Ayn Rand The Virtue of Selfishness epub. Ain rand virtue of selfishness

“The Virtue of Selfishness” is one of the cult American books that recently became popular in Russia. But few people know who wrote this book. At the same time, the author’s fate is more than interesting.

Ann Reid's childhood

The future writer was born in St. Petersburg into a Jewish family. At birth she received Zinovievna Rosenbaum. The future writer maintained a warm relationship, full of love and mutual understanding, with her father. It was not possible to find a common language with my mother, a capricious and demanding woman.

Alice had three sisters. But she stood out from the general background in that she could already read and write at the age of four. Having no adventures in real life, the girl found them in abundance in books. Alice was also an introverted child, so she could not boast of a wide circle of friends. Writers and heroes became her favorite friends. Among the former, she most preferred Hugo, among the latter, the French heroine Cyrus, who amazed with her courage and determination. At nine years old, Rosenbaum could not read more pleasantly than novels from France.

Even as a little girl, Alice advocated for gender equality. She was terribly irritated when she read or heard somewhere that a woman’s place was at home. She was drawn to adventures and distant countries. But Alice's world was destroyed in an instant. When the girl was nine years old, the First World War broke out. Many relatives of the future writer were called to the front. They never returned home.

Youth

A couple of years after the first tragedy, the second one happened in the Rosenbaum family. The First World War was replaced by the Civil War. And then Alice's father lost everything he had. They became a poor working family that had to work hard to have at least some food at home.

After school, the girl entered to study as a historian. She freely expressed thoughts full of faith in humanity and true heroism. Her ideal was still Hugo. But along with him, Nietzsche also appeared in life, with whose works Alice became acquainted already as a student.

After receiving higher education, Rosenbaum worked for some time as a tour guide. And then she decided to leave the country and go to America. Everything was presented as a two-week excursion to Chicago. But even then Alice decided that she would not return to her native St. Petersburg.

Life in exile

When the future writer found herself in New York, she had with her only a suitcase with personal belongings, a typewriter bought by her mother after selling family jewelry, and zero knowledge of the English language. Being practically unfamiliar with Western culture, Alice realized that she could not succeed under her real name. Then she decided to take a pseudonym.

She took the name Ein (Ain), and looked up the surname on a typewriter called “Remington Rand.” With a new name, she set off to conquer Hollywood. Even then, thoughts were forming in her head that would finally take shape in the book “The Virtue of Selfishness.” However, then Ein was not going to become a writer, but a screenwriter or actress.

In Hollywood, Rand met the young actor Frank O'Connor, whom she later married. This is how she gained not only a loyal friend, editor and attentive reader, but also US citizenship.

Maturity and death

In the United States, Ein gained enough freedom to speak, write and preach what she believed in. Even then, she defended ideas that would later be presented in the work “The Virtue of Selfishness.” The writer often spoke to the public, proving the inconsistency of communism. At the age of fifteen, she abandoned religion, considering it unreasonable and humiliating.

For many years, Anne's only true friend was her husband. They never had children. The writer devoted all her time to writing and defending her own ideas. At the same time, she had many fans who fell in love with a woman with her own point of view and sparkling eyes. This is how everyone remembered her.

Rand died in New York in her own apartment. Her legal husband died even earlier. She never saw the collapse of the USSR. However, I knew that one day this day would come.

Creation

“The Virtue of Selfishness” is not the only or even the most popular book by writer Ayn Rand. She began her creative journey back in St. Petersburg. Even then she realized that with a word you can excite the minds of many people and raise them to real action. Her favorite writers inspired her. Reading Hugo, Rand decided to write not about what people are, but about what they should be.

Many books came from her pen. She wrote We the Living, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand also often published in various newspapers and magazines. Her publications attracted no less attention. Although very popular in the West, it remained unknown to anyone in the USSR.

About the book “The Virtue of Selfishness”

Ayn Rand, while still Alice Rosenbaum, was outraged by Soviet slogans calling for devoting her entire life to working for the country. She believed that first of all it was worth thinking about yourself. After all, Christianity taught to love your neighbor. Can someone be closer to a person than himself?

The writer further developed all these ideas in her publications. At one point there were so many of them that it was decided to collect them all together and publish them under one cover for all fans of Ayn Rand. The Virtue of Selfishness created a sensation in the West and remained a popular book for a long time. In the post-Soviet space, the book became famous much later than its publication in the United States.

“The Virtue of Selfishness”: reviews and reviews

Rand had many admirers and opponents. All of them could not ignore the release of the writer’s new book. And even years after her death, the work still attracts a variety of people.

Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden

The Virtue of Selfishness

Introduction

The title of this book may raise a question that I have heard before:

“Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to describe positive character traits when it is disliked by so many people?”

To those who ask this question, I can answer: “Because it scares you.”

But there are those who will not ask such a question for fear of being suspected of moral cowardice, but who will not be able to articulate for themselves what I mean or precisely identify the critical moral issue I am talking about. I have prepared a more detailed answer for them.

The problem here is not just semantic. The meaning given to the word "selfishness" in society is not only inaccurate: it reflects a terrible intellectual "complex" which, far more than any single factor, is responsible for the retarded moral development of mankind.

Usually the word "selfishness" is used by people as a synonym for evil; it is associated with the image of a bloodthirsty savage who is ready to walk over corpses to achieve his own goals, does not pay attention to anyone else and strives only to satisfy his own base desires.

However, the true meaning of this word, which can be found in any dictionary, is: "caring for one's own interests".

This concept does not imply moral evaluation; it gives us no indication of whether it is good or bad to look after our own interests; just as it does not define what exactly these interests consist of. Ethics must answer these questions.

The image of the cruel savage is created by the ethic of altruism; this is a response that forces a person to accept two inhuman principles: 1) that concern for one's own interests is evil, regardless of what exactly these interests consist of; and 2) that any activity of a savage in fact is something that he does solely for his own benefit (which altruism encourages a person to sacrifice for the benefit of his neighbor).

You can learn about the true nature of altruism, its consequences and the incredible distortion of morality to which it leads, from the book “Atlas Shrugged” [Rand A. Atlas Shrugged: In 3 hours - 6th ed. - M.: Alpina Publishers, 2011.] or from the many headlines of today's newspapers. Here we will look at defeat altruism in the field of ethical theory.

There are two moral questions that altruism fuses into one complex: 1) What are values? and 2) For whose benefit should they be taken? Altruism replaces the first question with the second; thus it evades the task of defining a code of moral values and leaves the individual without moral guidance.

Altruism declares any action taken for the benefit of others to be good and any action taken for one's own benefit to be bad. Thus, the only criterion of moral worth is Who exactly receives benefit from the action, which means that as long as a person’s actions are useful for anyone other than himself, they should be considered good.

Hence the disgusting lack of morality, constant injustice, double standards, insoluble conflicts and contradictions that have characterized human relationships and human societies throughout history, with all variants of altruistic ethics.

Look how unworthy what passes for moral judgments today looks. The industrialist who made his fortune and the bandit who robbed a bank are considered equally immoral because both sought wealth for their own “selfish” gain. A young man who gave up his career to help his parents and remained a cashier in a grocery store for the rest of his life is considered more morally superior than one who, as a result of bitter struggle, realized his personal ambitions in professional activity. A dictator can be considered virtuous because the terrible deeds he committed were not committed for his own sake, but for the sake of the “people.”

What significance does such a moral criterion acquire in human life? The first thing a person realizes is that morality is his enemy; he receives nothing from her, but only loses; the only thing he can expect is loss and pain through his own fault and a gray, stultifying curtain of incomprehensible responsibilities. He may hope that others will sacrifice themselves for him from time to time, just as he reluctantly sacrificed himself for them, but he understands that such relationships bring only mutual rejection, not pleasure, and that, From a moral point of view, this acquisition of value is similar to the exchange of unwanted and unwanted Christmas gifts. Except for these moments, when he tries to perform certain sacrificial acts, he does not possess any moral values: morality has no meaning for him and cannot in any way give him a guiding line in difficult life situations; because it is his own, personal, "selfish" life, and, as such, can be viewed solely as evil, or, at best, as immoral existence.

Since nature has not provided man with an automatic survival mechanism and he must take care of himself to exist, it means that if we are guided by the principle that caring for one’s own interests is evil, then the human desire to live is also evil, and human life in itself is evil. It is impossible to think of a more immoral principle.

But this is precisely the meaning of altruism, which implies equating an industrialist with a bandit. But there is a huge difference between a person who sees his own interest in producing something and one who sees it in robbery. The robber's sin is Not is that he pursues his own interests, but that What it is he who considers these interests; Not in the very fact of guiding personal concepts of values, and in the fact what are these values; Not is that he wants to survive, but that he wants to exist on a subhuman level (see Chapter 1, “The Ethics of Objectivism”).

If you don't know the source of the disgusting combination of cynicism and guilt in which most people live, then I will tell you this

Do you need to sacrifice something in your life to make it good for someone else or society as a whole? For a long time it was believed that this was how it should be, that this was a manifestation of nobility. Many people still think this way. But will you be happy in this case? Will you be yourself? Perhaps it is better to be selfish, in the good sense of the word. People often don't understand what this word means. When Ayn Rand wrote the book “The Virtue of Selfishness,” there was a lot of controversy regarding this concept and the ideas that the writer expressed in her work. But, in order not to say that selfishness is disgusting, it is worth reading this book and understanding what the author wanted to convey to people.

This book is a collection of articles by Ayn Rand that reflect her philosophical thoughts. Here you can also see the ideas of her colleague and like-minded person Nathaniel Branden. The author talks about the individuality of one person, gradually moving on to the entire society and political system. Her ideas are very bold, bright and tough, especially for the time in which they were written. The theme of how virtuous selfishness is leads into many other topics, ranging from discussions of the meaning of sexuality in relationships to racism, communism, socialism.

