Many people reserve the concepts of genius and spiritual greatness for the philosopher, the sage, the theoretical scientist, and the artist; however, these concepts may equally apply to an entrepreneur, an industrialist, an inventor, a trader—that is, those engaged in the production and exchange of material goods and services. For the failure to understand this, we may thank the religionists who, with their soul-body dichotomy, damn this earth as an inferior realm, condemn production, trade, and profit seeking as ignoble and vulgar, and long for a “higher dimension” where human beings will be unencumbered by such unworthy, material concerns.
The contempt for business and trade used to be a typically European phenomenon; it has become an American one, with painful psychological consequences for millions of hardworking, undervalued human beings. An ethical code that holds life as the standard of value will teach us how to appreciate productive men and women and not leave them feeling psychologically invisible, as they too often feel today, even to their own families.
Just as productiveness is the primary expression of rationality in relationship to nature, so justice is the primary expression of rationality in the relationship of human beings to one another. If we are to live together in a civilized, benevolent way, then justice, not sacrifice, must be the ruling principle among us.
The subject of justice is an enormous one, and all I can do here is indicate a direction, an intention. To be just is to deal with human beings as ends in themselves, not as means to the ends of others; to recognize each person’s right to exist for his or her own sake and never to ask that person to exist for yours; to offer admiration for virtues and disapproval for vices; to deal with human beings as they objectively deserve, which means, among other things, to respect the distinction between the earned and the unearned (whether the currency be material or spiritual, wealth or admiration) and not to confuse a desire with a right (“I want” does not mean “I am entitled to”).
This concept of justice, I am persuaded, provides the best possible foundation for social cooperation, benevolence, and mutual aid. Reflecting a commitment to self-responsibility, it fosters the growth of individualism but not of narcissism. It reminds us that other people do not exist to satisfy our needs and wants; they are not our servants, as we are not theirs.
This view of justice is entirely incompatible with the ethics of altruism. The essence of altruism is the concept of self-surrender and self-sacrifice. It is the self that altruism implicitly regards as evil, since selflessness is its moral ideal; it is an antiself ethics.
Instead of the goodwill and mutual respect engendered by recognition of individual rights, altruism as a moral commandment produces only fear and hostility among human beings. It forces them to accept the role of victim or executioner and leaves them no standard of justice, no way to know what they can demand and what they must surrender.
It is ones view of oneself that determines one’s view of human nature and one’s way of relating to other human beings. The respect and goodwill that persons of high self-esteem tend to feel toward other persons is profoundly egoistic; they feel, in effect, “Other people are of value because they are of the same species as myself.” This is the psychological base of any emotion of sympathy and any feeling of species solidarity.
But this causal relation cannot be reversed. A person must first value him- or herself—and only then value others. Contrary to any number of spurious and utterly unfounded claims that the values of individualism encourage alienation, atomistic self-containment, and antisocial attitudes, there is an enormous amount of empirical research to support the judgment that an individualist value orientation facilitates rather than inhibits behaviors that contribute to human life. *
When we come across human suffering, it is natural and appropriate to wish to offer help or relief. And, generally speaking, it is a virtue to do so. But it is far from being the heart and soul of a moral existence. Disaster is not the most important part of life, and helping victims of disaster is not the most important part of morality. If it were, one would wish to see other people suffer just so that one could achieve virtue by offering help. What, then, are we to feel toward people who do not need us? They deprive us of the opportunity to be moral. Among people who are happy, we will have no way to gain self-esteem. Such is the corruption toward which altruism tends.
I am sometimes asked, “Isn’t selfishness incompatible with love?” It would be closer to the truth to say that selflessness, the absence of self, negates the possibility of love. As I discuss at length in The Psychology of Romantic Love and The Romantic Love Question & Answer Book, no one is as badly hampered in efforts to build satisfying relationships as the person with a deficient ego.
To suggest that love is selfless is to maintain that it is not in my self-interest to find a person whom I can admire, delight in, find pleasure with. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. In love, the self is celebrated, not denied, abandoned, or sacrificed.
To love selfishly does not mean to be indifferent to the needs or interests of my partner. When we love, our concept of self-interest embraces the well-being of our partner. This is the great compliment of love: to declare to another human being that his or her happiness is of selfish importance to ourselves. Do we wish to believe that for our partner the relationship is an act of self-denial and self-sacrifice? Do we want to be told that our happiness is not of selfish interest to our partner?
To help us understand this, let us ask ourselves whether we want our lover to caress us unselfishly, with no personal gratification in the doing, or do we want our lover to caress us because it is a joy and a pleasure for him or her to do so? And let us ask ourselves whether we want our partner to spend time with us, alone together, and to experience the doing as an act of self-sacrifice. Or do we want our partner to experience such time as glory? And if it is glory that we want our partner to feel, if we want our partner to experience joy in our presence, excitement, ardor, passion, fascination, delight, then let us stop talking of “selfless love” as a noble ideal.
