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Note:
This narrative follows Alice in Objectivist Land,
Part 10. It picks up immediately
after the end of that segment. The
Judge has just given his final instructions to the jury, and told them to
retire and consider their verdict.
Suddenly, a voice cried out from the back of the courtroom,
loud and firm, though not untouched by age.
"Wait!" it cried. I
must address the jury! They need
further instructions."
The judge struck his gavel and shouted "Order! Both sides have rested; only the judge may now address the
jury." Then he peered more closely
at the speaker, and the anger in his face turned to recognition and would-be
friendliness.
"You may approach and explain your request, sir, but
please address this court as "Your Honor."
The old man made his way up the center aisle, stopping by
the front row of seats. He moved
swiftly and purposefully, though his face showed the marks of age--surely
something well over seventy. His hair,
carelessly long but effortlessly attractive, was snow white, although his
eyebrows were still streaked with chestnut brown. Beneath them, from within the folds of age, green eyes flashed
out with undimmed brilliance. As he
stopped, he reached behind himself, under his jacket. Before anyone could guess his purpose, his hand was out, holding
an Army Colt .45 pistol, leveled at the judge.
"Your Honor," he said, making the title a curse,
"You deserve to be shot down like a mad dog!"
Oddly, the courtroom did not erupt in panic. The spectators watched the gunman calmly,
showing no fear of this man. A couple
of them actually nodded approvingly.
His pistol, some now noticed, was an expensive, highly customized model,
with a lustrous blue-green finish. He
handled it with expert ease.
Several of the cardsmen leveled their spears and prepared to
attack. But the man kept his pistol
trained on the judge and shouted "Tell the guards to lay down their
spears!"
Instantly, the judge yelled "Do it! Lay down your spears!" The cardsmen complied.
The man turned to the prosecutor, and said "Doctor, you
get up there by the judge, so I can keep an eye on you both." Dr. P. quickly did as he was told.
As the situation came under his control, the man relaxed
slightly. "I still can hardly
believe it," he said. "Force,
initiated in the name of 'protecting the community.' Here in Objectivist Land!
Is it ever possible to have a government that doesn't become
corrupt?"
His anger rose within him again. "YOU INITIATED FORCE!" he roared at the judge and
prosecutor. "These defendants
never lifted a finger against anyone, and you hauled them in here at spearpoint
and put them on trial for their lives!
Do you even remember anything she said about people like you? Let me remind you:
| One does not and cannot 'negotiate' with brutality,
nor give it the benefit of the doubt.
The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong--and no
consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate. |
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"Do you understand?
Your actions put you on the wrong side of a moral absolute! That's it, you're wrong, discussion
over. You deserve to be shot, and it's
pretty likely to happen. But luckily
for you, I have this long habit of making speeches, and I'm going to explain all the ways you people are completely wrong. So with good behavior,
you'll live at least long enough to hear it.
"Just don't make me take this out again," he said,
returning his pistol to its carrier.
"First, let's look at this alleged crime. The defendants are accused of harboring
wrong thoughts that may damage the community. They aren't charged with actually damaging it, mind you, just
with posing a threat. So this is a
preemptive prosecution. You're trying
the defendants now because they might do damage in the future.
"Now I take threats seriously, and I don't completely
rule out the idea of preemption. But
there's a big burden of justification on the preemptor, I'd say, because you
have to balance a "maybe in the future," the thing you're preempting,
against a "definitely happening now," which is whatever action you
take against the threat. If your preemptive
strategy involves initiating force now, it can only be justified by a virtually
100% certainty that you are preventing a gravely damaging use of force planned
by your enemy. Such certainty would
require knowing explicitly that your enemy possessed the means to use force
against you, was motivated to do so, and had in fact made firm plans to do so
in the near future. Were you on trial
for initiating force preemptively, as you should be, your defense would need to
show evidence of the possession of dangerous armaments by your alleged enemy,
and clear documentary evidence or direct testimony indicating clear,
unmistakable, certain, and definite intent to use force against you.
