Jatketaan vielä Ayn Randin tuotannolla. Tällä kertaa
on vuorossa The Virtue of Selfishness, joka on ehkä selkein paketti Randin filosofiasta ja ajattelusta. Siinä missä Randin Atlas Shrugged on fiktiivinen ja pitkä tarinamuotoinen mestariteos, The Virtue of Selfisness koostuu lyhyistä ja suoraan aihealueeseen iskevistä tekstipätkistä. Tyyliltään se on samanlainen kuin Capitalism - The Unknown Ideal, joka paneutuu puolustamaan kapitalmismia yhteiskunta- ja talousjärjestelmänä, tässä teoksessa sen sijaan keskitytään puolustamaan yksilöä kaiken toiminnan keskiössä.
 |
| Ayn Rand: The Virtue of Selfishness |
Poiminnot
- The exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
- The first step is to assert man’s right to a moral existence – that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life.
- “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible. (16)
- … It is only the concept of Life that makes the concept of Value possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. (16)
- An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means – and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value; that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil. (17)
- Consciousness is the basic means of survival. (19)
- Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. …Thinking requires a state of full focused awareness. (22)
- Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not”. Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not”. Metaphysically the choice “to be conscious or not” it the choice of life or death. (22)
- Ethics is not a mystic fantasy – nor a social convention – nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival – not by the grace of the supernatural nor or your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life. (24)
- Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work. (25)
- The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value – and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man. (27)
- Value is that which one acts to gain/or keep. Virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics – the three values, which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life – are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride. Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determinates the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work – pride is the result. (27)
- Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. (29)
- The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others – and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose. (30)
- Happiness is the successful state of life. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. (30)
- Happiness can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. (33)
- The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. (34)
- To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love – because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. (35)
- It is only on the basis of rational selfishness – on the basis of justice – that men can be fit to live together in a free, peaceful, prosperous, benevolent, rational society. (35)
- The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence – to protect him from physical violence – to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. (36)
- When I say “capitalism”, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism – with a separation of state and economics, in the same way for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America: various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future – if mankind is to have future. (37)
- The proper function of consciousness is: perception, cognition, and the control of action. (40)
- Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof…. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge. (41)
- Pride is one’s response to one’s power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one’s own efficacy. … Pride has to be earned. (45)
- The root of selfishness is man’s right – and need – to act on his own judgment. (46)
- Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. (50)
- Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love. (51)
- Any action that man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. (51)
- It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. …One should help men in an emergency. (55)
- One’s sole obligation toward others, in this respect, is to maintain a social system that leaves men free to achieve, to gain and to keep their values. (55)
- There are no conflict of interests among rational men. And there are four reasons to that: Reality, Context, Responsibility and Effort. (57)
- Like any other value, love is not a static quantity to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned. (63)
- There are, broadly, five (interconnected) areas that allow man to experience the enjoyment of life: productive work, human relationships, recreation, art, sex. – Nathaniel Branden.(72)
- Of the various pleasures that man can offer himself, the greatest is pride – the pleasure he takes in his own achievements and in the creation of his own character. The pleasure he takes in the character and achievements of another human being is that of admiration. The highest expression of the most intense union of these two responses – pride and admiration – is romantic love. Its celebration is sex. – Nathaniel Branden. (76)
- A man falls in love with and sexually desires the person who reflects his own deepest values. – Nathaniel Branden. (77)
- There can be no compromise on moral principles. (81)
- One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment. Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil. (82)
- There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. (83)
- Judge, and be prepared to be judged. (83)
- “Surely you don’t think in terms of black-and-white, do you?” – The proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: “You’re damn right I do!” (92)
- What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society? If you want to help them, you will not be stopped. Only individual men have the right to decide then or whether they wish to help others; society – as an organized political system – has no rights in the matter at all. (93)
- The man who is willing to serve as the means to ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends. (94)
- Progress can come only out of men’s surplus, that is: from the work of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to venture out in pursuit of the new. Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life. (97)
- All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost. (98)
- America’s greatness lies in the fact that her actual monuments are not public. The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. But America’s skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose; they were built by the energy, iniative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. (105)
- There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights”. No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel. (106)
- If one wishes to advocate a free society – that is, capitalism – one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. (108)
- The right to property is a right to action, like all others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values. (111)
- There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. (111)
- The Founding Fathers spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness – not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has a right to take actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy. (114)
- Rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. (115)
- Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights. (117)
- The government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose. (129)
- The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories: all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals – the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders – the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws. (131)
- In a fully free society, taxation – or, to be exact, payment for governmental services would be voluntary. The citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance. (135)
- For every species, growth is a necessity of survival. Biologically, inactivity is death. (141)
- Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as best to further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the productive process, whatever their level of ability. But it is not geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality. (146)
- Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage – the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. (147)
- Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements – and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men. (148)
- Racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own interiority. Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest from the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge – for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment – and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem). The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem”. (149)
- There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism. …It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly. No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. …It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. (151)
- The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. (154)
