The White, the Gray, and the Black

In a previous short, I pointed out that there are people who are utterly devoid of any moral qualities whatsoever. These people are not interested in producing any values themselves. Consequently, since they do not have any values to offer, they cannot engage in a life-affirming manner when dealing with others. Rather, experiencing what American philosopher Ayn Rand terms “hatred of the good for being the good,” these people long to tear down anyone who actually creates values. At the same time, though, Rand believed that the number of these man-haters is extremely low. In her article “Altruism as Appeasement,” for instance, she states, “The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority.”¹

These observations lead to several questions. First, what differentiates an evil, i.e. a morally black, person from a good, i.e. a morally white, one? Second, why does the majority of people choose to neither be completely white nor completely black, instead attempting to take a middle-of-the-road approach while becoming gray? Third, why does a small minority of people not remain gray, instead attempting to destroy those who are morally white while becoming morally black? It is these questions I would like to tackle in this week’s short.

Throughout mankind’s history, many philosophers have argued that it is impossible for a human being to be perfect. According to this reasoning, being fully white requires that a person never err and never make a mistake. If one accepts this notion of whiteness, it would, indeed, be impossible for a human being to be white. After all, man is neither omniscient nor infallible. Since we cannot attain perfect knowledge, even the most rational person will sometimes make mistakes, e.g. due to inadequate information.

The crucial error of these philosophers is their ignorance (willful or not) of man’s identity. Rather than first identifying man’s nature, they thoughtlessly and vainly attempt to apply the characteristics of a Godlike figure, omniscient and infallible, to man. Then they complain that man can never be white because he is unlike God.

Yet to reasonably determine what makes a person white, one needs to first identify man’s identity. Once one has realized that, given his nature, man is neither omniscient nor infallible, one also comes to understand that man is not to be damned for living according to his nature, i.e. for using his mind to the best of his knowledge to understand the world while occasionally making honest mistakes. Ultimately, one can only morally judge a person for that which is within the field of choice. In Rand’s words:

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.²

What morality demands is not that one never make a mistake but, rather, that one approach each and every issue rationally. A rational man understands that, given his nature, he will make intellectual errors. Yet whenever he realizes that he has made an error of judgment, he will attempt to immediately correct it. At the same time, a rational man would ensure that he never displays moral shortcomings. Whenever he has to choose between that which is right and good and that which is wrong and evil, he will always, consciously and resoundingly, fight for that which is moral. As Rand explains:

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. … Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality.³

If one accepts this notion of whiteness, it is, indeed, possible for every person to be completely white. After all, what it takes to be a moral person is not that one is omniscient but, rather, that one consistently use one’s mind to the best of one’s understanding, correcting errors of knowledge whenever one commits them while ensuring that one never commits a breach of morality. “Moral perfection,” Rand emphasizes, “is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.”⁴

A morally white man acts rationally in each and every aspect of his life. Understanding that he has to figure out what values are of importance to him, he will use his mind independently to identify his values. Knowing that values have to be achieved in reality, he will not engage in idle daydreaming but actually produce these values. Recognizing that he needs self-esteem to give form to his highest vision, he will always be proud of his achievements.

In real life, we, unfortunately, encounter only few people who constantly display virtues such as independence, productiveness, and pride. Instead of being morally white, most people are actually gray. In some aspects of their lives, they judge independently, produce vigorously, and display genuine pride. In other aspects of their lives, though, they are dependent upon others, fail to create values, and live in a penumbra of self-doubt. So why do these people take a middle-of-the-road approach rather than remain moral?

A key reason which leads people to sacrifice their values is that they default on a virtue not yet mentioned, namely the virtue of integrity. Integrity, American philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains, “is the virtue of acting as an absolute on (rational) principle. It is the principle of being principled.”⁵ What the virtue of integrity demands is that one never sacrifice one’s convictions or values, thereby achieving harmony between one’s body and one’s mind. In Peikoff’s words, “it is the policy of practicing what one preaches, regardless of emotional or social pressure.”⁶

Indeed, a great many people do not stay true to their convictions. Unlike the morally white person who knows that the achievement of happiness presupposes loyalty to one’s values, these people yield to the temptation of compromising some of their ideas for one reason or another, be it wealth, fame, or social prestige. Over time, they then sacrifice an ever-increasing amount of their convictions and values until, finally, they have given up everything they once held dear. In contrast to the morally white person who consistently and proudly works to achieve his independently chosen values, the gray person gradually becomes an empty shell that tries to fill the nagging emptiness inside by use of externally-validated pseudo-values.

Unfortunately, such a gray state of being characterizes the life of most adults. Having repressed their unborn aspirations for decades, they have long forgotten what it was they truly wanted from life when they were young, hopeful, and ambitious. At times, they experience a sudden feeling of envy and hatred when they encounter a happy and successful person, never attempting to understand the reason(s) why they experience these emotions. Other than that, the one emotion that characterizes their inner state is boredom. Every evening, they come home from a job that is of no interest to them only to spend the rest of their time with a partner and friends who have no values to offer. 

Unlike the morally white person who is motivated by the pursuit and the achievement of rational values, gray people lead a valueless existence, not living like human beings but vegetating like zombies. They eat, drink, and sleep to stay in existence. Yet they do not think, value, or live.

