Rand's 2 Basic Minimum Principles

The Founding Fathers were America’s first intellectuals and, so far, her last.

It is their basic political line that the New Intellectuals have to continue. Today, that line is lost under layer upon layer of evasions, equivocations and plain falsehood; today’s Witch Doctors claim that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was faith and uncritical compliance with tradition; today’s Attila-ists claim that that basic premise was the subordination of the individual to the collective and his sacrifice to the public good.

The New Intellectuals must remind the world that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

The moral premises implicit in the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, in the social system they established and in the economics of capitalism, must now be recognized and accepted in the form of an explicit moral philosophy.

That which is merely implicit is not in men’s conscious control; they can lose it by means of other implications, without knowing what it is that they are losing or when or why. It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her.

From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.

The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution. Evasions, equivocations and guilty apologies will not work any longer. The disgraceful injustice which penalized virtue for being virtue, which forced businessmen to apologize for their ability, for their success, for their achievements, has now been projected onto a global scale and translated into the disgraceful spectacle of America apologizing for her virtues and greatness to that bloody slaughterhouse of embodied altruism which is Soviet Russia.

The New Intellectuals must fight for capitalism, not as a “practical” issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it. The New Intellectuals must assume the task of building a new culture on a new moral foundation, which, for once, will not be the culture of Attila and the Witch Doctor, but the culture of the Producer. They will have to be radicals in the literal and reputable sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” The representatives of intellectual orthodoxy, conventionality and status quo, the Babbitts of today, are the collectivists. Let those who do care about the future, those willing to crusade for a perfect society, realize that the new radicals are the fighters for capitalism.

It is not an easy task and it cannot be achieved overnight. But the New Intellectuals have an inestimable advantage: they have reality on their side. The difficulties they will encounter on their way are not stone barriers, but fog: the heavy fog of passive disintegration, through which it will be hard for them to find one another. They will encounter no opposition, since, in this context, an opposition would have to possess intellectual weapons. As to their enemies, they should comply with their enemies’ request—and leave them to heaven.

The process of identifying, judging, accepting and upholding a new philosophy of life is a long, complicated process, which requires thought, proof, full understanding and conviction.

But there are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a “basic minimum,” as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance.

One principle is epistemological, the other is moral; they are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion.

These 2 principles are:

1. Emotions are not tools of cognition*

This rejects the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology.

It means that one must differentiate between one’s thoughts and one’s emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one’s own considered judgment from one’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. Those who claim that they cannot do it are merely confessing that they have never learned how to use their mind and are incapable of perceiving, judging or evaluating reality. This may be a psychological problem, but it becomes an intellectual fraud when such persons enter a philosophical discussion and demand consideration for their ideas. No discussion, co-operation, agreement or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.

2. No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.*

This rejects Attila’s psychoepistemology.

To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man—the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction—is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect. Perhaps the most obscene legacy of altruism among modern intellectuals is their axiomatic acceptance of brute force and of somebody’s sacrifice as a normal and necessary part of a human society, and their refusal to consider the possibility of a non-sacrificial, noncompulsory co-existence and co-operation among men.

Observe that they cannot conceive of “selfishness” except in terms of sacrificing others to oneself, and they cannot conceive of anyone who does not regard such sacrificing as to his own interest. This, of course, is a psychological confession about the nature of their own desires and about the Attila in their souls. When they declare that they see no difference between economic power and political power—which means: no difference between an employer and a holdup man, no difference between the United States and Soviet Russia—they are confessing a Witch Doctor’s abject fear of reality, which makes them equate a Producer with an Attila.

One would suppose that any man who makes claim to the title of moralist, humanitarian or intellectual would spend his life trying to devise—as an ideal— a social system where no man or group of men may initiate the use of physical force against others or demand the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. But when one remembers that such a system was devised and did exist less than a hundred years ago, one knows how to evaluate the brutes and thugs of the spirit who refuse to consider it possible.

So long as men believe that the initiation of physical force by some men against others is a proper part of an organized society—hatred, violence, brutality, destruction, slaughter and the savage gang warfare of group against group are all they can or will achieve. When physical force is the ultimate arbiter, men are driven to connive, conspire and gang up on one another in order to destroy rather than be destroyed; the best perish, but the Attilas rise to the top.

Primitive tribes could not conceive of a way of life without resort to physical violence—and the bloody chaos of tribal warfare was all they achieved, as those who remained on that level still demonstrate today. But when men propose to live in an industrial civilization by the moral concepts of those jungle savages, with nuclear missiles and H-bombs at their disposal—they deserve the catastrophes they ask for. Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of physical force against individual men, in any form whatever. Let no man posture as an advocate of freedom if he claims the right to establish his version of a good society where individual dissenters are to be suppressed by means of physical force. Let no man posture as an intellectual if he proposes to elevate a thug into the position of final authority over the intellect—or if he equates the power of physical compulsion with the power of persuasion—or if he equates the power of muscles with the power of ideas.

No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others.

No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion. If men of good will wish to come together for the purpose of upholding reason and establishing a rational society, they should begin by following the example of the cowboys in Western movies when the sheriff tells them at the door to a conference room: “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside.”

Those who will accept the “basic minimum” of civilization, the two principles stated above, will have made the first step toward the building of a new culture in the wide-open spaces of today’s intellectual vacuum. There is an ancient slogan that applies to our present position: “The king is dead—long live the king!” We can say, with the same dedication to the future: “The intellectuals are dead—long live the intellectuals!”—and then proceed to fulfill the responsibility which that honorable title had once implied.