The Virtue Of Seflishness 3

 

 

On Page 34 of her book The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand lays out that altruistic ethics force people to be sadists or masochists, and I could not agree more, and I see some convergence of our ethical thinking, occurring likely because rational egoists, like we are, following similar lines of thinking.

 

I have, for example, long written that it is one self-interest not to seek excess power over others (sadistic), or allow others to have excess power over oneself masochistic) One needs one share of power to self-realize and make a living and be a supercitizen, but one cannot be true to oneself or remain free, if one allows others to tyrannize one (robbing one of money, power and liberty), or seeks to tyrannize others (robbing others of their power, money and liberty). One is to abuse no one (sadistic) and allow no one to abuse one (masochistic). Rand and I are working in the same silver mine.

 

She writes: “The moral cannibalism of the hedonist and altruist doctrines lie in the premise that happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.

 

Today, hold this premise as an absolute not to be questioned. And when one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in one’s self-interest—which he must selflessly denounce. The idea that a man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to these humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or anyone, s long as the concept ‘rational’ is omitted from the context of ‘values,’ ‘desires,’ ‘self-interest’ and ethics.”

 

My response: when everything we do is tied to the lives of others, when our motives are altruistic as charitable and sacrificing towards others, or hedonistic as happiness attained by injuring others, this collectivist moral calculus is misleading. If everyone was a rational egoist, not pursuing enlightened self -interest, not cheap, basic urges satisfaction type of selfishness, we do not have time to love ourselves and maverize so we interfere with others and allow them to interfere without lives and projects, and all are held back and down. So, when we turn selfish, mean, or predatory, then we are already sacrifice and used to be now sacrificing, now we cannibalize our neighbors or lest those predators cannibalize us; collectivism sounds like noble brother hood, but it really holds all individuals down and back. Rand practices her golden rule, not sacrificing others to oneself, or oneself to others, and this is kindness to others, to let them be free to self-realize. She is also pointing out that we tie people to each other as ethically justified, they waste their lives running in packs and sacrifice to each other of each other, and all lose. That is evil.

 

Rand: “The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means : the values required for man’s survival qua man—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the ‘aspirations,’ the feelings , the whims or needs of irrational brutes, who has never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and conceive of no self-interest but grabbing the loot of the moment.”

 

My response: if Rand promotes selfishness, and she does, it is not the kind that helps the self at the expense of others, or the kind that let others exploit the self and destroys one life so one cannot put together the will and resources to maverize. Her selfishness is rational in that it must follow some Aristotelian higher-level self-interest of self-development of one potential into actuality as one life’s work. This requires hard work and self-discipline and there is not much immediate pleasure, hedonism, or unwillingness to sacrifice one temporary pleasure for long term gain.

 

Her biggest flaw is her purity, her uncompromising vision her near fanatical worship of reason for we are creatures of feeling and passion more than reason and temperate judgment, and these latte traits need to be nurtured in a maverizing child. Just as selfishness and reason can be used to evil ends, whether the motive is egoistic or altruistic, so feelings and whims can be used to good ends, not just evil ends. And irrational urges and will and whimsical choices do serve evil, or altruism and collectivism more than rational planning and rational intuition serve do, though good and egoism and individualism can be used for evil ends too. Rand is too simplistic and her moral agent at times seems like an idealized, cardboard character not a real flesh-and-blood, complicated human being struggling and confused her on earth trying to be good and a contributor. Still Rand is mostly right about reason being close to goodness and irrational whims and desire leading us usually to ruin and evil, but life is not easy or simple, and our efforts are a mixed bag of motives and willing to do good sometimes and evil other times.

 

Rand: ‘The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices or accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”

 

My response: This paragraph is lovely and so true and noble. Under free markets and a constitutional republic, rational egoists, maverizers and supercitizens, I suggest, can exchange goods and services freely without government regulation, and whatever conflicts arise can be usually settled by honorable compromise and reasonable negotiation. None sacrifices or is sacrificed too, and all love themselves and by handling their affairs well and for themselves, awhile allowing and enjoying neighbors so conducting themselves, allows all to prosper and be happy in peace, prosperity, and harmony and that is rational selfishness or enlightened self-love that leads to the common good: all are loved and cared for but regularly in a self-sustaining way.

 

Rand continues on Pages 34 and 35: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.

 

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat man as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange---an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. A trader does not expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. He does not switch to others the burden of his failures and he does not mortgage his life in bondage to the failure of others.”

 

My response: Rand and I again converge in our thinking: implicit to her remarks about not living or vying for economic profit as masters or slaves, but as independent equals, means that a classless society of upper middle calls majority will come about in a capitalist, constitutional republic Hierarchies will mostly disappear, and those that stay will be only as many levels as necessary to provide whatever public or private function that are required, and they shall not sprawl out like a socialist octopus with clerics ruling every aspect  of a citizens private or economic life.

 

Rand is sharp up above.

 

Rand: “In spiritual issues –by ‘spiritual’ I mean ‘pertaining to man’s consciousness’)—the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love for the weaknesses and flaws of others, only their virtues.”

 

My response: this paragraph is more difficult to translate, but I think she is thinking of friendship and social groups of first-handers (positive, accomplished, rational egoist achievers and producers that love themselves, the means of loving others, and they enjoy each other’s company not out of affection for weakness but because the other is a moral pure, a virtuous, accomplished, self-sufficient individual). Those that group-live and do not individuate, not only are not very virtuous, but they are also vicious because they never work to be virtuous, individualizing or accomplished, because they are nothing, they hate themselves, hate others and the hatred is mutual and this brotherhood of the mediocre herd is where these clingers and joiners prey on and yet hide behind each other’s weaknesses. They are crippled in their individual consciousnesses, and that arrangement is a big lie holding all down and back.

 

Rand on Pages 35 and 36: “To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm , consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”

 

My response: A lovely moral paragraph and 90% correct. I would add that some love from selfless altruism is genuine and benevolent—it does not always grow evil in the self or others, as well as some selfishness is purely individualistic, and it hurts the self and others straight up. Again, Rand’s moral agent has an ideal that is too pure, too high, too uncompromising. If we can get people to maverize most of the time and love themselves and God, most of the time then they are pretty darn good persons helping themselves, God and others and they will get to heaven. Rand needed to have some mercy on poor humans with their feet of clay, and her uncompromising fanatically severed standards of right and wrong may have been why she drove people away, and her disciples were splintered into bitterly warring sects that hate and seek to eviscerate each other—all of which hurts the egoist cause that they live and fight to advance.

 

Humans are animals more than angels so for Rand to expect and demand that we be creatures of pure reason is not only unreasonable but can be cruel and counter-productive. We are beasts that the moralist seeks to civilize. We are not rational robots of pure good will like a conservative, capitalist Dr. Spock. We are much richer, more bestial, and self-contradictory than Rand is allowing for. Her moral absolutism and her epistemological dogmatism and her absolute faith in the law of contradiction are right for the most part, but that is not how the world is and works and that is not how humans are constituted so to help people get well, we need to use Randian ethics, add in a benevolent deity and be patient and show mercy at human lapses and shortcomings. Over time, a society of first-hander supercitizens will come about.

 

Rand: “It is only on a basis of rational selfishness—on the basis of justice—that men can be fit to live together in a free, peaceful, prosperous, benevolent, rational society.”

 

My response: What a noble, truthful short paragraph. Amen.

 

Rand: “Can man derive any personal benefit from living in a human society? Yes, if it is a human society. The true great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his efforts to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each add to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or self-sustaining farm.”

 

My response: I like this paragraph, adding only that society provides kids a foundation from which they can become socialized and self-controlling so they can maverize as adults. Living in society gives people company and comfort, and these gains are not insignificant, though they are not substitute or replacement for answering the personal call from the Good Spirits to become a living angel.

 

Rand on Page 36: “But these very benefits indicate, delimit what kind of men can be of value to one another, and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society. Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to a human being—nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their needs, demands and protection, a society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a society based on the ethics of altruism. No society can be of value to a man’s life if the price is his surrender to his right to his life.”

 

My response: I agree totally. We want everyone to work and produce to the degree they can. With providing productive value that is marketable in our free market economy, as many people as possible should be contributors not dependents. I would add that this adult majority be trained up as self-actualizers and supercitizens. The ethics of altruism must be replaced by the ethics of egoism so that humans can achieve high civilization so each adult can enjoy the right to his own life without the government, county, social groups, or family units, holding him down and back.

 

Rand on Pages 36 and 37: “The basic political principle of Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clearcut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

 

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

 

I will not attempt, in a brief lecture, to discuss the political theory of Objectivism. Those who are interested will find it presented in full detail in Atlas Shrugged. I will say that every political system is based on and derived from a theory of ethics—and that the Objectivist ethics is the moral base needed by that politico-economic system which today, is being destroyed all over the world, destroyed precisely by a lack of moral, philosophical defense and validation: the original American system, Capitalism. If it perishes, it will perish by default, undiscovered and unidentified: no other subject has been hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions and misrepresentations. Today, few people know what capitalism is, how it works and what it was in actual history.”

 

My response: All true.

 

Rand on Page 37: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting it and distorting it from the start. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future.

 

For those that are interested in the history and the psychological causes of the philosophers’ treason against capitalism, I will mention that I discuss them in the title essay of my book For the New Intellectual.”

 

My response: Sounds good.

 

Rand on Pages 37 and 38: “The present discussion has been confined to the subject of ethics. I have presented the barest essentials of my system, but they are sufficient to indicate in what manner the Objectivist ethics is the morality of life—as against the three major schools of ethical theory, the mystic, the social, the subjective, which have brought the world to its present state and which represents the morality of death. These three schools differ only in their method of approach, nit in their content. In content, they are merely variants of altruism, the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. The differences occur only over the question of who is to be sacrificed to whom. Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value—and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.”

 

My response: I do agree with her above, and I like her point that altruism promotes death and self-destruction (chaos and evil) while rational egoism advocates affirmation of life and self-realization (creativity and good).

 

Rand: “The mystic theory is explicitly based on the premise that the standard value of man’s ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man’s life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and Middle Ages are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.”