It is certainly tragic that the majority of people sacrifice their values and become gray. Yet the life of a gray person is usually neither directly beneficial nor detrimental to society at large. It is, rather, one more meaningless, wasted life without any important implications for the rest of us. What about the small minority of adults who turn morally black, though?

As we have seen, the life of a morally white person is characterized by the pursuit of values. The life of gray people is characterized by the apathy to values. The morally black person is incapable of becoming part of either group. Unlike the morally white person, he is unable or unwilling to create values himself. Unlike the gray person, he knows that values are needed to lead a meaningful existence. Neither does the morally black person want to create values like the morally white person nor does he want to lead a valueless existence like the gray people. At the same time, he is painfully aware of the need for values. The only way to overcome this supposed dichotomy and live a life that is neither meaning- nor valueless, he concludes, is to destroy anyone who has actually produced values.

Like all gray people, a morally black person experiences latent feelings of envy and hatred for a morally white person. Yet unlike the gray people who thoughtlessly repress these feelings, the morally black man turns these feelings into the central purpose of his life. His aim becomes to destroy each and every morally white man by infecting him with guilt and killing his aspirations, his sense of values, and his self-worth. As Ellsworth Toohey, the archnemesis of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, explains:

If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. … The soul … is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours. … Want to know how it’s done? … There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way. Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection.⁷

The morally black person neither uses his mind to create values like the morally white person. Nor does he lead a valueless existence like the gray people. Rather, he is out to destroy the pursuers and producers of values. 

The inner state of a morally black person is, arguably, worse than the one of a gray person. While it is certainly awful to be in a constant state of boredom, how much more excruciating must it be to consistently experience hatred, hatred for both oneself and others? After all, the reason why the morally black person hates intelligent, successful, and prosperous people is that they have something which he lacks. Yet unable or unwilling to create values and fill the nagging emptiness he experiences inside, the morally black person sets out to belittle and destroy anyone virtuous while glorifying anyone who is devoid of virtues. Rand exemplifies this mindset through Lillian Rearden, a villain of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. Discussing the concept of beauty, Lillian argues:

If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.⁸

What Lillian does not understand is that “corrupting the concept of beauty” will not make her a more attractive woman. Nor will a person become more rational by destroying intelligent people, more fortunate by destroying successful people, or more prosperous by destroying wealthy people. To achieve a value is a positive, i.e. a process of creation. To kill a valuer is a negative, i.e. a process of destruction. As Rand puts it, “[A]chieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ … Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.”⁹

Rand’s statement explains why the morally black person cannot have a detrimental effect per se. After all, a morally white person (legitimately) gains economic power and influence by coming up with life-affirming ideas and producing something of value. Since the morally black person has neither rational ideas nor valuable products to offer, he cannot gain economic power or influence if he is left on his own. Life-threatening and life-destroying ideas do not sell on the free market.

Unfortunately, economic power is not the only form of power, though. Economic power, as Rand puts it, is “the power to produce and to trade what one has produced … by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade.”¹⁰ It is this kind of power which the morally white man strives to gain. The morally black man, in marked contrast, longs for power yet he also understands that he is incapable of gaining economic power due to his shortcomings. His solution to this dilemma is to strive for political power.

The morally white man wants to gain economic power by offering his ideas and products to others. The morally black man wants to gain political power by forcing his ideas on others. Political power, Rand highlights, is not “the power to produce and to trade what one has produced” but “the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.”¹¹

Powerless on the free market, the morally black man ultimately becomes a demagogue and longs to become a despot. If successful in the political arena, he would, he reasons, not have to convince potential customers of the value of his ideas and products. Rather, he would be in a position to enforce his ideas on others without their consent. Thus, he concludes, he will fill the nagging emptiness inside.

To achieve this perverted vision, though, the morally black person needs others who actually support his irrational ideas. Even in politics, one needs to make a convincing case for one’s ideas (evil or not) to gain power. Due to his reality-focused, independent, and uncorrupted mind, the morally white man is immune from the temptation of siding with the demagogue. Given his rational stance, he can all too well predict the terrible consequences of the demagogue’s actions. 

Yet there is an entire group ready to be taken over by the morally black man, namely all the gray people who have given up on principles and experience repressed feelings of envy for the morally white person. It is by manipulating these unprincipled people that the demagogue gains power. The deadly union of the demagogue who utters platitudes and the mob that blindly follows him can be witnessed all throughout modern history, from Adolf Hitler in Germany though Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. By supporting and voting for the demagogue, gray people actually are indirectly responsible for the dismal state of the world. It is their unprincipled stance which enables the dictator and his rule of bloodshed.

In toto, the preceding discussion shows why it is suicidal either to compromise one’s values or to set out to kill valuers. Neither the gray people who are apathetic to values nor the morally black person who wants to destroy values lead meaningful lives. Rather, it is only the morally white person who can flourish. Thus is the case for remaining morally white, i.e. consistently moral.

1. Ayn Rand, “Altruism as Appeasement,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: Meridian, 1990), 39.

2. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (London: Penguin, [1957] 2007), 1025.

3. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1059.

4. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1059 [emphasis in the original].

5. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, [1991] 1993), 260. 

6. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 260. 

7. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (London: Penguin, [1943] 2007), 665

8. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 305 [emphasis in the original].

9. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1024.

10. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 2nd ed (New York: Signet, [1966] 1967), 44 [emphasis in the original].

11. Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority,” 43.