Part 2 (2/2)
[”The Age of Envy,” NL, 177.]
This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested.
[”The Missing Link,” PWNI, 50; pb 42.]
In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of a.s.sociation. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate acc.u.mulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point-i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard....
A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty s.p.a.ce-and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.
[Ibid., 47; pb 39.]
He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to partic.i.p.ate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.
It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts -percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.
But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own-and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.
[”The Comprachicos,” NI., 218.]
It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beiiefs-i.e., the rules and slogans of his group-are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word ”outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang-the world of all those people who do not live by his ”rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-episternulogical: to deal with them requires that he rise above his ”rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.
”Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection-from the dreaded realm of abstract thought.
[”The Missing Link,” PWNI, 49; pb 40.]
Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia-the fear or hatred of foreigners (”outsiders”). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man's status (i.e., a.s.signs him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of sn.o.bbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to ”know their place” and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor wors.h.i.+p or of family ”solidarity” (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.
Tribalism ... is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality.
[Ibid., 50; pb 42.]
Observe that today's resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower cla.s.ses-of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant-but of the intellectuals, the college-educated ”elitists” (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs-hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women's Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children-which are not tribes, but s.h.i.+fting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal ”protection.”
The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (ma.s.s demonstrations), not action-in chanting, not arguing-in demanding, not achieving-in feeling, not thinking-in denouncing ”outsiders,” not in pursuing values-in focusing only on the ”now,” the ”today” without a ”tomorrow”-in seeking to return to ”nature,” to ”the earth,” to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.
[Ibid., 52; pb 43.1 See also CONCEPTS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RAC ISM; REASON; TRIBALISM.
Ant.i.trust Laws. The Ant.i.trust laws-an unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable mess of contradictions-have for decades kept American businessmen under a silent, growing reign of terror. Yet these laws were created and, to this day, are upheld by the ”conservatives,” as a grim monument to their lack of political philosophy, of economic knowledge and of any concern with principles. Under the Ant.i.trust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. For instance, if he charges prices which some but eaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful ”intent to monopolize”; if he charges prices lower than those of his compet.i.tors, he can be prosecuted for ”unfair compet.i.tion” or ”restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his compet.i.tors, he can be prosecuted for ”collusion” or ”conspiracy.” There is only one difference in the legal treatment accorded to a criminal or to a businessman: the criminal's rights are protected much more securely and objectively than the businessman's.
[”Choose Your Issues,” TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]
The alleged purpose of the Ant.i.trust laws was to protect compet.i.tion; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of compet.i.tors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) The Ant.i.trust laws were the cla.s.sic example of a moral inversion prevalent in the history of capitalism: an example of the victims, the businessmen, taking the blame for the evils caused by the government, and the government using its own guilt as a justification for acquiring wider powers, on the pretext of ”correcting” the evils.
”Free compet.i.tion enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms.
[”Ant.i.trust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962, 1.]
[There is only one] meaning and purpose these laws could have, whether their authors intended it or not: the penalizing of ability for being ability. the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 57.]
See also CAPITALISM; COMPEt.i.tION; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; LAW, OBJECTIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE; MONOPOLY; PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Appeas.e.m.e.nt. Do not confuse appeas.e.m.e.nt with tactfulness or generosity. Appeas.e.m.e.nt is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelitigs of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.
[”The Age of Envy.” NL, 160.]
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.
[”Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt,” TO, Jan. 1966. 6.]
It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgment they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values. debase their own character-for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil.
[”The Age of Envy,” NL, 158.]
[Intellectual appeas.e.m.e.nt] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: ”I'm not an outsider! I'm your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind-I'm using it only in order to serve you!” ... An intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind.
[”Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt,” TO. Jan. 1966, 2.]
See also COMPROMISE; EVIL,- INTEGRITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; TACTFULNESS.
”A Priori.” The failure to recognize that logic is man's method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 152.]
Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man's knowledge is not acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application of logic to experience. All truths are the product of a logical identification of the facts of experience.
[Ibid., 151.]
See also a.n.a.lYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; LOGIC; TRUTH.
Arbitrary. ”Arbitrary” means a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual; its basis is neither direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. [An arbitrary idea is] a sheer a.s.sertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.
If a man a.s.serts such an idea, whether he does so by error or ignorance or corruption, his idea is thereby epistemologically invalidated. lt has no relation to reality or to human cognition.
Remember that man's consciousness is not automatic, and not automatically correct. So if man is to be able to claim any proposition as true, or even as possible, he must follow definite epistemological rules, rules designed to guide his mental processes and keep his conclusions in correspondence to reality. In sum, if man is to achieve knowledge, he must adhere to objective validating methods-i.e., he must shun the arbitrary....
Since an arbitrary statement has no connection to man's means of knowledge or his grasp of reality, cognitively speaking such a statement must be treated as though nothing had been said.
Let me elaborate this point. An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is ent.i.tled to no epistemological a.s.sessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn't come up.... The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is p.r.o.nounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot ... sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.
In a sense, therefore, the arbitrary is even worse than the false. The false at least has a relation (albeit a negative one) to reality; it has reached the field of human cognition, although it represents an error-but in that sense it is closer to reality than the brazenly arbitrary.
I want to note here parenthetically that the words expressing an arbitrary claim may perhaps be judged as true or false in some other cognitive context (if and when they are no longer put forth as arbitrary), but this is in elevant to the present issue, because it changes the epistemological situation. For instance, if a savage utters ”Two plus two equals four” as a memorized lesson which he doesn't understand or see any reason for, then in that context it is arbitrary and the savage did not utter truth or falsehood (it's just like the parrot example). In this sort of situation, the utterance is only sounds; in a cognitive context, when the speaker does know the meaning and the reasons, the same sounds may be used to utter a true proposition. It is inexact to describe this situation by saying, ”The same idea is arbitrary in one case and true in another.” The exact description would be: in the one case the verbiage does not express an idea at all, it is merely noise unconnected to reality; to the rational man, the words do express an idea: they are conceptual symbols denoting facts.
It is not your responsibility to refute someone's arbitrary a.s.sertion-to try to find or imagine arguments that will show that his a.s.sertion is false. It is a fundamental error on your part even to try to do this. The rational procedure in regard to an arbitrary a.s.sertion is to dismiss it out of hand, merely identifying it as arbitrary, and as such inadmissible and undiscussable.
<script>