"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing— you who dread knowledge— I am the man who will now tell you." 

The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television 
set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; 
the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of 
the country— of the world, thought the chief engineer— sounding as if he were 
speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the 
tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind. 

"You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said 
it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. 

You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have 
cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you 
demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more 
sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, 
you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your 
plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed 
independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. 

You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to 
self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. 

"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all 
that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the 
sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it 
is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought 
into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you 
have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I —I am the man who has granted 
you your wish. 

"Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was 
designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your 
way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you 
were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your 
motor. I have deprived your world of man's mind. 

"Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The 
mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are 
values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there 
aren't. 

"While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of 
independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem— I beat you to it, I 
reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and 
the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently 
generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality— mine . It 
is mine that they chose to follow. 

"All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it 
is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not 
choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not 
recognize such duty- Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a 
claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't, Do not beg us to return. We are 
on strike, we, the men of the mind. 

"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the 
creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the 



dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against 
the doctrine that life is guilt. 

"There is a difference between our strike and all those you've practiced 
for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting 
them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you 
any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not 
to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to 
your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles 
any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have 
chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality— the 
reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind. 

"We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been 
the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to 
you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to 
offer us. We do not need you. 

"Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of 
ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral 
cannibals, I know that you've always known what it was that you wanted. But 
your game is up, because now we know it, too. 

"Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code 
of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges 
were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to 
spill al ! the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you 
damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took 
the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom- 
while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not 
good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?— by 
what standard? 

"You wanted to know John Galt's identity. I am the man who has asked that 
question . 

"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for 
your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature 
that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. 
Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its 
course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return 
to morality— you who have never known any— 

but to discover it. 

"You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. 
You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by 
whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God's 
purpose or your neighbor's welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave 
or else next door— but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you 
have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be 
served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against 
you, not to further your life, but to drain it. 

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who 
claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs 
to your neighbors— between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice 
for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is 
self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say 
that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it. 

"Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self 
interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, 
that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and 
force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is 
no right or wrong in reason— that in reason there's no reason to be moral. 



"Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your 
moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their schemes and 
systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to 
learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life. 

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival 
is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to 
him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act 
he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food 
without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a 
ditch— or build a cyclotron— without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to 
achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. 

"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 
'human nature, ' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact 
that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work 
automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic 
are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is 
automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your 
life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to 
escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival— 
so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is 
the question 'to think or not to think.' 

"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. 
He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one 
acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps 
it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for 
what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action 
in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are 
possible . 

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or 
non-existence— and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living 
organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence 
of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is 
indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is 
only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life 
or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If 
an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but 
its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' 

that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity 
that things can be good or evil. 

"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the 
chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life 
is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of 
action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is 
no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it 
cannot act for its own destruction. 

"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with 
an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or 
evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions 
where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it 
acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is 
unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as 
its own destroyer. 

"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from 
all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives 
by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good 
for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it 
requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self preservation? An 



instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 
'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an 
instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for 
living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil 
today is that (hat is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a 
love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must 
obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which 
nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own 
destroyer— and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. 

"A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not 
survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to 
break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. 
But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind. 

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of 
choice— and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or 
suicidal animal, Man has to be man— by choice; he has to hold his life as a 
value— by choice; he has to learn to sustain it— by choice; he has to discover 
the values it requires and practice his virtues— by choice. 

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. 

"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever 
living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, 
to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to 
man, and Man's Life is its standard of value. 

"AH that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all 
that which destroys it is the evil. 

"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless 
brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking 
being— not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement— 
not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's 
survival: reason. 

"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. 
If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values 
by the standard of that which is proper to man— for the purpose of preserving, 
fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life. 

"Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will 
destroy it- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of 
his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a 
metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the 
fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, 
capable of nothing but pain. 

"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. 

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the 
achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find 
happiness in the renunciation of your happiness— to value the failure of your 
values— is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an 
ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of 
others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the 
nature of life, man— every man— is an end in himself, he exists for his own 
sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose. 

"But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of 
irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random 
manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free 
to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration 
is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose 
of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and 
live . 



"Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the 
profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no 
values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man 
is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they 
have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living 
species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that 
a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of 
smell— but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any 
way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there's no practical reason 
why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind 
throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue. 

"Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity 
and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life 
as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb 
man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self- 
preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to 
be moral is the man who desires to live. 

"No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you 
choose to live, you must live as a man— by the work and the judgment of your 
mind . 

"No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But 
you cannot live as anything else— and the alternative is that state of living 
death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit 
for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows 
nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of 
unthinking self-destruction. 

"No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone 
had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on 
existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to 
sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil. 

"No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there 
any longer. I have removed your means of survival— your victims. 

"If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them 
quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am 
making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how 
great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re- 
evaluation, but only an identification of their values. 

"We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a 
single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours 
is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists. 

"Existence exists— and the act of grasping that statement implies two 
corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one 
exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of 
perceiving that which exists. 

"If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with 
nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness 
conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could 
identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If 
that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not 
consciousness . 

"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two— existence and 
consciousness— are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible 
primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge 
and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your 
life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know 
the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain 
the same: that it exists and that you know it. 



"To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non- 
existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific 
attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was— no matter what his errors —the 
greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept 
of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You 
have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: 
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. 

"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an 
action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the 
same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot 
freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in 
simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. 

"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters 
that have wrecked your world, came from your leadersl attempt to evade the 
fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all 
the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact 
that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you 
forget that Man is Man. 

"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only 
means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and 
integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to 
give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to 
his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must 
be learned by his mind. 

"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man 
perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his 
touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the 
object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that 
the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the 
molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind 
consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish 
the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that 
existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. 

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; 
neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. 
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction 
into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to 
confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to 
abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality. 

"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is 
merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human 
consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of 
reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of 
truth . 