 

My response: as a polytheist and Christian, I am not opposed to mystically derived ethics, and indeed suggest that God as the Creator is an individualist and individuator, and that God not only wants but commands that humans live as first-handers and great souls here on earth, and in this next world. There will always be suffering here, and perhaps some in the next world, but there can be joy and comfort and play here on earth as well as in the next world.

 

 Rand the secular humanist and physicalist is right that our life here does and should have its own rewards received here and now, and that is what happens. And Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson seem to see the Creator as rational principle in making the universe, so it is not a stretch to see humans as a rational individualists creating cosmos and lessening chaos here on earth while here on earth, and that Judeo-Christian values implicitly have some individualistic or egoistic ethical undertones, though altruism is largely altruistic codes of ethics.

 

Rand: “The social theory of ethics substitutes ‘society’ for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of the individual, but it the life of the disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody but himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto ‘dog eat dog’—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory. The existential monuments to this to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.”

 

My response: when the state replaces God as the deity to be worshiped, it is a malevolent deity, especially in its totalitarian instantiation. Altruism, and self-sacrifice are the moral slogans that true believers in the system chant to each other and to themselves, until they believe it. Marx and his followers saw group versus group and tribe versus tribe in eternal conflict, vying for money, power, control, territory, and dominance. The war between oppressor and the oppressed, and the ruling revolutionary elite must conduct revolution to overthrow the old guard, and usher in utopia for its young masters to rule and crush people with.

 

One of the most loving and noble things that Rand has done for humanity was to propose her egoistic ethical system as persistently, loudly, and consistently as she did. She not only warns humanity about how evil altruism actually is--once a mass movement’s leader takes over the government and start world wars, and purge his own people but she points out how altruist ethics keep people down and back even in a democracy like America.

 

She provides me an egoistic model, excellent and singular, to build on, adding the individualistic Good Sprits, and our divine spark to be actualized by living as a living angel. It is a disgrace that this saint to ethical egoism has been sneered at and dismissed for generations by ethicists, philosophers and intellectuals, CRT, and postmodernist radicals, still pushing their pathological altruism hatred, destruction and death.

 

Rand on Page 38 and 39: “The subjectivist theory of ethics, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more, it is a negation of reality, a negation not only of man’s existence but all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present case of our culture.”

 

My response: subjective epistemologies and ethical systems are not all false, wicked, irrational, contradictory in logic and due to their Hericlitean ontology, but they are so more than not. Rand is no moderate but is a black and white monist: her dogmatic epistemology and her dogmatic ethical code of egoism is presented as it is to be quite consistent, without contradiction and based on reality out there. But that is not how the world is made, works, or is best reacted to ethically. She is mostly right, good, noble true, consistent, and is accurate in how she describes the world as as it is, but she is not all correct in her objectivist epistemology and ethos.

 

Rand: “It is only philosophy that sets man’s goals and determines their course; it is only philosophy that can save them now. Today the world is facing a choice: if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that men have to reject.

 

I will close with words of John Galt, which I address, as he did, to all the moralists of altruism, past or present: “You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.”

 

My response: Rand’s egoist ethics do uplift people in this world as first-handers, and I would like to extend that offer for people to find hope, meaning and happiness in the next world by believing in and serving a benevolent deity as a spiritual first-hander, a living angel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upping The Ante Exodus 11:1-3

 

Here are lines from The New American Bible: “Then the Lord told Moses, ‘One more plague will I bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. After that he will let you depart. In fact, he will not merely let you go, he will drive you away. Instruct your people that every man is to ask his neighbor, and every woman her neighbor, for silver and gold articles and clothing.’ The Lord made the Egyptians well-disposed toward the people; Moses himself was very highly regarded by Pharaoh’s servants and the people in the land of Egypt.”

 

Note how the Lord has the power of foresight and knows that this plague will break the back of Egyptian resolve to disobey Yahweh. They kept competing and warring with God, upping the ante until God smashed them. What an arrogant, stupid, and foolish approach to God.

 

Here is the same passage from the Holy Bible: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterwards, he will let you go, he surely shall thrust you out hence altogether. Speak now into the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver and jewels of gold. And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and in sight of the people.

 

I have two thoughts. The Bible in these Plague stories reveals that God intervenes in the minds and wills of individual and whole peoples, likely without their knowledge or refusal or acceptance of God’s telepathic influence upon their minds, against goodness and God, and here in favor of God’s people, and God’s prophet, Moses.

 

I wonder if it would be appropriate today to pray that God or the Good Spirits provide a general spirit or psychological aura in society, in families and in our individual minds, not to overrule our free will, but to plant the seed to accept freely the option of receive God and God’s word into our hearts. It could be if we pray for a community aura of godliness, good will, and love in the air, it might help people leader better, more godly lives.

 

Second, notice how God psychologically tilts the Egyptians to be favorable towards the Hebrews just before refusing to let them go, and the first-born of the Egyptians are executed by Yahweh or Yahweh’s angel. Think of being for someone, and then viciously against them in treacherous reversal of attitude, just before their Lord, drops the hammer on you Egyptians by executing your first-born child. Think of how Yahweh understands to make pain and punishment maximally painful, by twisting the psyche of the Egyptian oppressors back and forth, pro and con, against the Hebrews until this horrible 10^th plague breaks their resolve and resistance.

