The Virtue Of Selfishness 20

 

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.