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- An Open Letter to Boris Spassky from Ayn Rand:
- Dear Comrade Spassky:
- I have been watching with great interest your world chess championship match
- with Bobby Fischer. I am not a chess enthusiast or even a player, and know
- only the rudiments of the game. I am a novelist-philosopher by profession.
- But I watched some of your games, reproduced play by play on television, and
- found them to be a fascinating demonstration of the enormous complexity of
- thought and planning required of a chess player–a demonstration of how many
- considerations he has to bear in mind, how many factors to integrate, how
- many contingencies to be prepared for, how far ahead to see and plan. It was
- obvious that you and your opponent had to have an unusual intellectual
- capacity.
- Then I was struck by the realization that the game itself and the players’
- exercise of mental virtuosity are made possible by the metaphysical
- absolutism of the reality with which they deal. The game is ruled by the Law
- of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Causality. Each piece is what it
- is: a queen is a queen, a bishop is a bishop–and the actions each can
- perform are determined by its nature: a queen can move any distance in any
- open line, straight or diagonal, a bishop cannot; a rook can move from one
- side of the board to the other, a pawn cannot; etc. Their identities and the
- rules of their movements are immutable–and this enables the player’s mind
- to devise a complex, long-range strategy, so that the game depends on
- nothing but the power of his (and his opponent’s) ingenuity.
- This led me to some questions that I should like to ask you.
- 1.. Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment–when, after hours
- of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent–an
- unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his
- favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able
- to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your
- country–and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected,
- not to play, but to live.
- 2.. Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to
- conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge–so that, at a
- crucial moment, your queen turned suddenly from White to Black, becoming the
- queen of your opponent; and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You
- would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of
- reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.
- 3.. Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork–i.e., if you
- were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of
- advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as
- champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort
- would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best?
- Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist,
- range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent’s knight at the
- price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to
- continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your
- country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with
- scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity
- required for man’s survival.
- 4.. Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were
- streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind
- you, with a gun pressed to your back–a man who would not explain or argue,
- his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be
- able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is
- the practical policy under which men live–and die–in your country.
- 5.. Would you be able to play–or to enjoy the professional understanding,
- interest, and acclaim of an international Chess Federation–if the rules of
- the game were splintered, and you played by “proletarian” rules while your
- opponent played by “bourgeois” rules? Would you say that such “polyrulism”
- is more preposterous than polylogism? Yet in the living world, your country
- professes to seek global harmony and understanding, while proclaiming that
- she follows “proletarian” logic and that others follow “bourgeois” logic, or
- “Aryan” logic, or “third-world” logic, etc.
- 6.. Would you be able to play if the rules of the game remained as they
- are at present, with one exception: that the pawns were declared to be the
- most valuable and non-expendable pieces (since they may symbolize the
- masses) which had to be protected at the price of sacrificing the more
- efficacious pieces (the individuals)? You might claim a draw on the answer
- to this one–since it is not only your country, but the whole living world
- that accept this sort of rule in morality.
- 7.. Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged,
- but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian
- principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the
- winner, but to the loser–if winning were regarded as a symptom of
- selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a
- superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in
- order to give others a chance? Would you and your opponent try playing not
- to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?
- You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to
- think of such questions–and I know the answers. No, you would not be able
- to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this
- category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess.
- Oh yes, Comrade, chess is an escape–an escape from reality. It is an “out,”
- a kind of “make-work” for a man of higher than average intelligence who was
- afraid to live, but could not leave his mind unemployed and devoted it to a
- placebo–thus surrendering to others the living world he had rejected as too
- hard to understand.
- Please do not take this to mean that I object to games as such: games are an
- important part of man’s life, they provide a necessary rest, and chess may
- do so for men who live under the constant pressure of purposeful work.
- Besides, some games–such as sports contests, for instance–offer us an
- opportunity to see certain human skills developed to a level of perfection.
- But what would you think of a world champion runner who, in real life, moved
- about in a wheelchair? Or of a champion high jumper who crawled about on all
- fours? You, the chess professionals, are taken as exponents of the most
- precious of human skills: intellectual power–yet that power deserts you
- beyond the confines of the sixty-four squares of a chessboard, leaving you
- confused, anxious, and helplessly unfocused. Because, you see, the
- chessboard is not a training ground, but a substitute for reality.
- A gifted, precocious youth often finds himself bewildered by the world: it
- is people that he cannot understand, it is their inexplicable,
- contradictory, messy behavior that frightens him. The enemy he rightly
- senses, but does not choose to fight, is human irrationality. He withdraws,
- gives up, and runs, looking for some sanctuary where his mind would be
- appreciated–and he falls into the booby trap of chess.
