The Virtue of Selfishness

Rating:
Summary: Rational Selfishness Rules
Review: Ayn goes into a lot of detail to try and explain her way of thinking about selfishness. Most people do not get it or do not want to because selfishness is a 'dirty' word. To me it is much better than helping the ungrateful, lazy, incompetent people. Everyone is selfish, but only the truly great are 'rationally' selfish. Read this to grasp the difference.

Rating:
Summary: No worse than any other philosophy
Review: I haven't read the whole book, but I get the gist. What this book advocates is survival of the fittest. It's hard to disagree with her train of thought. Rand will offend people who dwell on the afterlife or put their will in the hands of an invisible force that controls the world. As she should. We're here now. Concentrate on now. She also draws fire for correctly pointing out that we are selfish creatures who do things for our own happiness, even if that means giving selflessly. It takes guts to be this honest. She probably got sick of seeing people skate by in a socialist economy and embraced capitalism for that reason alone. In a capitalist society, its usually true that those that work the hardest at their career reap the greatest rewards. Don't blame her for pointing out the truth. It should be obvious.

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Summary: Selfishness does not diminish Responsibility
Review: Unfortunately for Ayn Rand and her followers the concept of INDIVIDUAL rational selfishness cannot be divorced form the interconectedness of social life. And although many refuse to accept the seemingly inconsequential effects of even the most common of actions the collective accumulation of such actions have a profound influence on the lives of ALL. Therefore, the idea of acting in one's own self interest in fundamentally flawed if it is put forth, as Rand does, on the assumption that one's actions are innocuous to the well-being of others. For example every piece of garbage one throws away, puff of car exhaust that spews from our cars, pair of Nikes that we buy, affect, often with terrible consequences for many, people in parts of the world we CHOOSE to ignore. The problem with this line of thinking is that it presents itself as a means of rescuing society from the evils of egalitarianism through the deification of free market capitalism( which has never existed as evidenced by endless corporate subsidies and bailouts antithetical to Rand's purported program when applied to individuals), which is built upon the same types of unquestionable idealogies as Communism and Fascism. The fact is wherever there is suffering, injustice and inequality in the world one also finds selfishness as one of the main contributing factors. I also find it intweresting that many of the same people who sing the praises of Rand's misguided ideas are those who have never worked or created anything on their own. Randian philosophy is therefore the philosophy of the trust fund, the inheritance recipient, the person who runs back to mommy and daddy for help when their personal form of "rational selfishness" becomes inconvienent. In its most insidious form Rand's ideas represent nothing more than a reapplication of the tenents of social darwinism, which is inextractibly rooted in racism, sexism and EUROCENTRISM in a declintionist view of historical progress.

Rating:
Summary: So far ahead of its time that it's actually late
Review: Ayn Rand's _The Virtue of Selfishness_ is so far ahead of its time that the self-sacrificing mystics out there still haven't caught up with it, in large part because it hasn't even actually arrived yet! That's how far ahead of its time it is.

Of course any book this far ahead of its time is bound to be misunderstood by people who misunderstand it, but in fact the irrational religious mystic looters out there could use their rational minds to reject Rand's philosophy if there were any rational objections to it, which there aren't, and if those selfless second-handers had rational minds, which they don't. When the ideas in this book catch on, things will be different. The moochers will have to live by their own efforts and not mooch off the productive achievements of people like me! And I will get the credit I deserve for not being a moocher but a productive and rational INDIVIDUAL!

This book is so far ahead of its time I haven't even got my own copy of it yet. That's how far ahead of its time it is -- in other words, pretty darned far. If you want a book that hasn't even been written yet and STILL has the power to make you think (if you have a rational mind, which SOME people obviously don't), this is the book for you. You should read it as soon as it's written.

Rating:
Summary: Rand's Wisdom is Far Ahead of Its Time
Review: Ayn Rand is a woman of almost unfathomable genius. I would encourage readers to disregard anything negative that other reviewers have to say about this book. For the small price that you have to pay Rand presents her vision of individual freedom that, even with its holes and shortcomings, is so far ahead of its time, it's difficult to imagine. It was far out ahead of its time when she published this book more than 40 years ago. Sadly, her vision is still WAY out ahead of the current state of the world even today.

