Nathaniel Branden

 

On Page 37 of Ayn Rand’s book, The Virtue of Selfishness, her follower and collaborator, Nathaniel Branden writes that mental health or self-esteem are identical, the same, synonymous: “Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrifice is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive existentially and psychologically.”

 

Branden like Rand is a secular humanist and believes God and the spiritual world are nonexistent, so he equates mystical faith in God or spirits necessarily leads to low self-esteem, mental illness, and the immoral ethical creed of self-sacrifice which Branden denounces as evil and destructive to human happiness and well-being.

 

Jordan Peterson would go ballistic to have Branden, a psychotherapist and Ph.D. holder, equate mental health is the same as high self-esteem, a view I largely agree with; Peterson would also reject his egoist ethics.

 

Branden continues writes about pride on Pages 39 and 40: “. . . His life and self-esteem require that make take pride in his power to think, pride in his power to live, pride in his power to live—but morality, men are taught, holds pride, and specifically intellectual pride, as the gravest of sins. Virtue begins, men are taught, with humility: with the recognition of helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one’s mind.”

 

My response: It seems quite evident that Rand and Branden, like I do, regard intellectual pride as man’s cardinal virtue, whereas Peterson dismisses intellectual pride as humanity’s cardinal sin or vice.

 

Branden: “Is man omniscient? –demand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how dare he challenge the word of God, or of God’s representatives, and set himself up as judge of—anything?”

 

My response: No human is not omniscient and never will be (even if he could be omniscient, he could not stay sane with that kind of thankless responsibility and power for everything; becoming omniscient for humans is an impossibility, and that impossibility is a blessing, for we would be destroyed by such awesome need to rule the world.). Still, we can know a lot and learn a lot as individuators, worshiping good deities, and obedient to these employers. We are not infallible, and the good deities expect, even demand that we question the existing word of God and God’s representatives, so that we can grow in truth and benevolent consciousness in this world and retire to heaven in the next world—as long as we are respectful and courteous while questioning and challenging the existing theological order.

 

We are to judge, but we are not to brag. Final, eternal judgement of people’s souls is not our bailiwick, and is reserved for the good deities to pass judgement and sentence upon all of us at heaven’s gate.

 

Branden: “Intellectual pride is not—as the mystics preposterously imply it to be—a pretense at omniscience or infallibility.”

 

My response: Branden and Rand are humbler than are transhumanists that deny the deities exist, or, if they do, the arrogant transhumanists anticipate humans with their new-found and arriving deity-level personal powers and intelligence, will push old deities aside, or even kill them (an impossibility). Transhumanist can regard themselves as omniscient, infallible, immortal, all-powerful and all-hating; if that self-appraisal is accurate and actual, then these despicable devils are guilty of vicious intellectual prid; they will be overthrown, defeated, and cast into the pits of hell by the angels defending and serving the good deities.

 

 Branden: “On the contrary, because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort, the men who assume this responsibility properly feel pride.”

 

My response: I agree with Branden that humans intellectually struggle to gain knowledge, and do make some modest progress in each generation, so having worked so hard, they can feel proud of what they have learned, deduced or discovered.

 

Branden: “Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud; he has merely chosen the most humiliating way to reveal his humility.”

 

My response: The boaster flaunting his unearned pride is not proud but boasting to mask and suppress his profound personal insecurity, his self-doubt to deny his immense, intense sense of self-loathing.

 

Branden: “Pride is one response to one’s power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one’s own efficacy. And it is this that the mystics hold as evil.”

 

My response: One has a right to feel proud if one has good values, and one actually lives them and achieves then efficaciously, and if one is modest in one’s pride in thought, in worship and in public comportment and statement.

 

Branden: “But if doubt, not confidence, is man’s  proper moral state; if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt not pride, is his goal—then mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners, those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue, and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.”

 

My response: Rand and Branden have a point to make, that doubt, beyond a certain amount, is a lack of self-confidence, conducive with self-hatred and a propensity to sin. The good deities want humans to be confident and proud and accomplished, but never to forget where they come from, who sponsored them, and to whom they owe a bottomless debt of gratitude, devotion, stated appreciation and public acknowledgment of dependency.

 

Branden: “Humility, is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality: it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.

 

Pride has to be earned; it is the reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to abstain from thinking—nothing else is demanded—and one will feel humble quickly enough.”

 

My response: Humility more than not is a vice under godly and secular egoist morality, and pride more than not is a virtue under godly and secular egoist morality.

 

Humility is a virtue under mystic and secular proponents and exponents of altruist morality, and pride is the cardinal vice to these altruists.

 

One is required by the good deities to feel positive or individual pride and to exhibit and practice positive individual humility, while one is to think, use one’s mind, talents, imagination and effort to make oneself self-realized, and, if one has served the good deities and fought the good fight, one can feel justly proud of one’s accomplishments, while ever humble or realistic enough to accept one’s modest improved status and position in the great chain of being among the living angels in league with the departed angels (the Good Spirits), and all are subordinate in rank and power and just pride felt by the individuated and individuating good deities.