#18.11 Gleanings from the John Galt Speech – Part 11

John Galt continues,

Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created-by whom? Blank-out.

This was a concept attributed by some to Leon Trotsky and other collectivists and served as a fundamental plank of Fabian socialism during the time Rand was a child. Again, the “share” is an equities or securities term applied to a product where it doesn't really apply. The kind of money and who gets to issue it, DOES apply and would determine whether a technology was considered beneficial or not, because those who wanted it would be able to buy it.

Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’ Supplied-by whom? Blank-out.

The frantic cowards here could only apply to collectivists as a group who seek a “government as Robin Hood solution,” no doubt with the other added fiction that Robin Hood was really a royal, therefore presumed to be virtuous. Are you beginning to understand how these myths circulate and why? But Galt / Rand acts as though the producers are not paid for their goods. They are paid for their goods, one way or another, but out of what created scarcity? She hasn't a clue. Blank-out.

Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being-but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out.

Interesting in that we DO have hoodlums posing as professors these days, do we not? But we care nothing for her characterization of the average poor man as irrational, or as some in the older mystical schools would have it, that the poor are poor due to karma, a string of wrong actions, or what have you.

Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind-and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce-on whom? Blank-out.

Everyone except the elites. And yes, we are seeing plenty of this right now. But these ideas do not arise from the poor who really and truly mostly would prefer a chance at independence, self-sufficiency from any government or corporation, the right to “live free or die.”

Random females with causeless incomes titter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand-of whom? Blank-out.

This was true back in the day and most of these spoiled brats were rich, not poor. But if these backward peoples of the world really had something we wanted, and apparently they do, else why would we be seeing what we are in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere right now?, and if they had their own money to pay for something we made and decided it would be better to buy it from us than make to it themselves, at least until they could figure it out and make it themselves, don't you think a real fair trade would result? The only demand would be that the money proffered would really buy something the producer wanted other than his products, to settle the split-barter. That's the only consideration the producer would logically have and which (the or an) VEN would supply.

And to forestall any enquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress-skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains-by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’

Yes, well we also know the basis for all such thoughts and have studied the intellectual history of this pattern going back at least into the 19^th century, again proceeding from the elites.

By the way, does anyone really know what an instinct is? It's supposedly something an animal possesses the knowledge of doing without supposedly having to learn how to do it. Ever wondered why beavers build beaver dams? Ever wondered why mammals living underground produce such intricate places to live? Ever wondered how spiders learn to spin webs? Next time you see a live spider in the centre of its web, spend some time and watch it. Take a tiny twig and drop it into its web. The spider will come out of the centre, examine the twig and then cut as many strands as necessary until the twig falls through the web, then repair the web and go back and sit in the centre. The whole process might take ten or fifteen minutes. Try as we might, we may never understand what animals really know or how they learn things. We have theory to explain much but not all. There are always limits to what we know and that's a fully rational statement. It's also a rational statement to suggest that we may never know everything there is to know.

Now Galt's speech continues,

Did you wonder what is wrong with the world?

(of course)

You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned.

Who have the most unearned wealth in the world at the moment? It is certainly not the indigent, so again, back at you!

All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body-you who have agreed to have no mind.

Churchmen that still remain are in a long since defeated position as far as worldly power goes, collectivists however remain and just change their spots like chameleons to obscure their true motives and intentions. Let's be very honest, if love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit then what is love? Who gets to decide what love is? Who gets to posit and broadcast the weird idea that “unconditional love” is something real and should be demanded of everyone? Furthermore, what is spirit? Have you ever seen spirit, touched it, eaten it? Is it real? Is it like the wind, something that we can feel against our skin but still cannot see, like it's effects? And if a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body then who gets to wield that whip? The collectivists, collectivism by any name you can think of from Bolshevism to tin-pot dictatorship, are all products sponsored by the elites, not of course for themselves, since they live above us all, the Barge as I used to call them. Mystery Babylon is probably a better name for expressing at least the source of their power, the corrupt and corrupting usury based monetary system that pretty much rules the present world. One last thing, look around you from the top to the bottom of society and you will see evidence that people have really decided not to think outside the paradigms given to them, to uncritically accept the unacceptable because of certain slogans that public relations and advertising have inserted into the information stream, things like that we must be concerned about overpopulation or protecting the earth from ourselves, etc.

Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them-that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens-they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

Right, and all against the imposed scarcity of a money system where the people who already have way too much money already, get to create the money, rather than the people who have next to nothing. Collectivism has never been for the good of the common people, never. It was instituted to rob and enslave them by those with more money and the presumed power to FORCE it on everyone. This is one of the elite's biggest lies. But yes, people are sheep or cattle in the sense that they are so easily goaded into believing such ideas are for their own good, or the good of the planet, or for what have you.

Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages-and power, the power to rule you by FORCE, has always been their only lust.