Ayn Rand wants to show that only in a state where human rights and freedoms come first can people live happily and develop freely. When society and government suppress human freedoms and interests, a person cannot be happy. Totalitarianism kills all individuality and turns people into obedient dolls who simply do what is allowed and do not strive for anything. These ideas may not be clear to many, especially since the text is written in a rather complex language, but those who are close to this philosophy will really enjoy reading it.

On our website you can download the book “The Virtue of Selfishness” by Rand Ayn for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.

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Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden

The Virtue of Selfishness

Translators G. Zelenina, M. Kulneva, K. Shcherbino

Editor Yu. Bystrova

Project Manager E. Gulitova

Corrector E. Chudinova

Computer layout A. Abramov

Cover design DesignDepot

Published with the assistance of Curtis Brown and the Synopsis Literary Agency

Rand A.

The Virtue of Selfishness / Ayn Rand; With added articles by Nathaniel Branden; Per. from English – M.: Alpina Publishers, 2011.

ISBN 978-5-9614-2030-2

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Introduction

The title of this book may raise a question that I have heard before:

“Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to describe positive character traits when it is disliked by so many people?”

To those who ask this question, I can answer: “Because it scares you.”

However, the true meaning of this word, which can be found in any dictionary, is: "caring for one's own interests".

You can learn about the true nature of altruism, its consequences and the incredible distortion of morality to which it leads, from the book Atlas Shrugged or from many of today's newspaper headlines. Here we will look at defeat altruism in the field of ethical theory.

Altruism declares any action taken for the benefit of others to be good and any action taken for one's own benefit to be bad. Thus, the only criterion of moral value is Who exactly receives benefit from the action, which means that as long as a person’s actions are useful for anyone other than himself, they should be considered good.

If you do not know the source of the disgusting combination of cynicism and guilt in which most people live, then I will tell you this source: cynicism comes from the fact that none of them uses or accepts altruistic morality; guilt arises because they do not dare to reject it.

To rebel against such a destructive evil, one must rebel against its fundamental principles. To save both man and morality, you need to save the concept "selfishness".

The first step on this path is to approve human right to moral existence, that is, to recognize that he needs a moral code to guide and fill his life.

A brief outline of the nature and necessity of rational morality is given below in my article “The Ethics of Objectivism.” Having found out the reasons for the need for a moral code for a person, you will understand that the main task of morality is to determine the correct values and interests of a person; What looking after one's own interests– this is the essence of moral existence; So what moral actions must benefit the person himself.

Since any value must be achieved and/or preserved by people, if a person does not benefit from his own actions, this cannot be considered fair, since it means that someone sacrifices himself for the sake of another, and morality is sacrificed for immorality. There is no justification for this and there was never any.

Choosing who benefits from moral values is a preliminary or introductory step in solving moral problems. It cannot replace morality itself or serve as a criterion for choosing moral values, as in altruism. Equally, he cannot serve and source morality: it must, on the contrary, stem from morality and be assessed by the fundamental provisions of the ethical system.

According to the ethics of objectivism, the one who performs them should benefit from his own actions, in other words, a person should act in his own reasonable interests. But his right to do so comes from his human nature and from the application of moral values in life - thus it applies only within the context of a rational, objectively clear and legitimate code of moral principles that defines and limits his self-interest. Selfishness does not mean "do whatever" and has no relation to the image of the "selfish" savage created by the ethic of altruism, nor to any person who is controlled by irrational emotions, feelings, impulses, desires and whims.

Everything I have said above is a warning to those “Nietzschean egoists” who are in fact products of altruistic morality and represent the other side of the coin of altruism: these are people who believe that any action, regardless of its essence, should be considered good if performed for one's own benefit. Just like can not While satisfaction of the irrational desires of other people may be a criterion of moral value, the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires cannot be one. Morality is not a competition of whims. (See Nathaniel Branden's articles - Chapter 18 "False Individualism" and Chapter 5 "Aren't We All Selfish?"

A similar mistake is made by those who declare that since a person must judge everything independently and independently, then everything he does is moral if He makes that choice himself. But a person's own independent judgment is only way choice of action, but not a moral criterion for assessing it: only appeal to a clear principle can serve as a criterion for assessing the morality of such a choice.

Just as a man cannot survive by random actions, but must develop and apply certain principles that will ensure his survival, so his personal interests cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved using rational principles. This is why the ethics of objectivism is a morality rational personal interests - or rational egoism.

Since egoism is “concern for one’s own interests,” the ethics of objectivism uses this concept in its precise and purest sense. This concept should not be left to the enemies of the human race, nor to the mindless misunderstandings, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and unreasonable. Attacks on “selfishness” are attacks on human dignity; to give up one means to give up the second.

And now a few words about the contents of this book. With the exception of lectures on ethics, it is a collection of articles first published in The Objectivist Newsletter, a monthly magazine co-edited and published by Nathaniel Branden and myself. The Objectivist Newsletter deals with the application of the philosophy of objectivism to the tasks and problems of today's culture, striving for a “golden mean” between philosophical abstractions and journalistic specifics. Its goal is to provide readers with a stable philosophical frame of reference.

This collection is not a systematic discussion of ethical topics, but simply a series of articles on those ethical issues that need clarification in today's context, as well as those that have been most distorted by the influence of altruism. You may notice that a number of the article titles are questions. Their source is questions sent by our readers.

...

Ayn RandNew York, September 1964

P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer relevant to me, my philosophy and The Objectivist(former The Objectivist Newsletter).

...

Ayn Rand, New York, November 1970

1. The ethics of objectivism

Ayn Rand

Since I am going to talk about the ethics of objectivism, I will begin with the words of its most prominent adherent - John Galt, the hero of the book Atlas Shrugged:

...

“Throughout the centuries of suffering and disaster caused by your moral code, you have cried out that your code is being violated, suffering is the punishment for breaking it, people are too weak and selfish to shed all the blood that this code requires. You cursed man, existence, this earth, but did not dare to doubt your code. Your victims took the blame and continued to work, rewarded by your curses for their martyrdom, while you cried out that your code is noble, but human nature is not good enough to live by it. And not one of you stood up and asked: “Is the code good?” By what standards?“

You wanted to know who John Galt was. I am the person who asked this question. Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are punished for your vices. But now it is not man who stands before the court, and the blame will not be placed on human nature. This time your moral code will be finished. He had reached his zenith, the dead end at the end of the road. And if you want to live further, you need not to return to morality - you never knew it - but to discover morality for yourself.”

What is morality or ethics? This is a value system based on which a person chooses and acts - this choice and these actions determine the purpose and course of his life. Ethics as a science deals with the disclosure and concretization of this system.

Before attempting to clarify, evaluate, or accept any particular ethical system, it is necessary to first answer the question: For what does a person need a value system?

I emphasize that the first question that needs to be asked is not: what specific value system should a person accept, but: do people need values at all and why?

Is the concept values, "good or evil", an arbitrary invention of mankind, which has no relation to, is not derived from or supported by any facts of reality, or is based on metaphysical fact, on the unchangeable condition of human existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” in the sense inherent in reality, the nature of things, existence.) Is the fact that human actions should be guided by a certain set of principles an artificial agreement between people, existing solely as part of tradition, or a requirement of reality? Is ethics relevant to the field? whims– personal emotions, social laws and mystical revelations, or to the sphere reason? Ethics is a subjective luxury or objective necessity?

In the sad history of ethical systems - with rare and unfortunate exceptions - moralists have viewed ethics as the realm of the arbitrary, that is, the irrational. Some of them declared it openly, others only implied it. “Arbitrariness”, “whim” is the desire of a person who does not understand and does not strive to understand its origin.

None of the philosophers gave a rational, objectively obvious, scientific answer to the question, For what a person needs a value system. While this question continues to remain unanswered, find and formulate a rational, scientific, objective ethical system is impossible. The greatest of philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; his ethical system was based on observations of the actions of noble and wise men of that time, but he did not answer the question Why that's how they behave, and Why he considers them noble and wise.

Most philosophers take the existence of ethics for granted, as a given, as a historical fact, and do not bother to search for its metaphysical source or objective assessment. Many of them tried to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics, and perhaps to formulate a rational, scientific, non-religious system of morality. But in the end they were all limited only to what they tried to give to ethics social foundation, simply replacing God by society.

Convinced mystics considered the arbitrary, incomprehensible “God’s will” to be the standard of goodness and the criterion of their ethical systems. Neo-mystics replaced it with “social benefit,” thus arriving at a vicious circle of definitions like: “Good is what is useful for society.” This, logically and in modern world practice, means that “society” stands above any ethical principles, since it itself is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “good” is anything to him, everything, that it decides to consider his own well-being and benefit. It turns out that "society" can do whatever it wants, since "good" is whatever it decides to do, That's why that it decided so. And since there is no such real entity as “society”, and society is just a collection of individuals, this means that some people (the majority or any group that declares itself representatives of the public will) have the ethical right to achieve whatever they want, and rest people will be ethically obligated to spend their lives providing for the desires of that group.

This can hardly be called reasonable, but today most philosophers have decided to declare reason untenable, ethics - lying beyond its power, that rational ethics cannot exist. They argue that a person in the field of ethics - in choosing his values, actions, aspirations and life goals - should be guided not by reason, but by something else. With what? Faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, taste, need, desire, whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics arbitrary(they call it “arbitrary demand”, “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”), and they only break their spears over what whose it must be arbitrary - of the person himself, of society, of a dictator or of God. Despite all the disagreements between them, modern moralists agree on one thing: ethics is subjective thing, and from its sphere three concepts should be completely banished: reason, thought and reality.

