On Page 100 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces easy 11, The Monument Builders: “What had once been an alleged ideal is now a ragged skeleton rattling like a scarecrow in the wind over the whole world, but men lack the courage to glance up and discover the grinning skull under the bloody rags. That skeleton is socialism.”
My response Great, grisly image: these Communist, secular regimes, huge totalitarian governments, and empires, murdered 100 million noncombatants in the 20th century, and still Marxism is preferred by millions of Americans? How sick are they?
Rand: “Fifty years ago, there might have been some excuse (though not justification) for the widespread belief that socialism is a political theory motivated by benevolence and aimed at the achievement of men’s well-being. Today, that belief can no longer be regarded as an innocent error. Socialism has been tried on every continent of the globe. In light of its results, it is time to question the motives of socialism’s advocates.”
My response: When one group-lives, is worshiping a secular religion, as part of the radical mass movement to spread postmodernist Marxism across the globe, one, not rational, not moderate, and not blameless. Whatever free will that person retains and managed to awaken, she is guilty of advancing the cause of the most malignant evil ever introduced to humanity, so she is a wicked creature herself, quite blameworthy.
Rand on Pages 100 and 101: “The essential characteristic is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property (which is the right of use and disposal) is vested in ‘society as a whole,’ i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.
Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany, The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases is the same.
The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.”
My response: how can something be so immoral and such a practical failure, and then still be widely hailed as a superior, Utopian model of government? Leftists are serial liars, and have no ability to separate their ideals, from nightmare consequences, and the conservatives have done a lousy job of pushing individual rights and maverizing, in a free market constitutional republic like America, as a strong viable alternative.
Rand on Pages 101 and 102: “Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly . . . In the more fully socialized countries, famine was the start, the insignia announcing socialist rule—as in Soviet Russia, as in Red China, as in Cuba. In these countries, socialism reduced the people to unspeakable poverty of the preindustrial ages, to literal starvation, and has kept them on a stagnant level of misery.
No, it’s not ‘just temporary,’ as socialist apologists have been saying—for half a century. After forty-five years of government planning, Russia is still unable to solve the problem of feeding her population.
As far as superior productivity and speed of economic progress are concerned, the question of any comparisons between capitalism and socialism has introduced a new kind of gruesome lunacy into international relations –the ‘cold war,’ which is a state of chronic war with undeclared periods of peace between wantonly sudden invasions—with Russia seizing one-third of the globe, with socialist tribes and nations at one another’s throats, with socialist India invading Goa, and Communist China invading socialist India.
As an eloquent sign of the moral corruption of our age is the callous complacency with which the socialists and their sympathizers, the ‘liberals,’ regard the atrocities perpetrated in socialistic countries and accept rule by terror as a way of life—while posturing as advocates of ‘human brotherhood.’ In the 1930s, they did protest against the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But, apparently it was not an issue of principle, but only the protest of a rival gang fighting for the same territory—because we do not hear their voices any longer.”
My response: The ability to rationalize and self-deceive is so powerful, so pervasive on the Left, that they failed to admit and oppose totalitarian regimes on the Left as on the Right, seeing them as allies with each other, and all are opposed to free peoples of the world, liberal and conservative.
Rand: “In the name of ‘humanity,’ they condone and accept the following: the abolition of freedom and all rights, the expropriation of all property, executions without trial, torture chambers, slave-labor camps, the mass slaughter of countless millions in Soviet Russia—and the bloody horror of East Berlin, including the bullet-riddled bodies of the fleeing children.
When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.
No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.”
My response; Amen.
Rand on Pages 102 and 103: “Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.”
My response: Eric Hofer long reported that each ruling elite, Nazi, Communist, the Catholic church cadres had their intellectual supporters, so it is interesting to see that Rand uncovered the same support by academics and other intellectual professionals, backing and excusing Communist butchery. Intellectuals are aristocrats: they see their right to rule as divine, and if their police and military units must violate human rights and kill citizens to get control and snuff out dissent, it is all explainable as for everyone’ benefit in the long run. Ideological creed is imposed on the masses by force, from above, and the elites are enthusiastically on board with that.
I wonder if these same intellectuals that , for the last 70 years, have kept Randianism suppressed in University circles, are punishing her for what she wrote above, excoriating them for their support of murderous Communism.
Rand: “What then is the motive of such intellectuals? Power-lust. Power-lust—as a manifestation of the helplessness, of self-loathing and of the desire for the unearned.
