far (2009) we know little, but whose campaign worked hard to prove that he is as devout as all the others. Will these developments, and many others like them, be united someday into an unstoppable religious juggernaut demanding of us the standard mind/self-emasculation, along with its standard political corollary? If it happens, its exponents are unlikely any longer to seize on economics or biology as their justification. As of now, it seems, we are headed back to the source: to the re-creation of medieval servitude—enforced by a much better-equipped secret police.
We the Living is a novel about the results of the freedom-erasing ideas you yourself probably accept. That is why it is relevant to you today. It is relevant because it tells you how to distinguish the poison the West is now greedily ingesting from the nourishment we desperately need. It is relevant because it is not about an ever-receding past, but about an ever-approaching future.
This book is not about your long-gone grandparents, but about your still-growing children.
—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
December, 2008
Foreword
I HAD NOT REREAD THIS NOVEL AS a whole, since the time of its first publication in 1936, until a few months ago. I had not expected to be as proud of it as I am.
Too many writers declare that they never succeed in expressing fully what they wished to express and that their work is only some sort of approximation. It is a viewpoint for which I have never had any sympathy and which I consider excusable only when it is voiced by beginners, since no one is born with any kind of “talent” and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made. It was mainly in regard to We the Living, my first novel (and, progressively less, in regard to my work preceding The Fountainhead), that I had felt that my means were inadequate to my purpose and that I had not said what I wanted to say as well as I wished. Now, I am startled to discover how well I did say it.
We the Living is not a novel “about Soviet Russia.” It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life—using the word “sanctity” not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of “supreme value.” The essence of my theme is contained in the words of Irina, a minor character of the story, a young girl who is sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia and knows that she will never return: “There’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it. . . . There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?”
At the time, I knew a little more about this question than did Irina, but not much more. I knew that this attitude toward one’s own life should be, but is not, shared by all people—that it is the fundamental characteristics of the best among men—that its absence represents some enormous evil which had never been identified. I knew that this is the issue at the base of all dictatorships, all collectivist theories and all human evils—and that political or economic issues are merely derivatives and consequences of this basic primary. At that time, I looked at any advocates of dictatorship and collectivism with an incredulous contempt: I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life. Today, the contempt has remained; the incredulity is gone, since I know the answer.
It was not until Atlas Shrugged that I reached the full answer to Irina’s question. In Atlas Shrugged I explain the philosophical, psychological and moral meaning of the men who value their own lives and of the men who don’t. I show that the first are the Prime Movers of mankind and that the second are metaphysical killers,