The New Intellectual

"The power of ideas has no reality for either [Attila nor the Witch Doctor], and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror."

- Ayn Rand, FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL. 1961.


Thus, Attila and the Witch Doctor work together: Attila represents the physical, material force of domination, and the Witch Doctor the mystical, moral force. Tracing history, Attilas and Witch Doctors have each ruled over populations by themselves, and then began working together: the Renaissance illustrates how a leadership in power by means of guilt (the Witch Doctor method) needs an Attila, and the Industrial Revolution illustrates how a materialistic system (the Attila method) needs a Witch Doctor. After the Industrial Revolution, both became a team and formed an alliance, each giving his cooperation to the other under an inherent fear: that the other had something to him that he lacked. Attila, in his mad grab for land and money, needed something to make his guilt go away, and needed justification for his actions so he could sleep at night. The Witch Doctor, in his epistemological vacuum, needed tangible evidence that what he was doing was in fact productive.

When the two conjoined, they became the "businessman and the intellectual" (49). They still rule populations solely on their capacity for material control (the businessman) and guilt (the intellectual). Following the writing of Rand, we come to the conclusion that these two figures working independently of one another in the same society will lead to that society's perpetual stupor. In the case of America, the goal of its institutions should be to produce thinkers that are grounded in practicality, and businessmen that are sensitive to intellectual morality.

This is a very thin slice of some of what Rand's FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL has to offer. I think that the philosophical practicality and applicability of this thought process can be exhumed in a reader based on the character of Two Face in the Batman series; first, the realization that one's mind operates with the duality of philosophical sense and material reality, and, second, that this duality can be fused into one functioning being: the "New Intellectual."

The inability to actively participate in the conscious fusion of the mind-duality is Two Face's hamartia. It may have to be blogged on later, but one could argue that the Joker is less of a tragic figure based solely on the fact that he has CHOSEN a side and sticks to it. Two Face is locked in liminality, confined to his own indecision, and thus has no capacity for revenge.