"Censorship: Local and Express" by Ayn Rand

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been saying for many years that statism is winning by default, by the intellectual default of capitalism's alleged defenders, that freedom and capitalism have never had a firm philosophical base, that today's conservatives share all the fundamental premises of today's liberals and thus have paved and are still paving the road to statism. I have also said repeatedly, repeatedly, that the battle for freedom is primarily philosophical and cannot be won by any lesser means because philosophy rules human existence, including politics. But philosophy is a science that deals with the broadest abstractions, and therefore many people do not know how to observe its influence in practice or how to grasp the process by which it affects the conditions of their daily life. Life. A recent event, however, offers a clear, striking illustration of that process. It shows philosophy in action and reveals the essence and the contradictions of both the conservatives and the liberal ideologies. This event is the decision of the Supreme Court in the five recent obscenity cases. In my publication, the Ayn rand letter of November 20, 1972, I expressed hope in regard to the four men appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, even though it was too early to tell the exact nature of their views. But I said, if they live up to their enormous responsibility, we may forgive Mr. Nixon a great many of his defaults. The Supreme Court is the last remnant of a philosophical influence in this country today. Less than a year later, the evidence is sufficient to indicate that there are no intellectual grounds left for forgiving Mr. Nixon. Since inconsistent premises lead to inconsistent actions, it is not impossible that the Supreme Court may make some liberating decisions. For instance, the Court made a great contribution to justice and to the protection of individual rights when it legalized abortion. I am not in agreement with all of the reasoning given in that decision, but I am in enthusiastic agreement with the result, that is, with the recognition of a woman's right to her own body. But the Court's decision in regard to obscenity takes an opposite stand. It denies a man's or a woman's right to the exercise of his own mind by establishing the legal and intellectual base of censorship. Before proceeding to discuss that decision, I want to state for the record my own view of what is called hardcore pornography. I regard it as unspeakably disgusting. I have not read any of the books or seen any of the current movies belonging to that category, and I do not intend ever to read or see them. The descriptions provided in legal cases, as well as the modern touches in soft core productions, are sufficient grounds on which to form an opinion. The Reason of my opinion is the opposite of the usual one. I do not regard sex as evil. I regard it as good, as one of the most important aspects of human life, too important to to be made the subject of public anatomical display. But the issue here is not one's view of sex. The issue is freedom of speech and of the press. That is, the right to hold any view and to express is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of pornography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of rights has begun with the suppression of a given rights. Least attractive practitioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the offenders makes it a good test of one's loyalty to a principle. In the five obscenity cases decided on June 21, 1973, the court was divided five to four. In each case, the majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Berger, joined by Justices Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, all four appointed by Nixon, and Justice White, appointed by Kennedy. In each case, the dissenting opinion was written by Justice Brennan, joined by Justices Stewart and Marshall. Justice Douglas in each case wrote a separate dissenting opinion. The two most important cases are Miller vs California and Paris Adult Theater 1 vs Slay. The Miller case involves a man who was convicted in California of mailing unsolicited sexually explicit material which advertised pornographic books. It is in the Miller case that Chief Justice Berger promulgated the new criteria for judging whether a given work is obscene or not. They are as follows. The basic guidelines for the trial of fact must be a whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interests B whether the work depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law and C Whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Close quote.