The 8th Plague, Exodus 10:1-2

 

In Exodus the Pharaoh was obdurate, and would not let God’s people go, and opposing God’s wishes and commandments is suicide in this world and the next. Pharaoh remained obstinate, so Yahweh was going to up the ante of punishment again, and he explains to Moses why he hardened their hearts, Now, I think God may make people more stubborn against him, if, they, prior and of their own free will, have communicated to God that they are rebellious, defiant and will remain so, no matter what. Yahweh knows their hearts much better than they do, and, since they have freely chosen to oppose Yahweh and live in since and corruption going forward, then it seems acceptable that Yahweh would harden their hearts even further against him, and then punish them for their militant, consistent rebellion against their benevolent deity. They asked for it and now they are going to get it big time, not an enviable place to be.

 

From The New American Bible: What follows is what Yahweh said Moses: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have made him and his servants obdurate in order that I may perform these signs of mine among them and that you may recount to your son and grandson how ruthlessly I dealt with the Egyptians and what signs I wrought among them, so that you may know that I am the Lord.”

 

My response: Since Pharaoh and his servants willed to go all the way in defying Yahweh, Yahweh said, okay, let us go all the way so that your people, my people and all people can realize that thought the Hebrews are my chosen people, they are not my only people, and you are not just pagan, but you are an evil king, and your outrageous treatment of God and God’s people will be addressed by me, with these signs or plagues sent to you and against you, to the world know about my power and my sometimes ruthless justice should you not relent, and you seem hellbent not to yield the Lord, your Master, not just the Hebraic master. By your recalcitrance and suffering, you will come to know that I am the Lord.

 

There are underlying themes at work here: monotheism (just) versus polytheism ( unjust and about divinities are corrupt and powerful, or do not even exist, good versus evil, slavery is a cruel, godless state versus liberty and released from bondage is a state of justice and God’s kingdom on earth, and, finally, the message from Yahweh to the Hebrews and their neighbors, like the Egyptians, that Judaism—and later Christianity—that the message from the Lord of love, hope and salvation for all that seek it is available for Hebrews and non-Hebrews alike.

 

Here are those same passages from the Holy Bible (KJV): “And the Lord said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh: for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might show my signs before them.  And thou mayest tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son, what things I have wrought in Egypt. And my signs which I have done among them; that ye may know that I am the Lord.”

 

 

Knowing

 

Can we have certain knowledge about reality, based upon our observations of it, our conceptions of it and the terms we apply to these abstractions concluded? A dogmatist would answer yes unequivocally.

 

The skeptical, anti-foundationalist would deny that claim, answering that we are inextricably trapped in our subjective bubble, and our abstractions do not correspond to the world out there, so the only way we can have knowledge of that outside world to encounter it and describe it metaphorically, instinctively and state how it makes us feel.

 

The Virtue Of Selfishness 2

 

On Pages 28 and 29 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand writes of Rationality: “The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of rationality as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. I mean one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious aware, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one’s power and to the constant, active expansion of one’s perception, i.e., of one’s knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one’s existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one’s goal, values and actions take place in reality, and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from chosen and validated by a process of thought, as precise and scrupulous process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits. It means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—that one must never seek or grant the unearned or undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purpose and motives—and that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits on selected issues, or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.”

 

My response: As an ethical, spiritual, and spiritual moderate, it is predictable that I like what she wrote above, and I agree with her for the most part but not entirely. Rationality is the primary source of knowledge but our feelings, intuition, and subconscious logical processing of things leading to flashes of insight popping into our surface consciousness—these are important, vital sources of knowledge from and about the universe within us and outside of us, and all of it is mediated through our rich, complex mind.

 

I admire her uncompromising emphasis on full mental focus for that is the sentient, alert mindset of a self-realizer. When we use logic and language, we need to be honest to take our linear processes to logical conclusions that may not mesh without romantic or cherished fantasies.

 

The virtues she cites and defines are admirable. At times, her pronouncements are too black-or-white, too all-or-none, for life and truth do not often fit into clear, precise, sewed-up pockets. Her standards are so severely pure and high that they could discourage a lot of people as impossible or unworkable, unrealistic, or naïve, but I conclude, in the main she is right, and the first-hander she cares for must apply her mind with razor-sharp acuity to live as she would and make high-resolution statements and decisions about the world.

 

Rand: “The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to reshaping the earth in the image of his values. ‘Productive work’ does not mean the unfocused performance of some motions on some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most powerful use of his mind.”

 

My response: Her virtue of Productiveness fits well with maverizig making money, writing poetry, or bending conduit. She requires workers of both genders and all ability levels to work to this degree of involvement with employment.

 

Rand continues on Pages 29 and 30: “The virtue of Pride is the recognition of the fact ‘that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul’ (Atlas Shrugged) The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: ‘moral ambitiousness.’ It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character—by never placing any concern, wish or fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one’s own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one’s rejection of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.”

 

My response: Pride as merited self-esteem based on self-improvement is okay. I would not dismiss irrational virtues out of hand, and our depraved nature and natural addiction to sin must be dealt with squarely if we are to work through all of this to become maverized moral agents of good will and legitimately held high self-esteem. She is perceptive in warning agents away from serving as a sacrificial animal to a doctrine or ideology requiring the self to lay down its life for the cause. It may be necessary sometimes, but the people should question each and every call to arms and self-sacrifice.

