On Rands editing of WeTheLiving

[intellectualammo]

What all did Rand edit out of the original publication of WTL?

I found this out there on the web, which was edited out years after original publication of WTL by Rand:

"What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?"

Which character said that, before Rand shut their mouth, was it Kira?

Who was she saying it to? What's the context? What all was edited out?

[mdegges]

Which character said that, before Rand shut their mouth, was it Kira?

Sounds like something Kira would have said to Andrei towards the end of the book, during that dramatic scene in his apartment. That's when she says she wasn't really in love with him and that the party forced her to do what she did (lie, sleep with him for money to pay for Leo's treatment (if she didn't, he would have died), etc).

I think that quote she deleted sums up the party's ideology: "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" The last line is sarcastic as is- but you can swap out 'those who deserve it' with 'party leaders' and still get the same effect.

[intellectualammo]

I would think something like that if Rand would have written something like: "What are the masses to you..." But it's not written like that. Maybe it was changed so people wouldn't think Kira thought that... I need context, anyone have the edition with it in?

Edited February 1, 2013 by intellectualammo

[softwareNerd]

Sounds like something Kira would have said to Andrei towards the end of the book, during that dramatic scene in his apartment.

Wikipedia agrees, and suggests this is how Kira describes the communist viewpoint. Edited February 1, 2013 by softwareNerd

[mdegges]

I would think something like that if Rand would have written something like: "What are the masses to you..." But it's not written like that.

Seems to me that "what are YOUR masses" is the same as "what are the masses TO YOU"

[intellectualammo]

Yes, I can see that now. Thank you. But I still want to check the exact context she says it in to confirm.

[Boydstun]

The line occurs in a fairly early conversation with Andrei. Kira says to him, in the 1936 version, concerning sacrificing millions for the sake of the few:

You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them.

That excerpt, which was greatly altered in the 1959 edition, appears in a contribution of Robert Mayhew’s to Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living on page 211. His sensible remarks on the passage and its alteration are on that page and the following one.

My own bet of her meaning in 1936, which later she would deplore, is that at the time she wrote the novel she accepted the idea that its either-or, sacrifice of the few best to the mindless masses or sacrifice of the latter to the former. True, she may have thought that applied really only in the context of what the communists had made of social relations in Russia, but I don’t think so. The sentiment is consonant with salient passages in Nietzsche, with whom she had some sympathy early on and who had not been writing in the context of post-revolutionary Russia. The idea later in the paragraph, an idea Rand would also later come to reject four-square, that equal justice for all is a mistaken ideal is also in accord with Nietzsche. Rand did not yet have her later idea that sacrifice is unnecessary where general independence is possible—and it is possible—nor her later idea that every individual has the same fundamental rights because every individual is an end in himself, I would suggest.

By the time she had completed The Fountainhead, Rand had rejected the bogus (and perhaps ambivalent) ideas she struck from the 1959 edition of that paragraph in We the Living.

Tidbits

The image of workers throwing themselves to work at office or factory as if into a burning furnace is repeated, though now in a purely wholesome and equalitarian way, in two places in Fountainhead: at Roark's firm and Wynand's newpaper plant. Notice that image of chewing words in the 1936 (and 1959) paragraph? Ever heard of chewing on ideas? That too is in Nietzsche, and with the positive meaning Rand would give it in the years of her mature philosophy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From my own work under the heading Nietzsche v. Rand:

–– Rand 1929–38 A, B, C


–– Rand 1938–46 A, B, C, D, E

[intellectualammo]

My own bet of her meaning in 1936, which later she would deplore, is that at the time she wrote the novel she accepted the idea that its either-or, sacrifice of the few best to the mindless masses or sacrifice of the latter to the former.

Reminds me of this passage from Atlas Shrugged:

Dan Conway to Dagny: “I suppose somebody’s got to be sacrificed.” “The right’s on their side. Men have to get together.”

Dagny, trembling with anger, exclaims, “If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive.” “Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best.”

Thanks so much for posting that passage, I will take in the context now.

Edited February 2, 2013 by intellectualammo

[Boydstun]

.

Thanks for the connection in Atlas!

[intellectualammo]

"I loathe most of them"

Sounds misanthropic to me. Big time. The way she spoke of the people, masses, men.

