The Red Side of Life ^ | 6/3/12 | RedInNewYork
“The Fountainhead” is to “Atlas Shrugged” what “Animal Farm” is to “1984.” Just like “Animal Farm” is not about farming, “Fountainhead” is not about architecture – it is about socialist ascent.
While “Atlas Shrugged” is all the rage these
days – and appropriately so – I strongly suggest that anyone who is truly
interested in defeating Obama in November read “The Fountainhead,” because it
subtly lays bare the Obama playbook. However, at some points, subtlety gives way
to blunt frankness – the gloating revolutionary. In this case Ellsworth Toohey,
the socialist villain, spells out several ways of accomplishing a socialist
takeover. I urge you to read this carefully – I will reproduce his words, in
relevant part, in a manner that constitutes “fair use.” If you read and
understand these points, you will know – in your own way – what you can do to
defeat Obama and socialism in general.
From “The Fountainhead”:
If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can
get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords
or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools
and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It
must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours.
You won’t need a whip—he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in
reverse—and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against
himself. Want to know how it’s done?
There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel
small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s
difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill
integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal
destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live
for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has
ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct
screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that
he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a
sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal
is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all
sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t
practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve
one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be
corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey.
He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he
feels unclean. That’s one way.
Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his
capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We
don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it
from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up
standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you
stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to
improvement, to excellence, to perfection... Don’t set out to raze all
shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are
razed.
Then there’s another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter
is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn
it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a
sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don’t let anything remain sacred in a
man’s soul—and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed
the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set
no limits to his obedience—anything goes—nothing is too serious.
Here’s another way. This is most important.
Don’t allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and
self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free
men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or
important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the
mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I
want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of
great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come
for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s
soul—and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked,
Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great
system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of
personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a
single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to
catch their theme song—‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? Look at the moral
atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to
the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing
makes men happy—and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied
happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born
into a sacrificial furnace—lie on a bed of nails—go into the desert to mortify
the flesh—don’t dance—don’t go to the movies on Sunday—don’t try to get
rich—don’t smoke—don’t drink. It’s all the same line. The great line. Fools
think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over,
old-fashioned. But there’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine
a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that
preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men.
Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell
people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything
that makes them happy. You don’t have to be too clear about it. Use big vague
words. ‘Universal Harmony’—‘Eternal Spirit’—‘Divine Purpose’
—‘Nirvana’—‘Paradise’—‘Racial Supremacy’—‘The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.’
Internal corruption, Peter. That’s the
oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still
fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if
you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to
reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial
offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who
speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the
master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s
your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man
who’s not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from
you. But let him come and you’ll scream your empty heads off, howling that he’s
a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you
might have noticed something. I said, ‘It stands to reason.’ Do you see?
Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must
be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be
careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand
away. Don’t say reason is evil—though some have gone that far and with
astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something
above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s
inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’—‘Feeling’—‘Revelation’—‘Divine Intuition’—‘Dialectic
Materialism.’ If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you
that your doctrine doesn’t make sense—you’re ready for him. You tell him that
there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel.
He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in
any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a
thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men.
Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead