Prayer Is Bad?

Seeking Purpose--Ayn Rand

 

 

I watched and took notes on a 29.38 minute long video excerpt entitled WRONG: Jordan Peterson vs. Ayn Rand on Finding Purpose In Life. I did copy my notes, slightly edited for coherency, and clarity. Then I will comment on the commentators’ comments. The two ARI philosophers who put out this podcast vide are Onkar Ghate and Nikos Sotirakopoulus, instructors and thinkers at the Ayn Rand Institute. They showed some clips of Jordan Peterson and a guest, whom they commented on.

 

Here is the video—ARI: “Should we live for something bigger than ourselves? In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute Podcast Onkar and Nikos the question of how to make one’s life purposeful without falling for the sacrifice tropes popular in our culture . . .”

 

My response: I think we should live for ourselves, and flourish as individuators, and that is the primary means of finding meaning and purpose in our lives. It requires that we delay and postpone our immediate self-gratifications, ease, and pleasure, by sacrificing our lower-level selves to individuate and become smarter, stronger, more loving, more creative, more rational. If we do this for a lifetime, then we will have lived a rich, rewarding life. Since the Mother and the Father, Jesus and the Good Spirits are Individuators more than they are joiners—they are that too and we should be joining nonindividuators too at least a little—as we maverize, our living angel lifestyle is a gift or sacrifice to these benevolent deities. And, in this way, we live and grow for something greater than ourselves while improving ourselves. Notice how I blend the Randian suggestion that we happily find  purpose in our own selves solely with being connected to good divinities, living with and working for forces greater than ourselves.

 

Onkar (O after this): “Life is its own meaning. It’s true that you have to construct a life. You have to become a full human being. And you have to live, and you have to choose to do that. You have to embrace that, and you have to see that as a mission. We give our lives meaning.”

 

My response: I agree with all that Onkar said above but would add that God is greater than the individual, and our soulful, personal relationship with a good divinity is required if we would know purpose, meaning, happiness, even. God provides meaning for us too; therefore, the complex challenge to figure out how to live and then live one’s plan is no slam-dunk, easily identifiable, easily definable, either/or choice. God does not want us to see living well and responsibly either as Randian secular humanism living without faith, or strictly Petersonian, suffering-laden, self-effacing, self-denying, total immersion of the self in the divine, an/or immerse in service to others in the community, beyond the self as the only resor to finding purpose in life.

 

O: “It is not that life has some meaning assigned to it. And we have to find some outside cause or crusade.”

 

Nikos (N after this): “Live for something bigger than yourself.”

 

My response: We as individuated souls are, in that mode of advanced existing, have linked ourselves to, are, and are living as something outside ourselves, greater than ourselves, to give our lives meaning and purpose. The individuated self is timeless, connected intimately and deeply to objective reality, to eternity, to the Divinity, and this is the most efficacious way to live for something bigger than oneself, is to grow the self to be growing beyond the undeveloped self.

 

N: “This is actually a very popular trope in the world of self-development. It is linked to the idea that life has meaning only when it is related to a purpose and to a mission, a mission that has to be difficult, an endeavor which has to be daring.

 

And so the story goes, we live in unheroic times when most people are lacking such a mission, this is why many are experiencing a spiritual emptiness. And quite often the trends are captured in popular memes which can, and this specific meme, which can in one hundred different variations, explain and capture exactly this sentiment. A study finds 100% of men would immediately leave their desk job to embark upon a crusade.”

 

My response: 100% of men willing immediately to go on an romantic, heroic venture or quest like Bilbo?—I doubt that, but they should if they dare, and they can maverize, while holding down the desk job to feed their families and pay their bills.

 

O: “And this lack of mission is prevalent particularly today in its counterculture. We see, for example, the very influential film and book club, Fight Club, capturing this trend in the often quoted words by Tyler Deran, when he addresses his little army of men. No purpose or place. No great war. No Great Depression. A spiritual (? Can’t make out the word—Ed Says.). Our Great Depression is our lives.

