A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960; at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960; and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.

If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world, I will say
that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial
problems—and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief
that no answers are possible.
Observe the peculiar nature of this contradiction and the peculiar emotional atmosphere
of our age. There have been periods in history when men failed to find answers
because they evaded the existence of the problems, pretended that nothing threatened
them and denounced anyone who spoke of approaching disaster. This is not the
predominant attitude of our age. Today, the voices proclaiming disaster are so
fashionable a bromide that people are battered into apathy by their monotonous
insistence; but the anxiety under that apathy is real. Consciously or subconsciously,
intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state
and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer.
The existence of the problems is acknowledged, yet we hear nothing but meaningless
generalities and shameful evasions from our so-called intellectual leaders. Wherever
you look—whether in philosophical publications, or intellectual magazines, or
newspaper editorials or political speeches of either party—you find the same mental
attitude, made of two characteristics: staleness and superficiality. People seem to insist
on talking—and on carefully saying nothing. The evasiveness, the dullness, the gray
conformity of today’s intellectual expressions sound like the voices of men under
censorship—where no censorship exists. Never before has there been an age
characterized by such a grotesque combination of qualities as despair and boredom.
You might say that this is the honest exhaustion of men who have done their best in the
struggle to find answers, and have failed. But the dignity of an honestly helpless
resignation is certainly not the emotional atmosphere of our age. An honest resignation
would not be served or expressed by repeating the same worn-out bromides over and
over again, while going through the motions of a quest. A man who is honestly
convinced that he can find no answers, would not feel the need to pretend that he is
looking for them.
You might say that the explanation lies in our modern cynicism and that people fail to
find answers because they really don’t care. It is true that people are cynical today, but this is merely a symptom, not a cause. Today’s cynicism has a special twist: we are
dealing with cynics who do care—and the ugly secret of our age lies in that which they
do care about, that which they are seeking.
The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world, the characteristic peculiar to
the twentieth century, which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the
fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance
that no answers are possible.
A friend of mine once said that today’s attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is: “Forgive me,
Father, for I know not what I’m doing—and please don’t tell me.” Observe how noisily
the modern intellectuals are seeking solutions for problems—and how swiftly they blank
out the existence of any theory or idea, past or present, that offers the lead to a solution.
Observe that these modern relativists—with their credo of intellectual tolerance, of the
open mind, of the anti-absolute—turn into howling dogmatists to denounce anyone who
claims to possess knowledge. Observe that they tolerate anything, except
certainty—and approve of anything, except values. Observe that they profess to love
mankind, and drool with sympathy over any literary study of murderers, dipsomaniacs,
drug addicts and psychotics, over any presentation of their loved object’s
depravity—and scream with anger when anyone dares to claim that man is not
depraved. Observe that they profess to be moved by compassion for human
suffering—and close their ears indignantly to any suggestion that man does not have to
suffer.
What you see around you today, among modern intellectuals, is the grotesque
spectacle of such attributes as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic
agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity. The two absolutes of
today’s non-absolutists are that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, and that
immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgments.
Now why would people want to cling to the conviction that doom, darkness, depravity
and ultimate disaster are inevitable? Well, psychologists will tell you that when a man
suffers from neurotic anxiety, he seizes upon any rationalization available to explain his
fear to himself, and he clings to that rationalization in defiance of logic, reason, reality or
any argument assuring him that the danger can be averted. He does not want it to be
averted because the rationalization serves as a screen to hide from himself the real
cause of his fear, the cause he does not dare to face. 
Ladies and gentlemen, what you are seeing today is the neurotic anxiety of an entire
culture. People do not want to find any answers to avert their danger: all they want, all
they’re looking for, is only some excuse to yell: “I couldn’t help it!”

If certain centuries are to be identified by their dominant characteristics, like the Age of
Reason or the Age of Enlightenment, then ours is the Age of Guilt.
What is it that people dread—and what do they feel guilty of?
They dread the unadmitted knowledge that their culture is bankrupt. They feel guilty,
because they know that they have brought it to bankruptcy and that they lack the
courage to make a fresh start.
They dread the knowledge that they have reached the dead end of the traditional
evasions of the centuries behind them, that the contradictions of Western civilization
have caught up with them, that no compromises or middle-of-the-roads will work any
longer and that the responsibility of resolving those contradictions by making a
fundamental choice is theirs, now, today. They are temporizing, in order to evade the
fact that we have to check our basic premises, or pay the price of all unresolved
contradictions, which is: destruction.