 

Rand on Page 30: “The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is just that life is an end in itself, so every human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others or sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”

 

My response: Very nice. Life (One life in this world and in the next.) is an end in itself, and every human being is an end in himself, so his primary focus in life is pursuing his own interests, and what will make him happy is something like self-realization. He is egalitarian: he wants his property and wealth to do his own thing, but he will not sacrifice others for his gain either, and they should lead their own productive, independent lives. Since a life of self-actualization is noble, fulfilling and very hard work iterated over decades, it could be construed as self-sacrifice of the self’s pleasure, ease and modest goals in service of becoming a first-hander over time.

 

It also occurs to me that Rand is a secular humanist: each human is of great worth and should live in accordance with that natural nobility of character, live up to this ideal, as best she can.

 

Rand: “In psychological terms, the issue of man’s survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of ‘life or death,’ but as an issue of ‘happiness or suffering.’ Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of a man’s body is not an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life, or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against –lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profits or loss.”

 

My response: If the merely survive is to stay alive as a mediocre, inauthentic nonindividuator, then one is intellectually and spiritually dying while biologically living. The life of a nonindividuator or second-hander,in the long run, will make the agent unhappy and declining physically, perhaps slowly dying. If that agent were to have a miraculous wake-up epiphany, and then focus the rest of her life on living as a first-hander or remarkable, gifted, wise individuator, she would be alive vibrantly and her good health would show it, and her joy, resolve, happiness and joy and living would so radiate from her aura, that she would glow with life, hope, and promise. There are always good pleasures and bad pleasures, and good pain and bad pain, but there is much suffering built into life, and some happy moments too, but lasting happiness is a merited byproduct of positive attitude and wise reaction to whatever comes at one.

 

Rand: “But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

 

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are tabula rasa. It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electric computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.”

 

My response: Rand seems correct that our primitive, primal reaction to experienced stimuli is divided by our mind into pleasure-pain categories, and these catetgorizing operations are instinctive. The next, higher level mental operations divide experiences and the reaction of the consciousness into suffering or joy as an immediate direct reaction, or as a long-term posture of reaction to cumulative painful and pleasurable reactions to stimuli from inside and outside of the agent.

 

This long-term posture of reaction or the functioning personality or worldview of the agent is Rand’s identified emotional mechanism valuing experiences that the agent has experienced as sources of suffering or joy.

 

It is brilliant of her to offer that man has no automatic knowledge (This is why the wisdom and tradition of the elders, and an accurate, impartial history of children’s people, society and culture must be taught to them.). As the agent or child grows and matures, he begins to think for himself as a maverizer (the ideal). He gains knowledge and wisdom about the world and his place in it. With his Objectivist set of values (We hope it is that set of values.), he now can make value judgments bracketing his cumulative response to what he has experienced over his lifetime as a life of suffering and loss, or joy and accomplishment.

 

 If he were a joiner, a lazy, hedonistic narcissist leading a blessed life, he would not feel joy, but ennui and jaded sense of boredom and worthlessness and no self-esteem. If he were a maverizer and loner, of limited means and shaky health, with 5 kids to support and a wife that he did not get along with, it could be fairly stated that he has suffered a lot, but, if he sublimated his frustrations and pain into meaningful work, compassion for his family, and at work he writes original theorems as a math professor, his life is joyful, and he likely is a happy man.

 

Though I am a Randian and an Objectivist, the moderate in me, makes me hesitate at her sweeping generalizations about humans having no innate ideas. Our essential nature is filled with preconditions:  original sin, with low self-esteem, with the desire for group-living, our self-loathing, our desire for ease, pleasure and luxury, our affection for bondage (enslaving others and being enslaved by others)--a weak and other-directed will, the personality of the second-hander--our religious appetite to meet and talk to and worship a divinity).

 

Still, she is more correct than not. Though we have some innate ideas, or something like them, we are largely born blank-slates and our family, our culture, our nature, our genetic makeup will feed us experiences that will help us shape our lives.

 

We start out tabula rasa, but if our naturally weak capacities to think and be self-reliant are encouraged and supported by parents and teachers, then we, as children, may choose to catch on, and learn to think and think for ourselves as a first-hander (the ideal). Then we will generate values to live by and that will program our personality, plans, behavior selections and future, for us intellectually and emotionally.

 

Rand continues on Page 31: “But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis, or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.”

 

My response: she is right: we think independently and create values consistent with maverizing, or we are a mirror for social values borrowed from others, and the life of a parasite and nonindividuator awaits us. Our emotions influence our thinking, and our thinking influences our feeling, I suspect.

 

Rand: “Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions—if he wants to have his cake and eat it too—he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).”

 

My response: Rand is a monist, atheist, firm foundationalist and epistemological optimist. Contradictions for her not only are false, but they cannot exist in the world. As a moderate, I say she is mostly correct, but that there are contradictions that are true and do exist in the world. How else can God be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, and yet we have free will and evil exists in the world, and we will go to heaven and hell based on our moral and spiritual choices. If people would react to and conceptualize their pain and pleasure felt more through rational values than irrational values (We cannot help but describe and judge the world on both sets of values because both are innate in our psyche.), and if we do so by loving truth, God, ourselves and others, then we can deal with our pleasure and pain in a way is not meaningless, shattering and embittering.

