Category Archives: Rand

Shannon Mullery
“A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions. This means that both parties to a compromise have some valid claim and some value to offer each other. And this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental principle which serves as a base for their deal.” – The Virtue of Selfishness.
I begin with the reiteration of this quote from my philosophical novel in order to illustrate and define the concept of compromise. Compromise is not a means of robbery, an unfair negotiation solicited by thugs, or one man’s surrender of property gained fairly to the whims of another man’s desires. One man’s ownership of any tangible resource or object must be earned, traded for, or his for the taking; if ownership is claimed without these requirements, then it is not in fact “ownership” but rather “theft” – one of the most deplorable human transgressions, which contributes to the various practices of human bondage.

In the instance of the North Dakota Access Pipeline, there are only a few vital, uninterpreted facts to consider. The argument being made by protestors relies on the Sioux tribe’s claimed ownership of the land and the water supply the pipeline would run under. Without any legal grounds, literal claim, or otherwise established ownership to the land, there is no argument for preventing the pipeline’s construction; however, the water is a public resource for which there could be an argument for ownership made. The tribe points to the number of instances in which water sources have been tainted by similar projects since 2010. If such damage were easily detectable after the construction (and the pipeline, relatively easy to deconstruct/remove), or easily predictable before the pipeline’s construction, the issue of ownership would favor the DAPL; however, as I state in the first chapter The Virtue of Selfishness, all ethical arguments must be based upon the principled value of life, as it is the only inherent, unarguable value that must be respected in and of itself. Water is an absolutely essential, fundamental necessity to the preservation of human life, even without the pretense of formal (legal) ownership. This is a value which cannot be dismissed or manipulatively redefined, and in the conflict of the North Dakota Access Pipeline, there are no basic values that the opposing parties may agree upon and preserve for a fair compromise to be negotiated. If the case was altered so that there were other means of acquiring clean drinking water in the historically plausible instance of this particular body of water’s contamination (and an absolute means of measuring the impact of the pipeline’s construction, prior to the harm imposed on human life, that would be caused by the water’s potential contamination), compromise would be possible; however, such an alternative is either ostensibly unavailable or simply has not been offered to the Sioux tribe.

The argument that has been made for the pipeline’s construction is a broad, non-objective cost-benefit quantification of the probable increase in energy accessibility and the probable profit to be gained by the pipeline’s investors, versus the potential harm that may be caused to a smaller number of people; however, this argument is an altruistic one that relies on the notion that “good” is quantified by the number of individuals benefited, no matter the means and no matter the level of harm thrust upon a smaller group of individuals. Is the murder of one man justified by the monetary gains of two men? Of course not. This is not compromise; this is the definition of human bondage.
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Even though minimum wage seems to take root firmly in modern developed countries as a part of wage system, its efficiency and legitimacy still remains controversial for many sensible people. In that sense, the idea of guaranteed minimum income(GMI) sounds too radical for now, but surprisingly, in some countries like Finland and Switzerland, a pilot project has already started, or a voting on a referendum to its installation is in progress.

The logic of proponents of GMI is simple; if you want to end poverty, just give people money. They remind us of the fact that we have already spent too much energy and resource to provide some relief for those people in need. Just give the people money and abolish all other transfer payments and the complex bureaucracies overseeing them. It will be much more cost-efficient, they claim. Regarding the concern about moral hazard, they offer us an optimistic prospect; if a society adopts GMI, everyone in the society will know that everyone has an income stream. Every person, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, job, or education, has at least some amount of money guaranteed enough to live on sufficiently, and this knowledge, consequently, requires every person to behave more responsibly because it is now impossible to blame society for my poverty, my dissatisfaction. If you want more, then do more! Don’t blame society because society gives you enough fairly.

Is GMI more cost-efficient than the current social security system? Would it make people more responsible and more reasonable in the end? If so, utilitarians would support it. I do not think that it is cost-efficient, nor is it helpful to make people become more responsible and reasonable, but even if so, objectivists would not support it. No matter how GMI is cost-efficient, no matter how GMI would help people become more responsible and reasonable, we objectivists would oppose it because the concept of GMI degrades life.

