Heretofore I’ve been concerned with refuting the claim made by Vishal Mangalwadi in The Book that Made Your World that “the Bible created the soul of Western civilization.” I’ve in effect granted (rather generously) that Mangalwadi values human dignity, individual liberty, learning, and progress but shown how he has utterly failed to demonstrate that those values came from and depend on Christianity.

So let me be clear: it’s not just Mangalwadi’s claim that Christianity is the source of science that’s false—Mangalwadi doesn’t genuinely value science. You can see that in his whole approach, which is to cite experts who agree with him without acknowledging (let alone refuting) experts who don’t. And you can see it most of all in the fact that in the course of portraying Christianity as a friend to science, he champions the anti-science dogma of “Intelligent Design,” declaring that natural selection is an “unproved theory.” (231-232)

I’m tempted to say, “Case closed.” A worldview that places faith and authority above reason cannot possibly ground a scientific worldview, and a thinker who treats “Intelligent Design” as scientific does not actually value science.

Nevertheless, it is true that modern science developed in the Christian West and that most of the thinkers who pioneered it—Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Boyle—were sincere if not always orthodox Christians who generally thought about their scientific work in religious terms. So while I will not concede for a moment that Mangalwadi is an honest commentator who gives a damn about science, I nevertheless think there are real arguments in Christianity’s favor that need to be examined.

How the Pagans Invented Science

From the first stirrings of rational inquiry in the sixth century BCE to the flourishing of Hellenistic scholarship, the Greeks transformed humanity’s approach to nature from myth and tradition to observation, reason, and systematic explanation. Thales and the early Ionian philosophers sought natural causes for cosmic order; Pythagoras and his followers revealed the mathematical harmony underlying number, music, and geometry; Hippocrates and his school advanced medicine as a rational art grounded in diagnosis and prognosis rather than superstition. In the Classical age, figures such as Aristotle laid the philosophical and methodological foundations for science, while the mathematicians of the Academy and Lyceum extended geometry, logic, and biology. By 200 BCE, the torch had passed to the Hellenistic world: in Alexandria, Euclid codified the axioms of geometry, Archimedes unified pure theory with ingenious engineering, and astronomers like Aristarchus and Eratosthenes measured the heavens and the Earth with a precision that would not be surpassed for centuries.

Given the scale of these pagan achievements, it would seem hard to defend the claim that “The West’s passion for science began” with the Bible, and that “the scientific outlook is a peculiar way of observing the world—an objective (‘secular’) method molded by a biblical worldview.” (221-223) But according to Mangalwadi, while the ancients had some “impressive achievements,” they fell short earning the title of “scientific.” In his view, they “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” of natural phenomena. (227) He goes on:

When ancients tried to explain the world, they used intuition, logic, mythmaking, mysticism, or rationalism—detached from empirical observation. For example, Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) intuition-based logic posited that if you drop two stones from a cliff, then a twice-as-heavy stone would fall twice as fast as the lighter stone. No Aristotelian scholar—Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Christian, or Muslim—ever actually tested Aristotle’s theory by dropping two stones. (227)

To the extent Mangalwadi’s claims are true, they are anachronistic. He is criticizing the ancients for not operating according to the methods of modern science, which is no more reasonable than criticizing heart surgeons in the 1960s for not using coronary stents. But the basic claim, that Greek thinkers like Aristotle “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” but “proceeded abstractly and deductively” (241) is not even true.

Aristotle’s biology, for instance, reveals him to be a scientist whose work was deeply rooted in observation. Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthelf explains that “the full Aristotelian scientific inquiry must be thought of as having three stages: the collection of data, the organization of data, and the explanation of data.” (Allan Gotthelf, Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology, 383) In seeking to explain data—to arrive at the causes of natural phenomena—observation was always the final court of appeal. Reflecting on his account of the generation of bees, for instance, Aristotle writes:

Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts. (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 760b)

What is true is that “observation” for the Greeks was understood in a wider and looser sense than it is for modern scientists. They often took what was “common knowledge,” such that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, for granted, which unquestionably led them down wrong roads. But to take this to mean that they did nothing but build abstract castles in the sky is false.

Nor is it even true that experimental science was unknown. Historian of science Marshall Clagett notes that the Greeks resorted to experiment both “for the purpose of uncovering new facts about nature” and “for the purpose of confirming scientific theory.”

