by Jon Rappoport

February 16, 2022

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Here I’m republishing my 2014 article because, these days, beyond the manipulation of people and agendas, a few questions are still burned on the sky:

What is freedom?

What is freedom for?

What is justice?

These are not questions for people who believe they already know everything worth knowing.

“Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand behind it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so for themselves and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.” (my notes for The Underground)

The one glaring problem in Ayn Rand’s work is the overall effect of her hammering mercilessly on behalf of freedom and the individual—after 400 pages, her prose takes on a programmatic aspect. It grips the reader with iron. The moral imperative to be free replaces the exhilaration of being free.

On the other hand, she obviously wrote her two great novels in the middle of a feverish exaltation. Every page burned. Most characters went down in flames. A few rose into the sky. She knew she was up against the most powerful forces of society, and she was not going to compromise or relent one inch. She fully intended to destroy collectivism at its root. On the basis of that decision, she refused to suspend her attack, even for a moment.

Most people who brush up against her work can’t stop to consider the depth of her admiration for the independent and powerful and creative individual, or the nature of her aversion to the collectivist who can only borrow from such individuals, and then distort and undermine what they have misappropriated.

She means to be extreme. It is no accident. With no apologies, she splits the world down the middle. In her own way, she is an ultimate riverboat gambler. She shoves in all her chips on the self-appointed task of illuminating the great dichotomy of human history and modern life: the I versus the WE.

On a personal level, she possessed enormous ambition, and she wrote her two novels to achieve deserved recognition. Again, no apologies. She knew she and her work would be attacked by numerous critics who didn’t themselves own a tiny fragment of her talent. So be it.

To say she revealed “a thorny personality” in her relationships would constitute a vast understatement. In her later years, she no doubt contributed to bringing the house down on her head. But by then, her work was over. She stood behind it. She had achieved what she set out to create.

And every cultural messenger of her time reviled her.

“…nearly perfect in its immorality.”
Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

“…shot through with hatred.”
The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged

“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”
The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged

But then: “[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.”
Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead

When people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in the battle for liberty?

What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by collectivism?

Yes the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?

And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?

The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the individual.

The FREE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the free individual.

The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.

Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.

To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.

I write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.

Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.

The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.

Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.

Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.

Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They imagine. They invent. They decide. They refuse to compromise. They leave the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.

Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.

Once a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.

On the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more.

If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That’s what we’re told.

Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those adults who buy the maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.

At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.

Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.

She was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters, brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full bloom of decay. Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized architect-hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.

Around us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized pretended hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together” sing-song collective mysticism.

Again, keep in mind that Rand’s two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.

The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite non-profit foundations:

“What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”

Rand was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.

Rand was also prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.

Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:

“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”

Parasites don’t want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp. The presence of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and confirm their deepest fear:

An individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.

Parasites want you to believe you’re just a drop of water in the great ocean, and once you attain “higher consciousness” you’ll give in and float in the sea, and you’ll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as Self. You’ll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.

In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I’M NOT VERY MUCH.”

Just that little phrase can open the door into the collective.

In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:

“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”

Keating, the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well, they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied about by “those who should know Quality.”

It’s a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.

And Peter is conventionally handsome, he’s the golden boy, he’s quick, he can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with others, he can look like he’s enjoying life, he’s good at meetings, he’s congenial.

On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?

Unfortunately and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he’s the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without trying.

Keating returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help, to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.

Not determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him “the glittering world”—and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.

Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance…Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.

Here is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite: they’re committed to live on an insider’s rotting feast of mutual admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected with a clarity they’d assumed was impossible to construct. But there it is.

The very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination: characters riddled with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.

The Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find bigger and better manipulators to serve. It’s a cacophony of madness, envy, and immolation posing as success.

The world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because, as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused, over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!

She elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and decisions that advance life and those that squash it.

Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the featureless consensus versus unique individual creative power.

Creative power isn’t a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn’t live in the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no exultant basis for life.

We are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic joke.

For those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It’s, in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty. And the strength of hypnotic trance.

The strategy is obliquely described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive following:

“…if I sold them the idea that you [an ordinary playwright] are just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they write.”

Reduction to absurdity. An overall grayness called equality.

If the public is told the owner of a business didn’t create that business, but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is pushed and emphasized by others, eventually the absurd notion will take hold. Then it won’t matter what is done to the independent individual, because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just an invisible nonentity.

Contrast this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes during his climactic courtroom trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”

“We inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane…The moving force is the creative faculty which takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.”

“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”

We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY.

Obama is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the course of history. That timeline shows us the heroic struggle to replace WE with I.

From the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always there, emerged fully enough to overthrow criminals and murderers who were restraining the individual.

But now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past, through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy. The I is turning back into the WE.

To people who carry advanced technological devices around with them wherever they go, which give them the capability to communicate instantaneously with anyone on the planet, this prospect seems harmless or ridiculous or irrelevant or comfortable.

The “I turning back into WE” is happening because IDEAS are slipping away as useful and necessary instruments of survival.

New generations are being raised and schooled in a sulfurous atmosphere of slogans designed to dead-end in a foggy “share and care” terminal, where “everything for everybody” and other so-called humanitarian banners wave in the rafters above secular leaders, who speak like priests and assure us that, very soon, the world will be a better place because we, as individuals, are absolving ourselves of the need to think of ourselves as individuals.

O yes, thank God, we are melting down. We are becoming One with All. Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your best and most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.

Let us, as ancient Greek vandals once did, chop away our most sacred statues, the ones that represent the I, and then let us watch as WE is reinstalled at the entrance to every public building.

Within the WE, individuals can hide and escape and postpone and delay, and imbibe the drug of forgetfulness, and listen to the chimes of paradise.

Roark continues to mount his courtroom speech: “An architect uses steel, glass, and concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “Rulers of men…create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander invented altruism.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Ayn Rand could be viewed as a tragic figure, but she would deny it, even in her darkest hour, just as her character, Howard Roark, would deny it.

She not only knew where she stood, she fleshed out, to an extraordinary degree, that position, in two astonishing and unique novels. Bolts from the blue.

She and her books were hated and adored, as no other author and no other works of the 20th century.

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(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

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Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Who was John Galt? More on Ayn Rand.

by Jon Rappoport

August 1, 2017

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.” (John Galt, Atlas Shrugged)

More on Ayn Rand, the most hated and adored novelist of the 20th century.

Her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, proposes a radical effort by inventor John Galt, and his assembled creative colleagues, to withdraw from society and take their inventions with them.

Civilization is already crumbling, owing to the federal government and its cronies installing a socialism based on top-down domination and the theft of material and intellectual private property.

