Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  But if one wishes to control the minds and lives of other human beings, it is imperative to maintain a kind of blackout on a nonsacrificial view of human relationships—to herd people into the pen of self-sacrifice under the threat that sacrificing others to themselves is the only alternative. In the perpetuation of this fraud, religious leaders and political leaders have reinforced each other through many centuries.

  *  *   *

  “In the hunt for their own happiness,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “people fall all the more out of heaven into hell.” 34

  If the advocates of an anti-individualist morality assert that self-interest is antisocial, that the profit motive is evil, that the competent and able must work and live for the good of society, that intelligence is a “natural resource,” so do the rulers of the modern totalitarian state.

  Benito Mussolini:

  The world seen through Fascism is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself.… The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, who is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.54

  Joseph Goebbels, quoted in Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm:

  To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.

  “In the hunt for their own happiness, people fall the more out of heaven into hell.” Would Augustine or Calvin or John Kenneth Galbraith or the current leaders of the Soviet Union, China, or sundry other dictatorships throughout the world disagree?

  As for communism, its connection to the altruist morality is too obvious and too well known to require lengthy discussion here. The sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the renunciation of all personal interests and motives, the individual’s service to society as the sole justification of his or her existence, society’s right to sacrifice the individual at any moment, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of any social goal—this is the essence of communism. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is the altruist-collectivist slogan picked up from antiquity and introduced into modern culture by Karl Marx. “In a country where the sole employer is the State,” wrote Leon Trotsky, with uncharacteristic candor, “opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” When, during his visit to the United States in 1959, Khrushchev declared, in effect, that communism merely puts into practice the precepts of the Bible, he revealed a better grasp of ethical principles than those who listened to him, aghast.

  It is obvious that just as the moral values we accept have consequences for our psychology, so they have consequences in terms of the kind of social system we will create. What are the social implications of proself, individualist ethics?

  *I shall treat the meaning and implications of the concept of self-sacrifice rather briefly here, because it is treated in such exhaustive detail in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I am confining myself here to the barest essentials of the issue. I might mention that while I agree with Rand entirely in her analysis of self-sacrifice, one of our differences is that I place far greater emphasis on the virtues of generosity, benevolence, and a spirit of mutual aid, all of which clearly have survival value, and all of which logically proceed from a code of ethics that holds man’s/woman’s life as its standard.

  14

  Individualism and the Free Society

  A political system is the expression of a code of ethics. Just as some form of statism or collectivism is the expression of the ethics of altruism, so individualism—as represented by laissez-faire capitalism—is the expression of the ethics of rational self-interest.

  In this chapter I propose to show why this is so, why such a social system follows logically from the preceding discussion, and what such a social system is and means.

  Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights, the principle that a human being is an end in him- or herself, and that the proper goal of life is self-realization.

  There are many persons who might describe themselves as subscribing to a philosophy of individualism in the abstract, as formulated thus far. But let us think through, concretely and specifically, what this means in social-political terms—because, especially among psychologists, there seem to be a great many persons who profess individualism while in their consulting rooms, working with therapy clients, but who become supporters of statism or collectivism when their focus shifts to the political arena.

  The essence of the social system entailed by the ethics I have been developing is contained in a single principle: No person or group of persons may seek to gain values from others by the use of physical force—in other words, the principle of voluntarism.

  When human beings enter into social relationships, when they choose to deal with one another, they face a fundamental alternative: to deal by means of reason, or to deal by means of force. This alternative is inescapable: either a person seeks to gain values from others by their voluntary consent, by persuasion, by appealing to their mind, or a person seeks to gain values without the voluntary consent of the owner, which means by coercion or fraud. This, I submit, is the issue at the base of all social relationships and all political systems.

  It is also the single most avoided issue in discussions of social philosophy.

  I shall be blunt here, because there is a tendency in this arena to dance around the obvious, to discuss everything but the self-evident. It is at the mind that every gun is aimed. Every use of force is the attempt to compel a person to act against his or her judgment; if the person were willing to take the action, force would not be required.

  In a free society, force may be used only as retaliation and only against the person or persons who initiate its use; a distinction is made between murder and self-defense. The person who resorts to the initiation of force seeks to gain a value by so doing; the person who retaliates in self-protection seeks not to gain a value, but to keep a value that is already rightfully possessed.

