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January 23, 1949
Dear Mr. Carr:
Thank you for your letter. It has answered my philosophical curiosity. I appreciate your taking the time and effort to do it in detail.
I did not think it was possible that anyone would write to me the following paragraph: âIn the formal study of ethics, (a course for which no attractive woman has ever enrolled) months and years of cruel discipline are required to drill into the average young manâs mushy little monkey-mind this basic principle: That an ethical act, to be ethical at all, must be performed with total disregard of the personal profit, loss, praise or blame attached to it.â
That paragraph states exactly the rotten corruption in all the systems of ethics which I am fightingâyet you present it to me as if you intended it to be news, or explanation, or expected me to agree, orâno, I cannot try to guess your intention. In THE FOUNTAINHEAD, I have presented a new system of ethics, the basic principle of which is that an ethical act, in order to be ethical at all, must be performed with the most profound regard for oneâs personal interest, that oneâs personal profit must be its sole motive and purposeâand that any other act is totally immoral.
The vicious nonsense which you quote from âformal ethicsâ (?) simply means that man has no personal interest in ethical behavior, that his personal interests are outside the realm of ethics, but that he must perform some allegedly ethical acts for some unknown reason which has nothing to do with himself. Sure, thatâs your formal ethics. And thatâs why they havenât worked after centuries of professors mouthing them at mankind. And thatâs why men prefer any kind of sin to this sort of ethics. Brother, have you come to the wrong person! Iâm the little girl who has set out (and succeeded) to prove that ethics must be based on manâs self-interest and can be based on nothing else.
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You say that Howard Roark is an example of ânot caring a damn either way what the hell happens to him.â This means that you have concluded that Howard Roark did not care about his actions or their resultsâthat he did not care a damn either way whether he happened to design a modern building or a classical monstrosityâthat he refused to design bad buildings out of some sort of selfless devotion to some sort of woozy âtruth,â but his real feeling would have permitted him to design them with pleasureâthat his real interest lay in a Peter Keating kind of career, but he sacrificed himselfâthat when he fought for the kind of buildings he liked, it really meant nothing to him, he had no personal interest in his work, he derived no joy from it and no personal profitâhe did not care in what way he used his creative energy, nor in what way he spent his timeâhe did not care about anything at allâhe was just a disinterested amoeba, totally indifferent to life, to reality, to thoughts, emotions and actions. If that is what you got out of THE FOUNTAINHEAD, the loss is yours, not mine.
If one approaches writing or thinking with such terms as: âselfish altruistâ, then your statements are not surprising. You write: ââIâm curious as to how and why your scorching letter, no matter how indignantly intended, turned out to be an altruistic act.â There is no mystery about it at allâjust look up the word âaltruisticâ in the dictionary. âAltruisticâ does not mean âkindâ or âvaluable to othersââwhich is the way you use the word. âAltruismâ means placing others above selfâand placing the interests of others above your own. If you keep this in mind, you will, perhaps, feel a little ashamed of such a paragraph as: âThese are the real, the selfish altruists, of whom you are one. Evidence? THE FOUNTAINHEAD, a book that has benefited hundreds of thousands of readers, and harmed only a few humbugs who deserved to be exposed.â
Do you call the fact that my book benefited readers âaltruisticâ? Do you mean that they derived from it greater benefits than I did, spiritual or material? Do you mean that their benefit was achieved at the expense of mine or at the price of some sort of self-sacrifice by me? Do you mean that I wrote it for their sake, not mine? Do you mean that I wrote it for the purpose of benefiting them, with no personal interest involved in the matter? Or do you mean that in order to be selfish, I had to expect my book to harm peopleâbut since it didnât, this makes me an altruist?