Galt decides that a head-on struggle with the government would be futile. Instead, he wants to apply the coup de grace: remove the authentic creators from the scene and let the system implode.

Here are key Galt quotes from the novel:

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler…”

“Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”

“The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others…”

“You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good…”

There are key elements of the novel that escape many people’s attention. For example, Galt is the inventor of a revolutionary engine that can provide energy to the whole planet. He created the engine. He owns it. The government, on the verge of an economic collapse, wants to take Galt’s engine from him and use it for “the greater good.”

Galt refuses.

He knows, of course, that the government could do unpredictable things with that engine—they could, in fact, put it in a vault and bury it.

On the other hand, he could maintain control over his invention and sell the abundant energy—not with the objective of becoming a king or an oligarch—at a price he sets. And eventually, the world would be swimming in energy.

Agents of the government (who resemble CIA types) kidnap him and prepare to torture him to get their hands on his engine—but at the last minute his friends rescue him, and they vanish to Galt Gulch, a hidden valley, where they wait for the government to cave in, collapse, thereby ushering in, by necessity, a truly free market.

Author Rand doesn’t bother spending time in her novel excoriating energy companies for their secret deals with government and their monopolies. She lets the chips fall where they would: in favor of the creative individual and his private property, his own inventions.

This is one reason why leaders of collectivism and their addled followers hate Rand and her work. They scream that every good thing in this world must be given away, which means that every good thing will be taken over by men who hate life and freedom and the individual and hate the population as a whole, while pretending to be messianic altruists.

Among these addled followers of collectivism are people who believe they themselves are unable to earn a living, and therefore insist that “everything should be free.”

For decades now, an operation has been underway to convince more and more people (especially the young) to see themselves as dependent. As if that status were righteous, as if that status were a badge of honor.

This is an intense rejection of the free and independent individual.

“You didn’t build that” and “we’re all in this together” and other such inanities are sparks shot by weapons of degraded thought. They intend to encircle humanity in a wretched fume of pretended helplessness.

Indeed, there is no intention to raise up the individual. Instead, there is a goal of sinking to the lowest common denominator—as if at the bottom of a stagnant lake lies some magic clue to the resurrection of the human species.

There, at last, beyond desperation, is the “sharing and caring” everyone has been seeking. This is the core of a Church of Failure.

Because at the bottom, there is nothing but sludge. And in this case, the fishermen of souls are casting their nets for participants in a half-light dystopia of abject need.

Endless need, never to be satisfied—the ultimate spiritual drug.

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt wins. Rand wrote about the ultimate victory of the individual, and that is why she is a silver bullet aimed at vampires.

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(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

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Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead still survives

by Jon Rappoport

July 18, 2017

This may seem like a strange way to start an article about Ayn Rand, but…

Sociologists and psychologists and other pseudo-academics miss the boat on almost every analysis of human culture they perform. They’re like surgeons reading the wrong X-rays before opening up the patient on the table.

For example, the “puppet factor” should loom large in studies of human endeavor. But it doesn’t. Puppets not only obey orders from above, they find other puppets and commiserate. They form groups. They share. They devote themselves to each other, struggling to believe that “human bonds” will mitigate and surpass the grinding years, during which they carry out the same orders and functions over and over.

“It’s not what you do in life, it’s the people you connect with. It’s expanding the sense of family.”

Somehow, the tedium of puppethood can be ignored, because people become people-people…and that’s sufficient, that’s what love is all about…you judge your value by what you can contribute to other marionettes…and the degree of appreciation you can garner from them…

I’ve written several articles about Ayn Rand and her work. No need to recapitulate my output here. Her 1943 novel still survives, as both the most hated and loved novel of the last three-quarters of a century.

Those who hate the book and want a hook for wounding it often say: the world Rand constructs isn’t real; it doesn’t and couldn’t exist; the people aren’t real, either.

How interesting. Novels are fiction, the last time I looked.

“Yes, but Rand is saying the world of her novels is the actual one.”

No, she’s saying her world is the underlying core of the real world. She’s claiming to reveal what’s percolating and boiling and steaming in back of mere social discourse and pretense and puppetry.

From people I’ve spoken to over the years, people who hate The Fountainhead, I would say they see themselves in a character in the novel, and they don’t like what they see.

For example, somewhere inside themselves, they see a no-hold-barred impulse for success without compromise, or they see a surrender to the flaccid norms of society and culture—and in either case, they’re disturbed.

Here is a sprinkling of quotes from Rand’s book. They challenge cultural platitude with a visceral and intellectual stroke of electricity. And that’s why The Fountainhead still lives, both for those love it or hate it:

Howard Roark (architect): “Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right—so long as it’s not yourself?”

Roark: “I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

Roark: “I don’t intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build.”

Rand: “Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work.”

Dominque Francon: “Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.”

Roark: I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything.”

Ellsworth Toohey (newspaper columnist and social engineer, who sees his ultimate nemesis as Roark): “Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill.”

Roark: “…the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone.”

Roark: “The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive.”

Roark: “Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.”

Roark: “As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self…Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative.”

These words are still capable of provoking thought—and not because they were merely intended to inflame or polarize.

And there are still people who will search for any reason under the sun to reject them—to avoid the need to read them, understand them, and make up their own minds about them.

(New piece up at my OUTSIDE THE REALITY MACHINE blog entitled “I’m Putin, I’m the US president, I am Russia, hear me roar, I sit in the White House”)

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(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

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Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Howard Roark and the Collective

by Jon Rappoport

April 4, 2017

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

Because in art we can see our visions. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

Her implication was: don’t you have the desire to discover your own highest ideals and live them out?

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has imagined before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

For reasons no one can discover (must there always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual.

But Roark, in his personality, spirit and force, is The Exception to the Rule.

He stands as a force that transcends the complication of Need and, instead, is pure Desire.

Desire, plus intelligence, plus creative power.

Whatever dross may once have existed in Roark’s character has been burned away.

Rand allows us to see that society encourages everything an individual does and thinks that keeps him from being self-sufficient. That is what society, in its advanced stage of dissolution, is for.

Therefore, as Roark moves through space and time, he ignites in others, without trying to, all the emotions that signal their self-betrayal: shame, fear, disgust, resentment, hatred.

Their dedication to endless compromise remains intact. They tell themselves whatever stories they need to, in order to protect their second-hand existences.

They enact the range of feelings that allow for entombment in The Group.

These days, when people talk about “self-improvement,” they unerringly manage to avoid the starkness of these matters. And this is why the so-called “helping professions” fail.

Those who own the systems that run the world enforce, celebrate, champion, and fund life-by-need.

Drug dealer and his addicts—that’s the societal model.