 

Rand continues: “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is a measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like a sadist—or self-torture, like a masochist—or life beyond the grave, like a mystic—or mindless ‘kicks,’ like the driver of a hotrod ca--his alleged happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moment’s relief from their constant rate of terror.”

 

My response: It seems that rationalists, first-handers or self-actualizers value and achieve productive work and they end up feeling happy about their lives, for they have sacrificed lower pleasures for higher pains of hard work and self-improvement to achieve their long-range goals. They have filled their lives with deep meaning and that is what makes one joyful and happy and it cannot be faked or substituted for by drugs or hotrod cars.

 

Note implicit moral standards here, important moral standards. She denounces sadists and masochists as irrationalist, unhappy and terrified by the demands of existence. If one is a first-hander, neither abusing others sadistically, or masochistically ever allowing one to torture oneself or be abused by another human, then one sweeps aide unhealth interrelations with others, and set up healthy relationships between the self and others and the self and the self Once this emotional and psychological  sense of well-being and proper self-esteem is one’s worldview then one I predisposed to maverize, and that is when real joy via gaining knowledge, creative ends and  productive work all lead one to having lived as one was meant to live, actualizing what one has to offer the world.

 

Here is Rand on Pages 31 and 32: “Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as a man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in an irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

On Page 32 Rand continues: “The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, it result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself—the kind that makes one think: ‘This is worth living for—what one greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.”

 

My response: To live fully, virtuously, and innovatively is to maintain one’s life and this kind of project results in great happiness.

 

Rand: “But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting ‘man’s life’ as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values that it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking ‘happiness’ as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take ‘whatever makes one happy’ as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whim—by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know—is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking it brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.”

 

My response: rational egoism of the kind that Rand espouses will bring one closer to happiness than will base hedonism and self-indulgence. I am not sure that pursuing happiness should be our highest aim. I think we should aim to be loving, wise, spiritually and morally good, and fight evil and champion good; if we feel happy after that, okay—happy as a deserved and unexpected mood and a deserved by product of a live well-lived. It may be more important to pursue being tranquil and at peace, than to feel happy. If one could serve God as a living angel, then one’s state of mind here and in the next world would to be happy, so in that way I can agree with Rand that happiness is the ethical purpose.

 

Rand on Page 32 and 33: “This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. ‘Happiness can be the purpose of ethics but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus give him the means to achieve happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that ‘the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure’ is to declare that ‘the proper value is what you happen to value’—which is an intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act that merely proclaims the futility of all ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.”

 

My response: the pursuit of happiness and chasing objects giving us cheap, immediate gratification are not the same.

 

Rand: “The philosophers who attempted to devise an allegedly rational code of ethics gave mankind nothing but a choice of whims: the ‘selfish’ pursuit of  one’s whims (such as the ethics of Nietzsche)—or ‘selfless’ service to the whims of others (such as the ethics of Bentham, Mill, Comte and of all social hedonists, whether they allowed man to include his own whims among the millions of others or advised him to turn himself into a totally selfless ‘shmoo’ to be eaten by others).”

 

My response: Rand believes that rational values and rational means of seeking how to fulfill them will provide a higher-level crass hedonism, the irrationally willed egoism if Nietzsche or all of the myriad of altruistic ethical codes.

 

Rand on pages 33 and 34: “When a ‘desire,’ regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as the greatest happiness of the greatest number)—men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and interests will necessarily clash. If ‘desire’ is the ethical standard, then one man’s desire to produce and another man’s desire to rob him have equal ethical validity; when one man’s desire to be free and another man’s desire to enslave him have equal ethical validity; one man’s desire to be loved and admired for his virtues and another man’s desire  for underserved love and unearned admiration have equal ethical validity. And if the frustration of any desire constitutes a sacrifice, then a man that owns and automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or ‘aspires to’ an automobile that the owner refuses to give to him—and these two ‘sacrifices’ have equal ethical status. If so, man’s only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others to any desire of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man’s only ethical alternative is to be a sadist or masochist.”

 

My response: Rand seems correct in denying that desire as an ethical motive is more than a erratic whim, and clashes arise as soon as a neighbor produces a competing desire as deserving social priority. Rand’s ethical egoism is a much more objective standard where all win, and social harmony and peace should follow.

 

The Virtues Of Selfishness 1

 

In this book of hers, on Page 21 Ayn Rand is describing how animals know how to act within their knowledge and instinctual overlay. Beyond that, they do not know how to act or what to do. The animal cannot “ . . . it cannot suspend its own consciousness—it cannot choose not to perceive—it cannot evade its own perception—it can not ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

 

My response: Humans can choose to be stupid, irrational, even evil and the animal cannot: we can suspend our consciousness—we can choose not to perceive it—we can evade our own perception, we can ignore our own good and choose the evil and act as our own destroyers. Her moral psychology is first rate, and she loves the truth. Though an atheist, her metaphysical stance is accurate: humans can will to non-individuate and be evil or motivated by altruistic self-sacrifice. Most people shuffle through life seeking not beauty, the good or the just.

