Atlas Shrugged [360]
If I had not known that my life depends on my mind and my effort-he was saying soundlessly to the line of men stretched through the centuries-if I had not made it my highest moral purpose to exercise the best of my effort and the fullest capacity of my mind in order to support and expand my life, you would have found nothing to loot from me, nothing to support your own existence. It is not my sins that you're using to injure me, but my virtues-my virtues by your own acknowledgment, since your own life depends on them, since you need them, since you do not seek to destroy my achievement but to seize it.
He remembered the voice of the gigolo of science saying to him: "We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick." We were not after power-he said to the gigolo's ancestors-in-spirit-and we did not live by means of that which we condemned. We regarded productive ability as virtue-and we let the degree of his virtue be the measure of a man's reward. We drew no advantage from the things we regarded as evil-we did not require the existence of bank robbers in order to operate our banks, or of burglars in order to provide for our homes, or of murderers in order to protect our lives. But you need the products of a man's ability-yet you proclaim that productive ability is a selfish evil and you turn the degree of a man's productiveness into the measure of his loss. We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.
He remembered the formula of the punishment that Lillian had sought to impose on him, the formula he had considered too monstrous to believe-and he saw it now in its full application, as a system of thought, as a way of life and on a world scale. There it was: the punishment that required the victim's own virtue as the fuel to make it work-his invention of Rearden Metal being used as the cause of his expropriation-Dagny's honor and the depth of their feeling for each other being used as a tool of blackmail, a blackmail from which the depraved would be immune-and, in the People's States of Europe, millions of men being held in bondage by means of their desire to live, by means of their energy drained in forced labor, by means of their ability to feed their masters, by means of the hostage system, of their love for their children or wives or friends-by means of love, ability and pleasure as the fodder for threats and the bait for extortion, with love tied to fear, ability to punishment, ambition to confiscation, with blackmail as law, with escape from pain, not quest for pleasure, as the only incentive to effort and the only reward of achievement-men held enslaved by means of whatever living power they possessed and of whatever joy they found in life. Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical.
"Yours was the code of life," said the voice of a man whom he could not forget. "What, then, is theirs?"
Why had the world accepted it?-he thought. How had the victims come to sanction a code that pronounced them guilty of the fact of existing? . .