Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Morality
& Goodness:
- Ayn Rand:
- Values, Virtues
and Life
Excerpt from Atlas Shrugged:
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior.
He needs a code of values to guide his actions.
- Value is that which one acts to gain and keep, virtue
is the action by which one gains and keeps it.
'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for
what?
'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in
the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence--and
it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms.
- The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the
existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action.
Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to
exist.
It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the
issue of life or death.
Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an
organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes
out of existence.
- 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.
A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the
chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue;
- its life is the standard of value directing its actions.
But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the
conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts
automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic
code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil.
It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions
where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its
knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own
good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
- Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular
distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of
alternatives by means of volitional choice.
He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what
values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.
Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation?
- An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man
does not possess.
An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire
is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living.
And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that
is the desire you do not hold.
Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the
knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a
process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he
has acted through most of his history.
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant
that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain
for long in the existence they affronted.
- But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to
destroy his mind.
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of
choice -- and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.
- Man has to be man--by choice; he has to hold his life as
a value--by choice; he has to learn to sustain it--by choice; he has to discover the
values it requires and practice his virtues--by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Whoever you are, you are hearing me now. I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left
uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say:
- There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man,
and Man's Life is its standard of value.
- All that which is proper to the life of a rational being
is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless
brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being--not life
by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement--not survival at any price,
since there's only one price that pays for a man's survival: reason.
- Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life
is its purpose.
If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and
values by the standard of that which is proper to man--for the purpose of preserving,
fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it.
- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and
goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate
and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of
destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.
- Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds
from the achievement of one's values.
A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation
of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of
morality...
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as
man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as
his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the
torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man.
- The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer
and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the
profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code
of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not
grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects.
They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded
by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live
without its sense of smell--but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can
survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there's no practical
reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled
and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.
Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that
the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell
you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for
the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.
- The only man who desires to be moral is the man who
desires to live.
No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you
choose to live, you must live as a man--by the work and the judgment of your mind.
No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as
anything else--and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within
you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence,
- no longer human and less than animal,
a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of
years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.
No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to
keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the
deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you
survive by your evil ...
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