The Virtue Of Selfishness: A New Concept Of Egoism on Superphysics

America is culturally bankrupt

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When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are 2 courses it can follow:

They can evade the reality of their situation

They can act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency

Preface

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This book is for those who want the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals.

It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.

The man of faith and The man of force

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With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for creativity.

Reason and its practical expression—free trade—were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated, usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who could revoke the tolerance at whim.

The Witch Doctor

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An animal has no critical faculty.

To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality.

Reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels.

The brute, the mystic, the thinker

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Men’s epistemology—or, more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of awareness—is the most fundamental standard by which they can be classified.

Few men are consistent in that respect; most men keep switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence—with echoes responding to them, in support or opposition, in the switching, flickering souls of the others.

Capitalism

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The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of their intellect.

Hume and Kant

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Hume declared that he saw objects moving about, but never saw “causality”.

It was the voice of Attila that men were hearing.

It was Attila’s soul that spoke when Hume declared that he experienced a flow of fleeting states inside his skull, such as sensations, feelings or memories, but had never caught the experience of such a thing as consciousness or self.

The Philosopher For and Against Capitalism

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While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason, breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body—what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements, was the plain Witch-doctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.

Karl Marx

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Karl Marx was the most consistent translator of the altruist morality into practical action and political theory.

He advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all through the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the successful and the wealthy.

The Altruist Morality of Socialism

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The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment.

This made evasion a virtue.

This morality of altruism replaced self-esteem.

Such moralists proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer—and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.

Collectivism is Dead

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Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction “don’t be certain.”

As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world.

The need for intellectual leadership

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Today, the businessman and the intellectual face each other with the mutual fear and the mutual contempt of Attila and the Witch Doctor.

The businessman has lost confidence in all theories, and functions on a range-of-the-moment expediency, not daring to look at the future. The intellectual has cut himself off from reality and plays a futile word-game with ideas, not daring to look at the past.

Rand's 2 Basic Minimum Principles

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The Founding Fathers were America’s first intellectuals and, so far, her last.

It is their basic political line that the New Intellectuals have to continue. Today, that line is lost under layer upon layer of evasions, equivocations and plain falsehood; today’s Witch Doctors claim that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was faith and uncritical compliance with tradition; today’s Attila-ists claim that that basic premise was the subordination of the individual to the collective and his sacrifice to the public good.

We the Living

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This novel was published in 1936 and reissued in 1959.

Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it.

Anthem

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This novelette was first published in England in 1938.

Its theme is: the meaning of man’s ego. It projects a society of the future, which has accepted total collectivism with all of its ultimate consequences: men have relapsed into primitive savagery and stagnation.

The Fountainhead

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This novel was published in 1943. Its theme is: individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist. The story presents the career of Howard Roark, an architect and innovator, who breaks with tradition, recognizes no authority but that of his own independent judgment, struggles for the integrity of his creative work against every form of social opposition—and wins.

The rule of the bromide.

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To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its selfrespect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way. Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. . . .

The Soul Of An Individualist

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This is the speech that Howard Roark makes in his own defense, while on trial for having dynamited a government housing project under construction; he had designed the project for another architect, Peter Keating, on the agreement that it would be built exactly as he designed it; the agreement was broken by the government agency; the two architects had no recourse to law, not being permitted to sue the government.

The Common Good

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“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

Atlas Shrugged

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This novel was published in 1957. Its theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.

The Martyrdom Of The Industrialists

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This is part of a conversation between Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden, a self-made man who has risen to the position of the country’s greatest steel industrialist. (Francisco speaking.)

“You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong—what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who’ve expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who’ve kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a ‘vulgar materialist.’

The Meaning Of Sex

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This is from a conversation between Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden, who are in love with the same woman, though neither one of them knows it. (Francisco speaking.)

“Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value. . . .

Howard Roark's Speech

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The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of manhours. He gave it to ‘the family,’ didn’t ask anything for it, either, couldn’t ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn’t gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn’t come up with any ideas, the second year.

The Forgotten Man Of Socialized Medicine

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This is the explanation given by a distinguished brain surgeon of why he joined Galt’s strike.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.” THE NATURE OF AN ARTIST This is an excerpt from a conversation between Dagny Taggart, the heroine of the story, and Richard Halley, a great composer, who is now on strike. “Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you? . . . That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotion—emotions be damned! —I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired. . . . There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek—I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart—only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. . . .

The Philosophy of Objectivism

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This is the philosophy of Objectivism.

This is John Galt – am who loves his life and does not sacrifice his love or his values.

What is Rationality

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Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.

Life is given to him, survival is not.

His body is given to him, its sustenance is not.

His mind is given to him, its content is not.

The Objectivist's Morals

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Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge.

Reason is:

his only means to gain it.
the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses.

The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

Objectivist Definitions

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Rationality is the recognition:

of existence
that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving the truth which is thinking
that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action
that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise
that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality
that the alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and annihilates one’s consciousness.

Independence is the recognition that you are responsible for judgment and nothing can help you escape it.

Sacrifice

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Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives.

Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

The good of others

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What is the good? Your only answer is ‘The good of others.’

The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they should feel.

Objectivist Happiness

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Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

The Morality of Death

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You claim that:

fear and joy are incentives of equal power
fear is the more ‘practical’

You do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned.

For the New Intellectual

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This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence—the congenital dependent—is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul.

The Looters

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Morality to you is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, boredom, punishment since pleasure cannot be moral.

For the New Intellectual

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By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

The character of mystics

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Their only purpose throughout the ages has been to:

undercut your consciousness
rule you by force

The rites of the jungle witch doctors:

distorted reality into grotesque absurdities
stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural

The supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn—to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force:

Human rights are superior to ‘property rights’

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It was the 3 of us who started what I am now completing. It was the 3 of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul.

The Esoteric Philosophies

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The secret of all their esoteric philosophies is to erect on that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums—that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger—that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipeline counts, but their feelings do not—that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

What is an Axiom?

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As the savages feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing.

Ending Words

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I am speaking to those who want to live and to recapture the honor of their soul.