If you can't understand why the world is descending lower and lower into the circles of hell, Here you have a reason.

If you want to save civilization you must oppose this the premises of modern ethics - and of all historically existing ethical systems.

To argue against a fundamental tenet of any discipline, you have to start at the beginning. In the case of ethics, we need to start with the question: what is values? Why do people need them?

“Value” is what a person strives to acquire and/or maintain. The concept of "value" is not primary; it requires first determining whom and for the sake of what this value is such. It is necessary to identify the entity that will determine the actions to achieve the goal in the presence of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, there can be no goals and values.

To quote from Galt's speech:

...

“In the Universe there is only one immutable alternative - existence or non-existence, it relates to only one category of existence - a living organism. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a certain course of action. Matter cannot be destroyed; it changes forms, but does not cease to exist. Only a living organism faces a constant alternative: the question of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. If the organism does not achieve its goal in its action, it dies; its chemical elements are preserved, but life ceases to exist. Only the concept of “life” makes the concept of “value” possible. Only for a living organism do the concepts of “good” and “evil” exist.”

To make this completely clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity that moves and acts, but which cannot be affected, which cannot be changed, which cannot be harmed, maimed or destroyed. Such an entity cannot have any values; she has nothing to gain or lose; for her there is nothing that would be behind or against her, what would serve or threaten her well-being, what would meet her interests or go against them. She could have no interests and no goals.

Only alive a creature can have goals and create them. And only a living organism has the ability for independent purposeful actions. On physiological level the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex - from the nutrition of a single amoeba cell to the blood circulation in humans - are actions generated by the organism itself, and leading to a single goal: maintaining life organism.

The life of an organism depends on two factors: energy substances, which must come to it from the external environment, and the activity of its own body, which must Right use these substances. By what standards is it determined in this case? right use? The only standard is the vital activity of the organism, or, in other words, what is necessary for its survival.

In this case, the organism has no choice: what exactly it needs to survive is determined by its nature, those What what kind of creature he is. Various options are possible for the body, various forms of adaptation to the external environment, including the possibility of existing for some time in a state of injury, dysfunction or illness. However, the main alternative to its existence remains the same: if the body cannot perform the basic functions inherent in it by nature - if the protoplast of the amoeba cell stops absorbing nutrients, or if the human heart stops contracting - it dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life is possible only with the constant implementation of self-sustaining activities. The ultimate goal of this activity value, to preserve which it is necessary to achieve it at every moment of action, is life body.

Ultimate value is that highest goal for the achievement of which all lesser goals serve as means, and on its basis are being assessed. The life of an organism is value standard: that which contributes to the continuation of life - good, what threatens her - evil.

Without an ultimate goal, no lesser ends or means can exist: a series of actions turning into an endless progression leading to nothingness is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. The existence of values is possible only if there is an ultimate goal, result as such. Metaphysically life- this is the only phenomenon that in itself is also a result: a value acquired and preserved in the process of constant, continuous activity. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically based and derived from the concept of “life” that precedes it. Talking about “value” in isolation from “life” is worse than simply admitting a contradiction in terminology. “The concept of “value” exists only because the concept of “life” exists.”

In response to those philosophers who argue that no connection can be established between final results or values and the facts of reality, I emphasize that the existence and functioning of living entities inevitably entails the existence of values and one absolute value, which for any living entity is its own life. Consequently, the verification of value judgments must be based on the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity There is, determines that she must do. And enough, perhaps, about the connection between "There is" And "must".

Now let us consider how a person discovers the concept "values"? By means of which he first comprehends the problem "good and evil" in its simplest form? Through physical sensations pleasure And pain. Sensations are the first stage in the development of human consciousness both in the sphere knowledge, and in the field assessments.

The ability to experience pleasure or pain is given to a person from birth; this is part of it nature, the type of entity he is. This ability is not subject to human choice, and a person cannot himself set a standard that determines what exactly - pleasure or pain - he will experience under certain conditions. What kind of standard is this? His life.

The pleasure/pain mechanism in the human body - as in the bodies of all living organisms that have consciousness - serves as a security alarm for its life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal showing that the body’s activities are carried out in correct direction. The physical sensation of pain is a danger warning signal indicating that the activity will be introduced into incorrect direction - something is interfering with the normal functioning of the body, therefore, some action is required to correct the situation. This is best illustrated by a rare congenital disorder in which a child is born without the ability to feel physical pain; Usually such children do not live long because they have no way of identifying what could harm them, no warning mechanism, and the slightest cut can lead to a fatal infection, and a serious illness may remain undetected until it is too late. fight her.

Consciousness, for those living organisms that possess it, is the main means of survival.

Simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive using their automatic physiological functions. Higher organisms, such as animals and humans, cannot: their needs are more complex, and the scope of their activities is wider. The physiological functions of their bodies are automatically capable of only using energetic substances, but get They cannot automatically remove these substances from the surrounding world. To obtain them, higher organisms need consciousness. The plant gets its food from the soil in which it grows. The animal must hunt for this. Man has to produce it.

The plant has no choice what to do; the goals it pursues are automatic and innate, determined by its nature. The values that nature instilled in him to strive for are nutrients, water and light. His life is the value standard that governs his activities. The environmental conditions it encounters in life can be different: for example, heat or cold, flood or drought, and the plant has the ability to carry out different actions to combat unfavorable conditions: for example, some plants are able to germinate and climb out from under a stone to be in the light. But under any conditions there is no choice in the actions of the plant: it acts automatically in order to continue its existence, it cannot act with the aim of destroying itself.

The range of actions necessary for the survival of a higher organism is much wider: it is proportional to the sphere of control of its consciousness. The lowest of the conscious species can only feel, and this is enough to guide their activities and provide for their needs. Sensations arise as a result of the automatic reaction of the sensory organ to external stimuli; their duration is limited by the duration of the stimulus and nothing more. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which consciousness can neither seek nor avoid. The actions of an organism that has only the ability to feel are controlled by the bodily pleasure/pain mechanism, that is, automatic knowledge and an automatic value system. The standard of value that determines his actions is his own life. Within the range of actions possible for it, the organism acts automatically to prolong its life; he cannot take actions leading to his destruction.

More highly developed organisms have a more powerful form of consciousness: they have the ability keep sensations, that is, the ability to perception.“Perception” is a group of sensations automatically stored and integrated by the brain of a living organism, thanks to which it can perceive not individual stimuli, but essence, things. The animal is guided not just by immediate sensations, but by an integrated picture perceived im reality. It can be aware of objects in its perceptual environment and form automatic perceptual connections, but it cannot go further. It can master certain types of activities: for example, parents of higher animals teach their offspring to hunt or hide. But the animal does not choose the knowledge and skills it acquires; generation after generation repeat the same thing. Also, he does not have a choice of value standard that guides his activity: his senses provide him with automatic a value system, automatic knowledge of what is good and what is bad for him, what is useful for his life and what is dangerous. The animal does not have the ability to expand its knowledge or abandon it. Finding itself in a situation where its knowledge is not applicable, it dies - like, for example, an animal that freezes on the rails in the path of a speeding train. But while it lives, it acts in accordance with its knowledge, using an automatic safety mechanism and having no choice: the animal cannot refuse to use its own consciousness, it cannot make a decision Not perceive, cannot ignore what it perceives, cannot act against its own benefit, cannot choose to act to its detriment and become its own killer.

The Virtue of Selfishness

Nathaniel Branden

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) - our former compatriot, a major American writer, whose books had a powerful influence on the worldview of millions of people around the world, the author of recognized bestsellers - “Atlas Shrugged”, “The Fountainhead”, “Anthem”, etc.

The book “The Virtue of Selfishness” is a collection of articles written by Ayn Rand over the years and united by one theme - the defense of the concept of “reasonable selfishness” as the ethical basis of a free capitalist society.

The author makes an unusually lively and convincing case that only within a system that places individual rights and reason at the forefront can people freely develop and find happiness without being enslaved by dictators, the state and other people. This means that only such a system can be recognized as moral and corresponding to human nature.

Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden

The Virtue of Selfishness

Translators G. Zelenina, M. Kulneva, K. Shcherbino

Editor Yu. Bystrova

Project Manager E. Gulitova

Proofreader E. Chudinova

Computer layout A. Abramov

Cover Design by DesignDepot

Published with the assistance of Curtis Brown and the Synopsis Literary Agency

The Virtue of Selfishness / Ayn Rand; With added articles by Nathaniel Branden; Per. from English – M.: Alpina Publishers, 2011.

ISBN 978-5-9614-2030-2

Introduction

The title of this book may raise a question that I have heard before:

“Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to describe positive character traits when it is disliked by so many people?”

To those who ask this question, I can answer: “Because it scares you.”

However, the true meaning of this word, which can be found in any dictionary, is: “caring for one’s own interests.”

The image of the cruel savage is created by the ethic of altruism; this is a response that forces a person to accept two inhuman principles: 1) that concern for one's own interests is evil, regardless of what exactly these interests consist of; and 2) that any activity of a savage is in fact something that he does solely for his own benefit (which altruism calls on a person to sacrifice for the benefit of his neighbor).

You can learn about the true nature of altruism, its consequences and the incredible distortion of morality to which it leads, from the book Atlas Shrugged or from many of today's newspaper headlines. Here we will consider the defeat of altruism in the field of ethical theory.

Altruism declares any action taken for the benefit of others to be good and any action taken for one's own benefit to be bad. Thus, the only criterion of moral value is who exactly benefits from an action, and therefore, as long as a person's actions are beneficial to anyone other than himself, they should be considered good.

