Fountain Head

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey's missive on how to rule the Earth.

"It's only a matter of discovering the lever.
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?

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.

That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way.

Kill integrity by internal corruption.

Use him against himself.

Direct him 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.

Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect.

You've destroyed architecture.

Build up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature.

Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theater.

Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the 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 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 every thing.

Tell them that a sense of humor is a limitless virtue.

Don't let any thing remain sacred in a man's soul - and his soul won't to 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 - any thing 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 truly 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 social mores of today.

Every thing 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 have 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 smoke - don't drink. It's all the same line. The great line.

Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Some thing 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 category of happiness by giving up every thing 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.

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 some thing.

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 any thing 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 some thing above it.

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 some thing above sense.

That here he must not try to think, he must feel.

He must believe.

Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild.

Any thing 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."

Keating had sat down on the floor, by the side of the dresser; he had felt tired and he had simply folded his legs. He did not want to abandon the dresser; he felt safer, leaning against it; as if it still guarded the letter he had surrendered.

"Peter, you've heard all this. You've seen me practicing it for ten years. You see it being practiced all over the Earth. Why are you disgusted?

You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You're in on it.

You've taken your share and you've got to go along. You're afraid to see where it's leading.

I am not. I will tell you.

The Earth of the future. The Earth I want.

A world of obedience and of unity.

A Earth where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of the mind of his neighbor who'll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who'll have no thought - and so on, Peter, around the Earth.

Since all must agree with all. A Earth where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who'll have no desire except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who'll have no desires - around the Earth, Peter.

Since all must serve all.

A Earth in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster - prestige. The approval of his fellows - their good opinion - the opinion of men who'll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain.

Judgment, Peter! Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes - since no individuality will be permitted.

An Earth with its head cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand.

My hand - and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me.

Those who know what makes you tick - you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who've liked and accepted those names. You'll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the limitless, god and prophet and king combined.

Vox populi. The average, the common, the general.

Do you know the proper antonym for Ego?

Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide.

But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time. We will do the originating.

Vox dei. We will enjoy limitless submission - from men who've learned nothing except to submit.

We will call it 'to serve.' We will give out medals for service. You'll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek. No other form of personal achievement.

Can you see Howard Roark in the picture? No? Then don't waste time on foolish questions.

Every thing that can't be ruled, must go.

And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their fourteenth year.

When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode.

The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight?

So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey.

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles?

Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.

But we will have neither God nor thought.

Only voting by smiles.

Automatic levers - all saying vote for the lesser of two evils ...

Now if you were a little more intelligent - like your ex-wife, for instance - you'd ask:
What of us, the rulers? What of me, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey?

And I would say, Yes, you're right. I will achieve no more than you will. I will have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the common good.

Peter, my poor old friend, I am the most selfless man you've ever known. I have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your soul. You've used people at least for the sake of what you could get from them for yourself.

I want nothing for myself. I use people for the sake of what I can do to them. It's my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my Earth of the future.

Let all live for all.

Let all sacrifice and very few profit.

Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop.

Let all stagnate. There's equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all.

Universal slavery - without even the dignity of a master.

Slavery to slavery. A great circle - and a total equality.

The Earth of the future."

-Ayn Rand, from the Fountain Head

Note: Ayn Rand was vehemently anti-communist. She believed in unresticted capitalism. Toohey is basically a communist but the truth is unresticted capitalism can as well work to the same ends as communism in taking the power away from the people and placing it in a ruling class. In communism the ruling class is the government bureaucrats, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In America the ruling class is the American aristocracy.

The ideal government would probably take the form of a social democracy. This is essentially what America became after Franklin D. Roosevelt legislated the New Deal.

The wealth in America of the ruling class is now and has been corrupting America's social democracy. America's social democracy has become one in which the corporate powers, owned and operated by the American aristocracy, are the only ones being served by the socialistic aspect of American society, think of the shift that has occured over the last 25 years from welfare for people to welfare for corporate entities owned by the American aristocracy. And if you believe that corporate subsidies are saving American jobs you must believe the latest propaganda - outsourcing scientific and professional white collar jobs to foreign countries is good for America!

Ayn Rand would be as vehemently opposed to corporate subsidies as she was to communism.

Ayn Rand as well was vehemently anti-violence. Ayn Rand did not believe freedom or democracy could be created when the subject (victim) was forced to look up a gun barrel (missile barrage/bombing campaign).

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