Beneficence

 

I receive an email of interest several times a week from The Atlas Society. This week (2/12/24) I would like to quote and comment on a paragraph from that email, called: “Throwback Thursday: The Evil of Self-Sacrifice

 

If the pursuit of happiness is one of our goals, what if a person enjoys being altruistic?”

 

My response: I think we should be leery of trying to control others: if they spend their own money and time in service to others, then that is their right and free choice, and we should not interfere.

 

My agreement with Randians is that self-sacrifice is evil more than not. Unlike them, I would allow and encourage self-sacrifice, self-discipline and delayed personal gratification of the self to the self for purposes of personal growth and development for the sake personal eudaimonia or flourishing as a self-actualizer.

 

People are born evil and that means they are altruistic and hate themselves, fleeing into the pack which gives them escape in cover in return for giving up their personal wills and power to the pack as the price of admission, to capture pack permanence of joining, and to gain social rank.

 

People naturally depraved and sinners already, and then traditional religions and modern secular humanists want them to practice altruist ethics. They take a youngster, born evil and selfish, anti-reason and anti-idealistic, filled innately with deep, powerful feelings of selflessness and self-hating, and lie to him, instructing him that to self-sacrifice or to live a life of service to others and their interests, is his highest moral aim. Consequently, he grows more evil, and their noble goals can never be met because they have an immoral ethical system which they teach to the confused young as a system that is presented to the youth admirable and to be implemented. Altruist ethics is bad and disastrous, and its proponents grow Satan’s power every day.

 

Because abstractions or slogans are made identical or emblematic to the holy cause pushed by the ruling elites to brainwash and receiving unquestioning, total obedience from their cowed masses, these passionate, pseudointellectual masses only view idealistic concepts as vetted terms that are canon and prescriptive as ideologically the standards promoting the cherished doctrine of their holy cause.

 

Atlas: “This is a question that often comes up from those unfamiliar with Objectivist ethics—as evidenced by its repetition in our weekly Instagram Takeovers—suggesting an inherent contradiction in Ayn Rand’s concept of ‘selfishness.’ Altruism entails putting others’ happiness before one’s own—benevolence, by contrast, furthers one’s self-interest, expanding one’s prospect and building social capital by treating others with kindness, respect and generosity. To better understand the distinction, we invite you to listen to a lecture by Nathaniel Branden as part of his 1968 series on The Basic Principles or Objectivism.”

 

My response: The student is invited to watch a lecture from Atlas Society audio archives, offered from the atlas society.org. It is a 1968 lecture by Nathaniel Branden; it is Lecture 12; The Evil of Self-Sacrifice in his The Basic Principles of Objectivism.

 

Does altruism entail putting others’ happiness before one’s own. In a way it does, but if one does that one engages in a contradiction, one is putting their unhappiness before one’s own pursuit of happiness, and that endeavor of pointless self-sacrifice to the interest of others will render both parties unhappy, immoral, sickened, and unfulfilled. The rage and self-loathing will grew accordingly—as will their rage and loathing for each other (the animosity is mutual), so all lose and evil grows in the world by leaps and bound.

 

The alternative to altruism is benevolence so say those at The Atlas Society, the heretical form of self-interest pushed by followers of David Kelley and the Atlas Society—heretical in the minds of the Ayn Rand Institute purists insisting, their take on orthodox Randian ethics, promulgating that unvarnished, bare selfishness and pursuing one’s own happiness without apology is what all should engage in, period.

 

I side with the Atlas Society thinkers more than the ARI purists, but they both are on the right track in accepting what Rand claimed that selfishness is virtue and selflessness, or self-sacrifice is evil. This seems horrible, counterintuitive, and contradictory, but it is true, good, ethically ideal and to be lived.

 

The followers of Kelley insist that benevolence, by contrast, furthers one’s self-interest, expanding one’s prospect and building social capital by treating others with kindness, respect, and generosity.

 

It is true that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. One can self-realize and find happiness and duty lived by self-realizing, but that one can simultaneously expand one’s prospects and build social capital by treating others with kindness, respect, and generosity.

 

I am cautious about making the building of social capital one’s of one’s ethical aims, because group-living, group-identifying, nonindividuating, conforming to group expectations, and prioritizing group rights over individual and personal rights are the critical and powerful steps that one can take to multiply and increase one’s social capital, one’s popularity, one’ status and one’s rank in whatever pack one is serving, but that kind of social capital increases evil in the pack, in oneself, in the world, and increases the power of personal powerlessness or self-loathing.

 

I like benevolence in that my own Mavellonialist ethics offers something like in in that, under my rational egoism, the moderate ethical balance is maintained and met, by treating other people with courtesy, respect, equality, dignity and by always or mostly conducting oneself with good manners in how one treats the self privately and internally, or externally interacts with others.

 

Ayn Rand though people had pure free will. I think they have largely initial, barely conscious free will, but as their intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, awareness and consciousness grow, deepen and expand, their will becomes much more powerful (the power of personal powerfulness), more good, more conscious and quite aware of actions, their consequences and if a pattern of actions fit one’s eudaimonia ambitions, and then are consistent with and contributing to one’s telos, to live as an individuated but always individuating living angel self-sacrificing to improve the self in service to the Individuators, the Good Spirits.

 

Ayn Rand believed human nature was neutral, I think. We could be and do good or be and do evil, but we if we thought and desire to live and flourish in a mode of self-interest, we would do good not evil as an adult, most of the time.

 

I do not know if she was a psychological altruist or a psychological egoist. I believe people are psychological altruists, in that they are selfless, self-hating, prefer pack-living and self-sacrificing for the sake over the pack, rather than individual-living and sacrificing the self of lower level of existing for the sake of the self’s evolving self to live on a higher level of being as a rational egoist of enlightened taste and ambition.

 

Both Rand and I are normative egoists. She is an egoist-individualist, and I am an egoist/altruist-individualist-collectivist.