The Four Worst Ideas in History and their Solutions

Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the copyright holder. This book is being offered to publishers who might be interested in publishing it as a hard cover or paper cover book. If you are a publisher and would like to talk to the author about publication of this book, please contact by email robdiego@aol.com.

Bad Idea #3 Selfishness is Evil

In Greek myth, it was Zeus who sent Lucifer/Prometheus to his punishment back down to earth for having the effrontery to steal his light for the benefit of man. Prometheus is the symbol for ambition and engaging in a quest for accomplishment. He is reputed to have had the qualities (or flaws) of ambition, pride, etc. It is also implied in the story that it was his independence that was his crime.[1] In the Jewish version of this myth, Sodom and Gomorrah, the men of these cities were identified as lustful and godless men who engaged in all sorts of “perverted” and “worldly” acts in complete disregard for the laws of God. These myths and many others with similar themes have led to a hatred of the ego that attacks and ridicules anyone who reveals pride, which means that society has taken upon itself the authority to impose ritual “justice” upon anyone who is deemed “prideful” and ambitious, worldly and self-interested.

Selfishness is thought to be the cause of cruel and inconsiderate behavior, dictatorship, wars, injustice, theft, murder and a whole host of other evils. It is even thought to be the cause of capitalism, the idea that men should be free economically. Indeed, it is thought by many that one of the goals of society is to discourage or prevent people from being selfish.

Our world is steeped in hatred of anything having anything to do with egoism, self-interest and even pride. Any act taken is deemed good when it is done out of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation and deemed evil if done for the sake of self-interest. Everywhere you turn, you see the most evil motives ascribed to businessmen, geniuses, scientists and independent thinkers. Examples include movies where the “suffering savior” hero sacrifices himself to a group of innocent non-entities considered good because of the fact that they neither think good or evil thoughts; politicians who proclaim that the only reason they are in politics is to help others; hugely successful athletes who seek to appease others by giving vast amounts of money to charitable organizations that achieve little good; priests who preach against vanity and pride and who collect large amounts of money in order to build massive churches and have lavish vacations; self-appointed prophets who proclaim the end of the world because man is evil by nature; environmentalists who preach the same; in fact, there is virtually no human activity where it is not common to pledge allegiance to the poor, the collective or the undistinguished.

Yet, one of the major failures of our culture is that it hasn’t adequately defined wrong action in a practical or even a moral sense. This is shown most eloquently in the concept of “the ego.” What is it? Is it intelligence, enlightenment and knowledge? Is it being beautiful and pure in soul? If so, why do so many in our culture still ridicule intelligence and beauty, knowledge, even honesty and integrity and especially success? Why do so many feel a jolt of pleasure when they see the rich ridiculed by politicians, or when they see art that distorts and disfigures the human form? Why do many still ridicule pride and berate young people for being assertive and self-interested? Why do so many talented people reduce themselves to humility when they are praised?

In my view, each human being is born with a perfect core that is the center of his sensory, emotional and reasoning capacity. That center is the ego, the “I” in each of us. From this center, each person makes his life, defines his values and decides how he will live and what he will enjoy. When society and family nurture this core, the individual can grow without guilt and can prosper as a self-interested person who is capable of being happy. When society and family attack the individual’s core and induce guilt, they call self-interest evil and demand self-sacrifice; the individual is confused about how much he can properly do for himself and he either accepts total self-abnegation or he accepts what is called his basic evil. In fact, today, religion and social institutions are the worst destroyers of happiness because of their unrelenting attacks on the individual mind and its freedom to think.

It is hatred of man (cynicism and chauvinism) that creates Hitlerian types, a hatred that believes people are too stupid to know what to do and that they must therefore be led (by them). It is both religion and skepticism that have this sort of cynicism about man. As we’ve stated above, most modern religions are steeped in deep cynicism, a belief in original sin, the imperfection of man, his inability to bridge the chasm between a carnal, worldly nature in favor of an elusive spiritual perfection. The leaders of such groups know not how to breed hope in people because they cannot and will not allow the sources of hope to flourish. The only hope they inspire is the hope of salvation in another dimension. The only solution they have for man’s inability to live by their morality is forgiveness of sins. They deny the role of reason in people’s lives because reason is anathema to faith. They criticize pride because the proud man thinks for himself.

Many people are so disabled by religious premises that they make up the millions of mediocrities that populate our societies. Their only real danger is when they create a chorus that empowers the haters who are their leaders. They represent the fertile field that creates the thugs, the storm troopers and the terrorists of our modern day who would destroy the foundations of civilization, freedom and reason in order to put forward their cynical precepts and express their chauvinistic anger; to wage the war against the individual through hatred, religious crusades and jihads. Not all of the haters carry bombs. Many of them teach in universities or preach in churches.