The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are:
mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism-as a cultural power-died at the time of the
Renaissance. Collectivism-as a political ideal- died in World War II. As to altruism—it
has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and
men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. But it
has caught up with them—and that is the killer which they now have to face and to
defeat. That is the basic choice they have to make. If any civilization is to survive, it is
the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Some of you will recognize my next sentences. Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes,
you are bearing punishment for your evil. Your moral code has reached its climax, the
blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is
not to return to morality, but to discover it.
What is morality? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices
which determine the purpose and the course of his life. It is a code by means of which
he judges what is right or wrong, good or evil.
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no
right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his
existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.
These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible.
The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means:
self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as
a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a
dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the
right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying
your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue
is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of
your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any
man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”
Now there is one word—a single word—which can blast the morality of altruism out of
existence and which it cannot withstand—the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the
sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no
earthly reason for it—and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy, no
earthly reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the
unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify
it—or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the
irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their
victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible. And this is the basic
contradiction of Western civilization: reason versus altruism. This is the conflict that had
to explode sooner or later.
The real conflict, of course, is reason versus mysticism. But if it weren’t for the altruist
morality, mysticism would have died when it did die—at the Renaissance—leaving no
vampire to haunt Western culture. A “vampire” is supposed to be a dead creature that
comes out of its grave only at night—only in the darkness—and drains the blood of the
living. The description, applied to altruism, is exact.
Western civilization was the child and product of reason—via ancient Greece. In all
other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant—the handmaiden—of
mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been
dominated—imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals—but still,
dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.
The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death—of freedom or
slavery—of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of
consciousness versus unconsciousness.
Let us define our terms. What is reason? Reason is the faculty which perceives,
identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason integrates
man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s
knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is
logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or
proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason.
Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-
identifiable means of knowledge, such as “instinct,” “in tuition,” “revelation,” or any form
of “just knowing.”
Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.
Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality—other than the one in
which we live—whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to
be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.
You realize, of course, that epistemology—the theory of knowledge—is the most
complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be covered exhaustively in a single lecture.
So I will not attempt to cover it. I will say only that those who wish a fuller discussion will
find it in Atlas Shrugged. For the purposes of tonight’s discussion, the definitions I have
given you contain the essence of the issue, regardless of whose theory, argument or
philosophy you choose to accept.
I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material
provided by man’s senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of
knowledge.
In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the
Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of
human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics.
“Renaissance” means “rebirth.” Few people today will care to remind you that it was a
rebirth of reason—of man’s mind.
In the light of what followed—most particularly, in the light of the industrial
revolution—nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of
mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it was taken in
the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance has automatically converted
everybody to rationality; far from it. It means only that so long as a single automobile, a
single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle’s Logic remains in existence, nobody will
be able to arouse men’s hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to
ditch their mind and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that mysticism, as a cultural
power, is dead. Observe that in the attempts at a mystic revival today, it is not an appeal
to life, hope and joy that the mystics are making, but an appeal to fear, doom and
despair. “Give up, your mind is impotent, life is only a foxhole,” is not a motto that can
revive a culture.

Now, if you ask me to name the man most responsible for the present state of the world,
the man whose influence has almost succeeded in destroying the achievements of the
Renaissance—I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the philosopher who saved the
morality of altruism, and who knew that what it had to be saved from was—reason.
This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a known historical fact that Kant’s interest and
purpose in philosophy was to save the morality of altruism, which could not survive
without a mystic base. His metaphysics and his epistemology were devised for that
purpose. He did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic—few of them have, since
the Renaissance. He announced himself as a champion of reason—of “pure” reason.
There are two ways to destroy the power of a concept: one, by an open attack in open
discussion—the other, by subversion, from the inside; that is: by subverting the meaning
of the concept, setting up a straw man and then refuting it. Kant did the second. He did
not attack reason—he merely constructed such a version of what is reason that it made
mysticism look like plain, rational common sense by comparison. He did not deny the
validity of reason—he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to
impossible contradictions, that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can
never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed, in effect, that the things we
perceive are not real, because we perceive them.
A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome,
ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is
what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism
about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human
consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot
represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had
been invalidated, they did not
notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the
faculty they were arguing about was not reason.
No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as
anyone could ever do. 
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as Pragmatism, Logical
Positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot
prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.
