The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 47

It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to "preserve" private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.

["The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus," CUI, 211.]

The gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes....

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

[Alan Greenspan. "Gold and Economic Freedom," CUI, 100.]

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?) There are two kinds of need involved in this process: the need of the group making demands, which is openly proclaimed and serves as cover for another need, which is never mentioned-the need of the power-seekers, who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power. Altruism feeds the first need, statism feeds the second, Pragmatism blinds everyone-including victims and prufiteers-not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on.

["A Preview," ARL, 1,23, 1.]

[A] real turning point came when the welfare statists switched from economics to physiology: they began to seek a new power base in deliberately fostered racism, the racism of minority groups, then in the hatreds and inferiority complexes uf women, of "the young," etc. The significant aspect of this switch was the severing of economic rewards from productive work. Physiology replaced the conditions of employment as the basis of social claims. The demands were no longer for "just compensation," but just for compensation, with no work required.

So long as the power-seekers clung to the basic premises of the welfare state, holding need as the criterion of rewards, logic forced them, step by step, to champion the interests of the less and less productive groups, until they reached the ultimate dead end of turning from the role of champions of "honest toil" to the role of champions of open parasitism, parasitism on principle, parasitism as a "right" (with their famous slogan turning into: "Who does not toil, shall eat those who do").

[Ibid., 2.]

In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the compet.i.tion of the tax-strangled newcorners. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.

["The Establishing of an Establishment," PWNI, 207; pb 170.]

See also ALTRUISM; CHARITY; COMPa.s.sION; FASCISM and COMMUNISM /SOCIALISM; GOLD STANDARD; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INFLATION; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; MINORITY RIGHTS; PITY; POVERTY; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RACISM; "REDISTRIBUTION" of WEALTH; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STATISM; TAXATION.

Whims/Whim-Worship. A "whim" is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 3; pb 14.]

Automatic omniscience [is what] a whim-worshiper ascribes to his emotions.

["Philosophical Detection," PWNI, 23; pb 19.]

What does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombie, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

["Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand," pamphlet, 6.]

What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue -of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill-is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: "How?"-they answer with righteous scorn that a "how" is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is "Somehow." On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality-is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

[GS, FNI, 185; pb 149.]

See also AMORALISM; EMOTIONS; FINAL CAUSATION; HEDONISM; IRRATIONALITY; MYSTICISM; RATIONALITY; SUBJECTIVISM.

"Window Dressing." The non-philosophical att.i.tude of most rightists, who surrendered the intellect to the leftists ... permitted the intellectuals to play the game of "window dressing," i.e., to preach political tolerance or impartiality and to practice it, on suitable occasions, by featuring the weakest, most befuddled champion of capitalism as a representative of the right. (Which led people to the conclusion: "If this is the best that can be said for the right, then the leftist position must be true.") ["The Disfranchisemem of the Right," ARL, 1, 6, 1.]

See also CAPlTALISM; "CONSERVATIVES"; "CONSERVATIVES" vs. "LIBERALS"; RIGHTISTS vs. LEFTISTS.

Words. In order to be used as a single unit, the enormous sum integrated by a concept has to be given the form of a single, specific, perceptual concrete, which will differentiate it from all other concretes and from all other concepts. This is the function performed by language. Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting concepts into the mental equivalent of concretes. Language is the exclusive domain and tool of concepts. Every word we use (with the exception of proper names) is a symbol that denotes a concept, i.e., that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind.

ITOE, 11.].

The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of ent.i.ties from all others-for instance, the universal type of a child's drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind's transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the concepmal level.

There is evidence to suppose that written language originated in the form of drawings-as the pictographic writing of the Oriental peoples seems to indicate. With the growth of man's knowledge and of his power of abstraction, a pictorial representation of concepts could no longer be adequate to his conceptual range, and was replaced by a fully symbolic code.

[Ibid., 15.]

The process of forming a concept is not complete until its const.i.tuent units have been integrated into a single mental unit by means of a specific word. The first concepts a child forms are concepts of perceptual ent.i.ties; the first words he learns are words designating them. Even though a child does not have to perform the feat of genius performed by some mind or minds in the prehistorical infancy of the human race: the invention of language-every child has to perform independently the feat of grasping the nature of language, the process of symbolizing concepts by means of words.

Even though a child does not (and need not) originate and form every concept on his own, by observing every aspect of reality confronting him, he has to perform the process of differentiating and integrating perceptual concretes, in order to grasp the meaning of words. If a child's brain is physically damaged and unable to perform that process, he does not learn to speak.

Learning to speak does not consist of memorizing sounds-that is the process by which a parrot learns to "speak." Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words, the kinds of existents that words denote in reality. In this respect, the learning of words is an invaluable accelerator of a child's cognitive development, but it is not a subst.i.tute for the process of concept-formation; nothing is.

[Ibid., 24.]

Words transform concepts into (mental) ent.i.ties; definitions provide them with ident.i.ty. (Words without definitions are not language but inarticulate sounds.) [Ibid., 12.]

It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept : a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines-by specifying their referents.

[Ibid., 52.]

See also COMMUNICATION; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; GRAMMAR; LANGUAGE; LINGUISTIC a.n.a.lYSIS; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); NOMINALISM; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY.

X.

Xenophobia. See Anti-Conceptual Mentality.

Z.

Zero, Reification of. A vulgar variant of concept stealing, prevalent among avowed mystics and irrationalists, is a fallacy I call the Reification of the Zero. It consists of regarding "nothing" as a thing, as a special, different kind of existent. (For example, see Existentialism.) This fallacy breeds such symptoms as the notion that presence and absence, or being and non-being, are metaphysical forces of equal power, and that being is the absence of non-being. E.g., "Nothingness is prior to being." (Sartre)-"Human finitude is the presence of the not in the being of man." (William Barrett)-"Nothing is more real than nothing." (Samuel Beckett)-"Das Nichts nichtet" or "Nothing noughts." (Heidegger). "Consciousness, then, is not a stuff, but a negation. The subject is not a thing, but a non-thing. 'The subject carves its own world out of Being by means of negative determinations. Sartre describes consciousness as a 'noughting nought' (neant neantisant). It is a form of being other than its own: a mode 'which has yet to be what it is, that is to say, which is what it is, that is to say, which is what it is not and which is not what it is.' " (Hector Hawton, The Feast of Unreason, London: Watts & Co., 1952, p. 162.) (The motive? "Genuine utterances about the nothing must always remain unusual. It cannot be made common. It dissolves when it is placed in the cheap acid of mere logical ac.u.men." Heidegger.) [ITOE, 80.].

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; EXISTENCE; IDENt.i.tY; NON-EXISTENCE; "STOLEN CONCEPT, FALLACY of.

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