Altruism as Appeasement
In this essay, Ayn Rand also draws out the implications of such appeasement for society as a whole. She connects it to trends in politics — such as the widespread sympathy for dictatorships — as well as to trends in esthetics, such as the celebration of “depravity” in modern art and literature. More broadly, she explains how appeasement by intellectuals unleashes the minority of deliberately evil men on society, while abandoning average men to “accept what the culture offers them,” however irrational or anti-rational the culture may be.
“Altruism as Appeasement” was originally published in the January 1966 issue of The Objectivist, now available in paperback, and later anthologized in The Voice of Reason (1989).
A few years ago, on the occasion of giving a lecture at M.I.T., I met a young student who was earnestly, intelligently concerned with opposing the trend to collectivism. I asked him his views on why so many of today’s young intellectuals were becoming “liberals.” He could not give me a full answer. But a few weeks later, he wrote me a remarkable letter.
He explained that he had given a great deal of thought to my question and had reached certain conclusions. The majority of college students, he wrote, do not choose to think; they accept the status quo, conform to the prescribed code of values and evade the responsibility of independent thought. “In adopting this attitude, they are encouraged by teachers who inspire imitation, rather than creation.”
But there are a few who are not willing to renounce their rational faculty. “They are the intellectuals — and they are the outsiders. Their willingness to think makes them shine forth as a threat to the stagnant security of the levelers in which they are immersed. They are teased and rejected by their schoolmates. An immense amount of faith in oneself and a rational philosophical basis are required to set oneself against all that society has ever taught. . . . The man who preaches individual integrity, pride and self-esteem is today virtually nonexistent. Far more common is the man who, driven by the young adult’s driving need for acceptance, has compromised. And here is the key — [the result of] the compromise is the liberal.
“The man who sets himself against society by seeking to be rational is almost certain to succumb to the extent of accepting a strong guilt complex. He is declared ‘guilty’ by his rejection of the omnipresent ‘equality in mediocrity’ doctrine of today. . . . So the intellectual, to atone for a false guilt, becomes today’s liberal. He proclaims loudly the brotherhood of all men. He seeks to serve his escapist brothers by guaranteeing them their desire for social security. He sanctions their mediocrity, he works for their welfare, above all he essentially seeks their approval — to atone for the guilt that they have thrust upon him in the guise of an absolute moral system which is not open to question.”
This young man deserves credit for an extraordinary psychological perceptiveness. But the situation he describes is not new; it is as old as altruism; nor is it confined to “liberals.”
Shortly after receiving that letter, I met a distinguished historian, a man of great intellect and scholarship, an advocate of capitalism, who was then in his late seventies. I had been puzzled by the fact that in his many works, the rigorous logic of his arguments was inexplicably contradicted and undercut by his acceptance of “the common good” as the criterion of morality — and I asked him his reasons. “Oh, one must say that to the masses,” he answered, “otherwise, they won’t accept capitalism.”
Between these two extremes of age — from college years to the culmination of a lifetime’s struggle — lies a silent psychological horror story. It is the story of men who spend their lives apologizing for their own intelligence.
The following pattern does not enmesh all men of superior mental endowment; some manage to escape it; but, in our anti-rational culture, it strangles too many of them.
By the time he reaches college, a bright, sensitive, precociously observant youth has acquired the sense of being trapped in a nightmare universe where he is resented, not for his flaws, but for his greatest attribute: his intelligence. It is merely a sense, not a firm conviction; no teenager can draw such a conclusion with certainty nor fully believe so enormous an evil. He senses only that he is “different,” in some way which he cannot define — that he does not get along with people, for some reason which he cannot name — that he wants to understand things and issues, big issues, about which no one else seems to care,
His first year in college is, usually, his psychological killer. He had expected college to be a citadel of the intellect where he would find answers, knowledge, meaning and, above all, some companions to share his interest in ideas. He finds none of it. One or two teachers may live up to his hope (though they are growing rarer year by year). But as to intellectual companionship, he finds the same gang he had met in kindergarten, in playgrounds and in vacant lots: a leering, screeching, aggressively mindless gang, playing the same games, with a latinized jargon replacing the mud pies and baseball bats.
There are many wrong decisions he can make at this crossroads; but the deadliest — psychologically, intellectually and morally — is the attempt to join the gang at the price of selling his soul to uninterested buyers. It is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: “I’m not an outsider! I’m your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind — I’m using it only in order to serve you!”
Whatever remnants of personal value he may preserve after a deal of that kind, self-esteem is not one of them.
Such decisions are seldom, if ever, made consciously. They are made gradually, by subconscious emotional motivation and semi-conscious rationalization. Altruism offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishness, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked. By the time he is old enough to know better, the erosion of his self-esteem is such that he dares not face or re-examine the issue.