"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The 
answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your 
own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you 
can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask 
others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth— and if others 
dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but 
a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of 
identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own 
judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity. 

"You who speak of a 'moral instinct' as if it were some separate endowment 
opposed to reason— man's reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a 
process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?— Right or 
Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow— right or wrong? Is a 



man's wound to be disinfected in order to save his life— right or wrong? Does 
the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic 
power— right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you 
everything you have— and the answers came from a man's mind, a mind of 
intransigent devotion to that which is right. 

"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step 
of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to 
cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest— but if devotion 
to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more 
heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility 
of thinking. 

"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that 
which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only 
will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices 
you make and determines your life and your character. 

"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. 
And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which 
all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, 
the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think— not 
blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It 
is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the 
responsibility of judgment— on the unstated premise that a thing will not 
exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you 
do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.' 

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an 
attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped 
out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' 

you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are 
negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'— he is 
declaring: 'Who am I to live?' 

"This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking 
or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. 

"To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing 
his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing 
his actions is death. 

"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no 
morality on a desert island— it is on a desert island that he would need it 
most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a 
rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth 
without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring 
his stock seed today— and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality 
will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only 
coin noble enough to buy it. 

"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only 
moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a 'moral commandment' is a 
contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the 
understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no 
commandments . 

"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: 
existence exists— and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from 
these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values 
of his life: Reason— Purpose— Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of 
knowledge— Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must 
proceed to achieve— Self -esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is 
competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is 
worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, 
and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: 



rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, 
pride . 

"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that 
nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of 
perceiving it, which is thinking— that the mind is one's only judge of values 
and one's only guide of action— that reason is an absolute that permits no 
compromise— that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's 
consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking 
reality— that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a 
short-circuit destroying the mind— that the acceptance of a mystical invention 
is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's 
consciousness . 

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the 
responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it— that no 
substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life— 

that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the 
subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an 
authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his 
say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your 
existence . 

"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your 
consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot 
fake existence— that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two 
attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach 
between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his 
convictions— that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not 
sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind 
shouting pleas or threats against him— that courage and confidence are 
practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to 
existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of 
being true to one's own consciousness. 

"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can 
have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by 
fraud— that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an 
act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you 
become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their 
evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness 
become the enemies you have to dread and flee— that you do not care to live as 
a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a 
fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling— that honesty 
is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most 
profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the 
reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. 

"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character 
of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all 
men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect 
for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a 
process of identification— that every man must be judged for what he is and 
treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty 
chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a 
rotter above a hero— that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for 
their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an 
honor as you bring to financial transactions— that to withhold your contempt 
from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your 
admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement— that to place 
any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and 
defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a 



default of justice and only the evil can profit— and that the bottom of the 
pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men 
for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse 
to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of 
your consciousness to the destruction of existence. 

"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the 
fact that you choose to live— that productive work is the process by which 
man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring 
knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea 
into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values— that 
all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative 
if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned 
from others— that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as 
your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human— 
that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to 
become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to 
settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is 
to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay— that 
your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition 
for values is to lose your ambition to live— that your body is a machine, but 
your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take 
you, with achievement as the goal of your road— that the man who has no 
purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to 
crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a 
stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader 
prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man 
who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up— 
that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any 
killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find 
outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you 
choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power 
in the same direction. 

"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value 
and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned— that of any achievements 
open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your 
own character— that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions 
are the products of the premises held by your mind— that as man must produce 
the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the 
values of character that make his life worth sustaining— that as man is a 
being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul— that to live 
requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no 
automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the 
image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born 
able to create, but must create by choice— that the first precondition of 
self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all 
things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to 
achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself— and that 
the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and 
rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile 
impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value 
which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your 
existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others. 

"Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned 
the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, 
corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty 
secret, spending your Me in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it 
be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now 



saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and 
of the fact that I wish to live. 

"This wish— which you share, yet submerge as an evil— is the only remnant of 
the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own 
happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve 
it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or 
sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue— and 
happiness is the goal and the reward of life. 

"Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as 
signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life 
or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and 
suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of 
that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving 
you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to 
feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good 
or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire 
or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your 
nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity 
is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills 
it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode 
your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine 
which you, the driver, have corrupted. 

"If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible 
as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for 
a fortune or a love you don't deserve, for a loophole in the law of 
causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the 
opposite of existence— you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that 
life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: 
it brought you where you wanted to go. 

"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. 
Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might 
blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy— a 
joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your 
values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping 
from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking 
reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, 
but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who 
desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and 
finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. 

"Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own 
effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor 
of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the 
pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure 
as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my 
values and no conflicts among my desires— so there are no victims and no 
conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned 
and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make 
sacrifices nor accept them. 

"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of 
respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, 
are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what 
he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be 
paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws, A trader 
does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not 
give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the 
values of his spirit— his love, his friendship, his esteem— except in payment 
and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, 



which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, 
throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while 
honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their 
sneers: a trader is the entity they dread— a man of justice. 
"Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? 

None— except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all 
of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: 
by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations 
as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. 

It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self 
interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they 
don't, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not 
swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to 
nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who 
surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no 
benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The 
only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a 
rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will 
learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. 

"Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may 
not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or 
forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate— do you 
hear me? no man may start— the use of physical force against others. 

"To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his 
perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to 
force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against 
his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of 
force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than 
murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live. 

"Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of 
your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends 
where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and 
propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can 
no longer claim the sanction of reason— as no advocate of contradictions can 
claim it. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only 
means of judging right and wrong: the mind. 

"To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a 
substitute, with a gun in. place of a syllogism, with terror in place of 
proof, and death as the final argument— is to attempt to exist in defiance of 
reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; 
your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with 
death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with 
death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is 
the surrender of all the virtues required by life— and death by a process of 
gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death 
is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men. 

"Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your 
money or your life, ' or a politician who confronts a country with the 
ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life, ' the meaning of that 
ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life'— and neither is possible to man without 
the other. 

