Who is the greatest enemy of American business?
In Ayn Rand’s last public lecture, delivered before an audience of businessmen in 1981, she answered: businessmen themselves are their own worst enemy. Previously available in print as an article in Ayn Rand’s anthology The Voice of Reason, “The Sanction of the Victims” has now been published online by ARI for the first time, with permission from the publisher.
Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, I am honored to present to you Miss Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand: Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, since the subject of these seminars is investment, I must start by stating that I am not an economist, and have no purely economic advice to give you. But what I am anxious to discuss with you are the preconditions that make it possible for you to gain and to keep the money which you can then invest.
I shall by start by asking you a question on the moral premise: what human occupation is the most useful socially? The borrowed premise is the concept of social usefulness. It is not part of my philosophy to evaluate things by a social standard. But this is the predominant standard of value today, and sometimes it can be very enlightening to adopt the enemy’s standard. So let us borrow the notion of social concern for just a little while, just long enough to answer the question: what human occupation is the most useful socially?
Since men’s basic tool of survival is his mind, the most crucially important occupation is the discovery of knowledge. That is the occupation of scientists. But scientists are not concerned with society, with social issues or with other men. Scientists are essentially loners. They pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. A great many scientific discoveries and technological discoveries were known before the Industrial Revolution and did not affect human existence. The steam engine, for instance, was known in ancient Greece, but knowledge of that sort remained an exclusive concern that lived and died with the scientist, and for century after century had not connection to the lives of the rest of mankind.
Now suppose that a group of men decided to make it their job to bring the results of the achievements of science within the reach of man, to apply scientific knowledge to the improvement of man’s life on earth. Wouldn’t such men be the greatest social benefactors as they have been since the Industrial Revolution? (Will you excuse me please; I don’t want any pictures taken of me. Please, gentlemen, don’t photograph me. I am much too old for that. Just leave me as I am.) Wouldn’t such men be the greatest social benefactors as they have been since the Industrial Revolution? Shouldn’t the socially concerned humanitarians, those who hold social usefulness as their highest value, regard such men as heroes? If I say no, such men are not regarded as heroes today — they are the most hated, blamed, denounced men in the humanitarian society — would you believe me? Or would you think that I am inventing some sort of irrational fiction, and would you say that something is wrong, terribly wrong in such a society?
But this isn’t all. There is something much worse. It isn’t merely the fact that these heroic men are the victims of an unspeakable justice. It is the fact that they are first to perpetuate that injustice against themselves. That they adopt a public stance of perpetual apology and universal appeasement, proclaim themselves guilty of an unspecified evil, begging the forgiveness of every two-bit intellectual, every unskilled laborer, every unemployed politician. No, this is not fiction. That country is the United States of America today. That self-destroying group of men is you, the American businessman. When I say you, I mean the group as a whole. I accept the tenet present company is excepted. However, if any of you find the shoe that fits, wear it with my compliments.
Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would commit suicide. The American businessman are carrying out that prediction, in destroying themselves, they are destroying capitalism, of which they are the symbol and product in America which is the greatest and freest example that capitalism has ever reached. There is no outside power that can destroy such men in such a country. Only an inner power can do it: the power of morality. More specifically, the power of a contemptibly evil idea accepted as a moral principle: altruism. Remember that altruism does not mean benevolence or consideration for other men. Altruism is a moral theory which preaches that man must sacrifice himself for others. That he must place the interests of others above his own. That he must live for the sake of others.
Altruism is a monstrous notion. It is the morality of cannibals devouring one another. It is theory of profound hatred for man. (I seem to have competition here. I will let you go first. Okay?) It is a theory of profound hatred for men, for reason, for achievement, for any form of human success or happiness on earth. Altruism is incompatible with capitalism, and with businessmen. Businessmen are a cheerful, benevolent, optimistic, predominantly American phenomenon. The essence of their job is the constant struggle to improve human life, to satisfy human desires, not to practice resignation, surrender, and worship of suffering. And here is the profound gulf between businessmen and altruism: businessmen do not sacrifice themselves to others. If they did, they would be out of business in a few months or days. They profit, they grow rich, they are rewarded as they should be. This is what the altruists, the collectivists, the other humanitarians hate the businessmen for: that they pursue a personal goal and succeed at it.
Do not fool yourself by thinking that altruists are motivated by compassion for the suffering. They are motivated by hatred for the successful. The evidence is all around us. (Thank you.) The evidence is all around us, but one small example sticks in my mind as extremely eloquent. In the early 1930s, an assistant of Jane Addams, the famous social worker, went on a visit to Soviet Russia and wrote a book about her experience. The sentence that I remember is, “How wonderful it was to see everybody equally shabby.” If you think that you should try to appease the altruist, this is what you are appeasing.
