Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved
Ayn Rand set a scientific footing for ethics by demonstrating an unbreachable bond between ethics and reality. The Randian paradigm shift – I would call it a revolution - in ethics is her proof that there is an objective standard by which one judges what is good or evil. That standard is “man's life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man" (P. 25).
What man’s life requires is knowable in reality, and reason is required to figure it out. It's the role of philosophy to provide understanding of reality and man’s place in it, and to provide practical guidance for living happily and successfully. Ethics requires the discovery of the nature of man and the conditions that allow him to flourish according to his nature. In a famous formulation, Rand wrote: "Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil” (P. 25).
Because man is devoid of the survival instincts possessed by most other animals, man’s survival requires that he function as a conceptual consciousness, applying reason and purpose to direct his actions toward survival goals. Everything man needs has to be discovered by a human mind and produced by human effort.
This is an existential fact that applies to each of us. We each must discover knowledge and act to bring about and sustain our own survival. This leads to two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being, says Rand: thinking and productive work. (As an aside, business is a way of organizing to make the most of both.)
To succeed at the task of survival, man has to choose his goals and values in the context of a lifetime. The longer the range of a person's thinking, the better he can plan and prepare for contingencies. Failure to think long range for oneself leaves a person vulnerable and dependent on the thinking of others, and leaves one’s fate to chance. When people fail to take control of their own life and responsibility for their own welfare, they are left to depend on either the charity of others, or worse, the looting of others. Rand wrote: "Man has to be man by choice - and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man" (P. 27).
Rand holds each person’s life as the standard of value, and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual life (P. 27). For Rand, a standard is an abstract principle that applies to every individual person. But every individual person has to live his or her own life by applying this principle to the specific purpose of living a life proper to a rational being. Rand wrote: "Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man - in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life" (P. 27).
Rand defined virtue as the act by which one gains and/or keeps values, and she identified Rationality as man's basic virtue and the source or all other virtue. She identified irrationality - the willful and purposeful rejection of reason – as man’s greatest vice. She wrote that irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival. It is anti-mind and anti-life because for a man to reject reason - his only tool of survival as a conceptual being – is to set himself on a blind course of self-destruction (see p. 28).
Placing rationality as the central tenet of ethics – as the primary virtue – is merely the identification of facts about reality and about us as human beings. Reason is man’s primary means of survival. It is a fundamental and non-optional requirement of his life that man understand what this requires of him, and that he puts forth the mental effort required to learn to excel at its application.
For Rand, the purposeful pursuit of rationality and the disciplined application of reason to achieve one’s chosen ends against all obstacles has been so rare historically, that it represents for her the heroic in man. Rand’s personal heroic achievement resides in the dedication of her life’s work to defining and demonstrating why this is so.
Her research and thinking on what constitutes virtue for man and her identification of the primary virtues and their functions, led her to overturn and refute all prior attempts to define a valid ethical code by non-rational means. Her unique methodology of taking an inductive and deductive scientific approach to philosophy led her to a unified philosophic system that is Aristotelian in spirit, and which culminates in a rational, individualistic, integrated, this-worldly code of ethics. Rand firmly shifted the basis of a philosophic defense of ethics from altruism to a form of enlightened egoism. She called her total system of philosophy Objectivism, and referred to the Objectivist ethics as a morality of “rational self-interest – or rational selfishness” (P. xi).
While her methodological approach has been vilified and swept aside by those who believe that all virtue resides in altruism and personal sacrifice, and reject out of hand her premise that facts and value are inseparable, it remains that fifty years after the publication of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, there has yet to be a reasoned and valid refutation of her philosophy.
Those most likely to criticize Rand as an original thinker and as making an important contribution to our understanding of the field of ethics are those who aren’t seriously seeking truth and knowledge in the field of ethics, but rather have an agenda to hijack the normative language of ethics as a means to emotionally coerce others into agreeing with the social or political agenda they are advancing (usually an agenda that involves the collecting of the sacrifices of others - often through the initiation of physical force or deceit - to pursue their own hidden motives under the guise of benefiting “society” or God).