Whom and what are you answering when you tell me: âIt is not true that any act which benefits another human being is per se a sickly, hypocritical fraud.â? Who said
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it was? What THE FOUNTAINHEAD said is that only an act of true selfishness motivated by and intended for oneâs own benefit can be of any benefit or value to othersâand only as a secondary consequence. But any act motivated by âthe good of othersâ is a vicious act. âThe good of othersâ as oneâs aim or motive is a vicious motive. The sole and inevitable result of such acts or motives is to destroy both the do-gooder and his victims. Any attempt to act for the âgood of othersâ is a piece of vicious impertinence.
So if my letter or my book benefited you or anyone, it is not paradoxical, and it can surprise nobody except the moralists of the âdisinterestedâ school. My book is of value to people, because my purpose in writing it was my own philosophical interest for my own pleasure. I did not attempt to do good to my readers. I did not attempt to render any sort of service to mankind. I did not consider it my duty to be of value to anyone. I did not think of anyone, only of my subject. I am happy if readers found benefit in my book, but that benefit was not my purpose.
As you see, I expect principles to have specific meanings, applicable to concrete reality and serving as a guide to oneâs actions. Therefore, such a statement as dividing people into âtruth-loving personsâ and âhypocritesâ for purposes of philosophical explanation is totally meaningless to me. What truth? What love? What constitutes loving truth? History is full of people who believed what they taughtâyet caused the most unspeakable disasters. Robespierre believed completely in his right to guillotine his opponents. Hitler believed in some mystical visions that had appointed him to be the ruler of mankind. Are these the âtruth lovers?â Is oneâs own blindness a guarantee of oneâs virtue? Do you use emotion (âloveâ) as a standard for a philosophical definition?
These are terms in which I do not deal, nor do I deal with such statements as: âstretching a generality that last fatal notch to 100 per cent that invalidates any generality.â What is that? A Sunday supplement version of Hegel?
I made the accusation that Cristina was the counterpart of Ellsworth Toohey. Your answer is: âOnly an initiate can tell the two species apart.â An initiate into what? (The question is rhetorical. I know the answer.) So you say youâre not a mystic? In the realm of rationalism, there is no such term as âan initiate.â It takes no âinitiationâ to explain anything in rational terms: it takes simple words and common sense. If you wrote a book, in which your readers cannot tell whether your heroine is a saint or a monster without some sort of âinitiationâ into something,
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previously to and apart from the content of your bookâcan you then complain about being âmisunderstoodâ? If you wrote a book in the Tibetan language (which, I think, you did), then offered it to English-speaking readers, and then sighed at peopleâs lack of understanding, saying nobly that you âforgiveâ themâdo you know the proper English answer to that?
After innumerable passages (in your book) in which you state that Cristina had achieved âtotal selflessness,â that she âdesired nothing for herself,â that her eyes lighted up with interest only when she thought that Dan was sick, so that she could âhelp himââyou attempt to tell me that she had something in common with Roarkâbecause she, too, had consecrated herself to her work, such work consistingâhere, on earthâof washing other peopleâs infected colons.
I suppose I should point out to you that the thesis of THE FOUNTAINHEAD is not: Do whatever you wish, so long as you believe it. The thesis is: Do whatever you wish, so long as you are independent of other men. This thesis rests, for its justification, on manâs natureâyou may discover why and how if you care to study Roarkâs speech, all the steps of the argument are included there. This thesis cannot be stretched to include those who wish to have its benefits without its baseâthose who wish to spend their lives in the unnatural perversion of serving others, yet try to claim all the rights pertaining to independence, at the same time.
I shall now have to quote from Roarkâs speech: âThe first right on earth is the right of the ego. Manâs first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist or the dictator.â
The intent of this paragraph was to close the door to all the Cristinas who might attempt to climb on the Roark bandwagon with no better ticket than the alleged happiness they claim to find in self-immolation. Nothing doing, sister!
You say of Cristina: âOf course, her motives were selfish; she was seeking full selfhood.â If you attach any meaning to words, if you made the above clear in your novel, but I missed itâthen you should have told me what her âfull selfhoodâ specifically consisted of. In your book, she achieved something which you called happiness
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somewhere after death. All that she did in life and on earth was to take care of sick children. What, specifically, was the connection between her âselfhoodâ and the sick children? What, specifically, gave her happiness? Why did she have to nurse the children in order to achieve happiness? If her happiness did not consist of the good of the children, what did it consist of? And where? And how?