This criteria are based on previous Supreme Court decisions, particularly on Ross vs. United States in 1957. Nine years later, in the case of Memoirs vs. Massachusetts, 1966, the Supreme Court introduced a new criterion. A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value. Close quote this was bad enough, but the present decision emphatically rejects that particular notion and substitutes a horrendous criterion of its own. Quote. Whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Close quote Morally, this criterion, as well as the rest of Chief Justice Berger's decision, taken as a whole, is. Is a proclamation of collectivism, not so much political as Specifically, moral collectivism. The intellectual standard which is here set up to rule an individual's mind, to prescribe what an individual may write, publish, read or see, is the judgment of an average person applying community standards. Why? No reason is given, which means that the will of the collector is here taken for granted as the source, justification and criterion of value judgments. What is a community? No definition is given. It may therefore be a state, a city, a neighborhood, or just the block you live on. What are community standards? No definition is given. In fact, the standards of a community, when and if they can be observed as such, as distinguished, distinguished from the standards of its individual citizens, are a product of chance, lethargy, hypocrisy, second handedness, indifference, fear, the manipulations of local busy bodies or small time power lusters, and occasionally the traditional acceptance of some decent values inherited from some great mind of the past. But the great mind is now to be outlawed by the ruling of the Supreme Court. Who is the average person? No definition is given. There is some indication that the term in this context means a person who is neither particularly susceptible or sensitive nor totally insensitive in regard to sex. But to find a sexually average person is a more preposterously impossible undertaking. To find a sexually average person is a more preposterously impossible undertaking than to find the average representative of any other human characteristic. And besides, this is not what the court decision says. It says simply average, which in an issue of judgment means intellectually average. Average in intelligence, in ability, in ideas, in feelings, in tastes, which means a conformist or a nonentity. Any proposition concerned with establishing a human average necessarily eliminates the top and the bottom, that is the best and the worst. Thus, the standards of a genius and the standards of a moron are automatically eliminated, suppressed or prohibited, and both ordered to subordinate their views to those of the average. Why is the average person to be granted so awesome a privilege. By reason of the fact that he possesses no special distinction? Nothing can justify such a notion except the theory of collectivism, which is itself unjustifia. The court's decision asserts, repeatedly just asserts, that this ruling applies only to hardcore pornography or obscenity, that is, to certain ideas dealing with sex, not to any other kinds of ideas. Other kinds of ideas, it keeps asserting, are protected by the First Amendment, but ideas dealing with sex are not. Apart from the impossibility of drawing a line between these two categories, which we shall discuss later, this distinction is contradicted and invalidated. Right. In the text of the same decision, the trial judges and juries are empowered to determine whether a work that contains sexual elements lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Ladies and gentlemen, this means, and can mean nothing else, that the government is empowered to judge literary, artistic, political and scientific values and to permit or suppress certain works. Accordingly, the alleged limits of that power, the condition of when, where and by whom it may be exercised, are of no significance. Once the principle that the government holds such a power has been established, the rest is only a matter of details and of time. The present Supreme Court may seek to suppress only sexual materials on the same basis the will of the community. A future court may suppress undesirable scientific discussions. Still another court may suppress political discussions. And a year later all discussions in all fields would be suppressed. The law functions by a process of deriving logical consequences from established precedence. The average person's community standards criterion was set up in the Roth case. But the Roth criterion of utterly without redeeming social value was too vague to be immediately dangerous. Anything may be claimed to have some sort of social value. So logically, on the basis of that precedent, the present court took the next step towards censorship. It gave to the government the power of entry into four specific intellectual fields, with the power to judge whether the values of works in these fields are serious or not. Serious is an unserious standard. Who is to determine what is serious, to whom and by what criterion? Since no definition is given, one must assume that the criterion to apply is the only one promulgated in those guidelines what the average person would find serious. Do you care to contemplate the spectacle of the average person as the ultimate authority? The censor in the field of literature, in the field of art, in the field of politics, in the field of science. An authority whose edict is to be imposed by force and is to determine what will be permitted or suppressed in all these fields. I submit that no pornographic movie can be as morally obscene as a prospect of this kind. No first rate talent will ever be willing to work in any of those fields. To work by the intellectual standards and under the orders of any authority, Even if it were an authority composed of the best brains in the world who would not accept the job, let alone an authority consisting of average persons. And the greater the talent, the less as to willingness. As to those who would be willing, observe the moral irony of the fact. They do exist today in large numbers and are generally despised. They are the hacks, the box office chasers who try to please what they think are the tastes and the standards of the public for the sake of making money. Apparently intellectual Prostitution is evil if done for a so called selfish motive, but noble if accepted in selfless service to the moral purity of the community. In another of the five obscenity cases, United States versus 12200 foot reels of Super 8 millimeter film, but in a totally different context, Chief Justice Berger himself describes the danger created by the logical implications of a precedent. Quote the seductive possibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth, or fifth logical extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in a first instance. This kind of gestative propensity calls for the line drawing familiar in the judicial as in the legislative process thus far, but not beyond. Close quote I would argue that since a legal rule is a principle, the development of its logical consequences cannot be cut off except by repealing the principle. But assuming that such a cutoff were possible, no line of any sort is drawn. In the Miller decision, the community standards of average persons are explicitly declared to be a sovereign power over sexual matters and over the works that deal with sexual matters. In the same Miller decision, Chief Justice Berger admits that no such line can be drawn. Quote Nothing in in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable national standards when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact, close quote he quotes Chief Justice Warren saying in an earlier case, quote I believe that there is no provable national standard. At all events, this Court has not been able to enunciate one, and it would be unreasonable to expect local courts to divine one. Close quote by what means are local courts to divine a local one? Actually, the only provable standard of what constitutes obscenity would be an objective standard, philosophically proved and valid for all men. Such a standard cannot be defined or enforced in terms of law. It would require the formulation of an entire philosophic system, but even would not grant anyone the right to enforce that standard on others. When the Court, however, speaks of a provable national standard, it does not mean an objective standard. It substitutes the collective for the objective and seeks to enunciate a standard held by all the average persons of the nation. Since even a guess at such a concept is patently important possible, the Court concludes that what is impossible and improper nationally is permissible locally and in effect passes the buck to state legislatures, granting them the power to enforce arbitrary, unprovable local standards. Chief Justice Berger's arguments in the Miller decision are not very persuasive. Quote it is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City. Close quote I read the First Amendment as not requiring any person anywhere to accept any depiction he does not wish to read or see, but forbidding him to abridge the rights and freedom of those who do wish to read or see it. In another argument against the national standard of what constitutes obscenity, the decision declares, quote people in different states vary in their tastes and attitudes, and this diversity is not to be strangled by the absolutism of imposed uniformity. Close quote what about the absolutism of imposed uniformity within a state? What about the nonconformists in that state? What about communication between citizens of different states? What about the freedom of a national marketplace of ideas? No answers are given. The following argument, offered in a footnote, is unworthy of a serious tribunal. The mere fact juries may reach different conclusions as to the same material does not mean that constitutional rights are breached. As this Court Observed in Ross vs United States, it is common experience that different juries may reach different results under any criminal statute. That is one of the consequences we accept under our jury system. Close quote In a criminal case, the jury's duty is only to determine whether a particular defendant committed the crime which is clearly and specifically defined by the statute. Under the new obscenity ruling, a jury is expected to determine whether the defendant committed an undefined crime and simultaneously to determine what that crime is. Thus, the Nixon court's notion of censorship sharing by diffusing it at random over the entire country is as illusory as Nixon's notion of returning power to the states by means of revenue sharing. While the public rides on the creaking train of local censorship, with delays, derailments, and chaos at every whistle stop, the express of statism is flying full speed on an unobstructed track. Four of the justices who handed down the Miller decision are regarded as concerned conservatives. The fifth, Justice White, is regarded as middle of the road. On the other hand, Justice Douglas is the most liberal or the most leftward leaning member of the Court. Yet his dissent in the Miller case is an impassioned cry of protest and indignation. He rejects the notion that the First Amendment allows an implied exception in the case of obscenity. Quote I do not think it does, and my view views on the issue have been stated over and Again, close quote. He declares, quote, obscenity, which even we cannot define with precision, is a hodgepodge. To send men to jail for violating standards they cannot understand, construe, and apply is a monstrous thing to do in a nation dedicated to fair trials and due process.

