Ayn Rand's Objectivism

The following tasty morsels are from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Miss Rand views logic as humanity’s tool for survival, a lens through which every aspect of our lives must be viewed…or else. She gives the name Objectivism to her philosophy; an additional important point is her claim that in every situation what is best for the individual is always best for everyone shorter-term signs to the contrary being simply misleading. This belief has some deep consequences concerning the underlying character of reality which I will not delve into here (mostly because I would quickly be in way over my head) but I do want to contribute my two cents before allowing you the worthy quotes.

First of all, I absolutely agree with Ayn Rand that every person must use logic when approaching the world – to not do so is preposterous. In my way of thinking however, there are points at which my logic does come to contradictions and breaks down. My favorite is that “something cannot come from nothing”. Basically reason tells us that existence and our universe could not have materialized out of thin air, it had to come from somewhere. Well, we know that pre-Big Bang or pre-multiple or infinite Big Bangs and universes, that our logic does not apply to this ‘pre-‘. This is outside of time and space, we cannot even scratch the surface of what this is like. Now, we apply our logic to it as best as we can as long as we understand that it defies all attempts. But enough of me, allow me to introduce some extremely well thought out logical applications by Miss Rand:

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment – on the unstated premise that the thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.’ Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to sat ‘It is’, you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’ – he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’(p. 944)

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud – that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while enemies you have to dread and flee – that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling – that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. (p. 945)

Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a produces. Happiness is possible only to a rational man; the man who desires nothing but rational goals seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. (p. 948)

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is that trader. We, who live, by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his souls as alms. Just as he does not five his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit – his love, his friendship, his esteem – except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters have know the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread – a man of justice. (p. 948)

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force is a killer acting on the premise of death in manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live. (p. 949)