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)