Even at the earliest stages of Greek science, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., there was experimentation by Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans. Thus Pythagoras or his followers clearly established by experiment the relationship between lengths of vibrating strings and the pitch of the notes emitted by the strings. It is true that the equally famous experiment of Emedocles (490-435 B.C.) with a water vessel to prove the corporality of air was more a notion of common experience than a deliberately planned and controlled test to confirm theory. But numerous controlled experiments are recorded in the Hippocratic medical treatises, which date from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and when we examine the famous Lyceum, Strato the Physicist, we are confronted with activity deliberately experimental for purposes of scientific investigation. (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 43)

Aristotle himself, discussing the question of why sea water is salty, notes that “When it turns into vapour it becomes sweet [fresh], and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment.” (Aristotle, Meteorology, 358 b 16-17)

Similarly, pagan science could also leverage mathematical techniques in areas such as optics and astronomy. (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 45)

I am in no way making the claim that ancient pagan science was identical to modern science, nor am I even trying to minimize how revolutionary the Scientific Revolution was. It is Mangalwadi who is trying to minimize the achievements of pagan science in order to support his facile claim that Christians were the first to grasp that the path to knowledge of reality is to study reality through observation.

Christianity vs. Science

In a previous installment, we saw how early Christians were divided in their attitude toward pagan learning. Some embraced it (while subordinating it to faith), others were essentially hostile. But even those who embraced pagan learning embraced it selectively. Augustine, who championed reason insofar as it was a handmaiden to faith, was hardly an enthusiastic champion of natural science.

When it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things, after the manner of those whom the Greeks called “physicists.” Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these “physicists” have come to understand, or think they have. . . . For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. (Quoted in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 51)

The essence of the Christian approach was to prioritize the supernatural over the natural, and authority above argument. This was hardly fertile soil for science to grow, and so it is unsurprising that for centuries it didn’t. Western science virtually vanished for the first five hundred years of Christianity’s rule, and it took another five hundred years before the Scientific Revolution arose.

That is a sorry track record, and if the fact that the Scientific Revolution did occur in the Christian West gives us some reason to suspect that Christianity might have been an inducement, then the thousand year failure to produce a Scientific Revolution gives us even stronger reason to discount Christianity as an explanation. (Indeed, what should we make of the fact that the Christian East never produced a Scientific Revolution?)

What does Mangalwaldi have to say about all this? He completely evades it. Or, rather, he pulls the same stunt we’ve seen him pull earlier: he contends that it took Christians a millennium to read the Bible the right way.

Such ad hoc justifications paper over the fact that this thousand-year gap was not some accident of history, but reflects Christian values and policies, which led Christians to deprioritize natural science and persecute scientific innovators.

In terms of deprioritization, I’ve noted that most learning in the early medieval period, such as it was, was channeled into religious themes. “Of the 264 surviving manuscripts we have from between 550 and 750 CE, all but 26 deal with religious subjects.” It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, while a few thinkers preserved ancient science, no one studied science.

Historian Peter Heather, for example, goes out of his way to celebrate the “intellectual achievements of some individual Churchmen, such as Braulio—and, perhaps, above all, his teacher Isidore of Seville,” which he counts as “prodigious.” (Peter Heather, Christendom, 333-4) But Isadore was mainly cataloging Greek and Roman knowledge, and not always to great effect. Isidore, Clagett writes, “seems to have had but a superficial knowledge of Greek learning; and his understanding of the subtleties of Greek science is either elementary or completely lacking.” (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 193)

Isidore is no outlier. Jacques Le Goff notes that early medieval Christian thinkers displayed “very tiresome intellectual habits” when dealing with classical thinkers: “the systemic deformation of the authors’ thoughts, perpetual anachronism, and thinking through quotations taken out of context. Ancient thought only survived the middle ages in a fragmented form. It was pushed out of shape and humiliated by Christian thought.” (Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization: 400-1500, 115)

It was only when the West rediscovered the ancients that genuine interest in science reemerged, and allowed Europeans to start raising the questions and developing the skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution.

As for persecution, I do not want to make too much of it. The notion that there was a sustained Christian assault on science is not true. But I do not want to make too little of it, either. Even Mangalwadi is forced to admit that “The Church persecuted some individuals, like Galileo, who were scientists.” (228) To challenge tradition was fraught, and scientific innovation requires challenging tradition.

