Gentlemen, I am here today with a painful feeling of incredulity.
To me, it is incredible that I should be speaking in the heart of New York, the greatest city
in the world, to a group of distinguished American businessman, over so magnificent
a product of American technology as a television set, on such a topic as capitalism versus
communism—as if any comparison, issue or choice between them were conceivable. On the
one hand, we have the record of the greatest achievements and the remnants of the noblest
system ever created in the history of man. On the other hand, we have a bloody slaughterhouse
of ragged savages ruled by a blustering anthropoid, inflated by our handouts, our lend-lease,
our atomic secrets, our concessions, our compromises, our self-betrayal. The world is being destroyed
by a terrible conflict, but it is not the conflict of capitalism versus communism. It
is the conflict of capitalism versus itself, with communism as the profiteer and the scavenger
among the ruins who is advancing and winning by default. Capitalism is in the process of
committing suicide, and if we want to stop that process, we must understand its reasons. No political-economic system in history had
proved its values so eloquently or had benefited mankind so greatly as capitalism, and none
has ever been attacked so savagely and blindly. Why did the majority of intellectuals turn
against capitalism from the start? Why did their victims, the American businessmen, bear
their attacks in silence? The cause of it is a primordial evil which, to this day, men
are afraid to challenge: the morality of altruism. Altruism has been man’s ruling moral code
through most of mankind’s history. It has had many forms and variations, but its essence
has always remained the same. Altruism holds 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. The conflict which since the Renaissance has
been tearing Western civilization and which has reached its ultimate climax in our age,
is the conflict between capitalism and the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are philosophical
opposites. They cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. The moral code
which is implicit in capitalism had never been formulated explicitly. The basic premise
of that code is that man, every man, is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of
others—that man must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself—and that men must deal with one another as traders, by
voluntary choice to mutual benefit. This, in essence, is the moral premise on which
the United States of America was based, the principle of man’s right to his own life,
to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness. This is what the intellectuals did not and
could not choose to identify, so long as they remained committed to the mystics’ morality
of altruism. If the good, the virtuous, the ideal is suffering and self-sacrifice, then
by that standard capitalism has to be damned as evil. Capitalism does not tell men to suffer
but to pursue and enjoyment and achievement here on earth. Capitalism does not tell men
to serve and sacrifice but to produce and profit. Capitalism does not preach passivity,
humility, resignation but independence, self-confidence, self-reliance. And above all, capitalism does
not permit anyone to expect or demand to give or to take the unearned. In all human relationships,
private or public, spiritual or material, social or political or economic or moral,
capitalism requires that men be guided by a principle which is the antithesis of altruism:
the principle of justice. So long as the intellectuals held altruism
as their moral code, they had to evade the actual nature and meaning of capitalism. They
had to evade the fact that the source of industrial wealth is man’s mind, that the fortunes
made in a free economy are the product of intelligence, of creative ability. This
led them to the modern version of the ancient soul-body dichotomy, to the contradiction
of upholding the freedom of the mind while denying it to the most active exponents of
creative intelligence, the businessmen—the contradiction of promising to liberate man’s
mind by enslaving his body. It led them to regard the businessman as a vulgar materialist
and to regard themselves as some sort of elite, born to rule him, to control his life and
dispose of his product. The shabby monument to this premise was the
idea of divorcing production from distribution, of assuming the right to distribute that which
one has not produced. The only way to implement an idea of that kind was the intellectuals’
alliance with the thug, with the advocate of rule by brute force, the totalitarian collectivist.
So long as the moral cannibalism of the altruist code permits people to believe that it is
virtuous and right to sacrifice some men for the sake of others, they will reject capitalism
as a system of selfish greed, and they will cling to totalitarian statism of one kind
or another, either communist or fascist or Nazi or socialist or welfare. So long as men
hold altruism as their moral code, terror, slaughter, devastation and destruction is
all they will or can achieve. Most people still lack the courage to realize that capitalism—real,
free, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, not the mongrel mixed economy
we have today—was the ideal social system which mankind had almost achieved, then lost.
