Rand On Our Desire To Live

 

On Page ix of her book, The Virtue Of Selfishness, Ayn Rand points out that we are creatures and rational animals that speak, and we have to work to support ourselves. Our desire to survive, thrive and be happy makes an egoist ethical standard workable and basic; otherwise, people will not teleologically strive to make their way in the world. She has a point.

 

She writes: “Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.”

 

My response: Life is good and to want to live, work, prosper, be happy and enjoy one’s life for one’s own benefit is good. Rand asserts that egoist ethics is an intuitive, easy adjacent value system to valuing one’s own life, and living and doing one’s own thing. Note that living one’s life is good, but one must put in effort. I construe this to mean that one is self-sufficient, self-reliant and works and provides for oneself. If all people did this, poverty and welfare would be “used-to-occur” social phenomena. Altruism attacks humans, attacks their living, attacks their beautiful and noble pursuit of self-interest, and she decries altruism is evil beyond belief. I agree with her.

 

She continues: “Yet that is the meaning of altruism, implicit in such examples as the equation of an industrialist with a robber. There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see ‘The Objectivist Ethics’).”

 

My response: Rand champions capitalism and the industrialists and entrepreneurs that make it grow and produce wealth arising from provided good and services. The capitalist is self-centered, a good person whose humanization is realized as he grows in wealth an influence growing out of his famed industrial prowess.

 

The robber seems selfish, and he is, but his selfishness is the altruistic parasitic exploiting others that are productive. He dehumanizes himself and his victims and it is a revolting, ugly spectacle.