Part 11 (1/2)
It is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics; since it designates existents, not their isolated aspects; and since it is a condensation of, not a subst.i.tute for, a wider knowledge of the existents involved.
[Ibid., 55.]
When ”rational animal” is selected as the definition of ”man,” this does not mean that the concept ”man” becomes a shorthand tag for ”anything whatever that has rationality and animality.” It does not mean that the concept ”man” is interchangeable with the phrase ”rational animal,” and that all of man's other characteristics are excluded from the concept. It means: A certain type of ent.i.ty, including all its characteristics, is, in the present context of knowledge, most fundamentally distinguished from all other ent.i.ties by the fact that it is a rational animal. All the presently available knowledge of man's other characteristics is required to validate this definition, and is implied by it. All these other characteristics remain part of the content of the concept ”man.”
[Leonard Peikoff, '”The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 139.]
See also a.n.a.lYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARISTOTLE; COMMUNICATION; CONCEPTS; CONCEPTUAL COMMON DENOMINATOR; CONTEXT; GENUS and SPECIES; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; LANGUAGE; OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; SENSATIONS; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY; WORDS.
Democracy. ”Democratic” in its original meaning [refers to] unlimited majority rule ... a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.
[”How to Read (and Not to Write),” ARL, I, 26, 4.]
If we discard morality and subst.i.tute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule, if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it's done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) -how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.
[”Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 9.]
The American system is not a democracy. It is a const.i.tutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the cla.s.sic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn't like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one's rights.
Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom....
The American system is a const.i.tutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 9.]
See also COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MINORITY RIGHTS; REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT; REPUBLIC; SOCIALISM; STATISM; TYRANNY; VOTING.
Deontological Theory of Ethics. See ”Duty.”
Determinism. Determinism is the theory that everything that happens in the universe-including every thought, feeling, and action of man-is necessitated by previous factors, so that nothing could ever have happened differently from the way it did, and everything in the future is already pre-set and inevitable. Every aspect of man's life and character, on this view, is merely a product of factors that are ultimately outside his control. Objectivism rejects this theory.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series, Lecture 1.]
Dictators.h.i.+p and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries. if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices-if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
[”Representation Without Authorization,” ARL, I, 21, I.]
See also AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NATURALISM; NECESSITY.
Dictator. 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 pa.s.sion; power-l.u.s.t 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 a.s.sertions, 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 l.u.s.t 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.
[GS, FNI, 201; pb 161.]
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 n.o.bler 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 dictators.h.i.+p 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.
[Ibid., 203; pb 162.]
Perhaps the most craven att.i.tude of all is the one expressed by the injunction ”don't be certain.” As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if n.o.body is certain of anything, if n.o.body holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world. This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 51; pb 45.]
See also COMPROMISE; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; MYSTICISM; PHYSICAL. FORCE; SECOND-HANDERS; STATISM; TYRANNY.
Dictators.h.i.+p. A dictators.h.i.+p is a country that does not recognize individual rights, whose government holds total, unlimited power over men.
[”Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 15.]
There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictators.h.i.+p: one-party rule-executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses-the nationalization or expropriation of private property-and censors.h.i.+p. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.
[”Collectivized 'Rights,' ” VOS, 141; pb 105.]
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictators.h.i.+p, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
[”Foreword,” WTL, viii.]
The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as ”the right to enslave.” A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal-but neither can do it by right.
It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like n.a.z.i Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights and no recognition of such ”rights” by civilized countries....
Dictators.h.i.+p nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade n.a.z.i Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent ”rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.
This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictators.h.i.+p does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.
[”Collectivized 'Rights,' ” VOS, 139; pb 104.]
Dictators.h.i.+p and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices-if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
[”Representation Without Authorization,” ARL, I, 21, 1.]
It is a grave error to suppose that a dictators.h.i.+p rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictators.h.i.+p has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.
[”Ant.i.trust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962. 5.]
The legal hallmark of a dictators.h.i.+p [is] preventive law-the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent by the permissive rubber stamp of a commissar or a Gauleiter.
[”Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 20.]
A dictators.h.i.+p has to promulgate some sort of distant goals and moral ideals in order to justify its rule and the people's immolation; the extent to which it succeeds in convincing its victims, is the extent of its own danger; sooner or later, its contradictions are thrown in its face by the best of its subjects: the ablest, the most intelligent, the most honest. Thus a dictators.h.i.+p is forced to destroy and to keep on destroying the best of its ”human resources.” And be it fifty years or five centuries later, ambitious thugs and lethargic drones are all a dictators.h.i.+p will have left to exploit and rule; the rest will die young, physically or spiritually.
[”The 'Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,”' NL, 119.]
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictators.h.i.+p or potential dictators.h.i.+p, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in n.a.z.i Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 45.]
It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special cla.s.s or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictators.h.i.+p can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of cla.s.s warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictators.h.i.+p; n.o.body wins-except the ruling clique.