Ellsworth Toohey - Time For A Regime Change
by Lindsay Perigo
In last week's article I noted that the most ardent practitioners of the ethic of self-sacrifice in our time are not Christians, but Muslims – to wit, the suicide bombers.
Now let me quote Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead:
Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able to catch their theme song - 'Give up, give up, give up, give up'? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy - & you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace - lie on a bed of nails - go into the desert to mortify the flesh - don't dance - don't go to the movies on Sunday - don't try to get rich - don't smoke - don't drink. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left-over, old-fashioned. But there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a folly - ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power & ruled millions of men.
Toohey, of course, is not criticising "the moral atmosphere of today" but celebrating it, savouring its service to his collectivist agenda - "one neck ready for one leash." A fellow- journalist said to me once that Toohey was a ridiculous caricature whose "preposterous" utterances might have served Rand's "warped" polemical agenda but bore no relationship to real life. My response was to draw his attention to a Sunday Telegraph profile by Christina Lamb of one Hafiz Sadaquilla Hassani, a defector from the secret police of the former rulers of Afghanistan, the Taleban:
At first Mr Hassani's job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves & signs of subversion. However, as the Taleban leadership began issuing more extreme edicts, his duties changed. Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who ventured outside her home. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence. 'Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed, & if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat - until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. ... Maybe the worst thing I saw was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin & blood that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. ... Nowhere else in the world has such barbarity & cruelty as Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people & telling the world what is happening.'
What is happening is that Ellsworth Toohey is flourishing - & far from being a fiction, he is ubiquitous. Of course he is cruel - those who preach & practise self-sacrifice don't hesitate to sacrifice others: they notoriously are, or become, sado-masochists.
His Taleban incarnation makes no bones about the fact that it is out to destroy the west, where people, unforgivably, love life. It is taking its campaign of mass murder & mayhem across the globe. Other Muslim Toohey incarnations are doing the same. The west is fighting back, but we must never lose sight of the fact that the leaders of the west are Tooheyites as well. In the parlance usually reserved for Muslims, one might call them moderate Tooheyites as opposed to militant ones. Any degree of Tooheyism, however, is malignant. Born-again Christian George W. Bush's apparently-upcoming proposal to spend taxpayer money on a campaign to "promote marriage" – including, no doubt, to persuade people to remain in unhappy marriages, rather than seek divorce – is a timely reminder that westerners love life in spite of, not because of, the ideology of their leaders & spiritual mentors.
We lovers of reason & freedom must strive ultimately to smite Toohey in all his guises.
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