"Of course, in the proceeding that has just taken
place, no such evidence has been produced, or even hinted at, with regard to
the defendants, against whom you have nonetheless initiated force. Instead, the prosecution’s theory is that if
the defendant's dangerous ideas flourish in Objectivist Land, they might
someday lead to the rise of tyrannical forces that would threaten innocent life. So, in the name of a 'might someday,' a
possibility in the future at the end of a long string of causation with
uncertainty every step of the way, the people of Objectivist Land are asked to
tolerate tyranny now. If we do, your
probable bad opinion of us would be justified.
"What bad opinion?
I submit that you must think at least one of the following propositions
is true: that Objectivism isn't very rational, and is therefore vulnerable to
competition from other ideologies, or else that the people of Objectivist Land
are not very rational, and are therefore, despite possessing studied knowledge
of the true ideas of Objectivism, quite likely to abandon them for false
ideas. The only other possibility is
that you are not rational.
“The last possibility strikes me as quite likely,
though. I'm not sure you are actually
motivated by a desire to preempt damage, because serious damage seems so
unlikely. What evidence is there that
the defendant's beliefs could cause a stampede of defections from Objectivism? No such evidence has been introduced. If they cause any defections, the number is
likely to be few. So the damage to
other community members, if any, would be slight and diffuse. The individuals who 'defect' may suffer
damage, if they are falling into error, but that is their own choice and no one
else's concern. I suspect this
prosecution is actually motivated by irrational feelings by the leadership that
they 'own' and 'control' the inhabitants of Objectivist Land, like cult leaders
feel they 'own' and 'control' their followers. They seem to me to be acting
like the 'defections' of any individuals would be personal losses to them. Perhaps this corruption relates to the ways
they financially benefit or lose as the popularity of Objectivism increases or
decreases.
"In sum, the matter is simple. Whatever your actual motives are, you claim
you are preempting damage. But absent
a scintilla of evidence that the defendants planned to use force, your
preemptive use of force against them is not justified, and therefore
criminal. That is the first way you are
wrong, and it's more than bad enough, but the others are worse.
"The second way you are wrong is that you are taking to
yourself the tyrannical power to tell the free, sovereign individuals of Objectivist
Land whom they may freely associate with, and what speech they may hear. This is a gross violation of the rights that
a good polity must recognize as proper for the flourishing life of free
individuals. While you rationalize with
badly conceived theories of hypothetical harm the defendants may do, you ignore
the possible benefits individuals might realize through association with
them. For example, we know that Frog
has recently starved to death, due to a less-than-optimum relation of his
concepts to reality. Our visitor was
offering helpful observations which might have materially aided him; she and
her friends might do the same for others.
So the innocent people of Objectivist Land, who are accused of nothing,
are damaged by this prosecution, by the abridgement of their rights, and by the
consequent loss of opportunity for mutually-beneficial free interaction.
"But the worst part is not the abridgement of rights,
or the loss of opportunity for benefit, damaging as these are. The worst part
is your evident belief that you can and should exercise power in the way you
are, for the reasons you give. You are telling the people of Objectivist Land
that they cannot listen to the defendant’s ideas and make up their own
minds. You are therefore seeking to
substitute your reason for the reason of other individuals. Even if you happened to be right, rational
individuals absolutely cannot allow you to do that. Let me quote from an old speech, that I think some here still
remember... " He glanced around the room, his eyes meeting those of some
of the older spectators.
| Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's
only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your
knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you
can deal. It is only your own knowledge
that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth--and
if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that
complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct that process but his own
judgment. Nothing can direct his
judgment but his moral integrity.
You who speak of a 'moral instinct' as if it were some
separate endowment opposed to reason--man's reason is his moral
faculty. |
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"You subvert reason when you seek to force men to
accept the substitution of your judgment for theirs. In so doing you subvert morality. What you do is the very essence of evil.