You say that you canât understand why I blame Cristina for ruining every life she touched. Perhaps I took your book and your character more seriously than you intended them to be taken. (I did not know, for instance, that you intended your book as a piece of âscience fiction.â) I took Cristina to represent an idealâthat is, your version of a human ideal. I did not gather that all the men in your book wanted to sleep with her. I gathered that their longing for her was the spiritual longing for an ideal which they could not reach and which left them dissatisfied with everything else thereafter, so that they never found happiness in any form with any other woman after they had known Cristina. If this was not your intention, then I am wrong, but then your book has no philosophical meaning at all. If Cristina was intended as an ideal, then she does ruin every life she touches, because she is an unattainable ideal. She arouses in men a longing for something which they cannot reach or achieve, which they cannot make part of their actions and their daily lives. This, of course, is the nature of altruism, and I gave you credit for presenting it correctly. Anyone who would hold altruism (living for others) as an ideal, would be condemned to a state of miserable frustration, fear, guilt and inferiorityâbecause the only way to be a complete altruist is to offer yourself as a meal to the first tribe of cannibals you can find. Anything less than that is way short of the ideal, and leaves one in the position of a weak, imperfect, unhappy sinner.
Why do I blame Cristina for Danâs unhappiness? Because she was a woman who professed to live for others, because she spent her life relieving suffering, the physical suffering of childrenâyet ignored the much greater suffering of Dan and of all the other men who wanted her, a suffering which she herself had caused. I gathered that they wanted her spirituallyâthey wanted her companionship, her understanding and the love which she had allegedly shown them and then withdrawn. If she was concerned with relieving the suffering of others, then it was her duty to give them what they wanted. And if, as you say, what they wanted was to sleep with herâthen, as an altruist, it was her duty to do that, too.
No, Dominique or I do not have to say âYesâ to every man, because Dominique and I are not altruists. We do not
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consider the suffering or the desires of others as our responsibility or concern. But an altruist would have to say âYesâ to any and every desire of any and every manâand this is just another minor example of the vicious nonsense which is altruism.
You ask: âHow do you treat admirers who interrupt you in the midst of your very important work and importune you with pastimes for which you have neither the time nor the inclination?â Well, for one thing, I do not make them carry my basket. I do not use them.
You ask: âIf you know any kindlier way of turning down a man than gentle laughter, letâs hear it.â The answer is: respect. Take the man seriously and tell him the truth. There can be no such thing as gentle laughter when one laughs at someoneâs pain or disappointment.
Do you really want to know why your readers liked Wendra? You say that she was âa bad, vain, worldly woman trying futilely to buy love and happiness.â You forgot a very important point: she did not try to buy love, she actually loved. She loved one man all her life. Any person capable of doing that is neither bad nor vain. The capacity for a love of this kind comes from a very deep, very noble and very selfish quality of the spirit. Some of your readers would not, perhaps, be able to explain it to you or give you their reasons, but they all know it. They know that Wendra knew more about love than Cristina ever could. Cristina, whoâas you said repeatedly in your bookâloved everybody, actually loved nobody at all, not even herself.
I strongly suspect that the real difference between you and me is that I did take your book more seriously than you intended. When you write a story in which the heroine vanishes through a shimmering film of air into the fourth dimension, and then returns, walking on a light rayâwhen you are then accused of being a mystic and answer that you are not, because you once got a letter from Einstein who does not write to mysticsâI cannot take it in any way except as humor.
Why, yes, you may show my letter privately to your friends, if you care to, on condition that you show them the complete case, that is, my complete first letter, your answer, and my present answer. If it interests them, I have no objection to their seeing it, but I do object to being quoted out of context. And, of course, none of this is for public use.
Sincerely,
Ayn Rand