Tuesday, January 16, 2018

"What is The Nature of a Creature in Which The Sight. . . .



"What is the nature of a creature
in which the sight of a value arouses 
hatred and the desire to destroy?
In the most profound sense of the term,
such a creature is a killer,
not a physical, but a metaphysical one
it is not an enemy of your values,
but of ALL values,
it is an enemy of anything 
that enables men to survive, 
it is an enemy of life as such
and everything living."



"Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living." . . . 

~ Found at Ayn Rand Lexicon - Envy/Hatred for the Good


"They do not want to own your fortune, 
they want you to lose it; 
they do not want to succeed, 
they want you to fail; 
they do not want to live, 
they want you to die; 
they desire nothing, 
they hate existence, 
and they keep running, 
each trying not to learn 
that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . 
They are the essence of evil, 
they, those anti-living objects who seek, 
by devouring the world, 
to fill the selfless zero of their soul. 
It is not your wealth that they’re after. 
Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, 
which means: against life and man." . . . 



"Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable." . . . 
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