Their one clear message is that the individual, every individual should sacrifice his life, liberty and property for the sake of others; that the surest sign of an evil person is pride and self-interest, self-regard and self-concern and the surest sign of a good person is the unquestioning, vacuous glance of approval given to a person every time he brags about what he is doing for others.

Consider that our most successful businessmen and athletes do everything they can to assure others that they don’t consider themselves to be better than they by giving large amounts of their hard-earned money to charity. Consider that our tax system is based upon a progressive scale where the largest earners pay more taxes relative to their earnings. When you hear progressives (liberals) telling us that it is only fair that those of us who make more money should pay more in taxes, you are hearing the basic “redistribution” mantra; the idea that the purpose of government is to ensure the distribution of money from rich to poor. This sort of pandering to voters who make less money is more than a political tactic; it is also a philosophy of government. What they ignore, beyond the obvious violation of individual rights, is that no one is benefited by this process. When the talented people in a society realize that their hard work is being stolen from them, they will not work as hard and they will have less capital to invest in the economy. Once they realize that the economy is not free, they will lose their desire to work harder.

The idea that egoism amounts to vicious self-absorption and predatory behavior is common today. Pride is so bad for many that it is even worse than self-destructive acts. Why? No answer. How is this so? No answer. Why is pride evil? What has it done in the world that is so evil? Touch god? Make money? Accomplish great deeds? There is no justice in the idea that accomplishing much in life requires that you serve others.

For some people, egoism is connected with prejudice, revenge (hatred) and other mean emotions. How? No answer. Why? No answer. By what reason; by what standard of the good; by what logic? Logic? No answer. Yet few attack these criticisms as cruel, vicious and unfair.

Pride is the opposite of pretense. Where pretense is used to prop up the avoidant, fearful personality, pride gives cohesion to the soul, releases the ego and enables man to understand himself. That is why pride is always attacked by both rationalists and empiricists alike. Pride is conviction in one’s value and it is based upon a firm understanding of the self; pride is the emotion that makes positive action possible; it is the conduit between reality and the mind, bridging the two and making freedom of action possible. Yet, the key to understanding the hatred of pride is to recognize that what the haters of pride criticize is not pride but pretense. Yet they do not hate pretense, it is pride that they hate.

When a person accepts criticism for having pride, he loses his personal foundation and the ability to develop character. This means a lowering of expectation in life, a loss of the potential for happiness and the inability to defend himself against aggressive religious judgments of his character. The true target of all this is the confident man; those who hate pride want to kill confidence, success and certainty. In effect, they want to kill the essence of man; that which makes him the kind of creature he is. They want to kill his mind.

I’d like to point out some examples on how certain types of people in our culture are treated by those who hate pride and egoism:

Let us look at the business tycoon who creates a new idea for a product that improves the lives of millions of people worldwide. You would think that once he has achieved his goals and the money starts piling up, that he would begin to enjoy the results of his hard work and struggles. But that success is precisely what makes him a target for the so-called moral authorities.

Almost as soon as he begins to feel the pride of accomplishment for his achievement, an avalanche of ridicule begins. First, he must pay high taxes on the income that he has earned because the government believes that he owes it to the society has just benefited through his new product. The basic premise of this view is that the more a person makes, the more he owes to others. That his product significantly improves the lives of his customers and save hundreds of minutes that enable them to live better lives is not as important as the fact that he is considered by many to not have a right to the profits he earns.

Then he must contend with a host of charlatans who attempt to befriend and exploit him. From photography hungry paparazzi to money hungry swindlers with the next new idea, to predatory lawyers who seek opportunities to sue him, to money hungry charities that seek his money for sundry causes, many of which are scams, he must now wade through this quagmire of aspirants and ensure that his money is safe and protected. When the media discusses his life and the various issues with which he must deal, he is bombarded by hundreds of stories about his evil parasitism, his greed and his sinister scheming.

If his wife, parents, siblings and others in his life are influenced by religion or the universities, they are going to constantly berate him about always thinking he is better than they are, even if he does not exhibit any behavior to that effect. If he has a priest or a preacher who influences him, he will, in all likelihood, be told about his duty to live for others and to relieve the suffering of the world. He will be told of God’s command to help the poor. He may set up a huge foundation whose goal is not to help poor people but to alleviate his own guilt for the “evil” thing he has done by becoming rich.

An athlete with supreme knowledge and skills that were created through struggle and individual effort will receive a similar treatment as the rich man. If he becomes a mega superstar he earns not only adulation and god-like status from the public but, in his private life, he is often bombarded by a cadre of hangers-on who promise to perform valuable tasks for him such as marketing, public relations, financial services, legal and even personal services. Many of these people would not be successful on their own without the large infusions of money given to them by the athlete. But by far the worst aspects of the superstar’s life are the huge numbers of people who seek to “bring him down” by finding or distorting any information they can about his character or mistakes that he has made.

