Nathaniel Branden, writing essay 16, for Ayn Rand’s book,
The Virtue of Selfishness, on Page 140 writes; “For every living species,
growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining
action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. This
principle is equally evident in the simple energy conversions of a plant and in
the long-range, complex activities of man. Biologically, inactivity is death.”
My response: Branden and Rand are right in what they espouse
here. We need to think, know, and serve God, and adopt an ethos that informs us
on how to act, move, live, do our duty and flourish, not only in this world as
the conservative humanists promote, but in the eternal world too. Humans grow
and grow best when self-realizing, actualizing their biological and
supernaturally potential.
Branden: “The nature and range of possible motion and
development varies from species to species. The range of a plant’s action and
development is far less than an animal’s; an animal’s is far less than a man’s.
An animal’s capacity for development ends at physical maturity and thereafter
its growth consists of the action necessary to maintain itself at a fixed
level; after reaching maturity, it does not, to any significant extent,
continue to grow in efficacy—that is, it does not significantly increase its
ability to deal with the environment. But man’s capacity does not end at
physical maturity; his capacity is virtually limitless. His power to reason is
man’s distinguishing characteristic, his mind is man’s basic means of
survival—and his ability to think, to learn, to discover new and better ways of
dealing with reality, to expand the range of his efficacy, to grow
intellectually, is an open door to a road that has no end.”
My response: Humans have free will once their power of
reasoning is their primary, essential trait. We are to self-realize as we see
fit to live, be active, to grow intellectually, materially, spiritually and intellectually—that
it is living, that is surviving and then thriving as we make the world conform
to our image of how cosmos is slightly altered to accommodate our
interpretation of how it should be assessed, envisioned and fashioned by us as
we work and are active for a lifetime.
Branden on Pages 141 and 142: “Man survives, not by
adjusting himself to his physical environment in the manner of an animal, but
by transforming his environment through productive work. ‘If a drought strikes
them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them,
animals perish—man builds dams . . . If life is a process of life-sustaining
action then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to
think—to produce—to meet the challenges of existence by never-ending effort and
inventiveness.”
My response: I concur: I wish to add that the Good Spirits
need to be included as supporters of and we as sacred humanists as well as
Randian secular humanists, can allow God to be in our lives as we grow and
invent. We also need to do this while being morally good, not hating and
destroying willingly or by accident.
Branden on Page 142: “When man discovered how to make fire
to keep himself warm, his need of thought and effort were not ended . . . when
he moved his life expectancy from nineteen to thirty to forty to sixty to
seventy, his need of thought and effort were not ended; so long as he lives,
his need of thought and effort is never ended.”
My response: yes, we need to think, do, love, create and
feel every day, anew, to keep growing and becoming; it could make one think
that we wish to become as smart, powerful, and skilled as gods, to rival or
replace God, if He did exist, or actually existed. God the Father is married to
God the Mother: they do exist, and indeed command us to self-realize until we
develop to the point of being great souls, living angels or demigods. They are
not intimidated by us, or worry that we will replace them, and nor are they
jealous of transhumanist, overweening human ambition: they gave us life and expect us to man up and
maverize, and to take on our share of the burden to expand heaven throughout
the universe, as is our duty, and greatest pleasure should we come to take on
this noble role, God-sanctioned and God-rewarded.
Branden on Pages 142 and 143: “Every achievement of man is a
value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and
values. Life is growth; not to move forward is to fall backward; life remains
life, only so long as it advances. Every step upward opens man to a wider range
of action and achievement –and creates the need for that action and
achievement. There is no final, permanent ‘plateau.’ The problem of survival is
never ‘solved,’ once and for all, with no further thought or motion required.
More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival
demands constant growth and creativeness.
Constant growth is, further, a psychological need of man. It
is a condition of his mental well-being. His mental well-being requires that he
possess a firm sense of control over reality, of control of his existence—the
conviction that he is competent to live. And this requires, not omniscience or
omnipotence, but the knowledge that one’s methods of dealing with reality—the
principles by which one functions—are right. Passivity is incompatible with
this state. Self-esteem is not a value that, once achieved, is maintained
automatically thereafter; like every other human value, it can be maintained
only by action. Self-esteem, the basic conviction that one is competent to
live, can be maintained only so long as one is engaged in a process of growth,
only so long as one is committed to the task of increasing one’s efficacy. In
living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one
proceeds to disintegrate—in the mental realm no less than in the physical.”