 

It looks like we need a battle of some sorts. We need to have something to aspire to, something big to aspire to. And indeed, is this indeed the case? Do we need battle and struggle to find meaning in life? Do we need at the end of the day to live for something bigger than ourselves?”

 

My response: I say yes to all of Nikos’s questions, and suggest that individuating, growing a greater, creative self is living in God’s image, and that is the God-sanctioned way to live for something bigger than ourselves.

 

N: “We’ll discuss it today with Dr. Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute. And Onkar, we will be critical of the statement that we need to live for something bigger than ourselves. But let me tell you something. I have to admit that there is something in this idea that you need a mission in life. Appealing, I find it quite appealing.

 

 And I will give a silly example. Last week we had our first, our first big conference in Australia. And getting there included a long trip. It was something that was a new endeavor. I felt as if I’m planting the flag of Objectivism in a new continent, and this made the event more meaningful for me. This made the event really special.

 

The difficulty of getting there and the fact that it was a first. So, does this actually mean that maybe we do need a crusade and a mission to experience our lives as meaningful?”

 

O: “There’s a lot to unpack here. And one of the main things is there are, and one of the main things is these are not all synonyms. So that you want something difficult is not the same as you want a life of suffering, that you want a mission or purpose, or even to be on a crusade is not the same as saying that mission or purpose is to serve something greater than yourself.”

 

My response: To encounter obstacles and suffering in life are inevitable and unavoidable, and they can be instructive, liberating and providers of purpose, but we need challenges and growth for positive reasons too.

 

Onkar, the moral egoist and atheist, must insist that meaning is found in the individual’s life solely, in this world.

 

O: “And, and if you think of the meme about the crusade. Part of that, when and when it’s literally like making a comparison to a crusade, or to a great war, it’s something like there’s a higher authority that’s telling you, you have to march on this crusade.

 

This is for the glory of God. Or we have to liberate Europe, if you, if you’re in the US and it’s we are embarking on this Great War. It’s really not in our interest. We’re not really in it but you have to go save Europe.

 

And there’s an element in that kind of perspective which I think is completely wrong. There’s an element of yours is not to reason why. Yours but to and I mean in the Tennyson poem to do or die. Like you’re given orders that you are to fulfill and that gives your life meaning and purpose.

 

To sort of blindly follow orders and to want some higher authority to tell you what to do, whether it is a father figure or in, in many religions, think of God as a father or mother figure.”

 

My response: It is okay not always to be self-sufficient, and instead seek help and communication from God to know what to do. It is also our duty to care for others as well as ourselves.

 

O: “Telling you what to do, or it’s a more secularized variant like go fight in a great war, and that’s going to give your life meaning, because you’re no longer in charge of your life because you’re taking orders.”

 

N: “What about the idea of the struggle and the idea that modern life is devoid of such struggle? And again, the example: Even in the Fight Club always is the office worker, the white-collar worker who follows a career. He is usually working for the trope; goes for this company that he couldn’t care less about. And this life, the comfortable life, the easy life, is, we are told, the life without meaning. Is there something to it?

 

O: “There’s something to it when you’re talking about the way it’s perhaps in the movies, and so on. I think it’s not just that you’re working for a big kind of amorphous corporation. It’s also that individuals are portrayed, and I’m not interested in this work. I’m not interested in what our company does. Our company makes washing machines, but I’m not interested in washing machines.

 

So, yeah, you shouldn’t work for something that you don’t think this is something valuable to do. But if you have been interested in machines all your life, say, and you grow up and you like taking apart things that you took apart, washing machines and dryers.

 

And, and it’s like you make a career out of this whether it’s just as a repair man, or working as a salesman in such a company, or working as an engineer, and a designer to get better uh machines, more efficient machines, and so on.

 

That is, that is difficult work, to do that and do it well. And if you’re genuinely interested in creating these values, and they certainly are values. If mean, if you can imagine life before these modern appliances. It is a tremendous value created.

