The Brute Force of Reason

Ayn Rand: From reason to a cult of ego

 that glorified adultery & abortion

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” ~ G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton’s observation is not paradox but prophecy. The last two and a half centuries have demonstrated that when men proclaim themselves apostles of Reason, they often become its executioners. 

The French Revolution, hailed as the dawn of Enlightenment, proclaimed liberty, equality, fraternity—and delivered mass executions, civil war, and the reign of terror. The guillotine became the emblem of rational progress, slicing off heads in the name of clarity. The revolutionaries, intoxicated by their belief that they embodied the Age of Reason, proved how easily abstract ideals can justify rivers of blood.

The lesson did not end there. The twentieth century carried this creed to monstrous extremes. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot—all believed they had a rational system, a scientific doctrine, a historical inevitability that authorized them to reorder humanity. They were not simply tyrants; they were self-proclaimed men of reason who believed their syllogisms and dialectics were more sacred than human life. 

And under their banners, some of the greatest genocides in history were carried out: gulags and purges in the Soviet Union, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the killing fields of Cambodia. These were not spasms of blind superstition, but cold, calculated programs executed in the name of reason, efficiency, and progress.

Nor is this tendency confined to dictators. Even democratic societies intoxicated by their rationalist self-image have repeatedly justified endless wars and economic predation as reasonable necessity. American progressives often claim reason is on their side, yet their state apparatus has funded and fought conflicts across the globe with little sense of moral responsibility. Reason in such hands does not appear as persuasion but as justification, a mask worn by violence to make itself seem inevitable.

When the absolutism of modern reason began to falter, it mutated into new disguises. Postmodernists denied the very possibility of truth while insisting on the authority of their critique; libertarians reduced the complexity of society to a narrow calculus of self-interest. Both postures were proclaimed as rational, but both detached themselves from the human heart and lived realities of community. 

Ayn Rand was the most grotesque example: she exalted “objectivism” as the philosophy of reason, but built a cult of ego that glorified adultery, abortion, and even stylized rape in fiction as symbols of creative power. This was not reason as wisdom, but reason as will to dominate, stripped of tenderness, mercy, or conscience.

History thus confirms Chesterton’s suspicion: reason, when enthroned as an idol, is not gentle but brutal. It cuts, hammers, and compels. Some of the greatest genocides of recent history were not committed by madmen in religious frenzy, but by cold administrators, engineers, and philosophers who claimed they were building a rational society. To follow the head alone is to risk reducing human beings into units, categories, numbers—things to be managed, eliminated, or improved.

Reason, without the tempering of heart, is indistinguishable from fanaticism. It cannot heal, it cannot forgive, it cannot love. The heart touches, the head strikes. And the societies that forget this truth—trusting only in the logic of their clever systems—become laboratories of cruelty. Chesterton was right: the men of reason are as dangerous, as psychopathic, as the most blinded zealots.

Walls or renewal? The paradox of conservative civilizations

Morality, though revered as an absolute by many philosophers and preachers, is in truth a subjective construct. Its edicts bind the conscience of individuals, not the destinies of civilizations. 

To speak of a “moral civilization” or an “immoral civilization” is to misapply the language of ethics. Civilizations are not saints or sinners; they are organisms of culture, faith, and survival. Their vitality is measured not by their moral rectitude but by the endurance of their traditions, their conception of the divine, and their will to perpetuate themselves through centuries of trial and sacrifice.

What endows a civilization with grandeur is not its claim to goodness, but its ability to forge a culture that gives meaning to existence. Generations suffer, labor, and perish so that a vision of man’s place in the cosmos, and of God’s sovereignty, might persist. This act of transmission—the handing down of myths, rituals, and principles of order—is the highest achievement of any people. A civilization’s true worth lies in its capacity to produce men and women of courage, character, and conviction, who, in turn, stand sentinel over its temples, scriptures, and laws.



Nor do I deny that survival requires not only culture but also strength, not only the poet and the priest but also the soldier. Warfare has always been one of the grim but necessary instruments through which civilizations are forged and preserved. No great culture has endured without a race of warriors to guard its borders, defend its honor, and, when destiny demanded it, to seize new frontiers. To fight, to conquer, and to secure the ground upon which one’s people may flourish—this belongs to the tragic yet unavoidable conditions of history.



But here lies the paradox of our time: those who proclaim themselves the guardians of tradition—the conservatives—are seldom true warriors. For all their bellicose rhetoric, they lack the harder courage: the courage of reform. They cling to the illusion that civilization can be preserved merely by denouncing outsiders, by railing against foreign influences, by imagining the source of all decline to be external. Yet no civilization survives by exclusion alone. To endure, it must ceaselessly renew itself from within. It must bring forth not merely yesterday’s soldier but a new breed of warriors, equal to the changing trials of their age. Without such renewal, no army, however numerous, remains unconquerable.



The conservative’s gaze remains fixed outward, upon the alien and the enemy, while his own house decays. He imagines that civilization is secured by building walls against others, but fails to see that the deeper work lies within: the cultivation of institutions, the purification of customs, the reform of spirit. A people that cannot confront its own corruption, that cannot wrestle with its own contradictions, cannot long endure. It is not the foreigner who defeats such a people, but their own refusal to change.



