The Romantic Manifesto_ A Philosophy of Literature - Ayn Rand [68]
The child who withstands it and damns the attackers, not himself and his values, is a rare exception. The child who merely suppresses his values, avoids communication and withdraws into a lonely private universe, is almost as rare. In most cases, the child represses his values and gives up. He gives up the entire realm of valuing, of value choices and judgments—without knowing that what he is surrendering is morality.
The surrender is extorted by a long, almost imperceptible process, a constant, ubiquitous pressure which the child absorbs and accepts by degrees. His spirit is not broken at one sudden blow: it is bled to death in thousands of small scratches.
The most devastating part of this process is the fact that a child’s moral sense is destroyed, not only by means of such weaknesses or flaws as he might have developed, but by means of his barely emerging virtues. An intelligent child is aware that he does not know what adult life is like, that he has an enormous amount to learn and is anxiously eager to learn it. An ambitious child is incoherently determined to make something important of himself and his life. So when he hears such threats as “Wait till you grow up!” and “You’ll never get anywhere with those childish notions!” it is his virtues that are turned against him: his intelligence, his ambition and whatever respect he might feel for the knowledge and judgment of his elders.
Thus the foundation of a lethal dichotomy is laid in his consciousness: the practical versus the moral, with the unstated, preconceptual implication that practicality requires the betrayal of one’s values, the renunciation of ideals.
His rationality is turned against him by means of a similar dichotomy: reason versus emotion. His Romantic sense of life is only a sense, an incoherent emotion which he can neither communicate nor explain nor defend. It is an intense, yet fragile emotion, painfully vulnerable to any sarcastic allegation, since he is unable to identify its real meaning.
It is easy to convince a child, and particularly an adolescent, that his desire to emulate Buck Rogers is ridiculous: he knows that it isn’t exactly Buck Rogers he has in mind and yet, simultaneously, it is—he feels caught in an inner contradiction—and this confirms his desolately embarrassing feeling that he is being ridiculous.
Thus the adults—whose foremost moral obligation toward a child, at this stage of his development, is to help him understand that what he loves is an abstraction, to help him break through into the conceptual realm—accomplish the exact opposite. They stunt his conceptual capacity, they cripple his normative abstractions, they stifle his moral ambition, i.e., his desire for virtue, i.e., his self-esteem. They arrest his value-development on a primitively literal, concrete-bound level: they convince him that to be like Buck Rogers means to wear a space helmet and blast armies of Martians with a disintegrator-gun, and that he’d better give up such notions if he ever expects to make a respectable living. And they finish him off with such gems of argumentation as: “Buck Rogers—ha-ha!—never gets any colds in the head. Do you know any real people who never get them? Why, you had one last week. So don’t you go on imagining that you’re better than the rest of us!”
Their motive is obvious. If they actually regarded Romanticism as an “impractical fantasy,” they would feel nothing but a friendly or indifferent amusement—not the passionate resentment and uncontrollable rage which they do feel and exhibit.
While the child is thus driven to fear, mistrust and repress his own emotions, he cannot avoid observing the hysterical