One star because we can't do fractions of stars.  This was obviously a hate-read for me.  As someone who thinks Objectivism is the purest, undistilled horse shit, forcing myself to get through even this slim 168-page volume was torture.  The worst of Halloween tricks, The Virtue of Selfishness waited on my nightstand every day like a flaming bag of dog mess to be stomped every morning.  I wouldn't read this book again if I was stranded on a desert island for the rest of my life and this was my only reading material.

Objectivism pretended to be something new.  Rand obviously intended "The moral purpose of a man's life is the achievement of his own happiness," (p.56) to be outre and scandalous.  Squares like us are supposed to be startled.  How could she say such a thing?!?

What Rand offers is an inversion of the Golden Rule.  Instead of Love Your Neighbor as Yourself, Rand instructs us to cut the middle man and just love yourself instead.  To Rand altruism is evil and selfishness should be rewarded.  A Medal of Honor winner who sacrificed his own life to save his platoon (my example) shouldn't be honored but criticized.  According to Rand any such extravagant displays of self-sacrifice show only a lack of self-esteem, diminished respect for others, and proof of a tragic indifference to ethics.  To Ayn Rand, Jesus Christ, held up by religious doctrine as sacrificing his life for the souls of everyone else, would be the ultimate sucker.  Sad.

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to turn everything upside down and inside out in an effort to create a whole new morality for mankind.  Up is down and black is white.  Rand says that love is a selfish value - the recognition of seeing one's values in another - and that selfless love is a contradiction in terms (p. 51).  Helping others and relief of suffering should never be one's primary concern.  Any help one gives another should be an act of generosity, never a moral duty.

Rand writes "If one wishes to advocate a free society - that is, capitalism..." showing that to her, they are the same thing (p.108).  In fact, the terms are completely interchangeable.  Objectivism and capitalism go hand in hand.  The implication of this book is that society would be better if we adopted Objectivist philosophy, though Rand rarely says so explicitly.  She constructs grand straw men to prove that uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism is the best of all worlds.  Socialist societies are "democratic absolute monarchy" that are "open to seizure of power by all comers, any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug." (p. 106)  Rand warns that the apotheosis of socialism is the cutting out of a healthy man's eyes to give a blind person the power of sight.  After all, if everything is community property, even one's own eyeballs would not be safe. (p. 98) 

Yet the only ruthless climber, opportunist, or demagogue I see is Ayn Rand herself.  Like any malignant narcissist, she reveals much more about herself in what she writes than what she is trying to convey.  The goal was never to create a better society.  Rand hates society.  The goal was to create a justification for the status quo.  This fancy new philosophy that Rand worked so hard developing was only ever about creating a place in the world for Ayn Rand. 

(Case in point, Nathaniel Branden, who wrote five chapters in this book gets almost no credit. Since when is contributing 5 chapters out of 19 not coauthorship? Instead, we get a cryptic note at the end of the introduction that tells us that despite contributing to large portions of this book and the Objectivist philosophy Branden is "no longer associated me, with my philosphy or The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter).")

What we have here is a fancy doctrine that says that the people at the top deserve to be there.  The point of Objectivism isn't to rattle cages and freak out squares, it is about justifying the existing class structure.  Rand knew that if she found a way to help rich people sleep better at night, she would be rewarded with her own creature comforts.  Being a good Objectivist, Rand was concerned only with herself and her own problems.  Ayn Rand was a selfish asshole.

Objectivism is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.  Rand starts with her conclusion and works her way back.  The point of Objectivism is to reward selfishness and self-centeredness.  Rich people don't just want to have all the money and power, they also want to be loved.  The Western religious tradition, based in large part on Christ's message of self-sacrifice, has always made rich people feel bad about being rich.  Ayn Rand saw an opportunity to ditch that old philosophy for something fresh that said, actually no, rich people are great.  They are the best of us because they are the culmination of this new morality that says you should put yourself first. 

Rand seeks to take the economic arguments of the Austrian School and Milton Friedman's neoliberalism to their logical conclusion.  She seeks to flatter capitalist society's winners and tell them they deserve everything they can horde.  This philosophy, like Neoclassical economics, is based first on property rights, "without property rights, no other rights are possible." (p.110)  Rand's vision of a utopian ideal is a place where taxation (payment for government, she clarifies) would be "strictly voluntary." (p. 135)  Just so.  Good luck building a military with that.

But the philosophy that Rand concocts is nothing new.  This is, in fact, the oldest philosophy in existence.  It's so old that it's not even really a philosophy at all.  It's called the Law of the Jungle.  Might makes right.  Bigger is better.  It's a slight twist on social Darwinism that says those at the top of the social food chain belong there because they are the biggest, best, and meanest.  To the victor go the spoils.  There is nothing original or new about this idea.  

Mankind is a social animal.  There is a reason that the United Nations considers solitary confinement torture.  People need others.  There is truth to John Donne's sentiment that "No man is an island."  Society only exists because people work together.  The people who decide to lone-wolf it end up like Christopher McCandless, lonely, cut off, miserable, and dead.  Like it or not, we need each other.

I think it is telling that Rand's worldview resonates with so many teenagers.  In this self-centered worldview, everyone is out to get you, so you need to fight hard just to survive.  A lot of teens feel this way.  It is also telling that Rand died without ever having had children.  In my own experience, having children made me grow beyond any selfish worldview I might have had as a young person.  A baby is not going to wait for you to deal with your own personal headspace before you cope with their needs.  Taking care of a family shakes a person out of their me-first attitude really quick and helps them see that there is more to life than one's own neuroses.  

