Holding on to Your Values

Retaining one’s values and thriving as an individualist is not an easy task. Ideologues and people who point to values as a guide in political and social actions are frequently given labels like “extremist” and painted as being anti-cooperative. They stand, the general sense seems to say, in the way of public good and of progress.

Ayn Rand labeled terms like extremist as anti-concepts. Extremism and polarization—another popular explanation for modern political programs—are arguments from authority, Rand wrote in The Ayn Rand Letter, which create an approximate and negative sense of understanding. They are “unnecessary and rationally unusable term[s] designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.”

In the case of modern political discourse, the legitimate concepts being obliterated frequently relate to individual sovereignty. Democracy, despite resting on the authority of the people, does not hesitate to run roughshod over the rights of an inconvenient individual when it benefits the majority.

That this happens, both in culture and politics, is a theme in Rand’s work. Dominique Francon, one of the protagonists in The Fountainhead, embodies the dejection that can warp an idealist in the face of an indifferent world. “I never open again any great book I’ve read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and what they were. Things like that can’t be shared.” Dominique says at one point early in the book. To avoid the pain of seeing her values mocked and rejected, she tries to reduce herself to nothing, to find freedom in the absence of wants or desires. 

Her reaction is perhaps understandable: Rand’s epistemology requires the individual to use reason to align their values to the objective truth. Seeing people reject and belittle those values is painful. It’s not just an affront to individual sovereignty, it’s an affront to reason itself.

But negating oneself in order to avoid pain is not a response Rand, whose philosophy rests on the idea that the moral individual cannot be made to sacrifice their life for others, applauds. Objectivism is ultimately a philosophy of hope. Evil, as Dominique will learn as the plot of The Fountainhead unfolds, is impotent.

Rand uses that exact adjective in multiple places, including in a speech given by John Galt—her ultimate embodiment of objectivist values—in Atlas Shrugged. Galt says that ““evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us” and adds “I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.”

To Rand, there are few people who are truly evil; it’s indifference to the propagation of moral values that is the problem. As Rand wrote in an essay entitled “The Anatomy of Compromise,” 

“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.” 

Take people and their failure to uphold rationality over the equation and the individualist can triumph. An individual’s success is tied to his rational capacity. It is from this that he gains his values and judges what actions he should pursue to benefit both his physical and spiritual wellbeing. Logically, the thinking individual cannot help but prosper because his values are a reflection of the objective world around him.

As Leonard Piekoff, one of Rand’s acolytes, stated in a lecture on objectivism,“[R]eality is “benevolent” in the sense that if you do adapt to it—i.e., if you do think, value, and act rationally, then you can (and barring accidents you will) achieve your values. You will, because those values are based on reality.” 

Suffering under such a worldview is not a reflection of reality, which is why it shouldn’t be given any serious weight. Rather, it’s a reflection of individuals either indifferent to reality or set on warping it to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Rand’s morality demands that neither be given any credence. To do so is not only a betrayal of the self but of the rational world. 

Defeating evil requires nothing more than sticking to principles and using reason. Neither of those require any special effort. They require grounding oneself in objective reality, seeking out values, and remembering that as long as these simple steps are done, the irrationality of evil will collapse under its own weight.

Rand’s philosophy has an inherently and indefatigably positive message for individuals: the world is not indifferent to your values, so long as they’re rooted in reason. Hold on to them, to the idea that your life is yours, and you can’t lose. 

That’s John Galt’s message to Atlas Shrugged:

 “Do not let our fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.”