  The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism—or totalitarianism or collectivism or communism or socialism or nazism or fascism or the welfare state.

  Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism—the belief that the individual exists to serve others—is translated into political reality.

  Although this issue has not been traditionally discussed in the terms in which I am discussing it here, the moral-political concept that forbids the initiation of force, and stands as the guardian and protector of the individual’s life, freedom, and property, is the concept of rights. If life on earth is the standard, an individual has a right to live and pursue values, as survival requires; a right to think and act on his or her judgment—the right of liberty; a right to work for the achievement of his or her values and to keep the results—the right of property; a right to live for his or her sake, to choose and work for personal goals—the right to the pursuit of happiness.

  Without property rights, no other rights are possible. We must be free to use that which we have produced, or we do not possess the right of liberty. W
e must be free to make the products of our work serve our chosen goals, or we do not possess the right to the pursuit of happiness. And—since we are not ghosts who exist in some nonmaterial manner—we must be free to keep and consume the products of our work, or we do not possess the right of life. In a society where human beings are not free to own privately the material means of production, their position is that of slaves whose lives are at the absolute mercy of their rulers. It is relevant here to remember the statement of Trotsky: “Who does not obey shall not eat.”

  In a political-economic context, freedom means one thing and one thing only: freedom from physical compulsion. There is nothing that can deprive us of our freedom except other persons—and no means by which they can do it except through the use of force. It is only by the initiation of force (or fraud, which is an indirect form of force) that our rights can be violated.

  Voluntarism as a moral principle means libertarianism as a political principle. The only proper and justifiable purpose of government is to protect individual rights—to protect us from physical violence. It is the fact that our rights can be violated by others that necessitates the institution of government. If we are consistent in our adherence to individualism, we can see that the sole function of a government is to protect us from criminals, to protect us from foreign invaders, to provide a system of courts for the protection of property and contracts against breach or fraud—and otherwise to leave us alone.

  In a society where our rights are protected by objective law, where the government has no other function or power, we are free to choose the work we desire to do, to trade our effort for the effort of others, to offer ideas, products, and services on a market from which force and fraud are barred, and to rise as high as our ability will take us. Among persons who do not seek the unearned, who do not long for contradictions or wish facts out of existence, who do not regard sacrifice and destruction as a valid means to gain their ends, there is no conflict of interest. Such persons deal with one another by voluntary consent to mutual benefit. They do not reach for a gun—or a legislator—to procure for them that which they cannot obtain through voluntary exchange.

  This is not the place for a treatise on political economy. I will simply say that, today, the difficulty in discussing this issue lies in the fact that most people have all but lost the knowledge of what capitalism is, how it functions, and what it has achieved. The truth about its nature and history has been drowned in a wave of misrepresentations, distortions, falsifications, and almost universal ignorance. Only within the past few decades has there been the beginning of a serious movement among historians to expose and correct the gross factual errors in the literature purporting to describe nineteenth-century capitalism. Almost everyone today takes it as axiomatic that capitalism results in the vicious exploitation of the poor; that it leads to monopoly; that it necessitates periodic economic depressions; that it starts wars; that it resisted and opposed the worker’s rising standard of living; that that standard of living was the achievement, not of capitalism, but of labor unions and of humanitarian labor legislation. Not one of these claims is true, but they are among the most common bromides of our culture. People do not feel obliged to question such bromides, since they “know” in moral principle that capitalism must result in evils: capitalism is based on the profit motive and appeals to the individual’s self-interest; that alone is sufficient to damn it.*

  It is a widely held belief, inherited from Marx, that government is necessarily an agent of economic interest and that political systems are to be defined in terms of whose economic interests a government serves. Thus, capitalism is commonly regarded as a system in which the government acts predominantly to serve the interests of businesspeople; socialism, as a system in which the government serves the interests of the working class. It is this concept of government that the libertarian principle rejects.

  The fundamental issue is not what kind of economic controls a government enforces, nor on whose behalf; the issue is whether one is to have a controlled economy or an uncontrolled economy. Laissez-faire capitalism is not government control of economics for the benefit of businesspersons; it is the complete separation of state and economics. This is implicit in the nature of capitalism, but historically it was not identified in such terms nor adhered to consistently.

