Her most famous work of fiction is called "Atlas Shrugged."
In this book, Ayn Rand lays down the principles of a philosophy called Objectivism. She saw how not just mystic beliefs of the religious could contaminate the mind; she also saw the materialists like in her homeland of communist Russia also required people to abandon clear thinking for impossible ends. The collectivism of her time required people to put other people lives and futures ahead of our own. She argued that the basis of our happiness is our struggle to survive by the means of reason and the creation of tools. Smart creatures are able to make the tools to survive an ice age. Intelligence allows us to become productive. This productivity allows for a free exchange. A value for a value, not a fraud for another fraud should be the basis of trade according to the book. To Ayn Rand, the problem was forgetting to seek our own good. When a ruling group of people decides to take your productivity for the sake of an unproductive group, such a system is no different than robbery.
Ayn Rand revives the thinking of Adam Smith on capitalism and demonstrates in the story how the promise of equal benefits to all for the labor of the few was based on bad premises. To reward the unproductive with the achievements of the productive is the same as rewarding vice and punishing virtue. Communism invalidated both property and mind.
In Atlas Shrugged, the industrials decided to go on strike. Against the tide of mandatory wage hikes, employment equality for all the industrialists just said "enough is enough I quit." This left the government and the rest of society in a bewildered state where no one really knew how to make the steel, build a railroad and make the grand machinery of the modern world work. Bureaucrats just could not understand anything. The book underscores where real values in society emanate. They come from the good minds of those that invented the infrastructure of the modern world in the first place. Value is destroyed when people's thoughts and productivity is invalidated.
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"The function of man is to live a certain kind of life,
and this activity implies a rational principle,
and the function of a good man is the good
and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed
it is performed in accord with the appropriate excellence:
if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be
an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue."
(Aristotle- Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a13)
Ayn Rand's influence was from Aristotle who proposed that reason is the tool to achieving the ultimate goal of happiness. Both Aristotle and Epicurus agreed that rational thinking allows people to avoid the pitfalls of mysticism. Mysticism elevates revelation over skeptical thinking, dreams over reality and the fortune teller over actual fortunes.
Reason is important to us and is the only thing that separates us from inanimate matter. Without a clear picture of the nature of our world, one is limited in the ability to perceive it and more susceptible to mystical explanations. If one is ignorant about the cosmos, for instance, one could not really have complete happiness. There still might be some myth about the universe that involves an angry god or deity. It's really nice to know it was not Zeus or any other of the gods that cause natural disasters. For centuries people thought that lightning bolts were from the angry gods. Now we know the principles of electromagnetism and even use these forces to power the internet.
Objectivism, like the critical thinking of Greek times, asked definite questions about what reason is, why sacrifice is a bad thing and how the best and highest value is in life is happiness. Its achievement is based on finding our freedom. We need to live in a just society that permits us both the freedom to think and freedom to use our ideas to produce. The mysticism of India has only left them in disease-ridden hovels along the Ganges. The freedom in the United States has created the skyline of Manhattan.
The real virtue in Epicureanism and Objectivism is the ability to use one's mind. Reason is the ability to discern how to survive. This virtue is fundamental and is hinged on the glorious premise that knowledge is attainable. To deny the use of reason is the greatest vice. It only leads to mental and physical decay. "To think" or "not to think" - that is the question.
The chief goals for Objectivism were: Reason, Purpose and Self-esteem.
Reason is thinking clear headed. Purpose is the value of applying your rational mind to the task of life improvement. Self esteem is the value of self recognition of the good.
The premises of the book are very similar to those you find in Epicureanism. The major goal was happiness. The achievement of this goal was to live wisely; only then could you also live pleasantly.
Here are a collection of great quotes:
"Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue and happiness is the goal and the reward of life."
"By the grace of reality and the nature of Life, man -every man- is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose."
"The purpose of morality is to teach you not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason as his only means to gain. Reason is the faculty that perceived, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of the census is to give him the evidence of the existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason ; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it must be learned by his mind."
"Reason is man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of proof."
"There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value. "
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil."
"Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue and happiness is the goal and the reward of life."
“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.”