Even if you don't agree with her, you will still have the freedom to use your own rational mind to challenge or discard anything that she says. Anyone who approaches Rand with an open mind, however, will have to admit that she had an uncanny understanding of how the value that each individual places on his own life impacts the course of history and the progress of man. She clearly describes how the cult of self-sacrifice is a logical and immoral progression from mysticism and how the resulting psychological, political and economic processes undermine individual liberty, man's pursuit of happiness, the general quality of life for all men, and the advancement of civilization.

The selfless and self-sacrificing among you can take comfort in the fact that when Rand's vision of laizzez-faire capitalism and individual freedom is finally realized (reason always wins in the end), you will still have compete and total freedom to live irrational, mystical, irresponsible lives. No one will have the right to prevent you from sacrificing your own life, mind or values to any person, state, religion, or collectivist ideals. No one will force you to achieve your full potential as a human being. It will still be your life and you will have complete freedom to sacrifice your own value in the service of lesser values.

The big change will be that you will no longer be permitted to force other men to sacrifice their own rational, life-sustaining, self-interest to your own. That is the virtue of your fellow man's selfishness. You will not be able to destroy him or deprive him of his liberty. You will no longer have the "right" to place liens on the success of others, or to force individuals to give up objective reality for subjective or collective delusions. Irrational, angry mobs will no longer have the "right" to enslave rational individuals and force them to sacrifice themselves to what is not rational and of their own choosing. You will not be entitled to legally force the efficient, intelligent producers to support the inefficient, the mediocre, or the parasites, be they rich or poor. All men will be free to use their own rational minds to seek their own values and happiness as long as it doesn't deprive others of individual liberty. All men will be free to learn and create, and trade freely with whomever they choose, which by default elevates the status of all men.

Rand's hyperbole sometimes made me laugh, but this book clearly articulated so many of my own perceptions and thoughts. It also made me see possibilities I never imagined before. This book and Rand's other writings are a must-read for anybody interested in the real meaning of liberty. Everything she talks about in this book is happening all around me.

Rating:
Summary: An Actual Review
Review: As the title suggests this is going to be an actual review of the _Virtue of Selfishness_ and not another argument for or against Miss Rand's thesis. I'm assuming here that you, as a potential reader, would possibly like to know a little something about what the book contains. If so, read on.

Objectivism, the philosophy which Ayn Rand originated, is a full system of thought. This book presents a part of that system, its ethics. And here, as with the other books Miss Rand has written, her thesis is controversial, strikingly original and brilliantly articulated. The book, for instance, begins with the following premise:

"Ethics is _not_ a mystic fantasy--nor a social convention--nor a dispensable, subjective luxury. . . . Ethics is an _objective necessity of man's survival_--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life."

This conception of ethics as a _this-worldly, objective need of man determined by reality and not by some ruling consciousness_ is virtually unwarranted in the history of philosophy. Her conclusions are just as controversial however--and, for proof, read the following passage (which shows the difference between the Objectivist ethics and that of every other system known to mankind):

"Every human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others," says Miss Rand, "and therefore, man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself."

In other words, Rand advocates _rational selfishness_. Now, what does this mean or entail--and how does one achieve it? These are the questions that the book answers (and which the other reviews posted at this site most certainly do not). If you would like to find out those answers, I highly recommend you read this book.

Rating:
Summary: she's certainly fared better than most of her critics
Review: [...]

Objectivism has been the target of innumerable attacks and its weaknesses have been thoroughly documented, so I'll not try to rehash them all here (see the links below for some essays that do the job). I'd just like to mention a couple of the things that really jump out at me. First, though I agree with her position that reason should be the guide to human action and not feelings, this is a personal preference that we happen to share; there is no abstract necessity for mankind generally to choose reason. And having so chosen, we both would opt for freedom as the primary value, but someone who has chosen the feelings as a guide to their ethics, would be justified, within the four corners of their ethos, in making a more mutual survival their primary value. This is the difference, discussed here many times, between freedom and security, which I have argued has some correlation to gender. Men, thanks to historical circumstances, and perhaps to biology, have tended to be more confident in their ability to survive and fend for themselves, and so have tended to come down on the side of freedom. Women, understandably less confident, have favored security, that their survival might be assured even if it requires curtailing freedom in general. To dismiss this countervailing viewpoint as irrational may even be true, but that does not delegitimize it. If survival is the ethical purpose of every man, why shouldn't those who question their capacity to survive on their own seek to force others to help ?