It’s ironic that those least able to defend their own agenda’s by means of rational arguments are the people most likely to disparage an author while failing to address serious legitimate challenges to their ethical ideas. Far too many thinkers dabbling in the subject of business ethics brush aside the serious challenges that Ayn Rand posed fifty years ago because facing those challenges are felt to be either unnecessary, or insurmountable. It is unfortunate that Rand’s work in ethics has been largely ignored through intellectual dishonesty and evasion in the hope that the advocacy of erroneous conclusions can remain valid. Nothing could be more irrational, and, frankly, more unethical, than such an evasion of reality.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
Ayn Rand's Revolutionary Ethics, Pt. 1
Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved
Ayn Rand was the first philosopher to attempt to establish a wholly scientific, inductive, bottom-up approach to ethics. She first presented her paradigm-shifting theory of rational egoism fully in the now famous 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in fictional form, but outlined her approach formally in a paper delivered in 1961 at a University of Wisconsin Symposium On "Ethics In Our Time," in a paper titled "The Objectivist Ethics." It is available in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. It should be required reading for anyone engaging in a discussion of ethics today because in this seminal work, Rand redefined the terms of any serious discussion of ethics. (All page references in this essay are to the Signet paperback Centennial Edition, ISBN 0-451-16393-1.)
Rand pursued an intellectual quest to establish a rational and objectively demonstrable answer to the question of why man needs a code of values and a means to identify valid moral principles. No philosopher before her had succeeded in this task.
“Most philosophers," wrote Rand, "took the existence of ethics for granted... and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation” (P. 14). They either tried to establish good or evil, right and wrong, by appeals to either God or Society, thereby taking a theological or sociological approach rather than a scientific approach aimed at establishing objective grounding for ethics as a science.
Ethics as a science, writes Rand, deals with discovering and defining a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions - the choices and actions that determine the purpose of his life. Rand contended that the starting point of any investigation into ethics had to begin with the question of whether and why man needs a code of value at all. It is only then that one can proceed to the central issue of ethics by answering the question: "What particular code of values should man accept?”
Why man needs a code of values is a scientific question for Rand because to answer it, one must appeal to reality. Rand challenged herself to identify a rational and objectively demonstrable approach to ethics, in contrast to the dominant approach which takes the rationale for ethics for granted as a historical fact. Rand wrote: "In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics - with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions - moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational." (P. 14)
For Rand, it didn’t matter whether one tried to establish the basis for ethics on the will of god or the will of society. Neither, she argued, could be justified by an appeal to reason. "Most philosophers," she wrote, "have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, that in the field of ethics - in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals - man must be guided by something other than reason” (P. 15).
That ‘something’, she wrote, was faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, urge, wish or whim. She defined whim as "a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause" (p. 14). "Whatever else they may disagree about," she concluded, "today’s moralists agree that ethics is 'a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason – mind - reality" (P. 15).
Respect for, and adherence to reason, mind and reality are prerequisites of science and a scientific approach to living. Those who reject reason in ethics affirm their position that reason and facts have no place in a discussion about what values are, why man needs them, and how man should apply them to achieve his goals. Such people divorce facts from value, placing the former (facts) in the scientific realm, and the later (values) in a place where reason, mind and reality have nothing to contribute. For these folks, value, which is the subject matter of ethics, is a matter of faith or personal feelings or whims, a realm to which they assert that reason and reality have nothing to contribute.
For Rand, reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by our senses. It operates by the process of thinking. The faculty of reason has to be exercised by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. To say that ethics is beyond the realm of reason is to assert that our senses and the world with which they interact have nothing to contribute to our understanding of the subject matter that ethics pertains to. It is to assert that ethics is beyond reality. It is to assert that ethics derives from, or pertains to a mystical or extra-sensory realm beyond the grasp of normal human experience. It removes thinking – reason and logic - as a valid methodology for ethical discovery and the pursuit of the right and the good. It removes the illumination of reason from the realm of man’s pursuit of values and the achievement of the good.
If reason and thinking are excluded as valid methodologies of ethical inquiry and discovery, all that's left are methodologies that reject the validity of reason and man's mind, namely, some variation of mysticism or nihilism.
