QUESTION| ANSWER |
| 01/01 | What is love? | To love is to value. Love, properly, is the consequence and expression of admiration; the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Love is not alms, but a moral tribute. As an orientation, love represents a disposition to experience the loved being as the embodiment of profoundly important personal values - and, as a consequence, a real or potential source of joy. |
| 01/02 | A no choice necessity? | To integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e. principles. |
| 01/03 | What are the three axiomatic concepts recognized by the phlosophy of objectivisim? | Existence -- Identity -- Consciousness. |
| 01/04 | The greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind? | Altruism -- the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted on others for the sake of himself. When it was added that man must find joy in self immolation; the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal -- under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. |
| 01/05 | What is inherent in the grasp of any object? | There is (existence) something (identity) I am aware of (consciousness). |
| 01/06 | Altruism | As an ethical principle holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the moral justification of his existence, that self-sacrifice is his foremost duty and highest virtue. |
| 01/07 | What is the validation of axioms? | Sense perception. |
| 01/08 | Scientific Ethics | A code of moral values based, not on revelation or subjective whim or social tradition, but on man's nature as a living being. |
| 01/09 | What is the root of the various magical world views? | A contradiction of the self-evident by not consistently adhering to the axioms and typically fall into some form of contradicting the self evident, as in the vaious magical world views which (implicitly) deny the law of identity. |
| 01/10 | That which can have needs, goals, values and that can generate the actions necessary to achieve them | a living entity |
| 01/11 | What is cognition? | Sensation (Entity) -- Perception (Identity) -- Abstraction (Unit) |
| 01/12 | The foundation of all knowledge? | Existence -- Identity -- Consciousness. |
| 01/13 | The foundation of all knowledge? | Existence -- Identity -- Consciousness. |
| 01/14 | What are the philosophers' categories of an entities being? | Qualities (red or hard), quantities (5 inches or six pounds), relationships (right of), actions (walking of digesting). |
| 01/15 | What is the law of causality (cause and effect)? | A universal law of reality. Identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. |
| 01/16 | What does the validation of the law of causality rest on? | Every entity has a nature (identity); it is specific, noncontradictory, limited; it has certain attributes and no other. Such an entity must act in accordance with its nature. |
| 01/17 | What is the law of causality (cause and effect)? | A corollary of identity. A corollary is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge. |
| 01/18 | The most depraved type of human being? | The man without a purpose? |
| 01/19 | What is the essence of metaphysics of metaphysics? | The step-by-step development of the corollaries of the existence axiom. |
| 01/20 | What does the law of causality (a fact independent of consciousness) state? | Entities are the cause of actions. Order, lawfulness, regularity, do not derive from a cosmic consciousness. Cause and effect is part of the fabric of reality as such. Causality - for Objectivism as for Aristotelianism - is a law inherent in being qua being. To be is to be something - and to be somethig is to act accordingly. |
| 01/21 | Who casued causality? Who created the universe? | Existence exists. (It is reality. As such, its elements are uncreated and eternal, and its laws, immutable.) |
| 01/22 | What is a fundamental principle to the metaphysics of objectivism? | Primacy of existence. Things (entities) are what they are independent of consciousness. |
| 01/23 | What is the 'primacy of consciousness'? | The principle that consciousness is the primary metaphysical factor. The function of consciousness is not perception, but creation of that which is. |
| 01/24 | What are the three prevalent versions of the 'primacy of consciousness', distinguished by the answer to the question: upon whose consciousness is existence dependent? | Supernaturalistic version, Plato - Hume axis. Existence is a product of a cosmic consciousness, God. Epistomologically this variant leads to mysticism, the relegious view. Social version, Kant - Hegelian axis. The secularization of the religious viewwhere existence is dependent on society. Epistomologically this leads to collective surveys, a kind of group introspection or group consensus among thinkers. Personal version. Protagoras. Mans own consciousness controls existence, existence is a product of man's urges. Epistemologically there are no standards of data of any kind to which a person must conform, where it is truth for me versus truth for you. |
| 01/25 | What is mysticims? | Knowledge is said to rest on communications from the Supreme Mind to the human, whether in the form of revelations sent to select individuals or of ideas implanted, innately or ohterwise, throughout the species. |
| 01/26 | What is objectivism? | Ayn Rands philosophy in which the primacy of existence comes to full systematic expression in Western thought for the first time. |
| 01/27 | The only form of human depravity? | The man without a purpose. |
| 01/28 | What are metaphysically facts? | Reality. As such, they are not subject to anyone's appraisal, they are not ture or false, 'they simply are', 'it' simply 'is'; they must be accepted without evaluation. |
| 01/29 | How must facts of reality be greeted? | Not by approval or condemnation, praise or blame, but by a silent nod of acquiescence, amounting to the affirmation: 'They are, were, will be, and have to be.' |
| 01/30 | How does man determine truth or falsehood of his judgements? | By whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality. |
| 01/31 | What is the standard of right or wrong? | The metaphysically given; by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices. |
