(on how to kill a man’s integrity and his soul)



"Preach selfishness. 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 it’s 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."

-the fountainhead-

posted by Tin Man



Um, can this be right?