a man find any values or any meaningful pleasure?

If a man holds a rational, or even semi-rational, view of life, where can he find any confirmation of it, any inspiring or encouraging phenomena?

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel—until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

Yes, there are a few giants of spiritual self-sufficiency who can withstand even this. But this is too much to ask or to expect of most people, who are unable to generate and to maintain their own emotional fuel—their love of life—in the midst of a dead planet or a dead culture. And it is not an accident that this is the kind of agony—death by value-strangulation—that a culture dominated by alleged humanitarians imposes on the millions of men who need its help.

A peculiarity of certain types of asphyxiation—such as death from carbon monoxide—is that the victims do not notice it: the fumes leave them no awareness of their need of fresh air. The specific symptom of value-deprivation is a gradual lowering of one's expectations. We have already absorbed so much of our cultural fumes that we take the constant pressure of irrationality, injustice, corruption and hooligan tactics for granted, as if nothing better could be expected of life. It is only in the privacy of their own mind that men scream in protest at times—and promptly stifle the scream as "unrealistic" or "impractical." The man to whom values have no reality any longer—the man or the society that regards the pursuit of values, of the good, as impractical—is finished psychologically.

If, subconsciously, incoherently, inarticulately, men are still struggling for a breath of fresh air—where would they find it in today's cultural atmosphere?

The foundation of any culture, the source responsible for all of its manifestations, is its philosophy. What does modern philosophy offer us? Virtually the only point of agreement among today's leading philosphers is that there is no such thing as philosophy—and that this knowledge constitutes their claim to the title of philosophers. With a hysterical virulence, strange in advocates of skepticism, they insist that there can be no valid philosophical systems (i.e., there can be no integrated, consistent, comprehensive view of existence)—that there are no answers to fundamental questions-there is no such thing as truth—there is no such thing as reason, and the battle is only over what should replace it: "linguistic games" or unbridled feelings?

(…)

This means that to look for ethical truths (for moral principles or values) is to be a coward—and that bravery consists of dispensing with ethics, truth, values, and of acting like a drunken driver or like the mobs that riot in the streets of the cities throughout the world.

If men seek guidance, the very motive that draws them to philosophy—the desire to understand—makes them give it up. And along with philosophy a man gives up the ambitious eagerness of his mind, the quest for knowledge, the cleanliness of certainty. He shrinks the range of his vision, lowers his expectations and his eyes, and moves on, watching the small square of his immediate steps, never raising his head again. He had looked for intellectual values; the emotion of contempt and revulsion was all he found.

(…)

Now, if men give up all abstract speculation and turn to the immediate conditions of their existence—to the realm of politics—what values or moral inspiration will they find?

There is a popular saying that alcohol and gasoline don't mix. Morality and cynicism are as deadly a mixture. But a political system that mixes freedom and controls will try to mix anything—with the same kind of results on the dark roads of men's spirit.

On the one hand, we are drenched in the sick, stale, sticky platitudes of altruism, an overripe altruism running amok, pouring money, blood, and slogans about global welfare, which everyone drips and no one hears any longer, since monotony—in moral, as well as sensory, deprivation—deadens perception. On the other hand, we all know and say and read in the same newspapers that all these welfare projects are merely a cynical power game, the game of buying votes with public funds, of paying off "election debts" to pressure groups, and of creating new pressure groups to pay off—since the sole purpose of political power, people tacitly believe, is to keep oneself in power, and the sole recourse of the citizens is to gang up on one another and maneuver for who'll get sacrificed to whom.

The first makes the second possible: altruism gives people an excuse to put up with it. Altruism serves as the veneer—a fading, cracking, peeling veneer—to hide from themselves the terror of their actual belief: that there are no moral principles, that morality is impotent to affect the course of their existence, that they are blind brutes caught in a charnel house and doomed to destruction.

No one believes the political proclamations of our day; no one opposes them. There is no public policy, no ideology, no goals, no convictions, no moral fire, no crusading spirit—nothing but the quiet panic of clinging to the status quo, with the dread of looking back to check the start of the road, with terror of looking ahead to check its end, and with a leadership whose range of vision is shrinking down to the public poll the day after tomorrow's television appearance.

(…)

Ask yourself: what is the moral and intellectual state of a nation that gives a blank check on its wealth, its work, its efforts, its lives to a "yearner" and "dreamer," to spend on lost causes?

Can anyone feel morally inspired to live and work for such a purpose?