"If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more 
contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or 
the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. 

That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not 
grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do 
not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I 



do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man 
attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him— by force. 

"It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man 
who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of 
morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he 
had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it 
only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; 
I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of 
evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil. 

"In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your 
death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our 
own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can't have both. We do 
not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their 
hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be 
on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of 
yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death 
to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as 
his reward for accepting ours. 

"You who are worshippers of the zero— you have never discovered that 
achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not 'the 
absence of pain, ' intelligence is not 'the absence of stupidity, ' light is 
not 'the absence of darkness, ' an entity is not 'the absence of a nonentity.' 
Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and 
waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to 
abstain from demolishing— and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: 
'Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.' I 
am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own 
void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an 
absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we 
let it extort from. us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot 
hold a mortgage over life. 

"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. 

You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of 
earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our 
incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to 
live . 

"You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear 
and joy are incentives of equal power— and secretly add that fear is the more 
' practical ' —you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you 
to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your 
days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare 
not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror 
the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The 
purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the 
thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death. 

"Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you 
have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to 
destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop 
running, for once— there is no place to run- 
stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at 
what you dared to call a moral code. 

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, 
means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he 
practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It 
demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity 
without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but 



with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to 
define the good: the good is that which he is not. 

"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory 
and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any 
passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him— it 
does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl 
through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray 
collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the 
good is that which is non-man. 

"The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin, "A sin without 
volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that 
which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of 
morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if 
he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, 
as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold 
man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he 
committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a 
matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, 
nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil 
hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. 

"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, 
but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is. like a 
game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of 
playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is 
weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the 
tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his 
choice, his will is not free. 

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? 
What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider 
perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of 
knowledge— he acquired a mind and became a rational being. 

It was the knowledge of good and evil— he became a moral being. He was 
sentenced to earn his bread by his labor— he became a productive being. He was 
sentenced to experience desire— he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. 
The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness , joy— all 
the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of 
man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they 
hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was— that 
robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, 
without labor, without love— he was not man. 

"Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues 
required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. 

His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that 
he lives. 

"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. 

"No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that 
alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only 
wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his 
pain— and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack 
with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the 
doctrine that splits his soul and body. 

"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have 
taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in 
deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, 
incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul 
belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in 
bondage to this earth— and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine 



it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break 
which leads into the freedom of the grave. 

"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, 
both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a 
body is a ghost— yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of 
a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil 
volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything 
known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists. 

"Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? 
It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. 
Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he 
could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and 
of a soul moved by mystic revelations- 
he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot 
and a dictaphone. 

"And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to 
live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that 
he'll find no solution, and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real 
existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true 
consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent— and if he is 
unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and 
his. consciousness impotent. 

"As products of the split between man's soul and body, there are two kinds 
of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics 
of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who 
believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence 
without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their 
revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture 
in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and 
so are their aims: in matter— the enslavement of man's body, in spirit— the 
destruction of his mind. 

"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only 
definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive— a definition that 
invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The 
good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society— a thing which they define as an 
organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in 
particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man's mind, say the 
mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God, Man's mind, say 
the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's 
standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose 
standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on 
faith. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of 
Society, whose standards are beyond man's right of judgment and must be 
obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man's life, say both, is to 
become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he 
is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to 
him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on 
earth— to his great-grandchildren. 

"Self ishness— say both— is man's evil. Man's good— say both— is to give up his 
personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man's good is 
to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice— cry both— is the essence of morality, 
the highest virtue within man's reach. 

"Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not 
man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of 
that darkness in which you're drowning, and if there still remains within you 
the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been 
yourself— use it now. The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice.' Use the 



last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have 
a chance. 

" 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the 
precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of 
the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' 

is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't. 

"If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you 
exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, 
after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for 
the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your 
starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor's 
child and let your own die, it is. 

"If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it 
to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, 
it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own 
discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral 
standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself— 

that is the virtue of sacrifice in full. 

"If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you 
love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, 
which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act 
of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate— that is 
the greatest of the virtues you can practice, "A sacrifice is the surrender 
of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to 
achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, 
no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of 
being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you 
pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that 
brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no 
reward— if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal 
of moral perfection. 

"You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man— and, by this 
standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of 
your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in 
approaching that ideal zero which is death. 

"If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to 
be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not 
win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. 
It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal 
desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must 
love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor 
it can give you— you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your 
desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not 
mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but 
death by slow torture. 

"Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am 
concerned with no other. Neither are you. 

"If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best 
actions a 'sacrifice': that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food 
for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: 
she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind 
of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve 
and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own 
freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it 
is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing. 

If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he 
is the sort of man who has no convictions. 



"Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice— no 
values, no standards, no j udgment— those whose desires are irrational whims, 
blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose 
desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right 
to the wrong, of the good to the evil. 

"The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral— a morality that 
declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can't impart to men any 
personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of 
depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it 
is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant 
punishment . 

"Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it's only material values 
that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are 
material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction 
of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. 

To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has 
produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you 
do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose 
opposed to your own— else your gift is not a sacrifice. 

"Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce 
your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in 
material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions 
contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite- 
yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from 
matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another— 

the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another— the man who 
considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of 
another— the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his 
effort to the production of trash— these are the men who have renounced 
matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought 
into material reality. 

"Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. 
You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of 
matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. 
Renounce your body and you become a fake. 

Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil. 

"And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code 
demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do 
not admire, submit to that which you consider evil- 
surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your 
self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat 
ready for any cannibal to swallow. 

"It is your mind that they want you to surrender— all those who preach the 
creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand 
it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you 
another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by 
saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to 
the wishes of others'— end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your 
convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.' 

"This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind 
that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its 
judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, 
your logic, your reason, your standard of truth— 

in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for 
the greatest number. 

"If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: 
'What is the good?'— the only answer you will find is 'The good of others.' 