Close quote.

What about the anti trust antitrust laws which are responsible for precisely this kind of monstrous thing? Justice Douglas does not mention them. But antitrust, as we shall see later, is a chicken that comes home to roost on both sides of this issue. On the subject of censorship, however, Justice Douglas is eloquently consistent. Quote, the idea that the First Amendment permits punishment for ideas that are offensive to the particular judge or jury sitting in judgment is astounding. No greater level of speech or literature has ever been designed. To give the power to the censor as we do today is to make a sharp and radical break with the traditions of a free society. The First Amendment was not fashioned as a vehicle for dispensing tranquilizers to the people. Its prime function was to keep debate open to offensive as well as to state people. The tendency throughout history has been to subdue the individual and to exalt the power of government. The use of the standard offensive gives authority to government that cuts the very vitals out of the First Amendment. As is intimated by the Court's opinion. The materials before us may be garbage, but so is much of what is said in political campaigns, in the daily press, on TV or over the radio. By reason of the First Amendment, and solely because of it, speakers and publishers have not been threatened or subdued because their thoughts and ideas may be offensive to some. Close quote I can only say amen to this statement. Observe that such issues as the individual against the state are never mentioned in the Supreme Court's majority decision. It is Justice Douglas, the archdeacon liberal, who defends individual rights. It is the conservatives who speak as if the individual did not exist, as if the unit of social concern were the collective, the community. A profound commitment to moral collectivism does not occur in a vacuum. As a causeless primary, it requires an epistemological foundation. The Supreme Court's majority decision in the case of Paris Adult Theater 1 vs. Layton reveals that foundation. This case involves two movie theaters in Atlanta, Georgia, that exhibited allegedly obscene films admitting only adults. The local trial court ruled that this was constitutionally permissible. But the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the decision on the grounds that hardcore pornography is not protected by the First Amendment. Thus, the issue before the US Supreme Court was whether it is constitutional to abridge the Freedom of consenting adults. The court's majority decision said yes. Epistemologically, this decision is a proclamation of non objectivity. It supports and defends explicitly the most evil of social phenomena. Non obtained objective law. The decision written by chief justice Berger declares, quote, we hold that there are legitimate state interests at stake in stemming the tide of commercialized obscenity. These include the interest of the public in the quality of life and the total community environment, the tone of commerce in the great city centers, and possibly the public safety itself.

Close quote.

Try to find a single issue or action that would be exempt from this kind of legitimate state interest. Quoting a book by professor Bickel, the decision declares, quote, a man may be entitled to read an obscene book in his room. But if he demands a right to obtain the books and pictures he wants in the market, then to grant him his right is to affect the world about the rest of it us. And to impinge on other privacies what is commonly read and seen and heard and intrudes upon us all, wanted or not. Which human activity would be exempt from a declaration of this kind? And what advocate of a totalitarian dictatorship would not endorse that declaration? Mr. Berger concedes that, quote, there is no scientific data which conclusively demonstrates that exposure to obscene materials adversely affects men and women or their society, close quote. But he rejects this as an argument against the suppression of such materials. And there follows an avalanche of statements and of quotations from earlier court decisions, all to the effect that scientific knowledge and conclusive proof are not required as a basis for legislation, that the state has the right to enact laws on the grounds of what does or might exist. Ladies and gentlemen, scientific data in the proper literal sense of these words means knowledge of reality reached by a process of reason. And conclusive demonstration means that the content of a given proposition proved to be.

A fact of reality. It is reason and reality that are here being removed as a limitation on the power of the state. It is the right to legislate on the basis of any assumption, any hypothesis, any guess, any feeling, any whim, on any grounds, or none that is here.

Being conferred on the government.

Quote, we do not demand of legislatures scientifically certain criteria of legislation. The decision affirms, although there is no conclusive proof of a connection between antisocial behavior and obscene material, the legislature of Georgia could quite reasonably determine that such a connection does or might exist. In the siding Ross, this court implicitly accepted that the legislature could legitimately act on such a conclusion to protect the social Interest in order and morality.

Close quote.

If the notion that something might be a threat to the social interest is sufficient to justify suppression, then the Nazi or the Soviet dictatorship is justified in exterminating anyone who in its belief, might be a threat to the social interest of the Nazi or the Soviet community. Whatever theory of government such a notion represents, it is not the theory of America's Founding Fathers. Strangely enough, Chief Justice Berger seems to be aware of it because he proceeds to call on a pre American president. Quote from the beginning of civilized societies, legislators and judges have acted on various unprovable assumptions. Such assumptions underlie much lawful state regulation of commercial and business affair.

Close quote.

This is preeminently true.

And look at the results.

