On Pages 147 and 148 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces the reader to her essay 17 Racism: “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors”
My response: Humans are group-creatures, naturally favoring altruist-collectivist ethics over egoist-individual ethics. Group identity and group rights are favored over individual entity and individual rights. People, in the eyes of collectivists, are all good, or all bad, all right or all wrong, to be deserving of justice and fair equal treatment legally if part of majority popular groups, and to be treated unequally and be denied justice due to being an unpopular or minority group or an independent individual, the most despised dissident of all.
It is group identity that creates racism and bigotry and the only way to remove them is to emphasize individual identity and individual rights as paramount for legal and social needs of society. Justice will never come about in societies based on favored groups versus disfavored and discriminated against groups.
Dennis Prager is no egoist ethicist, but he is headed that way guided by truth and rational intuition. He remarks, quoting Victor Frankl that the only two groups that count are the decent and the indecent. We should love and favor the decent, but oppose (not do pogroms against) and hate the ill deeds of the evil and indecent, and fight their program vigorously.
I go one step farther than Prager and assert that the decent, the children of God, are self-realized supercitizens, and the indecent follow Satan by commission but more often by omissions and mediocre, nonindividuating submissive citizens only too willing to be enslaved by governmental authorities.
Rand: “Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard of stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.”
My response: I admire her ideas here: all humans can reason and as thinkers, their free will is most strengthened and relied upon: where racial group bracketing is employed, it is a lie, a biased, non-scientific imposition upon individuals, say they are black, of a group destiny that is claimed to be their only chemical, biological or social destiny. The racist determinism outlook denies that blacks can think, choose, and opt to live moral lives, which is best exemplified by them, like all people, as maverizers.
Any individual that thinks, choose, and self-realizes is an impressive, good agent of good and free will. Group identity and group rights are essential, biological human traits, but the maverizer learns to be of strong feel will, shaping these essential traits to support and be subservient to his accidental traits, instantiating his individual identity and acting upon his individual rights. and his biologically, accidental and recessive traits are best expressed and instantiated as the agent acts in the world, by his crafting his evolving self-identity and developing his individual rights and abilities as makes him happy, kind, useful and productive.
Emphasizing group identity and group rights as the human process that is vital, altruists and egoists, self-loathing to the core, must hate those that are maverizers, or from rival groups, and racism and prejudice will never flicker and die. Self-hatred and low self-esteem must be diminished, if not eradicable entirely, for people to learn not to hate others. Only love as self-love generating a personal feeling of good will towards others can overpower our natural propensity to be bigoted.
Rand: “The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to ‘protect the family name’ –-(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)—the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)—the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law—the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history—all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called ‘newly emerging-nations.’
The theory that holds ‘good blood’ or ‘bad blood’ as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.
Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and is hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race—is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist appropriation , perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.”
My response: Rand is before her time recognizing that racists and racism are evil, but that those are manifestations of sickening pathological expressions of collectivism and altruism. That a great soul of any group is punished while alive, and then celebrated as the personification of the adored ethnic group from whence he sprung, is an abomination. Rand knew that great souls in their generations are persecuted by their surrounding groupists, and she anticipated that the cure for racism was to favor each individual who could be confident that he possessed plenty of talent, and if he worked hard and originally, he could amount to something fine, and his group identity and its group rights have nothing to do with his choice to be successful and maverize or not.
Rand: on Pages 148 and 149: “Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of superior brain power is greater among members of certain races than among members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to our judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as inferior because his race has ‘produced’ some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has ‘produced’ Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
These are not two different claims, of course but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters or moral judgement—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo self-esteem).”
My response: I like this if an individual has self-esteem, an earned state of self-respect merited by his moral and productive work and behavior in this world. Automatic self-esteem or pseudo-self-esteem is a collectivist obsession.
Rand on Pages 149 and 150: “To ascribe one’s virtues to one’s racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of ‘tribal self-esteem’ by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.
Historically, racism has risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to ‘society,’ to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.
