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I have been asked whether I have changed in these past 25 years. No, I am the same---only more so. Have my ideas changed? No, my fundamental convictions, my view of life and of man, have never changed, from as far back as I can remember, but my knowledge of their applications has grown, in scope and in precision.
Religion's monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach.
But such concepts do name actual emotions, and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is this highest level of man's emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man. It is an emotion that a few---a very few---men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent spark-extinguishers. A cruder variant of the same hatred [for man] is represented by those concrete-bound, "statistical" mentalities who---unable to grasp the meaning of man's volition---declare that man cannot be an object of worship, since they have never encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it. The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature---and struggle never to let him discover otherwise.
It is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps also, is not to be lost---The noble soul has reverence for itself. This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view with which---in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion---the best of mankind's youth start out in life. It is not even a view, for most them, but a foggy, groping, undefined sense made of raw pain and incommunicable happiness.
It is not in the nature of man---nor of any living entity---to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man.
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature---and that the rest will betray it.
The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me they will betray: it is their own souls.
AYN RAND New York, May 1968 The Fountainhead |