 

And if you’re really vested in that. That’s not like some job—I don’t know what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, and difficult doesn’t mean suffering.”

 

My response: Onkar makes a strong point as he differentiates difficult as the struggle the individual does for his own reasons—which give him purpose—and it is self-interested, and ultimately pleasing, from struggling as suffering and self-sacrifice for a greater cause than oneself, an outside cause which provides the individual with meaning.

 

O: “It doesn’t mean like you have to go and it’s suffering, and it’s painful. But if, if   mean just, just repairing washing machines, it is not self-evident how to do that, designing new machines. Again, it’s not self-evident how to do that and the creativity involved in that is difficult, and so that you want challenges in life, and you want to sort of think you are climbing a ladder, that I’m getting better and better and better.

 

And that’s difficult to do that. Think of a pro-athlete doing this. I don’t think we should think of like a Roger Federer or a Michael Jordan as like they’re constantly in pain and un suffering. But what they are doing is difficult and part of the challenge. And part of the joy is the difficulty and overcoming the difficulty so it’s not that, that’s not at all the same as, I’m, yeah, my day-to-day life is suffering.”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson is a bit gloomy in noting that roughly claiming that all or most of life is suffering, but it is undeniable that suffering is a large part of anyone’s lived experience.

 

N: “Right, and one of the voices in the cultural war who has popularized this idea that meaning, that meaning comes through struggle. And I mean there’s like this triangle: “struggle, meaning through struggle, purpose or meaning. And one of the popularizers of, of this idea is Jordan Peterson.

 

And here’s how he put it recently on Twitter: He says, ‘The purpose of life is finding the largest burden you can bear and bearing it.’

 

And we also have a clip in which he elaborates, and we can now watch it: Jordan Peterson: ‘You should be responsible because that’s what a good citizen is. It’s not no, no, you should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering, so you don’t get bitter.”

 

My response: Deep meaning to offset suffering and ego damage in life can be accrued through self-interested individuating, or serving a cause beyond yourself, and it can be suffering or enjoyable or both, and probably is both, bittersweet.

 

N presents Peterson on the clip: ‘And the way you that is to bear a heavy load you know. Get yourself in check for you now and for you in the future and then do the same for your family and for your community and that there’s nobility in that. And there’s and there’s real meaning.’”

 

N: “So his point, Onkar, is that life is tough. Life is going to throw things your way. And the way to withstand, the way to cope with how hard life is, is to voluntarily take as much responsibility and burden as you can. You should carry a heavy load as he puts it.

 

And in some other videos he explains that first you need to carry this for yourself. Then you need to carry it for your family. Then you need to carry it for your community. And at some point, if you are strong enough, you should carry this burden for the whole world.

 

And this is indeed a life of struggle because the load is heavy but also for Jordan Peterson, it offers meaning and purpose because you are elevated to the level almost of someone like Jesus Christ, because that’s what he does. He takes all the burdens of humanity on his, on his, on his  shoulders.

 

Now the way he would—the interesting thing with Peterson is he presents it as if this is something that is actually good for you.

 

So, he doesn’t tell you to sacrifice. He tells you this is what we live that will make your life more manageable. Do you think there is a point to it, that by taking this responsibility not only for yourself, but responsibility for other people, you become stronger and therefore life becomes eventually easier. So, the more burden you overtake, the easier your life becomes in a way? This is the way, the Petersonian line. Do you find any merit in it?”

 

O: “Essentially, no. Sort of at the periphery are things like perseverance, um resiliency, the ability to overcome suffering. Are these positive qualities? Yes, in a certain context. Are they the essence of life? Absolutely not. And just what you quoted the purpose of life is finding the largest burden you can bear and bearing it.”

 

My response: I am not against Peterson’s exhortation that the moral person takes on the largest burden which she can handle, but it may be self-sacrificing for humanity, others, or for some external cause, or it might be pushing yourself to your maximum edge of talent to self-realize, that you enjoy that, and it is a contribution back to God and to humanity too.

