The Journals of Ayn Rand (87 page)

As to Europe—keep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog. Nothing clear about it—only intimations that Europe is finished, there’s only a chaos of impotent collectivism left. If you refer to their forms of government, it’s always only: “The People’s State.” (You do all this by hints about the breakdown of communications—there’s little left of the radio, the telegraph, the mail, the boats, any kind of press, any kind of reliable source of information. People in the story take this for granted, as normal, matter-of-fact, implying that Europe has been like that for a long time.)

 

 

Now to answer [my earlier] question:
What happens in a world run by parasites?

Since the parasite’s basic premise is escape from reason, since he has discarded his capacity for independent rational judgment (and dreads the necessity of such rationality), the most evident and all-embracing manifestation of a parasite’s world will be the miserable scrambling to evade personal decisions and personal responsibility.

In every issue—business or personal—the parasites will, primarily, try to stall. They will neither say “yes” nor “no”—on anything. They will evade—in effect, hoping that their inactivity will somehow eliminate the issue. It is not even a conscious decision to wait or temporize—that’s still a decision—but just plain evading, which means giving the issue no thought at all and thus avoiding the necessity of examining it or even of admitting its existence.

The pointless stalling everywhere will be appalling; the kind of shifty-eyed, edgy, uneasy stalling that bursts into inexplicable, resentful, disproportionate anger whenever anyone as much as mentions the issue, let alone asks for a decision. This—everywhere, on any matter, big or little, in business offices and in homes, in professional relations and in love-affairs, in public speeches and drawing-room conversations. Nobody will make a definite statement. Nobody will “commit himself,” since nobody is sure of anything. Everything is said by indirection, circumlocution, vagueness, a kind of tangled ceremonial empty verbosity, in which the only thing that is clear is the absence of anything definite having been stated.

The one unforgivable sin that makes everyone jumpy, venomous, suspicious, makes them consider you a dreadful boor of bad manners, is to say anything definitely. It is a crime to be sure that the sun is shining and say so. The preferred form is: “It seems that the sun is shining,” or “I believe the sun is shining,” or “It is generally conceded that two and two make four.” (The theories about “nothing is absolute,” “nothing is certain,” “nothing is real” are enormously popular.) It is not any particular statement they dread, but the mere fact of a definite statement, and of a man being able to make it-because this implies their own need to make [such statements].

Such a world must be first bewildering, then totally unbearable to an intelligent person—like an insane asylum, which it is. Only, the insane cannot deal with reality because of their inherent incapacity to do it; these people refuse to deal with it by intention, which may be even more dreadful. (And, of course, everyone is extremely pleasant to everyone else, smilingly blank, because anger is a definite emotion, a definite stand.)

When things catch up with the parasite and he can stall no longer, he scrambles to pass the buck and shift the responsibility. The parasite will not make a decision; he will look for someone else to make it, then he will subscribe to it—halfway, cautiously, always leaving himself an out, an “escape clause.” If the decision turns out well, he will take all the credit and be extremely touchy about minimizing the credit for the man who made the decision. If the decision turns out badly, he will be the first to turn upon the decider and tear him to pieces. This kind of double-crossing, patsy-finding, pushing cat’s paws to pull chestnuts out of fires is a general policy, almost expected and taken for granted as normal procedure. Imagine the feelings of an honest, honorable person in the midst of this! And all this is done under that vapid blanket of a fixed, empty, mealy-mouthed smile; everybody suspecting, hating, and fearing everybody else (as they have to, since the double-cross is the general policy), yet always speaking softly and shaking each other’s hands limply. It is not the manner of my kind of brotherly love or benevolence—but the manner of cowards wearing a protective coloration in order not to be hurt: a manner that is automatic, emotionless, lifeless.

Another form of shifting responsibility—when it is not a matter of shifting it to a person—is the scramble for substitutes for thought, for “automatic thinking,” for guaranteed security without rational judgment or procedures decision. This is the miserable reliance on precedent and routine, the copying and imitating of anything that was or seemed to be successful, the judgment by any irrelevant side-issues, rather than by rational examination of the evidence. The devotion to routine is everywhere: “I’m doing it this way because so-and-so did it this way successfully in 1910.” Business procedures have come down to an incredible, senseless mess of wasted motion, inconvenience, inefficiency—just because it was done that way fifty years ago, and circumstances have changed, but nobody’s taken the initiative to notice it and change procedures accordingly.

The “judgment by side-issues” is on the pattern of thinking that a movie is good because its particular locale was popular; or because “the theme is timely.” Opinion polls [are used] as substitutes for judgment and as guides for action, on all issues, on the most preposterously inapplicable occasions.

Also—the desperate worship of authority
(what
authority and how “authorities” appear is another matter, to be analyzed later). Once somebody is an “authority,” everything he says or does is right, without questions or examination, not because it is right, but because
he
says or does it. It is never
what
is said, but
who
says it. The strict method of judgment by and from personality. To discredit an idea, one must discredit the speaker or his motives (the smear technique). The attempt to discredit an idea by examining it is treason against the code of the parasite, a breach of the general method of the parasite’s world. The examination of an idea can’t be done without independent rational judgment.

The attempts to substitute mechanical devices for judgment (like machines to study audience reactions) are fantastic and extend into the most preposterous spheres. (Like, say, a machine to measure your reactions and tell you whether you really love your wife or not.)

And the first question asked, before any action, is:
“Who
has done it that way?” The statement: “It’s never been done before” is pronounced everywhere as the final, unanswerable expression of disapproval, the self-evident defeat of the man who made the proposal, the ultimate damnation, in the same way that we would say: “It’s impossible.”