 

On Page 21 and Page 22 she writes, “Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.”

 

My response: our code of survival, our set of values, we need to survive minimally and to flourish, but we must devise that code of values. We rationally must decide what is good for us or evil (if one is a Christian or Jew, one could rely on the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule). We must choose our set of values, those that benefit our lives, not endanger them, and what goals will meet those values, and how best way to meet those goals.

 

Rand: “His own consciousness has to discover the answer to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on earth, the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge—man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man’s particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.”

 

My response: Since reading The Foutainhead carefully, recently, a second time, I now understand her thinking much more clearly, deeply. This ethicist and artist is not just blathering—she means what she says, she mostly knows what she is talking about, and she wishes people the best, that they should live as Roark, not Keating. It is not his consciousness that has to answer all these questions because God and the Good Spirits exist, and we can learn a lot from these benevolent beings. Still, they are maverizers, like we should be if we reason, feel and imagine in the mode of enlightened self-interest, then we can answer most of these questions. She is correct in admonishing that our consciousness will not work automatically—we must exercise it to the max to become a first-hander, not barely getting by, sliding through life as a barely conscious, minimally rational second-hander. For Rand, our consciousness is volitional and we must will to use it and self-develop and it is hard work, and it is a thrilling work of enlightened self-interest and individual-living more than sacrificing ourselves for others as part of the herd, popular, never lonely, but unfulfilled and relatively unproductive.

 

Rand: “Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.”

 

My response: both Rand and Dennis Prager agree—as do I—that humans do not reason enough, and  thinking usually helps us survive and gather and live by good values (There are exceptions for we can think to identify an evil end, or how to achieve it or how to rationalize it to ourselves to ease our troubled consciences.? We need to follow our feelings and hunches about actions that are decent in line with our good willing, but none of this occurs easily, for an adult must have worked hard to know how to live, and how to be productive and virtuous.

 

Rand wants us to work hard mentally, to abstract and engage in concept-formation, to develop the consciousness that does not automatically function rationally, conceptually, and artistically.

 

On Pages 22 and 23, she writes that the process of concept-formation “ . . . consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term ‘conceptualizing.’  It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sun. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts is reason. The process is thinking.”

 

My response: if the egoist thinks for himself and revs up his mental operations to think, observe and decide and conclude as a self-realizer, then his creative and original thinking will open up endless possibilities for him, leading him to develop as a great soul, if you are a Mavellonialist, or as a first-hander if you are Howard Roark.

 

On Page 22, Rand describes how we need to think to function as fully human, happening by choice not automatic function: “In any hour and any issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.”

 

 

My response: we need to focus our minds so that we enjoy a full, active awareness of reality. We are creatures of higher consciousness, and we must individuate with that bright intelligence, or slide through life semi-conscious as a nonindiviudator. Her intelligent, activistic, logical interacting with the world out there is something that an egoist commits to all of his life, in all of his waking hours, and this higher-level egoistic involvement with the world is her ethical linking of the right epistemology linked to egoism and individual self-development through working and becoming, motivated by self-interest. I am on board with her.

 

Rand: she admonishes that the refusal to be self-motivated to do something with one’s life, being rationally and worldly at a high level of focused consciousness is to live as a semi-conscious creature, hiding behind altruistic motive and sacrificing oneself for the group to sidestep taking responsibility for one’s life and doing something with one’s life and with ones consciousness and personality.

 

I think, based on my own ethical thinking, she thinks selfishness is virtue not only because doing great work as a person is living not only makes one happy and alive, and full conscious and aware, but it renders one doing what one is meant to do ethically as a high level intelligent creature at the top of the food chain in the physical universe that she held was all that we ever know. It is one’s duty to live as a first-hander, and individuate, t settle for zombie like drifting as a nonindivudator and conformist, group-liver.

 

She really believes people should be motivate by self-interest and practiced what she preached as motivated by self-interest and growing into a secular great sou with all of her writing, teaching and philosophizing.

 

She is not an elitist, I think. She does not feel that there are a small elite like Roark and Dominique that are first-handers, and all that others can do as lives as herd-dwelling joiners of unremarkable achievement. That pattern is how we are naturally, but if we transvalue altruism into egoism, individual-living and self-realizing, then there is a ethos, a code of values that can inspire and teach average people how to be all that they can be, to become, live, work, love and die as first-handers or secular or religious great souls. Everyone has the talent and capacity for a full life by thinking, and focusing, really focusing.

 

Rand: “Psychologically, the choice ‘to think or not’ is the choice ‘to focus or not.’ Existentially, the choice ‘to focus or not’ is the choice ‘to be conscious or not.’ Metaphysically, the choice ‘to be conscious or not’ is the choice of life or death.”

 

My response: The choice to be conscious or not is a choice to be human or not, or to exist at some lower level of existence as a herd-creature. When she asserts that the choice to be conscious or not is a choice of life or death, I believe she means it metaphorically, like when Jesus told his followers to let the dead bury the dead. Rand means something like that here: to be conscious, human, aware, focused and being all that one can be at work, play and when creating is to be spiritually alive (if she believed in spirituality), and to live as a second-hander is to slide through life as a zombie, dead-person-walking so to speak.

