The Journals of Ayn Rand (54 page)

 

 

The short-range must not contradict the long-range.
The distinction between immediate pleasure and happiness is that a pleasure which is part of your general happiness, a step towards it, is proper—but one which has to be paid for with suffering later is improper. Example: if your long-range happiness depends upon your marriage (by your own choice and definition, i.e., you have accepted it as happiness), then an affair with some chance woman may give you pleasure for the moment, but will destroy the thing you prize more. (In most marriages, the trouble is that the marriage is only a compromise, not happiness, and so is the affair—neither chosen nor accepted fully and consciously.) If you overeat it may give you pleasure for the moment, but destroys your stomach and health the next day. The long-range is your guide and standard for the immediate. What if you have nothing of long-range value to you? Well, you won’t be happy. What if two “compromises” clash—as in the conventional marriage? Choose by your own definition which you prefer. But you can’t expect to have your cake and eat it, too.

 

 

Since man must establish his own values, accepting a value above himself makes him low and worthless. Allow nothing to stand between you and the world. The worship of something above you (like God) is an escape, a switch of responsibility—to permit you anything.

A code of ethics is man’s statement of his instinct of self-preservation, and it must be based on his conviction of his value.

The first law of ethics: demand the best. (If you demand the worst, you betray the good—and yet ethics are supposed to be a code of good and evil.)

Establish your values—then go after the best.

Nature never gave to a creature instincts contrary to its own survival. All instincts are aimed at survival. If we assume that man has instincts that are contrary to his rational faculty, then nature has given him instincts opposed to his survival. That does not seem likely, unless we assume that he is slated for destruction and extinction (like the lemmings). And—as an “instinct” species—man certainly
is
on his way out. (Perhaps we are really in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen—and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.)

Regarding the argument that “we must live for the whim of the moment”: nature doesn’t function by the whim of the moment. The rational faculty works by observing and discovering immutable laws of nature. And the rational faculty functions through time. If you let one moment contradict your long-range decisions, you’re acting immorally.

Altruism poisons a man’s happiness. When he has achieved something and is happy, he is forced to think: “But I am not serving anyone. Therefore I’m vicious.”

Why are there more neuroses nowadays? Because, as men learn to think more and better, the evil of their original false premises catches up with them and makes it impossible for them to go on. (This is assuming that men have really learned to think more—or have tried to. It is possible that man’s ethics have been the cause of the fact that men have not achieved any intellectual progress. The ethics of altruism, of course, is the cause of men’s failure to achieve happiness or any progress in morality.)

An example of the vicious injustice of applied altruism: a man gives a job to a half-wit, on the basis of pity. He tells himself that he’s done something noble, he’s sacrificed the better service he could have had—for the sake of the inferior creature. Is he the only one whom he’s sacrificed? He’s sacrificed his customers—in effect, society—to the extent of the poorer service his business offers (and if he continues on this policy he’ll have to go out of business). But, above all, he’s sacrificed the better man, the able applicant, who expects and deserves justice—i.e., expects to have his ability recognized. The able man has been rejected for being able—for a virtue. The employer has committed an evil and immoral act. (Virtue includes the ability to recognize and appreciate virtue—this is
justice.)

Two crucial questions to formulate—the two most important steps or key points:
(1) define the
need
of morality, and (2) prove why (proceeding from the rational faculty) man’s morality must be that of individualism and egoism
(independence).

To exercise conscious rational control is man’s first responsibility, duty and moral commandment. (To assert his will against circumstances—like the man in the snow.)

 

 

 

1. Man’s morality must be based on his nature.

2. Man’s nature is that of a rational being. The rational faculty is his only means of survival. His physical faculties are of no use to him without the guidance of his mind.

3. The function of the rational faculty is to observe the physical world and draw conclusions about it, thus establishing a certain truth about it. Man must then act on the basis of this truth. The rational faculty operates through a series of acts of choice.

4. The rational faculty is not automatic. Nothing assures man of the correctness of his conclusions in advance. Nothing can prove an error to him—except the consequences, observed by his rational faculty.

5. Even the use of his rational faculty is not automatic. Man can choose not to exercise it—or, rather, not to exercise it in certain acts or in certain spheres of activity. He can choose to act as a robot (or second-hander). It is here that he becomes his own destroyer.

6. Man needs a moral code as a set of rules on what is right or wrong for him as a rational being. The moral faculty is a necessity of the rational faculty.

7. Man observes nature and concludes what is true of it or not. He then has to act upon his knowledge. To act, he has to set himself a purpose. He estimates what is right or wrong for his purpose. The purpose determines the value he places on his acts—as means to an end. (For example: he observes that a seed grows when planted in the ground, but not when thrown on a rock. If his purpose is to grow wheat—it is right to place seeds in the ground; it is wrong to scatter them on rocks.) Now if man has accepted it as his first moral axiom that his survival is good, this becomes the standard of his moral code—“Man must survive as man.” His moral code is a standard for his valuation of himself—he cannot consider himself good if he acts as his own destroyer. He must look at himself as a moral entity to be created by himself.

8. What is the purpose of man’s survival? Happiness. Whose happiness? His own. If man’s survival is made the means to some end—and if at any point this end [conflicted with] his survival, he would have to be motivated by self-destruction. Therefore, the placing of any goal as the standard above his survival is evil. If man is not to survive for his own happiness, but for someone else‘s—then, if the claims of this other interfered with his own happiness, he would have to survive in suffering. Therefore the placing of anyone’s happiness above one’s own is evil.