Every semester I ask first-year college students what they would do if they suddenly had infinite money. Rare is the one who can come up with anything better than the piggish pursuit of pleasure: cars, sex, houses, vacations, bling and more cars, sex, houses, vacations and bling. They imagine that pleasure, buying the fetishistic trinkets of our consumer culture, will make them happy. But happiness is not pleasure. Ten more minutes on the playground will not make a child happy, nor will a house in Aspen make an adult happy. Oh certainly these will provide pleasure, and so will heroin. Grandma was right, money cannot buy happiness, and only the childish, or the Ayn Randyian egoist would think otherwise.
The resurgence of contemporary Ayn Randyianism comes naturally with the demise of communism and the realization that individual moral agency is superior to the mindless amorality of various “collectivisms,” which include death-worshipping extremists, radical religions, as well as communism. But despite the Ayn Randyian’s notion that the individual is the locus of responsibility, their glorification of childish egoism, eliminates for them anything other than personal pleasure. Happiness will forever elude me, me, me Ayn Randyians.
Happiness, unlike pleasure, comes only from fulfilling your most personal human gifts. Happiness, as 2,500 years of Western Culture teaches, comes only from being fully human and that means being virtuous, or more simply, by being a good human being, a really human, human being, and only the fully human, human being can love. Randyians are left to love no more than their own appetites. They have reduced themselves to a variety of egoistic loneliness that is utterly inhuman. Love is not merely objective self-love. Human love always entails love of something or someone beyond oneself. Only the human being would sacrifice his own life to save his child or his friend or even to protect his ideas. Only a human being can recognize the moral fittingness of the behavior one’s hated opponent. “I may hate that jerk, but I recognize he is a good father, good mechanic, good tennis player, etc.” A loveless objectivist egoist could not recognize the goodness of others unless it served them personally. For the world of the egoist is a most primitive animal world of personal appetite and personal gain. Randyian Objectivism is ultimately solipsism it seems.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - DrPat
1. It's "Randian" - no Y.
2. Some of the most evil characters in Rand's fiction are focused wholly on "getting and spending."
Rand's definition of good accords completely with yours: Happiness, unlike pleasure, comes only from fulfilling your most personal human gifts. I believe the disparity comes from your differing appraisal of those human gifts.
By carefully defining "love" (inaccurately) as something no Randian can achieve, qua Randian, you sidestep the need to defend your premise. Neither the Randian virtue of selfishness, nor the pursuit of fulfillment for one's most human gifts (including rationality, judgment and intelligence) requires emotional solitude, and neither precludes happiness.
You have conflated "appetite" with "desire," and painted as Dionysian something that is totally Apollonian.
2 - Al Barger
Dear Mr PhD, I'm having real trouble seeing how a smart fellow such as yourself could honestly and accidentally so thoroughly and precisely misrepresent Rand. She was so completely NOT about getting high and collecting bling bling. Struggling night and day to become a world class architect or inventor is not mindless hedonism. Surely you know better.
3 - DrPat
Thanks, Al, for putting that into the vernacular! But one doesn't have to have read Rand to get your point - Rich Dad, Poor Dad makes the same distinction about having (saving) money.
4 - Maynard
OK, DrPat and Al have been nice and tried to reach your brain. I come from the mosh pit and instead will just kick you in the nads.
Carmine, you have absolutely no idea what Rand, nor Objectivism is about. After reading some of the other tripe you have posted, and seeing that you are in the "reformation" stage of your personal 12 step born again salvation, might I suggest you stop making shit up before you go out to talk about something in a very public forum?
You want to know the point of what you are missing? OK, it's about doing something the best you can, It's about reason and rationality over superstition and mysticism.
Example, the Canadien rock band Rush. Total Objectivists, could they have made radio friendly pop much by formulae and whore'd themselves out for all the money possible? Yeah, did they?
No. Instead they made the best music they could, and ethically conducted their business to reap the biggest rewards without violating what the considered important or corrupting and compromising their art.
Forget about Atlas Shrugged, just try actually reading the Fountainhead.
