The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 14

[Ibid., 191; pb 154.]

It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or Haws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them-it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your "selfishness," weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

[Ibid..22) ; pb 176.]

See also CONTEXT-DROPPING; EVIL; FOCUS; FREE WILL; IRRATIONALITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; SUBJECTIVISM.

Evil. The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics-the standard by which one judges what is good or evil-is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.

Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS. 16; pb 23.

Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think-not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not p.r.o.nounce the verdict "It is."

[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]

Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]

I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

[Ibid.. 206; pb 165.]

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

["The Anatomy of Compromise," CUI, 149.]

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

[GS, FNl. 217; pb 173.]

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

["Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt," TO, Jan. 1966, 6.]

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels-and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

[GS, FNI, 217; pb 173.]

As a being of volitional consciousness, [man] knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.... No man can survive the moment of p.r.o.nouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.

[lbid., 221; pb 176.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AMORALISM; APPEAs.e.m.e.nT; COMPROMISE; CYNICISM; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; FREE WILL; GOOD, the; IRRATIONALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.

Existence. Existence exists-and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an ent.i.ty of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was-no matter what his errors -the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Ident.i.ty, Consciousness is Identification.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 124.]

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason.

[Ibid., 154; pb 126.]

Existence is a self-sufficient primary. It is not a product of a supernatural dimension, or of anything else. There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it-and no alternative to it. Existence exists-and only existence exists. Its existence and its nature are irreducible and unalterable.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," ITOE, 148.]

The first and primary axiomatic concepts are "existence," "ident.i.ty" (which is a corollary of "existence") and "consciousness."

[ITOE, 73.].

An axomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be a.n.a.lyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

[Ibid.]

One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot a.n.a.lyze (or "prove") existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to "prove" them is self-contradictory : it is an attempt to "prove" existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.) [Ibid.]

Existence and ident.i.ty are not attributes of existents, they are the existents.... The units of the concepts "existence" and "ident.i.ty" are every ent.i.ty, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist.

[Ibid., 74.]

See also ABSOLUTES; ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ATHEISM; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; EXISTENT; IDENt.i.tY; INFINITY; METAPHYSICS; METAPHYSICAL; NATURE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; s.p.a.cE; TIME; UNIVERSE; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Existent. The building-block of man's knowledge is the concept of an "existent"-of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action. Since it is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) and man grasps it implicitly on the perceptual level-i.e., he grasps the const.i.tuents of the concept "existent," the data which are later to be integrated by that concept. It is this implicit knowledge that permits his consciousness to develop further.

(It may be supposed that the concept "existent" is implicit even on the level of sensations-if and to the extent that a consciousness is able to discriminate on that level. A sensation is a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments. A sensation does not tell man what exists, but only that it exists.) The (implicit) concept "existent" undergoes three stages of development in man's mind. The first stage is a child's awareness of objects, of things-which represents the (implicit) concept "ent.i.ty." The second and closely allied stage is the awareness of specific, particular things which he can recognize and distinguish from the rest of his perceptual fiefd-which represents the (implicit) concept "ident.i.ty."

The third stage consists of grasping relationships among these ent.i.ties by grasping the similarities and differences of their ident.i.ties. This requires the transformation of the (implicit) concept "ent.i.ty" into the (implicit) concept "unit."

[ITOE, 6.].

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; ENt.i.tY; EXISTENCE; IDENt.i.tY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; SENSATIONS; UNIT.

F.

Faith "Faith" designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 48; pb 54.]

Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

[GS, FNI, 223; pb 178.]

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

[Ibid., 157; pb 128.]

Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.

[Ibid., 200; pb 161.]

Faith and force . . . are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," PWNI, 80; pb 66.]

See also ATHEISM; DOGMA; G.o.d; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; MYSTICISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; REASON; RELIGION; STATISM; SUPERNATURALISM.

Falsehood. "True" and "false" are a.s.sessments within the field of human cognition: they designate a relationship [of] correspondence or contradiction between an idea and reality.... The false is established as false by reference to a body of evidence and within a context, and is p.r.o.nounced false because it contradicts the evidence.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism" lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

All falsehoods are self-contradictions.

When making a statement about an existent, one has, ultimately, only two alternatives: "X (which means X, the existent, including all its characteristics) is what it is"-or: "X is not what it is." The choice between truth and falsehood is the choice between "tautology" (in the sense explained) and self-contradiction.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," ITOE, 136.]

See also a.n.a.lYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARBITRARY; CONTRADICTIONS; IDENt.i.tY; TRUTH.

Fascism/n.a.z.ism. The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open.

The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

The dictionary definition of fascism is: "a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.), emphasizing an aggressive nationalism ..." [The American College Dictionary, New York: Random House, 1957.]