Look at the history of all the governments in the world prior to the birth of the United States. Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document, the Constitution, which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on will. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all all the other kinds of governments, unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions, demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built. Yet here is the Supreme Court citing all those bloody millennia of tyranny as a precedent for us to follow. If this seems inexplicable, the very next sentence of Mr. Berger's decision gives a clue to the and a violently clear demonstration of the role of precedent in.

The development of law.

That next sentence seems to unleash a whirling storm of feathers as chickens come flying home from every direction to roost on everyone's coop, perch or fence in retribution for every evasion, compromise, injustice and violation of rights perpetrated in past decades. That next sentence is, quote the same a basis of unprovable assumptions is true of the federal securities antitrust laws and a host of other federal regulations. I trust it isn't, Chief Justice Burger, that you're applauding. Formally, I would have to say, oh, Mr. Chief. Chief Justice. Informally, I want to say oh brother.

Quote.

On the basis of these assumptions, Mr. Berger goes on. Both Congress and state legislatures have, for example, drastically restricted associational rights by adopting.

Antitrust laws and have strictly regulated public expression by issuers of and dealers insecurities, profit sharing, coupons and trading stamps, commanding what they must and may not publish and announce. Understandably, those who entertain an absolutist view of the First Amendment find it uncomfortable to explain why rights of association, speech and press should be severely restrained in the marketplace of goods and money, but not in the marketplace of pornography. For quote on the collectivist premise, there is of course no answer. The only answer in today's situation is to check that premise and reject it and start repealing all those catastrophically destructive violations of individual rights and of the Constitution. But this is not what the Court majority has decided. Forgetting his own warning about the gestative propensity of the judicial and legislative legislative processes, Chief Justice Berger accepts the President as an irrevocable absolute and pushes the country many steps further toward the abyss of statism. Quote likewise, the decision continues, when legislatures and administrators act to protect the physical environment from pollution and to preserve our resources of forests, streams and parks, they must act on such imponderables as the impact of a new highway near or through an existing park or wilderness or wilderness area. Thus, the Federal Aid Highway act of 1968 and the Department of Transportation act of 1966 have been described by Mr. Justice Black as a solemn determination of the highest law making body of this nation that beauty and and health giving facilities of our parks are not to be taken away for public roads without hearings, fact findings and policy determinations under the supervision of a Cabinet officer. The fact that a congressional directive reflects unprovable assumptions about what is good for the people, including imponderable aesthetic assumptions, is not a sufficient reason to find that statute unconcerned constitutional. Close quote isn't it? If it is not, then the imponderable aesthetic assumptions of government officials are entitled to invade the field of literature and Art, as Mr. Berger's decision is inviting them to do. The ugly hand of altruism slithers into the decision in a passage that sideswipes the concept of free will. Quote we have just noted, for example, that neither the First Amendment nor free will precludes states from having blue sky laws to regulate what sellers of securities may write or publish about their wares. Such laws are to protect the weak, the uninformed, the unsuspecting, and the gullible from the exercise of their own volition. Close quote it is for this kind of purpose that the rest of us who are not weak, uninformed, unsuspecting or gullible are to be protected from our volition and deprived of the right to exercise it. So much for the relation of altruism to rights and freedom. Here is another chicken flying home. Quote States are told by some that they must await a laissez faire market solution to the obscenity pornography problem, paradoxically, by people who have never otherwise had a kind word to say for Less affair, particularly in solving urban, commercial and environmental pollution problems. Close quote the decision contains many other homing chickens of this kind, an entire barnyard of them, many more than I have time to quote. But these are sufficient to give you the nature, style and spirit of that ruling. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Bren, joined by Justices Stewart and Marshall, offers some good arguments to support the conclusion that censorship in regard to consent parenting adults is unconstitutional. But he wavers, hesitates to go that far and tries to compromise, to strike, quote, a better balance between the guarantee of free expression and the state's legitimate interests.

Close quote.

He concedes the notion that obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment, but expresses an anxious concern over the Court failure to draw a clear line between protected and unprotected speech. He cites the chaotic, contradictory record of the Court's decisions in obscenity cases. He speaks eloquently about the danger of vague laws and quotes Chief Justice Warren saying that, quote, the constitutional requirement of definiteness is violated by criminal statute that fails to give a person, person of ordinary, fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute. Close quote But Justice Brennan does not mention the antitrust laws which do just that. He states, quote, the resulting level of uncertainty is utterly intolerable, not alone because it makes bookselling a hazardous profession, but as well because it invites arbitrary and erratic and forced enforcement of the law.

Close quote.

He deplores the fact that obscenity judgments are now made on a case by case, side by side basis. He observes that the Court has been struggling, quote, to fend off legislative attempts to pass to the courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court, the awesome task of making case by case at once the criminal and the consequences constitutional law.

Close quote.

But he does not mention the living hell of antitrust, the grim monument to law made case by case. However, a greater respect for principles and a greater understanding of their consequences are revealed in Justice Brennan's dissenting opinion than in the majority decision. He declares, on the basis of that majority decision, quote, it is hard to see how state ordered regimentation of our minds can ever be forestalled. For if a state may, in an effort to maintain or create a particular moral tone, prescribe what its citizens cannot read or cannot see, then it would seem to follow that in pursuit of that same objective, a state could decree that. What could decree that its citizens must read certain books or must view certain films?

Close quote.