But then, what of community? What of family? These are often thrown in the face of The Fountainhead as accusations, as if Rand wants to stamp them out and leave them in the dust.

The obvious answer is, which community, which family? Are the individuals intact, or are they sacrificing themselves to an “ideal” of diminishing their power?

The Matrix has an entrance, a gate on which is transcribed, “Reduce your vision and surrender your separate power.”

Yes, “separate.” A word that is now considered taboo. “Separate” was what we defended before we “understood” that the only salvation was attained in “coming together” and melting down.

We can even find this Melt in physics. The latest version of coming together is the interpretation placed on quantum entanglement, in which atoms light years apart react simultaneously from a stimulus placed on either atom. We are supposed to believe that the whole universe is arranged as a spontaneously reacting Whole, with no part distinct from another. And this is confirmation that the Collective is the preferred pattern of life in every venue. In other words, political collectivism mirrors cosmic collectivism.

Are you sensing something strange here? You should be.

Once upon a time, in a document called the Constitution, separateness was considered a key element. There was separation of church and state. There was separation of the rights of an individual from what the state could arbitrarily do to the individual. There was separation among the three branches of federal government, a plan enacted to limit overall federal power. There was separation of the enumerated powers of the federal government from the far more numerous powers of the states.

DISTINCTIONS that created separation were absolutely necessary. Making and abiding by such distinctions were made possible by minds that could think, minds that could utilize logic—rather than minds that boiled down in a puddle of gray sameness.

Roark is shown to us as a man who stands separate from the mass, the crowd, the mob, the group, the collective, the majority, the minority. He isn’t seeking permission or approval or praise or consensus for his work, his art, his buildings, his creations.

The stunning intensity of his Desire isn’t watered down by a Need to be drawn into what the group wants or accepts or believes in.

The hallmark of The Matrix is a collective lens, through which the individual is supposed to view his life, his work, and the world.

“I see what everybody sees, and they see what I see, and we all see together.”

Talk about fiction. The collective lens is built, step by step, piece by piece, along a path of self-betrayal and corruption.

To speak about individual freedom while living and seeing and thinking through the collective lens is a contradiction and impossibility of titanic proportions.

“I have the inalienable right to see things as others see them. To melt down what might, in other circumstances, be my Separate Vision. To melt it down for the sake of the Whole. So that I might better serve others.”

Well, thank you for your sacrifice. I’m sure a gold star is waiting for you in some cosmic classroom. Now, if we all sacrifice all the time, someday soon we will all be invisible. We will all live in the great mouth of a great nothing. No one will have power. No one will be free. But we will speak as if we are free.

Our false words will sound important. Our rhetoric will, perhaps, convince us and everyone else that freedom still exists.

We will, in fact, be speaking like those politicians do, the ones we accuse of acting on ulterior motives.

Modern leaders have found their power through promoting a concept of endless need. This need can never be solved, it can only be accommodated.

Groups are educated and tuned up to demand more. They must have more of this and more of that. Without limit.

The individual, if he is thought of at all, is depicted as a bundle of needs.

Naturally, when someone defects, he is looked at as a betrayer. Actually, he is exposing the game.

That is when things become interesting.

That is when life takes over.

---

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

---

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Ayn Rand reconsidered

by Jon Rappoport

March 31, 2017

“Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so for themselves and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

I wrote the following article five years ago. Since then, I’ve had a chance to set down a few more remarks about Ayn Rand. Here they are:

The one glaring problem in her work is the overall effect of her hammering mercilessly on behalf of freedom and the individual—after 400 pages, her prose takes on a programmatic aspect. It grips the reader with iron. The moral imperative to be free replaces the exhilaration of being free.

On the other hand, she obviously wrote her two great novels in the middle of a feverish exaltation. Every page burned. Most characters went down in flames. A few rose into the sky. She knew she was up against the most powerful forces of society, and she was not going to compromise or relent one inch. She fully intended to destroy collectivism at its root. On the basis of that decision, she refused to suspend her attack, even for a moment.

Most people who brush up against her work can’t stop to consider the depth of her admiration for the independent and powerful and creative individual, or the nature of her aversion to the collectivist who can only borrow from such individuals—and then distort and undermine what they have misappropriated.

She means to be extreme. It is no accident. With no apologies, she splits the world down the middle. In her own way, she is an ultimate riverboat gambler. She shoves in all her chips on the self-appointed task of illuminating the great dichotomy of human history and modern life: the I versus the WE.

On a personal level, she possessed enormous ambition, and she wrote her two novels to achieve deserved recognition. Again, no apologies. She knew she and her work would be attacked by numerous critics who didn’t themselves own a tiny fragment of her talent. So be it.

To say she revealed “a thorny personality” in her relationships would constitute a vast understatement. In her later years, she no doubt contributed to bringing the house down on her head. But by then, her work was over. She stood behind it. She had achieved what she set out to create.

And every official cultural messenger of her time reviled her.

Here is my 2012 article:

“…nearly perfect in its immorality.” — Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

“…shot through with hatred.” — The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged

“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” — The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged

“[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.” — Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

When people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in the battle for liberty?

What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by collectivism?

Yes the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?

And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?

The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the individual.

The FREE INDIVIDUAL.

But not just the free individual.

The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.

Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.

To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.

I write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.

Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.

The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.

Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.

Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.

Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They invent. They decide. They imagine. They refuse to compromise. They leave the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.

Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.

Once a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.

On the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more.

If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That’s what we’re told.

Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those adults who buy the maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.

At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.

Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.

Rand refused to compromise her exaltation of individual power.

But she was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters, brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full bloom of decay. Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.

Around us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized pretended hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together” sing-song collective mysticism.

Again, keep in mind that Rand’s two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.

The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite non-profit foundations:

“What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”

Rand was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.

Rand was also prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.

Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:

“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”

Parasites don’t want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp. The presence of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and confirm their deepest fear:

An individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.

Parasites want you to believe you’re just a drop of water in the great ocean, and once you attain “higher consciousness” you’ll give in and float in the sea, and you’ll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as Self. You’ll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.

In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I’M NOT VERY MUCH.”

Just that little phrase can open the door into the collective.

In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:

“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”

Keating, the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well, they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied about by “those who should know Quality.”

It’s a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.

And Peter is conventionally handsome, he’s the golden boy, he’s quick, he can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with others, he can look like he’s enjoying life, he’s good at parties, he’s congenial.

On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?

Unfortunately and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he’s the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without trying.

Keating returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help, to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.

Not determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him “the glittering world”—and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.

Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance…Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.

Here is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite: they’re committed to live on an insider’s rotting feast of mutual admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected with a clarity they’d assumed was impossible to construct. But there it is.