Since nature has not provided man with an automatic survival mechanism and he must take care of his own existence, it means that if

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be guided by the principle that caring for one’s own interests is evil, then the human desire to live is also evil, and human life in itself is evil. It is impossible to think of a more immoral principle.

But this is precisely the meaning of altruism, which implies equating an industrialist with a bandit. But there is a huge difference between a person who sees his own interest in producing something and one who sees it in robbery. The sin of the robber is not that he pursues his own interests, but what exactly he considers to be these interests; not in the very fact of guiding personal concepts of values, but in what these values are; not that he wants to survive, but that he wants to exist on a subhuman level (see Chapter 1, “The Ethics of Objectivism”).

To rebel against such a destructive evil, one must rebel against its fundamental principles. To save both man and morality, the concept of “egoism” must be saved.

The first step on this path is to affirm a person’s right to moral existence, that is, to recognize that he needs a moral code that would guide and fill his life.

A brief outline of the nature and necessity of rational morality is given below in my article “The Ethics of Objectivism.” Having found out the reasons for the need for a moral code for a person, you will understand that the main task of morality is to determine the correct values and interests of a person; that self-interest is the essence of moral existence; and that moral actions should benefit the person himself.

Choosing who benefits from moral values is a preliminary or introductory step in solving moral problems. It cannot replace morality itself or serve as a criterion for choosing moral values, as in altruism. Equally, it cannot serve as a source of morality: it must, on the contrary, stem from morality and be assessed by the fundamental provisions of the ethical system.

According to objectivist ethics, the person who performs them should benefit from his own actions, in other words, a person should act in his own reasonable interests. But his right to do so derives from his human nature and from the application of moral values in life - thus it applies only in the context of a rational, objectively clear and legitimate code of moral principles that defines and limits his self-interest. Selfishness does not mean "do whatever" and has no relation to the image of the "selfish" savage created by the ethic of altruism, nor to any person who is controlled by irrational emotions, feelings, impulses, desires and whims.

Everything I have said above is a warning to those “Nietzschean egoists” who are in fact products of altruistic morality and represent the other side of the coin of altruism: these are people who believe that any action, regardless of its essence, should be considered good if performed for one's own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of other people's irrational desires cannot be a criterion of moral value, the satisfaction of one's own irrational desires cannot be one. Morality is not a competition of whims. (See Nathaniel Branden's articles - Chapter 18 "False Individualism" and Chapter 5 "Aren't We All Selfish?"

A similar mistake is made by those who declare that since a person must judge everything independently and independently, then everything he does is moral if he himself makes such a choice. But a person’s own independent judgment is only a way of choosing an action, but in no way a moral criterion for assessing it: only an appeal to an intelligible principle can serve as a criterion for assessing the morality of such a choice.

Just as a man cannot survive by random actions, but must develop and apply certain principles that will ensure his survival, so his personal interests cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved using rational principles. This is why the ethics of objectivism is the morality of rational self-interest—or rational selfishness.

And now a few words about the contents of this book. With the exception of the lectures on ethics, it is a collection of articles that first appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, a monthly magazine of which Nathaniel Branden and I are editors and publishers. The Objectivist Newsletter is dedicated to applying the philosophy of Objectivism to the challenges and problems of today's culture, striving for a "golden mean" between philosophical abstractions and journalistic specifics. Its goal is to provide readers with a stable philosophical frame of reference.

New York, September 1964

P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer associated with me, my philosophy, or The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter).

Ayn Rand, New York, November 1970

1. The ethics of objectivism

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As I’m going to talk about the ethics of objectivism, I’ll start with the words of its most prominent adherent - John Galt, the hero of the book “Atlas Shrugged”:

“Throughout the centuries of suffering and disaster caused by your moral code, you have cried out that your code is being violated, suffering is the punishment for breaking it, people are too weak and selfish to shed all the blood that this code requires. You cursed man, existence, this earth, but did not dare to doubt your code. Your victims took the blame and continued to work, rewarded by your curses for their martyrdom, while you cried out that your code is noble, but human nature is not good enough to live by it. And not one of you stood up and asked: “Is the code good? By what standards?”

You wanted to know who John Galt was. I am the person who asked this question. Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are punished for your vices. But now it is not man who stands before the court, and the blame will not be placed on human nature. This time your moral code will be finished. He had reached his zenith, the dead end at the end of the road. And if you want to live further, you need not to return to morality - you never knew it - but to discover morality for yourself.”

Before attempting to clarify, evaluate, or accept any particular ethical system, it is necessary to first answer the question: Why does a person need a value system?

I emphasize that the first question that needs to be asked is not: what specific value system should a person accept, but: do people need values at all and why?

Is the concept of value, "good or evil", an arbitrary invention of mankind, which has no relation to, is not derived from, or is not supported by any facts of reality, or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on the unchangeable condition of human existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” in the sense inherent in reality, the nature of things, existence.) Is the fact that human actions should be guided by a certain set of principles an artificial agreement between people, existing solely as part of tradition, or a requirement of reality? Does ethics belong to the realm of whims—personal emotions, social laws, and mystical revelations—or to the realm of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury or an objective necessity?

None of the philosophers gave a rational, objectively obvious, scientific answer to the question of why a person needs a value system. As long as this question continues to remain unanswered, it is impossible to find and formulate a rational, scientific, objective ethical system. The greatest of philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; his ethical system was based on observations of the actions of noble and wise men of that time, but he did not answer the question of why they behaved the way they did and why he considered them noble and wise.

Most philosophers take the existence of ethics for granted, as a given, as a historical fact, and do not bother to search for its metaphysical source or objective assessment. Many of them tried to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics, and perhaps to formulate a rational, scientific, non-religious system of morality. But in the end, they all limited themselves to trying to give ethics a social foundation, simply replacing God with society.

Convinced mystics considered the arbitrary, incomprehensible “God’s will” to be the standard of goodness and the criterion of their ethical systems. Neo-mystics replaced it with “social benefit,” thus arriving at a vicious circle of definitions like: “Good is what is useful for society.” This, logically and in modern world practice, means that “society” stands above any ethical principles, since it itself is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “good” is everything it pleases, everything it decides to consider his own well-being and benefit. It turns out that “society” can do whatever it wants, since “good” is whatever it decides to do, because it decided so. And, since there is no such real entity as “society”, and society is simply a collection of individuals, this means that some people (the majority or any group that declares itself representatives of the public will) have the ethical right to achieve whatever they want want, and other people will be ethically obligated to spend their lives providing for the desires of this group.

This can hardly be called reasonable, but today most philosophers have decided to declare reason untenable, ethics - lying beyond its power, that rational ethics cannot exist. They argue that a person in the field of ethics - in choosing his values, actions, aspirations and life goals - should be guided not by reason, but by something else. With what? Faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, taste, need, desire, whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is arbitrary (they call it “arbitrary demand,” “subjective choice,” or “emotional commitment”), and they only take issue with whose arbitrariness it should be— the person himself, society, a dictator or God. Despite all the differences between them, modern moralists agree on one thing: ethics is a subjective thing, and three concepts should be completely banished from its sphere: reason, thought and reality.

If you can't understand why the world is descending lower and lower into the circles of hell, here's the reason.

If you want to save civilization, you must oppose this premise of modern ethics—and all ethical systems that have existed historically.

To argue against a fundamental tenet of any discipline, you have to start at the beginning. In the case of ethics, we need to start with the question: what are values? Why do people need them?

“Value” is what a person strives to acquire and/or maintain. The concept of "value" is not primary; it requires a preliminary determination for whom and for what purpose this value is such. It is necessary to identify the entity that will determine the actions to achieve the goal in the presence of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, there can be no goals and values.

To quote from Galt's speech:

“In the Universe there is only one immutable alternative - existence or non-existence, it relates to only one category of existence - to

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living organism. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a certain course of action. Matter cannot be destroyed; it changes forms, but does not cease to exist. Only a living organism faces a constant alternative: the question of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. If the organism does not achieve its goal in its action, it dies; its chemical elements are preserved, but life ceases to exist. Only the concept of "life" makes the concept of "value" possible. Only for a living organism do the concepts of “good” and “evil” exist.”

To make this completely clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity that moves and acts, but which cannot be affected, which cannot be changed, which cannot be harmed, maimed or destroyed. Such an entity cannot have any values; she has nothing to gain or lose; for her there is nothing that would be for or against her, that would serve or threaten her well-being, that would meet her interests or go against them. She could have no interests and no goals.

Only a living being can have goals and create them. And only a living organism has the ability for independent purposeful actions. At the physiological level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex - from the nutrition of a single amoeba cell to the circulation of blood in humans - are actions generated by the organism itself, and leading to a single goal: maintaining the life of the organism.

The life of an organism depends on two factors: energy substances that must come to it from the external environment, and the activity of its own body, which must properly use these substances. By what standards is correct use determined in this case? The only standard is the vital activity of the organism, or, in other words, what is necessary for its survival.

In this case, the organism has no choice: what exactly it needs to survive is determined by its nature, by what kind of creature it is. Various options are possible for the body, various forms of adaptation to the external environment, including the possibility of existing for some time in a state of injury, dysfunction or illness. However, the main alternative to its existence remains the same: if the body cannot perform the basic functions inherent in it by nature - if the protoplast of the amoeba cell stops absorbing nutrients, or if the human heart stops contracting - it dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life is possible only with the constant implementation of self-sustaining activities. The goal of this activity, the final value, for the preservation of which it is necessary to achieve it at every moment of action, is the life of the organism.

The final value is that highest goal for the achievement of which all lesser goals serve as means, and are evaluated on its basis. The life of an organism is a value standard: what contributes to the continuation of life is good, what threatens it is evil.