As to Kant’s version of the altruist morality, he claimed that it was derived from “pure
reason,” not from revelation— except that it rested on a special instinct for duty, a
“categorical imperative” which one “just knows.” His version of morality makes the
Christian one sound like a healthy, cheerful, benevolent code of selfishness. Christianity
merely told man to love his neighbor as himself; that’s not exactly rational— but at least it does not forbid man to love himself. What Kant propounded was full, total, abject
selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty
and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any
benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that
man turn himself into a “shmoo”—the mystic little animal of the Li’l Abner comic strip,
that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody.
It is Kant’s version of altruism that is generally accepted today, not practiced—who can
practice it?—but guiltily accepted. It is Kant’s version of altruism that people, who have
never heard of Kant, profess when they equate self-interest with evil. It is Kant’s version
of altruism that’s working whenever people are afraid to admit the pursuit of any
personal pleasure or gain or motive—whenever men are afraid to confess that they are
seeking their own happiness—whenever businessmen are afraid to say that they are
making profits—whenever the victims of an advancing dictatorship are afraid to assert
their “selfish” rights.
The ultimate monument to Kant and to the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia.
If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality—the
intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The
greatest, unprecedented, undreamed of events and achievements were taking place
before men’s eyes—but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as
they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the
United States and of capitalism. For the first time in history, men gained control over
physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered
science and political freedom. The creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the
rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth
century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab
progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the
nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined. 
Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the
causes of that historical miracle?
They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism. Let me explain
this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth
century—the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent,
progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential—or:
one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his
existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom” I do not
mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or
“freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from
compulsion—freedom from rule by physical force” Which means: political freedom.

These two—reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal:
when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.
Their antagonists are: faith and force. These, also, are corollaries: every period of
history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Look at the Middle Ages—and look at the political systems of today.
The nineteenth century was the ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend
of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly
Aristotelian philosophy. And, for the first time in history, it created a new economic
system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of free trade on a free
market: capitalism.
No, it was not a full, perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism—as it should
have been. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even
in America—and this is what led to the eventual destruction of capitalism. But the extent
to which certain countries were free was the exact extent of their economic progress.
America, the freest, achieved the most.
Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of
capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford.
Capitalism did not create poverty—it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of
precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism
were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof—the enormous growth
of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent,
as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century.
Now why was this not appreciated? Why did capitalism, the truly magnificent benefactor
of mankind, arouse nothing but resentment, denunciations and hatred, then and now?
Why did the so-called defenders of capitalism keep apologizing for it, then and now?
Because, ladies and gentlemen, capitalism and altruism are incompatible.
Make no mistake about it—and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.
Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the “public good” or
the “general welfare” or “service to society” or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these
things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of
capitalism—not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of
capitalism is man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others
nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man—every man—is an end in
himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone’s
need.

This is implicit in the function of capitalism, but, until now, it has never been stated
explicitly, in moral terms. Why not? Because this is the base of a morality diametrically
opposed to the morality of altruism which, to this day, people are afraid to challenge.
There is a tragic, twisted sort of compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in spite of
all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will
not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the
morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not
oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of
morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact
that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best
within them.
So long as altruism was their moral ideal, men had to regard capitalism as immoral;
capitalism certainly does not and cannot work on the principle of selfless service and
sacrifice. This was the reason why the majority of the nineteenth-century intellectuals
regarded capitalism as a vulgar, uninspiring, materialistic necessity of this earth, and
continued to long for their unearthly moral ideal. From the start, while capitalism was
creating the splendor of its achievements, creating it in silence, unacknowledged and
undefended (morally undefended), the intellectuals were moving in greater and greater
numbers towards a new dream: socialism.
Just as a small illustration of how ineffectual a defense of capitalism was offered by its
most famous advocates, let me mention that the British socialists, the Fabians, were
predominantly students and admirers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.
The socialists had a certain kind of logic on their side: if the collective sacrifice of all to
all is the moral ideal, then they wanted to establish this ideal in practice, here and on
this earth. The arguments that socialism would not and could not work, did not stop
them: neither has altruism ever worked, but this has not caused men to stop and
question it. Only reason can ask such questions—and reason, they were told on all
sides, has nothing to do with morality, morality lies outside the realm of reason, no
rational morality can ever be defined.
The fallacies and contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed
and refuted time and time again, in the nineteenth century as well as today. This did not
and does not stop anyone: it is not an issue of economics, but of morality. The
intellectuals and the so-called idealists were determined to make socialism work. How?
By that magic means of all irrationalists: somehow.
