#18.14 Gleanings from the John Galt Speech – Part 14

John Galt continues,

Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures-and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

Well, yeah, that fits the lifestyles of the rich and famous far more than it does the winos or whatever skid row bums the world over. I'm so sure that John Galt is supposedly trying to get the common man reading his words to think that all the world's problems are due to these wasted people and their political supporters. Bosh! This profile far better fits the whole outlook of someone born and raised in riches and acquainted with luxuries.

If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation-of yourself, of life, of virtue-in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

... to keep other people in their place so you can pluck their assets from them that much easier.

Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

Hey, John, are you asking me? I choose to define my own dignity on rational terms and am at present happy with it. I always love with fire and I have no idea how I will die. We'll see. Meanwhile, I see through the fog of unanswerable questions that are mostly irrelevant. My life is not torn by impossible conflicts. Nor do I spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good. I know of a few whose lives look like this, and I may even regard them as crazy, but no, John, none of these things are my problems.

Do you cry that you find no answers?

No.

By what means did you hope to find them?

Reason, John. These days using the Trivium as best I understand it.

You reject your tool of perception-your mind-then complain that the universe is a mystery.

Ah, but I do not, John.

You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you.

I don't, John. Besides, some of those doors I now know lead nowhere I want to go.

You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

Not me, John.

The fence you have been straddling for two hours-while hearing my words and seeking to escape them-is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true.

Yes, reality is final and the truth is true. This is the essential cornerstone of experience for all of us; the ultimate authority on everything. Meanwhile this would describe what is intended for us:

A moral code impossible to practice, which is represented as this bourgeois morality of sacrifice for nothing which no one believes in.

a code that demands imperfection or death, caused by the character of the elitists themselves.

has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, especially when deception is being practised, which is very often.

to permit no firm definitions, of course not, or at least no final decisions that are not approved by the elites; a Soviet style adviser, who gives unwanted advice, which must be heeded, because they arrogate to themselves the use of FORCE, through their surrogate governments, who are always kept in debt to them!

to regard any concept as approximate especially if from any but an official source.

and any rule of conduct as elastic, as long as you pay for and get their permission.

to hedge on any principle, as a matter of business ethics for the elites.

to compromise on any value, which goes also for their politicians.

to take the middle of any road. which is determined again by the elites.

Notice that middle of any road has gradually been pushed to the left, so that any real conservatism, in any of the Western countries, has been driven way off into the fringes, to be replaced by the people with Europe as an idea, or those who might see the same for North America, or some other geographic combination, serving as stepping stones to a world government, another of their grand delusions.

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, by taking advantage of your belief in God.

it [mysticism] has forced you to reject the absolute of nature.

Perhaps, but unlikely. The best education one can hope to acquire these days is a technical one, because there are absolutes involved with the proper operation and functioning of many technologies for which certain kinds of training is required, to produce those whose minds can wrap around technical problems and come up with real solutions. These are the John Galts of the modern economic equation. The elites cannot function without them.

By making moral judgements impossible,

it has made you incapable of rational judgement.

This is another obvious trend. We're lucky that by now we know that there really is a fundamental by which anything can be judged; existence, identity, description, etc. the basic grammar of any situation. The message is that the elites, have through their own chicanery, managed to make themselves unable to rationally tell right from wrong or to distinguish anything other than their own continued hold on power and other insatiable lusts.

Indeed as one gains a perspective on the intentions of their public policies, one grows increasingly aware that nothing they do makes any long term sense at all, except or unless they're intention is to poison and destroy everything, including nature itself, for what?  For what has become for them hopelessly irrational; crazy, beyond moral redemption, etc.; their demand to be the rulers of the world through a world government, a world religion (the worship of the earth itself as some sort of mother goddess) and of course the world monetary system, which will all be based on central banking, fractional reserve financing and usury as it has always been, world without end. But recall, we're really dealing on a psychological level with a bunch of savage babies ... with the power to wipe out all life on earth. Some recall the famous words in the old movie, “stop it you fools, you'll kill us all!”

A code that forbids you to cast the first stone,

Oh no, they cast the first stones all the time.

has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones

Nope, they know those perfectly well too, as well as any swordsman of old knew how to use his sword, perhaps even better.

and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

No, they know. They'll do the stoning too, as they have done on many occasions over many thousands of years.

The man who refuses to judge,

who neither agrees nor disagrees,

who declares that there are no absolutes

and believes that he escapes responsibility,

is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.

No John, the man who FORCED him to go to war did that and he did it on behalf of those who profit from wars, John. None of the rest of it matters at all.

Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

Taking this as intended seems even a little funny. Galt is clearly trying to form a bigoted perception of the poor as looters. Yes, where they are desperate enough, and circumstances permit, many poor will take to looting. They have little other choice, having no money! But evidence has also shown that, remarkable as it seems, middle class people are just as prone to take to looting, under certain circumstances. Therefore Galt's contention is disproved. However, knowing who the real looters of society are, and their profile, how do you feel about your economic substance drained into the accounts of the looters that front for the elites?