To anticipate a common misunderstanding at this point: If a man continually neglects a wife he loves—goes off to a party, leaves her ill at home and unattended—and if she leaves him and he is then devastated and miserable, we might say that he was “selfish.” But it would be truer to say that he had a fool’s notion of his self-interest. His irrationality did not consist of his being selfish, but of being thoughtless, careless, and irresponsible about his self-interest.
No one denies that compromise and accommodation are necessary in every relationship. Sometimes I do things to please you that I may not especially feel like doing. Sometimes I will place your immediate concerns above my own. To label such behaviors as sacrifices is to poison their meaning as expressions of love. But if, too often, I ignore my own needs and wants in order to please you, I commit a crime against both of us—against myself, because of the treason to my own values, against you, because I allow you to become someone I will resent.
As is obvious in the above example, there are persons so deficient in maturity, so narrow in their vision of their own interests, that they do not understand the sharing and nurturing so essential to love. Enjoining such people to be less “selfish” will accomplish nothing. They need to learn, not to set aside their own interests, but to expand their understanding of where their interests lie.*
In this context I have been discussing romantic or erotic love. But I think it should be obvious that the principle involved applies to every kind of love.
It seems that most people find it extraordinarily difficult to think clearly on this subject. To challenge the ideal of selflessness strikes them as virtually inconceivable. Sometimes they seek what they imagine is a compromise by declaring that in a fully enlightened human being, the distinction between egoism and altruism collapses; or they declare, “Altruism is the egoism of the superior person.” Only two things are accomplished by creating confusions of this kind: the corruption of any int
elligible concept of justice—and the avoidance of the need to take a stand on the issue of whether the individual has a right to exist. I do not know how those who take refuge in such strategies can, at best, escape the charge of moral cowardice.
Since the concept of self-sacrifice and selfless service is the centerpiece of conventional morality, it is necessary to explore it in greater depth and to consider further some of its psychological consequences in the areas of religion, society, and politics.
*The philosophical differences that I have with Rand do not pertain to what I shall cover in this sequence. At this level of abstraction or generality, the viewpoint I am summarizing is my own. Some of my key differences with Rand are outlined in an article I wrote for the Journal of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (Fall, 1984) entitled “The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement.”
*Not all the principles we need pertain to ethics, of course—some pertain to an understanding of the physical universe—but that in no way alters the point I am making.
*For an excellent review of this research see Alan S. Waterman’s “Individualism and Interdependence” in The American Psychologist.
*About the difference between self-sacrifice and the legitimate compromises necessary in human relationships, I refer the reader to The Romantic Love Question & Answer Book.
13
Self-Sacrifice
Let us begin with the symbol of the cross.
Advocates of the Christian vision sometimes claim, with some measure of justification, that the course of Western civilization has moved forward under the shadow of the cross and that that shadow hangs over our history as its most powerful moral inspiration.
In order to understand the meaning of the Crucifixion, we need to recognize that it is an appropriate task of ethics to offer human beings an image of the perfect embodiment of a particular ethical vision. In terms of the Christian morality, Jesus Christ is the supreme moral ideal, a being without sin, in whose perfect image we are told we should strive to refashion our own souls. Let us accept Christian terms, for the moment, and look at the symbol in its own context. On the cross, the ideal man was sacrificed to human depravity. The highest, noblest, most perfect man was willing to sacrifice himself and die in agony for the sake of persons who are low, ignoble, sinful, evil. The morally superior chose to be immolated for the sake of the morally inferior.
The notion that such a sacrifice is in any sense right, that ignoble men and women may accept it, profit by it, and go on living—living at the price of the perfect man’s torture, living on the blood of the ideal—is, I submit, as monstrous an injustice, as profound a perversion of morality as the human mind can conceive. Precisely to the extent to which one may feel love and admiration for Christ, one would be driven to hate the world, hate humanity, and find existence unbearable. And yet this is the symbol hanging, as moral inspiration, over our lives in the Western world.
Of course, there is another, non-Christian way the symbol of the cross can be interpreted, but it is hardly more encouraging: as a signifier that humankind has a predilection for crucifying its saviors.
In traditional moral terms, however, the message of the cross is unequivocal: the nobility of the sacrifice of the higher to the lower.
Christianity by no means holds a monopoly in its advocacy of self-sacrifice. In fact, Auguste Comte attacked Christianity for the outrageous “selfishness” of its concern with personal salvation. Nevertheless, the cross remains a superb metaphor for an ethical vision that is worldwide.