My response: I approve. Living as a worldly creature and a
divine creature requires that we keep moving, keep improving and growing,
morally, spiritually, creatively, and intellectually. We gain and keep
self-esteem not just by being competent but by acting to make the world and
ourselves better spiritually and morally as we create and invent and produce.
Branden on Pages 143 and 144: “Observe, in this connection,
the widespread phenomenon of men who are old by the time they are thirty. These
are men who, having in effect concluded that they have ‘thought enough,’ drift
on the diminishing momentum of their past effort—and wonder what has happened
to their fire and energy, and why they are dimly anxious, and why their
existence seems so desolately impoverished, and why they see themselves sinking
into some nameless abyss—and never identify the fact that, in abandoning the
will to think, one abandons the will to live.”
My response: Branden and Rand are contrasting the life of
the individuator, that grows, lives, and thinks as he self-realizes for a
lifetime, and the drab, mediocre life of the common, majority, the
nonindividuator, who ceases to think, ceases to grow, and ceases to live though
he is still biologically alive. Thinking for these thinkers is code for
self-realizing, and living is to self-realize. I agree.
Branden: “Man’s need to grow—and his need, therefore, of the
social and existential conditions that make growth possible—are facts of
crucial importance to be considered in judging or evaluating any
politico-economic system. One should be concerned to ask: Is a given
politico-economic system pro-life or anti-life, conductive or inimical to the
requirements of man’s survival?”
My response: If that politico-economic system is conducive
to being pro-life for humans in this world and in the next, it needs to be
God-centered as rational believers in God, living as supercitizens
individuating in this constitutional republic.
Branden: “The great merit of capitalism is its unique
appropriateness to the requirements of human survival and to man’s need to
grow. Leaving men free to think, to act, to produce, to attempt the untried and
the new, its principles operate in a way that rewards effort and achievement,
and penalizes passivity.
This is one of the chief reasons it is denounced.
In Who Is Ayn Rand?, discussing the nineteenth-century
attacks on capitalism, I wrote: ‘In the writings of both medievalists and
socialists, one can observe the unmistakable longing for a society in which
man’s existence will be automatically guaranteed to him—that is, in which man
will not have to bear responsibility for his own survival. Both camps project
their ideal society as one characterized by that which they call ‘harmony,’ by
freedom from the rapid change or challenge or by the exacting demands of
competition; a society in which each must do his prescribed part to contribute
to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one will face the necessity of
making choices and decisions that will crucially affect his life and his
future; in which the question of what one has or has not earned, and does and
does not deserve, will not come up; in which rewards will not be tied to
achievement and in which someone’s benevolence will guarantee that one will
never bear the consequences of one’s errors. The failure of capitalism to what
may be termed this pastoral view o existence, it is essential to the
medievalists’ and socialists’ indictment of a free society. It is not a Garden
of Eden that capitalism offers men.”
My response: Rand actually is offering, without realizing
it, a first step towards achieving, a glimpse of the coming, high civilization,
Garden of Eden here on earth, near-utopia, a society of free market,
God-fearing, God-loving, anarchist indivduator supercitizens running and
enjoying life in their constitutional republic.
The medievalists and socialists offer hell-on-earth, the
newest version of that same on collectivist hive of slavery, tyranny, poverty,
needless suffering and want that has plagued poor humanity for thousands of
years of senseless suffering, not knowing how to live, how to act, how to
survive in this world and the next, how to go forward.
Branden continues: “Among the arguments used by those that
long for a ‘pastoral’ existence, is a doctrine which, translated into explicit
statement, consists of: the divine right of stagnation.
This doctrine is illustrated in the following incident. Once,
on a plane trip, I became engaged in a conversation with an executive of a
labor union. He began to decry the ‘disaster’ of automation, asserting that
increasing thousands of workers would be permanently unemployed as a result of
new machines and that ‘something ought to be done about it.’ I answered that
this is a myth that has been exploded many times; that the introduction of new machines
invariably resulted in increasing the demand for labor as well as raising the
general standard of living; that this was demonstrable theoretically and
observable historically. I remarked that automation increased the demand for
skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, and that doubtless many workers
would need to learn new skills. ‘But,’ he asked indignantly, ‘what about
workers who don’t want to learn new skills? Why should they have troubles?’”