| 02/01 | What must be judged? | Man made facts. Because they are products of choice, based on the rational and irrational. |
| 02/02 | What is the attempt to alter tne metaphphysical given? | The fallacy of rewriting reality. A common version is heaven by those who condemn life because man is capable of failure, frustration, pain, and who yearn instead for a world in which man knows nothing but happiness, and does not die. |
| 02/03 | What is the historical root of the fallacy of rewriting reality? | Religion - specifically, in the idea that the universe wass created by a supernatural Omnip0tence, who could have creatd things differently and who can alter them if He chooses. Christianity invites such wishing, which it describes as the virtue of 'hope' and the duty of 'prayer.' By the nature of existence nothing is posible except what actuall is. The concept of omnipotence is logically incompatible with the law of identity (aciom); it is one or the other. |
| 02/04 | What is a necessary condition for sucessful action? | Respect for reality, the refusal to evade or rewrite facts. |
| 02/05 | More evil than a closed heart to pity? | The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon |
| 02/06 | Where does the fundamental theory of a 'mind-body conflict' or dichotomy come from? | From a conflict with reality. The rejection of the absolutism of reality where the conscious mental set is reversed.. Where one expects existence to obey wishes and then discovers that existence does not obey. From my dream vs. the actual which thwarts it; or the inner vs. the outer; or value vs. fact; or the moral vs. the practical, the spiritual relm vs. the material relm. |
| 02/07 | What has corrupted every branch and issue of philosophy? | The theory of a mind-body conflict. |
| 02/08 | What is the real root of the theory of a mind body conflict? | Its root is a breach between some men's consciousness and existence. In this sense, the basis of the theory is not reality, but a human error: the error of turning away from reality, of refusing to accept the absolutism of the metaphysically given. |
| 02/09 | What are two outstanding falsehoods in the history of metaphysics? | Idealism and materialsm. |
| 02/10 | What is idealism? | The Idealists (Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Hegel) regard reality as a spiritual dimension transcending and controlling the world of nature. Since 'spiritual' has no meaning other than 'pertaining to consciousness'' the content of true reality in this view is invariably some function or form of consciousness (e.g. Plato's abstractions, Augustine's God, Hegel's Ideas). Idealism amounts to the primacy of consciusness and thus to the advocacy of consciousness without existence. Epistomologically idealists are mystics, mystics of the spirit. They hold that knowledge (of true reality) derives not from sense perception or from reasoning based on it, but from an outerworldly source such as revelation or the equivalent. The more sophisticated versions rest on technical analyses of the nature of percepts or concepts. The unsophisticated but popular version of idealism, which typically upholds a personalized other dimension, is religion. |
| 02/11 | One permanent victory of pain? | Making one lose the desire for joy |
| 02/12 | What is essential to all versions of the creed of idealism? | The belief in the supernatural. |
| 02/13 | What is nature? | Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law. It is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identites. |
| 02/14 | Altruism's supreme gesture of charity? | To give an unearned respect |
| 02/15 | What is supernatural? | A form of existence beyound existence; a thing beyound entities; a something beyound identity. An assualt on everything man knows about reality. It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics. It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy (or, in the case of primitive men, a failure to grasp them). |
| 02/16 | Is God the creater of the universe? | Not if existence has primacy over consciousness. |
| 02/17 | Is God the designer of the universe? | Not if A is A. The alternative to 'design' is not 'chance.' It is causality. |
| 02/18 | Is God omnipotent? | Nothing and no one can alter the metaphysically given. |
| 02/19 | Is God infinite? | Infinite does not mean large; it means larger than any specific quantity, i.e., of no specific quantity. An infinite quantity would be a quantity without identity. But A is A. |
| 02/20 | Can God perform miracles? | A miracle is an action not possible to the entities involved by their nature; it would be inviolation of the identity axiom. |
| 02/21 | Is God purely spiritual? | Spiritual means pertaining to consciousness, and consciousness is a faculty of certain living organisms, their faculty of perceiving that which exists. |
| 02/22 | What is the foundation of reason and logic? | Existence exists and only existence exists. |
| 02/23 | What happens when you postulate a supernatural realm? | You turn aside from reason, eschew proofs, dispense with definitons, and rely instead on faith. Such an approach shifts the perspective from metaphysics to epistomology. |
| 02/24 | What is materialsm? | Materialists (Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, Skinner) champion nature but deny the reality or efficacy of consciousness. Consciousness is either a myth or a useless byproduct of brain or other motions. The advocacy of existence without consciousness. The denial of man's faculty of cognition and therefore of all knowledge. Epistomologically materialist are mystics, mystics of the muscle. The blind operation of physical factors, such as atomic dances in the cerebrum, glandular squirtings, S-R conditioning, or the tools of production moving in that weird, waltzklike contortion known as the dialectic process. |
| 02/25 | What is a soul? | Your faculty of consciousness. Not a ticket to another reality. |
| 02/26 | What is Epistomology? | Epistomology is the science that studies the nature and means of human knowledge. It is the science that tells a fallible, conceptual consciousness what rules to follow in order to gain knowledge of an independent reality. |
