"Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice—your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth.

"I am not willing to surrender the world to the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye sockets who perform in stinking basements the immemorial rituals of staving off terror, which are a dime a dozen in any jungle—and to the quavering witch doctors who call it 'art.'"

When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values—of *all* values, of values as such—men's psychological destruction has to follow.

On the night when the opera was presented again, nineteen years later, the last sounds of the music crashed into the sounds of the greatest ovation the opera house had ever heard.

His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter—except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough.

No one knew what had happened to Richard Halley, or why. The story of his life had been like a summary written to damn greatness by showing the price one pays for it.

It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind.

What had she hoped to find?—she thought, walking on. These were the things men lived by, the forms of their spirit, of their culture, of their enjoyment. She had seen nothing else anywhere, not for many years.

She walked past the door of a night club. A couple came staggering out to a taxicab.

She walked on. She stopped at the window of a bookstore. The window displayed a pyramid of slabs in brownish-purple jackets, inscribed: The Vulture Is Molting. "The novel of our century," said a placard.

She started walking slowly, her hands in the pockets of her coat, the shadow of her slanting hat brim across her face.

Textbook of Americanism
By Ayn Rand, 1946

[Published originally in The Vigil, a publication of The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Intended as part of a series which Rand did not complete.]

1. What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?

The basic issue in the world today is between two principles: Individualism and Collectivism.

"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

"The mentally paralyzed, anxiety-ridden neurotics produced by the disintegration of modern philosophy - with its cult of uncertainty, its epistemological irrationalism and ethical subjectivism - come out of our colleges, broken by chronic dread, seeking escape from the absolutism of reality with which they feel themselves impotent to deal.

"People seem to insist on talking - and on carefully saying nothing.

"Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world.

"'The immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life' cannot be made singly, piecemeal or 'retail,' so to speak; an army of crusaders would not be enough to do it.

"A clear mind sees things and the connections between them.

A 'coercive monopoly' is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand.

"The secret of life.

"This may sound naïve. But—is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level?

"The art of any given period or culture is a faithful reflection of that culture's philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today's esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today's culture.

"If he finds himself fearing, evading and negating the highest experience possible to man, a state of unclouded exaltation, he can know that he is profound trouble and that his only alternatives are:

"What we need are real intellectuals, that is, thinkers. But we cannot 'convert' thinkers or 'regain their devotion.' We need them to convert us—that is, to teach businessmen and conservatives the proper kind of philosophy.

"When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark: 'Don't ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.'

" ... it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word 'I' could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

"Can this country achieve a peaceful rebirth in the foreseeable future?