Oct 10, 2019 - Sale 2519

Sale 2519 - Lot 181

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
"MORALITY IS ON THE SIDE OF CAPITALISM" RAND, AYN. Typed Letter Signed, to student Laura Janson, pointing out how her novel, Atlas Shrugged, illustrates the impracticality and immorality of collectivism, explaining that modern philosophy is the cause of the broken spirit of students today, encouraging her to learn to defend the "right ideas" and persuade others in order to build an "intellectual Renaissance," and enclosing a brochure concerning the lectures of objectivist Nathaniel Branden [not present]. 2 pages, 4to, personal stationery, written on separate sheets; horizontal folds. With the original envelope. New York, 28 June 1960
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". . . You seem to be baffled by the response of students who say: 'This philosophy is too idealistic, not practical enough.' . . . When you hear that (I hear it often), you have actually won--and the rest is a matter of time. . . . If you study cultural history, you will find that men are unable to oppose effectively any doctrine that they have recognized as 'idealistic' . . . . They may try to oppose it . . . in any given moment or issue, but they are spiritually disarmed in their long-range stand. This is precisely the manner in which capitalism was defeated by altruism--as I have shown you in ATLAS SHRUGGED. So long as men like Rearden were regarded as merely 'practical,' but men like James Taggart and Wesley Mouch as 'idealistic,' the Taggarts and Mouches had to win. . . . [O]nce men begin to realize that morality is on the side of capitalism, it will not take them long to see how dreadfully impractical (and immoral) collectivism really is.
Remember that the morality presented in ATLAS SHRUGGED is new, unprecedented and radically opposed to all the traditional versions of morality. You cannot expect it to be accepted by everyone at once. . . .
"You ask, what is wrong with the students who seem passive and broken in spirit. The answer is: the kind of philosophy which is taught to them today and which dominates our culture. Again, I refer you to ATLAS SHRUGGED for the essence of modern philosophy, which is: that man's mind is impotent, that thought is useless, that man is helpless. The students who accept these ideas will necessarily be broken in spirit. . . ."