They still lack the courage to realize that if justice, progress, abundance, peace, safety
and goodwill are their social goals, then capitalism is the ideal to live for and fight for. The truth which they refuse to face and to
admit is that the world conflict of today is the last stage of the struggle between
capitalism and socialism, and that the whole world knows it. The most helplessly ignorant
shopkeeper on any corner of any street on earth knows it in his own simple terms, though
he is unable to discuss political theory. Any illiterate peasant knows it in any Russian-occupied
country when he dies, fighting in desperate bewilderment for his right to his scraggly
patch of soil. But our political and intellectual leaders are the only ones who pretend not
to see, and who go through the shabby ritual of promising mankind free speech, free factories,
and free lunches, all to come from the American treasury, as if the masses of mankind were
in fact the looting parasites of the socialist fancy. If we do not fight for capitalism, we have
nothing to fight for, nothing to uphold, nothing to offer the world. We have no cause, no crusade,
no moral justification. The hypocrisy of America’s position in international affairs—the evasiveness,
the guilty pretense, the apologies for the greatest virtues of her system, implied in
the avoidance of any mention of capitalism as if it were the skeleton in her closet—have
done more for the prestige of Soviet Russia and for the growing spread of communism through
the world then their own cheap bombastic propaganda could ever accomplish. The morality of altruism is Russia’s best
and only weapon. Our attitude of moral guilt is not becoming to the leader of a world
crusade and will not rouse men to follow us. And what do we ask men to fight for? They
would join a crusade for freedom versus slavery, which means for capitalism versus socialism.
But who will care to fight in a crusade for socialism versus communism? Who will want
to fight and die to defend a system under which he will have to do voluntarily, or rather
by public vote, what a dictator would accomplish faster and more thoroughly: the sacrifice
of all to all? Who will want to crusade against murder for the privilege of committing suicide? I quote from my article, “Choose Your Issues,”
in The Objectivist Newsletter which I publish: “Neither a man nor a nation can have a practical
policy without any basic principles to integrate it, to set its goals and to guide its course.
Just as the United States, having abandoned its own principles, is floundering aimlessly
in international affairs, is unable to act and is merely reacting to the issues chosen
and raised by Soviet Russia—so, in domestic affairs, the conservatives are unable to act
and are merely reacting to the issues chosen and raised by the statists, thus accepting
and helping to propagate the statists’ premises. When the statists proclaim that their slave-system
will achieve material prosperity, the conservatives concede it and rush to urge people to sacrifice
their materialistic concerns in order to preserve freedom—thus helping the statists and their
own audiences to evade the fact that only freedom makes it possible for men to achieve
material prosperity. When the statists announce that our first duty is to support the entire
population of the globe, the conservatives rush into debates on whether Asia, Africa,
or South America should be the first recipient of our handouts. When certain statist
groups, counting, apparently, on a total collapse of American self-esteem, dare go so far as
to urge America’s surrender into slavery without a fight, under the slogan “Better
Red Than Dead”—the conservatives rush to proclaim that they prefer to be dead, thus
helping to spread the idea that our only alternative is communism or destruction, forgetting that
the only proper answer to an ultimatum of that kind is: “Better See the Reds Dead.” In recent years, the conservatives have gradually
come to a dim realization of the weakness in their position, of the philosophical flaws
that have to be corrected, but the means by which they are attempting to correct it are
worse than the original weakness. There are three interrelated arguments used by today’s
conservatives to justify capitalism, which can best be designated as the argument from faith, the argument from tradition, the argument from depravity. Sensing their need of a moral base, many conservatives decided to choose religion as their moral justification. They are claiming that freedom,
capitalism, and America are based on faith in God. Politically, such a claim contradicts
the fundamental principles of the United States. In America, religion is a private matter and must not be brought into political issues. Intellectually, to rest one’s case on faith
is to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies, to concede that there are
no rational arguments to support the ideas which created this country, no rational justification
for freedom, justice, property, individual rights, and they can be accepted only on faith.
Consider the implications of that attempt. While the communists are claiming that they
are the champions of reason and science, the conservatives concede it and retreat into
the realm of mysticism, into another world, surrendering this world to communism. It is
the kind of victories that communists’ irrational ideology could never have won on its own merits. Now consider the second argument, the attempt
to justify capitalism on the ground of tradition. Some people declare that to be a conservative
means to uphold the status quo, the given, the established, regardless of what it might
be, regardless of whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, defensible or indefensible.
They declare that we must defend the American political system not because it is right but
because our ancestors chose it, not because it is good but because it is old. America
was created by men who broke with all political traditions and originated a system unprecedented
in history, relying on nothing but the unaided power of their own intellect. But those neoconservatives
are now trying to tell us that America was the product of faith in revealed truth and
of uncritical respect for the traditions of the past. It is certainly irrational to use
the new as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because
it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the old as a standard of
value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient. The liberals
are constantly asserting that they represent the future, that they are new, progressive,
forward-looking, etc., and they denounce the conservatives as old-fashioned representatives
of a dead past. The conservatives concede it and thus help the liberals to propagate
one of today’s most grotesque contradictions. Collectivism and dictatorship, the frozen-status
society, is offered to us in the name of progress—while capitalism, the only free, dynamic, creative
society ever devised, is defended in the name of passivity and stagnation. The plea to preserve
tradition as such appeals to the worst elements in man and rejects the best. It appeals to
fear, cowardice, conformity, self-doubt, and rejects creativeness, originality, independence,
self-reliance. It is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere, but the
more outrageous here in America, the country based on the principle that man must stand
on his own feet, live by his own judgment, and move constantly forward as a productive,
creative innovator. This leads us to the third and the worst argument
of some alleged conservatives, the attempt to defend freedom on the ground of man’s
depravity. This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient,
and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator
and of ruling everybody else. Therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for
imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the exact meaning of this argument. Since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship. Freedom is all that they deserve.