Human beings need each other.  There is a reason that the world's great religions emphasize this.  We need to take care of one another if we are going to survive.  Putting oneself first, emphasizing the worst aspects of human nature, is no way to propagate the species.  It's no way to build a society.  It's no way to live your life.  Please do yourself a favor and let Ayn Rand go fuck herself.

Ayn Rand was one of the most controversial thinkers--and successful fiction writers--of the 20th Century. Her detractors would claim that there is little to distinguish her fiction from her philosophy: that both are the result of a fantasist's distorted perspective on the world, tainted by an extreme egoism and fueled by some rather profound delusions. Her supporters would claim that it is the world as we know it that is distorted, mostly through the insidious influence of the philosophy of altruism, and that Miss Rand's philosophy is the only antidote to a world gone mad and hurtling toward an orgy of self-destruction. (This kind of extreme, polemical speech is fairly common in Randian discourse, no matter which side you are on.) The truth, as in most cases, lies somewhere in the middle.

Miss Rand (as she is always referred to by her followers) was the founder of the philosophy of Objectivism. She presented that philosophy in a series of novels, the culminating magnum opus of which was Atlas Shrugged, a sprawling neo-scifi quasi-futurist melodrama that has become a perennial bestseller since its publication in 1957. (The Fountainhead, which I think is a far superior book from a strictly literary perspective, came out in 1943, and was intended, in her words, to be "a portrayal of the ideal man".) Critics savaged Atlas Shrugged almost immediately, but the public took a kinder view of it, and Miss Rand, after a period of depression caused by the lack of serious consideration of her work in academic circles, founded an organization (now known as The Ayn Rand Institute) to promote her philosophy. That organization published a monthly newsletter throughout the 1960's to explain the philosophy in greater detail; Ayn Rand's contributions (and those of her chosen heir, Nathaniel Branden) were then collected into a series of short books further explaining Objectivism in greater detail. The Virtue of Selfishness is one of those books.

And there is much to admire here. Objectivism is based on the belief that reality is real--"A is A"--and that alone is a welcome change from the gibberish that one often encounters in the more esoteric philosophical discussions. The problem is that Miss Rand believes that in life, regardless of the circumstances, A is always A, and it is her "A" which is the correct one. (There is a famous exchange she had during a Q & A on an episode of the Phil Donahue Show, where a guest asked her if she thought she was perfect. "In terms of adhering to my philosophy at all times," she said, "yes, I am." The crowd exploded in hoots of derision. She just laughed at them. And this was in the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden, with an attendance in the thousands. Say what you will, the woman had guts.) And that's a crucial flaw in the philosophy: to use logic to always come up with the right answer, as though life were a math problem, one must always have all the facts--all the inputs--and in life that is rarely the case. Most of the time we spend in doubt, trying to guess what "A" really is, or going forward on the basis of our experience and intuition. Miss Rand would call this mysticism; most other people would call it "life".

There is a distinct lack of humor and compassion here, as well. Neither of those values have a place in Objectivism, because the standard in Objectivism is always the same: rational self-interest. Everything in Objectivism is self-referential; how one feels about--or what one does for--another individual is based solely on that individual's place in one's own hierarchy of values. It is anathema to the Objectivist to suggest that there is a moral obligation to help someone in, say, a foreign country, even if the means are available to do so. And it is certainly immoral to suggest that society as a whole (meaning, of course, government) has a moral obligation to provide a social safety net for those who have been born ill-equipped to face the challenges of living in a modern society, or into familial or social circumstances which render it nearly impossible to develop into fully contributory citizens. Perhaps worst of all, though, is the idea that any sense of humor about oneself--any form of self-deprecating wit, or sign of humility--is somehow a betrayal of one's very soul. (There is that extremism again.) It sometimes seems, in reading Rand, that she has modeled the perfect human on Dr. Spock of Star Trek fame, which is unfortunate, given that the good Doctor was an alien.

But there is, as always when dealing with Miss Rand, another side to the story. As much as professional philosophers ridicule her as being a crackpot--and there are, admittedly, some howlers in there--for most people (who, frankly, themselves would consider most professional philosophers to be crackpots) there is a great deal of practical appeal in Objectivism, and for good reason: as Miss Rand so succinctly puts it, Objectivism is a philosophy "for living life here on Earth". There is very little angels-on-pinheads speculation here, very little that is off the point. Her focus is always concentrated on the here and now, the reality of living as experienced by individuals every day, and as such there is a great deal of utility in reading her work. To adopt her philosophy wholly is, ironically enough, to abdicate one's individuality, since she always insisted that her philosophy was "perfect" and had to be accepted in its entirety, exactly as she promulgated it. (If you're wondering whether or not there is a high degree of cult-like devotion in the Randian world, the answer is yes.) But if one is willing to think for oneself there is value in reading her work, and The Virtue of Selfishness is a good place to start.

I read this years ago, but wanted to hear it in audio format. The Bookguy on YT had it for free. The women's voice reading was cold and unflinching. As if you were listening to Rand herself. Rand's essays from the early 1960's still cut through the confusion of what is being called emotionalism (subjectivism) in today's world. Chapters like, The Conflicts of Men's Interests, The Cult of Moral Grayness, or even Racism, give the reader solid definitions about ethics, altruism, collectivism, etc. and allows one to think clearly, if, whether or not, you agree with the author. I find myself slipping in many word salads these days, not quite knowing if the individuals around me are living in fantasy or elsewhere. For me, Rand brings it back down to basics - understand your definitions, make sense that the community around you does not define you, unless you permit it, and for heaven's sake, don't stop eating toast just because the dog is barking incessantly at the toaster. So many continue to appease the animal instead of living their own life.

I will return to this again and again.

Interesante, complejo, pero interesante