My response: Eric Hoffer, back in the 60s or 70s, I do not
recall which, was worried that automation would leave millions of workers
unemployed and living off the government like a lazy aristocracy, getting
income without effort and machines took all of their jobs. He rightly worried
that unemployed workers and the middle class would become an existential threat
to social stability as millions of people with no work to fill their lives with
meaning would g=join whatever quirky ism and overthrow society. Later, he felt
the workers had adopted somehow, but Branden is right that we have to keep
evolving with technology and change
If the middle and working class of any industrialized or
developing nation could learn to self-realize and live as supercitizens, their
fecund creativity and powerful reasoning capacity would allow them to invent
new jobs and services, so that whoever wanted to work could work and feel
fulfilled by working, a primary source of meaning and enhancing self-esteem for
all adults.
With AI here, it could be that humans just do jobs and
invent jobs that robots are not allowed to take over, because, even if less efficient,
humans need to work to stay physically and mentally healthy. Having a free ride
and nothing to do is corrosive to the human spirit.
Branden on Pages 144 and 145: “This means that the ambition,
the farsightedness, the drive to do better and still better, the living energy of
creative men are to be throttled and suppressed—for the sake of men who have ‘thought
enough’ and ‘learned enough’ and do not wish to be concerned with the future
nor with the bothersome question of what their jobs depend on.”
My response: We all must grow and adapt, so Branden is
right.
Branden: “Alone on a desert island, bearing sole
responsibility for his own survival, no man could permit himself the delusion
that tomorrow is not his concern, that he can safely rest on yesterday’s knowledge
and skills, and that nature owes him ‘security.’ It is only in society—where a
burden of a man’s default can be passed to the shoulders of a man who did not
default—that such a delusion can be indulged in. (And it is here that the
morality of altruism becomes indispensable, to provide a sanction for such
parasitism.)”
My response: Amen.
Branden: “The claim that men doing the same type of job should
all be paid the same wages, regardless of differences in their performance or
output, thus penalizing the superior worker in favor of the inferior—this is
the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.
The claim that men should keep their jobs or be promoted on grounds,
not of merit, but of seniority, so that the mediocrity who is ‘in’ is favored
above the talented newcomer, thus blocking the newcomer’s future and that of
his potential employer—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.”
My response: We need unions so that workers have some bargaining
power to protect their rights, and if union members were maverizers as a group,
as they one day will be, then there could be minimum pay for all, and then some
incentive for super-achievers to receive merit pay. The sense of solidarity
among these workers need not divide them, if they remain true to their
brotherhood principles, and this paradoxical and cognitive dissonance in each
worker’s mind could be reconciled and balanced, most of the time as workplace
conditions and union-management could accommodate each other for mutual gain.
I am in Operating Engineers Local 70 right now, and have
deep affection for the union movement, but I also like union members become maverizers,
and that brotherhood would be powerful, innovative, push management to evolve,
share ownership and say, and no interest in stagnation to preserve inefficient employment
should much longer be an issue.
Branden on Pages 145 and 146: ” . . . The court’s decree,
under the antitrust laws, that a successful business establishment does not
have a right to its patents, but must give them, royalty-free, to a would-be
competitor who cannot afford to pay for them (General Electric case, 1948)—this
is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.”
My response: Stagnation preference is a secular phenomenon more
than a divine phenomenon, because under Mavellonialism, we now recognize and
posit that the Divine Couple and the Good Spirits are individuals and individuators,
more than group-creatures and nonindividuators.
The Good Spirits would remind us that we need to grow, think,
learn, create, change, become and constantly challenge ourselves to go forward
and upward for a lifetime and that is extending God’s kingdom on earth. This
applies to workers unionized or not, and to employers, small or corporate.
Branden: “ . . . Capitalism, by its nature entails, a
constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social
conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as best
to further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be
active in the productive process, whatever they level of ability. But it is not
geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality.
When one considers the spectacular success, the unprecedented
prosperity, that capitalism has achieved in practice (even with hampering
controls)—and when one considers the dismal failure of every variety of collectivism—it
should be clear that the enemies of capitalism are not motivated, at root, by
economic considerations. They are motivated by metaphysical considerations—by a
rebellion against the human mode of survival, a rebellion against the fact that
life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action—and by the dream
that, if only they can harness the men who do not resent the nature of life,
they will make resistance tolerable for those who do resent it.”
My response: Amen.