Thus the destiny of civilizations rests not on any illusion of moral superiority, nor on the endless denunciation of the outsider, but on the harder, nobler task: to preserve their essence without succumbing to arrogance, to reform without erasing their foundations, and to endure without pretending to perfection. A civilization lives when it produces warriors not merely of the sword, but of the soul.

From Lenin to Nixon: The fall of the dollar, the rise of a new world

Soon after the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks imagined that money itself could be annihilated. They saw Ruble as not a medium of exchange but a relic of bourgeois corruption. 

Lenin and Trotsky flooded Russia with Rubles until the currency collapsed, believing that once money died, society could be reorganized around coupons for food, housing, and education.  Yet by 1921, their utopia dissolved into chaos. Trade froze, incentives vanished, and the nation discovered that money is not just an instrument of greed but the grammar of civilization. To abolish it was to unwrite the syntax of social life.

Across the Channel, Britain staged a quieter revolution. The pound had been born in 1694, when a syndicate of bankers lent £1.2 million to the Crown and in return secured the right to issue notes, monetizing royal debt and tethering currency to gold. For centuries, this alchemy of credit and metal sustained the most trusted money in the world. 

But in 1931 Britain abandoned the gold standard, and in 1946 the Bank of England was nationalized. Money ceased to be metal; it became pure abstraction, underwritten not by gold but by trust in the state.

America soon followed. In 1933 Roosevelt severed the dollar’s partial link to gold; in 1971 Nixon severed it entirely. The dollar floated free, and with it began the global regime of fiat money—currencies backed not by substance but by promise, force, and habit. Western strategists believed they had devised the perfect scheme: export inflation to the world while consuming without constraint. 

But history is cunning. The torrents of paper that poured out of America and Europe were absorbed by Asia, which converted them into factories, supply chains, and industries. The West exported inflation; the East imported prosperity.

Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the dollar—the most traded and most weaponized currency in history—stands at the edge of exhaustion. Its very ubiquity makes it uncontrollable. Since its detachment from gold, its long arc has been one of decline, a slow erosion masked by inertia. 

A major crisis could trigger a stampede away from the dollar, and Washington will discover that hegemony built on paper can dissolve like paper in water. The death of the dollar will not be the collapse of one currency but the implosion of an entire financial order.

For two decades, Asia and even multinational corporations have been preparing for this twilight. Local-currency trade, sovereign funds, digital payments, and strategic stockpiles are scaffolding a post-dollar world. The West still mistakes this for adjustment; in truth it is replacement. The illusion that the dollar is eternal is America’s last superstition.

Money is always more than money. It is trust made tangible, empire made portable, the metaphysics of power disguised as paper. The Bolsheviks proved it could not be abolished; the British proved it could be nationalized; the Americans proved it could be globalized. What remains to be proven is how it will end. 

When the dollar dies, it will not merely mark the decline of a currency. It will announce the end of an epoch, and perhaps the beginning of another story for mankind.

Beyond the enlightenment myth: Diversity as humanity’s first principle

The dream of a universal human nature, so often invoked in the rhetoric of modernity, is not an ancient inheritance of mankind but a relatively recent construction. 

It emerged most forcefully during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers, intoxicated by the promise of reason, imagined humanity as a singular species that could be united beneath one political and moral canopy. This vision of universality—noble in aspiration, yet abstract in foundation—was less a discovery of human essence than an invention designed to serve a particular order: the Western order.

The Enlightenment project carried within it a utopian premise. It assumed that beneath the dense thicket of cultural difference, historical trauma, and geographical dispersion, there lay a common human substratum waiting to be revealed. If only reason were universally applied, it was believed, humanity could converge upon a shared destiny, a single form of government, and a universal moral law. Yet history, stubborn and unyielding, has consistently mocked this assumption.

Human beings have never been a singular tribe. They are divided by race, fractured by religion, anchored to disparate nations, and shaped by climates, languages, and traditions that generate profoundly different ways of life. What one civilization sanctifies, another abhors; what one calls justice, another may denounce as tyranny. To speak, therefore, of a universal human nature is to indulge in a myth, a philosophical fiction designed to ease the anxieties of fragmentation.

If there is no universal human essence, then the edifice built upon it—universal morality, universal law, universal government—collapses under its own weight. The dream of a single world order is not a political possibility but a mirage. The very attempt to impose it, as history has shown in colonial encounters and imperial adventures, leads not to harmony but to violence, resistance, and disintegration.

This recognition is not a call to nihilism but to humility. To accept the absence of a universal human nature is to acknowledge the plurality of human existence: that different peoples, born into different soils, shaped by different histories, will craft different visions of the good life. The challenge, then, is not to subsume them under a singular code, but to negotiate coexistence amidst incommensurability.

The Enlightenment myth of universality was a bold gamble of reason against reality. Its failure reminds us of an older, perhaps wiser truth: that mankind is not a monolith but a mosaic. The task of philosophy and politics alike is not to erase the tesserae but to find beauty in their irreducible diversity.