The very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination: characters riddled with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.

Keating is eventually reduced to an abject yearning: would that his life had been lived differently, better—yet at the same time he maintains a dedication to hating that better life he might have had. He’s consumed by the contradiction. He sees his own career fall apart, while Roark’s ascends. The tables are turned. Keating has administered a poison to his own psyche, and the results are all too visibly repellent.

The Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find bigger and better manipulators to serve. It’s a cacophony of madness, envy, and immolation posing as success.

The world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because, as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused, over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!

She elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and decisions that advance life and those that squash it.

Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the featureless consensus versus unique individual creative power.

Creative power isn’t a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn’t live in the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no basis for life.

We are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic joke.

For those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It’s, in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty. And the strength of hypnotic trance.

The strategy is obliquely described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive following:

“…if I sold them the idea that you [an ordinary playwright] are just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they write.”

Reduction to absurdity. An overall grayness called equality.

If the public is told the owner of a business didn’t create that business, but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is pushed and emphasized by others, eventually the absurd notion will take hold. Then it won’t matter what is done to the independent individual, because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just an invisible nonentity.

Contrast this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes during his climactic trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”

“We inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane…The moving force is the creative faculty which takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.”

“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”

We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY.

Obama is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the course of history. That timeline shows us the heroic struggle to replace WE with I.

From the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always there, emerged fully enough to overthrow the criminals and murderers who were restraining the individual.

But now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past, through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy. The I is turning back into the WE.

To people who carry advanced technological devices around with them wherever they go, which give them the capability to communicate instantaneously with anyone on the planet, this prospect seems harmless or ridiculous or irrelevant or comfortable.

The “I turning back into WE” is happening because IDEAS are slipping away as useful and necessary instruments of survival.

New generations are being raised and schooled in a sulfurous atmosphere of slogans designed to dead-end, from a number of directions, in a foggy “share and care” terminal, where “everything for everybody” and other so-called humanitarian banners wave in the rafters above secular leaders, who speak like priests and assure us that, very soon, the world will be a better place because we, as individuals, are absolving ourselves of the need to think of ourselves as individuals.

O yes, thank God, we are melting down. We are becoming One with All. Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your best and most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.

Let us, as ancient Greek vandals once did, chop away our most sacred statues, the ones that represent the I, and then let us watch as WE is reinstalled at the entrance to every public building.

Within the WE, individuals can hide and escape and postpone and delay, and imbibe the drug of forgetfulness, and listen to the chimes of paradise.

Roark continues to mount his courtroom speech: “An architect uses steel, glass, and concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “Rulers of men…create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander invented altruism.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Roark: “The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential.”

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Ayn Rand could be viewed as a tragic figure, but she would deny it, even in her darkest hour, just as her character, Howard Roark, would deny it.

She not only knew where she stood, she fleshed out, to an extraordinary degree, that position, in two astonishing and unique novels. Bolts from the blue.

She and her books were hated and adored, as no other author and no other works of the 20th century.

---

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

---

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

 

AYN RAND AND BARACK OBAMA

by Jon Rappoport

July 23, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

 

“…nearly perfect in its immorality.” — Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

 

“…shot through with hatred.” — The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged

 

“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” — The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged

 

“[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.” — Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

 

This article will give greater meaning to Barack Obama’s outrageous declaration in Roanoke that, “If you own your business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” (didntbuildthat.com)

 

Obama’s minions in the press claim that highlighting the president’s Roanoke quote is ripping an incidental remark out of context or bungling his intended syntax. Taking together all the president’s actions since assuming the throne in the Oval Office, it’s easy to see his remark in Roanoke fits quite well with his agenda: ATTACK THE INDEPENDENT INDIVIDUAL.

 

When people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by Collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in the battle for liberty?

 

What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by Collectivism?

 

Yes the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?

 

And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?

 

The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.

 

But not just the individual.

 

The FREE INDIVIDUAL.

 

But not just the free individual.

 

The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.

 

Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.

 

This was an author who lifted the subject of individual power beyond anything seen since Nietzsche. To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.

 

I write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.

 

Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.

 

The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.

 

Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

 

The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.

 

Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.

 

Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They invent. They decide. They imagine. They refuse to compromise. They leave the team and the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.

 

They contradict every element of collectivism. They see it for what it really is: the attempt to kill off the individual.

 

Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. It extols obedience to rules that hem in the individual. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.

 

Once a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.

 

On the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe that individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more.

 

If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That’s what we’re told.

 

Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those who buy the maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.

 

At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.

 

Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.

 

Rand refused to compromise her exaltation of individual power.

 

But she was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters, brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full bloom of decay. Are they! Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.

 

Around us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together” sing-song collective mysticism.

 

Again, keep in mind that Rand’s two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.

 

The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several major non-profit foundations:

 

“What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”

 

Rand was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.

 

Rand was prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.

 

Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:

 

“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”

 

Parasites don’t want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp, the collective. Because that presence of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and confirm their deepest fear:

 

an individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.

 

Parasites want you to believe you’re just a drop of water in the great ocean, and once you attain “higher consciousness” you’ll give in and float in the sea, and you’ll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as Self. You’ll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.

 

In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I’M NOT VERY MUCH.”

 

Just that little phrase can open the door into the Collective.

 

In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:

 

“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”

 

Keating, the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well, they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied about by “those who should know Quality.”

 

It’s a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.

 

And Peter is conventionally handsome, he’s the golden boy, he’s quick, he can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with others, he can look like he’s enjoying life, he’s good at parties, he’s congenial.

 

On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?

 

Unfortunately and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he’s the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without trying.

 

Keating returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help, to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.

 

Not determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him, Keating, “the glittering world”—and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.

 

Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance…Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.

 

Here is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite: they’re committed to live on an insider’s rotting feast of mutual admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected with a clarity they’d assumed was impossible to construct. But there it is.

 

The very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination and in the pages of her novel: characters riddled with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.

 

Keating is eventually reduced to an abject yearning: would that his life had been lived differently, better—yet at the same time he maintains a dedication to hating that better life he might have had. He’s consumed by the contradiction. He sees his own career fall apart, while Roark’s ascends. The tables are turned. But beyond that, Keating has administered a poison to his own psyche, and the results are all too visibly repellent.

 

The Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find bigger and better manipulators to serve. It’s a cacophony of madness, envy, and immolation posing as success.

 

The world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because, as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused, over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!

 

She elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and decisions that advance life and those that squash it.

 

Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the collective versus the free individual; the featureless consensus versus unique creative power.

 

Creative power isn’t a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn’t live in the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no basis for life.

 

We are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic joke.

