The “profit motive,” speaking broadly, means a man’s incentive to work in order to gain something for himself — in economic terms, to make money. By Objectivist standards, such a motive, being thoroughly just, is profoundly moral. Socialists used to speak of “production for use” as against “production for profit.” What they meant and wanted was: “production by one man for the unearned use of another.”
In a specialized sense, “profit” means…
“Capitalism,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, “is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” This is a definition in terms of fundamentals and not of consequences. “Capitalism,” by contrast, may not be defined as “the system of competition.” Competition (for power and even for wealth) exists in most societies, including totalitarian ones. Capitalism does involve a unique form of competition, along with many other desirable social features. But all of them flow from a single root cause…
This brings me to another topic: to an alleged opposite of statism that, in fact, entails it. I mean anarchism.
Anarchism is the idea that there should be no government. In Objectivist terms, this amounts to the view that every man should defend himself by using physical force against others whenever he feels like it, with no objective standards of justice, crime, or proof.
“What if an individual does not want to delegate his right of self-defense?” the anarchist frequently asks. “Isn’t that a legitimate aspect of ‘freedom’?” The question implies that a “free man” is one with the right to enact his desire, any desire, simply because it is his desire, including the desire to use force. This means the equation of “freedom” with whim-worship. Philosophically, the underlying premise is subjectivism (of the personal variety).
The citizens of a proper society should reply to such a subjectivist as follows…
A brief excerpt from Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
The fact that a man’s sex life is shaped by his conclusions and value-judgments is evident in every aspect. It is evident in the setting he prefers, the state of dress, the caresses, positions, and practices, and the kind of partner. This last is particularly eloquent.
No man desires everyone on earth. Each has some requirements in this regard, however contradictory or unidentified — and the rational man’s requirements, here as elsewhere, are the opposite of contradictory. He desires only a woman he can admire, a woman who (to his knowledge) shares his moral standards, his self-esteem, and his view of life. Only with such a partner can he experience the reality of the values he is seeking to celebrate, including his own value. The same kind of sexual selectivity is exercised by a rational woman. This is why Roark is attracted only to a heroine like Dominique, and why Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged is desperate to sleep with John Galt, not with Wesley Mouch. Romantic love is the strongest positive emotion possible between two individuals. Its experience, therefore, so far from being an animal reaction, is a self-revelation: the values giving rise to this kind of response must be one’s most intensely held and personal.
When a man and woman do fall in love — assuming that each is romantically free and the context otherwise appropriate — sex is a necessary and proper expression of their feeling for each other. “Platonic love” under such circumstances would be a vice, a breach of integrity. Sex is to love what action is to thought, possession to evaluation, body to soul. “We live in our minds,” Roark observes, “and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.” Sex is the preeminent form of bringing love into physical reality.
The subject of sex is complex and belongs largely to the science of psychology. I asked Ayn Rand once what philosophy specifically has to say on the subject. She answered…
EMOTIONS AS DISTINGUISHED FROM SENSATIONS
…Emotions are states of consciousness with bodily accompaniments and with spiritual — intellectual — causes. This last factor is the basis for distinguishing “emotion” from “sensation.” A sensation is an experience transmitted by purely physical means; it is independent of a person’s ideas. Touch a man with a red-hot poker, and he unavoidably feels certain sensations — heat, pressure, pain — regardless of whether he is a savage or a sophisticate, an Objectivist or a mystic. By contrast, love, desire, fear, anger, joy are not simply products of physical stimuli. They depend on the content of the mind…
…When, as a college teacher, I would reach the topic of emotions in class, my standard procedure was to open the desk, take out a stack of examination booklets, and, without any explanations, start distributing them. Consternation invariably broke loose, with cries such as “You never said we were having a test today!” and “It isn’t fair!” Whereupon I would take back the booklets and ask: “How many can explain the emotion that just swept over you? Is it an inexplicable primary, a quirk of your glands, a message from God or the id?” The answer was obvious. The booklets, to most of them, meant failure on an exam, a lower grade in the course, a blot on their transcript, i.e., bad news. On this one example, even the dullest students grasped with alacrity that emotions do have causes and that their causes are the things men think. (The auditors in the room, who do not write exams, remained calm during this experiment. To them, the surprise involved no negative value-judgment.)…
CONFLICTS BETWEEN THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS
…What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are not only largely subconscious, but also inconsistent. Men have the ability to accept contradictions without knowing it. This leads to the appearance of a conflict between thought and feelings.
EMOTIONALISM
Objectivism is not against emotions, but emotionalism. Ayn Rand’s concern is not to uphold stoicism or abet repression, but to identify a division of mental labor. There is nothing wrong with feeling that follows from an act of thought; this is the natural and proper human pattern. There is everything wrong with feeling that seeks to replace thought, by usurping its function.
If an individual experiences a clash between feeling and thought, he should not ignore his feelings. He should…