5 - John W. Bales
If Dr. Carmine would read further than the title of "The Virtue of Selfishness"--the introduction, perhaps--he would have to say about his own post "Oops! Nevermind!"
6 - carmine
1. I like the connotation of "randy".
2. Self-centered egoism without love is not a life without hard work. Many of the hardest workers work hardest for all the wrong reasons. Randy Randians must certainly work hardest of all.
7 - Sister Ray
Dr. Carmine, since you're interested in Ayn Rand, I'm curious what you think about Nietzsche and his ideas on joy and self-overcoming. He was an influence on Rand (although she denied it).
8 - carmine
I quote from a devout Randyian:
"Peikoff has said that the essential issue in this debate is the nature of objectivity. I agree. One of Ayn Rand's great insights, the one that gives Objectivism its name, is her recognition that knowledge and values are objective, not intrinsic or subjective."
So Randians are rigid absolutists who have an unsubstantiated faith in some perfect isomorphism between human reason and the great world outside. It seems to me Ayn Rand is a trivialized version of Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger. A pseudo-existentialist who likes the freedom part but continues to hold out faith that our minds grasp TRUTH. But truth as every logician knows only refers to statements not the world beyond. Statements are true or false. The world just is. What are the colors beyond violet and red? Ultra violet and infra-red. Really? or are we just pretending. Truth only occurs in the systems of Man. Man knows in the end only Man. Check out a few of the linguistic philosophers such as Saussure or Wittgenstein. Rand, humbug.
9 - Al Barger
There's certainly valid argument about human objectivity, that is, the ability of humans to grasp the "objective reality." Reality may be objective, but our ability to ferret out the objective truth tends to be significantly limited by our physical and psychological limits. For starters, our physical sensors to perceive the energies and movements around us are highly limited. Think of all the radio waves and microwaves and whatnot bashing through the air that we can't even pick up- much less interpret. That's before we even start negotiating the tricky stairwells of our mammalian emotional circuitry.
Humility is thus in order for all of us, including students of Rand and PhDs. And crackers from the holler.
10 - carmine
Certainly the gods that demand victims are dead to those with reason. But the the gods that deny heart are so infantile that they are the gods only of the puerile. Such a bleak world where fear of self-sacrifice in the name of individualism, such a bleak world where individualism eclipses the awesome love of one's own child, own's own wife, of the very universe. Let Peikoff have the fear of life he calls idividualism. Me? I do feel love. Hume is right. At the end of the day, passions inspire reason. Bad reasoning is when passions do your thinking for you. But do not be fool enough to reject your passions, to do so is to reject life. The greatest passion is not mere pleasure, bling and heroin, but love, the unselfish variety. To live without love in this momentary flash-- life --thrown in the world. Is the self-absorbed life of the paranoid. Go on take a chance, be a man, love someone beyond yourself.
11 - Omni Temporal
Rare is the one who can come up with anything better than the piggish pursuit of pleasure ...
Blame that on MTV, reality programming, celebrity worship, movies, hip-hop, advertising, and basic ignorance, not Rand.
... money cannot buy happiness, and only the childish, or the Ayn Randyian egoist would think otherwise.
A gross mischaracterization of her intention.
Happiness will forever elude me, me, me Ayn Randyians.
If me, me, me-ness is being justified as an exercise of Rand's tenets, then that's a misinterpretation of those tenets.
Maybe she is full of it. But, Ph.D. man, if you want to discredit her, the least you could do is to attack those things that she actually promotes.
Careful, or we'll see to it that your Ph.D. is revoked. (I gather that you have one of those.)
P.S. Do you make people address you as "Dr." ?
12 - Al Barger
Ya know there PhD, I was trying to be conciliatory, but that comment #10 just makes me wanna start bashing away. That's just SO cheesy, and utterly intellectually unworthy. With your nonsense about "unselfish love" I was ready for you break into Elmer Gantry, "Love is morning and the evening star.."
Never for a minute did Rand deny emotional bonds and love. She had, however, a different take on what should be the basis for love. She argued essentially that affections should be showered naturally on people who represent values- on good, worthy people, rather than throwing your pearls before swine with "unconditional" love being wasted on jackasses what will only break your heart.