To do as you are told without question, is what they want and to get you to do, by the FORCE of fear and the contrivances of guilt, as their usual approach. I note from considerable personal observation, that those who rise higher and faster in most collectivist organizations, including corporations, are those who obligingly do exactly as they are told (by their superiors of course) without opening their mouths to consider any possible objection. Students in most schools likewise get the best marks for reflecting back the teacher's perspectives, rather than having any independent thoughts of their own, etc. These patterns are evidence of a longstanding structural deficiency in social relations that a new monetary system would tend to address.

From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries-to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their-hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn-to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural FORCE: Society-all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

Galt / Rand may have put it into philosophical terms, but really what's always been at stake here is freedom for all, or freedom for some and slavery for the rest, it's that simple. If you believe that you have inalienable rights that derive from no one, no government, no outside FORCE, maybe from an unseen God should you prefer, then you cannot deny freedom to a single other living human being. Life, liberty and property, including the right to create one's means of exchange if one has no money, set the practical boundaries to each human being's freedom.

If one would really be free, one would respect the rights of others to be as free, so one would not deliberately infringe on another's freedom to life liberty and property, etc. These are rational and easily understood concepts; enough on which to base (the or an) VEN. Notice that chaos is defeated by simple reason and nothing else.

But it [reducing you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness] cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

These days, even the matter of your consent is open to question as more and more that's done, under the colour of law, is intentionally devised to coerce your consent from you, so increasingly you'll have no choice but to obey. Once again, the “no child left behind” programme is a really good example of how this works.

When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind [and the assumed competence of theirs as in a Soviet] and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is-yours.

... and this also appears to apply well to our present circumstances. The encroachment on an individual's human liberties is a never ending battle until it is finally resolved by ... turning you backs on these people and walking right out of their system!

Now this is really very interesting,

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others.

This is what she either is trying to prove or it serves as an axiom.

Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty.

A LOT of fairly intelligent people do this all the time because they know just enough about the elite's power to be afraid. Fear of independence, of standing out, of being alone, any number of similar fears rise to challenge the option of independence for most.

At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think.

Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.

Yes. Why don't we all decide to suspend our judgements concerning the relative status of everyone else and see what happens? What if anyone's mind, no matter how slow or clouded and deluded with grandiose ideologies, was just as good at basic rational thinking as anyone else's? It isn't “quality of mind” that counts at all, it is the truth that matters, being able to observe and proceed from existence, through identity and classification, then on to removing contradictions and finally arriving at the truth. That's real thinking and anyone could do it if they were taught simple ways to pay attention to what their senses are telling them. What Galt / Rand say is basically accurate, but I would say that it begins when we are infants and we must rely on our mothers and later our family structures. Some parents are so cruel as to even attempt to impress upon their children their belief in their own superiority, so the child never thinks much of himself. This causes all kinds of trouble. I note also that dysfunctional families are most often to be found among the elites, rather than the poor or the increasingly besieged middle class.

His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

... and researchers will be led down enumerable paths trying to acquire “secret knowledge” or some such oddball claptrap the elites supposedly possess that gives them their power, assuming that magic trickery is the same as knowledge. There is no secret knowledge worth knowing unless you have the means and ability to ferret out crimes and can ensure that justice is done. Others who are just intent on becoming rich, or at least having enough cash on hand so they wont have to work anymore, chase after one scam after another. The same people behind these frauds and scams laugh at those who seek “secret knowledge” or ways to become fabulously rich without doing anything. Since there's really no difference, why not just go blow your money in Vegas? It's all just the same.

From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness-and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

Ever notice how the elites have figured out that keeping “the masses” in a constant state of terror does seem to work? But after a while, after it goes on for too long, what is the inevitable result? Consider that the numbers of people who represent “the masses” is growing and this implies there are more people who need to be terrorized by the elites so they can be kept in line, for what? For the next war of course, since they want you dead anyway, they might as well make more money while you're busy dying and killing as many other people you don't even know as possible. If you manage to survive, they'll make sure that the poisons their corporations made, deployed on the battlefields, will kill you quicker than natural causes and usually that you will be unable to reproduce. Not having children to contribute to their notion of “useless eaters” is good for them.

When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own.

A trifle convoluted, but no, the mystics Rand is talking about surrendered their consciousness to those they were convinced (fooled into believing), really had superior knowledge. Elsewhere we have seen this referred to as outsourcing your thinking.

A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to FORCE that omnipotent consciousness of others.

These are all the techniques associated with the elites. They like to be impressed, love to cheat because cheating is considered part of their elite entitlement, to flatter and especially to accept flattery, to deceive of course, especially if it starts a nice profitable little war that can be kept going for a good long time, and especially to bully by FORCE everyone else.

‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Who are the 'they' here? These are, in the present scheme of things, the accredited experts who have come under the elite's wings, sometimes as discovered talent or promoted from among sycophants. The elites do purpose to harness whatever mysterious power these expert's work might bestow. By extorting their unaccountable consent is usually inferred, “if you work for us and in accordance with our designs, you will be well paid.” That usually works for most people. Most will not work for prestige alone and those who have the least money are the least likely to even consider working only for prestige. The elites are likewise very often, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live, because oddly enough, for all their pretences to the contrary, they too are even more prone to outsourceing their thinking. We should not lightly roll over this apt description; To control the consciousness of others becomes his [the mystic elitiest's] only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. Our reasoned response again is to abandon them to their follies.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims-as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and FORCE-he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason.

Clearly so, besides which, haven't the schools just done a great job convincing the world that the study of how to reason is boring? Haven't the mass media done a great job of distracting people from the real issues facing them, encouraging people at every turn to follow this or that celebrity or this or that politician or this or that cause or this or that ... yeah, the study of reasoning, learning how to think, not what to think, is so dusty dull to most people that they'd almost always prefer to be doing something else, even if as it turns out there is a grain of reason to every beneficial action they take.

Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason-and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

Convoluted but yes, not only does the elitist dread reason, he dreads truth, honesty, integrity, even competence. This is why there is so much falsehood (including obnoxious and beside the point fictions, the garbage of the mind these days), lying, dishonesty and incompetence. These things are rewarded to support the elitist contentions that but for their servants they would accomplish more. Meanwhile their aims remain Faustian or rather Nietzschean. Now in what follows, just replace the word mystic with the word elitist and read along,

Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others-

... what usury allows bankers and others of his friends to steal.

just as he [the mystic] is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others-

... what corporations in monopoly or near monopoly positions do. Apparently Rand is equating spirit with inventiveness or the actual inventions or ideas for them; the patents. [Laurence, are you paying attention?]

so he [the mystic] falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

Well, such has been the condition of man since before anyone can remember, which is as good as saying since forever. So to them, and for the sake of their exalted positions, etc. etc. world without end, why bother changing it?

There is only one state that fulfils the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death.

This is actually probably a projection. The elitist wants US dead, he wants an eternity to live for himself and a chosen few of his friends.

No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence-and the feelings that move him [the mystic] from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

No matter whose welfare he [the mystic] professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension-in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

Wow! Isn't this accurate? !!

Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that, you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

Agreed! Still hope you've replaced the word mystic with elitist for the full whammy of her quite accurate appraisal.

You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders-there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction.

Those FORCES who have been hired by elitists please take note. You are expendable to them. They do not care at all about what happens to you, whether you might get shot or killed, poisoned or maimed. They pay you now, but in future, they owe you nothing, which is why they have spent more on robots, drones, etc. because they know instinctively that they cannot trust you. You'd better think to yourselves just which side of history you will be on, theirs which is soon to fall apart under the exposure of its blood soaked follies, or with the great majority of humanity who will sooner or later be forced by circumstances contrived by the elites to turn their backs on them, to walk out of their system into something of their own. You have a much better chance at a future against them than with them. Just saying.

You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions-there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in-and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

She might be right. Most elitists are hopped up on prescription drugs. Ever wonder why? They're depressed, that's why. Imagine you have nearly everything one in this world could desire and yet you are still not happy because an insatiable greed for you know not what devours your insides and ridicules your wealth and power.

You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder-the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their [the mystic's] mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they [the mystics] clamour for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live, but their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape.

Notice too that down deep they cannot escape the notion that they live spoiled selfish lives and nothing stolen from someone else really brings that much happiness. The rest was very descriptive and familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the elites.

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

It's peculiar how well this fits the outlook of certain enclaves of the rich and powerful. The rich cannot have too many real friends, even if they must choose them from among those who can afford their lifestyles. There is always competition. The latest billionaire wants all the other billionaires to lose theirs while he keeps his. That's staying even. Washington, DC is another place where it has long been known that ruining someone else is a sport to those in power. They do not want any competition. They fear it.

You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’-may the God you invented forgive you!-they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

Yes, that's probably close to exactly how we see it too, John.

It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.

What was it the Bible said, ah yeah, “The [human] heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9 KJV.

It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners-a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure-and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue. Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice-and you are the last of their victims.

All pretty good, but just replace the word last with latest to bring it up to date. Yes, you who are reading this, who are wide awake to understand the implications of everything you have been reading, YOU are the latest of their victims, if they can get you.

We, who are the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time-and I am the man who has called in the loan.

An excellent and instructive projection! The first sentence sounds closest to the perspective of someone, the we, who once was a servant of the elite who has seen the errors of his ways. Galt is saying that he has walked out on them, encouraged many more talented people to do the same. I am aware that Rand intended to castigate the poor, loafers, the economic losers of this world and to extol the virtues of the elites, but surely you have noticed how much more accurately Galt's words describe the elite at the top of the present power and money structures. Galt says they are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours. More financial terms used as metaphors, or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. The key word is moral for the issues that will define them from henceforth are matters of right and wrong more than anything else. A moral deficit is either too many wrong actions, or the philosophical decision to reject morality entirely as many elitists down through time have done. To be continued in the next post.

David Burton

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