 

On Page 23 she elaborates on what she means by humans needing to think to live: their consciousness as focusing reasoning will help them figure out how get food, shelter, to build technology and structures to feed his family and to run a civilization: “yet, his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.”

 

What she writes on Page 23 and 24 is explanatory for Roark lived his life: “But man’s responsibility goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor ‘instinctive’—nor infallible. Man must initiate it, to sustain it, and to hear responsibility for its results. He must discover how to tell what is true and what is false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.”

 

My response: it would not hurt for the maverizer to have studied logic and philosophy, as an amateur intellectual, to help him learn to think for himself in singular ways as he goes off to be a farmer, blacksmith, or entrepreneur. His efforts will not all be correct the first time, but he will learn from his mistakes try again and continually improve. She warns that nature does not guarantee that he will succeed, but, if he perseveres and keeps mulling it over, something should start to work for him—I recommend.

 

She argues that succeeding and thriving is a do-it-yourself, engaged lifestyle: “Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material upon which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and a driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered, and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.”

 

My response: when Rand mentions that there is no limit to the knowledge that he can accrue and the enjoyment of life that he can achieve, this sound like maverization to me, and pleasure for her is having worked hard, developed the self creatively and rationally, so that the products of one’s thoughts, plans and creative fruits make one enjoy life, a high-end pleasure of merited satisfaction.

 

On Page 24, she points out how each human is thrown into the world, and we are not equipped to deal with it, let alone survive and thrive: “A being that does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot not automatically know what is right or wrong, what is good for him or what is evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and not open to choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and to stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means to survival; to a living consciousness, every ‘is’ implies an ‘ought.’ Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

 

My response: Humans require knowledge and right values to know true from false, and right from wrong, so she shares with the reader her optimistic epistemology that we can know about reality and our function within it, and that we can leap from facts about the world to what we ought to do with the right values, so she offers objective morality and ethical certitude as graspable. We can choose to not think, be conscious, gain knowledge and live as self-interested first-handers, but if we choose to destroy ourselves, as we have done mostly through human history, we are not free from the consequences of poor choices. I agree.

 

Rand: “What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values that his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why man needs a code of ethics.

 

Now you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrational, that reason cannot guide man’s life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim, that ethics have nothing to do with reality, , with existence, with one’s practical  actions and concerns—or that the goal of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.”

 

 My response: she offers that we need a code of ethics, Objectivism, and that goals pursued must be in alignment with those objectivist moral values. I am not simply for rational ethics, but it should be our main set of values, as the ethical moderate in me, insists that irrational feelings, and religious influences, and worrying about goodness for the souls of the living and dead, I suggest that those secondary ethical needs are best met through main emphasis: Objectivist ethics and egoistic motivation for acting.

 

Rand: “Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of you whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”

 

My response: Ethics is not a mystic fantasy but is a supernatural code of ethics that grows out of natural law, the law ruling nature set up by the Father and Mother, the Clockmakers and Creators. It is not a subjective luxury or a social convention or social construct. It is objective and critical for human survival and flourishing, by the grace of God, of reality and of the nature of living.

 

On Pages 24 and 25 she quotes from her hero Galt: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice---and the alternatives his nature offers him: rational being or suicidal animal. Man must be man by choice, he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

 

My response: Reason, choice, individualism, free speech and free will all seem to be linked, as are feeling, other-determinism, regulated speech, other-willedness. Our life, as well-lived, should be our primary value for living in this world as if it was the only world, or to prepare for afterlife in the next world.  We must identify the values that we wish to live in accordance with, and then practice what we preach.

 

Rand: “The standard of value of Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life . . . Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is good; that which negates, opposes it and destroys it is evil.

 

My response: one’s life is the moral standard: okay, but I would add that a life lived not just physically but spiritually in this world is a life that lived to uplift the self, others and God. Evil degrades them all.

 

Rand: “Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

 

My response: Rand goes on to note that first-handers think and work but there are many parasites that do not work or produce and just copy, steal or rob producers. That is how not to live.

 

Rand on Pages 26 and 27: “’Man’s survival qua man’ means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all these aspects of existence which are open to his choice.

 

Man cannot survive as anything but man. He can abandon his means of survival, his mind, he can turn himself into a subhuman creature, and he can turn his life into a brief span of agony—just as his body can exist for a while in the process of disintegration by disease. But he cannot succeed, as a subhuman—as the ugly horror of the antirational periods of mankind’s history can demonstrate. Man has to be man by choice—and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man.

 

The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.

 

My response: we can choose to fail and destroy ourselves, but we cannot be happy, successful, content or fulfilled living that wretched way. Life is a fine ethical standard for humans, and one’s individual life serves well as one’s ethical purpose and focus.

 

Rand: : “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself which is his own life.

 

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep—virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The key cardinal values of Objectivist ethics—the three values, which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, ither their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.

 

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result.

 

My response she has put together a tidy ethical system that seems tight and interlocking. Productive work, keeping the self busy, and filled with purpose, but  I would like to subsume under productive work, the process of self-development.

 

Rand: “Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction, that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.

 

My response her system seems consistent and clearly laid out.