“I hold that man should have self-esteem”, says Ayn Rand with unbridled conviction. And she is right, isn’t she?
How can we truly be happy and content if we continue to believe that our only fulfillment in life comes from sacrificing ourselves to others? In fact, according to Ayn Rand, this is man’s greatest sin.
Can sacrificing yourself to others really be immoral? Let’s examine this statement a little closer. When we give up one of our values to satisfy the value of another, who has really gained from this interaction? I would argue no one.
The only real gain in any kind of interaction between two conscious individuals — be it business or pleasure- is the uninhibited exchange of goods. Goods in form of ideas, concepts, things, or emotions.
In this way sacrificing yourself and your ideas — hiding your true self behind a persona — becomes an act of evil. Not only are you disallowing the expression that Nature has created you to express but you are actively robbing your counterpart from ever having to examine your convictions.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is more than a morality of greed and capitalism. It is the vanguard of a truly free and individual association of human beings. An uninhibited call to dare to value this freedom and become beings conscious of the effect of our choices.
I am reminded of a scene in Atlas Shrugged where Dagne confronts a security guard and asks him to let her pass. The security guard has no rules for this kind of confrontation and simply is incapable of acting on his own. As Ayn Rand writes — and I am paraphrasing — Dagne witnessed the struggle of a being that deeply longed not to be conscious.
In other words, pushing our consciousness, our free will, and our thereby resulting responsibility as human beings aside or upwards; delegating away our decisions, is the ultimate act of cowardice.
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