Who is John Galt Redux

Remixus 1

Published on August 19, 2004 By OckhamsRazor In Philosophy

Well, it's pretty cheap to do things this way, but why should I try to say something clever when someone else has said it so well?

Some of you may have read For the great honor that is Religion which was a long excerpt from the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

I read a ton of things on the entirety of JU that make me sad. People adopting blame and guilt that isn't theirs, or the flip side, attributing guilt and blame where it does not necessarily belong. I have practiced some of these same behaviors, but Objectivism explains a way to not live in this trap of victem vs. perpetrator; to genuinely be free with heavy emphasis on the word "genuinely."

A discussion has ensued where I am prompted to address one of my respondents, and I can simply think of no more eloquent way of saying what has already been said by the woman who might very well be the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century- Ayn Rand.

Reading the previous ariticle and comments will certainly add context to reading this article, but it is not necessary, and that is why I have made it a new post of its own.

To give proper credit I give you a piece of Ayn Rand's "John Galt speech" from "Atlas Shrugged." Enjoy.

Mr. Baker - the following statements I view as objectively observable truths. Your mileage may vary.

"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 a 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 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 judgement 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: 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 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 victems 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 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 if 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 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 your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of 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?"

Comments (Page 2)

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 25, 2004

God is either perfect or God is not perfect.

Prior to the universe, calling God "perfect" is both true in one way, but irrational if looked at another way. It's true because with only one thing existing, that one thing must be perfect as there is nothing to compare it to. It is irrational because you could as easily say that that one thing was completely IMperfect in every way, and your statement would have just as much truth. That sums up God prior to the universe. Either perfect or not perfect, and irrational to make a commitment to either.

So...for this discussion to not be irrational, there must be another object(s) or entity(ies) or objects AND entities against which God can be compared in order to determine God's perfection level.

Most adherents to deism that *I* have known tend to say, with complete faith, that God is perfect. If that is truly possible to discern, it needs be that there is something imperfect to compare God to, or trying to witness God's perfection would be akin to reading white letters printed on white paper. Impossible.

If God is perfect, nothing in the life of the universe can possibly be a mistake - everything is just as planned. I tend to side with this thought. Not a predestination thing, but that there's no way to screw it all up. You can go any number of ways, and it's all good.

If God is not absolutely perfect, then perfection is relative and has a changing schema which is dependent on the frame of reference of individual observers.

So to answer the question "What if you are agreeing with God" If God is perfect, you will always agree because everything you think and do is in accordance with the perfection that springs from God by virtue of being a derived from perfection. If God is not perfect, then whether you and God are agreeing will be a changing state which will be different based on the frame of reference of the observers experiencing the event in question.

Gideon MacLeish

on Aug 25, 2004

What if you are agreeing with god?

::::shakes head:::: there's one in every crowd....lol

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 26, 2004

Don't sell yourself short, Gideon. There are way more than one of you.

xtine

on Aug 26, 2004

Hey, I just finished up Atlas Shrugged a couple of weeks ago. Excellent Read.

$

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 26, 2004

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