The utter hatred and ridicule that the successful individual experiences in our culture forces many successful people to feel that they have to appease people by becoming altruists, by showing them that they really are good and that their main goal in life is to help others. This reaction is common because most people want to be liked by others and most don’t understand the source of the ridicule they receive. Where the high earning individual could be investing his earnings and enjoying his wealth without guilt; where he could also be investing in new businesses and creating new jobs, he destroys his money by giving it to people who throw it into an abyss. This abyss seldom sends anything out, seldom educates people about self-sufficiency; seldom teaches real skills that make poor people more able to work productively. Instead, it is a bottomless pit where there is little accountability and few actual beneficiaries.

There have been some prodigies[2] who have shown such promise in their intellectual capabilities that many people thought that they would grow up to be solvers of great problems. Indeed, though many of them were brilliant in such areas as advanced mathematics, physics and other fields that are a mystery to the average man, many geniuses lived undistinguished lives, preferring to study and observe the world in private and leaving very little to posterity. I believe there are two reasons for this.

First, most of these geniuses accept fully the premises of the existing culture into which they are born. This means that they accept some of the most illogical notions developed by people who are far inferior to them intellectually. They are subject to the same fear-generating ideas and they are told that because they are so intelligent they should not try to let people know that they consider themselves superior to other. They are badgered into appeasement by their parents and teachers; they are made to feel guilty for their intelligence.

Many of these geniuses are under severe criticism even while they are children. They are considered to be freaks of nature, robots who have no feelings, effetes who consider themselves to be better than other, braggarts who routinely embarrass other kids and adults by parading their superiority. Newspaper writers insult them before they even have an understanding of why they are being attacked.

It should be no surprise why, before these brilliant young people become adults, that they are beaten-down hulks in severe psychological crisis. In order to find a place in the world of adults, rather than shine and bring the world brilliant solutions, they have no regard for the world because that world has been only insulting to them. Many of them realize that the more they try to impress people with their brilliance, the more they are hated and ridiculed. It should be no surprise, then, when they decide to spend their adult lives collecting bus transfer tickets for a hobby and working non-descript accounting jobs.

If we study some of the most common arguments against egoism, we can obtain a glimpse of the anti-egoistic fraud that is being perpetrated against the individual and why this world is so hateful toward the independent mind.

The argument that egoism requires the exploitation of others assumes that the two basic alternatives in morality are altruism, which is sacrifice of the individual to others and egoism which is considered by many to be sacrifice of others to the individual. These two views actually presuppose the same basic premise; that someone has to be sacrificed and that since sacrifice of the individual for the sake of others is the proper thing to do, it is thought, sacrifice of others for the sake individual is the immoral thing to do.

I submit that both alternatives are wrong. Sacrificing for others as a moral imperative is harmful to the individual because it establishes a contradiction between self-interested action (which every individual needs in order to survive) and self-sacrifice which is destructive of the individual. Every individual has to have a base within his value priorities that relates to himself as a value, his consciously chosen values, the need of survival and the planning and accomplishments that will accomplish both survival and happiness. If instead, his prime value is giving to others, how can he even plan his life and stick to a sense of purpose that benefits him?

On the other hand, a truly egoistic person does not sacrifice others to benefit himself, he is not a predator looking to take, steal or exploit others. A truly selfish person does not do things that compromise his relationships with other rational people. And he knows that in order to live well he must be a productive, honest person with a foundation of integrity and purpose. He is not a loose-operating-adventurer, a moment-by-moment song-and-dance man who just makes things up on the spot. He is a thinker who knows that in order to have a good life many other things are necessary such as self-esteem, a free society, freedom of speech, a good education, seed capital and life planning.

These two approaches to moral action presuppose two opposed views of man’s nature. Otherism is the idea that all human action should be based upon serving others, that life is struggle and despair and that only by working collectively can we solve human problems (The fact that human problems prevail, and are not diminished through altruism, should cause a person to pause about the value of collective solutions for individual problems). An otherist is always thinking about how his actions affect others and makes all moral decisions on the basis of what others think, how they are affected and, more importantly, how they are served. A consistent otherist completely dispenses with doing anything for himself. Though he may ensure that he performs those acts that secure his personal well-being, the basic focus of everything he thinks and does is other people and collective action.

Otherism holds that value resides in everyone except the individual whose only purpose in life is to serve everyone but himself. The contradiction in this view is that it evades the basic question: if it is proper for a man to serve others as his highest moral duty, why is it not proper for those others to serve him? And how does one reconcile this contradiction between “others” who are supposed to be served and the individual who is supposed to serve? Are not those others supposed, each individually, to serve others? How can one effectively serve others if each of those others is also supposed to sacrifice for others? With this contradiction, if I do something for others, those others are only moral if they reject such service.