| 02/27 | Why can a man not accept ideas at random and count them as knowlege merely because he feels like it? | Knowledge is knowledge of reality, and existence has primacy over consciousness. Human knowledge however, though based on sensory perception, is conceptual in nature, and on the conceptual level consciousness displays a new feature: it is not automatic or infallible; it can err, distort, depart from reality (whether through ignorance or evasion). Man needs to learn how to use his mind, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to validate the conclusions he reaches. |
| 02/28 | Your means of survival? | Money. |
| 03/01 | Why can there be no concepts apart from sense experience? | Concepts are integrations of perceptual data. Objectivism postulates there are no innate ideas, ideas in the mind at birth. Consciousness begins as a blank state; all of its conceptual content is derived from the evidence of the senses. |
| 03/02 | What is the verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood? | The verdict you pronounce upon your life |
| 03/03 | What is one precondition of epistomology? | The postulate that the conceptual level is not automatic. |
| 03/04 | What is the primary axiom of epistomology that is a corollary of the conscious axiom? | The validity of the senses. |
| 03/05 | What are the human senses? | Color - Sound - Taste - Texture - Smell. |
| 03/06 | The barometer of a society's virtue? | Money |
| 03/07 | What is the task of man's senses? | To give man the evidence of existence. To sum up a vast range of facts, to condense a complex body of information -- which reaches our consciousness in the form of a relatively few sensations. |
| 03/08 | The essence of human morality? | To make money |
| 03/09 | What is the task of reason? | To identify existence. The senses tell man something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. |
| 03/10 | What is science? | The conceptual unraveling of sensory data; it has no other primary evidence from which to proceed. |
| 03/11 | What are dreams? | Contemplation of a consciousness content rather than external reality. Unfocused integrations. |
| 03/12 | The only evil thought? | The refusal to think |
| 03/13 | What is the conceptual level? | Making inductions, formulating theories, analyzing complexities, integrating ever greater ranges of data; discovering step by step the underlying structures and laws of reality. |
| 03/14 | A trade by which one gains and the other loses -- if you don't do it in business why do it in your own life? | A fraud. |
| 03/15 | What is physics? | The task of identifying the nature of physical objects as they are apart from man's form of perception. |
| 03/16 | A great sin and the worst guilt? | To accept an undeserved guilt |
| 03/17 | What is consciousness? | A faculty of perception. Its function is to look directly outward, to perceive that which exists- and to do so by a certain means. |
| 03/18 | Man's motive power? | His moral code |
| 03/19 | In consciousness and the physical world, every existent is bound by what two laws? | Identity and causality. Consciousness is what it is. It is limited, finite, lawful. It is a faculty with a nature, which includes specific instruments that enable it to achieve awareness.It is a something that has to grasp its objects somehow. |
| 03/20 | A viler evil than to murder a man? | To sell him suicide as an act of virtue |
| 03/21 | What is a precondition of consciousness? | Identity. It is the base from which epistemology must proceed; it is the principle by reference to which all standards of cognition must be defined. |
| 03/22 | What is the first stage of consciousness? | Sensation. A sensations is an irreducible state of awareness produced by the action of a stimulus on a sense organ. |
| 03/23 | Your default? | The sanction of the victim |
| 03/24 | What does irreducible mean? | Incapable of being analyzed into simpler conscious units. |
| 03/25 | What is the second stage of consciousness? | Perception. It is 'a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things.' |
| 03/26 | The result and sum of his fundamental convictions? | Sexual choice |
| 03/27 | What is a 'direct experience'? | The perceptual level of consciousness. |
| 03/28 | Chronologically, the sensation stage comes first, then the perceptual and then the conceptual. Epistomologically, what stage comes first? | Perceptual. If one seeks to prove any item of human knowledge, he must begin with the facts of perception. |
| 03/29 | What is performed by the brain automatically? | The integration of sensations into percepts. |
| 03/30 | Our response to our highest values? | Love |
| 03/31 | What is volition? | The voluntary integration of percepts into concepts. Philosophy has volumes of advice on this more complex kind of integration. |
| 04/01 | An idea unexpressed in physical action? | Contemptible hypocrisy |
| 04/02 | What is man's basic freedom of choice? | To exercise his distinctively human cognitive machinery or not; i.e., to set his conceptual faculty in motion or not; 'to think or not to think.' Man's power of volition is the power to seek such awareness of reality or to dispense with it. His choice is to be conscious (in the human sense) or not. |
| 04/03 | What is physical action unguided by an idea? | Fools fraud |
| 04/04 | What is the primary choice in volition? | The choice to focus one's consciousness. |
| 04/05 | A frozen shape of human courage? | A city |
| 04/06 | What is focus? | Focus is the state of a goal-directed mind committed to attaining full awareness of reality. |
| 04/07 | What is a hideous evil? | self-immolation |
| 04/08 | The base for the best Moral Code? | Life and production not death and taxes |
| 04/09 | Man's highest moral purpose? | Achievement |
| 04/10 | The value of achievement, success, ability and man's creative power? | Money of a free country |
| 04/11 | Where do dollar chasers and makers live? | In the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting; but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbole of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. |
| 04/12 | One word which is forbidden? | Give |
| 04/13 | There is no such thing as a lousy job? | Only lousy men who don't care to do it |
