[net.religion] Living for one's self or for others?

ark@rabbit.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (04/18/84)

Many of the people in this newsgroup seem to believe that it is good
to live your life for others and evil to live it for yourself.  Some
of us, however, believe the opposite:  it is good to live for yourself
and evil to live for others.

Before you recoil in horror, realize that if you give something up
to help a friend in trouble (or not in trouble), then you are really
doing something for yourself.  You DO value your friends, don't you?

For an excellent exposition of this idea and its consequences, see:

	The Virtue of Selfishness
	by Ayn Rand

A brief quote to arouse your interest:

	"The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute,
	as its answer [to the question of what are one's interests],
	in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any
	concern with one's own interests is evil, regardless of what
	those interests might be -- and (b) that the brute's activities
	are >in fact< to one's own interest (which altruism enjoins
	man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors)."

People keep talking on this newsgroup about books or events that
resulted in their religious conversion.  Well, this book, more than
any other I can think of, caused my intellectual conversion to the
philosophical view I now hold:  that my life belongs to me and no one
else, that it is not only permissible but correct for me to act
for my own gain, and that selfishness is not theft and theft is not
selfishness (for instance, if I have the right to steal from you,
consistency requires me to give you the right to steal from me, too).