 

Egoist ambition to improve the self morally, intellectually, and creatively, if the majority of humans engage in such high end, superlative self-care, has tremendous social benefit in that when most adults tend their gardens well, the need for other-care and charity greatly decline or even disappear. Then, charity and butting into the affairs of moral competent others getting it done is meddling, interference and power-grabbing, and is a failure to tend one’s own garden and clean up one’s own room—to quote Peterson.

 

O: Life doesn’t have a purpose.”

 

My response: Yes, it does.

 

O: “So the purpose of life is a, it’s, it’s this perspective that there’s some outside force that is giving meaning and purpose. Like giving you orders, a mission, a command that you are going to fulfill and you brought up like it’s bringing, it’s making you like Jesus.

 

That’s the portrait of Jesus and it’s important to get how incomprehensible the story of Jesus is. How does it—you’re the son of God. You’re suffering for other people’s sins. You’re perfect but in pain all the time. How like, how that is a meaningful existence?

 

I find the whole—I’m not raised a Christian, and the, the, the whole perspective is bizarre. Um, and that you would worship someone suffering on a cross, as that there’s something really, really, really wrong with that.

 

And to say to that person that there’s not a purpose to life. Life is its own meaning. It’s true that you have to construct a life. You have to become a full human being. And you have to live and and you have to choose to do that. You have to embrace that, and you have to see that as a mission and a goal that you have to and really like it is to create or construct a life that is a human life.”

 

My response: Yes, life is a do-it-yourself game, and one must build a life for oneself; it is not automatically gift-wrapped and set on the doorstep for one to answer a ringing doorbell, a suit of armor to take inside, unwrap from the package and don.

 

But one can build a life for oneself, while dedicating that life to God as a living, personal offering or sacrifice, and seek God’s approval on how one constructs and leads that life.

 

O: “That’s what’s not given to us. And that’s what we have to do if we’re going to embrace our own life. And that we give our life meaning, not life has some meaning assigned to it, and we have to find some outside cause or crusade that we’re going to serve, um, and you say it’s not a sacrifice. Well, it simultaneously is and is not a sacrifice.

 

It’s that sacrifice like and the, the portrait of Jesus. Is He sacrificing for everyone on the cross, dying, but it gives His life meaning?”

 

My response: Finding meaning in life is pursuing one’s own interest—but only if that interest is noble, not malevolent. To build a life for oneself (what makes one happy) is to building meaning in one’s life. Jordan’s point about self-sacrificing for a cause greater than oneself and outside oneself too has merit, but it is not suffering alone that provides meaning in a person’s life. That is too pessimistic a suggestion.

 

O: “So, it’s as though like the sacrifice but if gives your life meaning so in the end it’s really good for you, but, again, if you’re not raised as a Christian the idea that Jesus’s life and death and like is a, is a crucifixion is, is, a, is, a um like painful death. Oh yeah, okay that give some meaning or something.

 

No, like who wants that? And you shouldn’t want that. You shouldn’t want that existence. You should want a life that is challenging, um and difficult because you’re achieving real things. But, again, that’s not the same as suffering.”

 

My response is in the middle: We adults need to identify, adopt and work through an acquired mission: to be happy and fulfilled, we need real work to do, purpose and meaning to make life minimally bearable, and beyond that enjoyable and happiness-conducive. Jordan’s recommendation has some merit, that a life of duty, suffering, self-sacrifice for the greater good and shouldering responsibility are valuable. But Randian promotion of self-interest and self-care is the primary giver of meaning and purpose for the striving individual, especially if her chase is enlightened and she is self-realizing.

 

O: “I want to give a quote for how opposite Ayn Rand’s view here is about that like what and that um what you have to do is create a life. This is the description, a brief description, Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged and um he’s often the character people most respond to. He’s not the character I most respond to in Atlas Shrugged but he often is. And this is part of why I think ad here’s part of the description when one first sort of meets him: ‘His tall, slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape flowing behind him in the wind. People explain him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being so rare that no one could identify it.’