 

After the upcoming presidential election in America, we will have one of two jokers in the White House. Whatever they say, whatever they claim, they are messengers of the Group. I have been approached, as perhaps you have, to support, “as any intelligent person would,” the lesser of two evils with my vote.

 

But you see, you need a standard by which you can know how evil the lesser is; if it is too far down in the dank mass of the primitive swamp, why offer a shred of support?

 

When a house has been battered for so long that it is falling apart before your eyes, you have to design and build a new one. Empty rhetoric about repairs and staving off looming crises carries no weight. It is merely an urging to a fool’s errand.

 

When Barack Obama let slip his remark in Roanoke—“if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen”—he was advancing his attack on the individual and his exaltation of the collective into a new dimension. Obama voiced a supreme and familiar Marxian contradiction. As any fool knows, the attribution of a creation is to the person who was its creator. Yet in Obama’s words, the visible became invisible. The person who did it didn’t do it, the person was missing in action, the person who painted the canvas didn’t paint the canvas. Instead, the prime mover was the public sector, the collective. The collective created the painting.

 

This twist is intentional obfuscation. For those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It’s, in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty.

 

The strategy is cogently described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive following. In speaking of a playwright, he explains:

 

“Sure he’s good but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re [an ordinary writer] just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they write.”

 

If the public is told that the owner of a business didn’t create that business, but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is pushed and emphasized by others, on other occasions, eventually the absurd notion will take hold. Then it won’t matter what is done to the independent individual, because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just an invisible nonentity.

 

Contrast this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes during his climactic trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:

 

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”

 

“We inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane…The moving force is the creative faculty which takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.”

 

“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”

 

We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY. A sitting president tells us, in an unguarded moment, that the human being who created a business “didn’t build that.” The creator didn’t create it.

 

Therefore, the creator doesn’t own it. It is not his property. It can be used, taken, twisted, disposed of by the State. And if you don’t believe we’re already in that vise, you’re not awake.

 

Far from being a slip of the tongue, Obama’s remark was a battle flag raised in a night of the long knives. He is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the course of history. That record shows us the heroic struggle to replace WE with I.

 

From the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always there, emerged fully enough to overthrow the criminals and murderers who were restraining the individual.

 

But now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past, through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy called collectivism. The I is turning back into the WE.

 

To people who carry advanced technological devices around with them wherever they go, which give them the capability to communicate instantaneously with anyone on the planet, this prospect seems ridiculous, impossible. We are so…superior, how could this happen to us?

 

It is happening because IDEAS are slipping away as useful and necessary instruments of survival.

 

New generations are being raised and schooled in a sulfurous atmosphere of slogans designed to dead-end, from a number of directions, into a foggy “share and care” terminal, where “everything for everybody” and other so-called humanitarian banners wave in the rafters above secular leaders, who speak like priests and assure us that, very soon, the world will be a better place because we, as individuals, are absolving ourselves of the need to think of ourselves as individuals.

 

O yes, thank God, we are melting down. We are becoming One with All. We are allowing the goods of the realm to be apportioned by those who understand justice. Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your best and most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity?

 

Let us, as ancient Greek vandals once did, chop away our most sacred statues, the ones that represent the I, and then let us watch as WE is reinstalled at the entrance to every public building.

 

Within the WE, individuals can hide and escape and postpone and delay, and imbibe the drug of forgetfulness, and listen to the chimes of paradise.

 

Roark continues to mount his courtroom speech: “An architect uses steel, glass, and concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property.”

 

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

 

Roark: “Rulers of men…create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.”

 

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

 

Roark: “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander invented altruism.”

 

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else else made that happen.”

 

Roark: “The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential.”

 

Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

 

The president of the United States is so far removed from the sanctity of the free individual and what the free individual creates and what that truly means, he may as well be walking on a different planet.

 

I nominate Saturn or Jupiter, or perhaps a world beyond our solar system altogether, where he can spin his collective fantasies to himself and contemplate, when he is finally driven to, what it means to be a free individual.

 

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

HOWARD ROARK AND THE MATRIX

by Jon Rappoport

May 12, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

 

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

 

Because in art we can see our dreams. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

 

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

 

The implication of “of course” was: don’t you have the desire to discover your highest ideals and live them out?

 

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has come close to imagining before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

 

For reasons no one can discover (there must always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

 

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual.

 

But Roark, in his personality, spirit and force, in the cells of his being, is The Exception to the Rule.

 

Sometime after reading The Fountainhead, you may begin to feel Roark is cut from pure energy and exists in another dimension. He can take on mythic qualities.

 

He stands in juxtaposition to The Matrix, not only in human terms, but as a countervailing force that transcends the complication of Need and, instead, is pure Desire.

 

Desire, plus intelligence, plus creative power.

 

Whatever dross may once have existed in Roark’s character has been burned away.

 

Rand allows us to see that society itself is composed to accommodate everything an individual does and thinks that keeps him from being self-sufficient. That is what society, in its advanced stage of dissolution, is for.

 

Therefore, as Roark moves through space and time, he ignites in others, without trying to, all the emotions that signal their self-betrayal: shame, fear, disgust, resentment, hatred.

 

But their dedication to endless compromise remains intact. They tell themselves whatever stories they need to, in order to protect their second-hand existences.

 

They enact the range of feelings that allow for entombment in The Group.

 

These days, when people talk about “self-improvement,” they unerringly manage to avoid the starkness of these matters. And this is why the so-called “helping professions” fail.

 

These professions build ethereal mansion of cliches which emulate, like a cartoon, what Roark actually embodies. Roark is creative independence. The independence of creative power.

 

And most of all he is: vision.

 

How does vision operate for those caught up in “self-improving?” Well, the trick is to begin by conceiving of work and future taking place in a decidedly small arena. Fueled by small ideas. Small plans. Small ambitions. Dress them up, embroider them with minor dreams, claim these dreams are compelling and even heroic. Pile self-deception on self-deception.

 

And refer, always, to the cardinal rule of society, the rule of human-association-by-clinging need.

 

Roark experiences none of this. Therefore, people claim he couldn’t exist. Well, they would claim that. They live, night and day, by the rule of society, in a closed system.

 

Those who own the system enforce, celebrate, champion, and fund association-by-need.

 

It’s the drug dealer and his addicts. That’s the model.

 

But then, what of community? What of family? These are often thrown in the face of The Fountainhead as accusations, as if Rand wants to stamp them out and leave them in the dust.

 

The obvious answer is, which community, which family? Are the individuals intact, or are they sacrificing themselves to an “ideal” of diminishing their power?

 

The Matrix has an entrance, a gate on which is transcribed, “Reduce your vision and surrender your separate power.”