- You, the chess professionals, live in a special world–a safe, protected,
- orderly world, in which all the great, fundamental principles of existence
- are so firmly established and obeyed that you do not even have to be aware
- of them. (They are the principles involved in my seven questions.) You do
- not know that these principles are the preconditions of your game–and you
- do not have to recognize them when you encounter them, or their breach, in
- reality. In your world, you do not have to be concerned with them: all you
- have to do is think.
- The process of thinking is man’s basic means of survival. The pleasure of
- performing this process successfully–of experiencing the efficacy of one’s
- own mind–is the most profound pleasure possible to men, and it is their
- deepest need, on any level of intelligence, great or small. So one can
- understand what attracts you to chess: you believe that you have found a
- world in which all irrelevant obstacles have been eliminated, and nothing
- matters, but the pure, triumphant exercise of your mind’s powers. But have
- you, Comrade?
- Unlike algebra, chess does not represent the abstraction–the basic
- pattern–of mental effort; it represents the opposite: it focuses mental
- effort on a set of concretes, and demands such complex calculations that a
- mind has no room for anything else. By creating an illusion of action and
- struggle, chess reduces the professional player’s mind to an uncritical,
- unvaluing passivity toward life. Chess removes the motor of intellectual
- effort–the question “What for?”–and leaves a somewhat frightening
- phenomenon: intellectual effort devoid of purpose.
- If–for any number of reasons, psychological or existential–a man comes to
- believe that the living world is closed to him, that he has nothing to seek
- or to achieve, that no action is possible, then chess becomes his antidote,
- the means of drugging his own rebellious mind that refuses fully to believe
- it and to stand still. This, Comrade, is the reason why chess has always
- been so popular in your country, before and since it’s present regime–and
- why there have not been many American masters. You see, in this country, men
- are still free to act.
- Because the rulers of your country have proclaimed this championship match
- to be an ideological issue, a contest between Russia and America, I am
- rooting for Bobby to win–and so are all of my friends. The reason why this
- match has aroused an unprecedented interest in our country is the
- longstanding frustration and indignation of the American people at your
- country’s policy of attacks, provocations, and hooligan insolence–and at
- our own government’s overtolerant, overcourteous patience. There is a
- widespread desire in our country to see Soviet Russia beaten in any way,
- shape or form, and–since we are all sick and tired of the global clashes
- among the faceless, anonymous masses of collective–the almost medieval
- drama of two individual knights fighting the battle of good against evil,
- appeals to us symbolically. (But this, of course, is only a symbol; you are
- not necessarily the voluntary defender of evil–for all we know, you might
- be as much its victim as the rest of the world.)
- Bobby Fischer’s behavior, however, mars the symbolism–but it is a clear
- example of the clash between a chess expert’s mind, and reality. This
- confident, disciplined, and obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when
- he has to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child, breaks
- agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the kind of whim
- worship one touch of which in the playing of chess would disqualify him for
- a high-school tournament. Thus he brings to the real world the very evil
- that made him escape it: irrationality. A man who is afraid to sign a
- letter, who fears any firm commitment, who seeks the guidance of the
- arbitrary edicts of a mystic sect in order to learn how to live his life–is
- not a great, confident mind, but a tragically helpless victim, torn by acute
- anxiety and, perhaps, by a sense of treason to what might have been a great
- potential.
- But, you may wish to say, the principles of reason are not applicable beyond
- the limit of a chessboard, they are merely a human invention, they are
- impotent against the chaos outside, they have no chance in the real world.
- If this were true, none of us would have survived nor even been born,
- because the human species would have perished long ago. If, under irrational
- rules, like the ones I listed above, men could not even play a game, how
- could they live? It is not reason, but irrationality that is a human
- invention–or, rather, a default.
- Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are
- just as immutable (more so)–but her rules and their applications are much,
- much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may
- memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply
- them, i.e., in order to play well–so each man has to use his own mind in
- order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A
- long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic
- principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and
- life. His name was Aristotle.
- Would you have wanted to escape into chess, if you lived in a society based
- on Aristotelian principles? It would be a country where the rules were
- objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its
- fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you would gain rewards for
- your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the
- power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves. Such a social system
- could not be devised, you say? But it was devised, and it came close to full
- existence–only, the mentalities whose level was playing jacks or craps, the
- men with the guns and their witch doctors, did not want mankind to know it.
- It was called Capitalism.
- But on this issue, Comrade, you may claim a draw: your country does not know
- the meaning of that word–and, today, most people in our country do not know
- it either.
- Sincerely,
- Ayn Rand
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