The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or 
whatever you feel they ought to feel. 'The good of others' 

is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be 
recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even 
the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not 
an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no 
success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others —all you need to 
know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only 
definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.' 

"Your code— which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral 
values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective —your code 
hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral 
conduct: If you wish it, it's evil; if others wish it, it's good; if the 
motive of your action is your welfare, don't do it; if the motive is the 
welfare of others, then anything goes. 

"As this double- j ointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so 
it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest 
of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You 
are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the 
rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors 
never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or 
the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon 
them by a negative, by the fact that they are 'non-you.' 

"For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a 
consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that 
you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is 
to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to 
surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to 
protect all men except yourself— and if you find no joy in this procedure, it 
is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would 
find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in 
existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you. 

"You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not 
ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to 
acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. 

You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, 
while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a 
principle too vicious to name. 

"I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am 
here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness 
of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when 
experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation 
of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, 
but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it 
immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral 
to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not 
moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If 
you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and 
vicious when they take it? 

Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are 
good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil? 

'The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not 
evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral 
for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to 
deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for 
them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right. 



"Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double 
standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the 
effort of others— it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to 
consume the products of others— it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch— it 
is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the 
producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself— it is evil 
to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice— it is evil to 
create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of 
others . 

"Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by 
opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire 
nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters 
and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you 
to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value. 

"Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim 
upon those who don't lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to 
rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right 
to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to 
the lives of mankind. 

"If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man 
who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your 
wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the 
result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It 
is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that 
gives you a mortgage on all of existence. 

"If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: 
your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value 
you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire 
it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral 
acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a 
payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial 
realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral 
transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the 
other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your 
lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right. 

"A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness— nonexistence— as 
its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, 
incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw— the 
zero . 

"Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for 
being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since 
all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as 
the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure 
of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself 
to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the 
dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving 
loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem 
to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you 
see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral 
code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues. 

"Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; 
the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim 
and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving 
himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. 
He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he 
is both a beggar and a sucker. 



"You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is 
rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man 
who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you 
feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, 
the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to 
surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is 
rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others— you struggle to 
evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted 
you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you 
swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth— and you give up the 
problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be 
achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can 
and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self- 
esteem were possible and they expected you to have it Guilt is all that you 
retain within your soul— and so does every other man, as he goes past, 
avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved 
brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man? 

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more 
corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your 
sacrifice, it tells you, should be love— the love you ought to feel for every 
man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are 
more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who 
gives her body indiscriminately to all men— this same morality demands that 
you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers. 

"As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or 
any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, 
an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. 

The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love 
those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is 
possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is 
as valuable as gold. 

"Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his 
kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving 
you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when 
it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you 
accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling 
causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the 
attention of a psychiatrist; you are not 1034 so careful to protect the 
meaning, the nature and the dignity of love. 

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn 
for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the 
emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of 
another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and 
hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to 
his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a 
blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to 
set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral 
judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of 
evil in Its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it 
permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it 
tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy 
of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love 
to 'those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love 
you owe them— the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love— the more 
unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue— and if you can bring your 
soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if 



you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral 
perfection . 

"Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it 
offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human 
stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump. 

"Such was your goal— and you've reached it. Why do you now moan complaints 
about man's impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were 
unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy 
by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your 
standard of value? 

"The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your 
moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, 
you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a 
look at them now, when you face your last choice— and if you choose to perish, 
do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your 
life. 

"The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs 
that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. 
They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a 
mode of consciousness superior to reason— like a special pull with some 
bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. 
The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this 
special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of 
your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to 
extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, 
and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of 
unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own 
consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as 
proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of 
everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with 
existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, 
destruction . 

"They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence 
on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it 'another dimension, ' which 
consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it 'the future, ' 
which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What 
identity are they able to give to their superior realm? 

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All 
their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind 
can know, they say— and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge— God 
is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is 
non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions 
are not acts of defining, but of wiping out. 

"It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a 
universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to 
seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature— escape from the 
necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe 
is blood. 

"What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the 
world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle 
curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the 
second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non- 
material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, 
where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them 
from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit- 
chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue— of intelligence, integrity, 
energy, skill— is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance 



of one mile; in their nonmaterial, non-profit world, they travel from planet 
to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: 'How?'— they 
answer with righteous scorn that a 'how' is the concept of vulgar realists; 
the concept of superior spirits is 'Somehow.' On this earth restricted by 
matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of 
such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing. 

"And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their 
esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their 
evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy 
civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they 
pierce "their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their 
minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, 
matter, existence, reality— is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy 
absolute: their Wish. 

"The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom 
they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what 
their tears or tantrums— that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what 
their hunger— that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they 
could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a 
skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the 
nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not— that their 
feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space 
or the nature of any action they have committed. 

"Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted 
by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted 
by their feelings. 'Things as they are' are things as perceived by your mind; 
divorce them from reason and they become 'things as perceived by your 
wishes . ' 

"There is no honest revolt against reason— and when you accept any part of 
their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not 
permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if 
you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to 
charity or how many prayers you recite— that if you sleep with sluts, you're 
not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your 
wife next morning— that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces 
scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to 
anything., the universe of a child's nightmare where identities switch and 
swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily 
assumed at will— that you are a man— that you are an entity— that you are. 

"No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a 
higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non- 
existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be. 

"Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in 
their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their 
emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their 
emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an 
irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not 
desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, 
therefore I want it.' They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.' 

"They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want 
their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating 
existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their 
consciousness— they want to be that God they created in their image and 
likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. 
But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their 
desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the 



power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to 
the horror of a perpetual unknown. 

"Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you 
worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, 
incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your 
glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. 

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot 
explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you 
forbade your mind to revise. 

"Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of 
exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever 
you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I 
stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will 
be a man of reason about all else— that was the act of subverting your 
consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed 
jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the 
evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch— and a censored reality is the 
result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating 
among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid 
of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought. 