Without an ultimate goal, no lesser ends or means can exist: a series of actions turning into an endless progression leading to nothingness is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. The existence of values is possible only if there is an ultimate goal, a result as such. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is itself also a result: a value acquired and preserved in the process of constant, uninterrupted activity. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically based and derived from the concept of “life” that precedes it. Talking about “value” in isolation from “life” is worse than simply admitting a contradiction in terminology. “The concept of “value” exists only because the concept of “life” exists.”

In response to those philosophers who argue that no connection can be established between final results or values and the facts of reality, I emphasize that the existence and functioning of living entities inevitably entails the existence of values and one absolute value, which for any living entity is its own life. Consequently, the verification of value judgments must be based on the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity exists determines what it must do. And enough, perhaps, about the connection between “is” and “should.”

Now let's consider how a person discovers the concept of “value”? By what means does he first comprehend the problem of “good and evil” in its simplest form? Through the physical sensations of pleasure and pain. Sensations are the first stage in the development of human consciousness both in the sphere of cognition and in the sphere of assessment.

The ability to experience pleasure or pain is given to a person from birth; it is part of his nature, the type of entity that he is. This ability is not subject to human choice, and a person cannot himself set a standard that determines what exactly - pleasure or pain - he will experience under certain conditions. What kind of standard is this? His life.

The pleasure/pain mechanism in the human body - as in the bodies of all living organisms that have consciousness - serves as a security alarm for its life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal showing that the body’s activities are carried out in the right direction. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that activity is being carried out in the wrong direction - something is interfering with the normal functioning of the body, therefore, some action is required to correct the situation. This is best illustrated by a rare congenital disorder in which a child is born without the ability to feel physical pain; Usually such children do not live long because they have no way of identifying what could harm them, no warning mechanism, and the slightest cut can lead to a fatal infection, and a serious illness may remain undetected until it is too late. fight her.

Consciousness, for those living organisms that possess it, is the main means of survival.

Simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive using their automatic physiological functions. Higher organisms such as

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animals and humans cannot: their needs are more complex, and the scope of their activities is wider. The physiological functions of their bodies are automatically only capable of using energy substances, but they cannot receive these substances automatically from the surrounding world. To obtain them, higher organisms need consciousness. The plant gets its food from the soil in which it grows. The animal must hunt for this. Man has to produce it.

The range of actions necessary for the survival of a higher organism is much wider: it is proportional to the sphere of control of its consciousness. The lowest of the conscious species can only feel, and this is enough to direct their activities and provide for their needs. Sensations arise as a result of the automatic reaction of the sensory organ to external stimuli; their duration is limited by the duration of the stimulus and nothing more. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which consciousness can neither seek nor avoid. The actions of an organism that has only the ability to feel are controlled by the bodily pleasure/pain mechanism, that is, automatic knowledge and an automatic value system. The standard of value that determines his actions is his own life. Within the range of actions possible for it, the organism acts automatically to prolong its life; he cannot take actions leading to his destruction.

More highly developed organisms have a more powerful form of consciousness: they have the ability to retain sensations, that is, the ability to perceive. “Perception” is a group of sensations automatically stored and integrated by the brain of a living organism, thanks to which it can capture not individual stimuli, but entities, things. The animal is guided not simply by immediate sensations, but by an integrated picture of the reality it perceives. It can be aware of objects in its perceptual environment and form automatic perceptual connections, but it cannot go further. It can master certain types of activities: for example, parents of higher animals teach their offspring to hunt or hide. But the animal does not choose the knowledge and skills it acquires; generation after generation repeat the same thing. Also, he does not have a choice of value standard that guides his activities: his senses provide him with an automatic system of values, automatic knowledge of what is good and what is bad for him, what is useful for his life and what is dangerous. The animal does not have the ability to expand its knowledge or abandon it. Finding itself in a situation where its knowledge is not applicable, it dies - like, for example, an animal that freezes on the rails in the path of a speeding train. But while it lives, it acts in accordance with its knowledge, using an automatic safety mechanism and having no choice: the animal cannot refuse to use its own consciousness, it cannot decide not to perceive, it cannot ignore what it perceives, it cannot act against its own benefit, cannot choose actions to harm himself and become his own killer.

Humans do not have an automatic survival system. He does not have an automatic set of actions, an automatic value system. His feelings do not tell him what is good or bad for him, what is useful for his life and what is dangerous, what goals he should pursue and what will allow him to achieve them, what values his life depends on, what activities he needs. His own consciousness must find the answers to all these questions - but his consciousness does not function automatically. Man, the highest organism on earth, whose consciousness has an unlimited capacity to receive knowledge, is the only living entity that comes into being without any guarantee that it will remain conscious. The exclusive difference between man and all other forms of life is that his consciousness is arbitrary.

The automatic values that govern the functioning of a plant organism are sufficient to ensure its survival, but are not sufficient to ensure the survival of an animal; in the same way, the automatic values that exist in an animal due to the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to control its life, but are not sufficient for a person. Human activity and survival require the guidance of conceptual values generated by conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.

A “concept” or “idea” is the intellectual integration of two or more images of perception that are isolated through the process of abstraction and combined through a characteristic definition. Every word of human language, with the exception of pronouns, denotes an idea, an abstraction, which includes an unlimited number of concrete objects of a special kind. By organizing his perceptual material into ideas, and ideas into more and more general ideas, a person is able to capture and store, define and integrate into a system an unlimited amount of knowledge that extends beyond the specific perception of the current moment. Human senses work automatically; his brain combines sensory information into images automatically; but the process of combining images into ideas—the process of abstraction and concept formation—does not occur automatically.

The process of concept formation involves more than just learning a few simple abstractions such as “chair,” “table,” “hot,” “cold,” and learning to speak. It consists in a method of using consciousness that is best described by the term “conceptualization.” This is not a passive state of consciousness registering random impressions. It is an actively supported process of identifying impressions in conceptual terms, integrating all events and all observations into a conceptual context, identifying relationships, differences, similarities in perceptual information and abstracting it into new ideas, drawing conclusions, drawing generalizations, making decisions, asking new questions and searching new answers and constant expansion of the limits of knowledge. The faculty that controls this process, functioning through ideas, is the mind. The process itself is thinking.

Intelligence is an ability

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identify and integrate material supplied by the senses. This ability must be used by a person according to his own choice. Thinking is not an automatic process. At any hour of his life, regarding any problem, a person is free to think or abandon this effort. Thinking requires a state of complete, focused attention. You can focus your consciousness on something only voluntarily. A person can direct his thinking towards a complete, active, purposefully focused understanding of reality, or he can disperse it and exist in a semi-conscious fog, reacting only to random momentary stimuli, surrendering to the mercy of an undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and any unpredictable associative connections that may arise from its use.

When a person disperses his thinking, we can say that he is conscious in the subhuman sense of the word, since he has sensations and perceptions. But in the sense that applies only to humans - if we consider consciousness as a complete understanding of reality and the ability to interact with it, direct human activities and ensure his survival - undirected, dispersed thinking cannot be considered conscious.

In a psychological sense, the choice “to think or not to think” is the choice “to focus or not to focus your thinking.” In an existential sense, the choice “to focus or not to focus thinking” is the choice “to be or not to be conscious.” In a metaphysical sense, the choice “to be or not to be conscious” is a choice between life and death.

Consciousness, for those living organisms that possess it, is the main means of survival. For humans, the main means of survival is the mind. Man cannot survive, like animals, with the help of mere perception. The feeling of hunger signals to him that he needs food (if he has learned to define this feeling as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to get food, nor will it tell him which food is suitable for him and which is not. poisonous. Without thinking, a person cannot provide for his simplest physiological needs. To know how to plant and grow edible plants, or how to make weapons for hunting, he needs to think. His perception can lead him to a cave, if there is one, but to build the simplest shelter he needs to think. No images and no “instincts” will tell him how to make a fire, how to get fabric for clothing, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to build an airplane, how to cut out an appendix, how to make a light bulb, a cathode ray tube, a cyclotron or a box of matches. . But his life depends on this knowledge, and only an arbitrary act of his consciousness, the process of thinking, can give it to him.

But human responsibility extends even further: the process of thinking is not automatic, not “instinctive,” not involuntary, and not infallible. A person must launch it, maintain it and be responsible for its results. He must figure out how to distinguish truth from lies and how to correct his own mistakes; how to evaluate your ideas, your conclusions, your knowledge; he must find the rules of thinking, the laws of logic, in order to control his thoughts. Nature does not give him any automatic guarantee of the success of his mental efforts.

Man on earth is given nothing but opportunities and the material for their implementation. His capabilities are his magnificent machine, his consciousness; but this is a car without a spark plug; this candle, starter and driver for the car should be the person’s own will; he must understand how to use this mechanism, and he must keep it in constant operation. Material is the entire Universe, an endless field for the knowledge that a person can receive and for the joy of life that he can achieve. But everything that he needs and wants, he must learn for himself, he must find out and do it himself - by his own choice, by his own efforts and by his own reason.

A being who is not given automatic knowledge of what is true and what is false cannot automatically know what is true and what is false, what is good for him and what is bad. However, in order to live, he needs this knowledge. It cannot exist outside the laws of reality; a person is a special organism of a special nature, which requires special actions to maintain its life. He cannot ensure his survival either by arbitrarily chosen actions, or by chaotic movements, or by blind impulses, or by chance or whim. What is required for his survival is determined by his nature and is not subject to his choice. A person has only one thing in his power: to decide whether he will try to find out what exactly he needs, whether he will choose the necessary goals and values, or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed in doing so. He is free to flee from reality, to scatter his thinking and stumble blindly along any path he wants, but he cannot escape the abyss that he refuses to see. For any conscious organism, knowledge is a tool for survival; for a living consciousness, every “is” implies a “should.” A person can renounce consciousness by his own choice, but reality will not allow him to escape the punishment for unconsciousness - destruction. Man is the only species capable of being its own killer, and that is exactly what it has done for most of its history.

