Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to
gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any
living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and
self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition
of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic
knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes
which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction
“value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself:
What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred
and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a
creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an
enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that
enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything
living.