"Joe" wrote in message oups.com...
A friend of mine who is gone. Do not attempt to find us. We do not
choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do
not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. Do not
beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the
creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike
against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are
on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

There is a difference between our strike and all those you've practiced
for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of
granting them. We are evil according to your morality. We have chosen
not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your
economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are
dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have
chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are
only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to
blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality--the
reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always
been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to
present to you, no terms of bargain about, no compromise to reach. You
have nothing to offer us. WE DO NOT NEED YOU.

Are you crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of
ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral
cannibals, I know that you've always known what it was that you wanted.
But your game is up, because now we know it too.

Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code
of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the
scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and
too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you
damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question
your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your
curses as rewards for their martyrdom--while you went on crying that
your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice
it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?--by what standard?

You wanted to know John Galt's identity. I am the man who has asked
that question.

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment
for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not
human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's
through, this time. 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--you who have know any--but
to discover it.

You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social.
You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you
by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to
serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare, to please an authority
beyond the grave or else next door--but not to serve your life or
pleasure. Your pleasure you have been taught is to be found in
immortality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral
code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your
life, but to drain it.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who
claimed that it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached
that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and
those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of
incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to
you and that the good is to live it.

Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your
self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are
opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the
province of faith and force. Both side agreed that no rational morality
is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason--that in reason
there's no reason to be moral. Whatever else they fought about, it was
against man's mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was
mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and
destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the
anti-life.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him,
survival is not. His body is given to him 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 escape from
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: 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 indestructable, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to
exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative:
th eissue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and
self-generating action. If an organism fails in that action, it does;
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. Bur 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.

Joe

You forgot to credit Ayn!

CN