EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Ayn Rand
Translation from: "Philosophy: Who Needs It"
In my post “The Missing Link,” I discussed the anti-ideal mentality and its social (tribal) manifestations. All tribally minded people are anti-ideal to varying degrees, but not all people who are anti-ideal are tribally minded. Some are lone wolves (emphasizing the most predatory characteristics of the species).
The majority of these wolves are frustrated tribal-minded people who have been rejected by the tribe (or by the people in their immediate environment): they are too irresponsible to be relied upon to follow conventional rules, and too unscrupulously manipulative to fight for power in the tribe. Since a stagnant way of thinking cannot provide a person with a means of livelihood, such a person, left to his own devices, becomes an intellectual vagrant, carrying himself like an eclectic " second-hander" or a person who accepts other people's ideas and behaviors without having defended within himself the reasons and values behind them, selecting parts of ideas indiscriminately, supporting any of them according to his mood, with only one constant in his behavior: the need to move from group to group, to cling to people, whatever they may be, and to manipulate them.
Whatever theoretical constructs he is able to weigh and discuss in different spheres, it is the sphere of ethics that fills him with horror at his own fruitlessness. Ethics is the science of ideas, loyalty to a code of values requires the ability to make sense of abstract principles and apply them to concrete situations and actions (even at the most primitive level of fulfilling elementary moral rules). The lone wolf of the tribe is unable to understand ethical values. He considers this a lack that he must conceal at all costs, and this problem is the most difficult for him to conceal. The whims that navigate him and that change him from moment to moment or from year to year cannot help him choose inner convictions or lifelong devotion to certain values. His whims push him to the opposite: an automatic denial of any permanent devotion to anyone or anything. Without personal values, a person has no idea of what is right or wrong. The tribal lone wolf is an amoralist to the core.
The clearest symptom by which one can recognize such a person is his inability to judge his own actions, or to evaluate the fruits of his labor by any standard. Normal self-evaluation behavior requires comparison against some abstract value or virtue—for example, “I am good because I am rational,” “I am good because I am honest,” even the validation of a second-hander’s goodness is “I am good because I am liked.” Regardless of whether the standard of virtue is right or wrong, these examples hint at the existence of an essential moral principle: that your own worth must be earned.
An immoral person's verification of his behavior is (which he rarely acknowledges or identifies): "I am good because I am me."
Beyond the age of three to five (i.e., beyond the level of sensory mental development) this is not an expression of pride and confidence, but of the exact opposite: of a vacuum, of a stagnant, stuck mentality confessing its inability to achieve any virtue or personal value.
Do not confuse this pattern of behavior with psychological subjectivism. Psychological subjectivism is incapable of identifying its own values or of proving objectivity, although it does in practice apply such values (albeit through terrible psycho-epistemological difficulty). The amoral person does not even accept subjective values; he does not accept any values. The implicit expression of his judgments is: “It is good because I like it” – “It is right because I did it” – “It is true because I want it to be true.” What does the I mean in these statements? A physical affirmation born of chronic anxiety.
Common manifestations of this behavior are: the writer who rewrites some ancient fallacy and thinks his work is new because he wrote it; the biased artist who feels that his drawings have value because they are his; the businessman who selects mediocre shots because he likes them; the political "idealist" who claims that racism is good if practiced by a minority (by his choice) but evil if practiced by the majority - and any supporter of such a double standard.
But even such feeble substitutes for morality are only a pretense: the amoral man does not believe in them, he believes in “I am good because I am me.” This is his policy of self-proof against his never-spoken self-admission: “I am good neither at this nor at that.”
Love manifests itself in response to values. The verification of the amoral man is revealed through his abnormal need to be loved (but not in the rational sense of the word) – to be loved for himself, that is, without considering the consequences of his actions. James Taggart reveals the nature of this need: “I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself – not for anything I do or have or think or say. And for myself – not for body or words or work or actions” (“Atlas Shrugged”). But when his wife asks him “But then…who are you?” he has no answer.
A real-life example: Years ago I knew an elderly woman who was a writer, very intelligent but drawn to mysticism, bitter, embittered, lonely and very unhappy. Her beliefs about love were similar to those of James Taggart. At the time of the publication of The Fountainhead, I told her that I was very grateful to Archibald Ogden, the editor who had threatened to leave the publishing house if the novel was not published. She listened with a particularly skeptical and disapproving look, and then said, "You don't need to feel grateful to him. He didn't do it for you. He did it to advance his career because he thought the book was good." I was horrified. I asked, "Do you think it would have been better if he thought the book was pointless but had tried to fight for its publication out of indulgence for me?" She refused to answer and changed the subject. I was unable to get any explanation from her. It took me many years before I began to understand her motives.
A similar phenomenon, which has not puzzled us for a long time, is observed in politics. Commentators often exhort a politician to put the interests of the country before his own and those of his party and to compromise with his opponents - such exhortations are not addressed to petty crooks, but to people of value. What does this mean? If the politician (here we are talking about a politician as a profession, we may refer to a man or a woman) is convinced that his ideas are true, then the interests of the state will be betrayed if he compromises. If he is convinced that the ideas of his opponent are wrong, then again, the country he serves is the one he will harm. If he is convinced of neither one nor the other, then he must have the courage to examine his own convictions for the sake of acquiring his own more reasonable judgment, and not only out of good intentions towards his country - because verifying the rightness or wrongness of his own ideas must be of paramount personal importance to him.
