On Page 34 of her book The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand lays out that altruistic ethics force people to be sadists or masochists, and I could not agree more, and I see some convergence of our ethical thinking, occurring likely because rational egoists, like we are, following similar lines of thinking.
I have, for example, long written that it is one self-interest not to seek excess power over others (sadistic), or allow others to have excess power over oneself masochistic) One needs one share of power to self-realize and make a living and be a supercitizen, but one cannot be true to oneself or remain free, if one allows others to tyrannize one (robbing one of money, power and liberty), or seeks to tyrannize others (robbing others of their power, money and liberty). One is to abuse no one (sadistic) and allow no one to abuse one (masochistic). Rand and I are working in the same silver mine.
She writes: “The moral cannibalism of the hedonist and altruist doctrines lie in the premise that happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.
Today, hold this premise as an absolute not to be questioned. And when one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in one’s self-interest—which he must selflessly denounce. The idea that a man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to these humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or anyone, s long as the concept ‘rational’ is omitted from the context of ‘values,’ ‘desires,’ ‘self-interest’ and ethics.”
My response: when everything we do is tied to the lives of others, when our motives are altruistic as charitable and sacrificing towards others, or hedonistic as happiness attained by injuring others, this collectivist moral calculus is misleading. If everyone was a rational egoist, not pursuing enlightened self -interest, not cheap, basic urges satisfaction type of selfishness, we do not have time to love ourselves and maverize so we interfere with others and allow them to interfere without lives and projects, and all are held back and down. So, when we turn selfish, mean, or predatory, then we are already sacrifice and used to be now sacrificing, now we cannibalize our neighbors or lest those predators cannibalize us; collectivism sounds like noble brother hood, but it really holds all individuals down and back. Rand practices her golden rule, not sacrificing others to oneself, or oneself to others, and this is kindness to others, to let them be free to self-realize. She is also pointing out that we tie people to each other as ethically justified, they waste their lives running in packs and sacrifice to each other of each other, and all lose. That is evil.
Rand: “The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means : the values required for man’s survival qua man—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the ‘aspirations,’ the feelings , the whims or needs of irrational brutes, who has never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and conceive of no self-interest but grabbing the loot of the moment.”
My response: if Rand promotes selfishness, and she does, it is not the kind that helps the self at the expense of others, or the kind that let others exploit the self and destroys one life so one cannot put together the will and resources to maverize. Her selfishness is rational in that it must follow some Aristotelian higher-level self-interest of self-development of one potential into actuality as one life’s work. This requires hard work and self-discipline and there is not much immediate pleasure, hedonism, or unwillingness to sacrifice one temporary pleasure for long term gain.
Her biggest flaw is her purity, her uncompromising vision her near fanatical worship of reason for we are creatures of feeling and passion more than reason and temperate judgment, and these latte traits need to be nurtured in a maverizing child. Just as selfishness and reason can be used to evil ends, whether the motive is egoistic or altruistic, so feelings and whims can be used to good ends, not just evil ends. And irrational urges and will and whimsical choices do serve evil, or altruism and collectivism more than rational planning and rational intuition serve do, though good and egoism and individualism can be used for evil ends too. Rand is too simplistic and her moral agent at times seems like an idealized, cardboard character not a real flesh-and-blood, complicated human being struggling and confused her on earth trying to be good and a contributor. Still Rand is mostly right about reason being close to goodness and irrational whims and desire leading us usually to ruin and evil, but life is not easy or simple, and our efforts are a mixed bag of motives and willing to do good sometimes and evil other times.
Rand: ‘The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices or accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”
My response: This paragraph is lovely and so true and noble. Under free markets and a constitutional republic, rational egoists, maverizers and supercitizens, I suggest, can exchange goods and services freely without government regulation, and whatever conflicts arise can be usually settled by honorable compromise and reasonable negotiation. None sacrifices or is sacrificed too, and all love themselves and by handling their affairs well and for themselves, awhile allowing and enjoying neighbors so conducting themselves, allows all to prosper and be happy in peace, prosperity, and harmony and that is rational selfishness or enlightened self-love that leads to the common good: all are loved and cared for but regularly in a self-sustaining way.
Rand continues on Pages 34 and 35: “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.
A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat man as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange---an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. A trader does not expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. He does not switch to others the burden of his failures and he does not mortgage his life in bondage to the failure of others.”