The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and the unearned in spirit. (By spirit, I mean man’s consciousness.) These two aspects are necessarily interrelated, but a man’s desire may be predominantly on the one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the more destructive of the two and the more corrupt. It is a desire for unearned greatness; it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term ‘prestige.’”
My response: I like her attribution of motives to intellectuals for supporting socialism. When one is intelligent, educated, and perhaps brilliant, but one does not think originally as a first-hander, one is a conformist, without independent thought, word or action, and runs in ideological packs. Group-think is the price of admission, and uniformity in everything the group demands and gets from its members, and the one that surrendered his dignity and consciousness to the collective soul or combined consciousness of the cause or clique that he is part of—this utter self-surrender necessarily leads to self-loathing. They feel helpless and worthless because they are, and the only greatness they can achieve is for their faction or cause to spread all over the world, so its power-grabbing is a drug that they are addicted to, and the unearned prestige of being part of a ‘noble, winning” cause that will save and reshape the world, that is as good as it gets for a second-hander.
Rand: “The seeker of unearned material benefits are merely financial parasites, moochers, looters or criminals, who are too limited in number and in mind to be a threat to civilization, until and unless they are release and legalized by the seekers of unearned greatness.
Unearned greatness is so unreal, so neurotic a concept that the wretch who seeks it cannot identify it even to himself: to identify it, is to make it impossible. He needs the irrational, undefinable slogans of altruism and collectivism to give a semiplausible form to his nameless urge and anchor it to reality—to support his own self-deception more than to deceive his victims. ‘The public,’ ‘the public interest,’ ‘service to the public’ are the means, the tools, the swinging pendulums of the power-luster’s self-hypnosis.”
My response: I disagree a bit here: the ism that the second-handers worships is one that he can identify with an irrational definition of what it is and how it is good for the world—Rand considers irrational definitions a contradiction in terms, so it does not exist, is false and is nonsense---nonetheless, the true believer knows what cause he idolizes and this mendacious abstraction is the end-all and be-all that he drools over, with all of its altruistic and collectivist strings attached.
Rand on Pages 103 and 104: “Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of ‘the public interest’ with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently indefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that ‘That public, c’estmoi—and to maintain that claim at the point of a gun.
No such claim has ever been or can be maintained without the help of a gun—that is, without physical force. But, on the other hand, without that claim, gunmen would remain where they belong: in the underworld, and would not rise to the councils of state to rule the destinies of nations.
There are two ways of claiming that ‘The public, c”estmoi’: one is practiced by the crude material parasite who clamors for government handouts in the name of a ‘public’ need and pockets what he has not earned; the other is practiced by his leader, the spiritual parasite, who derives his illusion of ‘greatness’—like a fence receiving stolen goods—from the power to dispose of that which he has not earned and from the mystic view of himself as the embodied voice of ‘the public.’
Of the two, the material parasite is psychologically healthier and closer to reality: at least, he eats or wears his loot. But the only source of satisfaction open to the spiritual parasite, his only means to gain ‘prestige’ (apart from giving order and spreading terror) is the most wasteful, useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments.”
My response: I like her characterization of material and spiritual parasites. When the elite running things, especially intellectuals and the dictator, are very or all-powerful wielders of tyrannical power from the subjugated, and this collectivized power of powerlessness fills the wielder with a bottomless self-disdain, and they turn to terror and murder to feel better and powerful and meaningful for a bit, and these are the committers of genocide, and their bloodlust and ferocity is without bottom.
Rand: “Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man’s mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be served only switching, indefinable chimera of a public monument—which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it—which is dedicated to the service of all and none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.
This is the ruler’s only way to appease his obsession: prestige.’ Prestige in whose eyes? In anyone’s. In the eyes of his tortured victims, of the beggars in the streets of his kingdom, of the bootlickers in his court, of the foreign tribes and their rulers beyond the borders. It is to impress all those eyes—the eyes of everyone and no one—that the blood of generations of subjects has been spilled and spent.”
My response: The dictator seeks prestige, which is Rand’s synonym for self-esteem, but self-esteem is only warranted and the internal property of consciousness of a good spiritual and moral person, who is accomplished, very wise and learned, talented and loving. If he lives to enslave none and be enslaved by none, as he insists on living in a world where each person is invited to live as a first-hander or great soul, so he wields his own natural and acquired power, without allowing any other to subjugate him, and he lives by the vow not to tyrannize or enslave any other. Such a paragon will have high self-esteem.
