Highest Value

 

The dear reader will recognize that this entry is a minor follow-up piece or addition to my 8/26/24 blog piece on pride in reaction to Jordan Peterson’s controversial remarks about pride as the cardinal sin.

 

This entry is a quotation from Ayn Rand’s book, The New Intellectual, a paragraph from Pages 130 and 131, which I will quote in full and then comment on.

 

Rand: “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—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 as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—and to live requires a sense of self-value, but man who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable values which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.”

 

My response: I am an individualist and want people to be proud of themselves if they are making a living, are ethical, modest, and effectively individuating. I would not, even then, claim that any human, however brilliant and individuated, is her own highest value. She can rate herself plenty high, and that fine and deserved, but the good deities should be her highest value/values, and so represented by her in her own cogitations, as well as so publicly announced.

 

Rand is not for mindless hedonism, or whimsical selfishness: it is implied that she want each person to maverize, and Howard Roark seems to me to be the avatar of the great soul in action. Thus her standard of rational selfishness (I prefer self-interest, a term and concept, which is not loaded with so much notorious baggage as the adjective selfishness.) insists and demands of each maverizer that she is to set up high-quality values for herself, that she is to live up to and according to, and then she will have earned her self-pride, but it must be earned, and, if she later falls backward, she can no longer be proud of how she is living.

 

I repeat, none of this has to do with slighting the good deities or boasting.

 

Rand is correct that acquired fine personal character is built upon a self-conscious, life-long effort and journey, to accrue by one’s own hard work, self-made wealth, and a creative, noble self-made soul.

 

The articulate Rand, above, notes that ‘ . . . automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice . . .’ each person is morally obligated and responsible for self-development as a self-actualizer, that she must construct, adopt, and put into action a superior set of values (not instinctively embedded in her consciousness) to live by, and, then, only then will she feel self-esteem and pride in whom she has evolved into being. As such, she deserves praise.

 

 If she continued along the popular, unremarkable lifestyle of the nonindividuated second-hander, living inside of and running with the pack, she is a sinner and rebel against God (my addition, not Rand’s), and is to be rebuked as the sinful, altruistic, selfless slacker that she was born to be, and refuses to grow out of.

 

I would argue that the good deities agree with Rand more than they do not (they want to be worshiped, treated reverently and politely—and given credit for how wonderful they are), want each human to fail to shaper her soul in the image of her moral ideal as life as individuating, rational human, approved of by the individuating self, and approved of by the good deities and their Good Spirits, who also are individuated and individuating, and expect humans to maverize also.

 

Jordan Peterson, in one of his many video clips on Ayn Rand, referred to her as not a first-rate mind. Because he is a considerable, natural genius and a man of high ethical standards, there seems at times, to be an elitist snobbishness oozing out of him. That this little, Russian Jewish woman, an immigrant from Russia, put together from scratch all that she did, seems miraculously brilliant and astonishing to me. No second-rate mind gave us the Randian support for love of liberty, egoist-individualist morality, the pride of place attributed to reasoning over feeling and instincts, capitalism, the need to return to Objectivist ontology and epistemology, her adoration for the American constitutional republic, the accentuation of individualism as the sovereign Western axiom. She is a genius, and being Jewish likely helps: Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Eric Hoffer were all or likely were all Jewish Americans, and their influence upon me is profound.

 

Peterson needs to understand that individual’s possession of personal goodness and wisdom and self-realized creativity is not necessarily caused by being a genius; being brilliant helps, but, as all humans of differing talent and intelligence maverize, we cannot predict—only God can—who will be the wisest, the more insightful, or the best predictor of how humankind should proceed. We must be humble about not listening to others; God works through them too, and if they maverize, God’s truth comes pouring out in their thoughts and shared words, and Truth comes from mysterious places in unexpected ways.

 

The professional philosophers, so smart and specially educated and credentialed, denounce and revile Rand, the amateur philosopher, but she—not they--gave us Objectivism, rationalism, individualism and capitalism and democracy as the most moral economic and humane political arrangement required for people to thrive.

 

Rand, in the paragraph quoted above, seems to me to offer a vision for individual self-realizing, that is secular humanism at its apex. She and her followers likely and excessively verge over into transhumanism, under which humans seeks to become living, mortal gods, that run their world with no place for devotion to, service towards and bended-knew obedience to the guidance of the ruling good deities.

 

As transhumanists, humans would be guilty of Luciferian intellectual pride which Peterson rightly is railing against. When the good deities have been slighted, ignored, and insulted sufficiently, when they have had enough, they will burn the godless, secular, human civilization to the ground, should it come about.

 

Rand gave us a renewed emphasis on Objectivism, capitalism, love of personal liberty, egoist morality, and a championing of reason, and these are attributes inherent in and intricately intertwined with the actions, character and worldview of the good deities.

 

Of course I do not know, but I do not think Rand is in hell for her transhumanist leanings: she alone, by herself, came up with godly philosophical attributes to emulate and prioritize—though she was an ardent materialist and atheist—and that brings humankind closer to introducing Mavellonialism to the world, and that allows the good deities to be reintroduced to humankind, and for the Good Spirits to take over and rule here on earth.

 

For her services well-rendered, I like to assume that Rand served some time in Purgatory, and then perhaps is existing in some level of heaven.

 

Let me repeat the rest of that quote and then respond to what she wrote: “that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable values which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson would be angered and aghast that I agree with Rand that the first precondition of feeling positively proud and esteeming the self is to express and live that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things. I would replace the word selfishness with enlightened self-interest, that desires the best in all things for the body and soul, but would value the self highly, but would value the good deities even higher.

 

 

Each individuator that chooses to maverize will be able and empowered to develop a talented, original-thinking consciousness that is self-interest at its finest, and, then, only then, can the self esteem the self.

 

No longer must the human individual sacrifice herself for the sake of the pack, for society, for the ism favored by her tribe, clan, or nation. That historical role of the joined, selfless nonindividuator was to live a life of sin, being in league with and in service to the Dark Couple. No more.