The Virtue Of Selfishness 14

 

On Pages 93 and 94 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces her essay 10, Collectivized Ethics: “Certain questions, which one frequently hears, are not philosophical queries, but psychological confessions. This is particularly true I the field of ethics. It is especially in the discussion of ethics that one must check one’s premises (or remember them) , and more, one must learn to check the premises of one’s adversaries.

 

My response: I like this about premises.

 

Rand: “For instance, Objectivists will often hear a question such as: ‘What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?’

 

The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are ‘their brothers’ keepers’ and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others. The questioner is ignoring or evading the basic premises of Objectivist ethics and is attempting to switch the discussion onto his own collectivist base. Observe that he does not ask: ‘Should anything be done?’—but: ‘What will be done?’—as if the collectivist premise had been tacitly accepted and all that remains is a discussion of the means to implement it.

 

Once, when Barbara Branden was asked by a student: ‘What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?’—she answered: ‘If you want to help them, you will not be stopped.’

 

This is the essence of the whole issue and a perfect example of how one refuses to accept an adversary’s premises as the basis of discussion.

 

Only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help to help others; society—as an organized political system—has no rights in the matter at all.

 

 

On the question of when and under what conditions it is morally proper for an individual to help others, I refer you to Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. What concerns us here is the collectivist premise of regarding this issue as political, as the problem of duty of ‘society as a whole.’”

 

My response: I agree with Rand above. Collectivist ethics is based on group rights, so if any fall behind, it is the group that must pull them up. Individual rights is the assumption that the locus of any moral agent’s identity and purpose in life is taking care of himself, and in chasing after his share of the pie through productive work and hard work and self-realizing, most members of society should be able to bootstrap themselves up to happiness, prosperity and fulfillment, on their own, with little governmental largess required.

 

Rand on Pages 94 and 95: “Since nature does not guarantee automatic security, success and survival to any human being, it is only the dictatorial presumptuousness and the moral cannibalism of the altruist-collectivist code that permits a man to suppose (or idly to daydream) that he can somehow guarantee such security to some men at the expense of others.

 

If a man speculates on what society should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that man’s lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them, to set their goals, or to plan the ‘distribution’ of their efforts.

 

This is the psychological confession implied in such questions and in many issues of the same kind.

 

At least it reveals a man’s psycho-epistemological chaos, it reveals a fallacy which may be termed the ‘fallacy of the frozen abstraction’’ and which consists of substituting one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—in this case, substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of ‘ethics.’ Thus a man reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.

 

More often, however, that psychological confessions reveals a deeper evil: it reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out.

 

Humility and presumptuousness are always two sides of the same premise, and always share the task of filling the space vacated by self-esteem in a collectivized mentality. The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends. The more neurotic he is or the more conscientious in the practice of altruism (and these two aspects of his psychology will act reciprocally to reinforce each other), the more he will tend to devise schemes ‘for the good of mankind’ or of ‘society’ or of the public’ or of ‘future generations—or of anything but actual human beings’”

 

My response: I agree.

 

Rand on Pages 95 and 96: “Hence the appalling recklessness with which men propose, discuss and accept ‘humanitarian’ projects which are to be imposed by political means, that is, by force on an unlimited number of human beings. If, according to the collectivist caricatures, the greedy rich indulged in profligate material luxury, on the premise of ‘price no object’—then the social progress brought by today’s collectivized mentalities consists in indulging in altruistic planning, on the premise of ‘human lives no object.’

 

The hallmark of such mentalities is the advocacy of some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs or means. Out of context, such a goal can usually be shown to be desirable; it has to be public, because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch venomous fog has to shroud the issue of means—because the means are to be human lives . . . After centuries of civilization, most men, with the exception of criminals—have learned that the above mental attitude is neither practical or moral in their private lives and may not be applied to the achievement of their private goals. There would be no controversy about the moral character of some young hoodlum who declared: ‘Isn’t it desirable to have a yacht, live in a penthouse and to drink champagne?’—and stubbornly refused to consider the fact that he had robbed a bank  and killed two guards to achieve that ‘desirable’ goal.

 

There are no moral differences between these two examples; the number of beneficiaries does not change the nature of the action, it merely increases the number of victims. In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.”

 

My response: I agree that state evil is much worse than the evil of a single hoodlum acting in his limited sphere.

 

Rand: “It’s men’s views of their public or political existence that the collectivized ethics of altruism has protected from the march of civilization and has preserved as a reservoir, a wildlife sanctuary, ruled by the mores of prehistoric savagery. If men has some faint glimmer of respect for individual rights in their private dealings with one another, that glimmer vanishes when they turn to public issues—and what leaps into the political arena is the caveman who can’t conceive of any reason why the tribe may not bash the skull of any individual if it so desires.”

 

My response: Collectivized ethics are backwards and keep humanity from advancing. Group rights over individual rights is the totalitarian mantra.

 

Rand on Pages  96 and 97: “The distinguishing characteristic of such  tribal mentality is: the axiomatic, the almost ‘instinctive’ view human life as the fodder, fuel or means for any public project. The examples of such progjects are innumerable: . . . And here we come to the essence of the unreality—the savage, blind, ghastly, bloody unreality—that motivates a collectivized soul.

 

The unanswered and unanswerable question in all of their ‘desirable’ goals is: To whom? Not to the Soviet serfs who dies of epidemics, filth, starvation, terror and firing squads—while some bright young men wave to them from space capsules circling over their human pigsties. And not to the American father who died of heart failure brought on by overwork, struggling to send his son to college—or to the boy that could not afford college—or to a couple killed in an automobile wreck, because they could not afford a new car—or to the mother who lost her child because she could not afford to send him to the best hospital—not to any of these people whose taxes pay for the support of our subsidized science and public research projects.

 

My response: Government is too greedy, stealing excess wealth as legal taxes from wage-earners.

 

Rand of Page 97 and 98: “Science is a value only because it expands, enriches and protects man’s life. It is not a value outside of that context. And ‘man’s life’ means the single, specific, irreplaceable lives of individual men.

 

The discovery of new knowledge is a value to men only when and if they are free to use and enjoy the benefits of the previously known. New discoveries are a potential value to all men, but not at the price of sacrificing all of their actual values. A ‘progress’ extended into infinity, which brings no benefit to anyone, is a monstrous absurdity. And so is the conquest of space by some men, when and if it is accomplished by expropriating the labor of other men who are left without means to acquire a pair of shoes.

 

Progress can only come out of men’s surplus, that is: from the work of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to venture out in the pursuit of the new.--as Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and enjoyment of life.

 

It is only a frozen unreality inside a collectivized brain that human lives are interchangeable—only such a brain can contemplate as ‘moral’ or ‘desirable’ the sacrifice of generations of living men for the alleged benefits which public science or public industry or public concerts will bring to the unborn.”

 

My response: One thinks of the Covid 19 mask mandates, closing of churches, businesses and schools all in the name of public health based on tyranny and power grabs and shaky science.

 

Rand on Page 98 and 99: “Soviet Russia is the clearest, but not the only, illustration of the achievements of collectivized mentalities. Two generations of Russians have lived, toiled and died in misery, waiting for the abundance promised by their rulers, who plead for patience and commanded austerity, while building public ‘industrialization’ and killing public hope in five-year installments. At first, the people starved while waiting for electric generators and tractors; they are still starving, while waiting for atomic energy and interplanetary travel.

 

That waiting has to end—the unknown profiteers of that wholesale sacrificial slaughter will never be born—the sacrificial animals will merely breed new hordes of sacrificial animals—as the histories of all tyrannies have demonstrated—while the unfocused eyes of a collectivized brain will stare on, undeterred, and speak of a vision of service to mankind, mixing interchangeably the corpses of the present with the ghosts of the future, but seeing no men.

 

Such is the status of reality in the soul of any Milquetoast who looks with envy at the achievements of industrialists and dreams of what beautiful public parks and resources were turned over to him.

 

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

 

The next time you encounter one of those ‘public-spirited’ dreamers who tell you rancorously that ‘some very desirous goals cannot be achieved without everyone’s participation,’ tell him that he cannot obtain everyone’s voluntary participation, his goals had jolly well better remain unachieved-and that men’s lives are not his to dispose of.

 

And, if you wish, give him the following example of the ideals he advocates. It is medically possible to take the corneas of a man’s eyes immediately after his death and transplant them to the eyes of a living man who is blind, thus restoring his sight (in certain types of blindness). Now, according to collectivized ethics, this poses a social problem. Should we wait until a man’s death to cut out his eyes, when other men need them? Should we regard everyone’s eyes as public property and devise a ‘fair method of distribution’? Would you advocate cutting out a living man’s eye and giving it to a blind man, so as to ‘equalize’ them? No? Then don’t struggle any further with questions about ‘public projects’ in a free society. You know the answer. The principle is the same.”

 

My response: She makes a lot of sense here: government spends too much, robbing citizens of trillions of dollars of money more than they should be taxed for the sake of public projects.

 

We need to pay off our public debt, to downsize government to a modest size, and then privatize many functions that the government operates but never should have been allowed to meddle in.

 

Collectivized ethics also applies to institutions that need to be much less hierarchical, and to living arrangements, group-living no more, but replaced by individual-living, and individuating over commonplace nonindividuating.