| 04/14 | Whats wealth?? | The means of expanding one's life. There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster |
| 04/15 | The foulest man on earth? | More contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. |
| 04/16 | The objectivist's oath? | I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. |
| 04/17 | A moral crime? | To make assertions (Do not tell -- show. Do not claim -- prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction.) |
| 04/18 | The act of acknowledging that which exists? | Justice |
| 04/19 | Humanities darkest evil? | Non objective law -- the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men |
| 04/20 | An act of philosophy? | All work |
| 04/21 | The standard of moral values? | Productive work and that which is it's source -- man's reasoning mind |
| 04/22 | Man's noblest and most joyous power? | The ingenuity of man's mind |
| 04/23 | The tragic joke of human history? | On any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshiped: The idol of instinct and the idol of force. |
| 04/24 | Price of any contradiction? | Destruction |
| 04/25 | Terms of the objectivists moral code? | Man is an end to himself and not the means to any end of others |
| 04/26 | The principle of love? | Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values |
| 04/27 | What to look for in men? | Facts, proof and profit -- not faith, hope and charity |
| 04/28 | Your moral sanction? | Your pride |
| 04/29 | The moral absolute for agreement among men? | That neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade |
| 04/30 | The motor that drives every form of happiness and desire? | Our love for a single value --- For the highest potentiality of our own existence -- and every achievement is an expression of it. |
| 05/01 | The United States government's birth? | Born not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind. |
| 05/02 | The two monuments of mystic faith? | The lunatic asylum and the graveyard -- The supremacy of the irrational |
| 05/03 | A screen to hide a wish? | When nothing seems worth the effort |
| 05/04 | An artist's passion? | Desire for admiration |
| 05/05 | All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source? | An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth |
| 05/06 | How does every man build his world? | In his own image -- He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. |
| 05/07 | The world's code that worships white lies? | An act of mercy |
| 05/08 | The lowest and most futile action? | To throw upon another the burden of your abdication of choice |
| 05/09 | The only man never to be redeemed? | The man without passion |
| 05/10 | Nobody can live by? | Faking reality in any manner whatever |
| 05/11 | The guts of collectivism? | Depravity as its motive; plunder as its goal; lies, fraud and force as its method; and destruction as its only result. |
| 05/12 | Those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies? | traders |
| 05/13 | Man's killer tenet? | The breach between his mind and his body -- The one tenet that destroys a man before he is started |
| 05/14 | The highest of moral values? | That which makes life possible -- Pride in the ability to think, to act and to work for the satisfaction of your desires. |
| 05/15 | An act of self-abdication? | A lie -- because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condeming oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. |
| 05/16 | The opposite motive to charity? | Justice -- giving sympathy to innocence and granting none to guilt |
| 05/17 | What do you place nothing above? | The verdict of one's mind |
| 05/18 | Your highest of values? | Your life -- too high to be given up without a fight |
| 05/19 | The highest, noblest and only good on earth? | The feeling that your life is the highest of values |
| 05/20 | The darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world? | The motive to destroy the highest of values |
| 05/21 | What is the sin of forgiveness? | Placing mercy (forgiveness, brother-cannibal love) over justice (faking reality). |
| 05/22 | One at the mercy of anyone's will? | One who surrenders his/her values |
| 05/23 | The creed of collective independence? | Non - Identity, Non - Property and Non - Fact (Non - Absolute) |
| 05/24 | The virtue of sacrifice? | Sacrifice of: Reason to Faith, Purpose to Inefficacy, Self-esteem to Self-denial, Rationality to Mysticism, Independence to Unity, Honesty to Practicality, Integrity to Duplicity/Compromise, Justice to Mercy, Productiveness to Boredom, Pride to Humility, Wealth to Need, Happiness to Duty. |
| 05/25 | What is the good? | To live your life |
| 05/26 | The question to determine the good? | By what standard |
| 05/27 | Man's basic tool of survival? | Man's mind |
| 05/28 | The question to be or not to be is the question? | To think or not to think |
| 05/29 | What is a moral code? | A code of values to guide your actions. 'Value' is what one acts to gain or keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. |
| 05/30 | The fundamental alternative in the universe? | Existence or non existence -- and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms |
| 05/31 | The standard of value of a morality of reason? | Man's life. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good: all that which destroys it is the evil. |
| 06/01 | The basis of man's life, as required by nature? | Thinking being. Not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being -- not by force or fraud, but life by means of achievement -- not survival at any price, since ther's only one price. that pays for man's survival: reason |
| 06/02 | The successful state of life? | Happiness. Pain is an agent of death |
| 06/03 | Man's highest moral purpose? | The achievement of his own happiness -- Man is an end himself, he exists for his own sake. |
| 06/04 | The purpose of morality? | To teach you not to suffer and die but to enjoy yourself and live |
| 06/05 | Why does man need a code of morality? | For the purpose of self-preservation |
| 06/06 | Man's choice to live? | To live as a man--by the work and the judgment of your mind |
| 06/07 | The root of the objectivist moral code? | A single axiom -- Existence exists |