 

Close quote. And the project in life is become a healthy human being in the full meaning of that and just like a healthy physical existence is just a part, a small part of what it means to be a healthy human being. And that’s, that’s what you should be striving for.

 

And in that sense, you are your own cause. You’re your own mission. There’s not something outside of you that’s giving it meaning. You have to give your life meaning by becoming a healthy, vibrant human being who deserves to live and is living.”

 

My response: You are your own cause and you give your life meaning by becoming a healthy, vribrant human being, but that includes, beyond the ken of the Randians, that one self-realize as an individuators, philosopher and creator, in the image of the good deities, and one is undertaking one’s personal venture as much for God as for oneself, perhaps more.

 

O: “And that’s the goal. Life’s its own goal.”

 

N: “That line with Francisco and the cape is one of those lines you read once and you remember it forever.

 

But going back to the point of something bigger than yourself automatically implies that you should be less concerned with yourself. And you said the purpose at the end of the day is you and your own life.

 

And yet people who advocate the idea to live for something bigger than yourself would say that the more you are concerned with yourself, the more miserable you are going to be. So, let’s see the next video that we have of Jordan Peterson when he makes exactly this point.”

 

My response. When Jordan complains that people obsessed with self-consciousness become so selfish, narcissistic, miserable, and sickened by their self-obsession, that the only way to be sane, happy, and healthy is to be almost wholly other-centered, this take is mixing apples and oranges, without realizing it.

 

When people wallow in a narrow form of self-absorption, a morbid, dead-ended kind of self-interest, this subjective quagmire of consciousness will make one miserable and unhappy, but this subjective morass is the private mental state most of the time of low self-esteeming, selfless, altruistic, collectivist of group-oriented joiners. Their interests are mostly other-interested.

 

Individualists and individuators are self-interested but their self-concern primarily is healthy and productive, objective worrying about improving their careers, talents and creative outlets, and this makes them wholesome, healthy gratified and optimistic, virtuous. They are self-conscious in a way that is not self-obsessed and morbidly selfish or subjective.

 

Jordan thinks the cure for human wickedness and mental illness, mild or severe, is a strong, repeated dose of other-centered, other-care in a serving mode of humble self-regard and self-forgetfulness, but his altruistic selflessness as a way for people to live rather, makes sick people sicker, often very sick.

 

Rather we want adults to mostly be self-centered, self-caring mental and moral giants whose self-assessment is honest and pleasing to them in a quiet, non-bragging demeanor, through which they are proud of their merited accomplishments. This realistic self-esteeming, modestly expressed in public, is much more virtuous and healthy for the doer, and even is good for the community in the long run.

 

N: “J: ‘The more you think about yourself the more miserable you are. There is no distinction between being self-conscious and being miserable. They’re statistically identical. As soon as you become aware of yourself, you’re anxious and ‘hurt’, right. So, then you might think well, the cure for that is not to think about yourself. It’s no, the cure for that is to think about other people. You exist in relationships to other people.’”

 

Young woman in Jordan’s video: “’And I think you hit one of the other reasons why I wanted to be married and wanted to be married young and didn’t want to waste time doing that is because I wanted something that was more important than my career. I wanted something that was more important than . . ..’

Jordan interrupts her: ‘Why is it more important than your career?’

 

Young woman: ‘Because it is the foundation upon which all of that is built.’

 

Video over, so N continues: “So Onkar, let me try to steal man, not to steal man. Let me try to find some plausibility in this argument that says when you are uh concerned with, with, with yourself, you might become more nervous. But when you embark on something bigger, suddenly you feel better in a way with yourself.