My response: Rand and I again converge in our thinking: implicit to her remarks about not living or vying for economic profit as masters or slaves, but as independent equals, means that a classless society of upper middle calls majority will come about in a capitalist, constitutional republic Hierarchies will mostly disappear, and those that stay will be only as many levels as necessary to provide whatever public or private function that are required, and they shall not sprawl out like a socialist octopus with clerics ruling every aspect of a citizens private or economic life.
Rand is sharp up above.
Rand: “In spiritual issues –by ‘spiritual’ I mean ‘pertaining to man’s consciousness’)—the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love for the weaknesses and flaws of others, only their virtues.”
My response: this paragraph is more difficult to translate, but I think she is thinking of friendship and social groups of first-handers (positive, accomplished, rational egoist achievers and producers that love themselves, the means of loving others, and they enjoy each other’s company not out of affection for weakness but because the other is a moral pure, a virtuous, accomplished, self-sufficient individual). Those that group-live and do not individuate, not only are not very virtuous, but they are also vicious because they never work to be virtuous, individualizing or accomplished, because they are nothing, they hate themselves, hate others and the hatred is mutual and this brotherhood of the mediocre herd is where these clingers and joiners prey on and yet hide behind each other’s weaknesses. They are crippled in their individual consciousnesses, and that arrangement is a big lie holding all down and back.
Rand on Pages 35 and 36: “To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm , consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
My response: A lovely moral paragraph and 90% correct. I would add that some love from selfless altruism is genuine and benevolent—it does not always grow evil in the self or others, as well as some selfishness is purely individualistic, and it hurts the self and others straight up. Again, Rand’s moral agent has an ideal that is too pure, too high, too uncompromising. If we can get people to maverize most of the time and love themselves and God, most of the time then they are pretty darn good persons helping themselves, God and others and they will get to heaven. Rand needed to have some mercy on poor humans with their feet of clay, and her uncompromising fanatically severed standards of right and wrong may have been why she drove people away, and her disciples were splintered into bitterly warring sects that hate and seek to eviscerate each other—all of which hurts the egoist cause that they live and fight to advance.
Humans are animals more than angels so for Rand to expect and demand that we be creatures of pure reason is not only unreasonable but can be cruel and counter-productive. We are beasts that the moralist seeks to civilize. We are not rational robots of pure good will like a conservative, capitalist Dr. Spock. We are much richer, more bestial, and self-contradictory than Rand is allowing for. Her moral absolutism and her epistemological dogmatism and her absolute faith in the law of contradiction are right for the most part, but that is not how the world is and works and that is not how humans are constituted so to help people get well, we need to use Randian ethics, add in a benevolent deity and be patient and show mercy at human lapses and shortcomings. Over time, a society of first-hander supercitizens will come about.
Rand: “It is only on a basis of rational selfishness—on the basis of justice—that men can be fit to live together in a free, peaceful, prosperous, benevolent, rational society.”
My response: What a noble, truthful short paragraph. Amen.
Rand: “Can man derive any personal benefit from living in a human society? Yes, if it is a human society. The true great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his efforts to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each add to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or self-sustaining farm.”
My response: I like this paragraph, adding only that society provides kids a foundation from which they can become socialized and self-controlling so they can maverize as adults. Living in society gives people company and comfort, and these gains are not insignificant, though they are not substitute or replacement for answering the personal call from the Good Spirits to become a living angel.
Rand on Page 36: “But these very benefits indicate, delimit what kind of men can be of value to one another, and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society. Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to a human being—nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their needs, demands and protection, a society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a society based on the ethics of altruism. No society can be of value to a man’s life if the price is his surrender to his right to his life.”
My response: I agree totally. We want everyone to work and produce to the degree they can. With providing productive value that is marketable in our free market economy, as many people as possible should be contributors not dependents. I would add that this adult majority be trained up as self-actualizers and supercitizens. The ethics of altruism must be replaced by the ethics of egoism so that humans can achieve high civilization so each adult can enjoy the right to his own life without the government, county, social groups, or family units, holding him down and back.
Rand on Pages 36 and 37: “The basic political principle of Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clearcut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.
The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
I will not attempt, in a brief lecture, to discuss the political theory of Objectivism. Those who are interested will find it presented in full detail in Atlas Shrugged. I will say that every political system is based on and derived from a theory of ethics—and that the Objectivist ethics is the moral base needed by that politico-economic system which today, is being destroyed all over the world, destroyed precisely by a lack of moral, philosophical defense and validation: the original American system, Capitalism. If it perishes, it will perish by default, undiscovered and unidentified: no other subject has been hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions and misrepresentations. Today, few people know what capitalism is, how it works and what it was in actual history.”
