Carlton's Brain

Elsworth Toohey reveals all Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Still reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and almost done. Just read through a part where Elsworth Toohey, the villian, explains his evil plot to Peter Keating, who had made a Faustian deal with Toohey, unbeknowst to him. The story is really excellent, since the hero, Howard Roark, is the person everyone hates, since he is “selfish” or an “Egoist”, whereas Toohey is the “selfless” “humanitarian”. Toohey has just claimed that he wants power, to rule, and Keating ask’s him whom he wants to rule. Clearly draws parallels to religion. Wanted to reprint this part, although it is rather long (and not paragraphed at all!), so here it goes:

“You. The world. It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn 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 Napoleans 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? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell man 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 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, teh 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. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destoryed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you’ve destoryed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you’ve destroyed teh press. 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 the 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 teh Orient up. Didn’t they all preach teh 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 makind 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 your 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 thingking men.”