A short excerpt from Ayn Rand:
“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.
Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.
This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.”
— Ayn Rand in The Soul of An Individualist
My Comment
To forestall the superficial and misleading view that Rand was advocating Gordon Gekko style greed (she wasn’t) or crude selfishness (she wasn’t), read through this extended criticism of those readings of Rand.
Rand is Nietzschean. She gets a number of things wrong, yes. But to believe that her rewriting of morality, her overturning of Christian ethics was on behalf of enslavement to the vices, is, I think wrong, although it’s a widespread error.
Like Nietzsche, but less successfully (in my opinion) Rand was really trying to envision a new morality. Actually, I would say it’s not really a new morality. It’s a return to an old pagan one – of virtu rather than virtue – a return to techne (meaning excellence, skill, self-transcendence, or mastery) as the moral center of a being, an inward-directed moral center.
This she contrasts with what she, like Nietzsche, calls the slave mentality, the other directed mentality of Christianity.
As anyone formulating a new turn and a break from so powerful a forebear, Rand overstates her case and is sometimes ungenerous to her predecessor. But it’s wrong, I think, to call her an advocate of “selfishness” of the Wall Street bankster variety.
Gah, not Ayn Rand…
There is a distinction between types of self-interest between which Rand equivocates to make her fallacious point.
Read this
I have my problems with Rand but here at least she’s not really advocating selfishness here…she does specify that she is talking about rational self-interest in the Aristotelian sense – not Gordon Gekko greed or criminality>
I should post the rest of the passage..
You have to take the context and time in which she wrote…
There are other places where I disagree with her
Is there even such a thing as “altruism”? In Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene”, it is argued that most if not all actions are actually selfish–and not just on the genetic level. That is, even social actions which people superficially call altruistic are actually selfish upon any real inspection. (Many naive communists self-proclaim themselves to be altruistic (in being willing to sacrifice for the community), but are actually selfish and expect to gain (perhaps in the long run) from the association.)
But also, there are pros and cons to both perspectives (caring for oneself, and caring for others) — it’s not entirely fair to bash caring for others as Rand seems to exclusively do :b (but I can understand why she does this). The real problem is trying to legislate (ie. force at gunpoint) either behavior–which entirely undermines the alleged intention.