 

Yes, “separate.” A word that is now considered taboo. “Separate” was what we defended before we understood that the only salvation was attained in “coming together” and melting down.

 

We can even find this Melt in physics. The latest version of coming together is the interpretation placed on quantum entanglement, in which atoms light years apart react simultaneously from a stimulus placed on either atom. We are supposed to believe that the whole universe is arranged as a spontaneously reacting Whole, with no part distinct from another. And this is confirmation that the Collective is the preferred pattern of life in every venue. In other words, political collectivism mirrors cosmic collectivism.

 

Are you sensing something strange here? You should be.

 

Once upon a time, in a document called the Constitution, separateness was considered a key element. There was separation of church and state. There was separation of the rights of an individual from what the state could arbitrarily do to the individual. There was separation among the three branches of federal government, a plan enacted to limit overall federal power. There was separation of the enumerated powers of the federal government from the more numerous powers of the states.

 

DISTINCTIONS that created separation were absolutely necessary. Making and abiding by such distinctions were made possible by minds that could think, minds that could utilize logic—rather than minds that melted down in a puddle of gray sameness.

 

Roark is shown to us as a man who stands separate from the mass, the crowd, the mob, the group, the collective, the majority, the minority. That is his crime. That marks him as dangerous.

 

That also marks him as a man who can hold his vision intact, because he isn’t seeking permission or approval or praise or consensus for his work, his art, his buildings, his creations.

 

The stunning intensity of his Desire isn’t watered down by a Need to be drawn into what the group wants or accepts or believes in.

 

The hallmark of The Matrix is a collective lens, through which the individual is supposed to view his life, his work, and the world.

 

“I see what everybody sees, and they see what I see, and we all see together.”

 

Talk about fiction. The collective lens is built, step by step, piece by piece, along a path of self-betrayal and corruption.

 

To speak about individual freedom while living and seeing and thinking through the collective lens is a contradiction and impossibility of titanic proportions.

 

“I have the inalienable right to see things as others see them. To melt down what might, in other circumstances, be my Separate Vision. To melt it down for the sake of the Whole. So that I might better serve others.”

 

Well, thank you for your sacrifice. I’m sure a gold star is waiting for you in some cosmic first-grade classroom. Now, if we all sacrifice all the time, some day soon we will all be invisible. We will all live in the great mouth of a great nothing. No one will have power. No one will be free. But we will speak as if we are free.

 

Our false words will sound important. Our rhetoric will, perhaps, convince us and everyone else that freedom still exists.

 

We will, in fact, be speaking like those politicians do, the ones we accuse of acting on ulterior motives.

 

If you’re beginning to get the idea that, in my work, I’m not only talking about what THEY are doing to US, but what WE are doing to OURSELVES, you’re absolutely right.

 

For those new readers coming to my work, here is a description of my new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED.

 

But first, since I’m speaking so frankly, I’ll also add this. My work is also my business, my enterprise. I create, and I sell what I create. Not only do I think “I deserve to make a living” because of the nature and content of my work, I would love to become RICH because of it.

 

I’m sure that statement must be a sin in The Great Book of Rules for Modern Living. But I’m willing to sin when sin is good.

 

“Well, Rappoport is doing a great service by giving away all his articles for years and years. He’s providing a real service. He’s selfless. He labors for humanity. He puts aside personal ambition for the sake of others. All right, he’s okay. He’s a member of the Group. He can wear the badge. Especially if he ends up poor and destitute. Then we’ll know he’s a good person.”

 

No, that was actually never my aim. I stand for what I stand for, and I research and report on what I discover, and I imagine and invent and create. That’s what I do because I want to. The prospect of finding people who will understand what I’m writing is appealing. Any artist will tell you that. But it doesn’t rule what I say or write. IF IT DID, I’D BE USELESS TO YOU AND USELESS TO MYSELF.

 

But…but…how can writing the truth and truth below that and the truth below that be a BUSINESS? The truth should be free and everybody should have access to it because, well, the cosmos says so.

 

I guess I missed the conference where that was decreed. I was probably painting in my studio, and I couldn’t be bothered. I think I saw a list of the conference speakers. As I recall, they were thieves and liars who were mouthing the word “truth” as a con, to convince people that EVERYBODY DESERVES EVERYTHING, and they, the liars and the thieves, were going to run that charity operation, and the only price people had to pay to benefit from it was to give up themselves in every possible way.

 

Sounds like one of those bothersome little contradictions, but never mind. Sounds like a principle of the Matrix, but never mind…

 

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INTRODUCTION TO THE MATRIX REVEALED, Volume 1

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2012 by Jon Rappoport

 

Let me start with the nuts and bolts of this product. It is enormous in scope.

 

250 megabytes of information.

 

Over 1100 pages of text.

 

Ten and a half hours of audio.

 

The 2 bonuses alone are rather extraordinary:

 

My complete 18-lesson course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, which includes the teacher’s manual and a CD to guide you. I was previously selling the course for $375. This is a new way to teach logic, the subject that has been missing from schools for decades. Click here for more details on the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS Course.

 

The complete text (331 pages) of AIDS INC., the book that exposed a conspiracy of scientific fraud deep within the medical research establishment. The book has become a sought-after item, since its publication in 1988. It contains material about viruses, medical tests for diagnoses, and the invention of disease, the understanding of which is, now and in the future, vital to our correct perception of phony epidemics arising in our midst. I assure you, the revelations in the book will surprise you; they cut much deeper and are more subtle than “virus made in a lab” scenarios.

 

The heart and soul of this product are the text interviews I conducted with Matrix-insiders, who have first-hand knowledge of how the major illusions of our world are put together:

 

EILLIS MEDAVOY, master of PR, propaganda, and deception, who worked for key controllers in the medical and political arenas. 28 interviews, 290 pages.

 

RICHARD BELL, financial analyst and trader, whose profound grasp of market manipulation and economic-rigging is formidable, to say the least. 16 interviews, 132 pages.

 

JACK TRUE, the most creative hypnotherapist on the face of the planet. Jack’s beyond-Matrix understanding of the mind and how to liberate it is unparalleled. His insights are unique, staggering. 43 interviews, 320 pages.

 

Then there are several more interviews with brilliant analysts of the Matrix, including recent conversations. 53 pages.

 

The ten and a half hours of mp3 audio are my solo presentation, based on these interviews and my own research. Title: The Multi-Dimensional Planetary Chessboard—The Matrix vs. the Un-Conditioning of the Individual.

 

Here is some background on the product and my own history:

 

In 2001, I essentially left a career as an investigative reporter and rolled the dice on the emerging internet. I started a site called www.nomorefakenews.com

 

I didn’t stop investigating and publishing, but my field of operation widened. My first big question was: WHO REALLY RUNS THE WORLD?