Reason and thinking are required by man to focus his awareness - his consciousness - on reality and deal with it so he can take action and provide for his survival as an individual. Everything a person does to sustain life requires thought, and though is not infallible. We have the responsibility to initiate thinking to acquire and apply knowledge to help us define and pursue our values and successfully live our lives. I will quote Rand at length because it is critical to understand why she holds that reason and ethics are inseparable. She writes:
"[Man] has to initiate [a process of thought], to sustain it and bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him – by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, his is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.” (P.p. 23-24).
Rand’s argument leads to the conclusion that "Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival - not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life" (P. 24).
Ayn Rand was the first philosopher to attempt to establish a wholly scientific, inductive, bottom-up approach to ethics. She first presented her paradigm-shifting theory of rational egoism fully in the now famous 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in fictional form, but outlined her approach formally in a paper delivered in 1961 at a University of Wisconsin Symposium On "Ethics In Our Time," in a paper titled "The Objectivist Ethics." It is available in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. It should be required reading for anyone engaging in a discussion of ethics today because in this seminal work, Rand redefined the terms of any serious discussion of ethics. (All page references in this essay are to the Signet paperback Centennial Edition, ISBN 0-451-16393-1.)
Rand pursued an intellectual quest to establish a rational and objectively demonstrable answer to the question of why man needs a code of values and a means to identify valid moral principles. No philosopher before her had succeeded in this task.
“Most philosophers," wrote Rand, "took the existence of ethics for granted... and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation” (P. 14). They either tried to establish good or evil, right and wrong, by appeals to either God or Society, thereby taking a theological or sociological approach rather than a scientific approach aimed at establishing objective grounding for ethics as a science.
Ethics as a science, writes Rand, deals with discovering and defining a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions - the choices and actions that determine the purpose of his life. Rand contended that the starting point of any investigation into ethics had to begin with the question of whether and why man needs a code of value at all. It is only then that one can proceed to the central issue of ethics by answering the question: "What particular code of values should man accept?”
Why man needs a code of values is a scientific question for Rand because to answer it, one must appeal to reality. Rand challenged herself to identify a rational and objectively demonstrable approach to ethics, in contrast to the dominant approach which takes the rationale for ethics for granted as a historical fact. Rand wrote: "In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics - with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions - moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational." (P. 14)
For Rand, it didn’t matter whether one tried to establish the basis for ethics on the will of god or the will of society. Neither, she argued, could be justified by an appeal to reason. "Most philosophers," she wrote, "have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, that in the field of ethics - in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals - man must be guided by something other than reason” (P. 15).
That ‘something’, she wrote, was faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, urge, wish or whim. She defined whim as "a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause" (p. 14). "Whatever else they may disagree about," she concluded, "today’s moralists agree that ethics is 'a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason – mind - reality" (P. 15).
Respect for, and adherence to reason, mind and reality are prerequisites of science and a scientific approach to living. Those who reject reason in ethics affirm their position that reason and facts have no place in a discussion about what values are, why man needs them, and how man should apply them to achieve his goals. Such people divorce facts from value, placing the former (facts) in the scientific realm, and the later (values) in a place where reason, mind and reality have nothing to contribute. For these folks, value, which is the subject matter of ethics, is a matter of faith or personal feelings or whims, a realm to which they assert that reason and reality have nothing to contribute.
For Rand, reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by our senses. It operates by the process of thinking. The faculty of reason has to be exercised by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. To say that ethics is beyond the realm of reason is to assert that our senses and the world with which they interact have nothing to contribute to our understanding of the subject matter that ethics pertains to. It is to assert that ethics is beyond reality. It is to assert that ethics derives from, or pertains to a mystical or extra-sensory realm beyond the grasp of normal human experience. It removes thinking – reason and logic - as a valid methodology for ethical discovery and the pursuit of the right and the good. It removes the illumination of reason from the realm of man’s pursuit of values and the achievement of the good.
If reason and thinking are excluded as valid methodologies of ethical inquiry and discovery, all that's left are methodologies that reject the validity of reason and man's mind, namely, some variation of mysticism or nihilism.