My response: All true.
Rand on Page 37: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting it and distorting it from the start. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future.
For those that are interested in the history and the psychological causes of the philosophers’ treason against capitalism, I will mention that I discuss them in the title essay of my book For the New Intellectual.”
My response: Sounds good.
Rand on Pages 37 and 38: “The present discussion has been confined to the subject of ethics. I have presented the barest essentials of my system, but they are sufficient to indicate in what manner the Objectivist ethics is the morality of life—as against the three major schools of ethical theory, the mystic, the social, the subjective, which have brought the world to its present state and which represents the morality of death. These three schools differ only in their method of approach, nit in their content. In content, they are merely variants of altruism, the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. The differences occur only over the question of who is to be sacrificed to whom. Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value—and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.”
My response: I do agree with her above, and I like her point that altruism promotes death and self-destruction (chaos and evil) while rational egoism advocates affirmation of life and self-realization (creativity and good).
Rand: “The
mystic theory is explicitly based on the premise that the standard value of man’s
ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another
supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it
is unsuited for and opposed to man’s life on earth, and that man must take the
blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone
for being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and Middle Ages
are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.”
My response: as a polytheist and Christian, I am not opposed to mystically derived ethics, and indeed suggest that God as the Creator is an individualist and individuator, and that God not only wants but commands that humans live as first-handers and great souls here on earth, and in this next world. There will always be suffering here, and perhaps some in the next world, but there can be joy and comfort and play here on earth as well as in the next world.
Rand the secular humanist and physicalist is right that our life here does and should have its own rewards received here and now, and that is what happens. And Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson seem to see the Creator as rational principle in making the universe, so it is not a stretch to see humans as a rational individualists creating cosmos and lessening chaos here on earth while here on earth, and that Judeo-Christian values implicitly have some individualistic or egoistic ethical undertones, though altruism is largely altruistic codes of ethics.
Rand: “The social theory of ethics substitutes ‘society’ for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of the individual, but it the life of the disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody but himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto ‘dog eat dog’—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory. The existential monuments to this to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.”
My response: when the state replaces God as the deity to be worshiped, it is a malevolent deity, especially in its totalitarian instantiation. Altruism, and self-sacrifice are the moral slogans that true believers in the system chant to each other and to themselves, until they believe it. Marx and his followers saw group versus group and tribe versus tribe in eternal conflict, vying for money, power, control, territory, and dominance. The war between oppressor and the oppressed, and the ruling revolutionary elite must conduct revolution to overthrow the old guard, and usher in utopia for its young masters to rule and crush people with.
One of the most loving and noble things that Rand has done for humanity was to propose her egoistic ethical system as persistently, loudly, and consistently as she did. She not only warns humanity about how evil altruism actually is--once a mass movement’s leader takes over the government and start world wars, and purge his own people but she points out how altruist ethics keep people down and back even in a democracy like America.
She provides me an egoistic model, excellent and singular, to build on, adding the individualistic Good Sprits, and our divine spark to be actualized by living as a living angel. It is a disgrace that this saint to ethical egoism has been sneered at and dismissed for generations by ethicists, philosophers and intellectuals, CRT, and postmodernist radicals, still pushing their pathological altruism hatred, destruction and death.
Rand on Page 38 and 39: “The subjectivist theory of ethics, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more, it is a negation of reality, a negation not only of man’s existence but all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present case of our culture.”
My response: subjective epistemologies and ethical systems are not all false, wicked, irrational, contradictory in logic and due to their Hericlitean ontology, but they are so more than not. Rand is no moderate but is a black and white monist: her dogmatic epistemology and her dogmatic ethical code of egoism is presented as it is to be quite consistent, without contradiction and based on reality out there. But that is not how the world is made, works, or is best reacted to ethically. She is mostly right, good, noble true, consistent, and is accurate in how she describes the world as as it is, but she is not all correct in her objectivist epistemology and ethos.
Rand: “It is only philosophy that sets man’s goals and determines their course; it is only philosophy that can save them now. Today the world is facing a choice: if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that men have to reject.
I will close with words of John Galt, which I address, as he did, to all the moralists of altruism, past or present: “You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.”
My response: Rand’s egoist ethics do uplift people in this world as first-handers, and I would like to extend that offer for people to find hope, meaning and happiness in the next world by believing in and serving a benevolent deity as a spiritual first-hander, a living angel.
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