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

We like this in principle and liken it to another strict rule, that one cannot prove a negative. It's like dividing by zero, the results are undefined.

The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth,

if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.

But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth

in order to pretend that no choice or values exist,

who is willing to sit out the course of any battle,

willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent

or to crawl on his belly to the guilty,

who dispenses justice by condemning

both the robber and the robbed to jail,

who shoves conflicts by ordering

the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway.

In any compromise between food and poison,

it is only death that can win.

In any compromise between good and evil,

it is only evil that can profit.

In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil,

the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

Therefore, “come out of her, my people” is the appropriate response. 
 

But to get there requires an alternative system be established that can and will take the bulk of trade and help maintain an orderly market for the time when their system crashes. When that happens, they may just decide to declare the next day, after a bank holiday, that another system will be based on essentially the same models of lying, cheating and stealing with perhaps some other differently coloured notes and coins, etc. We know by now what money looks like and how to use it, so presumably most would just go on using whatever "the authorities" decree as "legal tender.". But all this does is further their grip on everything and empower them to do more evil. We simply can't and wont be able to go on like this.

You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself.

That certainly fits the flimflam con-artists of Wall Street pretty well.

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate,

then evil acquires the force of an absolute,

Galt equates evil with approximation, waffling, indecisiveness, double mindedness, deceit, all characteristics of elitists. They don't like being pinned down to any absolute that would openly reveal how evil their intentions really are, and of course they will make it sound as logical as you please, but certain obvious contradictions are not to be questioned, so any dealings with them is on the level of shark and prey.

when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous,

it’s picked up by scoundrels-and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

What is this unyielding purpose? The virtuous here are castigated for dropping their load, allowing scoundrels to hold sway. This is like the old ... bromide, to use one of Rand's favourite words, about evil triumphing due to the inactivity of good men to stop it. Good men can stop it and at least fictionally, Galt has shown us what to do; walk out of their system and never return to it, deny it power by removing yourself from it, etc. Galt's point is well taken; the system cannot run without the John Galts, who it uses and then discards. Why should you be among them? Meanwhile, we'd suggest that there is no unyielding purpose other than the relentless pursuit of the truth, that which is the ultimate authority about everything. Perhaps Rand is saying then, that those who would know themselves to be virtuous, have dropped the ball and compromised with those who aren't interested in the truth, but will settle for their own imposed authority, which can't help but be evil.

As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle [the collectivists] when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgement.

Ah yes, this is in many ways an apt description of today's scene.

When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right,

you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing.

When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions,

you assure them that you have no convictions whatever.

When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion-you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror.

What's really amazing, looking at all this, is the degree to which all of history could have been changed, had people known the depths of the deceptions being played out and by the hundreds of thousands just refused to go to war, just refused to help the war machines, just walked out of the banking and finance houses that were sponsoring the wars for their own profit. In point of fact then, every person who just went along with it contributed to their own deaths or those who died in some senseless fighting between essentially brother nations. We were supposed to know from obvious rational grounds based on existence, identity, etc. exactly what right and wrong are and to promote the good while punishing the wrong, which is justice.

When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you:

How dare you be rich-you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

Well, we did that too, but I really doubt any barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia was yelling. It was in and of the manner of a fix, a gigantic swindle as all such things are. In this case, Asians and Americans are being variously swindled to benefit certain people who may be living in Europe for a few months, the Middle East a few months and America the rest of the year. Those reaping the profits from all this of course contributed nothing of value into the transaction but value added costs traceable to certain new worldwide trade agencies, etc. who will now nanny everyone around and of course all that nannying must be paid for by extortions.

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist.

Ah yes, since there are too many people, then rightfully some of us should die and be willing to die for the good of the planet, for mother earth: the new world religion will be one of sacrificial death to appease the appetite of a mother goddess.

Once, you believed it [your right to exist]

was ‘only a compromise’:

you conceded it was evil to live for yourself,

but moral to live for the sake of your children.

This is the primary sacrifice any of us might make. It preserves our species.

Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children,

but moral to live for your community.

This is the sacrifice to the immediate surroundings, one's neighbourhood, civic pride, etc.

Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community,

but moral to live for your country.

Nationalism, patriotism, etc. another sacrifice.

Now, you are letting this greatest of countries

be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth,

Galt criticizes immigration policies; another sacrifice.

while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country

and that your moral duty is to live for the globe.

Globalism, world government, etc. Don't worry, you bet everyone will be expected to sacrifice.

A man who has no right to life,

has no right to values and will not keep them.

Galt / Rand have just poked the eye of the globalist. They have no rational basis for their globalism.

At the end of your road of successive betrayals,

stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honour,

Are you feeling it yet? Note that weapons were included.

you commit your final act of treason

and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy:

while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States

proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science,

you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle,

that reason is on the side of your destroyers,

but yours is the side of faith.

Update, the bourgeois morality that's still being flogged is pretty much dead now, money is the new God, those who have it, etc. The People’s States as Rand knew them, are all but gone or have transmogrified into globalist corporatist states.

To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason.

