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I have come to bury Ayn Rand + Ayn Rand’s misunderstood position on altruism

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Ayn Rand’s misunderstood position on altruism
https://www.dailynews.com/2020/02/02/ayn...-altruism/

EXCERPTS: . . . Rand rejected altruism as the standard for moral behavior, calling it “incompatible with freedom, with capitalism, and with individual rights.” However, her opposition to altruism was not opposition to benevolence, but to French philosopher Auguste Comte. To Comte, acts done for any reason beyond advancing someone else’s well-being were not morally justified. That would mean that taking a tax deduction for a charitable contribution strips it of its morality. Feeling good about doing good does the same. Even “love your neighbor as yourself” fails the unlimited duty to others his version of altruism imposes.

The main problem with understanding Ayn Rand’s position on this today is that modern usage of the term has eroded his meaning of altruism to little more than a synonym for generosity, so Rand’s rejection of the original meaning — the requirement of total selflessness — is erroneously taken as rejecting generosity. As she wrote, “The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”

With Comte as a starting point, more attention to people’s own well-being — more selfishness, in Rand’s terminology — was the only way to move toward recognizing value and significance in each individual’s life. Comte’s conception of altruism is also inconsistent with liberty, Rand’s focus. The duty to put others first at all times and in all circumstances denies self-ownership and the power to choose deriving from it. Everyone else’s presumptive claims override individual rights. However, benevolence, which involves voluntary choices to benefit others in ways and to the extent individuals choose for themselves, does not.

An omnipresent duty of self-sacrifice also makes people vulnerable to manipulation by those who disguise power over others as “really” a means to attain some noble goal. The desire to sacrifice for the good of others can thereby be transformed into the requirement to sacrifice to the desires of leaders.

[...] To Rand, Comte’s view of altruism was logically impossible, joyless, and inconsistent with liberty, while enabling vast harms. However, we should recognize that she offered no such objection to voluntary benevolence — voluntary individual choices people make to be generous to others... (MORE - details)


I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand
https://nautil.us/issue/98/mind/i-have-c...y-ayn-rand

EXCERPTS: . . . Little did I know that by heading away from the madding crowd of humanity and my father’s vocation, I would end up writing a sequel to another famous novel of the 1950s—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But don’t get me wrong. I’m no Rand acolyte. I’m not here to praise her ideas but to bury them.

Even if you never read Atlas Shrugged or anything else by Rand, you probably know the names and what they stand for: The sanctity of the individual and the pursuit of self-interest as the highest moral ideal. Rand constructed an entire philosophy around this called Objectivism, which she claimed could be fully justified by rationality and science. But it was through fiction that she reached her largest audience, with Atlas Shrugged selling over 7 million copies and still widely read. She wisely noted that “Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.”

The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world, like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.

Whether conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits for its shareholders.

In Ayn Rand’s fictional rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches. In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!

How did someone running away from his famous father into the woods end up in a position to critique Ayn Rand and neoliberal economics? By becoming an ecologist, I did not escape the kind of Individualism that pervaded Rand’s thinking. Instead, I encountered it in a different form: The dogma that organisms never evolve to behave “for the good of the group,” but only for the good of themselves and their selfish genes. This conclusion had been reached with such certainty when I entered graduate school in 1971 that only a fool would challenge it...

[...] Later, when I began to study topics such as religion from an evolutionary perspective, I discovered that Individualism pervaded all of the social sciences, not just economics. It was called Methodological Individualism, as the most practical way to study all aspects of human society, regardless of its philosophical underpinnings. In short, Individualism is a far bigger beast than Ayn Rand. She gave voice to it, but it would be just as strong if she never existed.

Individualism has long historical roots but didn’t become dominant in Western thought until the second half of the 20th century. [...] What I discovered, even before entering graduate school, is that Darwin provided a perfectly good explanation for how behaviors can evolve for the good of the group.

To understand its logic, imagine playing the game of Monopoly [...see article...] What my Monopoly example makes intuitive dawned upon Darwin only gradually. At first, he thought that competition among individuals could explain all examples of design that had been attributed to a creator. Then he realized that prosocial behaviors—anything that requires time, energy, and risk on behalf of others or one’s group as a whole—were a glaring exception. Finally, he realized that by adding a layer of selection among groups in a multi-group population to selection among individuals within each group, he could explain the evolution of prosocial behaviors after all. We know that the awareness dawned on him gradually because we can track it by the changes that he made in successive editions of his books.

In a sense, I was a fool rushing in to explain how behaviors can evolve “for the good of the group” in the 1970s, since Darwin had done my work for me. Then why had his theory of between-group selection been so soundly rejected?

There is one big difference between my Monopoly example and what takes place in nature. In a Monopoly tournament, competition among teams completely overrides competition among individuals within teams. In nature, both levels of selection usually operate simultaneously. Sometimes within-group selection is the stronger force, resulting in nasty brutish behaviors such as killing the babies of others to have one’s own babies. At other times between-group selection is the stronger force, resulting in cooperative behaviors such as collective defense of a group’s offspring. It all depends on the balance between levels of selection... (MORE - details)
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