So what are the right goals for a person? What values does its survival require? Ethics must answer this question. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs an ethical system.

Now you can appreciate for yourself the significance of the teachings that convinced you that ethics is the realm of the irrational, that reason cannot govern human life, that human goals and values \u200b\u200bmust be determined by vote or whim, that ethics has no relation to reality, to existence , to the practical activities and experiences of a person, or that the goals of ethics lie on the other side of the grave, that ethics is needed not by the living, but by the dead.

Ethics is not a mystical fantasy, not a social contract, and not an optional, subjective luxury that can be changed or completely discarded in case of danger. Ethics is the objective, metaphysical requirement of human survival, not by the grace of supernatural forces, your fellow human beings, or your own whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.

Let me turn once again to John Galt’s speech:

“...thinking is an act of choice. The key to what you so thoughtlessly call “human nature” is the well-known secret that you live with but are afraid to name, the fact that man is a creature of volitional consciousness. The mind does not work spontaneously, thinking is not a mechanical process, logical connections are not established by instinct. The work of the stomach, lungs, and heart is spontaneous, the work of the mind is not. At any hour, in any difficulty in your life, you are free to think or avoid this effort. But you are not free to escape your nature, the fact that the mind is a tool for survival, so

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For you people, the question “To be or not to be” is the question “To think or not to think.”

The value standard of objectivist ethics - the standard by which a person evaluates what is good and what is bad - is human life, or what a person needs to survive and remain human.

Since the main tool of survival for a person is the mind, then what is suitable for the life of a rational being should be considered good; that which interferes, spoils or destroys his life should be considered evil.

Since everything that a person needs, he must find with the help of his own mind and do on his own, then the two necessary components of the method of survival of an intelligent being are thinking and productive activity.

People who try to survive not with the help of reason, but with the help of force, behave like animals. But if an animal could not survive if it acted like a plant, abandoning movement and counting on the soil itself to feed it, then man cannot survive, abandoning reason and counting on human producers as prey for himself. Such aggressors can achieve their goal for some time at the cost of destruction - both their victims and themselves. As evidence, I suggest you take any criminal or any dictatorial regime.

A person cannot survive if, like an animal, he acts based solely on the current moment. The life of an animal consists of a number of distinct cycles that repeat over and over again, such as the cycle of reproduction or storing food for the winter; the consciousness of an animal cannot cover its entire life; its continuity is maintained only for a limited period of time, and then the animal must begin the cycle all over again, without any connection with the past. A person’s life is an inextricable whole: for better or worse, every day, every year and every decade of human life carries within itself the sum of all previous days. A person can change his decisions, the direction of his movement, in many cases he is even free to correct the consequences of past actions, but he is not free to get rid of them and is not free to live in the current moment, like an animal, a loafer or a robber. If a person wants to successfully cope with the task of survival, if he does not want his actions to lead to his own destruction, he must choose for himself the direction of movement, goals and values in the context and on the scale of his entire life. This cannot be done through feelings, images, impulses or “instincts”; this can only be achieved through the mind.

This is the meaning of the definition: “what a person requires to survive as a person.” This does not mean immediate or purely physical survival. This does not mean the immediate physical survival of a foolish savage who waits until another savage breaks his skull. This does not mean the immediate physical survival of a reptile set of muscles, ready to accept any conditions, submit to any bandit and abandon any values for the sake of what is called “survival at any cost,” which may or may not last, a week or a year. “The survival of man as a man” implies the conditions, methods, factors and goals necessary for the survival of an intelligent being throughout the entire period of his life in all spheres of existence open to his choice.

A person cannot survive without being a person. He can give up his means of survival, his thinking, he can turn himself into a sub-human creature and he can turn his life into a short period of agony - just as his body can exist for some time in the process of destruction by disease. But as a sub-human he cannot succeed in anything other than the sub-human condition, as has been demonstrated in the abominable historical periods of anti-rationalism. A person must be a person by his conscious choice, and ethics must teach him to live like a human being.

In the ethics of objectivism, human life serves as a value standard, and each individual’s own life is his moral destiny.

The difference between “standard” and “purpose” in this context is as follows: “standard” is an abstract principle that guides a person as a measure or standard when making his choice in the process of fulfilling his specific, special purpose. “What a human being requires to survive as a human being” is an abstract principle that applies to every human individual. The implementation of the principle for a specific person - to live a life worthy of a rational being - is a task for each individual individually, and each individual must live his own life.

A person must choose actions, values and goals, guided by the standard of what is worthy of him - in order to acquire, preserve, embody and make for himself a source of joy that absolute value, that final result, which is his own life.

Value is what human activity is aimed at acquiring and/or preserving; the very actions by which he acquires and/or maintains value are his virtues. The three main values of objectivist ethics, which together represent both the means of achieving and the realization of the ultimate value of a person - his own life, are Reason, Purpose and Self-Esteem; and the three corresponding virtues are Rationality, Productivity and Pride.

Productive activity is the central purpose of a rational person’s life, a central value that unites and distributes other values into a hierarchical system. Reason is the source, a necessary condition for productive activity, and pride is its result.

Rationality is the fundamental virtue of man, the source of all his other positive qualities. The main human sin - the source of all other sins - is the act of scattering thinking, stopping work

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consciousness: this is not blindness, but an unwillingness to see, not ignorance, but an unwillingness to know. Irrationality is the abandonment of the means of survival and, therefore, submission to the process of blind destruction; it is an attack against reason and against life.

The virtue of Rationality means the awareness and acceptance of reason as the only source of knowledge, the only measure of values and the only guide to action. It signifies a person's ultimate dedication to a state of complete, conscious immersion in reality, maintaining a precise intellectual focus in all matters, in all acts of choice, in every moment of life. It means the most complete perception of reality within the limits of human capabilities and the constant, active expansion of these limits, that is, human knowledge. It means being true to the reality of one's own existence, that is, the principle that all human goals, values, and actions exist in reality, and thus no one should place any values or principles above his own perception of reality. It means complete agreement that the basis, source, criterion for selection and evaluation of all beliefs, values, goals, aspirations and actions of a person should be the process of thinking - as precise and thorough, governed by as impeccably strict logical rules, as the best abilities of a person allow . It means that a person accepts responsibility for forming his own judgments and for organizing his life according to his own conclusions (the virtue of Independence). It means that no one should sacrifice their beliefs for the sake of the views or desires of others (the virtue of Self-True); that no one should ever try to falsify reality in any way (the virtue of Honesty); and no one should himself strive to receive and should not allow others to receive that which is not earned and deserved, neither in the material nor in the spiritual sphere (the virtue of Justice). It means that no one should expect a result if he has done nothing to achieve it, and that no one should do anything without taking full responsibility for the result of his actions; that no one should ever behave like a zombie, that is, having no idea about their own goals and motives; that no one should make decisions, draw conclusions or pursue values out of context, that is, without taking into account or in conflict with the entire integrated body of one's knowledge; and, above all, that no one should ever turn a blind eye to contradictions. It means the denial of any forms of mysticism, that is, any statements about the existence of any extrasensory, irrational, unknown, supernatural sources of knowledge. It means fidelity to reason, not in some particular moments, in some particular questions or under some special circumstances, but as the only way of existence.

The virtue of Productivity is the recognition of the fact that man maintains his life by the process of productive labor, which frees him from the need to adapt to the environment, which is common to all other animals, and gives him the opportunity to adapt the environment to his needs. Productive work is the path of unlimited human achievement, requiring from him the manifestation of the best qualities of character: creativity, determination, self-confidence, willingness to deal with any setbacks and dedication to the goal of transforming the earth in the image of his values. Productive work is not the aimless repetition of certain “working” movements. It is the conscious pursuit of a productive path in any field of rational activity, great or humble, at any level of ability. Here, from the point of view of ethics, what matters is not the level of a person’s abilities and not the scale of his activity, but the most complete and purposeful use of reason.

The virtue of Pride is the recognition that “just as a person must create the material values necessary to support life, so he needs those character traits that make life worth maintaining.” The best way to describe the virtue of Pride is “moral responsibility.” Its meaning is that a person must earn the right to consider himself the highest value by achieving moral perfection, and this can be achieved if one does not accept any irrational moral systems, which are impossible to follow in practice, and never change a system in the rationality of which one is confident ; never take on someone else’s guilt and never allow your own, and if this does happen, be sure to make amends for it; never passively accept your own character flaws; never put any momentary experience, desire, fear or mood above the reality of your own self-esteem. And, above all, its meaning is to renounce the role of the sacrificial animal, from any doctrine that declares self-sacrifice a moral virtue or duty.

The basic social principle of the ethics of objectivism is that life is an end in itself, therefore, every person is an end in itself, and not a means to achieve some goals or ensure the well-being of others, which means that he must live solely for his own sake, without sacrificing himself for the sake of others and by others for themselves. To live for one's own sake means to consider the achievement of one's own happiness as the highest moral goal.

In psychological terms, the problem of human survival arises before his consciousness not as a question of “life or death,” but as a question of “happiness or suffering.” Happiness is a successful state of life, suffering is a warning signal of failure, death. The automatic indicator of the well-being or damage of the human body, a barometer that oscillates between the two main alternatives - life and death - is the pleasure/pain mechanism; another similar barometer, registering the same alternative states, is represented in the human mind by a mechanism based on the opposition of two basic emotions: joy and suffering. Emotions are the result of automation by the subconscious of a person’s value judgments; emotions indicate what reinforces a person’s values and what threatens them, what works for him and what works against him, carrying out a lightning-fast calculation of the total gain or loss.

