How to be free

In honor of the 104th anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand, America Wants To Know wanted to invite the novelist and philosopher to speak to us through a psychic medium and explain why it's a bad idea to accept the government's word that we should give up some of our rights, our freedoms and our money for the common good.

Unfortunately, our psychic medium is on loan to the Federal Reserve, so instead we just read Miss Rand's 1944 Reader's Digest article, "The Only Path to Tomorrow."

"The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy," she wrote. "Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

"Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group--whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good.'"

Miss Rand goes on to list some of the vicious dictators who came to power by vowing to serve "the common good."

"No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a sacred faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer nor supposed benefactor.

"This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals.

"The American system is founded on individualism. If it is to survive, we must understand the principles of individualism and hold them as our standard in any public question, in every issue we face. We must have a positive credo, a clear, consistent faith.

"We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees.

"The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual."

The author explains the eternal antagonism between the "Active Man," who produces, creates, originates, and needs independence to function, and the "Passive Man," who dreads independence and prefers a collectivist system that removes all need for thought and initiative.

"Some humanitarians demand a collective state because of their pity for the incompetent or Passive Man," she writes. "For his sake they wish to harness the Active. But the Active Man cannot function in harness. And once he is destroyed, the destruction of the Passive Man follows automatically. So if pity is the humanitarians' first consideration, then in the name of pity, if nothing else, they should leave the Active Man free to function, in order to help the Passive. There is no other way to help him in the long run."

America Wants To Know is constrained from quoting much more by a decent respect for the opinion of copyright law. But we wanted to call up the spirit of the 20th century's greatest freedom fighter to warn of the dangers of a policy of wealth redistribution in the guise of "economic stimulus," this week's synonym for "the common good."

Okay, just a little more....

"While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

"We are now facing a choice: to go forward or to go back.

"Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday. But there is a New Order of Tomorrow. It belongs to Individual Man--the only creator of any tomorrows humanity has ever been granted."

Happy 104th birthday to Ayn Rand. She was right about everything. But so was Galileo and a lot of good it did him.


Copyright 2009

Source note:
"The Only Path to Tomorrow" appeared in Reader's Digest, January 1944; Vol. 44, No. 261. It is described by the editors as "Condensed from 'The Moral Basis of Individualism,' a forthcoming book from the Bobbs-Merrill Co." The book was never published.

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