Religion and capitalism

Let me clear up what Rand thinks about it in her own words:

AR wrote:

What is the moral code of altruism? 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.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

It's just a word of course, there is no god-given meaning to "compassion" or "altruism", let alone "philosophy".

We decide what we choose to mean with the terms. Altruism evidently has to do with valuing the other.

VO is, as is very obvious, far beyond all this, as it recognizes the other in terms of the subject, and in other cases, reversed - that is of no concern. As long as there is a nourishing referential system of the subject and his environment, whichever species, that's selfvaluing.

I absolutely disagree with her understanding of altruism. It isn't self-negation that is from where the altruistic impulse comes, but rather from self-overflowing, from a generosity of the excess of self, of our values spilling out into the world around us and wanting to live in that way. I have no idea what kind of weird trauma or experience warped Rand's way of thinking, but her understanding of altruism is deeply pathological, and cynically, totally inaccurate.

"Do you have a right to exist without giving a dime to a beggar", Jesus what a stupidly moralistic formulation. Your right to exist, whatever that means, has nothing to do with how or why you do or do not give a dime to a beggar, and besides that isn't even the most significant kind of compassion or altruism, giving spare change to a stranger.. apparently at some point she felt forced to give to charity, and that moment defined her entire future. "I will not be forced!" That's fine, no one is forcing you. Take a breath, it's going to be ok.

Her experience was of it being enforced wholesale on the American people.

She doesn't agree that she doesn't have the right, she is rather denying it.

Ive found what she exposes to be precisely the nature of the Clontin campaign. The wording is somewhat different, but the principle is equal: we must value others above ourselves, strangers above our children, other religions above our own, and we must condemn ourselves, our land, and our tradition in order to be good - for others.

I think Rand is spot on, but her wording is clunky. Why I don't read her novels.

Then what she is describing isn't altruism at all, but a fake of altruism. She needs to be more clear about that. No one can feel more sympathy or compassion for a stranger than for one's own kids, no one can value a foreigner religion more than one's own religion, such things are impossible because of how self-valuing works. Rand is basically saying that the Clinton-type PC liberal ideology is trying to make people invert their valuing, and to an extent that is true, but none of that has anything to do with real altruism or compassion, and furthermore it isn't even possible to invert valuing like that.

In fact whenever a PC-liberal falsity forces someone to act as if their values were inverted, one of two things is taking place: either they are only going through the motions and in fact feel nothing at all, no valuation is occurring, or they are acting on their true valuation-excess toward the other, out of natural joy of generosity, and such act simply happens to conform to the presence of a PC-liberal mandate of some kind.

In any case, it is deeply incorrect to assume that it is even possible for valuing to be inverted in the way Rand imagines, let alone to actually define altruism and pity like that, as she does.

To take an example of why her views are so dangerous, imagine someone sees a homeless person and feels a burst of sympathy for them, and decides to give them $10. That is a natural outpouring of one's valuation, a healthy excess of self, but now this person reads Rand and becomes convinced that their act was "evil" because it was based on pity (according to Rand, the worst evil imaginable), and that altruism is simply "self-negation of being forced to live for others".

Now this person is really confused. From where did my feelings and action to give come, they wonder? Is it good or bad? Am I just living for the sake of another? This is the sort of nonsense that Rand's ideas lead to.

VO explains it so much better: each person has values, and those overflow in excess of healthy strength and joy. Sometimes this means that when we see another person in need we feel a drive to help them, because we have a positive regard for human life; when we see another person suffering then in a sense we also suffer, because we are alike to them, because our minds work by establishing metaphors of meaning between ourselves and our experiences. None of that is "bad" or "evil".

What Rand simply needed to say was "leftism will try to co-opt your valuing for its own ends". Yeah, we know that. Good point. But don't try to fucking convince people they aren't even human just because they value helping someone.

But this is precisely what the quote says, that it is up to you whether you give or not. She protests against precisely that which has now become the narrative of the Democratic party.

Unfortunately it is very well possible to not exist as a structural integrity of consciousness (a human heart) and still wander the earth as a human form. This is because text, narrative, and symbolism can take over the human form. Flesh in the service of some phrase, this happens a lot. There are near infinite degrees of enslavement, philosophy is a very low degree of enslavement, but it still relies on language, which is utterly arbitrary. This is why I decided to select a single word from it as conveying the meaning of all other words. It limits the slavery to language.

I am never being poetic when I say people dont exist. I've always been meaning that literally. I can not reconcile a support for Clontin on a moral basis with a self-valuing integrity; such humanity has all been hijacked, become drone, unsoul. I mean it. It's sad but true. Only thing is Ive seen it before, on tv and in the history books or the stories of my grandmother, whole populations becoming drones and just killing at the command of this or that "magicians hand", "politician", "Idea", "homeland" - Uebervalue.

Fuck all them. I have my own nation. It's right here, where my words are.