The best statement, however, is made again by Justice Douglas, who ends his forceful dissent with the words, quote, but our society Unlike most in the world, presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that make the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment and it is the article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world. Close quote I concur, except that it is not an article of faith, but a provable rational conviction. In the life of a nation. The law plays the same role as a decision making process of salt does in the life of an individual. An individual makes decisions by applying his basic premises to a specific choice, premises which he can change but seldom does. The basic premises of a nation's laws are set by its dominant political philosophy and implemented by the courts whose task is to determine the application of broad principles to specific cases. In this task, the equivalent of basic premises is precedent, which can be challenged but seldom is. How far a loosely worded piece of legislation can go in the guise of a President is horrifyingly demonstrated by the Supreme Court's majority decision in another one of the five obscenity cases, United States vs. Orito. This case involves a man charged with knowingly transporting obscene material by common carrier in interstate commerce. The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate interstate commerce is one of the major errors or contradictions in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution's foundation, the entire wage of statism which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. Still, I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived what that flaws has now become if in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states. That clause has reached the opposite destination. We may now expect 50 different frontiers inside this country with customs officials searching your luggage and pockets for books or magazines. Permitted in one state decision declares, quoting an earlier court decision, quote, the motive and purpose of a regulation of interstate commerce are matters for the legislative judgment, upon the exercise of which the Constitution places no restriction and over which the courts are given no control.

Close quote.

Such an interpretation means that legislative judgment is given an absolute power beyond the restraint of any principles, beyond the reach of any checks or balances. This is an outrageous instance of context dropping. The Constitution taken as a whole is a fundamental restriction on the power of the government, whether in the legislative or in any other branch. It is sufficient to reiterate. Mr. Burger declares the well settled principle that Congress may impose relevant conditions and requirements on those who use the channels of interstate commerce in order that those channels will not become the means of promoting or spreading evil, whether of a physical, moral, or economic nature. Close quote as if this were not clear enough, a footnote is added. Quote Congress can certainly regulate interstate commerce to the extent of forbidding and punishing the use of such commerce as an agency to promote immorality, dishonesty, or the spread of any evil or harm to the people of other states from the state of Ari. Close quote Immorality, evil and harm. By what standard? The only rights which the five majority decisions leave you are the right to read and see what you wish in your own room, but not outside it, and the right to think whatever you please in the privacy of your own mind. But this is a right which even a totalitarian dictatorship is unable to suppress.

You are free to think in Soviet.

Russia, but not to act on your thinking. Again, Justice Douglas dissent is the only voice raised in desperate protest. Quote Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Close quote.

The division between the conservative and the liberal opinions of the Supreme Court is sharper and clearer than in less solemn writings or in purely political debates. By the nature of its task, the Supreme Court has to and does become the voice of philosophy. The necessity to deal with principles makes the members of the Supreme Court seem archetypical of of the ideals almost of the soul of the two political camps they represent. They were not chosen as archetypes. In the undefined, indeterminate, contradictory chaos of political views loosely labeled conservative and liberal, it would be impossible to choose an essential characteristic or a typical representative. Yet as one reads the Supreme Court's opinions, the essential premise stand out with an oddly bright, revealing clarity. And one grasps that under all the lesser differences and inconsistencies of their followers, these are the basic premises of one political camp or of the other. It is almost as if one were seeing not this antagonist's philosophy, but their sense of life. The subject of the five obscenity cases was not obscenity as such, which is a marginal and inconsequential matter, but a much deeper issue, the sexual aspect of man's life. Sex is not a separate nor a purely physical attribute of a man's character. It involves a complex integration of all his fundamental values. So it is not astonishing that cases dealing with sex, even in its ugly manifestations, would involve the influence of all the branches of philosophy. We have seen the influence of ethics, epistemology, politics, aesthetics. This last as the immediate victim of the debate. What about the fifth branch of philosophy, the basic one, the fundamental of the science of fundamentals, metaphysics. Its influence is revealed in and explains the inner contradictions of each camp. The metaphysical issue is their view of man's nature. Both camps hold the same premise, the mind, body, dichotomy, but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy. The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm. They tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man's speed, that is man's consciousness. They advocate the state's right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to set up and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm. They oppose censorship. They oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education, not their concern with academic freedom. But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property. They advocate it all the way down to total expropriation. The conservatives see men as a body freely roaming the earth, building sandpiles or factories, with an electronic computer, computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul free, willing to the farthest reaches of the universe, but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread. Yet it is the conservatives, who are predominantly religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body, who represent what I call the mystics of spirit. And it is the liberals, who are predominantly materialists, who regard men as an aggregate of meat and who represent what what I call the mystics of muscle. This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction. Each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important. Each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. Observe that the conservatives insult and demean the reach, or those who succeed in material material production, regarding them as morally inferior, and that the liberals treat ideas as a cynical con game. Control to both camps means the power to rule by physical force. Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man's consciousness, the liberals his body. On that premise, neither camp has permitted itself to observe that force is a killer in both realms. The conservatives, frozen in their mystic dogmas, are paralyzed, terrified and impotent in the realm of ideas. The liberals, waiting for the unearned, are paralyzed, terrified and frequently impotent in or hostile to the realm of material production. Observe the extra psychology crusade. Why do both camps cling to blind face in the power of physical force? I quote from Atlas Shrugged. Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine, the mind body dichotomy, was designed to destroy? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart.

Close quote.

Both camps, conservative conservatives and liberals alike, are united in their hatred of man's mind, that is, of reason. The conservatives reject reason in favor of pace, the liberals in favor of emotions. The conservatives are either lethargically indifferent to intellectual issues or actively anti intellectuals. The liberals are smarter in this respect. They use intellectual weapons to destroy and negate the intellect. They call it to redefine. When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another except brute physical force. I quote from Atlas Shrugged.