The larger issue raised by Objectivism though is whether, even assuming an ideal world where the ethics could be applied absolutely, it suffices. Would an existence wherein each of us was concerned solely with our own survival really be worth living ? Even if it can be argued that we had arrived at the imperative to survive through a process of reasoning, would we be any better than animals ? I think not. And this is the most powerful criticism not merely of Objectivism but of pure reason, of capitalism, and of individualism in general : in the absence of any values external to man (presumably religious, but at least spiritual in some form), man's life or his freedom or his happiness are all standards arbitrarily adopted, and therefore not clearly superior to other standards which might otherwise be arbitrarily adopted. So what makes my rational decision to choose freedom any better than the next person's emotional decision to choose forced sharing of resources ? And suppose I get my freedom, what's the point if all I use it for is to further my own inevitably temporary survival ? There have to be some broader purposes to human existence, don't there ?

Though life is indeed precious, the continued existence of each of us is simply not a fit measure for the meaning of our lives. So in the end I find it easier to forgive Ayn Rand's stridency--her overbearing insistence on the primacy of the individual and individual concerns was appropriate to the time--than the narrowness of her vision. Objectivism, like Existentialism, is ultimately too niggardly a philosophy for my tastes. Freedom must be a means to get us somewhere, not an end in itself; otherwise it is simply one end among many that we might choose from. We must raise our eyes from our own navels in order to find absolute meaning in our lives, but Objectivism stubbornly refuses to do so.

GRADE : B+

Rating:
Summary: Optical Illusions in Philosophy.
Review: This slim little collection of essays is the Objectivist book of ethics. Now, I consider Objectivist ethics about as depraved as they come, so the majority of my review will be against the ideas contained herein.

Rand begins the book by defining selfishness as "concern with one's own interests." My dictionary defines selfish as "devoted to or caring only for oneself." Note the primacy of the ONLY in my dictionary; Rand's definition barely scratches the surface. Later, she mis-defines sacrifice as "the surrender of a greater value for a lesser one or a nonvalue." (In reality, sacrifice is the giving up of something less valued for something more valued; the reason for its importance is that these values are relative, and the "less valued" sacrifice may be significant indeed.) With acts of sleight of word like these, Rand is capable of great feats of optical illusions-which explains her entire philosophy. Rand's favored argumentative method is to create her own view, create a false "opposite" view, assume (given her worship of binary logic) that all must take one side or the other, and then bash the "opposite" view into oblivion. This is not reason, or rationality; it is misdirection and heavy use of the strawman argument. Rand's altruism is strictly a strawman, as it does not actually describe any ethical system I am aware of. Meanwhile, there is no support given to her own position-the premise, that enjoyment (in a very specific context) of life (in a very specific context) is the highest value, is never really supported other than by weakly striving to show that man survives by rational faculties; her basis of individual value as the highest priority is extraordinarily questionable-there is no reason given why man should not value the survival of the species more highly than his survival as an individual. None. Rand cannot explain this, in large part because her foundational beliefs (such as dogmatic atheism) are wrong. Anything built on a wrong foundation cannot help but be wrong.

Rand's version of free will also creeps in here, and it helps to explain why Objectivist thought is itself an optical illusion. In Rand's view, the point of choice in self-determinism is whether to "focus" or not. Rand describes focus as "a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality" and its Randian opposite (read: strawman) is "letting [oneself] drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus..." Now, like I said, Objectivist thought is an optical illusion. Why? Well, let's look at the ramifications of this "free will" choice. The choice to focus or not is THE CHOICE that a man makes, according to Rand. Allow me to re-phrase that: in the Randian worldview, man does not make any choices except whether or not to focus. Now, allow me to elaborate. One, Rand has a view that those who do not focus are subhuman-redefining to create a class of "true" humans who fit her description and make everybody else cattle who can be eliminated at will. Two, Rand's view is that "wrong" ideas come about by unfocusing at some point in the thought process. Now, the Randian definition of "wrong" is "disagrees with Ayn Rand." So, if you disagree with Rand at ANY point, it's because you've voluntarily unfocused and made yourself inhuman. In reality, the thought process described here does not reflect human thought, but rather the view that Rand had of it thanks to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Since this lies at the base of why Rand viewed ethics as a necessity, we may throw away said argument.