If they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state. Dictatorship, this
school asserts, believe it or not, is the result of faith in man and in man’s goodness.
If people realized that man is depraved by nature, they would not entrust a dictator
with power. The belief in human depravity is what would protect their freedom. And more:
dictatorships, this school declares, and all the other disasters of the modern world are
man’s punishment for the sin of relying on his intellect and of attempting to improve
his life on earth by seeking a perfect political system and a rational society. Thus humility,
passivity, resignation, and belief in Original Sin are the bulwarks of capitalism. This is
truly the voice of the Dark Ages rising again in the midst of our industrial civilization.
The liberals are trying to put statism over by stealth, without letting the country realize what road they are taking to what ultimate goal. And while such a policy is reprehensible,
there is something much more reprehensible: the policy of the so-called conservatives
who believe in compromise and who are trying to defend freedom by stealth. If the liberals
are afraid to identify their program by its proper name—if they advocate every specific
step, measure, policy and principle of statism but squirm and twist themselves into semantic pretzels with such euphemisms as the welfare state, the New Deal, the New Frontier—they
still preserve a semblance of logic if not of morality. It is the logic of a con man
who cannot afford to let his victims discover his purpose. Besides, most liberals are afraid
to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They do not want to know
or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery. So they evade the issue for fear of discovering that their goal is evil. Immoral as this might be, what is
one to think of men who evade the issue for fear of discovering that their goal is good?
What is the moral stature of those who are afraid to know or to proclaim that they are
the champions of freedom? What is the courage and the integrity of those who outdo their
enemies in smearing, misrepresenting, spitting at and apologizing for their own ideals? What
is the rationality of those who expect to trick people into freedom, cheat them into
justice, fool them into progress, con them into preserving their rights, and while indoctrinating
them with statism, put one over on them and let them wake up in a perfect capitalist society
some morning? Such unfortunately are a great many of today’s conservatives. Gentlemen, if you want to save capitalism,
there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won
in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of
the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full moral certainty. I quote
from my book, For the New Intellectual: "The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution. We must fight for capitalism,
not as a ‘practical’ issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous
pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.” I should like to suggest that you begin by
applying to the realm of ideas the same objective, logical, rational criteria of judgment that
you apply to the realm of business. You do not judge business issues by emotional standards; do not do it in regard to ideological issues. You do not build factories by the guidance
of your feelings; do not let your feelings guide your political convictions. You do not
count on men’s stupidity in business, you do not put out an inferior product because
people are too dumb to appreciate the best; do not do it in political philosophy. Do not
endorse or propagate ideas which you know to be false, in a hope of appealing to people’s
fears, prejudices, or ignorance. You do not cheat people in business; do not try to do
it in philosophy. The so-called common man is uncommonly perceptive. You do not doubt
your own judgment in business; do not doubt it in the realm of ideology. Do not let the
unintelligible gibberish of the liberal intellectuals intimidate you or discourage you. Do not conclude “it must be deep because I don’t understand it," or “if this is what intellectual
stuff is like, then all ideas are impractical nonsense." Ideas are the greatest and most crucially
practical power on earth. You do not hire men as heads of your business departments without firsthand knowledge of the nature of their jobs and of how to judge their performance;
do not do it in regard to your public relations department. Learn to judge whether the stuff they are selling you is poison or not. You do not hire witch doctors as mechanics or engineers; do not hire them as PR’s. Know how to tell your friends from your enemies. Know whom to support in philosophical and political issues. If you are unable to speak
freely, if you are bound and gagged by the disgraceful injustice of such evils as the
antitrust laws, at least do not praise, spread, or support the philosophy of your own destroyers.
Do not grant them the sanction of the victim. Give some thought to the possibility of establishing
a civil liberties union for businessmen. And if you still wish to have a social mission or purpose, there is no greater service that you can render mankind than by fighting for your own rights and property. Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes
capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing
the rest of the world. All the other social groups—workers, professional men, scientists,
soldiers—exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in
misery and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen
under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs, by bureaucrats and commissars.
Businessmen are the symbol of a free society, the symbol of America. If and when you perish,
civilization will perish. But you still have a chance to save it if you accept the noble
responsibility of your proper, moral self-interest and announce it proudly to the hearing of
the whole world, including the city of Washington.
