Please forgive any typos of this writ as I actually typed this from the book and did not cheat in doing a cut and paste so please note that I did this with love. When reading this, if you do read this, gather from it what you will as all is a matter of perspective. There are some of you who may see several views depending on where you stand intellectually. Enjoy! ~ Maggie
Page 670
The door of the structure was a straight, smooth sheet of stainless steel, softly lustrous and bluish in the sun. Above it, cut in the granite, as the only feature of the building's rectangular austerity, there stood and inscription:
I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER (page 671) LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR ME.
Page 677
We are on strike...
...Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable–except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike...
..."Through all the ages," he said, "the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter–every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation–every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad–have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of rational connection.
Page 678
Yet only to the extent to which–in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of trader–some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice–it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two makes four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction–only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human, and only the sum of such moments permitted them to continue to exist. It was the men of the mind who taught them to bake their bread, to heal their wounds, to forge their weapons and to build the jails into which they threw him. He was the man of extravagant energy–and reckless generosity–who knew that stagnation is not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power–and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, pay with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. This was his glory and his guilt–that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of the sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man who they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshiped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force–the mystics and the kings–the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted–and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man's souls were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach–but both were united against hi mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust. Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering of life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The despoiling of ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice. The despoilers have always know it. We haven't. The time has come for us to see what we are now asked to worship, what has once been dressed as God or king is (page 679) naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us– a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we–we, who must atone for the guilt of ability–we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgement to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can't produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be make to work? They know it, but it is you who don't–and thye are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last--and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive–and the span of each succeeding victim will shorter, and while you'll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread. This does not worry the looters of the moment. Their plan–like all the plans of all the royal looters of the past–is only that the loot shall last their lifetime. It has always lasted before, because in one generation they could not run out of victims. But this time–it will not last. The victims are on strike. We are on strike against martyrdom–and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be ti practiced in body or spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but our–and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist–without our help. And, once and for all, they will learn the meaning of their creed. That creed has lasted for centuries solely by the sanction of the victims–by means of the victims' acceptance of punishment for breaking a code impossible to practice. But that code was intended to be broken. It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don't, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its sinners. We have decided not to be sinners any longer. We have ceased breaking that moral code. We shall blast it out of existence forever by the one method that it can't withstand: by obeying it. We are obeying it. We are complying. In dealing with our fellow men, we are observing their code of values to the letter and sparing them all the evils they denounce. The mind is evil? We have withdrawn the works of our (page 680) minds from society, and not a single idea of ours is to be known or used by men. Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents. The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We do not seek to make fortunes any longer. It is evil to earn more than on's bare sustenance? We take nothing but the lowliest jobs and we produce, by the effort of our muscles, no more than we consume for our immediate needs–with not a penny nor an inventive thought left over to harm the world. It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased burdening the weak with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us. It is evil to be an employer? There is no form of enjoyment that we seek from their world, and–this was hardest for us to attain–what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an idea: Indifference–the blank–the zero–the mark of death....We are giving men everything they've professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries. Now let them see whether they want it."
Page 681
"...Let him–and those who entrust him their children's minds–have exactly that which they demand: a world of intellectuals without intellect and of thinkers who proclaim that they cannot think. I am conceding it. I am complying. And when they see the absolute reality of their non-absolute world, I will not be there and it will not be I who will pay the price of their contradictions."
Currently reading Page 709 of the 50th Anniversary Edition. ~ Arachne ~ November 10, 2008 @ 10:43 p.m. EST
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