A contradiction is a thinking error that is wrong not only in word but also in action. If words are descriptions of reality, if the quality of our thinking is dependent upon the relation of our ideas to the real world, when you relate self-sacrifice to the real world, it does not work. It is not possible for a person to be consistently self-sacrificial because to do so is to die. It is not possible for a person to be half-egoistic and half self-sacrificial because to do so is to live a half-life. In this case, the individual will merely die more slowly but he will have wasted his life in half-living and half-dying. You can see this contradiction everyday if you merely look at the wasted lives of many people around you who are living that contradiction. And you can see it in the hatred, envy and ridicule that are aimed at the successful in our society.

If a person’s actions are consistently based on his self-interest, on what is actually in his self-interest, then the result will always be good for him and for those that deal with him. The contradiction can be discovered when we notice that living for others does not result in good for anyone. In fact, the person sacrificed is harmed by means of wasting his time and product, losing his moral integrity, while the person who receives charity is harmed by the false idea that one can survive off the work of others. Living off the work of others means a lowering of the beneficiary’s self-respect, morality, integrity and his ability to make proper decisions that matter to his well-being. If the question of living is “who can I get money from?” rather than “how can I live productively?” there will be no success for this individual.

Self-sacrifice, mindlessness and collectivism are the enemies of egoism, reason and individualism. In fact, the arguments for the former set of ideas are an attack on the latter set. And more importantly, practicing the former set of ideas leads to death while the latter ideas lead to life and flourishing. In practice, in action, self-sacrifice, mindlessness and collectivism are destructive, deadly and evil. Just look at their results in the lives of individuals and nations. Spend your life consistently sacrificing and you will wind up destitute and dead. Make decisions mindlessly and you will not have the knowledge necessary to survive or make correct decisions. Create a society based on collectivism and you have a nation of people sacrificing their product for the sake of thieves and charlatans.

Look at murderers and you will find a hatred of successful people. Look at leftist politicians or college professors and you will find a hatred of successful people. Look at a rapist and you will find a hatred of beauty and self-confident women. Look at people who practice infidelity to those that they claim to love and you will find a hatred of and fear of moral perfection. Over and over, you can analyze any idea that has negative or terrible consequences and you will find a hatred of and criticism of egoism, reason and freedom.

This is the difference between otherism and egoism: if it is mindless it is deadly and immoral and requires an attack on reason and moral purity. Moral purity is the result of reason. Immorality is the result of mindlessness, faith and the willful suspension of mental and moral focus. If you don’t understand this, you have been duped by the propaganda of otherism, the false promises of altruists and the fake invocation of a false hope that offers only a mindless melding into the non-existent collective.

This argument is merely a tautology based upon the premise that morality without god is the same as wanton moral abandon. The premise of this argument is that men would be out of control savages were it not for religious morality. In spite of the fact that neolithic societies appear to have existed before religious symbols began to populate their walls and that they were well organized with the division of labor, agriculture and even rudimentary art, there is no evidence that men would be totally immoral without religion. In fact, from archaeology and even modern history we learn that men are capable of making correct decisions about their lives merely be analyzing reality and its survival requirements.

It is not true that religious morality is good for man. In fact, it turns men into automatons whose only duty is to serve others...which is slavery. If one thinks that this sort of control is what morality is supposed to achieve, then one doesn’t understand what “the good” is in practical terms. The good is the survival of individual men, achieved by their own effort and made possible by thinking and production. The good is rational egoism where what is actually good for the individual is that which his mind defines as proper for him as an individual, not as a sacrificing member of a collective. In fact, membership in a collective means the loss of individual’s product and the diminishment of his life. The collective is not some ethereal good that invokes glory and love; it is the sacrifice of the individual to others.

The view that selfishness is antithetical to morality holds that if you live for yourself, you are a savage who is willing to do anything to anyone in order to gain something. This view is not the opposite of altruism but a misrepresentation of what it means to be rationally selfish or egoistic. Rational egoism holds that what you choose as “the good” should actually be good for you. It holds that to uphold self-sacrifice is to attack, hate and ridicule rational thought and moral action; in effect to make them impossible. Rational egoism is not violent, moral abandon and exploitation. In fact, altruism is a violent attack on the individual that leads to exploitation and death for man. Just listen to any altruist and you’ll see, hidden under protestations of love, a hatred of the individual and anything that he might do to further his life and well being.

This argument is actually aimed at capitalism and implicitly represents view which claims that success and assertive action rob the less assertive of their right to survive. The assumption is that the less assertive individual is being robbed of something that he possesses by someone who is more aggressive at getting it. This fallacy overlooks the fact that production and intelligence bring something new into existence that the less assertive or less intelligent are incapable of making.

