Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. He’ll be glad to obey – because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self respect. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. But don’t you see what you accomplish ? Man realises that he’s 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. His every living instinct screams against it. Not a single one has ever reached it and not a single one ever will. Direct it towards a goal destructive of all integrity. The worst among you gropes for an idol in his own twisted way. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. Want to know how it’s done? See if I ever lied to you. Set him in reverse – and his own mechanism will do your work for you. You won’t need a whip – he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it – and the man is yours. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. That’s why the Caesars, the attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits.

I inherited the fruit of their efforts and I shall be the one who’ll see the great dream made real.

Ellsworth Toohey on How to Rule Souls (from 'The Fountainhead') Ellsworth Toohey on How to Rule Souls (from 'The Fountainhead') : LUSENET : Unk's Wild Wild West : One Thread

Peter keating the fountainhead