Some degree of social metaphysics is almost always involved in the psychology of such a man, but it is hard to tell whether it led to or resulted from his surrender. In either case, his basic motivation is different and, in a certain sense, worse. Basically, a social metaphysician is motivated by the desire to escape the responsibility of independent thought and he surrenders the mind he is afraid to use, preferring to follow the judgments of others. But an intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind. The degree of self-abasement is greater; the implicit view of values — as irrelevant to the mind — is disastrous; the implicit view of the mind — as functioning by permission of the mindless — is unspeakable. (Nor does the appeaser often care to speak about it.)
There are as many variants of the consequences as there are men who commit this particular type of moral treason. But certain scars of psychological deformity can be observed in most of them, as their common symptoms.
Humanitarian love is what the altruist-appeaser never achieves. Instead, his salient characteristic is a mixture of bitter contempt and intense, profound hatred for mankind, a hatred impervious to reason. He regards men as evil by nature, he complains about their congenital stupidity, mediocrity, depravity — yet slams his mind ferociously shut to any argument that challenges his estimate. His view of the people at large is a nightmare image — the image of a mindless brute endowed with some inexplicably omnipotent power — and he lives in terror of that image, yet resists any attempt to revise it.
If questioned, he can give no grounds for his view. Intellectually, he admits that the average man is not a murderous brute ready to attack him at any moment; emotionally, he keeps feeling the brute’s presence behind every corner.
An accomplished young scientist once told me that he was not afraid of gangsters, but waiters and gas-station attendants filled him with terror, even though he could not say what it was he expected them to do to him. An elderly, extremely successful businessman told me that he divided people into three classes according to their intelligence: the above average, the average and the below average; he did not mind the first two classes, but those of below average intelligence threw him into uncontrollable panic. He had spent his life expecting a bloody uprising of brutes who would seize, loot, wreck and slaughter everything in sight; no, he was not a “conservative”; he was a “liberal.”
There is an element of truth in that image of the brute: not factual truth, but psychological truth, not about people at large, but about the man who fears them. The brute is the frozen embodiment of mankind as projected by the emotions of an adolescent appeaser. The brute’s omnipotent power to perpetrate some unimaginable horror is merely an adult’s rationalization; physical violence is not what he fears. But his terror is real: a monster that had the power to make him surrender his mind is, indeed, a terrifying evil. And the deepest, the unconfessed source of his terror lies in the fact that the surrender was not demanded or extorted — that the monster was the victim’s own creation.
This is the reason why the appeaser has a vested interest in maintaining his belief in the brute’s existence: even a life of terror, with the excuse that he could not help it, is preferable to facing the full enormity of the fact that he was not robbed of self-esteem, but threw it away — and that his chronic sense of guilt does not come from the spurious sin of possessing intelligence, but from the actual crime of having betrayed it.
A corollary symptom, in most intellectual appeasers, is the “elite” premise — the dogmatic, unshakeable belief that “the masses don’t think,” that men are impervious to reason, that thinking is the exclusive prerogative of a small, “chosen” minority.
In the field of politics, this leads the more aggressive type of appeasers, the “liberals,” to the belief in rule by physical force, to the doctrine that people are unfit for freedom and should be ruled — “for their own good” — by a dictatorship of the “elite.” Hence such “liberals’” craving for governmental recognition, and their extreme susceptibility to bribes by any strong-arm government, foreign or domestic, in the form of minor jobs, loud titles, official honors or simply dinner invitations. Hence such “liberals’” tolerant sympathy for the regimes of Soviet Russia or Red China, and their appalling indifference to the wholesale atrocities of those countries.
The more timorous type of appeasers, the “conservatives,” take a different line: they share the notion of an intellectual “elite” and, therefore, they discard intellectuality as numerically unimportant, and they concentrate on cajoling the brute (“the masses”) with baby-talk — with vapid slogans, flattering bromides, folksy speeches in two-syllable words, on the explicit premise that reason does not work, that the brute must be won through appeals to his emotions and must, somehow, be fooled or cheated into taking the right road.
Both groups believe that dictatorships are “practical” — the “liberals” boldly and openly, the “conservatives” fearfully. Behind the “conservatives’” ineffectual, half-hearted, apologetic attempts to defend freedom, lies the often confessed belief that the struggle is futile, that free enterprise is doomed. Why? The unconfessed answer is: Because men are brutes.
Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil, which means — not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing, blinding panic — that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.
To an appeaser, the self-assertive confidence of the good is a reproach, a threat to his precarious pseudo-self-esteem, a disturbing phenomenon from a universe whose existence he cannot permit himself to acknowledge — and his emotional response is a nameless resentment. The self-assertive confidence of the evil is a metaphysical confirmation, the sign of a universe in which he feels at home — and his emotional response is bitterness, but obedience. Some dictators — who boastfully stress their reign of terror, such as Hitler and Stalin — count on this kind of psychology. There are people on whom it works.
Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil. The next step leads to opposing the good in order to appease the evil, and rushing out to seek the evil’s favor. But since no mind can fully hide this policy from itself, and no form of pseudo-self-esteem can disguise it for long, the next step is to pounce upon every possible or impossible chance to blacken the nature of the good and to whitewash the nature of the evil.
Such is the relationship of mind to values — and such is the fate of those who sought to preserve their intellect by dispensing with morality.
The appeaser’s inner state is revealed in the field of esthetics. His sense of life dominates modern art and literature: the cult of depravity — the monotonous projection of cosmic terror, guilt, impotence, misery, doom — the compulsive preoccupation with the study of homicidal maniacs, a preoccupation resembling the mentality of a superstitious savage who fashions a voodoo doll in the belief that to reproduce is to master.
This does not mean that all the practitioners of modern art or modern politics are men who betrayed their own intelligence: most of them had nothing to betray. But it does mean that such practices would not have spread without the sanction of the intellectual traitors — and that they brought their own nightmare universe into reality by creating a cultural bandwagon for pretentious mediocrities and worse.
Not all of the intellectual appeasers reach the public arena. A great many of them perish on the way, torn by their inner conflicts, paralyzed by an insufficient capacity to evade, petering out in hopeless lethargy after a brilliantly promising start. A great many others drag themselves on, by an excruciating psychological effort, functioning at a small fraction of their potential. The cost of this type of appeasement — in frustrated, hampered, crippled or stillborn talent — can never be computed.
An appeaser’s professional success or failure, as well as the degree of his precarious psychological adjustment, depends on the slowness or speed of a process common to all appeasers: the erosion of his sense of values. The renunciation of values — the acceptance of an irrational morality — was the specific form of his surrender. The pretense at any belief in altruism vanishes from his mind in a very few years, and there is nothing left to replace it: his independent capacity to value has been repressed — and his fear of the brute makes the pursuit of values seem hopelessly impractical. What sets in, thereafter, is the dry rot of cynicism — like a kind of premature senility of the spirit — a thin coating of belligerent amorality over a swamp of lifeless resignation. The result is a muted, impoverished, extinguished personality, the impersonal personality of a man with an ever-shrinking range of concern, with nothing to seek, to achieve, to admire or oppose, and — since self-assertion is the assertion of one’s values — with no self to assert. One of the bitter penalties of the appeasers is that even the most brilliant of them turn out, as persons, to be conventional, empty, dull.
If their initial crime was the desire to be “one of the boys” this is the way in which they do succeed.
Their ultimate penalty is still worse. A wrong premise does not merely fail, it achieves its own opposite. After years of intellectual faking, diluting, corner-cutting — in order to smuggle his ideas past an imaginary censor, in order to placate irrationality, stupidity, dishonesty, prejudice, malice or vulgarity — the appeaser’s own mind assumes the standards of those he professes to despise. A mind cannot maintain a double standard of judgment indefinitely (if at all). Any man who is willing to speak or write “down,” i.e., to think down — who distorts his own ideas in order to accommodate the mindless, who subordinates truth to fear — becomes eventually indistinguishable from the hacks who cater to an alleged “public taste.” He joins the hordes who believe that the mind is impotent, that reason is futile, that ideas are only means of fooling the masses (i.e., that ideas are important to the unthinking, but the thinkers know better) — the vast, stagnant underworld of anti-intellectuality. Such is the dead end of the road he has chosen to take, he who had started out as a self-sacrificial priest of the intellect.
Hatred for reason is hatred for intelligence; today’s culture is saturated with both. It is the ultimate product of generations of appeasers, past and present — of men who, fearing an imaginary brute, upheld and perpetuated the irrational, inhuman, brutalizing morality of altruism.
No, men are not brutes; neither are they all independent thinkers. The majority of men are not intellectual initiators or originators; they accept what the culture offers them. It is not that they don’t think; it is that they don’t sustain their thinking consistently, as a way of life, and that their abstract range is limited. To what extent they are stunted by the anti rational influences of our cultural traditions, is hard to say; what is known, however, is that the majority of men use only a small part of their potential intellectual capacity.
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. No, the average man is not morally innocent. But the best proof of his non-brutality, of his helpless, confused, inarticulate longing for truth, for an intelligible, rational world — and of his response to it, when given a chance he cannot create on his own — is the fact that no dictatorship has ever lasted without establishing censorship.
No, it is not the intelligent man’s moral obligation to serve as the leader or teacher of his less endowed brothers. His foremost moral obligation is to preserve the integrity of his mind and of his self-esteem — which means: to be proud of his intelligence — regardless of their approval or disapproval. No matter how hard this might be in a corrupt age like ours, he has, in fact, no alternative. It is his only chance at a world where intelligence can function, which means: a world where he — and, incidentally, they — can survive.
