Part 38 (1/2)
S.
Sacred. I will ask you to project the look on a child's face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-a.s.sertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world-inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as ”sacred”-meaning: the best, the highest possible to man-this look is the sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.
[”Requiem for Man,” CUI, 303.]
[I use] the word ”sanct.i.ty” not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of ”supreme value.”
[WTL, ”Foreword,” v.]
See also MYSTICISM; PRIDE; RELIGION; UNDERSTANDING; VALUES.
Sacrifice. ”Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less ”selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.
This applies to all choices, including one's actions toward other men. It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values (values chosen and validated by a rational standard). Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.
[”The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 48; pb 44.]
”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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionless 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 pa.s.sion 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 judgment-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 immorat-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.
[GS, FNI, 172; pb 139.]
Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests. If a man who is pa.s.sionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a ”sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife's survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him-as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice-nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.
[”The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 49; pb 45.]
If the frustration of any desire const.i.tutes a sacrifice, then a man who owns an automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or ”aspires to” an automobile which the owner refuses to give him-and these two ”sacrifices” have equal ethical status. If so, then man's only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others to any desire of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man's only ethical alternative is to be a s.a.d.i.s.t or a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 27; pb 30.]
The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as ”sacrificing his interests.”
[”The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests,” VOS, 67; pb 56.]
It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
[”The Soul of a Collectivist,” FNI, 84; pb 73.]
See also ALTRUISM; ”DUTY”; INTEGRITY; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; PRIDE; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; STANDARD of VALUE; STATISM; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.
Sanction. To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.
[”The Argument from Intimidation,” VOS, 198; pb 143.]
One must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere ”I don't agree with you” is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one's views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one's own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.
[”How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 92; pb 73.]
To combat petty larceny as a crucial danger, at a time when murder is being committed, is to sanction the murder.
[”Ant.i.trust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962, 8.]
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: ”Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
[”How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 91; pb 72.]
A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not const.i.tute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
”The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 235.]
See also APPEAs.e.m.e.nT; EVIL; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; SANCTION of the VICTIM; SOVIET RUSSIA.
Sanction of the Victim. The ”sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the ”sin” of creating values.
[Leonard Peikoff. ”The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.]
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 p.r.o.nouncing a single word in my mind. I p.r.o.nounced it. The word was ”No.”
[GS, FNI, 206; pb 165.]
Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen's own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeas.e.m.e.nt of enemies, their compromises-all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today's philosophical corruption are the universities.... It is the businessmen's money that supports American universities-not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalisrn propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.