Let’s look at a simple example; the person who creates an exciting new engine that uses less fuel and produces more power significantly affects the lives of millions of people, saving them time, money and ensuring transportation that makes it possible for people to get to their jobs, shop and enjoy nature. His brother who did not go to engineering school may also be a productive individual in some field but the market for his skills is smaller and he never produces anything that affects people in the way that his brother’s skills did. Can anyone say that the engineer took something away from his brother? If so, what is it? Did he steal his intelligence, his energy or his time? Did he in any way seek to design his motor at the expense of his brother? In fact, his brother is benefited tremendously if he buys a motor from his brother. What facts support the idea that the successful become successful at the expense of the unsuccessful?

Another way that this issue is argued is to claim that the engineer brother, when he sells his engine to his brother for use exploits him by requiring that he pay for the engine. This is seen, in some circles, to be theft of resources from the less accomplished brother by the more accomplished brother. Since the engineer is offering a product that the non-engineer needs, he is thought to be holding him up, demanding payment in a way that limits and harms his non-engineer brother. But is this actually the case? Even if the engineer hires a marketing company to convince his brother that he needs the engine when he might not otherwise think he needs it, isn’t the non-engineer brother saving money in his fuel consumption when he uses the engine? Is he not benefiting from the engine that carries him to places to which he might otherwise have to walk or ride a horse? In fact, this new engine significantly improves the life of the non-engineer brother since he is able to buy a highly efficient engine at a price that is much less than what he would have had to pay to create the engine for himself; an engine that he does not have the ability to create. In fact, one could argue that it is the non-engineer brother who is exploiting his engineer brother by buying the engine from him at a price that is well within his means and from which he gains a considerable benefit in time saved and energy consumed.

The argument from exploitation has no merit and all the arguments about Madison Avenue advertising cannot show that anyone is being exploited when people engage in free trade for mutual advantage. Only people who think they know how businesses should conduct themselves or who think they know what decisions are right for people to make, in other words, only fascistically-oriented people, make arguments about how we should regulate businesses in order to avoid this kind of non-existent exploitation. There is no conspiracy of Wall Street executives to steal anyone’s money and, more importantly, the idea of free trade has liberated countless millions to pursue their dreams of having a good life and succeeding where in the past the only success was finding the next meal.

This argument is part of the rhetoric (or propaganda) against egoism which believes that morality can only be legislated by God. According to this view, men cannot define an ethics that relates to the real world without having that morality given to them by religion. Without such a handed down ethics, it is assumed, men would be sexually promiscuous, brutal, barbaric and seek only short-term advantages. The assumption, implicit in this view, is that it is rational for man to be wild and out of control while religion somehow makes him more refined and controllable. It assumes that there is no such thing as an ethics of rational self-interest.

Is it possible to have a morality without religion? And if it is, does this not prove that it is wrong to insist that religion is the only form of morality? My answer is yes, it is possible, and more importantly, it has been done and is being done every day by people all over the world. To see the truth of this, we should recognize that our nation was originally set up as a secular society where each man was responsible for deciding what he would do and what he would hold as his philosophy. He was free to make all his own decisions even to believe in religious principles if he chose to do so. Everything was up to the individual. If one looks at the first few amendments (The Bill of Rights) to the Constitution, we see that they allow and protect freedom; we see the genesis of the idea that people can and should make their own decisions about what will make them happy. Although secularism does not provide a systematic morality, many people, while functioning in the secular world, make moral decisions every day about what they will do, what products they will buy, where they will live, what education will help them achieve success and for whom they should vote. In a secular society like ours, morality is a matter of choice.

Every day, in our society, we can see that being selfish does not mean that a person will be greedy, promiscuous and barbarous. In fact, only religion believes so because religious thinkers have never investigated the possibility of a rational morality and they do not want people to abandon religion. Their most common argument is that they care about people and don’t want to see them lose salvation in God’s eyes. But what if morality is not about salvation in the after life? What if there is no after life? What if morality is about “salvation” (where salvation means happiness) in this life?

For those who have accepted the idea that morality consists of serving others, and who are afraid to challenge the authority of their families, friends or clergy, it is sometimes easy to accept the idea that we need not go to extremes in morality. The argument that we should not judge people too harshly, that we should be unwilling to cast the first stone, etc., are all statements that disregard the true nature of the person being judged.

What does it mean to compromise between egoism and self-sacrifice? It means essentially that one is a moral agnostic, that one does not want to anger people that insist that altruism is the proper morality but that one also wants to have a nice life by working and succeeding. One could say that the compromiser is more than an agnostic but also a coward who is unwilling to stand up for his own right to self-determine his values and the purpose he has set for his life. As a young Catholic, I felt the pull of altruism and the guilt that comes from displeasing a parish priest or parent who wants you to “be good.” From the Church I learned of the miracle that Jesus brought to man through his sacrifice on the cross. Because of that sacrifice, I too wanted to help others. I bought into the idea that helping others was the highest goal of my life and I felt a twinge of pride for being such a good person. In fact, I experienced euphoria when I contemplated the fact that morally I was pure.