| 06/08 | The corollary axioms to existence exists? | Something exists which one perceives -- One exists possessing consciousness |
| 06/09 | Consciousness is? | Identification |
| 06/10 | Reason is? | The faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. |
| 06/11 | The task of your senses? | To give you the evidence of existence, (something is) |
| 06/12 | The task of your reason? | Identifying existence (what is) |
| 06/13 | Logic is? | The art of non-contradictory identification |
| 06/14 | To arrive at a contradiction is? | To confess an error in one's thinking |
| 06/15 | To maintain a contradiction is? | To abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality |
| 06/16 | Reality is? | That which exists; the unreal does not exist |
| 06/17 | Truth is ? | The recognition of reality |
| 06/18 | The most depraved sentence you can utter? | Is to ask whose reason |
| 06/19 | Your only judge of truth? | Your mind |
| 06/20 | The court of final appeal? | Reality |
| 06/21 | The director of your judgement? | Your moral integrity |
| 06/22 | Your moral faculty? | Man's reason |
| 06/23 | The process of reason? | A process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False |
| 06/24 | A rational process is? | A moral process |
| 06/25 | Your soul or spirt is? | Your consciousness |
| 06/26 | Your free will is? | Your minds freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your ccharacter. |
| 06/27 | The hallmark of morality? | Devotion to truth |
| 06/28 | Man's basic vice? | The source of all his evils is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's conscousness, the refusal to think -- know. |
| 06/29 | The content of 'Who am I to know'? | A declaration of 'who am I to live' -- a suspension of your judgement and negation of your person |
| 06/30 | Your basic moral choice? | Thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. |
| 07/01 | Value to be bought? | Life -- thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it |
| 07/02 | Supreme and ruling values of man's life? | Reason -- Purpose -- Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge -- Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve -- Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his peron is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. |
| 07/03 | Man's virtues? | Pertaining to the relation of existence and consciousness: Rationality, Independence, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness. |
| 07/04 | Independence? | The recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it |
| 07/05 | The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction? | The subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your conscousness. and your existence |
| 07/06 | Independence? | The reliance upon our own mind and judgement, the acceptance of intellectual responsibility for our own existence |
| 07/07 | Integrity? | The recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence -- that courage and confidence are practical necessities. |
| 07/08 | Courage? | The practical form of being true to existence, of being true to the truth |
| 07/09 | Confidence? | The practical form of being true to one's own consciousness |
| 07/10 | Integrity? | The loyalty in action to the judgment of our consciousness |
| 07/11 | Most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice? | His refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others |
| 07/12 | Justice? | The recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all. men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a procedss of identification. |
| 07/13 | Moral counterfeiting? | To withhold your contempt from men's vices |
| 07/14 | Moral embezzlement? | To withhold your admiration from men's virtues |
| 07/15 | Productiveness? | Your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live. |
| 07/16 | Products of the premises held by your mind? | Your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions. |
| 07/17 | That as man is a being of self-made wealth? | Man is a being of self-made soul, i.e., his character is formed by his basic premises. |
| 07/18 | The first precondition of self-esteem? | That radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself. |
| 07/19 | Proof of an achieved self-esteem? | Your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the imcomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others. |
| 07/20 | Man's only moral purpose? | His own happiness |
| 07/21 | The reward of virtue? | Life |
| 07/22 | Goal and reward of life? | Happiness |
| 07/23 | Two fundamental sensations of the body? | Pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death. |
| 07/24 | Two fundamental emotions of consciousness? | Joy and suffering, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death. |
| 07/25 | Emotions are? | Estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lighting calculators giving you a sum of our profit or loss. |
| 07/26 | Your emotional capacity's fuel? | Your values |
| 07/27 | Happiness is? | A state of non-contradictory joy -- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction. Not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a ratonal man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. |
| 07/28 | The moral symbol of respect for human beings? | The trader -- the man of justice |
| 07/29 | Spiritual values are? | Love, friendship, esteem-- given in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for your own selfish pleasure, which you receive form men you can respect. |
| 07/30 | Your moral obligation to your fellow men? | None -- except the obligation you owe to yourself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. |
| 07/31 | Your final arbiter? | Reality -- If you are right, your opponent will learn; If you are wrong, your opponent will; one of you will win, but both will profit. |
| 08/01 | One act of evil not open to disagreement? | Physical force. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate -- start -- the use of physical force against others. |
| 08/02 | Where does morality end? | Where a gun begins. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind. |
| 08/03 | An attempt to exist in defiance of reality? | To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument. |
