Ayn Rand and the selfish/selfless dichotomy

The smile says: "I ain't going to take your restrictive ideas
on morality"

Most people remember where they were when they first heard of Ayn Rand. I was a chipper, starry-eyed 16-year-old (who was deeply existentially depressed, but that's neither here nor there). Needless to say, coming from a thoroughly Judeo-Christian background I found her ideas challenging. If I recall correctly, her idea of objectivism actually caused a mental breakdown. I only got like 200 pages into "Atlas Shrugged" before I decided I just couldn't be bothered anymore (which I think is as far as anyone gets in that monstrously-long book) after which all of my knowledge of Ayn Rand came from second-hand sources (blogs, wikipedia, what have you...). But in the time since, I've developed something of a strong, suspicious respect for her ideas and for her deceptively-alluring smile.

So what was it about Ayn Rand that so thoroughly shook me? What is Randian Objectivism and what can it do for you? Good question, astute (although admittedly uncultured) reader!

Objectivism is Rand's moral framework for an ideal society. In a nutshell, it says that people ought to pursue their own self interest at all times. It was hot in the late 20th century as a justification for rampant capitalistic ruthlessness. And for someone whose entire moral?  framework from birth had been "put others before yourself because it's what Jesus said and it's the right thing to do," this idea caused an obsene amount of cognitive dissonance. But after a sobering 10 years, I've come to the realization that Ayn Rand is perfect for understand the dichotomy between selfishness and selflessness.

I was brought up to view selfishness as bad and selflessness as good. It was a nice, clear dilineation that made it easy to know what I was supposed to do. It also had a very obvious ascetic bent that made me terrified to ever do anything that made me happy or felt good (two guesses why I was so depressed). So the idea of Objectivism seemed like the face of Satan- an ideology of evil that threatened the moral framework of society.

But when you look closely at Objectivism, you realize that it's not designed to promote doing shitty things to people. If you look at the protagonists in Rand's novels, they generally do good things for the people they care about and for society in general (her characters are the poster children for a trickle-down Utopia). Hold the phone! Bram, I thought you said Objectivism promoted selfish action above all else! Why would selfish people do things for other people? And again, good question.

The answer is that doing good things for other people makes people feel good. You get pleasure out of caring for another person or living creature. It's deeply ingrained in human nature because we are a social species, so cooperation made it more likely that our ancestors on the savannah would be liked instead of excommunicated where they would be easy prey for the worst mother nature had to throw at them.

There's a long-standing in debate about whether true selflessness is possible for this reason. The logic is that doing good things feels good, so it must therefore be a selfish action. If someone is giving a lot of money away to charity or going out of their way to help someone in need, it's only because they are secretly selfish, shitty people who are lying to themselves about their intentions. If ever there was a narrative to make you cynical and to destroy social cohesion it is this.

The core problem is that our language clearly distinguishes between selfishness and selflessness and loads the two words with large amounts of moral connotation. Given the connotations we have associated with the two words, it is impossible for an action to be both selfish and selfless.

This is a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. It consists of someone presenting two contrasting options as the only explanations or answers for something, when in reality there are rarely (if ever) only two explanations. In this case, an action can be both selfish in the sense that it makes you feel good and selfless in the sense that part of the motivation for doing it was to help someone else. There isn't a good word for this in our language, but fortunately we can make up words whenn no words exist (I can do that. I went to Cambridge; not related, but I like to juxtapose the two ideas for a false appeal to ethos). I propose the word selflessish.

Words create the narratives which govern our lives. The concept of a selflessish action allows us to reframe the destructive narrative that people only do good things because they are secretly assholes. It also allows us to gain a deeper insight into what Rand was trying to say. Instead of seeing her as promoting rampant selfishness, we can instead view her as deeply intrigued with the incentive structures that govern society.

The key idea from Rand is that people are more likely to do the right thing when they have some incentive to do so (even if that is just feeling good). Rewarding good behaviour is much more likely to produce a positive result than shaming and punishing bad behaviour (which leads to resentment, which leads to hatred, which leads to dehumanization, which leads to violence, which led to World War 2. A bit of a slippery slope, but you wouldn't want to accidentally bring back the Nazis would you? Oh wait...). We have Pavlov and his puppers to thank for this insight. Positive reinforcement is a generally more effective form of conditioning than negative punishment.

I still have some issues with what Rand had to say, but I think I'll save that for another blog post because I'm currently procrastinating on my Master's thesis with this blog and need to get my lazy ass to work. Plus, I think that's enough word nourishment for you today. You only need to drink so much from the tit of knowledge everyday. So until next time, don't be a fucking idiot.

Good talk.