Quote.

The men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of. Of the flesh, the destruction of the soul, and vice versa, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

Close quote.

Since the two camps are only two.

Sides of the same coin, the same counterfeit coin, they are now moving closer and closer together. Observe the fundamental similarity of their philosophical views. In metaphysics, the mind body dichotomy, in epistemology, irrationalism. In ethics, altruism. In politics, statism. The conservatives used to claim that they were loyal to tradition, while the liberals boasted of being, in quotes, progressive. But observe that it is Chief Justice Berger, a conservative, who propounds a militant collectivism and formulates general principles that stretch the power of the state way beyond the issue of pornography. And it is Justice Douglas, a liberal, who invokes the traditions of a free society and pleads for our constitutional heritage. If someone had said in 1890 that antitrust laws for the businessmen would sooner or later lead to censorship for the intellectuals, no one would have believed it. You can see it today when Chief Justice Berger declares to the liberals that they cannot explain why rights, quote, should be severely restrained in the marketplace of goods and money, but not in the marketplace of pornography, unquote. I am tempted to feel that it serves them right, except that all of us are the victims. If this censorship ruling is not changed, the next step will be more explicit. It will replace the words marketplace of pornography with the words marketplace of ideas. This will serve as precedent for the liberals to determine which ideas they wish to suppress in the name of the social interest when their turn comes. No one can win a contest of this kind except the state. I do not know how the conservative members of the Supreme Court can bear to look at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, where his words are engraved in marble. I have sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of men. Men, permit me to add, without presumptions. So have I.

Gentlemen, would like to know the which impel you to support abortion.

Why I say support abortion? For the very simple reason that I support individual rights. For the simple reason that neither the state, nor any community nor yourself have any right to tell a woman what she should do with her life. And also for the reason that an embryo is not alive. And for the reason that one of the most disgusting, disgusting frauds among many of today's frauds is the idea that the enemies of abortion call themselves defenders of life or pro life movement or something like that, so that they advocate the rights of the embryo of an unborn entity and refuse to recognize the right of the living person, the woman. And for that matter, the fact.

This question is an intriguing one, I.

Think.

And those of you who may not have heard it, listen carefully and I'll ask the questioner if he's content with what I've said. He said that perhaps Ms. Rand knows what you already know because of my constant appeals of the financial difficulties of the forum. And part of the reason for the financial difficulties of the forum derives from the the fact that the fees charged by speakers have grown really quite enormously. And you, on the other hand, have been a constant friend of the forum and have not sought to take advantage of this. And he regards this as an interesting paradox since he would say this is altruism. And he wonders what your defense of it is. Is that it? Is that it? Yes, he says, that's it.

Now, first of all, how do you know what various speakers charge? I'm not going to tell you, but.

If the judge is willing, I will.

Ask him later, after I answer, to.

Answer you on that point.

But the main point in your question is that you assume that the only possible values one can can derive from any activity are financial. Therefore that anyone who wants to be a speaker does so only for a very high fee. Well, you know, that's placing your self interest terribly low and terribly cheap. It's a very difficult job, which no one who wants to do it for money should undertake because too much work is involved. You. You wouldn't make a fortune that way. Well then, what's my purpose?

Altruism? No, in any deal.

With a proper deal, you act on the trader principle. You give a value and you receive a value. Your question would imply that unless I Collect some kind of fortune which I don't need. I'm collecting it in other ways.

Incidentally.

Unless I am paid. I have no interest in spreading ideas which I believe to be right and true. That the only purpose is to enlighten others. That would mean that I have no interest in a free society. I have no interest in denouncing the kind of evil which I can see and want to speak against. That all that is not to my selfish interest. It's only to the interest of my audience. But not to mine. That would be an impossible contradiction. If I believed it, I wouldn't be worth 2 cents as a speaker. I believe that I have the most profound and the most selfish interest in having the freedom of my mind, knowing what to do with it and therefore fighting to preserve it in the country for as long as. As I'm alive or even beyond my life. I don't care about posterity, but I do care about any free mind or any independent person that may be born in future centuries. I do care about them.

Comment upon poetry and its relations to man's conscious cognitive processes. And would you give us some examples of poets whom you admire?

There is no one particular poet that I like. I am not a particular student of poetry. I like individual poems of different authors, but very few. And as to the cognitive meaning, Poetry has the same meaning as literature with some of the values of music added. And for further details I suggest that.

You read the Romantic Manifesto where I analyze the cognitive nature of the various.

Arts statement which this questioner believes that you said at your last appearance at the forum when a questioner stood up and said that the Nixon administration was the most corrupt in the history of our country. And you said that you did not believe that that was accurate. Are you prepared to stand by that statement if in fact you made it?

I did make it. I still stand by it. And I would tell you more. I would vote for Nixon today even though I think his behavior has been contemptible. I wouldn't say he's the most corrupt of our presidents, but. But it's quite probable that he is the most contemptible. I would still vote for him. Against McGovern. And I'll add another one. Thank you, but let me finish. This is important because it may come up and against Senator Kennedy.

Can you tell the difference between evasion and passive non thinking? And how is a person to be able to judge between the two so as to be able to establish which it is?

I don't think there is any difference between the two. Evasion Is the refusal to think. Therefore passive non thinking is simply a chronic evasion.

Please comment upon the recent events in the Justice Department in connection with President Nixon.

As in all things, I would like.

