Rand And Mystical, Traditional Ethics And Modern Neomystical Ethics

On Page 15 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand writes traditional ethics are the will either of God, or God's secular replacement, nonexistent abstraction, society: "The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable 'will of God' as the standard of good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with 'the good of society,' thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as 'the standard of the good is that which is good for society.' This meant, in logic--and, today in worldwide practice--that 'society' stand above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since 'the good' is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that 'society' may do anything it please, since 'the good' is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And-since there is no entity as 'society,' since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority of any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in service of that gang's desires." My response: Rand is conflating mystical, irrational sources of ethical standard, arbitrary, personal and subjective with traditional, barbaric even wicked codes of ethics, of divine origin, supposedly revealed by its Author, the Divinity, or represented as shared, via circular reasoning, as a cultural construct of the secular deity, society. Do I agree with this conflation. Well, if Logos or God is the rational principle that created, made and operates the chaotic world as a cosmos, it would be reasonable to assume that the ethical will of God presented to humans as a standard of behavior would parallel and be analogous with natural law controlling God's cosmos. Traditional morality can be mystically and irrationally derived and that may be more barbaric than enlightened, but such sources of value are ancient and viable but not to be dismissed so offhand as Rand does. The altruistic claim by the secular neomystics that the will of the majority or elite that run society is the ethical standard to be obeyed by all the citizens in a community or polity is untenable. I admire Rand for bring forth a rational, secular, humanistic, egoistic code, but it needs blending with traditional morality, although I am not yet able to master or explain how the blending and integration is to proceed. Both theistic and society-based moral codes preach the top billing for the collective good at the expense of individual members of society, and that is morally wrong and wasteful of human potential and their happiness.