In "The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests," Rand steps (revealingly) into a groundless philosophical predicament that ruins another of her base premises. As she eradicates desire (and emotion, and whim) as valid interests of rational men, Rand reveals that her "irrational or mystical" view of reality entails acceptance of goals "regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not." In essence, Rand is making a mystical statement of her own: the belief in much of modern Western society of the "facts of reality" corresponding exactly with what is known scientifically and "rationally." Allow me to state something that may surprise you, especially if you are an Objectivist: we do not know all the facts of reality. That is plain and simple truth. We do not know if consciousness survives after death in some way, or if there exists life on other worlds, or if there are higher beings than humans in any sense of the word. I have my beliefs, which may entail significantly more than someone else's, and both I (a Christian) and an atheist would feel that we knew a final fact about the universe, even though I know (and I use that word forcefully) that human souls will live on after death, and he knows (possibly with as much force) that they will not. Rand is assigning completeness to a world view not intended to ever be complete. This is what I referred to earlier as a foundational error. Because of it, Rand rejects anything that she feels touches on "mysticism" out of hand; no higher power exists as a source or enforcement of ethics.

Lacking God to give ethics, Rand's attempts to pick a highest value and use it are lackluster. She chooses human (Rand-speak for Objectivist) survival. Damning is her claim that other survival is just temporary sub-human living. Essentially, we are now to buy that this method of living is the best. Even if it were needed to live (it's not) or to be happy (it's not), Objectivist living is never defended as being of high quality. There is nothing to actually recommend it; this is what Scott Ryan always refers to.

So, I think I'll pass on your "life," Miss Rand.

Rating:
Summary: This is Virtue?
Review: One thing I've discovered from the reader reviews about Ayn Rand is that you either love her or hate her (both are too strong words, but you know what I mean). If you buy into her objectivism philosophy of minimialist government then you will enjoy this. If not, it's time to move on. That being said, a lot of what Rand writes makes sense. If altruism is taken to its logical extremes, then altruism does fail as an approach to life. However, if objectivism is taken to its logical extremes, then it fails just as miserably. It is absurd to suggest that government is necessary solely for protection againsy physical and economic violence. Modern society requires infrastructures that are dependent on more than private whim (even if that private whim is Rand's holy dollar). Also, Rand argues incessantly (both here and in "Atlas Shrugged") that objectivism is our escape from the animals. I cannot agree that a philosophy that justifies the survival and advancement of the strong (in Rand's world that means wealthy) over that of the weak (poor and disadvantaged) rises us above the level of the animal. In fact, I am convinced that this philosophy keeps us firmly entrenched at that level. Finally, how is it that laws that tax corporations are bad, but laws that allow the formation of corporations in the first place and allow owners/shareholders to escape personal liability in the first place are bad? Just curious. Actually, don't fool yourself. Rand's philosophy is not about advancing the individual spirit; it's all about being rich and feeling good about it, no matter who gets stepped on.

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Summary: Hierarchy of Values
Review: I don't want to turn this into a discussion forum on Greg Nyquist's "soldier dilemma", but I feel a response is warranted.

Objectivist ethics are based on one's hierarchy of values. It is only evil to sacrifice a greater value for a lesser one, Or a value for a non-value. For instance, if I give up my life to save my son's, that is not a sacrifice. I hold his life to be a higher value than my continued existence without him.

Therefore, in the soldier example, an objectivist soldier would throw himself on the grenade if 1), he had become friends with the other soldiers, and held them in very high value and did not want to continue his existence without them or 2) he believed that by doing this he was serving the cause of the greater war effort of freedom, and did not want to live his life in serfdom.

It can even be argued that it is not evil to give up one's life for a stranger, since it is your life that is at stake, and your life is yours to do with what you please. It IS evil, however to expect or require that someone else do so.