Philosophy, General: Objectivism, part 2

I have been posting condensations of Objectivist thought by Glyn Hughes not in the order of that philosophy's development of it's ideas but in an order that struck me as provocative and important. As a disclaimer, I don't know if I agree 100% with the following article, but there are some things there worth discussing:

RACISM
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock farm version of collectivism.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes to "protect the family name", the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history - all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today's so-called "newly emerging nations."

The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, or a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievement. Even if it were proved - which it is not - that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes - or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms. To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them.

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. Racism was always strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany - and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth - and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists' claim of "states' rights" is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the "right" of some men to violate the rights of others. The "conservatives" who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism, do not seem to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. The "liberals" are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule - yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges. For instance, since Negroes constitute 25 per cent of the population of New York City, they demand 25 per cent of the jobs.

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes' fight. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. For instance, the demand for racial quotas in schools is pure racism. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses - those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech.