On Page 108 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces essay 12, Man’s Rights: “If one wishes to advocate a free society—that is—capitalism—one must realize its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted, and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called conservatives.”
My response: A free society is a capitalist society and under it individual rights are best upheld, but collective rights and group right or identity rights are pushed by the Left, and conservatives barely fight for liberty and individual rights, because they are altruists and collectivists themselves.
Rand: “’Rights’ are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”
My response: Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law—that is brilliant, so moral law and a just legal system cannot be viable, permanent, or just unless individual rights are upheld.
Rand on Pages 108 and 109: “Every political system is based on some code of ethics. The dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variations of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny, differing only in degree, not in basic principle, limited only by the accidents of tradition, of chaos, bloody strife and periodic collapse. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside of moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter—and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man’s earthly existence.”
My response: Rand is insightful here: she is asserting that egoist ethics require that individual rights as a moral ethos has primacy over society, group right, group values, and they are parked under the aegis of individualistic moral law. Society must no longer be placed outside of moral law, acting as the source of judgment for moral law, bringing individualistic moral law under and forced to play second fiddle to group rights and altruistic values, aligned with the needs of society, an abstraction cited but that is nominalistic only, not real a concrete thing but a collection of flesh and blood individuals. Her point seems right.
Rand: “Since there is no such entity as ‘society,’ since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society, were exempt from moral law; subject only to traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience—on the implicit principle of: ‘The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.
This was true of all statist systems, under all the variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ summarizes the political theory of the first—‘Vox populi, vox dei’ of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with Pharaoh as the embodied god—the unlimited majority rule of Athens—the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome—the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages—the absolute monarchy of France—the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia—the gas chambers of Nazi Germany—the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.”
Rand on Pages 109, 110 and 111: “All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics—and their common characteristic is the fact that the society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim-worshiper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.
The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state. , as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.
All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of other, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. All previous systems held that man’s life belonged to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that a man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is a property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.”
My response: I love her thinking here, that individual rights are natural, and if the political system must be subordinated to individual rights, then the state will be limited in size and function. Yes, US is the first moral society in history.
My idea of an anarchist-individuator supercitizen meshes nicely with the idea that all political arrangement, law and policies must protect individual rights, and then we will run society for the nonexistent group benefits as well as we can without forsaking our individual rights. How my political system meshes with Rand’s remains to be seen, but clearly we want egoistic morality to curb government power and protect individual rights.
Rand: “A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all other rights are its consequences or corollaries); a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generating action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by nature of a rational being the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
The concept of a right pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.
Thus for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.
Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action; like all the others: it is not a right to an object, but to action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.
The concepts of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.”
My response: she is solid here. The idea of individual rights is still fairly novel, and it is the key to human survival going forward: we get it right or totalitarianism, war and weapons of mass destruction will end our species. We are too smart and too dangerous to be illogical and passionate about settling our disputes any longer.
Our individual rights have two objective sources: the mystical, or from God, our Creator, or as natural rights, flowing from Nature from whence we evolved, and both sources are objective, necessary and unalienable, not to be stolen or displaced by politicians, Leftists, dictators, United Nations and mob rule.
If governments are the source of our rights, then they can remove them when they want to, and that is scary and has happened, as totalitarian monsters wipe out rights, see human nature as infinitely plastic and remake and distort humans in all kinds of cruel, horrifying ways.
Rand on Pages 111 and 112: “The Declaration of Independence stated that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ Whether one believes man is a product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.
The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use him mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids for him the irrational (Atlas Shrugged).
My response: I agree over all.
Rand: “To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgement, or to expropriate his own values. Basically, there is only one way to do this: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of men’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two—by forbidding the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.
The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that ‘to secure these rights the governments are instituted among men.’ This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.
Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect men from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government—as an explicit declaration that the individual rights supersede any public or social power.”
My response: I concur, but the Progressives and the Administrative state do not believe or rule that individual rights supersede any public or social power—observe how the governor of New Mexico this weekend banned 2A rights in Albuquerque for 30 days, all in the name of emergency powers and for the public good—she is a dictator, and her Progressive ilk are m=just getting going.
It will not revert to the federal government being the servant of the people instead of its ruler as its currently is, until the government is downsized drastically within its traditional, constitutional boundaries, say like it was in 1872, and individual rights are the law of the land as anarchist-individuator supercitizens get the government in line, and keep them in line.
Rand: “The result was the pattern of a civilized society which—for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years—America came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships—in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.
This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. But it was not formulated explicitly, nor fully accepted nor consistently practiced.
America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism, with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.”
My response: The paragraph just above quote is brilliant, that altruism is incompatible with freedom, capitalism and individual rights: altruism is compatible with communism, tyranny, and group rights, all hallmarks of Leftists ambition.
Rand on Pages 113 and 114: “It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.
A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated ‘rights’ that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these ‘printing-press rights’ negate authentic rights.
Consider the curious fact that such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new ‘rights’ and of slave-labor camps.
The ‘gimmick’ was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm. The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration ‘will affirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience sixteen years ago . . . A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?
Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values—goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?
If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.
Any ‘alleged’right of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
No man can have a right to impose and unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the ‘right to enslave.’
A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.”
My response: Amen.
Rand: “Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers; they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean others must make him happy.”
My comment: we are guaranteed, under the Constitution, equality of opportunity and the right to pursue happiness, but there are no positive rights in the Constitution mandating equality of outcome, or that government will step in to make people happy or whole—life, over all, is a do it yourself enterprise, a blessing, not a cures. Altruists curse people when they see themselves as their brothers’ keepers.
Rand on Pages 114 and 115: “The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
The right to property means that a man has a right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and dispose of it, it does not mean that others must provide him with property.
The right of free speech means that a man has a right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that the other side must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or printing press which to express his ideas,
Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Everyone of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his speech on others . . . .There is no such thing as ‘a right to a job’ . . . There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.
Property rights and the right of free trade are the only ‘economic rights’ (they are, in fact, political rights)—and there can be no such thing as ‘an economic bill of rights.’ But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to force and violates the rights of others is a criminal—and men have legal protection against him.
Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors—the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions—perpetrated by human governments. Potentially government is the most dangerous threat to a man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.
My comment: She is spot on: altruism and collectivism gave us totalitarian government, and she provides the laundry list of way that they have terrorized the masses in the name of utopia, better times and group rights. When tyrannical government turns on the people, and they all do sooner or later, they are far more vicious and destructive than any serial killer.
Rand on Pages 115, 116 and 117: “Now observe the process by which that protection is being destroyed.
The process consists of ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government (which private citizens have no power to commit) and thus freeing the government from all restrictions. The switch is becoming progressively more obvious in the field of free speech. For years, the collectivists have been propagating the notion that a private individual’s refusal to finance an opponent is a violation of the opponent’s right of free speech and an act of censorship.
It is ‘censorship’ they claim, if a newspaper refuses to employ or publish writers whose ideas are diametrically opposed to its policy . . . And while the people are clamoring about ‘economic rights,’ the concepts of political rights are vanishing. It is forgotten that the right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of ‘the right of free speech’ is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities
from forcible suppression—not to guarantee them the support, advantages and rewards of a popularity they have not gained . . . Such is the state of one of today’s most crucial issues: political rights versus ‘economic rights.’ It’s either-or. One destroys the other. But there are in fact no ‘economic rights,’ no ‘collective rights,’ no ‘public-interest rights.’ The term’ individual rights’ is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.
Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.’
My comment: I admire her for contrasting political rights for individuals versus economic rights under soft tyranny.
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