Good advice, I say.
Carmine, do you really not understand this?
13 - Harald
The subtitle of "The Virtue of Selfishness" is "a NEW concept of egoism". Already in the title the reader gets a tip: she has a DIFFERENT concept of egoism in mind than the conventional concept of an unthinking brute pursuing his whim you picked as your straw-man. If you actually read the book, instead of making it all up to fit your whim, that becomes clear. But by all means, please criticize Rand to your hearts content, but why not read and criticize what she actually defends (a RATIONAL egoism)? so that a real informative discussion might be had?
14 - carmine
Tsk Tsk such anger boys. But it should not be surprizing, lack of compassion is the pride of Rand. Does Peikoff allow you to quote the sacred texts or just to ape him. Where does Ms. Rand tell us love of deserving others is more valuable than self love? Where does she tell us those who hold subjective or intrinsic values deserve love? In your zealousness to defend her you have missed my argument. If enlighted self interest will help us all, and morality is absolute then only those that love themselves appropriately are the good people. The others are left to languish. Whether we consume bling or philosophy, without love of our community we are but lonely pigs. Happiness cannot be had with mere reason, objectivism or genitals. Read the little book by Hume, develop your sensitivity for others.
Oh by the way Life and Liberty come from Locke, pursuit of happiness from Hume. And the pig comparison comes from JS Mill, the fellow who provided the back bone for our freedom of speech and the notion of the marketplace of ideas.
And I think you are selling a faulty product. Your hallowed stern objecivism is no less a fetish than Victoria's Secret underware. For Sartre too all love ultimately became an attempt to define and be defined. How easily reason without heart allows the weak to suffer. Will your fellows remember you when you are weak, my bold little Randies?
15 - Al Barger
Oh Carmine, your condescending sermon has shown me the error of my ways. Rand didn't mean what she said, she meant this other thing that you say she said.
You're right. I've had no heart, and no empathy for others. I am a monster. I know not of True Love for my Fellow Man like you do.
Look, I'm no kind of Randroid. She has her better and lesser points philosophically, literarily and emotionally. You're simply not a credible critic of the weak points though, for you're trashing straw men and not honestly addressing her actual views. Just based on what you're saying here, it doesn't sound to me like you've ever even actually READ any of the books.
You're supposed to be a PhD, but this nonsense post on Rand is unworthy of a scholar. A junior high school student who actually read the books could easily give a more stinging, convincing criticism than you do here.
You flatter yourself to describe me as "angry." It'd take a lot more credible effort than this to get my goat.
16 - Carsten
Hi Carmine,
since your article itself just shows that you haven't read anything of Ayn Rand, I won't bash this further here.
But you made an interesting comment about "faith" which I don't quite understand: "So Randians are rigid absolutists who have an unsubstantiated faith in some perfect isomorphism between human reason and the great world outside."
1) Randians are in fact absolutists...about the fact that we live in a comprehensible and stable universe. Man, according to Rand, is neither omnipotent nor infallible but ABLE to understand the objective world with means of reason.
2) Faith is (may be) defined as a trust in something, which cannot be proven, neither a priori nor a posteriori. Since the connection between "reason" and "outside world" is proven by any scientific progress, this has little to do with "faith".
2) Because mans senses have limitations (you mentioned ultra-violette) doesn't mean all thought things are invalid per definitionem. In fact, ironically Hegel (great anti-philosopher to Ayn Rand) stated eloquently, that the grasping of limitation in the senses itself shows, that there are no actual limitations for the human mind.
4) Here the question: Since faith is everything else but to believe in objective facts, how can you claim that this would be faith, too?
Greetings
Carsten
17 - Sister Ray
Thanks for responding to my earlier question, Dr. Carmine. I need to check out those linguistic philosophers.
I brought up Nietzsche because so many Ayn Rand fans swoon over her as *the* font of individualism and reason. Whereas if you read just a little bit of Nietzsche you'll find that he covered a lot of that territory earlier and better.
Maybe it's just literary taste, but I find "Thus Spake Zarathustra" more inspiring than John Galt's speech. And less long-winded.