The great tragedy of capitalism, and of America, is the fact that most businessmen have accepted the morality of altruism, and are trying to live up to it, which means that they are doomed before they start. Another contributory evil is the philosophical root of altruism, which is mysticism: the belief in the supernatural, which preaches contempt for matter, for wealth, well-being, or happiness on earth. The mystics are constantly crying appeals for your pity, your compassion, your help to the less fortunate, yet they are condemning you for all the qualities of character that make you able to help them.
Evil theories have to rely on evil means in order to hold their victims. Altruism and collectivism cannot appeal to human virtues. They have to appeal to human weaknesses. And when there not enough weaknesses, they have to manufacture them. It is in the nature of altruism and collectivism, that the more they need a person or group, the more they denounce their victims, induce guilt, and struggle to never let the victims discover their own importance and acquire self- esteem. The businessmen are needed most by the so-called humanitarians, because the businessmen produce the sustenance the humanitarians are unable to produce. Doctors come next in the hierarchy of being needed, and observe the hostility, the denunciations and the attempts to enslave the doctor’s in today’s society.
Most businessmen today have accepted the feeling of guilt induced in them by the altruist. They are accused of anything and everything. For instance, a college is denounce the businessmen to sacrifice themselves to the snail darter doctor and the Furbish lousewort. But the businessmen’s actual guilt is their treason against themselves, which is also a treason against their country. The statement that aroused such fury among the collectivists, “What is good for General Motors is good the country,” was true, and the reverse is also true. What is bad for industry is bad for this country. I am here to ask you a question on my own, not on borrowed premises. What are you doing to be the advocates of capitalism, particularly the young? Appeasement is the betrayal of not only one’s values, but of all those who share one’s values. If, for whatever misguided reason, businessmen are indifferent to and ignorant of philosophy, particularly moral and political philosophy, it would be better if they kept silent rather than spread the horrible advertisements that make us cringe with embarrassment. By us, I mean advocates of capitalism. Mobil Oil ran ads in the New York Times which stated the following, I quote from memory, “of the expression of free, private, responsible enterprise, will strike out free and private as non-essential.” One of the big industries advertises on television that they are full of “people working for people” and some other big company announces on television that its goal is “ideas that help people.” I do not know what the ghastly PR man who came up with these slogans wanted us to think. That the companies work for free, or that they traded with people rather than with animals? Actually, their purpose was to suggest populism in some indirect kind. It was actually the desire to give the impression that businessmen work for nothing but others, for the people, that they are in fact no better than the politicians.
The worst of the bunch is some new group in Washington D.C. called something like Committee for the American Way, which puts out a television commercial showing some ugly, commonplace people, of all kinds, each proclaiming that he likes a different kind of music. I like rock and roll, I like Jazz, I like Beethoven, and etc. ending on a voice declaring, “This is the American way, with every man entitled to have and express his own opinion.” I, who come from Soviet Russia, can assure you that the debates and differences of that kind were and are permitted in Soviet Russia. What about political or philosophical issues? Why didn’t they show people disagreeing about nuclear weapons or about abortion or about affirmative action? If that committee stands for the American way, there is no such way any longer.
Observe also that in today’s proliferation of pressure groups, the lowest sort of unskilled laborer is regarded as the public, and presents claims to society in the name of the public interest, and is encouraged to assert his right to a livelihood, but the businessman, the intelligent, the creative, the successful man, who made the laborers’ livelihood possible, have no rights and no legitimate interests, are not entitled to their livelihood, their profits, and are not part of the public. Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made the derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine.
What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromise, all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Actually, the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities. Businessmen are both content. (Thank you, that is the most important point.) Businessmen are both contemptuous of and superstitiously frightened by the subject of philosophy. There is a vicious circle involved here. Businessmen have good grounds to despise philosophy, as it is taught today. But it is taught that way because businessmen have abandoned the intellect to the lowest rung of the unemployables. All the conditions and ideas necessary to turn men into abjectly helpless serfs of dictatorship rule the institutions of today’s higher education as the tight monopoly with very few and rare exceptions. Hatred of reason and worship of blind emotions, hatred of the success and worship of self-sacrifice, hatred of the individual and worship of the collective — these are the fundamental notions that dominate today’s universities. These notions condition and paralyze the minds of the young. If you want to discover how a country philosophy determines its history, I urge you to read The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, to be published this coming spring by Stein and Day. This brilliant book presents the philosophical similarities between the state of America’s culture today and the state of Germany’s culture in the Weimar Republic in the years preceding the rise of Nazism. After you read this book, you will know the power of philosophy, and you will know that one cannot play with it irresponsibly as people do today, nor can one ignore it.
