Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism.
Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason;
psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
The political goal presupposes the two others :
the obliteration of reason and the erosion of ambition
The human characteristic
required by statism
is docility, which is
the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation.
Thinking men cannot be ruled;
ambitious men do not stagnate.
'Ambition' means the systematic pursuit of achievement
and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal.
Like the word “selfishness,” and for the same reasons,
the word “ambition” has been perverted to mean
only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals,
such as the pursuit of power;
this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values.
But “ambition” as such is a neutral concept:
the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral
depends on the nature of the goal.
A great scientist or a great artist
is the most passionately ambitious of men.
A demagogue
seeking political power is ambitious.
So is a social climber
seeking “prestige.”
So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously
to acquire a home of his own.
The common denominator is
the drive to improve
the conditions of one’s existence,
however broadly or narrowly conceived.
“Improvement” is a moral term
and depends on one’s standard of values.
An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact,
lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.
from - The Ayn Rand Letter
