Atlas Shrugged

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 "You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters' fight against the mind, and the fact that their
bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics
of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you
call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking
completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and
vice versa—that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse
into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.
"You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of 'faith' in order to blank out the knowledge that the
looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code—that the looters are the final
and consistent practitioners of the morality you're half-obeying, half-evading—that they practice it the
only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace—that your morality forbids you
to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and
proudly asserting your right to exist—that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is
your morality that you have to reject, "You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic
'unselfishness' which you've never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess
that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you've
invested it in counterfeit securities—and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced
to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that
need of self-esteem, which you're unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it's
the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.
"By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his
discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of
life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order
to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life;
to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.
"Every act of man's life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the
person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the
person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his
only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this
gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting
existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.
"Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's
hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to
the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself
irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it—if he's chosen an
irrational standard—he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of
happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion
rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.
"It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your
failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of
Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of
suspending your mind, of refusing to think.
Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come
from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your 'selfishness,' weakness or
ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your