Can anyone preserve any values by looking at anything today? If a man who earns his living hears constant denunciations of his "selfish greed" and then, as a moral example, is offered the spectacle of the War on Poverty—which fills the newspapers with allegations of political favoritism, intrigues, maneuvering, corruption among its "selfless" administrators—what will happen to his sense of honesty? If a young man struggles sixteen hours a day to work his way through school, and then has to pay taxes to help the dropouts from the dropout programs—what will happen to his ambition? If a man saves for years to build a home, which is then seized by the profiteers of Urban Renewal because their profits are "in the public interest," but his are not—what will happen to his sense of justice? If a miserable little private holdup man is hauled off to jail, but when the government forces me into a gang big enough to be called a union and they hold up New York City, they get away with it—what will happen to the public's respect for the law?

(…)

The next time you hear about a crazed gang of juvenile delinquents, don't look for such explanations as "slum childhood," "economic underprivilege," or "parental neglect." Look at the moral atmosphere of the country, at the example set by their elders and by their public leaders.

Today, the very motive that arouses men's interest in politics—their sense of responsibility—makes them give it up. And along with politics a man gives up his good will toward people, his benevolence, his openness, his fairness. He withdraws into the small, tight, windowless cellar of his range-of-the-moment concerns, shrinking from any human contact, convinced that the rule of the game is to kill or be killed and that the only action possible to him is to defend himself against every passerby. He had looked for social values; the emotions of contempt and revulsion was all he found.

In the decadent eras of history, in the periods when human hopes and values were collapsing, there was, as a rule, one realm to which men could turn for support, to preserve their image of man, their vision of life's better possibilities, and their courage. That realm was art.

(…)

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Observe what image of man, of life and of reality modern art infects people with—particularly the young whose first access to a broad view of existence and first source of values lie in the realm of art.

Today, the very motive that draws a man to art—the quest for enjoyment—makes him run from it for his life. He runs to the gray, sunless, meaningless drudgery of his daily routine, with nothing to relieve it, nothing to expect or to enjoy. And he soon stops asking the tortured question: "Is there anything to see tonight? Is there anything to read?" Along with art, he gives up his vision of values and forgets that he had ever hoped to find or to achieve them.

He had looked for inspiration. Contempt and revulsion were not the only emotions he found, but also horror, indignation, and such a degree of boredom and loathing that anything is preferable to it—including the brutalizing emptiness of an existence devoid of any longing for values.

If you wonder what is wrong with people today, consider the fact that no laboratory experiment could ever reproduce so thorough a state of value-deprivation.

(…)

When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values—of all values, of values as such—men's psychological destruction has to follow.

We hear it said that this is merely a period of transition, confusion, and growth, and that the leaders of today's intellectual trends are groping for new values. But here is what makes their motives suspect. When the scientists of the Renaissance concluded that certain pseudo-sciences of the Middle Ages were invalid, they did not attempt to take them over and ride on their prestige; the chemists did not call themselves alchemists, the astronomers did not call themselves astrologers. But modern philosophers proclaim themselves to be philosophers while struggling to invalidate the essence of philosophy: the study of the fundamental, universal principles of existence. When men like Auguste Comte or Karl Marx decided to substitute society for God, they had the good grace not to call themselves theologians. When the esthetic innovators of the nineteenth century created a new literary form, they called it a "novel," not an "anti-poem"—unlike the pretentious mediocrities of today who write "anti-novels." When decorative artists began to design textiles and linoleums, they did not hang them up in frames on walls or entitle them "a representation of pure emotion."

The exponents of modern movements do not seek to convert you to their values—they haven't any—but to destroy yours. Nihilism and destruction are the almost explicit goals of today's trends—and the horror is that these trends move on, unopposed.

Who is to blame? All those who are afraid to speak. All those who are still able to know better, but who are willing to temporize, to compromise, and thus to sanction an evil of that magnitude. All those intellectual leaders who are afraid to break with today's culture, while knowing that it has rotted to the core—who are afraid to check, challenge, and reject its basic premises, while knowing that they are seeing the ultimate results—who are afraid to step out of the "mainstream," while knowing that it is running with blood—who cringe, evade, and back away from the advance of screeching, bearded, drugged barbarians.

Now you may logically want to ask me the question: What is the solution and the antidote? But to this question, I have given an answer—at length—elsewhere. The answer lies outside today's cultural "mainstream." Its name is Objectivism.” - Ayn Rand, ‘Our Cultural Value-Deprivation‘ (April 1966)

photos of Ayn Rand by Arnold Newman (1964)

#ayn rand #objectivism #culture #values #ethics #reason #thinking #philosophy #religion #politics #art #liberty #libertarian #libertarianism #capitalism

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