Collectivism is Dead

Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction “don’t be certain.”

As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world.

This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty—not by chickens hiding their heads in the sand (“ostrich” is too big and dignified a metaphor for this instance).

And, paving the way for Attila, the intellectuals are still repeating, not by conviction any longer, but by rote, that the growth of government power is not an abridgment of freedom—that the demand of one group for an unearned share of another group’s income is not socialism—that the destruction of property rights will not affect any other rights—that man’s mind, intelligence, creative ability are a “national resource” (like mines, forests, waterfalls, buffalo reserves and national parks) to be taken over, subsidized and disposed of by the government—that businessmen are selfish autocrats because they are struggling to preserve freedom, while the “liberals” are the true champions of liberty because they are fighting for more government controls—that the fact that we are sliding down a road which has destroyed every other country, does not prove that it will destroy ours—that dictatorship is not dictatorship if nobody calls it by that abstract name—and that none of us can help it, anyway.

Nobody believes any of it any longer, yet nobody opposes it. To oppose anything, one needs a firm set of principles, which means: a philosophy. If America perishes, it will perish by intellectual default.

There is no diabolical conspiracy to destroy it: no conspiracy could be big enough and strong enough. Such cafeteria-socialist conspiracies as do undoubtedly exist are groups of scared, neurotic mediocrities who find themselves pushed into national leadership because nobody else steps forward; they are like pickpockets who merely intended to snatch a welfare-regulation or two and who suddenly find that their victim is unconscious, that they are alone in an enormous mansion of fabulous wealth, with all the doors open and a seasoned burglar’s job on their hands; watch them now screaming that they didn’t mean it, that they had never advocated the nationalization of a country’s economy. As to the communist conspirators in the service of Soviet Russia, they are the best illustration of victory by default: their successes are handed to them by the concessions of their victims. There is no national movement for socialism or dictatorship in America, no “man on horseback” or popular demagogue, nothing but fumbling compromisers and frightened opportunists. Yet we are moving toward full, totalitarian socialism, with worn, cynical voices telling us that such is the irresistible trend of history. History, fate and malevolent conspiracy are easier to believe than the actual truth: that we are moved by nothing but the sluggish inertia of unfocused minds.

Collectivism, as a social ideal, is dead.

But capitalism has not yet been discovered.

It cannot be discovered by the psycho-epistemology of Witch Doctors and Attila-ists—and as to the businessman, he is struggling to forget that he had ever known it. That is his guilt.

The businessman, historically, had started as the victim of the intellectuals; but no injustice or exploitation can succeed for long without the sanction of the victim. The businessman, who could not accept the intellectual leadership of post-Kantian Witch Doctors, made his fatal error when he conceded to them the field of the intellect. He gave them the benefit of the doubt, at his own expense: he concluded that their meaningless verbiage could not be as bad as it sounded to him, that he lacked understanding, but had no stomach for trying to understand that sort of stuff and would leave it respectfully alone. No Witch Doctor could have hoped for a deadlier concession.

By becoming anti-intellectual, the businessman condemned himself to the position of an Attila. By restricting his goals, concerns and vision exclusively to his specific productive activity, he was forced to restrict his interests to Attila’s narrow range of the physical, the material, the immediately present. Thus he tore himself in two by an inner contradiction: he functioned on a confidently rational, conceptual level of psycho-epistemology in business, but repressed all the other aspects of his life and thought, letting himself be carried passively along by the general cultural current, in the semi-unfocused, perceptual-level daze of a man who considers himself impotent to judge what he perceives. It is thus that he turned too often into the tragic phenomenon of a genius in business who is a Babbitt in his private life.

He repressed and renounced any interest in ideas, any quest for intellectual values or moral principles. He could not accept the altruist morality, as no man of self-esteem can accept it, and he found no other moral philosophy. He lived by a subjective code of his own—the code of justice, the code of a fair trader— without knowing what a superlative moral virtue it represented. His private version or understanding of altruism—particularly in America—took the form of an enormous generosity, the joyous, innocent, benevolent generosity of a selfconfident man, who is too innocent to suspect that he is hated for his success, that the moralists of altruism want him to pay financial tributes, not as kindness, but as atonement for the guilt of having succeeded. There were exceptions; there were businessmen who did accept the full philosophical meaning of altruism and its ugly burden of guilt, but they were not the majority.

They are the majority today. No man or group of men can live indefinitely under the pressure of moral injustice: they have to rebel or give in. Most of the businessmen gave in; it would have taken a philosopher to provide them with the intellectual weapons of rebellion, but they had given up any interest in philosophy. They accepted the burden of an unearned guilt; they accepted the brand of “vulgar materialists”; they accepted the accusations of “predatory greed”—predatory toward the wealth which they had created, greed for the fortunes which, but for them, would not have existed. As a result, consciously or subconsciously, they were driven to the cynical bitterness of the conviction that men are irrational, that reason is impotent in human relationships, that the field of ideas is some dark, gigantic, incomprehensible fraud.

No one can accept unearned guilt with psychological impunity. Starting as the most courageous class of men in history, the businessmen have slipped slowly into the position of men motivated by chronic fear—in all the social, political, moral, intellectual aspects of their existence. Their public policy consists of appeasing their worst enemies, placating their most contemptible attackers, trying to make terms with their own destroyers, pouring money into the support of leftist publications and “liberal” politicians, placing avowed collectivists in charge of their public relations and then voicing—in banquet speeches and fullpage ads—socialistic protestations that selfless service to society is their only goal, and altruistic apologies for the fact that they still keep two or three percent of profit out of their multi-million-dollar enterprises.

There are many different motives behind that policy. Some men are moved by actual guilt: they are the new type of businessmen, the product of a “mixed” economy, who make fortunes, not by productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special privileges; these are psycho-epistemologically and economically closer to Attila than to the Producer, and have good reason to feel guilty. Others are forced reluctantly into a mixed position, where they still live by productive ability, yet have to depend on government favors in order to function; these are the closest to the position of self-destroyers. The majority of businessmen— perhaps the ablest and best—work in silence and are never heard from publicly. Most businessmen have probably given up the expectation of any justice from the public. But there is one motive which is shared by too many businessmen and which is the penalty for renouncing the intellect: an unconfessed fear of ideas under the professed conviction that ideas are futile, which leads to a nervously stubborn evasiveness, an anxious feeling or hope that wealth as such is power, that only material possessions are of practical importance.