But while the value standard on which the pleasure/pain mechanism operates is an automatic and innate standard, the value standard that guides the emotional barometer is not. A person cannot have automatically given values because he does not automatically have given knowledge; there are no innate standards of value because there are no innate ideas.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism as well as a cognitive one; however, at birth both of these mechanisms

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represent "tabula rasa". Their content is determined by a person’s cognitive ability, his mind. The emotional mechanism of a person can be likened to a computer, the programming of which must be carried out by the mind - and these programs are built from the values chosen by the mind.

But if the functioning of the human mind is not automatic, then its values, like all fundamental components of the human personality, must be either a product of thinking or a consequence of its refusal: a person chooses values for himself during a conscious thought process - or accepts them by default , guided by subconscious associations, faith, someone’s authority, absorbs from the social environment or simply blindly copies. Emotions are a consequence of the primary attitudes that guide a person in life - consciously or unconsciously, openly or secretly.

A person cannot consciously control the ability to feel that something is good for him or, conversely, bad; but what exactly he considers good or bad, what causes him joy or pain, what he loves and hates, what he dreams of and what he fears, depends on his value standards. If he chooses irrational values for himself, his emotional mechanism, instead of the function of a security system, begins to perform the function of a destroyer. The irrational is impossible, it contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be changed at will, but they can destroy the one who wishes it. If a person craves contradictions and strives for them, if he wants to admire the pie and eat it at the same time, he destroys his own consciousness; his inner life turns into a civil war of blind forces clashing in dark, unclear, meaningless, useless conflicts. (By the way, this is precisely the state in which the inner world of most people finds itself today.)

Happiness is a state of consciousness that arises as a result of acquiring values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of the success of his life's service. But if a person values destruction, like a sadist, or self-torture, like a masochist, or life after death, like a mystic, or mindless euphoria, like the driver of a “cool” car, it is assumed that his happiness is measured by the success of the task of self-destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all these irrationalists cannot be called happiness, or even pleasure: it is nothing more than a momentary relief from the chronic horror that haunts them.

Let me quote John Galt's speech again:

“Happiness is a successful state of life, suffering is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness that stems from the achievement of a person’s own values. A morality that dares to teach you to seek happiness by renouncing your happiness—to value not achieving your values—is a blatant denial of it.”

Maintaining life and pursuing happiness are not two different things. Considering your own life as the highest value, and your own happiness as the highest goal, are two sides of the same achievement. From an existential point of view, the activity of pursuing rational goals is precisely the kind of activity that is necessary for the maintenance of life; from a psychological point of view, its result, reward and concomitant circumstance is the emotional state of happiness. Experiencing happiness, a person lives an authentic life, at any hour, any year or throughout its entire duration. And when a person experiences such pure happiness that in itself can be considered an end in itself - one that makes you think: “This is worth living for,” he welcomes and affirms in emotional expression the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.

But the relationship between cause and effect cannot be reversed. A person can achieve happiness only by accepting "human life" as something primary and pursuing the rational values that it requires - and not by accepting "happiness" as some vague, primary requirement and then trying to arrange his life in accordance with it. If you achieve what is good according to reasonable standards of value, that in itself makes you happy; but what makes you happy according to some vague emotional standard is not necessarily good. To take “whatever makes you happy” as your guide is to be guided solely by your emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims - desires, the source, nature and meaning of which you yourself do not understand - means turning yourself into a blind robot controlled by unknown demons (by your tacit consent), a robot whose frozen consciousness beats against the walls of a reality that it refuses to see.

This is a fallacy that is always inherent in hedonism - any version of ethical hedonism, personal or public, individual or collective. “Happiness” may well be the purpose of ethics, but it is not its standard. The purpose of ethics is to determine the correct value system for a person and thus give him the means to achieve happiness. To claim, as ethical hedonists do, that “it is true to regard whatever gives you pleasure as valuable” is tantamount to declaring that “it is correct to regard whatever you please as valuable,” an act of intellectual and philosophical renunciation that merely proclaims the unimportance of ethics and encourages everyone to indulge in any lawlessness.

Philosophers who have tried to develop supposedly rational ethical systems have in fact given humanity nothing more than a choice between whims: the "selfish" pursuit of one's own desires (e.g., Nietzsche's ethics) and the "selfless" fulfillment of the desires of others (e.g., Bentham's ethical systems, Mill, Comte and all the social hedonists, the only difference between which is whether they allow a person to include his own whims in the set of millions of others, or advise him to turn into a completely altruistic nonentity who dreams only of being devoured by others).

If "desire", regardless of its nature and origin, is accepted as something ethically primary, and the satisfaction of each and every desire is considered the ethical goal (for example, "maximum happiness for the maximum people"), people have no choice but to hate, fear and fight each other because their desires and their interests are bound to conflict. If "wish" is an ethical standard, then one person's wish

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to produce something and the desire of another to rob it will have equal ethical value; just like the desire of one person to be free and the desire of another to make a slave out of him, the desire of one to win love and admiration for his virtues and the desire of another to receive love and admiration, which he has done nothing to deserve. And if failure to fulfill any desire is considered a sacrifice, then the person whose car is stolen is considered a sacrifice, as is the person who wants to have a car, but no one provides him with a means of transportation for free - and these two sacrifices must have equal ethical considerations. status. If so, then the only choice a person has is to steal or be robbed, destroy or be destroyed, sacrifice someone to satisfy his desires, or sacrifice himself to satisfy the desires of others. Then the only ethical alternative for a person is to be a sadist or a masochist.

The moral cannibalism of any hedonistic or altruistic doctrine is that it assumes that the happiness of one person necessarily requires the suffering of another.

Today, most people consider this an axiom that does not require proof. And when someone talks about a person’s right to exist for himself, for the sake of his own interests, the majority automatically believes that this requires sacrifices on the part of someone else. If someone implies this, it means that he is internally convinced that suffering, enslaving, robbing or killing others is in a person’s personal interests, although out loud he will certainly categorically protest against this. It never occurred to the humanitarian apostles of altruism, who professed to dream of universal brotherhood, that they could satisfy their own interests without sacrificing anyone. But this did not occur to them or anyone else, because the idea of “reasonableness” was never considered in the context of “values”, “desires”, “personal interests” and ethics.

Objectivist ethics proudly defends and proclaims rational egoism, that is, the values necessary for human survival. These are not the values that come from the desires, emotions, "aspirations", feelings, whims or needs of irrational savages who will never emerge from a primitive state, will never discover industrial society and will never be able to understand any other self-interest than capture immediate production.

According to the ethics of objectivism, goodness for a person does not require his own sacrifices and cannot be achieved through the sacrifices of someone else. According to it, reasonable human interests do not conflict; there cannot be a conflict of interests between people who do not seek to get what they do not deserve, who do not sacrifice anything and do not accept sacrifices, who treat each other as partners, exchanging something valuable.

The principle of exchange is the only reasonable ethical principle for any human relationship, personal and public, private and public, spiritual and material. This is a fair principle.

The person involved in such a relationship deserves what he gets and never gives or takes anything for nothing. He treats people not as masters and slaves, but as equal and independent individuals. He interacts with others on the principle of free, voluntary, non-coerced exchange, which both parties consider beneficial for themselves. Such a person does not expect that he can get something for nothing, but only a fair payment for his achievements. He does not shift responsibility for his failures onto others and does not pay for the failures of others.

In spiritual matters (that is, those related to human consciousness), the means of exchange are different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one person to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment for the pleasure that one person receives when communicating with another. Only a savage or an altruist can declare that pleasure derived from the virtues of another is an act of selfishness, that if a person achieves something for personal interest and for personal pleasure, then in case of success it does not matter whether he dealt with a fool or a genius, a hero or a robber, an ideal woman or a whore. A person who lives by the principle of fair exchange is one who strives to be loved not for his weaknesses and shortcomings, but only for his virtues, and who gives his love not to someone else's shortcomings and weaknesses, but only to virtues.

To love means to appreciate. Only a rationally selfish person, a person with self-respect, can love, because only such a person can have solid, constant, unchanging values to which he will always remain faithful. A person who does not value himself cannot value anything or anyone else.

Only on the basis of reasonable egoism, on the basis of justice, can people live together in a free, peaceful, prosperous, voluntary, rational society.

Can a person derive any personal benefit from living in human society? Yes, if this is truly human society. The two main values that a person can acquire in social life are knowledge and exchange. Man is the only species that can expand and transmit its knowledge from generation to generation; the amount of knowledge potentially available to a person is greater than any person can even begin to comprehend in one lifetime; each person receives untold benefits from the knowledge acquired by others. The second huge advantage is the division of labor: it allows a person to apply his efforts in a certain field of work and exchange the products of labor with those who are engaged in other fields. This form of cooperation allows everyone who takes part in it to receive, in exchange for their own efforts, significantly more new knowledge, skills and products of labor than everyone could get if they had to produce everything they need on a desert island. or a subsistence farm.

The basic political principle of objectivist ethics: no man has the right to be the first to use brute force against others. No one - neither a person, nor a society, nor

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the government does not have the right to take on the role of a criminal element and use physical coercion against any person. People have the right to use force only as a counteraction to the one who used it first. The underlying ethical principle is simple and clear: the difference between murder and self-defense. An armed robber seeks to take possession of valuables and wealth by killing his victim; the victim does not become richer if he kills the one who tried to rob him. The principle is this: no one can take possession of property belonging to others by using physical force.