"The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek 
to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. 

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Al ! 

actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and 
determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in 
contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be 
caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity 
controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent— which is the 
universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless 
action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their 
morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the 
reign of the zero. 

"The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, 
too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you 
have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you 
pretend to yourself and to others that you don't see— then you can try to 
proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach 
that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the 
way to produce is to start by consuming, that "all wishers have an equal 
claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of 
the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit. 

"Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent 
desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, 
as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause— 

you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you 
virtue, the cause— you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could 
give you ability, the cause— you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an 
unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge 
your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while 
they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the 
cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your 
sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause. 

"Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, 
condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony 
disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the 
mind . 



"We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the 
process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and 
discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, 
to desire, to love. You who abandon reason— were it not for us who preserve 
it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You 
would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the 
automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, 
as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been 
experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and 
pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to 
value . 

"You— who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the 
Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric 
lights, but to destroy the generators— it is our wealth that you use while 
destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our 
language that you use while denying the mind. 

"Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our 
earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle 
out of non-matter— so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and 
promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will 
into all the rewards desired by your non-mind. 

"For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection 
racket— by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation 
and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then 
riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be 
sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, 
were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their 
moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason— we who thought and 
acted, while they wished and prayed— we who were moral outcasts, we who were 
bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime— while they basked in 
moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing 
in selfless charity the material goods produced by— blank-out . 

"Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant 
us even the identification of sinners— by savages who proclaim that we do not 
exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don't possess, if we fail 
to provide them with the goods we don't produce. Now we are expected to 
continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive 
after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running 
steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the 
cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in 
mid-air— 

while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the 
carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no 
principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind. 

"Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words 
he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be 
altered by the power of the words they do not utter— and their magic tool is 
the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the 
voodoo of their refusal to identify it. 

"As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in 
mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is 
stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts 
while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As 
they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, 
not to think, but to take over human thinking. 

"As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the 
ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who 



created the factory— so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing 
exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing 
which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept 
as 'motion.' As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank 
out the question of who's to produce it— so they proclaim that there is no law 
of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that 
change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that 
without the law of identity no such concept as 'change' is possible. As they 
rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power 
over all of existence while denying that existence exists. 

" 'We know that we know nothing, ' they chatter, blanking out the fact that 
they are claiming knowledge— ' There are no absolutes, ' they chatter, blanking 
out the fact that they are uttering an absolute— ' You cannot prove that you 
exist or that you're conscious,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that 
proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: 
the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and 
of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the 
proved and the unproved. 

"When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must 
be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence— when he 
declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it 
by means of unconsciousness— he is asking you to step into a void outside of 
existence and consciousness to give him proof of both— he is asking you to 
become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, "When he declares that an axiom 
is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn't choose to accept the axiom 
that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering 
that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound 
no theories and die. 

"An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any 
further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily 
contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify 
it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact 
that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny 
it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try 
to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept 
derived from it— let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the 
existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or 
verbs— let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of 
sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by 
sensory perception —let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the 
validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic— let the pigmy who 
proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth 
story, yank the base from under his building, not yours— let the cannibal who 
snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed to create an industrial 
civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and 
bearskin, not a university chair of economics. 

"Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you 
back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the 
era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language . Their purpose is to deprive 
you of the concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depend: the 
concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human 
consciousness— and you will know the purpose of their creed. 

"A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is 
real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby's, at the stage when a 
consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to 
distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur 
of motion, without things that move— and the birth of his mind is the day when 



he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and 
the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and 
neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they 
exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he 
grasps that he has— and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he 
grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is 
real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a 
delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is 
not a city, it is a city's reflection— the day when he grasps that he is not a 
passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do 
not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of 
context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn 
to integrate— the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that 
physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are 
physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the 
evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand 
it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his 
sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives— that is 
the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist. 

"We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it 
partly; a savage is a man who never does. 

"To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where 
anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. 

His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. 
He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, 
moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the 
mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by 
demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid 
plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife 
into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any 
non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not 
attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his 
life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the 
arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the 
blame when they don't, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and 
sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship 
of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as 
their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask 
sufficiently frightening— he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, 
as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his 
idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of 
non-A. 

"His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the 
world to which they want to bring you. 

"If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college 
classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man 
can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, 
that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he's incapable of 
knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and 
truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they 
teach, there's only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no 
more valid than another's faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of 
science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in 
revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is 
an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a 
rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon— truth is 
whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; 



reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, 
there are only people's arbitrary wishes— a man who seeks knowledge in a 
laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, 
superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public 
polls— and if it weren't for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel 
girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, 
you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the 
entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that 
their beliefs forbid its existence. 

"For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is 
superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason. 

Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job 
and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it 
a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they 
proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural 
knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the 
enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt 
against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind. 

"If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your 
standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell 
you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes 
you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the 
collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not 
the whole of mankind, they will answer: 'By what means do you know that we 
are not? Are, brother? 

Where did you get that old-fashioned term? ' 

"If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate 
consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a 
concept such as 'mind' has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined 
verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in 
midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the 
concept of 'thinking.' Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of 
'reflexes,' 'reactions,' 'experiences,' 'urges,' and 'drives' 

—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, 
to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are 
performing when you listen. Words have the power to 'condition' you, they say 
and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your— 
blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of— 
blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of— 
blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle 
a conflict, does it by means of— blank-out . An industrialist— blank-out— there 
is no such person. A factory is a 'natural resource, ' like a tree, a rock or 
a mud puddle. 

"The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no 
study or concern; the only problem left for your 'reflexes' to solve is now 
the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, 
they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get 
here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes. 

"They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, 
the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive 
his 'minimum sustenance ' —his food, his clothes, his shelter— with no effort on 
his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it— from whom? Blank-out. 
Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits 
created in the world. 