To start with the base of it.

I think it serves Nixon right. His behavior in the whole Watergate scandal has been inexcusable. It is pure pragmatism, of course, but I hope maybe we can learn that.

Kind of value out of the disaster.

To what extent pragmatism doesn't work? He has tried every kind of approach. He started by apologizing and speaking from his heart. Then one other of the worst things from his viewpoint if he were innocent, that he could have done was to agree to appoint a special prosecutor. Because it's really accepting the contempt and suspicion in effect, not only against himself, but against the entire administrative branch of the government. He in effect declared that none of the man in the Department of Justice.

The FBI or any agency is concerned.

Can be trusted, particularly not those whom he appointed. And therefore, let's have an outsider when he considered that nobody could respect him afterwards. And as I wrote in one of the issues in my letter discussing Watergate, observe what kind of impartial prosecutor he accepted. A man who had been his political enemy. Active political, not just theory, but the head or manager of the Kennedy campaign in 1960 against Nixon. Archibald Cox was the head of that campaign. And as you probably know, there is a strong suspicion campaign constantly mentioned, never pursued or verified that that campaign was actually stolen. That there were massive vote frauds and stealing of votes in key states, Illinois, Texas and some others. The man who was in charge of that campaign was never investigated, never prosecuted. All right, let's say he was smarter and wasn't coated. But to appoint him in this kind of case against a president who is his former antagonist is such an admission of guilt and unprincipled pragmatism and contempt for ideas on Nixon's part that after accepting that kind of slap in the face, there was nothing that he could do that would be right. And strangely enough, it is Cox and what's the Attorney General Richardson who behaved quite honorably in this case. They behaved like men of principle. Nixon should have either refused from the beginning to show his babies or show them to the whole world from the beginning either, but not go this one way or the other. And then fire the special prosecutor because as Brinkley pointed out on the air last night, he's firing a prosecutor because the prosecutor was prosecuting. Not believe that Mr. Nixon was guilty? Not necessarily. I thought perhaps Marginally, because the whole case began as nonsense. Last night, for the first time, I began to suspect that he must be guilty. Because the alternative guilty in the sense that there's something on those tapes that.

Would be damaging to him.

Because if he's not guilty and there's nothing particular damage, it's worse because then he's a monumental fool.

Wait, I want to get somebody in back and then I'll come back again.

Come on.

I'll be up. Definition of duress and coercion. Visible force and coercion.

To begin with, I don't know that.

There are anti defamation laws.

There's libel laws and slander laws. Is that what the gentleman do?

Defamation together?

Together, yes, that is totally appropriate laws. Because the freedom of ideas does not permit you to lie about a particular person.

And under the older interpretation of the.

Courts, truth was your defense. If you knew something defamatory about some person but it was true, then you have the right to say it. But today you can practically say anything so long as you're supposedly not motivated by malice and try and prove it. There are some standards, but they're not.

Very clear nor very practical.

But this type of law is strictly in defense of specific individuals. It has nothing to do with ideas. It is an issue of did you or did you not lie about some person and cause him damage. Now, what's the second definition of coercion and force? Look, force is a primary. It's this. It's that which is not done by persuasion but by physical compulsion. If you are forced to do something because the alternative is physical damage to you, whether you'll be put, seized, put in jail or deprived of your property, or executed and killed. That is the use of physical force. Something which is done to you not by right, not by a clear and objective process of law, but simply by the power of might. It's the opposite of right, if you.

Know the old bromide.

But now we must remember that that the government is an instrument of force. In fact, properly the government has a monopoly on force in order to prevent constant civil riots or gang warfare among citizens who disagree. And properly, government should use force only against those who initiate its use. Proper government must necessarily initiated today. All governments certainly do. But then why do I call law, governmental law, force? Because it is enforced on you under threat of penalties. If you disagree with a private individual, he can do nothing to you except disagree and not deal with you. But then you shouldn't want to deal with him. If the government demand something and you disagree, it can seize you badly put you in jail or deprive you of your property. That's legalized force.

Thank you.

Profoundly retarded and severely retarded individuals have rights.

Not actual rights, not the same rights as would apply or belongs to a normal individual. They would have the right to be protected as perennial children. In effect, just as children are entitled to protection, so do retarded people simply on the very distant possibility that since they are human, they may be cured and they may become at least partly able to stand on their own, or partly conscious, so that their protection of their rights is a courtesy extended to them for the fact that they are human beings, even if budged ones. But you could not extend the actual exercise of individual rights to a man who is retarded, meaning that he is not able to function cognitive, since all your rights actually rest on your nature as a human being, a being that cannot exercise its rights cannot have the.

Full rights of a human being.

Further, we feel the same way about censorship of drugs as you feel about the censorship of pornography.

Well, now, don't let mix categories. Nobody censor drugs. Censorship is a term that applies only to ideas, to the suppression of ideas. Drugs are not censored, they're prohibited. So, asking on its own merit, do I approve of the prohibition of drugs? No, I don't. I think drugs should be sold openly because it is an individual's right to commit suicide if he wants to. As an important point, if drugs were sold legally, that would put the whole underworld and all the drug addicts as pushers out of business because they wouldn't have to commit crimes in order to buy very expensive drugs underground. Same issues with prohibition or gambling.

The first 20 years of your coming to this country. Country. Were there any American writers, particularly in the field of nonfiction, who influenced your ideas?

No, not a single one. I wish there were.

Person in front reconcile the Supreme Court's decision through the majority on abortion with the Supreme Court's decisions by majority on censorship.