My father, however, was the bringer of reality. He told me that I had to think of myself, decide what I would do in the future and how I would live. He encouraged me to do creative things, learn skills and be productive. His message was that it was great to help people but if you were not a person able to earn money you could help no one. What he meant was that I should think of myself first. To my mind, he was encouraging me to be a mere maker of things rather than a person devoted to the higher value of contemplating the essence of God.

I found his message strange considering that he too was a Catholic and, well, wasn’t God’s word enough to enable me to survive? And since I felt I was under the protection of God because of my devotion and altruism, I began to feel uncomfortable. The feeling of euphoria was replaced by the tension of wondering how to define my self-worth. Was I good merely because I helped others or was I good because of what I produced in the real world? For a pre-teen, these were daunting questions.

It was during these times that I was working as a sales person of magazine subscriptions. This was my after-school job that helped me earn enough money to buy things. My boss, the gentleman who drove me around to make the calls at peoples’ houses, told me that he was an atheist. I thought that talking with him would give me a chance to see a different perspective on the issues I was dealing with and he told me my problem was religion. I found this view startling and questionable to say the least. My commitment to my faith was very strong and I had become convinced by the priests and nuns of my Church that the Catholic religion was the only source of good in the world. I felt firmly that I wanted to do everything I could to get to heaven and that the only way to do that was by being a “good boy.”

For a large part of my life, I thought that my conflict was between my love for altruism and my desire for self-respect and even self-esteem. Hannah Arendt, more lately, has convinced me that it was a far more profound question:

“…Plato as well as Aristotle tends to invert the relationship between work and action in favor of work. Thus Aristotle, in a discussion of the different kinds of cognition in his Metaphysics, places dianoia and episteme praktike, practical insight and political science, at the lowest rank of his order, and puts above them the science of fabrication, episteme poietike, which immediately precedes and leads to theoria, the contemplation of truth.[3]

For the Greeks, whose survival was provided by slaves doing the kinds of things that kept them fed and prosperous, the contemplation of truth, as opposed to the production of “things” was the highest state of mankind. As history developed and slavery waned; men learned that contemplation was enhanced by actually doing and knowing about the real world and even by producing the things that enhance living. I realized that for me, as contemplation of god became more and more an escape into the spiritual, a dichotomy arose between the spiritual and the practical. My father had been encouraging me back then to concentrate more on the practical, first in order to help me and secondly, in order to keep me from becoming a spiritualist who spent his life contemplating only God.

Even pre-teens can get caught up in the consequences of a philosophical conflict that has spanned ages. I did not know it at the time and only later learned about the spiritual vs. practical split in philosophy. My father’s exhortations woke me up to the necessity of having to “do something” in order to get along in the world; where the Church had taught me that contemplation of God was all that I needed.

My first thought was that I should find a way to be good and also to be successful in the working world. In fact, I thought, only a successful person can have enough money to be able to make an impact on the suffering of others. I set a goal to become a millionaire (at that time a million dollars was a lot of money) who had so much money that he would be considered great because of all the good he had done. Only great men, I thought, could do great things for others.

Consider what this compromise did to me. It made me ambitious to make lots of money but not for myself. The money I would be making was for others, to be given away so that those who had no ambition could receive the love of God. Leaving aside the question of why many of these people were not able to be as ambitious as I, we have to ask whether placing the purpose of my life in others defeated me in my efforts to become “great.” As I recall, I seldom made any life decisions about education, career choices or friendships on the basis of whether they would help me help others. On the other hand, the sheer size of the need for assistance of the many millions of people convinced me of my utter inability to solve all these people’s problems. I could never do the amount of work necessary to even feed them all their next meal.

The need to be a great altruist was an imposing responsibility. Just the small amount of altruism I was able to do left me exhausted and wondering how I could ever become rich when my time yielded so little in terms of money. Should I give the earnings from my job? This money was the source of so much enjoyment because I did not have to rely on my parents to purchase books and other things for myself.

The more ambitious I became to help others, the harder I had to work and that made me even more tired. Then, when I saw some of the people who needed help, as the Great Society advanced during the 60s, I saw that many of them spent the alms given to them on drugs, alcohol and lazy living. Many of the needy were needy because they had no ambition. They did not deserve all the hard work I was putting forth. It didn’t matter to me that some of the needy did not deserve to suffer; what mattered is that most were not “good” people like I had been taught they were.

My father had not actually come out and said to me that I should think of myself first. He merely wanted me to be a “man” and fare for myself. And he never told me to forget about the poor. He merely thought that in being such a “good boy” I was also not being myself, I was pretending…I was a phony. At least that is how I interpreted what he meant, though I did not see the phoniness until one day he told me to stop being so stiff at the neck (we were at Church).