But the pursuit of verification of ideas requires an ideological consciousness that takes ideas seriously – that is, one that draws conclusions based on principles based on reality. The stagnant consciousness is incapable of believing that ideas can be of personal significance to anyone; it views ideas as an arbitrary choice and as a means to achieve some goals in the present. Thus, a person does not try to be elected to the head of state in order to implement certain policies – he preaches certain policies in order to be elected. By this logic, why be elected at all? The stagnant consciousness never asks itself such a question: the achievement of long-term and comprehensive goals is always beyond its limitations. (There are enough politicians and similar commentators of this type – and since such a way of thinking is considered normal and acceptable, does this raise the question of the intellectual level of the culture of our time?)
If a person uses ideas and principles to achieve his personal interest, then what is his personal interest and what determines it? Think of what meaningless and thankless slave labor politics is doomed to if the goal of his work – achieving quality government of the state – is not of his personal interest (or of the lawyer, if justice is not important to him; or of the writer, if the objective value of his books is not important to him, as the woman I gave as an example found acceptable). But the stagnant consciousness is not capable of generating goals or values, and must select them second-hand, taking them as they are handed to it, as if simply drifting with the flow. (Not all such people are tribal lone wolves – some are believers, resigned conformists because of their psycho-epistemological beliefs – but certainly all have anti-ideological consciousnesses).
By emphasizing “himself” (and deserving to be loved “for his own sake”), the lone wolf has no sense of self and his own interests, only momentary whims. Such a person is aware only of his own momentary sensations and nothing else. When such a person speaks of spiritual (i.e. intellectual) values—the things we admire or love—we would be shocked by the banality, vulgarity, and superficiality that emanates from him.
The tribal lone wolf feels that his essence has nothing to do with his actions, his work, his pursuits and goals, his ideas. And all this, he attributes to some force outside him – society or reality or material limitations – that compels him. He feels that his essence is some vague concept without attributes. One thing is certain: his essence is ineffable, that is, non-existent. The essence of a person is not his mind – his ability to perceive reality, to form beliefs, to choose values. For the lone tribal wolf, “reality” is a meaningless term, his metaphysics consists in the chronic feeling that life is somehow a conspiracy of people and things against him, and he will walk through fields of corpses in order to impose himself? No – in order to cover up (or fill) the heavy inner emptiness produced by his aborted personality.
It is a bitter joke on humanity that such a person is considered a symbol of egoism. This drives him to devastation: it gives him the hope of success in forging a height that is beyond his potential. Egoism is a deep philosophical, ideological achievement. Anyone who accepts the image of the tribal lone wolf as an example of egoism simply recognizes the stagnant nature of the functioning of his own consciousness.
Yet tribalists (i.e., tribal people) continue to claim that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that belonging to a tribe—whatever that may be—is the only way to make people moral. But the obedient members of the tribe are no better than their outcast wolf brother and are also amoral: their standard is “We are good because we are us.”
Abdication and self-deprecation are the hidden characteristics of the stagnant mind, the tribal people or the lone wolves. They all fear autonomy; they fear the responsibilities that only the Self (ideal consciousness) can perform, and they try to escape the two basic actions that the truly egoistic person would defend with his own life: personal choice and judgment. They fear reason (which is applied purposefully) and trust emotions (which are automatic) – they prefer relatives (accidentally chosen by birth) to friends (who are chosen by choice) – they prefer the tribe (what is given to them) to outsiders (the new) – they prefer commands (the remembered) to principles (the understood) – they welcome any theory of determinism, any thought that allows them to cry: “There was nothing I could do!”
It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistoric men were physically incapable of surviving without tribal affiliation to protect themselves from other tribes. The reason for the perpetuation of altruism in the civilized world, however, is not physical survival but psycho-epistemological: the need of the stagnant and repressed mind to survive in reality prompts it to associate with the tribe. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of personal space and personal worth - they do not understand what it is that they are being asked to sacrifice - they have no such thing as intellectual integrity, love of truth, self-chosen values, or passionate devotion to an idea. When they hear an injunction against "selfishness," they believe that what they must reject is the brutality, the senseless whims of the tribal lone wolf. But their leaders – the theorists of altruism – know that this is not so. Immanuel Kant knew, John Dewey knew; B. F. Skinner knew; John Rawls knew. It is not mindless brutality, it is reason, intellect, ability, moderation, confidence, self-esteem that they want to destroy.
In our time we are witnessing a terrifying spectacle: a magnificent scientific civilization dominated by the morality of prehistoric savages. The phenomenon that makes this possible is the disconnect between psycho-epistemological “straightforward” minds. The best example of this is people who flee to the material sciences (or technology or industry or business), hoping to find a haven from human irrationality, and abandon the field of ideas to the opponents of reason. Such refugees include some of the best minds of humanity. But such a refuge is not attainable. Such people, who perform feats of integration of ideas and rationality in their work, become helplessly anti-ideal in all other aspects of their lives, especially in human relationships and social affairs. (For example, compare Einstein’s achievements in science with his political beliefs.)
Human progress requires specialization. But the division of labor in society cannot survive without a rational philosophy – without a solid foundation of fundamental principles whose task is to train the human mind to be human, that is, to be ideal.