[Boydstun]

It is unclear whether that misanthropic angle is just for the character Kira—who is introduced as returning to Petrograd in a railroad box car, who is wearing wooden sandals, who will be seeing all the human suffering and limitation around her as the result of an ideology purporting to favor the masses and, in winning control of the state, doing a lot to turn people into mere masses—or whether it was the more general attitude of Kira’s creator, at least into her first years in America.

Did you notice that quote from Emerson in the second of the links of #7? “Yes, we are the cowed,—we the trustless. . . . / Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd’.”

Nevertheless it would be incorrect to conclude that Emerson espoused a misanthropic attitude simply from that aspect being in this one quotation. He favored individualism and saw around him good individuals.

As you probably know, in Fountainhead Rand came to define civilization as the process of freeing man from men. That sense of the individual man can mean any man, hence potentially most men. (Notice the variety of men Roark selects for his jury.) In Atlas she used it to mean every man in the following benevolent passage: “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself. He exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

[intellectualammo]

Robert Mayhew’s to Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living on page 211. His sensible remarks on the passage and its alteration are on that page and the following

I just requested the book from a nearby library, and I'll take a look at it when it's ready for pickup.

Seems like in AS, Galt was able to find they way for the few who know life, the best, to ascend to it's right to the top and not be sacrificed to the many below them.

Edited February 7, 2013 by intellectualammo

[intellectualammo]

This is a very interesting, thought provoking quote said by Kira before it was edited:

"If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don't know, however, whether I'd include blood in my methods."

Galt found a creative method. It's all about method in the context you are living in. Ours is a zombie culture:

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24577&hl

Edited February 14, 2013 by intellectualammo

[Dante]

This is a very interesting, thought provoking quote said by Kira before it was edited:

"If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don't know, however, whether I'd include blood in my methods."

Galt found a creative method. It's all about method in the context you are living in. Ours is a zombie culture:

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24577&hl

 

She struck that passage because it no longer accurately represented her worldview, and she wanted to avoid the attempts of others to paint her mature philosophy with the same brush... which seems to be exactly what you're trying to do.

[intellectualammo]

I am?

[Dante]

I am?

You characterize Galt's actions as a continuation of this view expressed by Kira; it's not that Rand changed her mind, her characters just got more "creative" about forcing.  That's how I read your statements, at least.

[intellectualammo]

No, not creative about forcing, but in figuring out a method.

[intellectualammo]

The following is a remarkable passage I was just reading in Rands journals. I think this fits perfectly somewhere between going from Kira to Galt:

Here is the place to emphasize that genuinely superior beings are too individualistic [in a social manner], in the sense that they achieve their own positions and are not concerned with the propagation and advancement of their kind.

But since the superior men live in society, they have to organize for their own protection - a kind of class brotherhood of talent - if they are to survive at all. The only kind of "unselflessness" permissible to the great man is unselflessness to the cause of that superior form of living which he represents, and which has to be protected in the person of other individuals like him.

She wrote that in her notes on TF.

I will address two more edited quotes of Kiras from the first edition WTL soon.

[intellectualammo]

From the first edition WTL:
 

Andre:

“Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isn’t it?”

 

Kira:

“You have the right to kill, as all fighters have. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living.”

 

Kira:

“It is an eternal, unpleasant necessity that the masses should exist and make their existence felt. This is a time when they make it felt particularly unpleasantly.”

 

If ourkind can rise to power in the US, we could really start liberating ourkind from theirkind not only America, but even the rest the world, as we would have the military might, the legislative power, will, enough resources and financial backing, and of course having the moral right to do so…

 

But, the masses, the zombie culture, all the Little Street’ers out there, are in the way because there are just so fucking many of them, so many numbers, and the democratic process largely has to do with numbers (and how to get those numbers) which right now really stops us from rising to power in that manner. We have very little power in that respect, unless we have the numbers and reps of our kind to get into power. How can we get the numbers we need, among all the zombies, vampires, sheeple, lemmings, parasites, Little Street’ers? By flattering them by appealing to their ‘minds’? How can the individual, the smallest minority, become the majority, in such a culture? We need cultural change, moral revolution, but we’re in a zombie culture. We feel their existence unpleasantly, they make their existence felt, how do we make ours, to them? Try to reason with them until we are blue or red in the face?

