The Virtue Of Selfishness 17

 

Ayn Rand on Page 118 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, introduces her essay 13, Collectivized Rights: “Rights are a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Just as a man needs a moral code in order to survive (in order to act, to choose the right goals and to achieve them), so a society (a group of men) needs moral principles in order to organize a social system consonant with man’s nature and with the requirements of his survival.”

 

My response: This short, rich paragraph is most insightful. I do not know how others define rights but she defines it as a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Even a racial individualist and great soul, like I am, has to admit that we are social creatures. So, how are we to live so that we can satisfy our need to be social without group-living and its corrupting, sadomasochist, conflict-and-competition-producing games and structures, tearing up everyone and growing evil in the world? I would suggest egoist ethics, individual-living, self-realization per capita (if each individual wills her life to be that of a creator) and prime priority set for individual rights over group rights, group-living, altruist ethics, collectivist economics, government interfering in our lives as self- authorized social engineers and the cult of nonindividuating and mediocre personal development as the hallmark of social rank and popularity.

 

We are born as sinful, savage beast, so it is patent that we need a moral code to live by to keep us from daily tearing each other apart, robbing, raping, stealing, killing, looting, and smashing property that we did not construct and do not own.

 

For humans to survive we need rational egoism as our ethos, and that is a bit compatible with our basic nature, but we are naturally good enough to grow into being good souls and maverizers, with much dedication, self-control, and self-discipline.

 

The traditional altruist codes, what Rand dismisses as mystical or social, are compatible with our rotten basic natures, and we will be attracted to that hemlock cup, willingly, unthinkingly, and eagerly, all day long without the Good Spirits to nudge us to maverize.

 

Human got free will when their Creator endowed them with fairly big brains, with concept and language for them to symbolize abstractly what they have been reasoning about. One definition of free will, it occurs to me, is that a creature has it, once their bestial nature is no longer kept moral or under control by genetics and instinct, but the creature now must think, devise a moral code, and live by it in order that he can become civilized, and that he and his neighbors are fit to live in some semblance of peace, law and order in their community.

 

Now when people do not self-realize, continue to group-live, nonindividuated and run in packs, reinforcing their stultifying conformity, mediocrity and non-growth, They choose group rights, collectivist government and economics and altruist ethics: as such they have free will but it is at a very crude level of development, of low resolution awareness. Only if they answer the call from the Good Spirits to maverize, to become great souls or living angels or sacred first-handers, the freedom of their will grows with their expanded and deepened, powerful intelligence and heightened consciousness. They could still will to sin, and often do in minor ways, but their good habits of long standing and their powerful good wills, not give them great resistance to temptation.

 

I believe in a moral paradox: Thomas Hobbes and I share the same very low opinion of natural humans, but he posits an absolute monarchy and tyranny under a social contract where the people are willing to give up their liberty in exchange for a civil society,  authoritarian to be sure, but one with safety, security, stability and some level of peace and prosperity.

 

I, by contrast, argue the opposite: only in an advanced state of tremendous person liberty, wielded by each anarchist-individuator supercitizen, are people in a free market constitutional republic liberated enough and powerful enough to control their own natures. They are exemplars personally instantiated in their own selfs to be the embodiment of ordered liberty politically and high moral living on the ethical side. Only in liberty can humans become good and lead ethical lives.

 

Rand on ages 118 and 119: “Just as man can evade reality and act on the blind whim of any given moment, but can achieve nothing save progressive self-destruction—so a society can evade reality and established a system ruled by the blind whims of its members or its leader, by the majority gang of any given moment, by the current demagogue or by a permanent dictator. But such a society can achieve nothing save the rule of brute force and a state of progressive self-destruction.

 

What  subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that “Anything I do is right because I choose to do it,’ is not a moral principle, but is a negation of morality—so the notion ‘Anything that society does is right because society chooses to do it,’ is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principle.

 

When ‘might’ is opposed to ‘right,’ the concept of ‘might’ can have only one meaning: the power of brute, physical force—which, in fact, is not a ‘power’ but the most hopeless state of impotence; it is merely the power to destroy; it is the ‘power’ of a stampede of animals running amuck.”

 

My response: I like her definition of violence against other, not as power but as impotence, all the loser actor can do is destroy; it is a negative power if it is a power.

 

Rand: “Yet that is the goal of today’s intellectuals. At the root of all their conceptual switches, there lies another, more fundamental one: the switch of the concepts of rights from the individual to the collective—which means: the replacement of “The Rights of Man’ by ‘The Rights of the Mob.’”

 

My response: Intellectuals are for positive or economic rights because that requires government tyranny and big government ruling private live to ensure that such rights are universally implemented, lived by and believed in the the mesmerized masses. The intellectuals will be a main part of the new ruling elite cracking the whip over the hands and on the backs of their underlings in bondage.

 

Rand: “Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression ‘individual rights’ is a redundancy (which one has to use or purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression ‘collective rights’ is a contradiction in terms.”

My response: this, if it is her original thought, is a brilliant illumination: to be an individual is to have rights (moral worth based on wise actions in living and working), and to have rights is what an individual is and has. Collective rights cannot stand because the grouped masses are not individual in that context, so they cannot have rights, and rights are alien to the collectivists' destructive life style—they can enjoy unearned privileges in political power and social power, but these are not rights.

 

Rand on Pages 119 and 120: “Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have not rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society,  the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members, through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ of free association and free trade. (By legitimate, I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was force to join.) . . . This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional associations, labor unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labor union delegate, etc.”

 

My response: This is where the system breaks down: the little people have to be very involved, organized and switch out their representatives all the time to prevent entrenched , swamp-dwelling elites to see themselves as of the masses that they now have contempt for, and it is the job of the masses to just shut up, obey, be grateful to do as they are told. No way say we superciticesn.