| 08/04 | The meaning of 'Your mind or your life'? | A highwayman's ultimatum 'Your money or your life' or a politician's ultimatum 'Your children's education or your life'. |
| 08/05 | Who is the most contemptible? | The brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. |
| 08/06 | Force can only be used? | As a retaliation against the man who starts its use |
| 08/07 | The producer's single ultimatum? | Our work or your guns |
| 08/08 | Morality of death? | Non thinking, irrational, altruism |
| 08/09 | Original Sin? | The good is that which is non-man |
| 08/10 | What is outside the province of morality? | That which is outside the possibility of choice |
| 08/11 | A mockery of morality? | To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice. |
| 08/12 | A mockery of Nature? | To hold man's nature as his sin |
| 08/13 | A mockery of Justice? | To punish man for a crime he committed before he was born |
| 08/14 | A mocker of Reason? | To hold man guilty in a matter where no innocence exists |
| 08/15 | Altruism's Original Sin? | Reason, morality, creativeness, joy. (the cardinal values of man's existence) |
| 08/16 | Your cardinal values are? | Reason, morality, creativeness, joy. |
| 08/17 | Altruism's Morality of Mercy is? | The doctrine of love for man: Cardinal values are his sin. His evil is being man, his guilt is that he lives. |
| 08/18 | A Soul without a body is? | A ghost |
| 08/19 | Your two worst monsters? | A body moved by unaccountable instincts, a soul moved by mystic revelations, i.e. a victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone. |
| 08/20 | The teachers of the morality of death? | Mystics of spirit and mystics of muscle, the spiritualists and the materialists. |
| 08/21 | Sacrifice is? | The surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't |
| 08/22 | Altruism's greatest virtue? | Serving men you hate |
| 08/23 | The creed of sacrifice? | Morality for the immoral |
| 08/24 | The most selfish of all things? | The independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. |
| 08/25 | A sacrifice of your intellectual integrity? | Becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number |
| 08/26 | Product of virtues? | All values |
| 08/27 | Altruism's motive of your sacrifice? | Love -- the love you ought to feel for every man |
| 08/28 | An emotion? | A response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. |
| 08/29 | To love is? | To value. The expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. |
| 08/30 | The highest of emotions? | Love |
| 08/31 | Twin ideals of a morality of sacrifice? | To refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyard, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump. |
| 09/01 | Your single sore open to mystic germs? | Your fear of relying on your own mind |
| 09/02 | To exist is? | To possess identity |
| 09/03 | The metaphysics of a leech? | The idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification and building its private universe with blood |
| 09/04 | The desire not to be anything? | The desire not to be |
| 09/05 | The corpse of your mind? | Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands. |
| 09/06 | What permits you no miracles? | The law of causality, the law of identity applied to action. |
| 09/07 | The reign of the zero? | the non-existent ruling the existent, causeless action. |
| 09/08 | What does not permit you to have your cake and eat it too? | The law of identity |
| 09/09 | What does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it? | The law of causality |
| 09/10 | The corollary of the causeless in matter? | The unearned in spirit |
| 09/11 | A rebellion against causality? | Unearned love, admiration, wealth, forgiveness, spending. |
| 09/12 | The producer is? | The cause of values: process of thinking, defining identity, discovering causal connections. |
| 09/13 | An axiom is? | A statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge |
| 09/14 | An objective reality? | A concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depends. |
| 09/15 | A revolt against reason? | Spirit mystic's faith |
| 09/16 | A revolt against believing? | Muscle mystic's faith |
| 09/17 | A surrender of your power to perceive? | A surrender of the objective to the collective waiting for mankind to tell you what to think |
| 09/18 | Your consciousness is? | The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent |
| 09/19 | A mystic is? | A man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. At the crossroads of the choice between 'I know' and they say, he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. |
| 09/20 | Power Lust is? | A weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind |
| 09/21 | A dictator is? | A mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. |
| 09/22 | The concept 'the people' is ? | Disembodied gargoyle |
| 09/23 | An inventor is? | A man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind |
| 09/24 | The enemy is? | An inverted morality |
| 09/25 | The able men of reason versus the? | Extortions of loafing relatives, atrocities of collectivized countries. |
| 09/26 | The scientists, inventors, industrialist versus? | The grotesque little atavists |
| 09/27 | The mystics image of man and standard of value? | Idol of the cult of zero-worship |
| 09/28 | The mystics concept of 'human'? | The weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward and the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventer, the strong, the purposeful and the pure, as if to feel were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not -- as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not. |
| 09/29 | The meaning behind 'But we don't have to go to extremes!'? | The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. |
| 09/30 | The man responsible for all the blood spilled? | The man who refuses to judge |
| 10/01 | The two sides to every issue? | The right side and the wrong side -- the middle is always evil. |
| 10/02 | In a compromise between good and evil? | Only evil can profit |
| 10/03 | Your highest value? | Self esteem |
| 10/04 | Man's hidden dread? | His inability to deal with existence, every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness. |