Back when this was written, bourgeois morality was at least superficially in fashion. There was even a school of thought which originated at the University of Chicago that has gained ascendency in policy making circles that claims something like a bourgeois morality is necessary to give society a proper cohesiveness; that it is akin to a necessary relic. That doesn't mean by any means that any of these policy makers actually believe in it. They believe what the elitists believe; sustainability as the buzzword for their own preservation and to hell with “the masses.”

You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational-

Rand meant this of the collectivists and their supporters, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to the code of the elites, who I have no doubt do tell their children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder other people, not themselves of course.

that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps, and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence-

Again, ordinary people, who might have done otherwise, cooperated in these evils. They were goaded into it by FORCE in many cases, but in most cases they were paid for their participation. Likewise many hundreds of people were involved in building skyscrapers and factories who were paid to participate in building them. If money had been less plentiful radios would not have been sold, perhaps the whole enterprise would have developed differently and been used differently too.

that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages.

Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity-you declare that the looters’ ideal are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away.

That was probably late 1950's philanthropy to a degree.

Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors-and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

Actually, all through this period the People's States were being kept alive through grants of foreign exchange, etc. Rand didn't know anything about this. She charges forth on her Aristotelian horse, attempting to vanquish all with philosophy, without a full perspective, a deficiency in her grammar.

You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking.

Oh yes, we know of these.

You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa-that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

Seriously, we think this is leading to a dead end. Any of the great historical dialectics were deliberately set up by those who stood to make the most money. It's just that simple. These people bet on both sides of the fence. They want to earn the ears of all who might be concerned. Few by now get off the strings that are attached to them.

You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith’ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code-that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading-that they practice it the only way it can be practised: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace-that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist-that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject.

This is sort of a give up that old bourgeois morality of self sacrifice, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, so that you might ... fight the collectivists? No. This is NOT a good strategy. Getting oneself prepared to exist on less, becoming self sufficient, doing almost everything that they do not recommend, walking out of their system and never looking back, that's a workable strategy and if millions do it and keep doing it, what will they do? Politics, according to E. C. Riegel is useless. We add that violence, the use of FORCE to settle anything, is also useless, worse than useless since it spends the most valuable assets of all, human lives.

You blank’ it out, because your self-esteem is tied to ‘that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practised, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror.

Well, this is 2013, not 1957 and much has changed.

No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities-and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction.

Some may be caught in this kind of jam, particularly if they have aligned themselves with any of the “green” agenda organizations, causes and activism.

The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

This is more about the John Galts of this world recognizing each other and working and trading among themselves for a rational outcome to human affairs.

By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death.

Life of a sort is certainly possible without self-esteem as all the world presently shows. However having more of it in rational proportion to what one is able to accomplish in virtuous acts to create value, wealth, etc. would certainly make the world a better place.

As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

Get that? To be evil, means to be unfit for existence. Rand is certainly not blurring anything here either as she postulates that a precise and absolute standard exists on purely rational grounds to deem someone evil and therefore unfit for life. Does she imply violence? She could not be doing so and renounce the first resort to violence without becoming inconsistent. Again, what is the solution? “Come out of her, my people.”

Every act of man’s life has to be willed;

the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved;

every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment.

He has no choice about his need of self-esteem,

his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it.

And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge

protecting his life into the service of his own destruction,

when he chooses a standard contradicting existence

and sets his self-esteem against reality.

... and since every act of man's life has to be willed, all the great follies of the past would not have happened had people been prepared and trained beforehand to march at a command, to go out to some field and kill other people one didn't even know and had no reason to be fighting, to work in factories where guns and bullets were made for the fighting to continue, or to work in the procurements businesses that supply armies. {I had this opportunity once a long time ago.  I'm happy I didn't make this wrong decision.]

Every form of causeless self-doubt,

every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact,

man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence.

Isn't it time that we all tried to deal with our existence?

But the greater his terror,

the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him.

No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.

To escape it-if he’s chosen an irrational Standard-

he will fake, evade, blank out;

he will cheat himself of reality, of existence,

of happiness, of mind;

and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem

by struggling to preserve its illusion

rather than to risk discovering its lack.

To fear to face an issue

is to believe that the worst is true.

The worst usually is true. What Galt is discussing here is of course the doing of justice to all that is wrong, taking the ultimate responsibility to settle matters with wrong doers, etc. The core of the bourgeois morality Rand hates is not it's sacrificing, but its non violence. “Vengeance is mine, I shall repay,” along with much else reinforces the message not to resist or fight against that which is evil, but rather to turn one's back on it and walk away from it.

It is not any crime you have committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them-

Facing up to one's own wrongs is the beginning of self-knowledge.

it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think.

We agree.

Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions,

they are real and you do deserve them,

but they don’t come from the superficial reasons

you invent to disguise their cause,

not from your ‘selfishness,’ weakness or ignorance,

but from a real and basic threat to your existence;

fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival,

guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

The last point underscores what I said earlier, that all the past's historical events, the really bad things like wars, etc. required ordinary people to participate else they wouldn't have happened.

The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential ‘you’ which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.’ Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.

Apparently. To be continued.

David Burton

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