  It was the United States of America, with its system of limited, constitutional government, that implemented the principle of capitalism—a free trade on a free market—to the greatest extent. In America, during the nineteenth century, people’s productive activities were for the most part left free of governmental regulations, controls, and restrictions; most thinkers considered themselves thoroughly emancipated from the discredited economic policies of medievalism, mercantilism, and precapitalist statism. In the brief period of a century and a half, the United States created a level of freedom, of progress, of achievement, of wealth, of physical comfort—a standard of living—unmatched and unequaled by the total sum of humankind’s development up to that time.

  With the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism, an extraordinary transformation took place in men’s and women’s thinking about the possibilities of life on earth, a revolution so radical that it is still far from fully understood.

  With the collapse of the absolute state and the development of the free market society, people saw the sudden release of productive energy that had previously had no outlet. They saw life made possible for countless millions who could have had no chance at survival in precapitalist economies. They saw mortality rates fall and population growth rates explode upward. They saw machines (the machines that many of them had cursed, opposed, and tried to destroy) cut their workday in half while multiplying incalculably the value and reward of their effort. They saw themselves lifted to a standard of living no feudal baron could have conceived. With the rapid development of science, technology, and industry, they saw, for the first time in history, the individual’s liberated mind taking control of material existence.

  To the extent that various countries adopted capitalism, the rule of brute force vanished from people’s lives. Capitalism abolished slavery and serfdom in all of the civilized nations. Trade, not violence, became the ruling principle of human relationships. Intellectual freedom and economic freedom rose and flourished together. Political thinkers had discovered the concept of individual rights. Individualism was the creative power revolutionizing the world.

  A system in which wealth and position were inherited or acquired by physical conquest or political favor was replaced by one in which values had to be earned by productive work. In closing the doors to force, capitalism threw them open to achievement. Rewards were tied to production, not to extortion; to ability, not to brutality; to the capacity for furthering life, not to that for inflicting death.

  Much has been written about the harsh conditions of life during the early years of capitalism. Yet when one considers the level of material existence from which capitalism raised men and women and the comparatively meager amount of wealth in the world when the Industrial Revolution began, what is startling is not the slowness with which capitalism liberated people from poverty, but the speed with which it did so. Once the individual was free to act, ingenuity and inventiveness proceeded to raise the standard of living to heights that a century earlier would have been judged fantastic. It would be difficult to name an event of history more impressive than this—or less appreciated.

  Capitalism was achieving miracles before human beings’ eyes. Yet, from its beginning, the majority of nineteenth-century intellectuals were vehemently antagonistic to it. Their writings were filled with denunciations of the free market economy. Broadly speaking, the antagonism came from two camps: the medievalists and the socialists.

  The medievalists found the disintegration of feudal aristocracy, the sudden appearance of fortune makers from backgrounds of poverty and obscurity, the emphasis on merit and productive ability, the concern with science and material progr
ess, and, above all, the pursuit of profit spiritually repugnant. Many of them—such as Richard Oastler, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Southey, William Cobbett, Thomas Hood, and Thomas Love Peacock—unleashed scathing attacks on the factory system. They were avowed enemies of the Age of Reason. They declared individualism vulgar. They longed for a return to a status society. “Commerce or business of any kind,” wrote John Ruskin, “may be the invention of the Devil.” 71

  The medievalists dreamed of abolishing the Industrial Revolution. The socialists wished to take it over. Both camps dismissed or gave only grudging acknowledgment to the achievements of capitalism. They preferred to eulogize the living conditions of previous ages. Friedrich Engels, along with Carlyle, regarded the domestic industry’s system of the preindustrial era as the golden age of the working classes. The criticisms leveled against capitalism by both camps were remarkably similar: the “dehumanizing” effect of the factory system upon the worker, the “alienation” of man and woman from nature, the “cold impersonality” of the market, the “cruelty” of the law of supply and demand—and the evil of the pursuit of profit.

  In the writings of both medievalists and socialists, one can observe the unmistakable longing for a society in which the individual’s existence will be automatically guaranteed—that is, in which no one will have to be responsible for his or her own survival. Both camps project their ideal society as one characterized by what they call “harmony,” by freedom from rapid change or challenge or the exacting demands of competition; a society in which each must do his or her prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one will lace the necessity of making choices and decisions that will crucially affect his or her life and future; in which the question of what one has or has not earned, and does or does not deserve, will not arise; in which rewards will not be tied to achievements and in which someone’s benevolence will guarantee that one need never bear the consequences of one’s errors.*