 

I remember in the first days, the dark days of the first lockdown when Covid was new. There was all this scare-mongering from the media. Everyone was scared and I also experienced myself, living in this gloomy atmosphere. And then I remember what was the moment where it, it changed, with some people we created an initiative in Your where it was something, where it was something like any who needs from our friends or our colleagues, anyone who needs shopping from the supermarket, we can help.

 

I mean, I mean we didn’t have to seal in place. We didn’t have with vulnerable immune systems at home to contend with, so we could take action and we could help.

 

And indeed, when we saw ourselves as capable doers, suddenly the atmosphere of fear and the atmosphere of passivity changed.

 

Now Peterson would probably say it’s because you stopped only caring about yourself, but I have a different explanation here. What actually changed is that I experienced myself differently as a doer. I experienced myself differently, not as someone who just passively thinks things happen to me. There was all this scare-mongering. And suddenly me and some friends, we said no, we’re going to do something.

 

It wasn’t about I don’t care if I don’t get Covid or not. It was no, I have self-esteem. I trust myself.”

 

My response: I concur wholeheartedly with Nikos suggestion that without self-esteem and self-trust, we will be assertive enough, self-confident, or willful enough to act decisively to do and bring meaning into our lives, either as self-care or other-care.

 

N: “I can understand the situation and I will rise up to the occasion. So, is there, is there even any merit to this idea that oh, if you care too much about yourself, you got, you’ve become self-obsessed, then, you become, uh, nervous? You get all sorts of anxieties. He says this is basically what anxiety is at the end of the day, and this leads to bad things.”

 

O: “No. And, and, and, so much of what Peterson of, I find so much of Peterson is what in um Objectivism we call package deals: putting things together as they are are all similar when they’re the things that need to be distinguished because they are very different from the other.

 

And so, your presenting the Covid—and I would agree with part of your analysis about there, what, what you felt and it was important to feel this, like an element of control again over your life. That you are not passive, just kind of buffeted by forces external to your agency, your action.

 

 

My response: Yes, the individualist should be an activist more than a passivist. She primarily is the one in control of her life, selecting her interest priorities, and defining and living what brings purpose and meaning to her life.

 

I believe she best expresses this enlightened self-interest if she is religious and faithful to a good divinity, and God wants her to run her own affairs, and rewards her for so living, and punishes her for being overly dependent on God for things to go her way.

 

God wants her to man up, to help build, extend, administrate a piece of the kingdom of heaven in this world of nature, on this planet, and she best affects her plan through self-control rather than God-controlled, though she wants to do her thing in ways parallel to God’s plan—if she can intuit what that plan is—and she still blesses God and prays for God’s blessing and guidance. She finds meaning and purpose when doing her thing is doing God’s thing and, she blends these dual—and hopefully not clashing objectives—obviously and compatibly.

 

O: “So you feel and rightly feel, yeah, I’m able to live because I can take the actions and I’m going to take  the self-initiated actions that are necessary to live.”

 

N: “But also to help others who couldn’t take these actions.”

 

O: “Yeah, that’s the other part. And that, that part of human life is having connection with other people. Other people you value and, and like all kinds of human relationships from work colleagues to friends, um, to just when you’re at the grocery store. And the sort of social interaction with the whatever, the cashier, to, to love relationships and family relationships.

 

These are enormously important elements of a good human life. But they’re not ones where you are living for other people.”

 

My response: Onkar makes a great point: one can be an Objectivist, an egoist, even an individuator whose primary source of meaning is gained by pursuing self-interest, while demanding that the listener not conflate self-interest with an utter rejection of all group affiliating, a false dilemma. At bottom, humans are social creatures, but the only way to socialize humans for maximum social benefit is to train the young to live for themselves more than they live for others, all the time enjoying some group-living and group-identifying.

 

O: “Like, it’s like my life doesn’t count and somehow their life counts.”

 

My response: It is not that my life, my concerns, my desires, my needs, my plans count more than the life, concerns, desires, needs and plans of others, but, instead the needs of each individual and all individuals in society is best serviced and served when each individual assumes and lives as if her life counts most, and that the lives of others, though vital and to be heeded, count less than her own for purposes of living for herself first, but not solely.

