.

.

I think I’ve gotten to that point where I can honestly say that the goal isn’t Preparing for the Real World, i.e. acquiring skills and confidence and self-esteem and intellectual depth and searching for a purpose, but rather, the goal is Accomplishing Something. Something outside of myself.

That’s not to say I’ve become selfless. Far from it. Rather, it’s to say that I no longer have any desire to understand myself more fully than I do now. I know who I am. I will still expect things of myself; I still desire to grow intellectually, to gain a better understanding of the world, but I no longer need a better understanding of myself. It’s like clearing a field and finally having an empty space to stand. To call home.

I now have home. I am home.

~~~

I started reading Atlas Shrugged a few weeks ago. Haven’t touched it in a week or longer, been busy with other things. But I wanted to say something about Objectivism. Something had always seemed wrong with it to me, not morally so, but intuitively, logically. I figured out what it is.

It’s very easy when dealing with the theory of a subject to consider that subject alone. To form boundaries at the edges of your field of study and consider only that which lies withing those boundaries. However, we must realize that these boundaries are necessarily artificial. Fields of study (we’ll call them that) are constructs of the human mind. They do not exist outside of how we see them — nature does not separate Chemistry from Biology, Physics from Math, Cosmology from Meteorology. Any boundaries we create are artificial, as much with the natural sciences as with language as with, say, economics.

Laissez-faire capitalism makes an assumption that seems like an obvious one to make: people want money. Economists necessarily have to simplify things in these terms, due to the sheer magnitude of the problem, but their assumption is an oversimplification. Ayn Rand should have known this, given thought to this, because in fact laissez-faire capitalism contradicts another statement of the philosophy:

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

Read the last sentence again. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moralpurpose of his life. Do you see any mention of money?

Let me go one step further, for those of you who may still be skeptical. In For the New Intellectual, Rand defines the word happiness as thus:

“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. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

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.”

Again, do you see the word money? It would be foolish of me to say money is not linked to happiness, for money enables life, maintains life, but they are not one in the same. Money itself does not promote happiness absolutely. Not even in a hypothetical laissez-faire system. A businessman who works his entire life will be less happy than a man who works normal hours and spends the rest of his time enjoying himself.

You are still skeptical. You say, but work = achievement, does it not? And happiness is defined in terms of achievement, and work is defined by earning money, correct? Let me ask you this: by whose standard do we define an achievement? If you take the stance of the laissez-faire capitalist, achievements are based on society — that for which people are willing to pay money. However, if you consider one’s personal happiness, achievements are based on one’s own self-interest alone. (In fact, the Ayn Rand lexicon doesn’t even define the term “achievement”.)

What I’m trying to say is that a pure laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t correspond with Ayn Rand’s own beliefs — she herself must have been ignorant of this. Due to the political situation at the time, it probably made perfect sense, and I won’t hold it against her. But the political tenets of Objectivism contradict the core of the philosophy by excluding other sources of happiness.

If you care to know, I would still consider myself an Objectivist in the personal sense. My goal is happiness through my own personal, selfish achievement. But I’m not going to make the bold assumption that what I consider to be an achievement will be considered as such by the rest of society.