Quite properly, that question should be asked of the Supreme Court. Not of me. Don't know. But I have said that people who hold inconsistent premises will act inconsistently. And therefore some better premises were in their minds apparently on that occasion, but not on the occasion of absentia.

The German way of the this gentleman quotes you as having said last year in the forum that the revolt of the people would come only when censorship has become intolerable.

No, would be proper.

Would be proper only if censorship had become intolerable. And he wonders, has that time now come?

No, fortunately not yet. Or I Couldn't be giving you this speech and you couldn't be here to listen. You don't quite know how real censorship operates, but take a look sometimes in translation at Russian magazines or newspapers or some of Germany under the Nazis. It is total government enforced uniformity of opinion, but total under penalty of death. Now we haven't reached that point yet. And I don't think that they'll get away with it in this country, at least not yet. But even in Soviet Russia, where I've seen that process after they had seized total power, they did not establish total sentiment immediately. It took a process of years and gradual step, until each step being a trial balloon, until they saw that they could get away with it by smaller encroachments and finally re establish total censorship here, as I say, they would not get away with it. But why not? Precisely because the basic premises of the American people are still pro freedom, but basic premises about which nothing is done will not do anybody any good. I was warning you here about the advance of censorship. But they're not yet suppressing books.

Not yet.

When they begin to. I mean by government control now, not by private, because private cliques have the right to do it if they don't agree with you. It's when the government begins wholesale suppression and it so officially declares, as every dictatorship does at that time, it would be right to revolt.

Another question here.

Come on.

Towards open immigration. And what is your attitude towards the effect it may have upon the standard of living in this country? And does not this require, if the answer is that you are opposed to both, Aren't you asking a person to act in connection with his own self interest in connection with his decision as to what to advocate?

You don't apparently know what my positional self interest is. I have never advocated that anyone has the right to pursue his self interest by law or by force. If you close the borders, you forbid immigration on ground that it lowers your standard of living, which certainly is not true. But even assuming it were true, you have no right to bar others. Therefore, to claim it's your self interest is an irrational claim. You are not entitled to any self interest which injures others and the rights of others, and which you cannot prove in fact in reality to be valid. You cannot quit claim that anything that others may do, not directly to you, but simply through competition, let's say, is against your self interest and their work.

You want to stop competition dead. That is the kind of self interest.

You are not entitled to. It is a contradiction in terms and cannot be Defended. But above all, aren't you dropping a more personal context? How could I ever advocate that immigration should be restricted when I wouldn't be alive today if it were?

The gentleman is interested in the question of strikes by the scientists and intellectuals in connection with the increased activities of the government in promoting of various industries and the rest. And he wonders what your attitude with regard to that is.

I don't think that science has any particular problem here different from any other profession. The government is encroaching on and progressively controlling more and more every kind of profession. Therefore, I don't think that scientists are in a particularly privileged position, but they certainly are victims. So is everybody else. Now, taking scientists only as an example, if you wanted them to do something, they would have to begin by knowing.

What it is they're doing.

And they couldn't possibly achieve anything, particularly not today, without a very sore understanding and commitment to philosophy. Not only scientists, but I would venture to say if you took longshoremen or the least intellectual group, if any group today could come out on an issue of principle but knew how to hold to that principle consistently, not in the way of the conservatives. In this example of the Supreme Court, said group could liberate, liberate the whole country. But it would have to be consistent. Simply to say I don't want to work under government regulations and I go on strike, wouldn't do anything because the country has been sold and by default has accepted the idea that government regulations are necessary. Before you could make such a strike effective, you would have to say why.

You don't want to work under government regulations.

Why it is your right. What are rights? What is the consequence the government controls. If you could answer all those questions and hold to that kind of quote, party line, and I don't mean political party, intellectual line. If you could hold to it consistently, yes, then you would be justified in a strike. Anyone who can prove his case rationally is justified to use any peaceful means. But if you ask me out of context, would a strike by scientists today do much good? No, because too many of them are rational, brilliantly rational in their profession and mystical or worse in their philosophical and political outlook. I know the case of, of one, I don't know his name. Scientists who work for NASA and who believed in black magic, but literally black.

Magic, not even traditional religion.

When you have a contrast like that, scientists as a group are in a pretty bad condition.

Military has a right to censor extra military or non military publications.

And what that extra military.

What is meant by extra military publications?

By military people.

But published outside of the military. Published what? Yes, published, edited and written by military people for the public.

I personally here, I'm open to persuasion. But of hand, I would say the military have the right to censor anyone.

Who is in the military.

Why? For the reason that an army is built on the exact opposite premises from civilian population. It is an instrument, a legal instrument of using force through its force in self defense. It's honorable force, certainly in the United States. Nevertheless, an army requires total obedience and it has a hierarchy of command. And it couldn't function without total obedience. If so, the freedom of publication that might undermine the morale of the soldiers. I'm speaking now, of course, of a free army, not a drafted army, because, as you know, I oppose the draft profoundly as a total, total violation of rights. But now, speaking of an ideal, proper situation, a proper volunteer army. Yes, I think the commanders of that army would have the right to censor the expression of ideas by those men.

Who have joined the army voluntarily.

For as long as they are in that organization. They have to accept the views of or the orders of their command commanders. They're free to leave. And that is what permits their commanders while they're in the army to give them orders and to censor the kind of materials that would be published by military personnel, particularly for military personnel. But you see, the situation here is.

The exact opposite of civilian life.