 

O: “So what my mission is to serve them and to minister to them, and to help them as though they are significant and I’m not. And this kind of view is rarely projected of and what about those people? Like this is what you are supposed to do, aren’t they supposed to the moment you give them something? Like you’re helping these people, like say take, your taking groceries to, shouldn’t the moment what they do as well. I can’t keep these.”

 

My response: Duty, as Peterson would define it, is the individual obligation to be selfless and self-sacrificing, to devote one’s life to giving priority to the needs of others. That is our secondary duty, I believe, and our primary duty is to live for ourselves, first, and to maverize, gaining meaning and purpose that way.

 

And the duty to self-discipline and self-sacrifice, delaying gratification of base desires so that the maverizing self can grow in creativity, technical skill, and intellectual prowess. One can still seek pleasure and happiness too.

 

O: “I have to go, go, give them to someone else. And it would be this endless chain. And Ay Rand makes this point because she thinks of these issues as you have to take them seriously, what they really mean, and take them to their full, logical expression.

 

And what that means it’s, it’s a life that is incredibly empty. And what human relationships should be are both people benefiting (Ed agrees.). And, um, and, and when you’re in a case of emergency um as Covid, as you said in the early days like it, it, could feel like that, then, yeah, that you’re together as a human community fighting this emergency. There’s real um significance in that but it is again significance from the perspective of life, not there’s some external thing that’s giving meaning to life.”

 

My response: God does give meaning to our lives from De’s internal and external loci of communicating to us, but we then receive this welcome nudge and express it sublimely as self-caring self-interest, if we are fully alive and fully live.

 

O: “You know, God told us it is good to suffer and I’m sending you Covid so you can suffer. That, that’s not what is going on.”

 

My response: We all know that life is suffering, and we intuit, if we are reflective that life is happiness, and enjoyment too. It is good to suffer a little, for it deepens us, and makes us aware of our human tragedy, fragility, and mortality. But, too much suffering, either natural suffering or unnatural, malevolent (humanly fabricated unnecessary suffering) soon reaches the point in each life where the individual is irreversibly damaged and degraded by too much pain. And that is to be minimized if we can, and we should take on the duty to maverize which helps us convert suffering into meaning, gain, even happiness and joy.

 

N: “Yeah, and actually the moment I realized that what Ayn Rand talked about (altruism) was a very hard pill to swallow for me. I was raised in a Communist or Christian country that altruism is a morality which is impossible to live by.

 

It was this example of try to imagine a life: a day in your life from morning to night, you try to constantly sacrifice. It’s, it’s impossible. And equally the idea that you have to pick the most difficult burdens from morning to night. How would you live?

 

What would you ever, ever do, and what would the towards what type of purpose? So, I think it is the other way around. First, you have a purpose and if the purpose you need to very clearly choose that purpose is, and, of course, that purpose are, will require for you to take difficult actions.

 

And then you take the actions. If the struggle come before the purpose, then this makes no sense. So which struggle would I pick and what would I pick it for? And one other thing in this idea of that for living for others, your life gets more meaning.

 

We have a very good example in fiction on, and this is Kate in the Fountainhead. She is a person who more and more loses herself because she believes the poison which if the leaking of her uncle Ellsworth Toohey. And we see her at some point complaining that the more I try to live for other people, the more I try to get this meaning for struggling and suffering for others, the more my life becomes meaningless.

 

So again, this is, this is a morality, this is a way of life which would be impossible, an ideal which would be impossible to live by, and this would be my parting words, Onkar.

 

I lived a life for many years where there was no purpose. Or, to put it this way, there was no mission. And it was a life that sucked, so I totally agree with us: if your life is without—you wake up in the morning and you don’t know why, what you’re trying to achieve, this is a life indeed that sucks.

 

And you feel somewhere inside you, your best part and conscience tells you, you should be doing more, you should be doing something else. When you find a purpose suddenly everything changes in life.