The attempts to agree on everything with everyone are sickening. “Why raise an issue?” “Do you have to be disagreeable?” “Do you have to be difficult?” are the constant phrases. A disagreement, of course, implies the need of taking a stand. It’s easy to think oneself safe, so long as everybody agrees; it must be so, since everybody thinks it is and there are no dissenters; but a dissenter brings up the possibility that it may not be so, and that brings up the possibility that you may have to decide what is so.

The contradictions and inconsistencies—in speeches, ideas, policies and actions—are unbelievable. They’d rather contradict themselves all over the place than face a contradiction; to face it means that one must resolve it, choose, and make a decision. Nobody says today what he said yesterday. Nobody means what he says—nor says what he means—nor knows what he means when he says it. This, of course, makes all personal relations disgusting. But when this is applied to business matters—the disasters follow. (When they discard the rational faculty, they
have
to live in and for the moment, without connection to the rest of their lives; they break the continuity of an identity—since they have no identity. The power of reason is the identity.)

Nothing and nobody is reliable. There is no way to pin a man down to anything definite, nor to count on him. He has no character—he has no identity, no fixed entity. It is not a world of crooks and dishonesty—crooks have a tangible, definite purpose, robbery, and one could even deal on the basis of
that
as a solid starting point; it is much worse. It is a world in the exact image of a parasite’s soul—a gray, shapeless fog. A world with a treacherous quicksand under one’s feet—and no defined outlines, no solid shapes, no fixed entities; a heavy, passive, stagnant fog in which something moves, as if trying to form, but dissolves the moment you attempt to focus on or touch it; a world without focus, blurred, not to be reached, never quite in existence. It is something like the spectacle one would see if one’s power of central, focused vision were gone and only one’s marginal side-vision was left; one would then be in the awful [position] of knowing that one can’t function or remain that way, it’s an unbearable state, worse than blindness, because one would have to make constant efforts to see clearly, while knowing that it’s impossible.

There is only clear attribute of the fog—pain. Suffering. It’s not even a specific suffering—how can anything be specific in such a fog?—but a pervading sense of suffering, perhaps more awful for not being defined (if it were defined, one could perhaps combat it). It is as if one heard screams (or sounds approximating screams) among the vague, floating shapes, and whenever these shapes seemed to jell into forms of something for an instant, the forms were those of open wounds. The Hegelian-Marxist process without an object that does the “processing”? There it is.

There is never an event of success, achievement, completion, fulfillment, or happiness in this world. Whenever a definite event emerges from the rotten stagnation, it’s a disaster-a failure, a breakdown, destruction, suffering, disappointment, frustration, misery. This—in business life, in public life, in personal life. (Since the parasite functions on the death principle, the positive events are impossible in his world; only the negative ones, the progressive steps to final destruction, can be achieved in reality, the reality he asked for.)

In this world’s productive life, nothing is ever done successfully, everything is botched, halfway, doesn’t quite come off; but the disasters and failures are clear-cut and definite enough; after each, the productive activity falls a step below the previous level; there is no power of recovery. In personal life, the attempts at happiness are dismal failures—forced, unconvincing, unsatisfying, a pretense at joy rather than real joy—everything is bloodless, in half-tones, in faded, washed-out, blotched pastels—the love affairs, the marriages, the friendships. (Emotions proceed from reason—and where there are no firm rational convictions, there can be no real emotions; their feelings are an exact counterpart of their intellectual state, of the content of their minds.)

The misery of these people is real enough—but not sharp enough to make them stop, scream, rebel and do something about it; that, too, would be a definite emotion. It is more like a chronic state of dull pain, almost as if they had come to take for granted that pain is man’s normal state of existence. Occasionally, it becomes unbearable; one of them breaks. And the specific events or results of their personal relationships are all disastrous, each leaving the relationship worse than it was before.

Now, as to their “authorities.” It is, of course, part of the basic contradiction of the parasite that he must hate the creator and need him at the same time, that he must destroy the creator and seek him out. So the behavior of men in the parasite’s world has both aspects, viciously and ludicrously mixed. First, they try to discard, ignore, hamper, destroy any man of ability and grab his ideas, his property, his position, his prestige. They sense genuine ability, they fear and resent it, and one way of fighting it is the Toohey method of “enshrining mediocrity”: while they sneer at heroes and heroism, they practice a maudlin, sickening kind of half-abject, half-sneering hero-worship of their own kind of celebrities, and they eagerly push their mediocrities onto public altars, blow nonentities into giants—while proclaiming their resentment of and the nonexistence of giants. (And don’t we see
that
today?) They scramble for the spotlight themselves—and also push
their own kind
into prominence, into the places of the destroyed or missing creators.

The second stage is when the parasites discover what the positions of the creators entail. There is a period of bewildered hesitation and uncertainty. To be “a great man” means to have to take action, make decisions and
bear the responsibility.
This the parasite cannot and will not do; he will run from the mere thought of it. So now there comes the period of the ghost-writer, the front and the patsy. The parasites try to keep their “prestige” and positions, but switch the work and the actual responsibility to someone else. (My story opens just before the beginning of
this
period.) That’s the stage equivalent to the Soviet custom of liquidating factory heads for the failure of a five-year plan, the heads who are placed there for that purpose, who have the responsibility of trying to produce under impossible conditions, who never get credit for success (the Commissar does) and get executed for failure. (This is precisely what James Taggart does with his key employees.
There
is one concrete, dramatic issue in human terms.)

The parasites are not concerned with the results, i.e., the actual performance or production that their high position demands. They are concerned only (and fiercely, hysterically) with faking a performance—in the eyes of others and in their own eyes. They maneuver themselves into positions and situations where the responsibility for actual results is not theirs—and they have a plausible alibi for it not being theirs, for their right to put the blame on somebody else, for even being the injured party (on the “I work so hard—and here’s what people do to me—I can’t help it” pattern).