 

Rand: “A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group or lose the rights that he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.”

 

My response: This last sentence is critically significant: The principle of individual rights I the only moral base of all groups or associations, so all groups must primarily allow individual-living for its members, or it is not a moral group at all, but demonism is seeping and creeping through it very core.

 

Group-living, nonindiviudation, altruism, group rights and collectivism need to be downgraded to second level emphasis and individual-living, individuating, rational egoism, and  individual rights  must be our highest legal and political priority. We need to define individualism as the axiom that you own nobody and nobody owns you

 

 

Political environment  intimately and directly influences our ability to be good. There are saints like Solzhenitsyn that grow in goodness and courage, despite being victimized by totalitarian master, but most people will just obey, shut down and be corrupt by omission and commission in light of such pressure to be corrupt. Rather than expecting too much of people—more than they can give—on average, it is better offer people a free society, a republic or even a democracy. So they have at least a chance to dare to maverize. People lack courage and will, so without easy free encouragement outside of them from the community and state, most will just shut down.

 

Since egoism is love and is spiritual and moral goodness, for the average, naturally bad citizen, liberty and self-confidence to dare to try to become good, with maximum political and economic and social liberty that he can handle with a thin but durable structure of state to hold it all together.

 

We need self-rule so the anarchist-individuator suprecitizens use individual-living as their primary lifestyle to self-realize. These supercitizens will run society right from the bottom up in their free market constitutional republic. Citizens can grow to be mostly good spiritually and morally but it would go better and easier for them if they had God in their lives, rational religion and worship of some benevolent deity.

 

Rand: “And association that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob . . . The notion of ‘collective rights’ (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that rights belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the ‘right’ to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position  consists of numerical superiority.”

 

My response: With collectivist political arrangements, the dominant or in power group, association or tribe champions its group rights over the downtrodden groups and individuals. Most human rights violations, wars and bigotry arise from identity group against identity group with their self-indulgent view that their group rights are superior and makes them more deserving of special treatment, when all groups of humans are more or less equal in ability.

 

Rand: ”Nothing can justify or validate such a doctrine—and nothing ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism in supernatural edicts, like “The Divine Rights of Kings’—or on the social mystique  of the modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.”

 

My response: Altruist ethics and group rights are equally popular with the “mystics” and secular humanists, but both are evil and demonic at their core, no matter what doctrines its adherents fervently espouse. Notice how they commit the fallacy of considering society a god or living creature, talk about reifying an abstraction.. This idol that does not exist cannot serve as a justification for its patriots to wave the flag in support for group rights, because it does not exist, and its passes not traits, no right, etc.

 

Rand Page Pages 120 and 121: “The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today in the issue of national rights.

 

A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects, and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system, and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense).

 

The citizens of a free nation may disagree about the specific legal procedures or methods of implementing their rights (which is a complex problem, the province of political science and of the philosophy of law), but they agree on the basic principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights. When a country’s constitution places individual rights outside the reach of public authorities, the sphere of political power is severely delimited—and thus the citizens may, safely and properly, agree to abide by the decisions of a majority vote in this delimited sphere. The lives and properties of minorities and dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others.

 

Such a nation has a right to its it sovereignty (derived from the rights of citizens and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respect by all other nations’

 

But this right cannot be claimed by dictatorships, by savage tribes, or by any form of absolutist tyranny . . . ‘”

 

Rand on Pages 121 and 122: “The right of ‘the self-determination of nations’ applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the ‘right’ to commit crimes (that is, to violate the rights of others), so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others), There is no such thing as ‘the right to enslave.’ A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

 

It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like Nazi Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political functions of rights is to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority of earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights an—and no recognition of such ‘rights’ by civilized countries—just as a mob of gangsters cannot demand recognition of its ‘rights’ and a legal equality with an industrial concern or a university, on the ground that the gangsters chose by unanimous vote to engage in that particular kind of group activity.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

Rand: “ Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent ‘rights’ of the gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate the other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has a right to do it, when and if it so chooses.”

 

My response: She has a point: a nation ruled by a dictatorship has no rights to invade its neighbors or to resist invasion itself, but if it was a free people, it would have both rights.

 

Rand on Pages 122 and 123: “This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.

 

A slave country has no national rights, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized, and the conqueror has no right to violate them. Therefore, the invasion of an enslaved country is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.

 

Since there is no fully free country today, since the so-called ‘Free-World” consists of various ‘mixed economies” it might even be asked whether every country on earth is morally open to invasion by every other. The answer is: No. There is a difference between a country that recognizes the principles of individual rights, but does not implement it fully in practice, and a country that denies and flouts it explicitly.”

 

My response: She is correct: countries with mixed economies are not fully free countries.

 

Rand on Pages 122 and 123: “All ‘mixed economies’ are in a precarious state of transition which, ultimately, has to turn to freedom or collapse into dictatorship.  There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of  private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw . . . Internationalism has always been one of the ‘liberals’ basic tenets. They regarded nationalism as a major social evil, as a product of capitalism and as the cause of wars. They opposed any form of national self-interest; they refused to differentiate between rational patriotism and blind, racist chauvinism, denouncing both as ‘fascist.’ They advocated the dissolution of national boundaries and merging all nations into ‘One World.’ Next to property rights, national rights were the special target of their attack.”

 

My response: We need rational nationalism, but one-world governments will only degenerate into a universal monarchy, a perfect illustration for how vicious the unintended consequences of idealist getting their way with no clue as to what they are inflicting upon the world, as things go from bad to much worse.

 

Rand: “ . . . Observe the double standard: while in civilized standards of the West, the ‘liberals’ are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice . . . Mankind is reverting to a preindustrial, prehistorical view of society, to racial collectivism.”