 

First of all, you got more self-esteem. You appreciate yourself because you experience yourself getting somewhere,”

 

My response: It is true that once you discover, latch onto, and grow the self through an implement an unfolding program of enlightened self-interest, your self-esteem does increases, and that is praiseworthy.

 

Many nonindividuators, as true believers, gain false self-esteem by serving a holy cause in a mass movement, and this belonging suffuses them with a powerful, complete sense of self-esteem, worth and purpose, but they have no self-esteem left, and they are growing evil and tyranny in the world by spreading their holy causes. We must be careful and avoid becoming true believers in any cause.

 

N: “as doing something that is efficacious, something which, something which is adding up to something. And if this purpose burns you with the fervor of a mission (a holy cause perhaps, Ed says), that’s even better. That’s then you’re even more living a life which you, which you experience it a strongly, you experience it as meaningful.

 

But here’s the thing. It needs to be your purpose. And it’s not something above yourself. It’s not you’re not living for something bigger than yourself. You’re living for yourself at his best. You’re living for yourself, a self who has a purpose, a self who has carefully chosen that purpose so it’s yours as yours can be. And this is a meaningful life, the purposeful life.”

 

O: “And either you say it is a purpose you’ve chosen, it’s a purpose you’ve chosen because what it is or involves the creation of values that further your life so. And this is what I it’s really perverse to tie together things that are difficult demanding effort with suffering. It’s a burden, look around, find the biggest burden, and take that on. That, one is a pro-life attitude and one’s an anti-life attitude.

 

And the pro-life attitude, what is distinct about human life is that we can grow. We can do things that are new, creative. We can learn more and therefore act in new ways.”

 

My response: Life is rarely either-or, but is more one thing, and less another thing, but do both. Jordan’s life of altruistic suffering and grim burden-hoisting is anti-life more than is the pro-life secular humanist, egoist route espoused by these two Randian scholars. But the Randian version is anti-life in that it makes no room for God in our lives or grounding our values with the Divinity. Jordan’s altruistic suffering of the self for the group is anti-life in that it denies individualism, self-enjoyment, which are godly attributes which humans need to imitate.

 

The individuators should be doing both more than not, but more Randian than Petersonian.

 

O: “And life is about and if you are taking your own life seriously, you want to advance it. It’s about getting better, and this is why like the perspective of a pro-athlete who’s constantly improving. That’s what life should be like—and your own life.

 

And if you think of it like that it is challenging. It is demanding. You’re moving from achievement to more difficult achievements because there would be a greater value you are achieving.

 

Like if you think of a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of them venturing into the new creating. That’s what human life is, that’s what we are capable of. That’s what we should dedicate to grow in whatever capacity you can grow. But you shouldn’t look at a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk and say like when he’s working on Space X and Rocket, like that’s suffering, and he’s looked for the biggest burden.

 

No, it’s difficult and I’m sure there’s like, there’s long hours, there’s frustration, there’s dead ends. We try this, that doesn’t work. But that’s all what achievement looks like. And that’s not suffering. It is part of the joy of life. Not and then to think of it as a suffering or a burden or painful.

 

It’s just, it’s just a completely wrong perspective on what human life can and should be.”

 

N: “And since we are in the festive period, let me suggest once more for people to do themselves a favor and read for the first time, or reread The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

 

They’re the only, they’re the first time in my life that I saw the idea of your life and your work as a crusade and a mission. And actually, Ayn Rand uses the term crusade quite often in her work.

 

But crusade as you said, it’s a goal that is carefully chosen to add meaning to your life, a life lived properly with your happiness as, its goal so if you want to see a crusade without an actual cape, but someone who engages in very difficult endeavors, always with a goal, with a goal ahead.

 

And what it takes to reach that goal. Do yourself a favor these days and reread Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead.

 

This was the podcast of The Ayn Rand Institute. Many thanks for your time.