| 10/05 | Your chronic emotions? | Fear and guilt: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival; guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally. |
| 10/06 | The ego you seek is? | Your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you've impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your feeling. |
| 10/07 | Paradise is? | A rational consciousness facing an open universe |
| 10/08 | The noblest act you have ever performed? | The act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four |
| 10/09 | The moral ideal? | Is the task of becoming a man, 'I am, therefore I'll think'. |
| 10/10 | An unlimited license to evil? | Claiming that man is imperfect |
| 10/11 | Moralities realm? | Nothing less than perfection will do |
| 10/12 | The gauge of your virtue? | To think or not to think |
| 10/13 | A breach of morality? | The conscious choice of an action you know to be evil |
| 10/14 | The only moral purpose of your life? | Achievement of your happiness |
| 10/15 | Proof of your moral integrity? | Happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence. |
| 10/16 | The most despicable coward? | The man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence. |
| 10/17 | The first step toward attaining self-esteem? | Learning to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help |
| 10/18 | When do you chose to help a man who suffers? | Only on the ground of his virtues |
| 10/19 | The worship of need? | Replacing your soul with a mooching midget |
| 10/20 | The basis of a countries political system? | Its code of morality |
| 10/21 | America's moral premise is? | That man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienalble right. |
| 10/22 | The source of man's rights? | The law of identity, Not divine law or congressional law. Rights are a moral concept -- and morality is a matter of choice |
| 10/23 | Translating one's rights into reality is? | To think, to work and to keep the results -- which means the right of property. Only a ghost can exist without matgerial property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort |
| 10/24 | The source of property rights? | The law of causality |
| 10/25 | Criminals are? | Savages who play it short range and starve when their prey runs out |
| 10/26 | The purpose of government? | To protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. |
| 10/27 | The proper functions of a government? | The police to protect you from criminals; the army to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. |
| 10/28 | The collectivists rule of social conduct? | You may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his |
| 10/29 | The power of unknowable demons? | The unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats and gangs of entrenched mediocrity. |
| 10/30 | A standard to which the honest will repair? | The standard of life and reason |
| 10/31 | The single moral premise of a trader's objective political system? | No man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgement. |
| 11/01 | A trader's oath? | I swear -- by my life and my love of it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. |
| 11/02 | The only sacred value in the world? | The human mind |
| 11/03 | What is a trader versus a mystic? | Truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights versus force, fraud and plunder. |
| 11/04 | A mystics highest fulfillment? | Mindless adulation, approval without standards, tribute without content, honor without causes, admiration without reasons, love without a code of values. |
| 11/05 | The mystic's recipe for progress? | Patience, faith and unity. |
| 11/06 | The best within us? | Business and earning a living, and man's mind which makes it possible. |
| 11/07 | The two great tragedies? | never to have had a dream to strive for, never to have fully reached it. |
| 11/08 | A volitional faculty which man has to choose to discover, employ, and preserve? | Reason |
| 11/09 | The missing link between the human and the animal species? | Attila and the Witch Doctor |
| 11/10 | The task of man's consciousness? | To perceive, not to create reality. |
| 11/11 | Man's method of integrating his sensory material? | Abstractions |
| 11/12 | The very best of every man which capitalism demands and rewards him accordingly? | His rationality |
| 11/13 | The two corollaries of the soul-body dichotomy? | The impotence of man's mind and the damnation of this earth |
| 11/14 | The requirements of reason? | Freedom, self-confidence and self esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidence of one's thinking -- the right to live by one's own independent judgement. |
| 11/15 | A free mind and a free market are corollaries? | Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom. |
| 11/16 | The twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds? | the intellectual and the businessman. |
| 11/17 | The field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher? | The professional intellectual |
| 11/18 | The eyes, ears and voice of a free society? | The intellectual |
| 11/19 | The 'Problem of Universals'? | To define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data and to prove the validity of scientific induction. |
| 11/20 | The great treason of the philosophers? | They never stepped out of the Middle Ages: they never challenged the Witch Doctor's code of morality. They were willing to doubt the existence of physical objects, to doubt the validity of their own senses, to defy the authority of absolute monarchies, to proclaim themselves to be skeptics or agnostics or atheists -- but they were not willing to doubt the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal, that he has no right to exist for his own sake, |
| 11/21 | The doctrine of moral cannibalism? | The morality of Altruism |
| 11/22 | The coiner of the term 'Altruism', for the placing of others above self, of their interests above one's own? | Comte |
| 11/23 | The Witch Doctor's morality of human sacrifices? | of self-denial, self-abasement, self-immolation -- of suffering, guilt and death. |
