Outcome Responsibility

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of prudence and nothing can help you escape it. Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of attaining goals.

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment – on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.”

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

Reality

Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind. Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness—a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty—and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who shoves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Happiness was the responsibility socialized-you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume—and the anxious staleness of your day is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun.

When you don’t have legitimate responsibility for goal-seeking success, you do not have to know about cause and effect of the operational reality. You are right at home in a social environment where the ruling class cannot be outcome responsible (the 2½ rule). When it claims responsibility as supreme commander, it knows it has a valid excuse ready for the day of reckoning. The truth comes out in Congressional hearings about corporate wrongdoing. “How could I know?”

The first ruling class invented omnipotent, infallible deities to take responsibility for social consequences from its incompetent leadership facing a fickle reality. People took the blame for war, pestilence, drought, etc., on their failure to appease the deities. The population defends the honor of their deities rather than adjust to the operational reality, suffering the consequences in perpetuity.

Why is the keystone the only level in the hierarchy legitimate with outcome responsibility? Keystones have a master/apprentice relationship with their workforce, a relationship proven over dozens of millennia. Every keystone-worker combination work with the reality of production – ground truth. It is the only part of the hierarchy that can bring prosperity to society. All others are illegitimate.

Discard the protective rags of that vice which you call a virtue: humility. Learn to value yourself, which means to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn how to flourish.

On freedom

When you freely take responsibility for goal-seeking results, you must be given the autonomy to deliver. The idea of “freedom” itself is tricky.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.” No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

Misguided people seek to escape the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that natural law will prevail, no matter what their tears or tantrums—that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger—that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not—that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

There is no honest revolt against reason—and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite—that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love our wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will—that you are a man—that you are an entity—that you are.

Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

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