'The Sanction of The Victims' (1981) a Lecture by Ayn Rand

This is Ayn Rand's final public talk, given in November 1981 to an audience of businessmen at a conference in New Orleans sponsored by the National Committee for Monetary Reform. She was 77 years old and died 15 weeks later of heart failure at her home.

In this lecture, Rand observes that profit-seeking businessmen, despite conferring huge benefits upon society in the form of higher standards of living, are the "most hated, blamed, denounced men" in the eyes of so-called social humanitarians. This injustice is further compounded when these same victimized businessmen accept their attackers' moral standards and end up guiltily apologizing for their own productive virtues.

"The Sanction of the Victim" is a core concept in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. It refers to the idea that evil cannot succeed without the moral consent of the good—that irrational or immoral individuals rely on the productive, rational people they exploit to voluntarily accept their own victimization. Rand argues that tyrants, looters, and parasites can only thrive when their victims fail to withdraw their moral support and refuse to say "no."

In Atlas Shrugged, this idea is dramatized through the strike of the mind—where the producers, thinkers, and creators stop giving their sanction, causing society to collapse without them. The concept calls on individuals to withdraw moral approval from those who demand unearned power, guilt, or sacrifice.

In essence, Rand is saying: evil wins only when good people agree to let it.