Sure Things III: After Money

© Laurence B. Winn

Jun 1, 2001

Knowledge, money, power ... It's how a frontier works. Enclosure (the walling off of resources, see "First Principles") monopolizes and corrupts the cycle in a most undemocratic fashion, one which you may have come to know as "the way the world works".

In "Engines of Affluence" we examined the connection between knowledge and money. What we did not explore at that time, and now shall, is the proposition that money undefended is easy to take away.

It is amazing - some would say alarming - how meekly wealth falls prey to the politics of envy. During the year 2000 U.S. national elections, the political rhetoric portrayed persons in the top 1% of income as selfish, privileged individuals unworthy of tax relief. In an upscale subdivision on eastern Long Island not long ago, new houses were set ablaze using birthday candles attached to plastic jugs filled with gasoline. The arsonists left a message spray-painted on an undamaged structure nearby: "Burn the rich".

The novels of Ayn Rand (including Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) raised serious questions about the ability of the individual to survive the modern trend toward obedience and unity. She had certainly seen the effects of enclosure in Soviet Russia. To learn more about that, read We The Living, Rand's first novel, a work so depressing that it should be left on the shelf while there's snow on the ground. She tells her readers it is "as close to an autobiography as I will ever write".

As a practical matter, then, you'll need power, and you will need to get it before enclosure reduces to criminal behavior the few remnants of frontier values that still exist.

Fortunately, the final chapter of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead serves as a useful guide for those wishing to develop a set of skills suitable for the acquisition of power.

Here are the rules, paraphrased by the author, as revealed by Ellsworth Monkton Toohey, a fictional newspaper editorialist in Rand's novel, and its chief villain:

Kill integrity. Advocate selflessness. You may be sure that mere mortals will fail in their attempts to achieve pure altruism. Use their guilt. Make them feel small. Cripple their spirit so they are unable to stand up straight, or stand for anything at all.

Kill values. Set up standards of achievement open to everyone. Enshrine mediocrity.

Kill reverence. Turn joy into a sneer. Promote humor as an unlimited virtue. After all, when nothing is serious, anything goes.

Kill happiness. Make the fulfillment of personal desires the ultimate evil. Unhappy people will come to you, their souls empty, yours to fill. Teach them sacrifice. Why? Because "the man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master."

Tame reason. It's the one weapon your victims will have against you, catching you in a contradiction. Tell them that reason is not everything. There's instinct. There's intuition. There's faith.

And finally, there's this: "Everything that can't be ruled must go."

Surely the foregoing sounds familiar. Frightening, isn't it -- the lead others have on you? More frightening still is the Matthew Effect: "Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath". It works relentlessly in enclosed societies.

Better get moving.