This personal story is intended to indicate how personal the conflict between altruism and self-interest can get. I suspect that each of us goes through a similar questioning and many of us deal with these issues in different ways. The key point however, is whether we try to find a happy compromise with altruism or whether we choose sides on this issue. Most of us, unfortunately, try to compromise. And, when we compromise on this issue, we delay the movement toward a self-interested purpose. For every gift you give “the poor,” there is something taken from you that was a theft of your time; time that you will have to make up with more production. When you do this during your developing years, in school and even in college, you delay your development and in many cases you lose the opportunity to improve your skill or knowledge level. Everything has a price and with altruism, the price is your own delayed success, even possibly your failure.

The same is true of the poor. Most of these people are poor because they made grievous thinking errors or choices. Life is finite and you only have so many moments to learn and even to enjoy it. To waste your developing years in a constant sacrifice means that the sacrifice is you. The poor have already wasted their developing years by refusing to think clearly. My altruism was their savior and my loss was the price I paid for their lack of ambition. They are poor because they don’t plan their lives well and they make choices that favor short-term values rather than long-term.

Inside every poor man is a lifetime of poor choices. And the moral development of each man is seen in the way he dresses, how he conducts himself and the level of his knowledge. Measure most poor people against this standard and you can see that the failure to think and act rationally is the most harmful mistake they make. They forgot to think of their very real future needs and that is why they are poor.

A consistent purpose is the hallmark of the self-interested person. This purpose, if it is based upon the individual’s life as the standard, will define his choices and what he does with his limited time on this earth. A clear purpose is the basic characteristic that makes a person into a valuable creature, worth knowing and worth loving. To compromise on one’s rationally chosen purpose is to compromise on the planning and enjoyment of one’s life. Only the purposeful individual can ever hope to create enough value in the world so that if, someday, he should come across a person who did not earn his poor condition, he can give that person some temporary assistance until he can get on his feet. This sort of giving is not charity; it is benevolence.

On the other hand, a rationally purposeful person knows how hard it is to create one’s character, how many years of study; how those years create self-confidence and a sense of the value of achievement and accomplishment in life. He understands that the decisions a young person makes are the very decisions that create a person’s value. He could not possibly reward a person who makes the wrong choices by limiting the damage that the person has done to himself. When such a person is confronted with the example of a person who needs help, he is more inclined to evaluate such request according to the standard of his own life and according to the consequences that such a “gift” will have on his own life. In particular, he will completely reject anything that smells of deception or guilt-producing arguments. The key for him would be whether altruism is used as a club or whether the people who need help are true victims of unanticipated disasters, and more importantly, whether it will hurt him to give up his income or time. He would understand that altruism, through out history, has been used as a tool by some of the most vicious murderers in the world and that those who use it today are of the same ilk.

The ego is assertive hope seeking the best in life, it is selfishness without the comparison of one’s self with others – a pure form of self-regard that includes the basic conviction that one can pursue one’s happiness without holding back. The ego is the source of human freedom in society. It is freedom, a celebration of man and his capabilities. If we understand that the ego is the foundation of man’s emotional core, his free mind supplemented with knowledge, we learn to express it in a human way, not as a guilty pursuit of mindless pleasures, but as a pursuit of a happy life lived without guilt and without regret – and especially without fear. The ego has nothing to do with “others” but is the essence of human striving and even the source of such positive emotions as good will and romantic love. It has nothing to do with a suffering god and his quest for the light but is a natural quest to which the individual is drawn for self-understanding and self-fulfillment, in short, for happiness.

After centuries and generations of negatively equating the ego with both pride and villainy, we can now arrive at an appropriate definition of the ego. The ego is the core emotion of man, the key requirement of his psychological health. The ego is the central emotion, the soul, the driving force of man whose goals are survival and happiness. The ego is best achieved when guided by logic because logic is pure thinking and the ego is pure positive emotion and innocent striving. This is why it is the cardinal evil for all religions, the one point that has to be attacked and driven out in order to drive men into herds of complacent and obedient slaves.

The successful person suffering under hatred of the ego should understand fully what success means: you are hated in this religion-dominated society precisely because of your success. Those who hate success believe that you are evil; you have done something unthinkable to them: you have discovered or learned something that made you successful – you have learned that it is possible to succeed within a chaos of failure. In other words, you used your mind, they did not, and they intend to make you suffer for it. So they tell you, “Money is the root of all evil”, “Pride is a sin” in order to make you question your brilliance and your greatness. They believe that you must bear the burden of their prejudice and that you deserve to suffer. You possess a characteristic that their culture has forbidden; and they think they are right, through the authority of culture, to hate you and punish you. Your evil, to them, consists of refusing to compromise the values which are your mind and your self to the views of others.

