The Altruist Morality of Socialism

The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment.

• This made evasion a virtue.

This morality of altruism replaced self-esteem.

Such moralists proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer—and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.

But while the intellectuals regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to behave: he was impervious to their power.

The businessman was as bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no defense, and— knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not his role—he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals’ attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but had no use for Immanuel Kant.

Today’s “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman’s only form of philosophy.

The businessman asked for proof and expected things to make sense—an expectation that kicked the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of the “noumenal” world.

To understand the course the intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt.

They derive their mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold on the other’s secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two blackmailers, who count on each other’s fear.

The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist society—as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any universe he cares to recognize.

He has no means to deal with innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his living—who takes pride in his work and in the value of his product—who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless ambition to do better and still better and ever better—who is willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements—who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible—who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions—who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt.

What the businessman offered to the intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of ideas.

To live by the work of one’s mind, to offer men the products of one’s thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one’s ideas and to rely on nothing but objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has to judge, accept or reject on his own—is a task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic “elite.” A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector, by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by suppression, by censorship.

Having accepted the philosophy and the psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the intellectuals rebelled against the “commercialism” of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality.

Just as Attila, since the Renaissance, was looking for a Witch Doctor of his own, so the intellectuals, since the industrial revolution, were looking for an Attila of their own.

The altruist morality brought them together and gave them the weapon they needed. The field where they found each other was socialism.

It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.

Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists.

They demanded the right to enforce ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government, and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who would gain control of the government’s machinery.

They extolled the State as the “Form of the Good,” with man as its abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases, the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual mentality— which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to principles and no power to ideas—that can still wonder why a theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove that these had to be the necessary results—or still try to blame it on the “imperfection” of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang who “betrayed a noble ideal,” and still promise that its own gang would do it better and make it work—or still mumble in a quavering voice that the motive was love of humanity. The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer; the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man’s metaphysically predestined impotence. Guilt and fear are the disintegrators of a man’s consciousness or of a society’s culture. Today, America’s culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt: don’t look—don’t judge—don’t be certain. The psycho-epistemological meaning and implementation of these three are: don’t integrate—don’t evaluate—give up.

The last stand of Attila-ism, both in philosophy and in science, is the concerted assertion of all the neo-mystics that integration is impossible and unscientific.

The escape from the conceptual level of consciousness, the progressive contraction of man’s vision down to Attila’s range, has now reached its ultimate climax. Withdrawing from reality and responsibility, the neo-mystics proclaim that no entities exist, only relationships, and that one may study relationships without anything to relate, and, simultaneously, that every datum is single and discrete, and no datum can ever be related to any other data—that context is irrelevant, that anything may be proved or disproved in midair and midstream, and the narrower the subject of study, the better—that myopia is the hallmark of a thinker or a scientist.

System-building—the integration of knowledge into a coherent sum and a consistent view of reality—is denounced by all the Attila-ists as irrational, mystical and unscientific. This is Attila’s perennial way of surrendering to the Witch Doctor—and it explains why so many scientists are turning to God or to such flights of mysticism of their own as would make even an old-fashioned Witch Doctor blush.

No consciousness can accept disintegration as a normal and permanent state. Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

The abdication of philosophy is all but complete.

Today’s Witch Doctor philosophers declare that nobody can define what is philosophy or what is its specific task, but this need not prevent anyone from practicing it as a profession.

Qua Attila-ists, they declare that the use of wide abstractions or concepts is the prerogative of the layman or of the ignorant or of the man in the street—while a philosopher is one who, knowing all the difficulties involved in the problem of abstractions, deals with nothing but concretes.

The injunction “don’t judge” is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence.

When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent—one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil—one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.