Part 20 (1/2)
This last is not a coincidence: in regard to social issues, ”inflation” does not mean growth, enlargement or expansion, it means an ”undue” -or improper or fraudulent-expansion. The expansion of a country's currency (which, incidentally, cannot be perpetrated by private citizens, only by the government) consists in palming off, as values, a stream of paper backed by nothing but promises (or hot air) and getting actual values, the citizens' goods or services, in return-until the country's wealth is drained. A similar activity, in private performance, is the pa.s.sing of checks on a non-existent bank account. But, in private performance, this is regarded as a crime-and most people understand why such an activity cannot last for long.
Today, people are beginning to understand that the government's account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread-and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.
[”Moral Inflation,” ARL, III, 12, 1.]
Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the gouvernment: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
[”Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 18.]
The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible a.s.sets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare on other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.
[Alan Greenspan, ”Gold and Economic Freedom,” CUI, 101.]
There is only one inst.i.tution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only inst.i.tution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.
[”Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 156; pb 128.]
The ”wage-price spiral,” which is merely a consequence of inflation, is being blamed as its cause, thus deflecting the blame from the real culprit: the government. But the government's guilt is hidden by the esoteric intricacies of the national budget and of international finance -which the public cannot be expected to understand-while the disaster of nationwide strikes is directly perceivable by everyone and gives plausibility to the public's growing resentment of labor unions.
[”The Moratorium on Brains,” ARI., 1, 3, 3.]
You have heard economists say that they are puzzled by the nature of today's problem: they are unable to understand why inflation is accompanied by recession-which is contrary to their Keynesian doctrines; and they have coined a ridiculous name for it: ”stagflation.” Their theories ignore the fact that money can function only so long as it represents actual goods-and that at a certain stage of inflating the money supply, the government begins to consume a nation's investment capital, thus making production impossible.
[”Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 163; pb 134.]
See also CAPITALISM; DEFICIT FINANCING; GOLD STANDARD; MONEY; SAVINGS.
Innate Ideas. See Tabula Rasa.
”Instinct.” 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 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.
[GS, FNI, 148; pb 121.]
[Man] is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or ”instinctual” knowledge.
[”The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 136.]
Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answers to all these questions-but his consciousness will not function automatically.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS , 11; pb 19.]
Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.
Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but. at birth, both are ”tabula rasa.”
[Ibid., 23; pb 27.]
See also EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; FREUD; GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; TABULA RASA.
Integration (Mental). Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a pa.s.sive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration.
[ITOE, 5.].
Integration is a cardinal function of man's consciousness on all the levels of his cognitive development. First, his brain brings order into his sensory chaos by integrating sense data into percepts; this integration is performed automatically; it requires effort, but no conscious volition.
His next step is the integration of percepts into concepts, as he learns to speak. Thereafter, his cognitive development consists in integrating concepts into wider and ever wider concepts, expanding the range of his mind. This stage is fully volitional and demands an unremitting effort.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 57.]
A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition.... [In concept-formation], the uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental ent.i.ty which is used thereafter as a single unit of thought (but which can be broken into its component units whenever required).
[ITOE, 11.].
[The] enemies of reason seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason ... and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man's integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 77.]
Integration is the essential part of understanding.
[”The Comprachicos,” NL, 208.]
See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; LEARNING; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; SENSATIONS; UNDERSTANDING.
Integrity. 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 ent.i.ty, 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.
[GS, FNI, 157; pb 128.]
The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not ”selflessness” or ”sacrifice,” but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.
[”The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 51 ; pb 46.]
Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one's subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles.
[”Doesn't Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 87; pb 69.]
See also COMPROMISE; HONESTY; RATIONALITY; SUBJECTIVISM; SACRIFICE; VIRTUE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.
Intellectuals. The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the ”ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor-to the writer-to the artist-to the newspaperman-to the politician-to the movie maker-to the night-club singer-to the man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called ”humanities,” but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man's means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 25: pb 27.]
[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.
The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason-if their goal is the development of man's rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge-they are a society's most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society's unemployed and unemployable.
From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals-with very rare exceptions-were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.
[”A Preview,” ARL, 1, 24, 1.]