It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities, not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse, in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations and endowments etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up. It is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and probably years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea what their money is being spent on, or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Money is a great power, because in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of energy, of productive energy, and therefore the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called academic freedom, it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree. It means ideas, which you consider wrong, false, and evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers, yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility. (Thank you.) On the faculties of most colleges and universities, the advocates of reason, individualism and capitalism are a very small minority, often represented by feeble specimens of window-dressing. But the valiant minority of authentic fighters is struggling against overwhelming odds and growing very slowly. The hardships, injustices and persecutions suffered by these young advocates of reason and capitalism are too terrible a story to be told briefly. These are the young people whom businessmen should support. Or, if businessmen are too ignorant of academic issues, they should leave academic matters alone. But to support irrationalists, nihilists, socialists, and communists, who form an impenetrable barrier against the young advocates of capitalism, denying them jobs, recognition, or a mere hearing is an unforgiveable outrage on the part of irresponsible businessmen, who imagine that it is morally safe to give money to institutions of higher learning.
The lasting influence of the universities is caused by the fact that most people question the truths or falsehood of philosophical ideas only in their youth, and whatever they learn in college marks them for life. If they are given intellectual poison, as they are today, they carry it into their professions, particularly in the humanities. Observe the lifeless, grayness, the boring mediocrity of today’s culture. Observe the empty pretentiousness and mawkish sentimentality of today’s stage, screen, and television writing. There are no serious dramas any longer, and such few as attempt to be serious are of a leftist-collectivist persuasion. On this subject, I can speak from personal experience. For several years, a distinguished producer in Hollywood has been attempting to make a television mini-series or a movie of my novel Atlas Shrugged. He was stopped on two counts. One: he could not find the writer able to write a Romantic drama, even though there are good writers in Hollywood. Romanticism is completely unknown to them. And two: he could not raise the money for his project. Allow me to say, even though I do not like to say it, that if there existed a novel of the same value and popularity as Atlas Shrugged, but written to glorify collectivism, which would be a contradiction in terms, it would have been produced on the screen long ago. You are not, I hope, applauding that fact, that there are too many supporters of left kind of writers. Well, I do not believe in giving up, and so, in answer to many questions, I chose this occasion to make a very special announcement. I am writing a nine hour teleplay for Atlas Shrugged. (Thank you. Thank you very much.) I intend to produce the mini-series myself. There is a strong possibility that I will be looking for outside financing to produce the Atlas Shrugged series. I am not afraid of that.
In conclusion, let me touch a briefly on another question often asked of me. What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be, “but I don’t think of him, and the more I see the less I think.” I did not vote for him, nor for anyone else, and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called Moral Majority and sundry other severe religionists (thank you) who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages by the unconstitutional union of religion and politics. The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Regan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost like Herbert Hoover to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for the next fifty years. Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element, but he will not find it in the God, family, tradition swamp. The greatest inspirational leadership this country could ever find rests in the hands of the most typically American group: the businessmen, but they could provide it only if the acquired philosophical self-defense and self-esteem. Here is what young Americans have to say about it: I quote from the May 15, 1980 of the Intellectual Activist, a newsletter by Peter Schwartz, “Feminists threatened to publicize the names of psychologists that hold their convention in a state which has not yet endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment. Unionists protest political functions that serve lettuce approved by César Chavez, yet businessmen are willing not simply to tolerate denunciations of free enterprise, but to financially sponsor them.” Then, I quote from an article by M. Northrup Buechner, “The Root of Terrorism,” in the October, 1981 issue of the Objectivist Forum, published by Harry Binswanger, “Imagine the effect if some prominent businessmen were to defend publicly their right to their own lives. Imagine the earth-shaking social reverberations if they were to assert their moral, excuse me, if they were to assert their moral right to their own profits, not because those profits are necessary for economic progress or the elimination of poverty, which are purely collectivist justifications, but because a living being has the right to live and progress, and do the best he can for his life for the time he has on this earth.” I recommend both of these publications very highly. You may write to the Intellectual Activist at 131 Fifth Ave, NY, NY 10003, and to the Objectivist Forum at Box 5311, NY, NY 10150.
As for me, I will close with a quotation which is probably familiar to you, and I will say that the battle for capitalism will be won when we find a president capable of saying it. “The world you desire can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man, for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, and grandeur, any goodness, any joy, that has ever existed on this earth.” Thank you.
