I thought you said Hillary swinging from a lamppost and looking pissed.
This is from the late 90s. WTF happened to Bill Gates PR department?
Bill Gates recently dished out at a high school speech about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain
forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer.
This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul… Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Atillas, the Napoleans were fools and did not last… The soul is that which can't be ruled… It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it - and the man is yours. You won't need a whip - he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse - and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how its done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven't heard this all for years, but didn't want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here's one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness.
Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don't you see what you've accomplished? Man realizes that he is incapable of what he's accepted as the noblest virtue - and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can't practice. But one can't be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one's integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self respect. You've got him. He'll obey. He'll be glad to obey - because he can't trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean.
That's one way. Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want great men. Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept - and you stop the impetus to greatness in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at [the best] and hold the [mediocre] as [great]. You've destroyed greatness… Don't set out to raze all shrines - you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.
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Ayn Rand (1/1)
Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as an instrument of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul - and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't revere with a giggle.He'll obey and he'll set no limit to his obedience - anything goes - nothing is serious.
Here's another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is self contained, and self sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men, so kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important. Never let them have what they want. Make them think that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying 'I want' is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this.
Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty a man's soul and the space is yours to fill… This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn't they all teach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able to catch their theme song - 'Give up, give up, give up, give up'?
Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first born into a sacrificial furnace - lie on a bed of nails - go into the desert to mortify the flesh - don't dance - don't go to the movies on Sunday - don't try to get rich - don't smoke - don't drink. Its all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense, something left over, old fashioned. But there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a folly - ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system that preached self sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they'll acheive a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. 'Universal Harmony' - 'Eternal Spirit' - 'Divine Purpose' - 'Nirvana' - 'Paradise' - 'Racial Supremacy' - 'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. Internal corruption… that's the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of service, speaks to you of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who is not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries.
But here you might have noticed something: I said, 'it stands to reason'. Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil - though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either. The field's inexhaustible. 'Instinct' - 'Feeling' - 'Revelation' - 'Divine Intuition' - 'Dialectic Materialism'. If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrines don't make sense - you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want thinking men.
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Ayn Rand (2/2)
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