The immolation of the higher in favor of the lower is intrinsic to the very concept of sacrifice. Sacrifice means the surrender of a higher value in favor of a lower value or of a nonvalue. If we give up that which we do not value in order to obtain that which we do value—or if we give up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater one—this is not a sacrifice but a gain.*
It is important to note that we cannot give up or renounce or sacrifice what we do not possess or value. If sacrifice is a virtue, we must first have something to sacrifice. But we are not told, for example, that earning money is necessarily evil; we are merely told that virtue consists of giving it away. We are not taught to see moral significance in the cultivation of intelligence, but we are encouraged to admire the surrender, the sacrifice, of intelligence to “faith.” We are not taught to attach moral significance to the nurturing of our own ability, but we are taught that virtue consists of placing our ability at the disposal of those less able than ourselves. We are not taught to find moral significance in the struggle for happiness, but we are taught to applaud the sacrifice of our happiness for “the good of others.”
To sacrifice our happiness is to sacrifice our desires; to sacrifice our desires is to sacrifice our values; to sacrifice our values is to sacrifice our judgment; to sacrifice our judgment is to sacrifice our mind. Self-sacrifice means—and can only mean—mind sacrifice. If our mind and judgment are to be objects of sacrifice, what sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, serenity of spirit, or self-esteem will be possible to us?
To those who might find mind sacrifice an overly theatrical term, I offer the following illustration taken from the untheatrical world of academic psychology.
Earlier in the book I pointed out that evolution toward psychological maturity is evolution toward autonomy, one of the manifestations of which is the ability to engage in principled moral reasoning. In his article “Individualism and Interdependence,” Alan Waterman observes, “Some of the sharpest criticisms of the psychological qualities associated with individualism have been directed against Kohlberg’s … discussion of principled (postconventional) moral reasoning.” He then goes on to quote one such critic, E. E. Sampson:
The cognitive-developmental thesis itself is rooted to a self-contained, individualistic context; as it is applied, therefore, to issues of moral growth and development, it disposes us to view the moral ideal as one who can stand up in defiance of the group and collective rather than as one who can successfully work within the interdependent context of the group.
If compliance with and conformity to the norms, expectations, and values of “the group and collective” are regarded as the cardinal good, the mind of the individual has to be an object of sacrifice. Thus, in the above example, the person capable of principled moral reasoning needs to sacrifice his ability and his judgment to those who have not yet attained a “postconventional” level of moral reasoning: the sacrifice of the higher to the lower.
At the age of fourteen I was profoundly impressed by a particular paragraph in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. It strikes me as no less impressive now, at the age of fifty-three, and singularly relevant to the immediate discussion.
We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it.… We have come to hold … that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice.… Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.
An irrational antiself morality necessarily forces us to accept the belief that there is an inevitable clash between the moral and the practical—that we must choose either to be virtuous or to be happy, to be idealistic or to be successful, but that we cannot be both. This view establishes a disastrous conflict on the deepest level of our being: it forces us to choose between making ourselves able to live and making ourselves worthy of living. Yet self-esteem and psychological well-being require that we achieve both.
If we hold life on earth as the good, if we judge our
values by the standard of that which is appropriate to the existence of a rational being, then there is no clash between the requirements of survival and of morality, no clash between making ourselves able to live and making ourselves worthy of living; we achieve the second by achieving the first. But under an antilife, antiself morality, to the extent that we make ourselves able to live, we make ourselves unworthy of living.
One of the answers given by defenders of traditional morality is, “Oh, but people don’t have to go to extremes!”—meaning, “We don’t expect people to be fully moral. We expect them to smuggle some self-interest into their lives. We recognize that people have to live, after all.”
A defense, then, of this code of morality is that few people will be suicidal enough to practice it consistently. Hypocrisy is to be our protection against our professed moral convictions. What does that do to our self-esteem?
As examples of what the conflict of egoism and altruism means in our daily lives, consider the following dilemmas. Should a woman stay with a husband she no longer loves and respects, merely because he professes to “need” her? Should a hard-pressed employer retain the services of an incompetent employee who is hurting his business merely because the employee “needs” a job? Should a young man fight in a war he regards to be evil, merely because his political leaders profess to “need” his services? The confusion in most people’s minds concerning how such questions should be answered is testimony to how thoroughly indoctrinated we are in the ethics of altruism. When we drop the notion of sacrifice from human relationships, the confusion dissolves—and so does the hypocrisy.
In order for human beings to accept self-sacrifice as a moral ideal, they have to remain ignorant of the concept of rational selfishness. Moralists have commonly declared or implied that our basic alternative is to sacrifice others to ourselves (which they call “egoism”) or to sacrifice ourselves to others (“altruism”). This is equivalent to declaring that our basic choice is between being a sadist or a masochist. Just as healthy sex consists of the exchange of pleasure, not pain, so healthy relationships of any kind consist of the exchange of values, not sacrifices.
Honoring the Self Page 25