18 - carmine
Not drawing the desired conclusions from a text is somewhat different than not reading a text. I conclude differently than you. A common criticism made by the Bible crowd too. Read The Book and you will be saved. Yeesh. On the other hand.
Carsten, other than the the ad hominem yours are most reasonable responses. Indeed I tend toward subjectivism, and theirin lies my fundamental criticism of Ayn Rand and primarily her "Randroids". People do feel the good of the good. People do feel what is beyond reason. Morality ultimately entails developing a refined sensitivity to other people (a la David Hume.) I too accept that reason is our finest tool for grasping and shaping our world, but unlike Hegel, I do not project the mind of man upon the order/disorder of the world. As Nietzsche puts it, "Truth is but irrefutable error." We are the truth makers but the noumenal remains noumenal. Our reason allows us to exert our "will to power" upon the world but our reason is but US. Dr. Pat's initial comment about my conflating the appetite with desire and thereby turning the Appolonian into the Dionysian is also an accurate criticism, but what else is the tragic nature of man but that conflict. To downplay the Dionysian is no less dangerous than to downplay the Apollonian.
19 - DrPat
So the devil (or the tragic conflict in the nature of man) made you do it?
Carsten: neither omnipotent nor infallible but ABLE to understand...
Or, as we see in your case, James, UNable.
20 - carmine
Dr. Pat,
spoken as a true zealot
"Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.... Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward [?!]you can earn[?!]for the moral qualities you have achieved in your charater and person, the emotional price[?!]paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another."
Less heart than Kant who at least recognized the real world is transcendent even if we share an inborn moral vision that somehow magically is right. Kant said one of the funniest things to make lust palatable: "Marriage is but a contract allowing for the mutually exclusive use of one another's genitals" Now there's love for you!
So Johnny Galt, Love is but barter, quid pro quo. No one really loves his own infant, the helpless as of yet characterless human being. The infant has just not yet earned it. There is no grace for us. Diogenes clinging to his very large barrel waiting to find an honest man, pretending his reason and his character has made him and his heart is cold enough to disdain those messy people all gooey and sticky with the vagaries of the world. No diapers for John Galt!
21 - DrPat
James, I reserve my zeal for dialogues with people whose opinions matter to me - a subset, if you will, of the "deserved love" Rand espouses.
But again, you miss the mark in your conclusion that Randian virtue precludes one from loving one's children. That "expression of one's values" may certainly extend to the potential one sees in chance-met strangers, uneducated colleagues, and one's own "characterless" infants.
And "how sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is when that potential is unfulfilled! James, you are my latest chance-met disappointment. Go, and bite no more...
22 - Randy Kirk
Take the argument one step further. My experience is that happiness is still about what is happening and is more objective that joy. Joy comes from being free of the shackles of materialism completely.
Bill Hybels in "Decending Into Greatness" points out that we become chained to our things, our professions, our source of income. And these very things create anxiety as we attempt to maintain them, increase them, etc.
We can even become chained to the very things we love. Our children, to continue the example, can become a chain that pulls down our marriages.
Ayn Rand wanted to be freed from the rules, and act on her own reason, which she somehow believed would be the same as mine. I want to be freed from having to decided whose reason is right.
And stop using my name in vain. Either that or send me money for each use.
23 - Maynard
"I want to be freed from having to decided whose reason is right." - states Randy.
So instead of thinking for yourself, and making up your own mind by what you think of as morals and ethics, as well as every other person's individual free will to do the same:
You would rather have some authority tell you what is right and everybody have to toe the line?
Question for you, who decides?
24 - Robert
Mr. James D Carmine PhD,
Your understanding of Miss Rand's book, The Virtue of Selfishness is zero.
It takes a THINKING human being to understand the values and virtues of being selfish.
Robert
25 - Randy Kirk
C'mon Maynard. You know. The Bible.
6000 years. 2,000,000,000 adherants now on planet earth.
Sure, even as I use the Bible as the touchstone of my reason, I still have to extrapolate from Biblical scripture to make reasoned decisions about things that are specifically covered. At least I have a touchstone that has stood the test of time.