The only worthy, moral purpose of government is to protect the rights of man, that is, to protect him from physical violence, to protect his right to life, to liberty, to own property and to achieve happiness. Without property rights, other rights are meaningless.

I will not attempt to discuss the political theory of Objectivism in a short lecture. Those who are interested in this can find its full description in the book Atlas Shrugged. I will only say that any political system is based on and stems from an ethical one, and that objectivist ethics is the moral basis necessary for that political-economic system, which today is being destroyed throughout the world precisely because of the lack of moral, philosophical protection and assessments: a system that originally arose in America, capitalism. If this system disappears, it will disappear by default, undisclosed and misunderstood: nothing else has ever been hidden through so many distortions, distortions and misinterpretations. Today, very few people have any idea what capitalism is, how it works and what its real history is.

When I say “capitalism,” I mean full, pure, uncontrolled free market capitalism, one in which the economy is separated from the state in the same way and for the same reasons as the church is separated from the state. Capitalism in its pure form has never existed before, even in America; one degree or another of state control has suppressed and distorted it from the very beginning. Capitalism is not the system of the past; this is the system of the future - if humanity has a future at all.

For those interested in the history and psychological reasons for the philosophers' betrayal of capitalism, I will mention that I discussed them in the title article of my book For the New Intellectual.

This discussion should be limited to questions of ethics. I have presented here only the most important in my system, but this is enough to understand that the ethics of objectivism is a morality of life, in contrast to the three main schools of ethical theory: mystical, social and subjectivist, which have brought the world to its present state and represent the morality of death .

These three schools differ only in approach, but not in content. In content, they are all nothing more than variants of altruism, an ethical theory that views man as a sacrificial animal, which believes that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is the highest moral duty , virtue and value. Differences appear only in the discussion of the question of who and for whom one can and should sacrifice. Altruism considers death as its ultimate goal and value standard; Therefore, it is logical that self-denial and any other forms of suffering, including self-destruction, are considered virtues. And, according to logic, this is the only thing supporters of altruism can achieve and are currently achieving.

Please note that all these three areas of ethics are anti-life not only in content, but also in method.

The mystical theory of ethics is based on the premise that the value standards of human ethics exist only in the afterlife and are established according to the laws of another, supernatural dimension; that man cannot practice ethics, that it is not suitable and contrary to man's earthly existence, and that man is guilty of this and must suffer throughout this existence for his inability to follow what is impossible to follow. The Dark and Middle Ages are an existential monument to this ethical theory.

The social theory of ethics replaces God with society, and although it states that its main concern is life on Earth, this is not the life of a person, not the life of an individual, but the life of an abstract entity - a collective, which, in relation to any person, consists of all except for himself. As for the individual, her ethical duty in this case is to be a self-ignoring, voiceless, powerless slave for any needs and goals set by others. The motto “man is a wolf to man,” which has nothing to do with capitalism or wolves, is quite suitable for the social theory of ethics. The existential monument to this theory is Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The subjectivist theory of ethics, strictly speaking, is not a theory at all, but a negation of ethics. Moreover: this is a denial of reality, a denial not only of human existence, but of existence in general. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indefinite Heraclitean Universe allows someone to think or preach that a person does not need objective principles of action, that reality gives him carte blanche for any values, that anything he chooses can be good or bad, that human desire is a completely worthy moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument of this theory is the current state of our culture.

It is not the immorality of people that is responsible for the catastrophe that now threatens to destroy the civilized world, but the morality that they are called upon to follow. Altruistic philosophers bear all responsibility. They must be satisfied with the “success” achieved: people submit to them and embody their moral ideals into reality.

It is philosophy that sets human goals and determines the path; only philosophy can now save humanity. Today the world is faced with a choice: if civilization wants to survive, it must abandon altruistic morality.

I will end with the words of John Galt, which, like him, I address to all supporters of all who have defended and continue to defend altruistic morality:

“You used fear as a weapon and brought death to a man as punishment for denying your morality. We offer him life as a reward for accepting ours.”

2. A healthy mind against mysticism and self-sacrifice

The standards for mental health—the biologically acceptable functioning of the mind—are exactly the same as the standards for physical health. The mind can be considered healthy as long as it provides a person with the control over reality that is necessary to maintain life.

The main feature of this control is self-esteem. Self-esteem is a consequence, expression and reward for the brain, which is completely subordinated to the mind. Reason is the ability through which we can identify and

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integrating information from the senses is a basic survival tool for humans. Submission to reason is the maintenance of complete intellectual concentration, constant processes of understanding and knowledge, submission to the principle that a person's actions should be consistent with his beliefs. It is an acceptance of the statement that no one should try to create a false reality, put any consideration above reality, or allow himself to be plunged into contradictions - that no one should ever try to distort or suppress the true functions of consciousness.

The true functions of consciousness are perception, cognition and control over activity.

A consciousness that is not limited by anything, a consciousness that is whole and thinking - this is a healthy consciousness. A mind that is limited, avoids problems, is torn by conflict and contradicts itself, a mind that is separated from reality or immobilized by depression is an unhealthy mind. (These issues are discussed in more detail in the chapter “Objectivism and Psychology” in my book Who is Ayn Rand?)

To successfully interact with reality and achieve everything that is required for life, a person needs high self-esteem: he needs confidence in the effectiveness of his own activities and a sense of self-worth.

Anxiety and guilt - the antipodes of high self-esteem and signs of mental illness - are destroyers of thought, perverters of values and paralyzers of action.

A person with self-esteem chooses his values and sets goals when he makes long-term plans that integrate and guide all his actions. This is like a bridge thrown into the future, along which his whole life will pass; a bridge based on the firm belief that he is capable of thinking, judging and evaluating, that he is worthy of enjoying the values he has acquired.

This sense of control over reality is not the result of having any special skills, abilities or knowledge. It does not depend on any specific success or failure. It reflects the basis of a person’s relationship to reality, his conviction in his own fundamental self-worth. It reflects the individual’s confidence that, in essence, he is suitable for reality. Self-esteem is a metaphysical assessment.

It is precisely this psychological state that traditional morality makes impossible for a person who submits to this morality.

Mysticism and sacrificial morality are incompatible with mental health and self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive from an existential and psychological point of view.

1. Maintaining one's life and achieving adequate self-esteem requires that one use one's mind fully - while one is taught that morality requires and rests on faith.

Faith is the subordination of consciousness to dogmas that cannot be confirmed in practice or rationally proven.

When a man gives up reason as a standard of judgment, the only standard he has left is his feelings. A mystic is a person for whom feelings are an instrument of knowledge. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

To practice the "virtue" of faith, a person must willingly renounce his own views and judgments; he must of his own free will live among the inexplicable, among that which cannot be included in the system of his other knowledge, and at the same time remain in a state similar to a narcotic trance. He must of his own free will suppress a critical attitude towards the world and perceive it as a sin; to voluntarily expel from the mind any questions that call into question the tenets of faith - to stifle confidence in the mind, which is desperately trying to fulfill the functions assigned to it by nature of protecting human life and integrating knowledge.

Do not forget that all human knowledge has a hierarchical structure. The foundation and starting point of human thought is sense perception; on this basis, a person forms primary ideas, and then builds the entire structure of knowledge, continuing to identify and include new ideas at higher levels. If a person's thinking is normal, this process occurs under the guidance of logic, the “art of consistent identification,” and any new idea that arises in a person must be built into the hierarchical structure of his knowledge so that no contradictions arise. In order to introduce into consciousness any idea that does not originate from reality, is not evaluated by reason and is not amenable to rational consideration or judgment - worse, an idea that does not coincide with the structure of the rest of a person’s ideas and with his understanding of the world - it is necessary to abandon the unifying function of consciousness , from a complex of other beliefs and destroy the very possibility of being confident in something. This is the meaning of the statement of John Galt, the hero of the book Atlas Shrugged, that faith is “a short circuit that destroys reason.”

There is no worse self-deception than imagining that it is possible to somehow distinguish between the spheres of reason and faith in the consciousness of one person. Faith cannot be limited or limited; give in consciousness even an inch, and it will be a complete defeat. Reason may or may not be an absolute in consciousness; in the latter case there is no place where the line could be drawn, no principle according to which it could be drawn, no barrier that faith could not overcome, and no sphere of life into which it could not penetrate: man remains reasonable until his feelings declare otherwise.

Faith is an evil that no system can tolerate with impunity; a person who yields to faith will turn to it precisely in those cases where he most needs reason. If a person turns from reason to faith, if he rejects the absolutism of reality, then he thereby rejects the absolutism of his own consciousness - and his brain becomes an organ that can no longer be trusted. It becomes what the mystics declare it to be: a tool for perverting reality.

2. The human need for self-esteem entails the need to feel control over reality - but no control is possible in a Universe that contains something supernatural, miraculous and causeless, a Universe in which man is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which he must deal not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible where a person assumes and a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.

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Notes

Rand A. Atlas Shrugged: B

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3 hours – 6th ed. – M.: Alpina Publishers, 2011.

Rand A. Atlas Shrugged: In 3 hours - 6th ed. – M.: Alpina Publishers, 2011. – Part III. – pp. 355–356.

Rand A. Atlas Shrugged. – Part III.

When applied to physiological phenomena such as automatic bodily functions, the term “goal-directed” should not be taken in the sense of “intentional” (a concept that applies exclusively to the activities of consciousness); it does not imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in inanimate nature. In this context, I use the term "purposeful" to refer to the fact that the automatic functioning of a living organism is an activity that by its nature tends to preserve the life of that organism.

Rand A. Atlas Shrugged. – Part III.

End of introductory fragment.

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