 

And my second was: WHOEVER THEY ARE, HOW DO THEY MANUFACTURE REALITY FOR THE POPULATION OF EARTH?

 

I was prepared to deal with these enormous questions, because I had contacts. These were people I had come to know well during my days as a reporter, writing for LA Weekly and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe—and also during a stint on radio at KPFK in Los Angeles.

 

These people, these contacts, were insiders.

 

They had deep knowledge in their fields:

 

PROPAGANDA; FINANCE; HYPNOTISM; MIND CONTROL; MEDICINE; INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS…

 

They were unwilling to be cited as on-the-record sources in my articles. They knew they would suffer consequences if they went public.

 

Once I started my website, I did extensive research to confirm the credentials of my insiders. I wanted to make sure they were who they said they were. I wanted to verify they had worked where they said they had worked. This was a laborious process.

 

When I was sure, I began to interview them.

 

I wasn’t certain where all this would go.

 

Gradually, I realized I was getting VERY high-level information on The Matrix. But this was the real Matrix.

 

As one of my sources described it:

 

“Imagine a factory that turns out illusions. And these illusions are woven together to make up what we think the world is.”

 

The actual Matrix involves a number of areas: government; money; energy; the military; intelligence agencies; medicine; mega-corporations; psychology and mind control; science…

 

I started a members-only newsletter, and word quickly spread. Every Friday, I would email a newsletter to subscribers. Many of these newsletters were interviews with my insiders.

 

It was quite a job, keeping up with writing (public) daily articles for my site and also putting out the (private) newsletter. I was also collating the high-level information from my sources and making maps of the expanding territory.

 

I saw that I was looking at global CARTELS. As you will discover in reading this material, these cartels are not frozen organizations. They are evolving.

 

In this last months, I’ve had some very competent assistance, and I’ve assembled the most important newsletter-interviews for you.

 

But in addition to that, I’m publishing, for the first time, interviews that never made it into those newsletters. And I’m presenting interviews from very recent days as well.

 

It’s very instructive to talk to people who have been there on the inside. They are bright, they are informative, they convey the depth of situations they were involved with. They go beyond relaying dry facts, and in doing so, you learn how elite players play the game. You receive a rounded and three-dimensional picture of: the process of constructing The Matrix. How it’s built.

 

In every case, each insider was relieved to be able to talk with utter frankness, with no fear that his words would be twisted or taken out of context or deleted. So you’re getting the full story.

 

I met my first two insiders while I was writing my first book, AIDS INC., SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY, in 1987-88. The book was my initial experience in putting together a vast amount of data—which contradicted every official position on a supposedly rock-hard subject: medical science.

 

At the time, I didn’t really understand how deep I was drilling down into a cardinal aspect of The Matrix. I only knew I was I digging up and exposing long-held delusions broadcast as facts by the Medical Cartel. These false realities went far beyond the subject of AIDS.

 

That first book of mine started as a pure lark. I had just published a piece in LA Weekly about certain televangelists and their support of an intentionally staged Armageddon in Israel. When the piece was published, I sat back and thought, “Where do I go from here? What could be weirder than this?”

 

Like other investigative reporters, I was excited by strange and bizarre stories that could blow readers’ minds. I was motivated by that.

 

So, in 1987, I wondered what could be stranger than the Armageddon story I had just done.

 

Sitting in my Los Angeles studio, a thought popped into my head. “AIDS. I bet there’s something about that whole thing that’s pretty weird.”

 

Little did I know…

 

That was my first big leap.

 

I had studied logic extensively in college. I had been taught by a philosophy professor who was a very generous soul and a relentless thinker. If you were an inch from accuracy, he would point it out, and he would give you the full reason and understanding that pulled you back to the straight and narrow.

 

Once I dove into research for AIDS INC., I was amazed at the sloppy thinking and contradiction that was posing as science.

 

And then I met my first two insiders.

 

Their basic message to me was: keep going; you’re on the right track; we have a great deal more to share with you.

 

They weren’t just talking about medical issues.

 

They were talking about the whole construction of reality from a number of angles.

 

Each of the insiders I have gotten to know over the subsequent years has a different personal story. They have all left their particular corner of The Matrix-Construction Group. Jack True, my late friend and colleague, was a different man altogether. He was never part of that Group. He was the most informed and brilliant researcher I’ve ever come across on the subject of the mind—the essential link that makes The Matrix work.

 

Jack started the ball rolling. He was instrumental in making the deal that got AIDS INC published. He introduced me to a few key figures along the way—insiders who proved invaluable.

 

Why did these insiders want to talk and spill secrets? Well, the process of interviewing them wasn’t always easy. They could be thorny at times. But they all had seen, finally, the abyss toward which they were heading, toward which they were leading the population. And they pulled back.

 

So…

 

This Volume is for individuals.

 

Because:

 

Beyond The Matrix is true individual power.

 

Despite all the illusions, it has always been there.

 

It’s for you.

 

And it IS your power.

 

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

https://marketplace.mybigcommerce.com/the-matrix-revealed/

 

AYN RAND AND THE MATRIX

by Jon Rappoport

MAY 2, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

 

“…nearly perfect in its immorality.” — Gore Vidal, reviewing Atlas Shrugged

 

“…shot through with hatred.” — The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged

 

“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” — The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged

 

“[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.” — Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

 

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When people perceive that their society is being infiltrated and taken over by Collectivism, when they finally view that system as the enemy, when they point accusing fingers at the cultural and political transformation taking place under their noses, when they gear up to fight it…what is their ultimate fuel in that battle?

 

What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by Collectivism?

 

Yes, the Constitution, yes, the Bill of Rights, yes, the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?

 

And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?

 

The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.

 

But not just the individual.

 

The FREE INDIVIDUAL.

 

But not just the free individual.

 

The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.

 

Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.

 

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Is it possible to remove Ayn Rand’s work from its cultural context, from all the arguments it has spawned, from the weight of confusion intentionally generated to distract people from its essential lightning?

 

This was an author who lifted the subject of individual power beyond anything seen since Nietzsche. To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its need for an entangling Matrix, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.

 

I write this because the Matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of POWER. You can run, but you can’t hide. You can spin doily slogans and clever captions and wispy pretensions; you can call for “group consciousness” and collective sensibilities; you can say “we are all together”; you can herald consumerism or the promise of the digital universe or some version of New Ageism as the answer to our ills. But this feinting and tap dancing isn’t going to change one iota of truth about power. It isn’t a mantle you can refuse and deny and still live to the fullest. You have to come face to face with it and make your choices.

