Noted Novelist Discusses Intellectual Disintegration

The professional businessman and the professional intellectual, both born with the advent of capitalism, are well on their way toward wiping each other out, Ayn Rand declared at the Ford Hall Forum last night. And, she noted, the intellectual is largely to blame for his own demise.

Speaking on "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," the noted novelist and playwright maintained that the ideal political system was the laissez faire capitalism of the 19th Century. But the same "liberals" who introduced the system began the "revolt against freedom" and the ensuing march toward totalitarianism.

Miss Rand explained the present "intellectual disintegration" in terms of a conflict between Reason and Mysticism, the struggle between rational understanding and claims to irrational knowledge.

According to Miss Rand, the moral standard of altruism--which she defined as the antithesis of capitalism--is responsible for our inability to maintain a true laissezz faire capitalism. Afraid to challenge the morality of altruism, the liberals placed the blame for their own weaknesses on the head of the private businessman, "using their own guilt as an excuse for extending their power."

Mysticism, collectivism, and altruism are diametrically opposed to reason, individualism, and capitalism, Miss Rand asserted. Every man, she said, is an end in himself. He must neither sacrifice himself to others or sacrifice others to himself. She called the morality of altruism "moral cannibalism," stating that the consistent altruist "would have to jump into the nearest cannibal pot, because there is always somebody who wants your mind or body."

She attacked modern intellectuals for equating liberalism with collectivism, censuring men like John Kenneth Galbriath, who, she said, "demands controls for the sake of controls;" and the group of liberals who, she charged, "start out as champions of freedom and wind up crawling on their stomachs to Moscow with Bertrand Russell."

Asked about her views of Barry Goldwater, Miss Rand replied, "He appears promising." She approved of his foreign policy, but on domestic issues proclaimed him "a mixed economist."