GMI guarantees our survival. We do not need to do anything. We do not need to think, because we have nothing to worry about. We do not need to focus on what is going on and what will happen next. If we do not focus on anything, that means we are not conscious about anything. If we are not conscious about anything, that means our life does not mean anything.

We objectivists oppose GMI because it creates a wrong fantasy of survival. Perhaps, we could feel happy and satisfied with no need to do anything. We could feel free and relieved because we do not need to make difficult decisions. Perhaps, we might convince ourselves that doing nothing is what we are doing now, and avoiding making decisions is the decision we make now. However, we are not free from the result of our doing, our decision, our doing nothing at all, and our decision not to make any decision. We survive because we do something, I mean, really do something. We survive because we make a decision, because we think to make a decision. Although the concepts of the welfare state and social security system supported by collectivism tend to allow some people to live like a parasite, we survive because most of us are hosts, not parasites. We survive because we know we should do something to survive. GMI is easy to fool us that we can survive even if we do nothing to survive. GMI creates wrong social dynamics that rational parasites survive at the expense of irrational hosts. GMI makes hard-working, truly responsible and truly reasonable people appear to be irrational. GMI makes people doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and thus, degrading life, appear to be rational. Is it the world of rational parasites and irrational hosts that we dream of?

Become rationally selfish. There is no future, no life, with rational parasites and irrational hosts.

Now, it is real time to talk about why instead of whom. Of course, we always try to focus on why (we should support this person, not that one) before the election, but in the end, we always end up talking about whom (because we are forced willy-nilly to choose one of them). After the election, however, we are free from that burdensome, inevitable choice. What is done is done. At this point, talking about why one candidate is better than the other is belated as well as meaningless, but talking about why this particular candidate becomes our next President is timely as well as meaningful. We can talk about why in the context of the things passed away, not the things coming up, and hindsight always makes us wiser, while foresight often betrays us miserably, as we witnessed in this very election.

Sorry for our next President, Donald Trump, and his supporters, he did not win the election. Sorry for Hilary Clinton and her supporters, that does not mean that she did not lose this election; she lost. Again, sorry for our next President, I do not think he won because he was a better candidate than his opponents. His words are crude and vulgar; his policies are unclear and superficial. He won because he succeeds in wrapping himself as a candidate for people who are fed up with collectivism. He won because he appears to be reasonably selfish; he is not one of those abundant hypocrites in Washington D.C. claiming that we are hungry now, but we should still help other hungrier people out there. He won because he seems to put individuals ahead society, trust individuals more than society; he is not one of those nagging, patronizing politicians thinking that we are too careless or dangerous to carry guns or that we are too irresponsible or irrational to prepare health care for ourselves. Hilary Clinton lost because she appears to be irrationally unselfish; why should we give illegal immigrants legal opportunities and protections while we offer various ways to immigrate legally? Why is our tax money spent for them? She lost because she failed to see that we are no longer to be deceived a fantasy of altruistic collectivism; Do you want to expand Medicaid? Allow some moratorium on student debt? Believe in climate change and preserve our beautiful Earth? Great! But at whose expense?

I am not sure yet whether Donald Trump is a true objectivist who believes that rational selfishness is the basis of individual happiness and the key for prosperous society. He could be a false objectivist who cleverly glorifies his greed and prejudice making it look like rational selfishness. However, one thing is for sure, at least; we should and could make this election a victory of objectivists. Let us not it be remembered as a victory of “a basket of deplorables.” What is done is done, but what can be done is not.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil… In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”

― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Buddhism is one of the largest organized religions on the planet, based off of 2,500 years of history . By contemporary standards, it has over 700 million individual believers around the globe, making it the fourth largest religion. Although there are three main branches of Buddhist beliefs, they all respect the same principles: the Three Universal Seals (premise of existence), the Four Noble Truths (philosophical enlightenment), the 12 Links of Dependent Origination (laws of existence) and the Eight-Fold Path (guide to enlightenment). All of these principles stem from the “Middle Way”, which rejects extremes and finds the satisfactions of life from ­­taking neither the “high” nor “low” road. The sixth-century Buddhist scholar Chih-I proposed this as a “third truth”, in which “there is a middle way between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial, free from sorrow and suffering. This is the way to peace and liberation in this very life” (Jack Kornfield).