The dictator, the penultimate victimizer and vampire sucking the blood, life and power of thousands or millions of souls, is purely rotten and vile. He has total power but no self-esteem; he can never have this one thing that he craves most, for gaining illicit power over others, required that he lose his soul, his self-regard, and he was eager to accept the devil’s bargain; now he tries to make up for it by substituting prestige, where his peers and minions tell him incessantly what a demi-god he is, and he believes them half the time.
Rand: “One may see, in certain biblical movies, a graphic meaning of the public monument building: the building of the pyramids. Hordes of starved, ragged, emaciated men straining to the last effort of their inadequate muscles at the inhuman task of pulling ropes that drag large chunks of stone, straining like tortured beasts of burden under the whips of overseers, collapsing on the job and dying in the desert sands.—that a dead Pharaoh might lie in an imposingly senseless structure and thus gain ‘eternal’ prestige in the eyes of unborn future generations.”
Rand on Pages 104 and 105: “ . . . The great distinction of the United States of America, up to the last few decades, was the modesty in its public monuments. Such monuments as did exist were genuine: they were not erected for ‘prestige,’ but were functional structures that had housed events of great historical importance. If you have seen the austere simplicity of Independence Hall, you have seen the difference between authentic grandeur and the pyramids of ‘public-spirited’ prestige-seekers.
In America, human effort and material resources were not expropriated for public monuments and public projects, but were spent on the progress of the private, personal, individual well-being of individual citizens. America’s greatness lies in the fact that her actual monuments are not public.”
Rand on Pages 105 and 106: “The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. But America’s skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose; they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, the skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people’s standard of living—including the inhabitants of slums, who lead a life of luxury compared to the life of an ancient Egyptian slave or a modern Soviet Socialist worker.
Such is the difference—both in theory and practice—between capitalism and socialism.
It is impossible to compute the human suffering, degradation, deprivation and horror that went to pay for a single, much-touted skyscraper of Moscow, or the Soviet factories or mines or dams, or for any part of their loot-and-blood-supported ‘industrialization.’ What we do know, however, is that forty-five years is a long time: it is a span of two generations; we do know that, in the name of promised abundance, two generations of human beings have lived and died in subhuman poverty; and we do know that today’s advocates of socialism are not deterred by a fact of this kind.”
My response: What I have never gotten over is how the totalitarian Communists were not scientific, not morally superior, not more able to raise the standard of living, not able to bring about the collapse of capitalism and the West, and yet their murderous barbarism in enslaving billions of people and killing 100 million noncombatants—none of this sticks to them and discredits them or their ideology. How they can lie so brilliants and still be regarded today as a noble, utopian future for the world, with millions of young people, that is the success of the Big Lie on a scale impressive and dismaying. Deep down we humans are born evil, and we like being enslaved, exploited, abused, and oppressed as long as big government promises us sustenance, safety and security and offers to do our thinking for us. In exchange all we have to do is renounce our liberty, our property, our money, our wealtth, or independence, our ability to dissent and criticize the government.
People group-live and love collectivism and altruism, though these are evil and sicken them, but people lie to themselves and each other, arguing that socialism is good for them, that brotherhood is their prime value. Such a people prefer Communism and totalitarianism over the vexing, straining requirement to amount to something—and be criticized in front of everyone for one’s shortcoming—in our republic, small government, and free market arrangement. If they keep lying and admiring Communism as morally superior, the masses never have to improve themselves, or even try.
Rand on Pages 106 and 107 : ‘Whatever motive they might assert, benevolence is one they have long since lost the right to claim.
The ideology of socialization (in a neo-fascist form) is now floating, by default, through the vacuum of our intellectual and cultural atmosphere. Observe how often we are asked for undefine ‘sacrifices’ to unspecified purposes . . . There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny. Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.
When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember there is no such dichotomy as ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights’. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights is means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the ‘right’ to ‘redistribute’ the wealth produced by others is claiming the ‘right’ to treat human as chattel.”
My response: This paragraph is splendidly written. There is no free human life, not human dignity, no liberty unless the individual enjoys property rights to what he has produced. To deny men property rights is to turn men into property owned by the state, and that is immoral and outrageous. The people need to rise up against such federal dehumanization of their rights and personal worth and dignity.
Rand: “When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed, not for the ‘good of mankind’ nor for any ‘noble ideal,’ but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned ‘greatness’—and the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories public theaters and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for ‘prestige’ to the starless void above him.”
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