Created— by whom? Blank-out. 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. 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. 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. 
Random females with causeless incomes flitter 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. 

"And to forestall any inquiry 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.' 

"Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the 
climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. 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. 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. 

"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. 

"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. 

"But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be 
done, you deserve it. 

"When you listen to a mystic's harangue on the impotence of the human mind 
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. 

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the 
minds of others. 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 dependence that he renounced his rational faculty. 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. 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. 

"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. 

"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 mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, 
to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. 
'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. 

"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. 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 rests 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. 

"Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth 
created by others— just as he is a parasite in spirit, who 

plunders the ideas created by others— so he 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. 

"There is only one state that fulfills the mystic's longing for infinity, 
non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he 
ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects 
existence— and the feelings that move him 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 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. 

"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. 

"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. 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. 

"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 mind the nature of their 
motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor 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. 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. 

"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. 

"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. 

"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. 

"We, who were 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. 

"I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you 
to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You 
did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried 
the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did 
not want me to die, because you knew it. 

"Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor. 

I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be 
first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who 
asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his 
mind . 

"Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered 
the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the 
birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an 
object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I 
completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune 
for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the 
efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the 
gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living. 

"Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death 
by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and 
my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and 
depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, 
they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right 
to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to 
live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence. 

"Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and 
nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy 
was an inverted morality— and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that 
evil was impotent— that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real— and 
that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve 
it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless 
dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery 
they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self- 
immolation to provide them with the means of their plan— so throughout the 
world and throughout men's history, in every version and form, from the 
extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, 
it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, 
who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them 
the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and 
for their own values— the impotence of death. 

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when 
his own consent is needed for evil to win— and that no manner of injury done 
to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw 
that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my 
mind. I pronounced it. The word was 'No.' 

"I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your 
victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method 
was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice. 

"If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers 
deserted your world— stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness 



unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve 
and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to 
teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be 
able to discover— ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have 
reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on 
performing the actions you learned from others— ask yourself whether you would 
be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you 
would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an 
electronic tube— then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by 
the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and 
whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let 
your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and 
pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, 
century by century— then let them ask themselves whether their 'instinct of 
tool-making' will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their 
washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to 
destroy those who provided it all, but not 'by instinct.' 

"Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by 
men's means of production, that a machine is not the product of human 
thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never 
discovered the industrial age— and you cling to the morality of the barbarian 
eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular 
labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him 
from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, 
stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of 
enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, 
industrialists. 

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are 
clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that 
the answer you deserve is only: 'Try and get it.' 

"You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, 
yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you 
cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to 
dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge 
the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force— and expect that 
we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, 
will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a 
chance to command us . 

"You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: 
that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives 
of others— that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an 
omnipotent ruler— that you're unable to earn your living by the use of your 
own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of 
total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never 
studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic 
industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be 
unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser. 

"This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence— 

the congenital dependent— is your image of man and your standard of value, 
in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. 'It's only human, ' you 
cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where 
you seek to make the concept 'human' mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, 
the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human 
race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the 
purposeful, the pure— as if 'to feel' were human, but to think were not, as if 
to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but 



virtue were not —as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the 
premise of life were not. 

"In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our 
wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral 
recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be nonprofit, and damn the 
men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as 'in 
the public interest' any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in 
the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. 
'Public benefit' is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure 
the public. 'Public welfare' 

is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to 
no welfare. 'The public, ' to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue 
or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for 
survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human 
race . 

"What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this 
muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the 'No' of 
your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What 
permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and 
to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are 
counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught 
you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the 
presence of your vices, wounds and failures— guilty of succeeding at 
existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you 
to live, "Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of 
ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not 
do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. 
I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who 
wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them, alive. I am the first 
man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal 
with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without 
me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the 
need and whose the ability— and if human survival is the standard, whose terms 
would set the way to survive. 

"I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history 
by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on 
strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their 
action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his 
thoughts— the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial 
employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, 
expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises— the man 
who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, 
the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction 
of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found— they 
are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and 
your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest 
to know— in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous 
without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, 
they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of 
their mind— and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned 
the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love. 

"The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on 
strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying 
in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of 
the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period 
ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on 
strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, 



leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to 
venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the 
final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate 
sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club. 

The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile 
stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of 
sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the 
wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again. 

"But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is 
up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will 
survive . 

"I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted 
you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of 
their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we 
choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality 
of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of 
humanity's brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, 
had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was 
the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory. 

"You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who 
claims supernatural visions— you, who scramble like vultures for plundered 
pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker— you, who scorn a 
businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted— the root 
of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, 
that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the 
fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the 
crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical 
needs— who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to 
sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who 
is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who 
sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? 
Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the 
germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of 
New York? 

"Unless you learn the answers to these questions— and learn to stand at 
reverent attention when you face the achievements of man's mind— 

you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not 
permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I 
have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the 
nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It 
is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the 
unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a 
malevolent reality defeated you— you were defeated by your own evasions. Do 
not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal— you will perish as fodder 
for the haters of man. 

"But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to 
love one's life, I am offering the chance to make a choice. 

Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed 
or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values 
and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now 
take an inventory of your mind. 

"Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no 
desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and 
hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you're devoid of 
those moral 'instincts' which others profess to feel. 

The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and 
servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self, 



the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a 
skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes 
and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of 
ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. 
Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one 
another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his 
moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the 
reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break 
the vicious circle. 

"No matter what dishonorable compromise you've made with your 
impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half -cynicism, half- 
superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the 
lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. 
Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have 
never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice 
to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings 
you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil— and if the good, the moral, 
is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures 
you and brings you loss or pain- 
then your choice is to be moral or to live. 

"The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from 
life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of 
living, except as an impediment and threat, that man's existence is an amoral 
jungle where anything goes and anything works. 

And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen 
mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues 
required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the 
practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical 'good' was 
self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that 
the practical 'evil' was production, you believe that robbery is practical. 

"Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral 
wilderness; you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are 
honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror 
and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, 
your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You 
pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the 
men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel 
disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound 
to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical. 

"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. 

"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. 

"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? 

"Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find 
them? You reject your tool of perception— your mind— then complain that the 
universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are 



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

"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. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands 
imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit 
no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of 
conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to 
take the middle of any road. 

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you 
to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it 
has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast 
the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to 
know when or if you're being stoned. 

"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. 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 . 

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

"You, who are half -rational , half-coward, have been playing a con game 
with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce 
their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an 
absolute, 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. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle 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 judgment. 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. 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. 



"You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you 
agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was 'only a 
compromise': you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live 
for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live 
for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded 
that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your 
country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any 
scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to 
live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A 
man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them. 

"At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of 
certainty, of honor, 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. 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. 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— 

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— 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' ideals 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. 

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. 

"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. 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. 

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

"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. 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. 

"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. 

"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. 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. 

"It is not any crime you have ever 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— 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. 

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 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. 



"Observe the persistence, in mankind's mythologies, of the legend about a 
paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of 
Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. 

The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the 
past of every man. You still retain a sense— not as firm as a memory, but 
diffused like the pain of hopeless longing— that somewhere in the starting 
years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the 
terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a 
radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational 
consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have 
lost, which you seek— which is yours for the taking. 

"Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have 
known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy 
lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its 
sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I —I am only the man who 
knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made 
it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had 
practiced and been in that one moment. 

"That choice is yours to make. That choice— the dedication to one's highest 
potential— is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever 
performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two 
make four. 

"Whoever you are— you who are alone with my words in this moment, with 
nothing but your honesty to help you understand— the choice is still open to 
be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in 
the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: I 
am, therefore I'll think. 1 

"Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind. 

Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your 
evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a 
volitional consciousness— a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive 
action, for intuitive certainty— and while you called it a longing for the 
state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal. 

Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man. 

"Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so 
little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little 
that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep 
expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops 
of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a 
zombie will not give you omniscience— that your mind is fallible, but becoming 
mindless will not make you infallible— that an error made on your own is safer 
than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to 
correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from 
error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact 
that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and 
that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his 
morality, his glory. 

"Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that 
man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept 
the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. 
But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the 
impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to 
your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the 
gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality— not the 
degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, 
not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an 
absolute . 



"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and 
breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you 
are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the 
standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is 
the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion 
of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not 
know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, 
is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors 
of "knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the 
benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential 
killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, 
announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, 
that they 'just feel if —or those who reject an irrefutable argument by 
saying: 'It's only logic' which means: 'It's only reality.' The only realm 
opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death. 

"Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral 
purpose of your life, and that happiness— not pain or mindless self- 
indulgence— is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and 
the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. 

Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of 
rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume— and the 
anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the 
knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no 
more despicable coward than, the man who deserted the battle for his joy, 
fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty 
to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective 
rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility— learn to value 
yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness— and when you learn that 
pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man. 

"As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal 
any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is 
his property— and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still 
more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's ever proper to help 
another man? No— if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe 
him. Yes— if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the 
value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only 
man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, 
do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his 
rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is 
still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man 
who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to 
accept his faults, his need, as a claim —is to accept the mortgage of a zero 
on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on 
the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his 
career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile 
he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those 
who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the 
desolation of your world was made. 

"Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you 
fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were 
lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You 
kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the 
worst. Look around you-: what you have done to society, you had done it first 
within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which 
is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your 
values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, 
to yourself. 



"We— whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer— we had 
lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see 
what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented— and it became, in 
your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your 
soul— and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you 
cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your 
world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed 
self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other. 

"When you failed to give recognition to man's mind and attempted to rule 
human beings by force— those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who 
had, were men who don't submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in 
your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, 
choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the 
thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to 
defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule 
of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold, my 
first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and 
honor I speak? 

"It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the 
three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned 
soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality— on the inviolate 
supremacy of man's right to exist— but you dreaded to admit it and live up to 
it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects 
and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human 
morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge— you kept damning this 
country as immoral and its progress as 'material greed, ' you kept offering 
apologies for this country's greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, 
to decaying Europe's idol of a leprous, mystic bum. 

"This country— the product of reason— could not survive on the morality of 
sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who 
sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man's 
soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this 
earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, 
this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant 
rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world 
what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It 
was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn't. 
You let them infect you with the worship of need— and this country became a 
giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living 
soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, 
unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, 
Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged? 

"Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to 
rebuild this country— until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been 
wiped out of our way. A country's political system is based on its code of 
morality. We will rebuild America's system on the moral premise which had 
been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your 
frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic 
morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the 
ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are his by 
inalienable right. 

"You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent 
evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural 
gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to 
be broken at its arbitrary whim— the source of man's rights is not divine law 
or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A— and Man is Man. Rights 
are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. 



If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right 
to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to 
keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right 
to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, 
any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which 
means: is evil, which means: is anti-life. 

"Rights are a moral concept— and morality is a matter of choice. 

Men are free not to choose man's survival as the standard of their morals 
and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is 
a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and 
collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the 
diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has 
been the fate of your societies in history, but you've evaded the knowledge 
of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of 
identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the 
irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man 
can't succeed by defying reality, so a nation can't, or a country, or a 
globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of 
victims . 

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without 
the right to translate one's rights into reality— to think, to work and to 
keep the results— which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of 
muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of 'human rights' versus 
'property rights, ' as if one could exist without the other, are making a 
last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a 
ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no 
right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that 'human rights' are 
superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the 
right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to 
gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their 
betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human 
and right, has no right to the title of 'human.' 

"The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and 
all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor. As you cannot have 
effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without 
intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who ' re able to 
think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won't produce much 
more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot 
obtain the products of a mind except on the owner's terms, by trade and by 
volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man's property is the 
policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who 
play it short range and starve when their prey runs out— just as you're 
starving today, you who believed that crime could be 'practical' if your 
government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal. 