"Look at the results of other prosecutions like
these. Persons of brilliance, who
should flourish and produce with unfettered creativity as free men, are made by
fear of sanction into shadows of their true selves, ultimately suspicious and
frightened of every thought, afraid they will suffer for being seen to
associate with whatever the orthodox will see fit to proscribe. Meanwhile, other twisted, unethical men are
handed a weapon: they can slyly lay intellectual traps containing disguised
'error,' bringing punishment down on opponents who do not perceive their
schemes. This brings us to
consideration of the third and by far the worst way that what this trial is
doing is wrong: this trial seeks to criminalize thought!
“Why has all the prosecution's evidence been testimony about
the 'wrong' content of the defendant's beliefs? Why has there been no testimony to demonstrate their purported
harmfulness? Because that theory of
harm is just rationalization, and rationalizations are by definition not provable,
and never can stand serious examination.
In the prosecution's eyes, the 'wrong belief' is the crime, and the
rationalization was just part of the process.
It just wasn't important to them to try to justify their unjustifiable
actions. The main thing was to punish
the thought they didn't like.
It's what people like them have always done. The long history of human life on earth is a
history of almost unrelieved despotism, men held as serfs, or slaves, or 'free'
but only at the pleasure of their rulers and priests. How many were tortured and burned, explicitly for 'wrong belief?' How often was genius, like Galileo, forced
to public denial of what they knew to be true?
How many centuries of suffering preceded the great Western
Enlightenment, in which an explosion of scientific progress, enabling the
industrial revolution that finally raised human life out of the muck, resulted
when men's minds were finally freed of the yoke of church and state? It was not for nothing that Thomas Jefferson
pledged "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man." Jefferson knew exactly what
had been gained, and how it might again be lost.
The point was well made in that old speech I mentioned so
let me quote two more passages from it:
| If man is to live on earth, it is right for
him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the
irrational. Any group, any gang, any
nation that that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means:
is evil, which means: is anti-life.
. . .
But a government that initiates the employment of
force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion
against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to
annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and
switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from
the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right of the
wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of
self-defense. |
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"I stand here armed, in this thing that must be
cleansed before it will be fit again to be called a court, to provide emergency
aid to these victims of the deadly disaster of criminal government. You, who would banish or kill them, have
chosen death. You are hereby banished,
by me, and if I see you again in Objectivist Land, I will grant you the death
you have chosen."
The
men banished seemed to be struck dumb. The judge sat with his arms
raised in front of his face as if cringing from blows; Dr. P. stood
slack and still, his face as white as a ghost.
He turned to the defendants. "Miss Blumenthal, Mr. Hatter, and Your Majesty," he
said, inclining his head slightly in friendly acknowledgement of the honorary
rank of the Red Queen, "I would be honored if you would accompany me to my
home, where I will try with my hospitality to amend some of the assaults Objectivist
Land has offered you."
He raised his voice to the room. "All my friends are invited!" A chorus of assent answered him, and the defendants headed for
the door under the protection of a crowd of well-wishers.
But when he was about to go out the door, the man stopped
and turned. "I almost
forgot!" he exclaimed. "My
instructions for the jury!"
He cupped his hands to his mouth, and smiling, shouted
"GO HOME!" Then he turned and
was gone.
The courtroom behind him was a scene of pandemonium. Spectators, cardsmen, and jury members were
all jostling about, exclaiming about the events or trying to get to an
exit. Up on his bench, the judge was
pounding his gavel and trying vainly to regain control.
"Order! Order!" he shouted. "Jury Members! Return to your seats! I instruct you to disregard…all the words of
John Galt!"
quote references
1. Ayn Rand,
"Brief Comments," The Objectivist, March 1969,1, quoted
in The Ayn Rand Lexicon, "Physical Force."
2. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Plume paperback edition,
p. 1017.
3. Ibid., pp. 1061, 1062.
last edited 5/12/07
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