Reason and thinking are required by man to focus his awareness - his consciousness - on reality and deal with it so he can take action and provide for his survival as an individual. Everything a person does to sustain life requires thought, and though is not infallible. We have the responsibility to initiate thinking to acquire and apply knowledge to help us define and pursue our values and successfully live our lives. I will quote Rand at length because it is critical to understand why she holds that reason and ethics are inseparable. She writes:
"[Man] has to initiate [a process of thought], to sustain it and bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him – by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, his is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.” (P.p. 23-24).
Rand’s argument leads to the conclusion that "Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival - not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life" (P. 24).
Monday, December 10, 2007
Ethics 50 Years After Atlas Shrugged
Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved
A major paradigm shift in the field of philosophy, including ethics, came in the middle of the 20th Century with the publication of the novel Atlas Shrugged by American philosopher Ayn Rand. This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and hence it is timely to revisit her revolutionary perspective on ethics and the challenge her philosophy poses to those who argue for particular ethical viewpoints with disregard for, or ignorance of, her foundational paradigm-shifting philosophic arguments.
If you are seriously interested in business ethics, and have not yet read Atlas Shrugged, you are doing yourself an injustice. If you have heard about Ayn Rand and have not read Atlas out of prejudice, then you are committing a grave intellectual error. The bottom line is that today, any serious discussion of ethics must, at some point, deal with issues Rand raises not only about ethics, but about other related philosophic issues about reality, knowledge, and politics. If one is truly seeking ethical guidance in the form of a rational, principled philosophy, consideration of Ayn Rand’s arguments are foundational, even if in the end one chooses to reject them.
What Rand offered in Atlas Shrugged was a complete rethinking of philosophy as a discipline and its role in human life in all its dimensions, including science, economics, business, politics, and psychology. What is even more astounding is that she presented her discoveries and formulations in the form of art – fiction – which she later followed up in her non-fiction philosophic essays. Her great achievement was her ability to reformulate two thousand years of western philosophy in a way akin to sweeping out the trash that settled into dark corners and cluttered up people’s minds.
Rand was able to challenge to the core a plethora of widely embraced cultural “truths” and paradigms that have been leading thinkers away from truth, understanding, achievement and well-being. In the face of a world gone mad by its acceptance of irrationality, and in the face of an intellectual culture that had virtually abandoned reason as a valid means of acquiring knowledge, Rand offered a rational and meaningful alternative to millions of people where theretofore no viable alternative existed.
Against a vision of nihilism and sacrifice and tribal bloodshed as man’s only hope for survival, she offered a different vision of personal and social renaissance through the efficacy of the human mind to know reality, to reach valid conclusions through reason and logic, to understand the requirements of personal happiness, to achieve that state through the discovery and application of objective ethical principles, and to live in a state of freedom through the organization of individuals into a society that understands the need for, and respects the principle of individual natural rights.
What differentiated Rand from others was that she didn’t just assert her vision and the premises that underlie its foundation. She offered proof – proof that any person, with appropriate effort, could understand and think through for themselves. What she offered was a competing, unified theory of rational philosophic principles that had a stronger theoretical and practical appeal to that which existed (and still exists) as an alternative. She presented philosophy, including ethics, not as a set of disconnected mystical or arbitrary ideas to be accepted on faith or by appeal to experts, nor as interesting irresolvable paradoxes and unanswerable questions to aimlessly ponder, but as a rational, coherent, objective system of thought grounded in reality and logic, with the purpose of serving the well-being of each individual. She demonstrated that man requires freedom of thought and action to live happy and successful lives proper to human beings, as against others who disingenuously argued that it is natural and right for man to live under the authoritarian rule of others who claim through mystical or intuitive means to know what is best, and that ethics requires conformity to authority and the sanctioning of coercion and personal sacrifice to achieve the ends of the dictatorial-minded.
Atlas Shrugged is a world-shaking book about philosophical ideas in action (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged for an overview). While most people have not heard of the book nor its author, that’s not to be taken as an indication of its popularity or its influence. A 1992 U.S. Library of Congress survey found it to be the most influential book in the United States, second only to the Bible. In 2006, fifty years after its publication, sales of the novel in bookstores topped 130,000 copies! When I checked amazon.com on November 14, 2007, the paperback version ranked an astounding #330 in books.