The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang-rule, regardless of which gang seizes power. And—since there is not rational justification for such rule, since none ever has been or can be offered—the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are natural prey for men of another—and establishes its own internal subcategories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man’s birth, such as an inherited title of nobility or inherited serfdom.
The racism of Nazi Germany—where men had to fill out questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their Aryan descent-has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill out similar questionnaires to show their ancestors had owned no property and thus prove their proletarian descent. The Soviet ideology rests on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically—that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent—only the official pogroms are now called ‘political purges.’”
Rand on Pages 150 and 151: “There is only one antidote to racism; the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.”
My response: I agree.
Rand: “Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can only be achieved on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members . . . It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.
No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.”
My response: What Rand means when she writes that no system can establish universal rationality (the first-hander life of achievement and production willed by the rational individual to be his triggered life purpose) by force, for only each individual can will freely to maverize.
Rand: “A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semifree economies of the nineteenth century. Racial and/or religious persecution of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Germany and Russia—and the weakest in England, the then freest country in Europe.”
My response: Her instincts are sound: she allies rationalism, individualism, democracy and capitalism as strongest in England where racism was weakest, and racism was virulent in other European countries with controlled economies ruled by monarchs or dictators, where irrational prejudice and ideology are the tool of frustrated, subjugated second-handers hankering for someone to blame for their miserable lives. Rand is also right that pure capitalism or nearly pure capitalism would work wonders here if tried, but socialists in charge in statist America are having none of it.
Rand: “It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries in the world. . . . Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years. The spectacular results and achievements of that trend need no restatement here.
The rise of collectivism reversed that trend.”
Rand on Pages 151 and 152: “When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group—the inevitable consequence was that men began to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify—particularly for people of limited intelligence—the least demanding form of ‘belonging’ and of ‘togetherness’ is: race.
It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the ‘humanitarian’ advocates of a ‘benevolent’ absolute state, have led to the rebirth, and the new, virulent growth of racism in the twentieth century.
In its great era of capitalism, United States was the freest country on earth—and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America has been called ‘the melting pot,’ with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.”
My response: Rand is wise; she knew that individualism, reasoning and pursuing fulfillment of their rights and happiness, in a free, capitalist society; only where the rational individual is free up to gain private property is there a chance for cooperation and peace, wherein racial and tribal rivalries, and racism or bigotry arising from competing groups and identity politics, that is how people end racism and finally move forward. Nothing else works.
Rand: “The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the noncapitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white man’s own economic interest.
Today, the problem is growing worse—and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth century Europe. The cause is the same the growth of collectivism and statism.”
My response: Look at CRT and DEI with their Marxist and anti-racist ideology; both are deeply imbued with race consciousness, moving away from a capitalist, small-government, free society towards socialism, collectivism, statism and groupism, and the new reverse racism makes victim and grievance groups the new aristocracy, and whites the new pariah, to blame for everything, and naturally corrupt and rotten. Leftists are race-obsessed, and they are racist to their core.
Rand on Pages 152 and 153: “In spite of the clamor for racial equality, propagated by the ‘liberals’ in the past few decades, the Census Bureau reported recently that ‘(the Negro’s)’ economic status relative to whites has not improved for nearly 20 years.’ It had been improving in the freer years of our ‘mixed economy’; it deteriorated with the progressive enlargement of the ‘liberals’ Welfare State.
The growth of racism in a ‘mixed economy’ keeps step with growth of government controls. A ‘mixed economy’ disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another . . . In the absence of any coherent political philosophy, every economic group has been acting as its own destroyer, selling out its future for some momentary privilege. The policy of the businessman has, for some time, has been the most suicidal one in this respect. But it has been surpassed by the current policy of Negro leaders.
So long as Negro leaders were fighting against government . . . “
Rand on Page 154: “The ‘liberals’ are quite guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule—yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
My response Progressive and liberals will defend minority group rights, but not the individual rights of each and every citizen, the smallest and most numerous bunch of minorities—they rights are canceled by the Left all the time.
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