Pride cannot be the result of both achievement and villainy. Aristotle’s principle of identity argues that a thing cannot be both itself and its opposite. Yet, the commonly accepted idea of the ego includes both the freedom of action to achieve high values and villainy. Clearly, we have here a problem of crucial importance for man and his understanding of what is proper action; how can one concept be considered both anti-social and good? Man is either free to achieve high values or he should not do so. He cannot do both consistently; yet he cannot survive if he is supposed to suppress his need for accomplishment.

Properly, evil, in a human social context, is any act that violates the rights of others to achieve their own survival. Anti-social behavior includes any act that deprives others of the life and/or property that they rightly hold. Assertive action then, in order to be good, is any act that is rightly taken for the benefit of the individual. It is an expression of his rights to happiness, property and freedom. The ego, in order to function, in any human being, requires complete freedom and especially, it requires an advanced use of abstract knowledge not available on the animal level. Whether you call the ego assertive action, egoism, rational egoism, etc., the main point is that man should be free to achieve values through the use of the mind, without the imposition of guilt, faith and the requirement of self-sacrifice. It is those that require self-sacrifice that are truly evil. It is they who violate the rights of others and make survival more difficult for honest men.

A rationally selfish man is a clear thinker that uses his own mind, who defines his generalizations by means of looking at reality and not from copying the thoughts of others. The rationally selfish man, by keeping the property that is his, spreads life and hope for the future and he shows others the example of how to be happy, free and successful. A result of the existence of the rationally selfish man is success. That altruists consider this man to be a malefactor and robber baron only shows that the altruist is after expropriation, sacrifice and guilt.

The power of reason and egoism, however, can be seen everywhere. Look at the clean cities, tall buildings, air conditioned offices, jumbo jets and space stations built by people in the United States and you see the power of the human being who can look at reality, have confidence in the validity of his senses and use his mind to create technology that positively affects his own life and that of others. Reason is released by political freedom and because man is free he can benefit from his own thinking; because he is free he can trade with others who see the real value of his skills and products; because he is free he can make his own life and the lives of others better through production. This is the power that altruists hate. This is what they consider evil, this is what they consider to be theft – while they (the altruists) enjoy their beautiful multi-million dollar homes, limousines and private jets – given to them from money they have extorted by means of making honest men feel guilty.

Properly, the full range of moral action must include reason, productivity, property acquisition, the pursuit of happiness, respecting the rights of others, none of which are considered moral according to the premises of altruism. This full range, in order to be experienced maximally, requires that the individual put himself first and that a proper society does not demand that he sacrifice himself, his values, his goals and his time for the sake of others. A proper society demands that the free individual be protected against having his property and time stolen from him by altruists of all types, religious or governmental. In fact, there is no difference morally between requiring that an individual sacrifice for others at the point of a gun or at the point of suffering eternally in hell. The cause (sacrifice is a duty) and the result (overall impoverishment) are the same in either case.

Consider the utter arrogance of dealing with young people with the view that self-interest is evil, the utter uncertainty and invalidity of criticizing someone for “thinking you are better than others” as if that means something. Here, pride is considered to be the cause of all evil in the world. Indeed, for man haters, pride is a demon, a spirit whose intent is to do harm in the world. What about pride in accomplishment, pride in doing good, pride for having lived a productive life? What evil do they create? Further, also consider the utter ruthlessness of these haters; a ruthlessness every bit as virulent as that which religion ascribes to its myth of predatory egoism. If you have pride and if you become confused by this form of criticism, if you give these people the authority to criticize you, if you take them seriously, you will become confused and you will fulfill their wish: you will suffer self-doubt. Yet no one criticizes the utter cruelty and unfairness of statements of this type. And few notice that it is unearned guilt that is the stock in trade of religion.

One must get a proper perspective on the difference between altruism and egoism. Egoism has never had a consistent defender until Ayn Rand began writing. During the course of her life, she has been the most eloquent defender of the idea and her writing has shown that the arguments against it are biased. Not only is altruism a cynical attack on the individual, but it leads to cruelty and oppression, not benevolence toward people.

More importantly, it benefits you if you take a more serious view of your own ego rather than others; learn about yourself and how to develop yourself. Understand that life-planning, education, social etiquette and respecting contextual protocols are all about individual flourishing. Our society is virtually the first since the Greeks where the individual could function as an autonomous being and live for the sake of living. Understand how unique and rare that is culturally and learn to take advantage of the cultural phenomenon that is egoism. For centuries, philosophers, prophets and government leaders have sought to denigrate and enslave the individual; not to mention keep him ignorant and incapable of reading and using his mind.

There is no evil in having real pride. There is no evil in seeking to be the best one can be; in being ambitious and desirous of the best; of learning and drawing conclusions with one’s own mind. There is no evil in refusing to sacrifice your time and production for the sake of others. These are all characteristics of the autonomous and proud individual and you have your ego available to you if you choose to pursue it.

[1] Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

[2] Billy Sidis is an excellent example

[3] Metaphysics 1025b25 ff., 1064a17 ff.

We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club and Discover Card.