Today, more than ever, every person that takes business seriously and is searching for rational philosophic guidance against the forced imposition of the irrational, needs to read and heed the philosophic wisdom embedded in Atlas Shrugged.
A major paradigm shift in the field of philosophy, including ethics, came in the middle of the 20th Century with the publication of the novel Atlas Shrugged by American philosopher Ayn Rand. This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and hence it is timely to revisit her revolutionary perspective on ethics and the challenge her philosophy poses to those who argue for particular ethical viewpoints with disregard for, or ignorance of, her foundational paradigm-shifting philosophic arguments.
If you are seriously interested in business ethics, and have not yet read Atlas Shrugged, you are doing yourself an injustice. If you have heard about Ayn Rand and have not read Atlas out of prejudice, then you are committing a grave intellectual error. The bottom line is that today, any serious discussion of ethics must, at some point, deal with issues Rand raises not only about ethics, but about other related philosophic issues about reality, knowledge, and politics. If one is truly seeking ethical guidance in the form of a rational, principled philosophy, consideration of Ayn Rand’s arguments are foundational, even if in the end one chooses to reject them.
What Rand offered in Atlas Shrugged was a complete rethinking of philosophy as a discipline and its role in human life in all its dimensions, including science, economics, business, politics, and psychology. What is even more astounding is that she presented her discoveries and formulations in the form of art – fiction – which she later followed up in her non-fiction philosophic essays. Her great achievement was her ability to reformulate two thousand years of western philosophy in a way akin to sweeping out the trash that settled into dark corners and cluttered up people’s minds.
Rand was able to challenge to the core a plethora of widely embraced cultural “truths” and paradigms that have been leading thinkers away from truth, understanding, achievement and well-being. In the face of a world gone mad by its acceptance of irrationality, and in the face of an intellectual culture that had virtually abandoned reason as a valid means of acquiring knowledge, Rand offered a rational and meaningful alternative to millions of people where theretofore no viable alternative existed.
Against a vision of nihilism and sacrifice and tribal bloodshed as man’s only hope for survival, she offered a different vision of personal and social renaissance through the efficacy of the human mind to know reality, to reach valid conclusions through reason and logic, to understand the requirements of personal happiness, to achieve that state through the discovery and application of objective ethical principles, and to live in a state of freedom through the organization of individuals into a society that understands the need for, and respects the principle of individual natural rights.
What differentiated Rand from others was that she didn’t just assert her vision and the premises that underlie its foundation. She offered proof – proof that any person, with appropriate effort, could understand and think through for themselves. What she offered was a competing, unified theory of rational philosophic principles that had a stronger theoretical and practical appeal to that which existed (and still exists) as an alternative. She presented philosophy, including ethics, not as a set of disconnected mystical or arbitrary ideas to be accepted on faith or by appeal to experts, nor as interesting irresolvable paradoxes and unanswerable questions to aimlessly ponder, but as a rational, coherent, objective system of thought grounded in reality and logic, with the purpose of serving the well-being of each individual. She demonstrated that man requires freedom of thought and action to live happy and successful lives proper to human beings, as against others who disingenuously argued that it is natural and right for man to live under the authoritarian rule of others who claim through mystical or intuitive means to know what is best, and that ethics requires conformity to authority and the sanctioning of coercion and personal sacrifice to achieve the ends of the dictatorial-minded.
Atlas Shrugged is a world-shaking book about philosophical ideas in action (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged for an overview). While most people have not heard of the book nor its author, that’s not to be taken as an indication of its popularity or its influence. A 1992 U.S. Library of Congress survey found it to be the most influential book in the United States, second only to the Bible. In 2006, fifty years after its publication, sales of the novel in bookstores topped 130,000 copies! When I checked amazon.com on November 14, 2007, the paperback version ranked an astounding #330 in books.
Today, more than ever, every person that takes business seriously and is searching for rational philosophic guidance against the forced imposition of the irrational, needs to read and heed the philosophic wisdom embedded in Atlas Shrugged.
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