 

Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.

 

I recommend her work because the characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols. You discover what it is like to be them. What you think after that will sit on a new line of exploration.

 

Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

 

The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.

 

Whether or not you agree with Rand’s philosophy, after you read her two novels, you will be forced to admit it is formidable. It holds nothing back. It takes its stand and it deepens that stand, page after page. It never shrinks from accepting and embracing the implications of its principles.

 

Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force. That apparently is a sin. If so, how should power be described? What is their better alternative? Oligarchy?

 

Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. This is also apparently a central crime. These men are creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They invent. They decide. They imagine. They refuse to compromise. They see no reason to feel guilt or incur debt. They leave the team and the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.

 

And they can and do explain why.

 

They bow down before no religion or mystical concept of the universe.

 

In other words, they contradict every current element of political propaganda. They see such a campaign for what it is: the attempt to kill off the individual.

 

Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. It extols obedience and love of rules that hem in the individual. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.

 

Once you own a space, you can alter it. You can make it smaller and smaller. You can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. You can pretend to elevate the mob and give it the illusion that the majority are running things. You can con whole populations.

 

Is this not what organized religions do in their so-called spiritual formulations?

 

We are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe that individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more. Whereas, if we only take into consideration what is best for everybody, we will see our way out of the morass.

 

Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal.

 

At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.

 

Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.

 

Again and again, the debate comes back to individual power. Minds swerve away from it as if it were a crime scene on the highway.

 

Who wants to face what individual power means when such confrontation is tantamount to examining one’s own life and its surrenders and compromises and excuses?

 

Profoundly compromising and surrendering people are there in Rand’s novels, in the full bloom of decay. Are they! Peter Keating, the pathetic hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.

 

Around us today, we see growing numbers of such collectivists who operate in the political, economic, social, scientific, and spiritual realms. They make hay from their overt or subtle attachment to group goals. They sell their phony idealism over and over.

 

What are we to do?

 

I suggest, to start with, an unflinching look at individual power. What is it? What can be done with it? Why do we see it expressed and lived in such paltry terms? We know the answers on the level of society, but I’m talking about the universe of the individual.

 

If you want to lock horns with a titan and discover your own responses to power, read or re-read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

 

And, again, keep in mind that her two major heroes were artists. This is was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.

 

There are other important implications in the work of Rand and those who start with the assumption of freedom and individual power: for example, history is not, as some philosophers claim, a process that unfolds in a particular direction all by itself.

 

This “process” formulation has been used to argue that history is embedded with a separate intelligence that seeks collectivism. Collectivism signals progress from past to future, and its adherents are actors speaking its lines in a grand inevitable drama that culminates in domination over the individual, and utopia for the masses.

 

This is akin to saying that you may be driving your car on the road, but the real navigator in charge of arriving at some hidden destination is a predestined force inhabiting the engine.

 

Staring at individual power need not involve us in a cold, brutal, surgical exercise. After all, the kind of power we are talking about is deeply engaged in life itself. It isn’t sitting in some ivory tower or cave. It isn’t scoring points in a competition. It is intimately connected to expression of self in a far-reaching way.

 

Neither is this power married to time or contained in one space. It flows out from the individual because he launches it, because it carries his energy for purposes of his own invention. Power is bathed in freedom.

 

Many years ago, I wrote a letter to a painter whose work I admired. He was largely unknown in the New York matrix of social-art-gallery-collector entanglements. I asked him a question about power.

 

He responded: “It all comes down to this. A true artist’s work is not about time, nor is it a random occurrence ruled by society. A single artist’s power is immortal. You can take that sentence any way you want to. Do you know this statement attributed to Albert Camus? ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.’”

 

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The dark opposite of that was told to me by retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy, whom I interview 28 times in my new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED: “What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board, because the ‘patient’ was already hypnotized. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”

 

A great deal of criticism and confusion launched at Ayn Rand had to do with the style of her description of power. It was called brutal, cold, heartless, etc. People failed to realize she was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. Collectivism had already won. It had beaten its opponents. The state of humankind was being managed in the aftermath of the victory. If you were going to go up against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. You needed to see the situation with great clarity. You needed to be able to describe what the free individual was dealing with. There was no way to short-circuit it.

 

More importantly, Rand was prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.

 

She portrayed obsessive social niceties (so adored by the crowd) as the stuff and substance of a whole network of compromise, a way of surrendering to The Group. Naturally, when her critics, who were part of that system, saw themselves reflected in her mirror, they became outraged and they went on the attack. They had to. She had them in her sights.

 

Interestingly, in tracking back the ideal of the individual, not only did I visit the most obvious and important destination, ancient Athens, but I also, unexpectedly, came upon early Tibet. That philosophy (and its related practices), before the priests took over with a Matrix of super-complex and impenetrable metaphysics, began with the free individual.

 

Not an immobile individual. Not an offshoot of something else. Not an idea. Not a concept. Not mystical. A REALITY.

 

About 1500 years ago, this message was brought to Tibet by a few isolated Indian Hindu teachers who had been removed from their teaching posts at home. They had unloaded enough metaphysical and cosmological baggage to see through to the essence: THE FREE INDIVIDUAL.

 

The Matrix is a web and a network of enormous complexity generated from a fundamental desire to avoid this core of existence.

 

It is like a game of pin the tail on the donkey, in which the blindfold on the searcher guarantees that the tail will arrive everywhere except on target. And while en route to each wrong spot, a terrific amount of false wisdom is generated.

 

So we’re really looking at a series of many levels, every one of which is built as an illusion.

 

When you read these words of Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead, keep in mind that Collectivism is, already, firmly entrenched, and that when a free individual embarks on the full expression of his own power, he isn’t thinking about charming and pleasing everyone around him. He’s cutting to the center of things:

 

“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”

 

Again: “The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.”

 

Time and time again, while researching and investigating The Matrix, I came to this question: HOW FAR CAN INDIVIDUAL POWER REACH?

 

Cutting away the excess fat and the vague “collectivist-rainbow metaphysics” surrounding the question, my answer, gleaned in part from Tibet, was: THERE IS NO LIMIT.

 

All limits are imposed by fiat. All limits are imposed by agenda-driven philosophies and speculative ruminations and fearful “group-thinkers.”

 

Science itself, utilizing a severe form of reductionist materialism, reflexively denies the upper reaches of individual power, despite ample evidence to the contrary unearthed by well-formed paranormal laboratory studies.

 

The masses are not only laboring under an advancing Collectivism, they’re huddling in a preposterous rejection of what the individual can do.

 

Here again, for those who have not yet read it, is the introduction to my new extensive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED — click here.

 

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com