It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the labor unions, it was not the working
classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and
revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government’s right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time,
it was not in the name of the “divine right of kings,” but in the name of the divine right of
the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun
the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of
government.
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic.
Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have
always resorted to guns.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the socialists got their dream. They got it in the twentieth
century and they got it in triplicate, plus a great many lesser carbon copies; they got it in
every possible form and variant, so that now there can be no mistake about its nature:
Soviet Russia—Nazi Germany—Socialist England.
This was the collapse of the modern intellectuals’ most cherished tradition. It was World
War II that destroyed collectivism as a political ideal. Oh, yes, people still mouth its
slogans, by routine, by social conformity and by default—but it is not a moral crusade
any longer. It is an ugly, horrifying reality—and part of the modern intellectuals’ guilt is
the knowledge that they have created it. They have seen for themselves the bloody
slaughterhouse which they had once greeted as a noble experiment—Soviet Russia.
They have seen Nazi Germany—and they know that “Nazi” means “National Socialism.”
Perhaps the worst blow to them, the greatest disillusionment, was Socialist England:
here was their literal dream, a bloodless socialism, where force was not used for
murder, only for expropriation, where lives were not taken, only the products, the
meaning and the future of lives, here was a country that had not been murdered, but
had voted itself into suicide. Most of the modern intellectuals, even the more evasive
ones, have now understood what socialism—or any form of political and economic
collectivism—actually means. 
Today, their perfunctory advocacy of collectivism is as feeble, futile and evasive as the
alleged conservatives’ defense of capitalism. The fire and the moral fervor have gone
out of it. And when you hear the liberals mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or
that it was all Stalin’s fault, or that socialism never had a real chance in England, or that
what they advocate is something that’s different somehow—you know that you are
hearing the voices of men who haven’t a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some
vague hope that “somehow, my gang would have done it better.”
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the
unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are
intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is
the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did
not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the “selfishness” of
human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no
reason—no reason that a mystic moralist could name—why a dictator should not push
them in at the point of bayonets—for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the
good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat’s latest five-year plan. There is no
reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man’s life? His right to
exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to
individualism and capitalism—to the antithesis of the altruist morality.
Twenty years ago, the conservatives were uncertain, evasive, morally disarmed before
the aggressive moral self-righteousness of the liberals. Today, both are uncertain,
evasive, morally disarmed before the aggressiveness of the communists. It is not a
moral aggressiveness any longer, it is the plain aggressiveness of a thug—but what
disarms the modern intellectuals is the secret realization that a thug is the inevitable,
ultimate and only product of their cherished morality.
I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the
rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is
the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when
men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and
frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge,
no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild
animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And
that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of
disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or
mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts
and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so,
because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all
materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of
revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the
same.
Such is the nature of the evil which modern intellectuals have helped to let loose in the
world—and such is the nature of their guilt. Now take a look at the state of the world.
The signs and symptoms of the Dark Ages are rising again all over the earth. Slave
labor, executions without trial, torture chambers, concentration camps, mass
slaughter—all the things which the capitalism of the nineteenth century had abolished in
the civilized world, are now brought back by the rule of the neo-mystics.
Look at the state of our intellectual life. In philosophy, the climax of the Kantian version
of reason has brought us to the point where alleged philosophers, forgetting the
existence of dictionaries and grammar primers, run around studying such questions as:

“What do we mean when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’?”—while other philosophers
proclaim that nouns are an illusion, but such terms as “if-then,” “but” and “or” have
profound philosophical significance—while still others toy with the idea of an “index of
prohibited words” and desire to place on it such words as—I quote—”entity—essence—
mind—matter—reality—thing.”
In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless, guilt-ridden, instinct-
driven automaton—while another school objects that this is not true, because there is
no scientific evidence to prove that man is conscious.
In literature, man is presented as a mindless cripple, in habiting garbage cans. In art,
people announce that they do not paint objects, they paint emotions. In youth
movements—if that’s what it can be called—young men attract attention by openly
announcing that they are “beat.”
The spirit of it all, both the cause of it and the final climax, is contained in a quotation
which I am going to read to you. I will preface it by saying that in Atlas Shrugged I stated
that the world is being destroyed by mysticism and altruism, which are anti-man, anti-
mind and anti-life. You have undoubtedly heard me being accused of exaggeration. I
shall now read to you an excerpt from the paper of a professor, published by an alumni
faculty seminar of a prominent university.
“Perhaps in the future reason will cease to be important. Perhaps for guidance in time of
trouble, people will turn not to human thought, but to the human capacity for suffering.
Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the
inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision makers in
bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten
man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be
entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or
Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than
thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and
how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the
university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of
creative suffering.”
Observe that we are not to question “the helpless decision makers in bureaucracy”—we
are not to discover that they are the cause of the concentration camps, of the foxholes
and of victims like Anne Frank—we are not to help such victims, we are merely to feel
suffering and to learn to suffer some more—we can’t help it, the helpless bureaucrats
can’t help it, nobody can help it—the inmates of asylums will guide us, not intellectual
giants—suffering is the supreme value, not reason.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural bankruptcy.

Since “challenge” is your slogan, I will say that if you are looking for a challenge, you
are facing the greatest one in history. A moral revolution is the most difficult, the most
demanding, the most radical form of rebellion, but that is the task to be done today, if
you choose to accept it. When I say “radical,” I mean it in its literal and reputable sense:
fundamental. Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by
default. But in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is the altruist
morality that you have to reject.
Now, if you want to know what my philosophy, Objectivism, offers you—I will give you a
brief indication. I will not attempt, in one lecture, to present my whole philosophy. I will
merely indicate to you what I mean by a rational morality of self-interest, what I mean by
the opposite of altruism, what kind of morality is possible to man and why. I will preface
it by reminding you that most philosophers—especially most of them today—have
always claimed that morality is outside the province of reason, that no rational morality
can be defined, and that man has no practical need of morality. Morality, they claim, is
not a necessity of man’s existence, but only some sort of mystical luxury or arbitrary
social whim; in fact, they claim, nobody can prove why we should be moral at all; in
reason, they claim, there’s no reason to be moral.
I cannot summarize for you the essence and the base of my morality any better than I
did it in Atlas Shrugged. So, rather than attempt to paraphrase it, I will read to you the
passages from Atlas Shrugged which pertain to the nature, the base and the proof of
my morality.
“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 cyclotron—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.’
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a
code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to
the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a
purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no
alternatives, no values are possible.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-
existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The
existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on
a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot
cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of
life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an
organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of
existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is
only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs
are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its
actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it
encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its
life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
“An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic
code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to
extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its
knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge,
with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable
to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
“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 for 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 has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the
alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be
man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain
it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by
choice.
“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living
remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I
say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its
standard of value.
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys
it is the evil.
“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. 
“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on
earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that
which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the
irreplaceable value which is your life.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what Objectivism offers you.
And when you make your choice, I would like you to remember that the only alternative
to it is communist slavery. The “middle-of-the-road” is like an unstable, radioactive
element that can last only so long—and its time is running out. There is no more chance
for a middle-of-the-road.
The issue will be decided, not in the middle, but between the two consistent extremes.
It’s Objectivism or communism. It’s a rational morality based on man’s right to exist—or
altruism, which means: slave labor camps under the rule of such masters as you might
have seen on the screens of your TV last year. If that is what you prefer, the choice is
yours.
But don’t make that choice blindly. You, the young generation, have been betrayed in
the most dreadful way by your elders—by those liberals of the thirties who armed Soviet
Russia, and destroyed the last remnants of American capitalism. All that they have to
offer you now is foxholes, or the kind of attitude expressed in the quotation on “creative
suffering” that I read to you. This is all that you will hear on any side: “Give up before you have started. Give up before you have tried.” And to make sure that you give up,
they do not even let you know what the nineteenth century was. I hope this may not be
fully true here, but I have met too many young people in universities, who have no clear
idea, not even in the most primitive terms, of what capitalism really is. They do not let
you know what the theory of capitalism is, nor how it worked in practice, nor what was
its actual history.
Don’t give up too easily; don’t sell out your life. If you make an effort to inquire on your
own, you will find that it is not necessary to give up and that the allegedly powerful
monster now threatening us will run like a rat at the first sign of a human step.
It is not physical danger that threatens you, and it is not military considerations that
make our so-called intellectual leaders tell you that we are doomed. That is merely their
rationalization. The real danger is that communism is an enemy whom they do not dare
to fight on moral grounds, and it can be fought only on moral grounds.
This, then, is the choice. Think it over. Consider the subject, check your premises,
check past history and find out whether it is true that men can never be free. It isn’t true,
because they have been. Find out what made it possible. See for yourself. And then if
you are convinced—rationally convinced—then let us save the world together. We still
have time.
To quote Galt once more, such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of
existence decide.