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold t.i.tle to the property, but merely the right to use it-at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens.

Needless to say, under either system, the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy-and a man's position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force.

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis--and "the public good" is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national "greatness." The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis merely extols leadership-teadership without purpose, program or direction-and power for power's sake.

["The Fascist New Frontier," pamphlet, 5]

If the term "statism" designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then n.a.z.ism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism-the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies-which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual. Although previous dictators (and many today, e.g., in Latin America) often preached the unlimited power of the state, they were on the whole unable to enforce such power. As a rule, citizens of such countries had a kind of partial "freedom," not a freedom-on-principle, but at least a freedom-by-default.

Even the latter was effectively absent in n.a.z.i Germany. The efficiency of the government in dominating its subjects, the all-encompa.s.sing character of its coercion, the complete ma.s.s regimentation on a scale involving millions of men-and, one might add, the enormity of the slaughter, the planned, systematic ma.s.s slaughter, in peacetinte, initiated by a government against its own citizens-these are the insignia of twentieth-century totalitarianism (n.a.z.i and communist), which are without parallel in recorded history. In the totalitarian regimes, as the Germans found out after only a few months of Hitler's rule, every detail of life is prescribed, or proscribed. There is no longer any distinction between private matters and public matters. "There are to be no more private Germans," said Friedrich Sieburg, a n.a.z.i writer; "each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in this service." "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the n.a.z.i hierarchy, after several years of n.a.z.i rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

In place of the despised "private individuals," the Germans heard daily or hourly about a different kind of ent.i.ty, a supreme ent.i.ty, whose will, it was said, is what determines the course and actions of the state: the nation, the whole, the group. Over and over, the Germans heard the idea that underlies the advocacy of omnipotent government, the idea that totalitarians of every kind stress as the justification of their total states: collectivism.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective-society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. -is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it-or its representative, the state-deems this desirable.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 6; pb 16.]

Contrary to the Marxists, the n.a.z.is did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold t.i.tles to property-so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

If "ownership" means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then n.a.z.ism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a contentless deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under n.a.z.ism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.

[Ibid., 9; pb 18.]

It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its n.a.z.i climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy, involving dozens of figures stretching back to the beginnings of Western thought. The same figures helped to shape every Western nation; but in other countries, to varying extents, the results were mixed, because there was also an opposite influence or antidote at work. In Germany, by the turn of our century, the cultural atmosphere was unmixed : the traces of the antidote had long since disappeared, and the intellectual establishment was monolithic.

If we view the West's philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

The three are: Plato-Kant-Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.) [Ibid., 17; pb 26.]

No weird cultural aberration produced n.a.z.ism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern phitosophy-not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams-which turned the Germans into a nation of killers.

The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Twice in our century Germany fought to rule and impose its culture on the rest of the world. It lost both wars. But on a deeper level it is achieving its goal nevertheless. It is on the verge of winning the philosophical war against the West, with everything this implies.

[Ibid., 98; pb 98.]

I have stated repeatedly that the trend in this country is toward a fascist system with communist slogans. But what all of today's pressure groups are busy evading is the fact that neither business nor labor nor anyone else, except the ruling clique, gains anything under fascism or communism or any form of statism-that all become victims of an impartial, egalitarian destruction.

["The Moratorium on Brains," ARL, I, 3, 3.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RACISM; RIGHTISTS vs. LEFTISTS; STATISM; TYRANNY; WAR.

Fascism and Communism/Socialism. For many decades, the leftists have been propagating the false dichotomy that the choice confronting the world is only: communism or fascism-a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right-with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it had never existed.

["The Presidential Candidates 1968," TO, June 1968, 5.]

[Some "moderates" are trying to] revive that old saw of pre-Vor)d War II vintage, the notion that the two political opposites confronting us, the two "extremes," are: fascism versus communism.

The political origin of that notion is more shameful than the "moderates" would care publicly to admit. Mussolini came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Italy. Hitler came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Germany. It is a matter of record that in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the n.a.z.is-with the explanation that they could later fight the n.a.z.is for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of "Freedom or dictatorship?" into "Which kind of dictatorship?" -thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice-according to the proponents of that fraud-is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

That fraud collapsed in the 1940's, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory-that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state-that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders-that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique-that fascism is not the product of the political "right," but of the "left"-that the basic issue is not "rich versus poor," but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government-which means: capitalism versus socialism.

[" 'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing," CUI, 180.]

The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal....

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold t.i.tle to the property, but merely the right to use it-at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens....

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis-and "the public good" is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national "greatness." The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-n.a.z.i axis merely extols leadership-leadership without purpose, program or direction-and power for power's sake.