Prometheus Unbound
"There is no darkness but ignorance." – William
Shakespeare
"Knowledge is power." – Francis Bacon
We have access to all the knowledge of the World, and yet, choose
not to use it
“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to
make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to
light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived, and he lifted darkness
off the earth.
“Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first
steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. The great
creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood
alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed; every new
invention was denounced. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They
fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won.
“Look at history: Everything we have, every great
achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every
horror and destruction came from attempts to force men into a herd of
brainless, soulless robots -- without personal rights, without personal
ambition, without will, hope, or dignity….(all for the “Greater Good”)
“Our country, the noblest country in the history of men, was
based on the principle of individualism, the principle of man's
"inalienable rights." It was a country where a man was free to seek
his own happiness, to gain and produce, not to give up and renounce; to
prosper, not to starve; to achieve, not to plunder; to hold as his highest
possession a sense of his personal value, and as his highest virtue his self-respect.”
Ayn
Rand
The
Fountainhead
“Man cannot survive except by gaining
knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that
perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The
task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of
identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something
is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
“They proclaim
that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality
to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum
sustenance’—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as
his due and his birthright. To receive it—from whom? Every man, they
announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the
world. Created—by whom? Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of
industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between
the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’
Supplied—by whom? Intellectual hoodlums
who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that
their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a
rational being—but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be
established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being
irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Any
stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of
mankind—and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions
his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce—on whom? Random (“experts”) with causeless incomes take
trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward
peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand—of whom?
“You propose to
establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent
to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re
unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re
unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to
judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have
never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which
you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own
definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of (any
fast food worker)
“Man’s mind is his
basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is
given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is
not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the
nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge
of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a skyscraper—without
a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must
think.
“But to think is
an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the
open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being
of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is
not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.
The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your
mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to
evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the
fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human
being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to’ think or not to
think.’
“Man has no
automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living
species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of
volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or
evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are
you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? 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 secret evil today is that that is the
desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of 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.
“Man’s life, as
required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug
or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of
force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price,
since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.
“Whatever the
degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you
cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action
you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray
of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you
might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the
structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and
that you know it.
“To exist is to be
something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an
entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man
who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated
the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A
is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I
am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
“Whatever you
choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of
identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot
be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the
same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot
have your cake and eat it, too.
“The most
depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is:
Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind
that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal.
It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to
consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your
verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can
perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is
thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can
direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
“Thinking is man’s
only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the
source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but
struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of
one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to
see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your
mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the
unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it,
that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt
to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it
will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to
say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a
man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’
“If you wonder by
what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will
hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing,
that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and
no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality.
What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is
their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your
belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in
his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid
than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be
produced by ‘a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that
it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of
the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except
yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no
objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks
knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned,
superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public
polls—and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel
girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you
would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire
population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their
beliefs forbid its existence.
“For centuries,
the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but
have not dared deny the existence of reason. Their heirs and products, the
mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they
proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As
revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved;
as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is
possible; as-revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science
is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim
that there is no mind.
“There have always
been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they
did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life,
to think, but not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his years
in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind,
never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world
he despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before
he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions
at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not
found—they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your
world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon
the quest to know—in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is
righteous without knowledge of the fight, and passionate without knowledge of
desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives
of their mind—and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned
the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.
“The infamous
times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of
ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died;
destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs
remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era
of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working
for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their
rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate
collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the
whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right
and by grace of a club. The road of human history was a string of blank-outs
over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts
of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the
wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.
“Rights are a moral concept—and morality is a matter of
choice. Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their
morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the
alternative is a (parasitic) society, which exists for a while by devouring its
best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by
the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has
been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of
the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of
identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the
irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man
can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe.
A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.
“Every man is free
to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he
thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such
can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more
than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own
contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither
for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of
rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent
benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some
ultimate consumer; it Is only the value of an idea that can be shared with
unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or
loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the
value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak,
letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further
discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the
mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire
to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.
“Some of you might
plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But
the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to
know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to steel their
intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those
mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure knowledge’—the
purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose
on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that
the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn
money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And
since there is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge’ or any sort of
‘disinterested’ action, since they scorn the use of their science for the
purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death,
to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing
weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from
moral values, they are the damned on their earth, theirs is the guilt beyond
forgiveness.
“In the name of
the best within you, do not sacrifice this word to those who are its worst. In
the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be
distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never
achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an
upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Do
not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless
swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not
let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of
your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible,
it’s yours.”
Ayn Rand
Atlas
Shrugged
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know
nothing." – Socrates
"The more you know, the more you realize how much you
don't know." – Aristotle
"An investment in knowledge pays the best
interest." – Benjamin Franklin
The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take
it away from you." – B.B. King
"Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought
for with ardor and attended to with diligence." – Abigail Adams
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can
use to change the world." – Nelson Mandela
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