[Boydstun]

This is a follow-on to #18, something Rand wrote in her 1963 essay “The Goal of My Writing” concerning The Fountainhead.

There is a passage . . . in which Howard Roark explains to Steven Mallory why he chose him to do a statue for the Stoddard Temple. In writing that passage, I was consciously and deliberately stating the essential goal of my own work—as a kind of small, personal manifesto: “I think you’re the best sculptor we’ve got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be. Because you’ve gone beyond the probable and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I’ve ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man.”

Today, more than twenty years later, I would want to change—or, rather, to clarify—only two small points. First, the words “more devoid of contempt for humanity” are not too exact grammatically; what I wanted to convey was “untouched” by contempt for humanity, while the work of others was touched by it to some extent. Second, the words “possible only through you” should not be taken to mean that Mallory’s figures were impossible metaphysically, in reality; I meant that they were possible only because he had shown the way to make them possible. (39–40)

[intellectualammo]

In a letter written by Rand to Mencken, July 28, 1934: We The Living:

 

 

I am sure you understand that my book is not at all a story about Russia, but a story of an individual against the masses and a plea in defense of the individual. Your favorable opinion of it was particularly valuable to me, since I have always regarded you as the foremost champion of individualism in this country.

 

 

This book is only my first step and above all a means of acquiring a voice, of making myself heard. What I shall have to say when I acquire that voice does not need an explanation, for I know that you can understand it. Perhaps it may seem a lost cause, at present, and there are those who will say that I am too late, that I can only hope to ne the last fighter for a mode of thinking which has no place in the future. But I do not think so. I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the too many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten.

 

 

I have heard so much from that other side, the collectivist side, and so little in defense of man against men, and yet so much has to be said. I have attempted to say it in my book. I do not know of a better way to make my entrance into the battle.

 

In a letter to Wick, Oct. 27, 1934 in regards to the soldier that shot and killed Kira, this is Rand talking about the importance of it:
 

 

I feel I must explain one point to Mr. Benefield - a point of greatest importance. Mr. Benefield wonders why I stop in the last chapter to present the biography of the soldier who kills Kira Argounova. That stop, in my opinion, is one of the best things in the book. It contains - in a few pages - the whole idea and purpose of the novel. After the reader has seen Kira Argounova, has learned what a rare irreplaceable human being she was - I give him the picture of the who killed Kira Argounova, of the life that took her life. That soldier is a symbol, a typical representative of the average, the dull, the useless, the commonplace, the masses - that killed the best there is on this earth.

 

 

Kira Argounova against citizen Ivan Ivanovo - that is the whole book in a few pages.

 

 

The time is certainly ripe for an anti-Red novel and it is only a question of finding the right party for take an interest in it.

 Remember, Kira is the closest to an autobiograpical character to Rand:

 

 

The specific events of Kira’s life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions,
her values were and are.

　

 

 

I'm very grateful of what Mayhew has done in this essay of his.  The first edition of We The Living, of which there were only 3,000 copies, can fetch at least $10,000 from what I have seen, so it is rather difficult for me to get my hands on a copy or find all that which was edited out there.

Edited February 23, 2013 by intellectualammo

[aselene44]

In context, it's apparent that Kira was expressing her own view of the masses. Rand's journals clarify that she was expressing both Kira's view, and what Kira believed was Andrei's unconscious view of the masses.

The full quote from the 1936 edition reads:

What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat, and sleep, and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don't see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them.

In her journals, Rand wrote:

Both [Kira and Andrei] are superior individuals. Both have in their souls the sensitivity, the understanding, the hunger for the real life, as few men see it. Both rise to fight for their rights to that life; and both face the same enemy: society, the state, the mass.

She is stronger, in that she realizes the fight, and the enemy. He is more tragic because his fight is unconscious: the fight against society of a man who stands as a champion of the most sociable ideals.

(red text used for emphasis--text found in The Journals of Ayn Rand, pg. 51)

 

Edited October 14, 2016 by aselene44
clarity/style

[Boydstun]

More on Rand's journey from 1936 WL to 1957 AS (& 1959 WL), since purchasing my own 1936 WL:

His Own Truth

First Time