I however, find all of this to be symptomatic of the “Cult of Moral Grayness” I defined in my piece, The Virtue of Selfishness. According to Buddhism, there is never a “black” or “white” answer, one cannot choose along the polarity lines. This denial of the reality is the problem. Buddhists believe, as I do, in fleshing out all the details prior to reaching to a conclusion, but they also believe in compromise, and area of “grayness”. What Buddhists seek is “not amorality, but something more profoundly irrational a nonabsolute, fluid, elastic, middle-of-the-road morality” (74).

Buddhism and I are at an impasse. However, I recently discovered Morgan Rosenberg’s new synthesized religion: Dark Buddhism . It is a fusion of Objectivism, meditation, and psychology. As an Objectivist, he also rejected some of Buddha’s tenants, mostly selflessness. By fusing the pacifism and respect of Zen Buddhism and the discipline of Objectivism, he realizes a “logically consistent whole” of personal principles to live by. As Rosenberg says in his manifesto, Dark Buddhism:

The most important aspect of the self in Dark Buddhism and even in the traditional Buddhist dharma is that your practice requires a conscious choice, and the consciousness is the key part of the self. You must make a conscious choice to step onto the path and you must exercise conscious decision-making and a conscious sense of self-responsibility to remain on the path.

Therefore, one can infer that the middle path in Dark Buddhism is no longer the middle. Buddhism opens your mind to the choices and the consciousness of the issues, but one eventually must make a choice that revolves around the self, another major pillar of Dark Buddhism. Rosenberg says that Buddhism can be interpreted by self-interest and choice, but the choices must be conscious and not fall into a “gray” area. For example, he says that the choices one makes on a daily basis “are not only discipline choices, such as whether to eat that Big Mac or not, but fundamental choices”. Buddhism, in Rosenberg’s eyes, and my own, is flawed, but can be fixed by making solid “black” or “white” selfish choices.

“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” – John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged

After tackling the virtues of selfishness and the concepts of value and reason, I stumbled upon an article in USA Today. Eric Trump, son of Donald, “made sure there was no ambiguity regarding his opinion” of David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, agreeing with a Denver radio host that “[t]he guy does deserve a bullet”. Putting aside the innate issues of racism for now, one must unpack the threat of physical force on the metaphysical level.

I do not believe in a pacifist society, as it will crumble under the first threat of force, but I also do not believe threats are moral. Irrational people exist, as is the nature of humanity. However, the solution is not in a polar opposite society. If our society, which is merely a collection of individuals, formed a gang of thugs that were only organized on the principle of protection against outside force, it would be chaos. We must find a solution at a halfway point. As I say in The Virtue of Selfishness, “the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another”(103).

To evaluate the questionable rationality of threats, one must take the objective standpoint of punishment and established reasons for justice to be served against the irrational. Threats are not actual physical force, but they allude to it, and must be taken seriously. The objective standpoint of justice holds reason at its core. Threats are irrational because they stem from an emotion, feeling, urge, wish, or whim that is “an attack on man’s self esteem” (8). Ethicality stems from reason, not whims. A threat fits well in my definition of a whim: a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

Eric Trump was heedlessly acting upon his whims when he said that David Duke should be rightfully assassinated. This is clearly an attack on a man’s self esteem, even if Duke is a man with substantial ties to one of America’s most bigoted hate groups. Duke has been evidentially proved a racist, which is “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism” (120). Trump “said the Clinton campaign intended to discredit his father by labeling him a ‘bigot, a racist, xenophobic, this and that.’” (Cummings, USA Today), yet he throws threats of physical force around without intent of consequences. Threats are irrational whims, and goes against the basic metaphysical principles of consciousness as reason. As John Galt in Atlas Shrugged implied, these threats of force do not incentivize us to become “better” people, and therefore are irrational.