What wealthy people don't tell you.

[Nocturnal]

Egoist, do you know Ayn Rand?

Have you read her books?

Have you read the Fountainhead?

Have you read the Virtue of Selfishness?

Have you?

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

Before all else, be armed.

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

I contend that if those are the principles that you understood Ayn Rand to be advocating in her books, then you are one of the most close-minded people I know, willing to overlook the actual arguments and ideas for the sake of maintaining your own ideas, unwilling to consider any others, only exploring them for the sake of blindly assaulting them. If you have not read her work, then you can disregard that, but I would ask why you have such a strong, but unfounded idea about what she is advocating.

Seriously, go to the library and read Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. She dedicated a book justifying the sefishness of man and why it is beneficial to be selfish. Any person who believes with conviction in those principles is a sad person. A person with no integrity. You would be foolish to abide by her words. A woman like that has an empty and superficial life. She is correct in the acknowledgement of power and money. Rarely will GREAT POWER be associated with KINDNESS. Rarely, will the KIND succeed in the paths of business. In order to achieve POWER, you must absolve kindness. But her views on life entail a superficial, empty and meaningless life. She talks about the importance of success and power but she also acknowledges the fact that people of great power live alone. She discourages kindness, interpersonal relationships, altruism, morality, religion, friendliness, honor, faithfulness, etc. because they are weaknesses and obstacles. What a shallow life.

She did discourage religious, altruism, and faith for the fact that they are not objectively grounded in reality and contradict enlightened self-interest, which would be moral.

She did NOT discourage kindness (or friendliness), she merely stated that it is not a virtue. She would say that a virtuous man can be kind, but a kind man is not necessarily a virtuous man, a selfish man is a virtuous man.

She did encourage interpersonal relationships, honor (depending on how you define it), and other things related to having strong moral principles and sharing them with people who you value for having them as well. If, from the Fountainhead, you got the vibe that Howard Roark was Ayn Rand's way of saying, "you should be as impersonal with people as possible," you missed the point. What she was really saying was, "don't waste your time trying to please people for the sake of pleasing them. If you find value in doing so, then do so." Howard Roark did not care about the abhorrent men he was constantly surrounded by, so he felt no need to be fake with them by being nice or friendly.

I am illustrating a point that a person who obtains wealth and riches far beyond his needs and ENDEAVORS to obtain more wealth...has essentially become a slave to his riches.

So those of us who stop at geting what we NEED, as opposed to what we WANT, have denatured souls? All I need is a few pieces of bread and some water every day, I don't even have to work to do that. Would my soul be better if I abandoned my ambitions, forgot about money, threw away my possessions, and moved to the streets to beg for bread? Tell me then, why do the souls who do live on the streets seem so miserable?

Here are some quotes from Ayn Rand.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

I think this is something more closely related to each person's philosophy, so it would be pointless for me to explain why altruism is bad in this post, when you appear to have read so much of Ayn Rand's work without getting it.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

This essentially means that people are evil because their victims allow them to commit their crimes on them. I don't know if this is a direct quote, but if it was, she was most likely referring to how the leechers of society, the ones who take more than they produce by mooching off of the great men of society, they are evil because the ones they mooch off of are letting them do it. Her point was that you have control over accepting the burdens of other people, and that you are not obligated to do so.

Religion is a primitive form of philosophy, the attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality.

If you are religous there is no point in trying to convince you of this.

In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

This one you are taking completely out of context. Rand is saying that there are no shades of gray in between black and whites, you can't be "kind of moral." She is saying that to be moral you must live by absolute principles and uphold them with rigor, doing 10 good deeds doesn't justify one evil deed.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

I'm starting to think you're taking keywords "force," "morality," "mind," etc and plugging them in to fit your own biased, unvalidated ideas of what Rand is saying. Here Rand is saying that force is NEVER justified (with the exception of self defense). To use this quote to support your argument that she is Machiavellian is ridiculous, as it shows the complete opposite.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

She's basically saying that the men who get things done, the great men of the world, the ones with virtue, are the ones who do not accept what society says for face value. They determine the truth for themselves, and they live for themselves. How could you disagree with this?

I hope people take this as an example of how easy it is for someone to make unjustified claims that give someone a bad reputation (this happens to Rand all the time). Don't make the mistake of believing them, come to conclusions like that on your own.

 

[Visceral]

Take Rand's statement that you must not cause harm to others in the service of your own self seriously, and you'll find that most of the things conventional morality condemns are immediately prohibited. Crime, predatory capitalism, even pollution could all be forbidden by virtue of the fact that they cause harm to others.

I think that the reason that Randism rubs people the wrong way is that conventional morality argues that failure to help constitutes harm, therefore the only way to avoid causing harm is to help. From this perspective, Randism is immoral. If you restrict the definition of harm to only what makes someone worse off after you're done with them, then it becomes possible to argue that "enlightened self-interest" is moral.

I'm fairly convinced that the reason there is so much harm being done in the world is that most people DO NOT follow Rand's philosophy, and instead subscribe to something more along the lines of Nietzsche, especially his commandment to seek and exercise power regardless of the cost to anyone, even yourself.

I had a long PM debate with Nocturnal about this apparent contradiction. His repeating Rand's claim that "enlightened self-interest" describes the way people behave confused me, because it clashed with every observation of human nature I had made, but when I found Rand's own admission that she wrote about man as he ought to be - not as he was - there was no longer any conflict between reality and her philosophy.

 

[disciple]

To quote the rap group "The Lox", "Money, power, respect is what you need in life, Money, power, respect keep you eating right, you'll see the light, you'll be alright"