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which 
means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a 
policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort 
to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper 
functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the 
army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your 
property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by 
rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates 
the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of 
armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine 
designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral 
purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's 
deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested 



with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the 
right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the 
following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your 
neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his. 

"Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or 
agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to 
accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at 
their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical 
force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. 
We, the men of the mind, we who are traders not masters or slaves, do not 
deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of 
the non-objective. 

"So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective 
reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable 
demons— no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men 
discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to 
rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, 
slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its 
immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable 
demons— the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little 
bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he's unable 
to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants— who 
plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake 
ninety-nine-year contracts— to continue to function and produce, not knowing 
what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon 
them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and 
physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, 
the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue 
to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who 
envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving 
devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of 
entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, , 
restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and 
succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention. 

"Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete 
with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your 
livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of 
voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but 
the productive effort of your mind— if you lived on a desert island. The less 
efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would 
bring you— and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a 
precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any 
further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to 
trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is 
determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive 
minds who exist in the world around you. 

"When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, 
but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for 
the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who 
saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the 
engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for 
the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on 
making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into 
the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men 
how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing. 

"The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that 
expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. 



If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your 
earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days 
and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work 
for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was 
created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product 
of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your 
muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden. 

"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only 
the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise. 
Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. 
The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value- 
equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves 
no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an 
idea in any field of rational endeavor— the man who discovers new knowledge— is 
the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they 
belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be 
shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's 
sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they 
perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect 
transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while 
devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual 
advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of 
intelligence, among men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the 
unearned . 

"In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new 
invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material 
payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. 
But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, 
receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job 
requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of 
ambition and ability. 

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all 
those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no 
intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at 
the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, 
contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of 
their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and 
the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which 
you have damned the strong. 

"Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. 
What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us 
free to function— free to think and to work as we choose— free to take our own 
risks and to bear our own losses- 
free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes— free to gamble 
on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose 
of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your 
mind's ability to see it— free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and 
to deal with nothing but your mind. 

Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. 

You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your 
hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, 
should own our palaces and yachts— you decided that you had a right to your 
wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal 
with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: 
'May you be damned !1 Our answer came true. You are. 

"You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence— you are now 
competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won 



by successful production— you are now running a race in which rewards are won 
by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade 
value for value— you have now established an unselfish society where they 
trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men 
gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use 
as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and 
clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of 
service to an unnamed public's unspecified good. You had said that you saw no 
difference between economic and political power, between the power of money 
and the power of guns— no difference between reward and punishment, no 
difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and 
fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference 
now, "Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind 
and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men 
who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who 
were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the 
contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some 
sort of 'pure knowledge'— 

the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical 
purpose on this earth— who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but 
believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no 
rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a 
laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as 'non- 
practical knowledge' or any sort of 'disinterested' action, since they scorn 
the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver 
their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can 
ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. 
They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned 
on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. 
Robert Stadler? 

"But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among 
you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and 
unstamped: '—to the order of others.' If, in the chaos of the motives that 
have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational 
desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished 
to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement 
to those whom it does concern and who ' re making an effort to know. Those 
who ' re making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine. 

"I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of 
their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting 
your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but 
the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do 
not try to live on your enemies' 

terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules. Do not seek the 
favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have 
robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup 
what they've taken by helping them rob your neighbors. 

One cannot hope to maintain one's life by accepting bribes to condone 
one's destruction. Do not struggle for profit, success or security at the 
price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; 
the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you 
seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system 
of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by 
means of your love for existence. 

"Do not attempt to rise on the looters' terms or to climb a ladder while 
they're holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power 
that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike— in the manner I 



did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your 
ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to 
produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung 
of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra 
penny to support the looters' state. Since you're captive, act as a captive, 
do not help them pretend that you're free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy 
they dread. When they force you, obey— but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a 
step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose. 

Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and 
benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your 
natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is 
the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they're 
unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only 
life belt. 

"If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, 
do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their 
racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral 
code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to 
win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a 
standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason. 

"Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all 
those who are starved for a voice of integrity— act on your rational values, 
whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen 
friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind's 
rebirth . 

"When the looters' state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, 
when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of 
the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one 
another— when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their 
final ideal— then and on that day we will return. 

"We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city 
of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes. 

We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you'll 
build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol— the sign of free trade and 
free minds— we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent 
savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who 
choose to join us, will join us; those who don't, will not have the power to 
stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the 
banner of the mind. 

"Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing 
species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained 
in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by 
resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his 
rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only 
victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a 
gun to improve it, If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have 
the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; 
but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors 
of another. 

"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you 
had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and 
certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is 
afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has 
stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the 
incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the 
hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of 
responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the 



guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective 
reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, 
your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, 
none will be provided for your evil. What you'll receive from men will not be 
alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. 
And when you'll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, 
suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect. 

"Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so 
does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice 
is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present 
or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that 
consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, 
a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories 
you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a 
struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to 
the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and 
the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, 
and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level 
touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your 
love of existence decide. 

"The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be 
hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but 
by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on 
your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you're serving. Your destroyers 
hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your 
love— the endurance that carries their burdens— the generosity that responds to 
their cries of despair— the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil 
and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without 
understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs— the love, 
your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they 
love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the 
object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of 
your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don't exhaust the 
greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you 
hear me . . . my love? 

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those 
who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let 
your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in 
those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that 
man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step 
that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by 
irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not- 
quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. 

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the 
life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the 
nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is 
real, it is possible, it's yours. 

"But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the 
world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who 
exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight 
for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for 
his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the 
absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that 
yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any 
goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth. 

"You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the 
start of my battle— and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I 
shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: "I swear— by my life and 
love of it— that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask 
another man to live for mine."