| 11/24 | The great injustice of the intellectuals? | They share the philosophers treason knowing for a long time that no firm philosophical base exists for the humanities. They knew that they were functioning in a philosophical vacuum and that the currency they were passing was rubber checks which would bounce some day wrecking their culture |
| 11/25 | The victim of the intellectuals' most famous injustice? | The bussinessman |
| 11/26 | What neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit? | The existence of man the producer |
| 11/27 | Attila's and the Witch Doctor's ignoring the existence of the faculty of discrimination? | Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman robber. Between freedom and compulsion they called him a slave driver, between reward and terror they called him an exploiter, between checks and guns, they called him an autocrat, between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. |
| 11/28 | The most crucial issue Attila and the Witch Doctor had to evade? | The difference between the earned and the unearned |
| 11/29 | The faculty Attila and the Witch Doctor betrayed? | The faculty of discrimination, the intellect. |
| 11/30 | A practical faculty? | The intellect, a guide to man's successful existence on earth with its task the study of reality (as well as the production of wealth), not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a special monopoly on the 'unknowable'. |
| 12/01 | That which the Witch Doctor most dreads? | the freedom of the market place of ideas |
| 12/02 | A task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill? | To live by the work of one's mind, to offer men the products of one's thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one's ideas and to rely on nothing but objective. truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has to judge, accept or reject on his own |
| 12/03 | What is socialism? | The doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him. in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good? |
| 12/04 | The disintegrators of man's consciousness or of a society's culture? | Guilt and Fear |
| 12/05 | The three injunctions which permeate America's intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt? | Don't Look -- Don't Judge -- Don't Be Certain |
| 12/06 | The psycho-epistemological meaning of don't look, don't judge and don't be certain? | Don't Integrate -- Don't Evaluate -- Give Up |
| 12/07 | The last stand of Attila-ism both in science and philosophy? | The concerted assertion of all the neo-mystics that integration is impossible and unscientific |
| 12/08 | The integration of knowledge into a coherent sum and a consistent view of reality? | System building |
| 12/09 | To oppose anything one needs a firm set of principles? | Which means philosophy |
| 12/10 | History, fate and malevolent conspiracy are easier to believe than the actual truth. | That we are moved by nothing but the sluggish inertia of unfocused minds. |
| 12/11 | The businessman's fatal error, those who could not accept the intellectual leadership of post-Kantian Witch Doctors? | Conceding the field of intellect to the post-Kantian Witch Doctors |
| 12/12 | A superlative moral virtue? | The code of a fair trader, the code of justice. |
| 12/13 | A product of a mixed economy? | The new type of businessman who makes fortunes, not by productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special privileges. |
| 12/14 | The new intellectual? | A man guided by his intellect -- not a zombie guided by feelings, instincts, urges, wishes, whims or revelations |
| 12/15 | Discarding the irrational conflicts and contradictions of the soul-body dichotomy? | mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality verses desire, practical versus the moral. |
| 12/16 | Ideas divorced from consequent action? | are fraudulent |
| 12/17 | Action divorced from ideas? | is suicidal |
| 12/18 | Man's greatest moral virtue and the basic necessity of man's survival? | The conceptual level of psycho-epistemology -- the volitional level of reason and thought |
| 12/19 | Moral strength and personal ambition is? | Self esteem. |
| 12/20 | What must the New Intellectuals remind the world? | That the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man's right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness -- which means: man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. |
| 12/21 | Today the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut? | Either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress, and man's happiness on earth -- or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces |
| 12/22 | Emotion for proof? | No discussion, cooperation, agreement or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof. |
| 12/23 | Counterfeit Reasoning is? | Rationalizing. |
| 12/24 | The central pillar of positive self esteem? | A commitment to awareness, the will to understand, the will to be efficacious, consciousness, reality. |
| 12/25 | The other pillers of positive self esteem? | Integrity (Integration of convictions, standards, beliefs, and behavior where behavior resonates with professed values, and philosophy and action are integrated), Self responsibility, Self acceptance, Independence. |
| 12/26 | One of the most important forms of heroism? | Consciousness, thought, the will to tolerate aloneness. |
| 12/27 | Do mystics declare that all they demand of man is that he sacrifice his happiness?? | To sacrifice one's happiness is to sacrifice one's desires; to sacrifice one's desires to sacrifice one's values; to sacrifice one's values is to sacrifice one's mind -- and it is nothing less than this that the creed of self-sacrifice aims at and demands. |
| 12/28 | What is an axiomatic concept? | The identification of a primary fact of reality, being implicit in all facts and in all knowledge, and fundamentaly given and directly perceived or experienced. |
| 12/29 | Altruism | As an ethical principle holds that man must make the welfare of others his primary moral concern and must place their interests above his own. |
| 12/30 | Productiveness? | The act of supporting our existence by translating our thought into reality, of setting our goals and working for their achievement, of bringing knowledge, goods, or services into existence. |
| 12/31 | A body without a soul is? | A corpse |