When twelfth-century thinkers such as Willaim of Conches attempted to revive interest in scientific questions, for instance, they encountered virulent opposition by conservative Christians. Abbot Willaim of Saint-Thierry howled that William of Conches, in seeking to understand humanity’s origins in natural terms, “holds the authority of sacred history in contempt . . . ; by interpreting that history from the point of view of physical science, he arrogantly prefers the ideas he invents to the truth the history contains, and in so doing makes light of a great mystery.” William of Conches was unapologetic, railing against the anti-science dogmatists of his day:

Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance, they don’t want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like peasants and not to ask the reason behind things. . . . But we say that the reason behind everything should be sought out. . . . If they learn that anyone is so inquiring, they shout that he is a heretic, placing more reliance on their monkish garb than on their wisdom. (M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 16, 11)

More striking is how the Scientific Revolution itself could have easily been strangled in its infancy, thanks to the Church’s opposition to heliocentrism, which led to Galileo’s Inquisition sentence in 1633 and to Descartes burying his own work on heliocentrism.

There has been an attempt in recent years to rewrite the story of Galileo in order to whitewash the Church’s actions, and while the story is more complicated than “Pope say science bad,” the apologists can’t get around the fact that the Church did ban the teaching of heliocentrism and that this did cripple science in Italy and much of the Catholic world. In How Modern Science Came into the World, H. Floris Cohen argues that this could have easily ended the burgeoning Scientific Revolution:

For all the absence of capital punishment or captivity, and for all the remaining possibilities for publication elsewhere, little innovative pursuit of nature-knowledge remained after 1633 in countries where the Inquisition held sway. . . . The 1633 ban led not only to an Italy where Galileo’s disciples no longer dared pursue the possibly contentious issue of the void but also to a good deal of self-censorship all over the Continent, affecting Descartes, Gassendi, van Helmont, and many another here left unmentioned. Precisely this effect might smoothly yet surely have led to a loss of momentum such as might then have become the first step in a process of decay, petrifaction, and ultimate extinction. (H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, 438-439; italics in original)

Lest this be seen as solely a Catholic issue, it’s important to note that Protestants were by no means uniformly pro-science. Historian Charles Webster notes that:

In the seventeenth century, as in later periods, every sectarian group contained an influential party convinced that the values of religion and science were essentially incompatible. There existed very real antagonism to scientific and philosophical innovation among Anglicans, Puritans, and Separatists, induced by fear of distraction from the central religious goals of life, through the dangers of vain curiosity. Calvinism, like its rivals, could be associated with a rejection of the new science in favor of obsolete knowledge drawn from a body of Scholastically oriented dogmatic theology. (David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 289)

Christians were not uniformly hostile towards science. Again, that is not the point. The point is that you cannot treat Christianity per se as pro-science. At most you can argue that certain Christians were pro-science, and that they drew on Christian ideas in ways that promoted the Scientific Revolution.

But how solid is that argument?

Did Christianity Make the Scientific Revolution Possible?

In his influential book, The Invention of Science, David Wootton notes that the claim that religion is responsible for modern science is prima facie dubious. If belief in a single creator God is what leads to science, then why was there no Scientific Revolution in the Christian East or the Islamic world? If it was only Protestant Christianity that unleashed the scientific endeavor, then what are we to make of Galileo?

The idea of laws of nature represents a crucial test case, and theological questions do not prove to be fundamental: indeed, the key source for the concept appears to be Lucretius; and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible. There are Jesuits and Jansenists, Calvinists and Lutherans, and some who have little or no belief. (David Wootton, The Invention of Science, 733)

None of this is definitive, however. We might imagine that there were ideas buried in Christianity that were crucial for the development of science, which only emerged and became influential in the West. And this is precisely what Mangalwadi argues.

Ignoring the reality that the Greeks did practice observational science and that Aristotle did treat observation as the final court of appeal for science, Mangalwadi claims that whereas the Greeks practiced deductive science, it was Christianity that taught the West the importance of induction. The Greeks were stuck in abstract theorizing divorced from reality; the Bible taught Europeans to look at reality and use experiment and mathematics to arrive at precise, quantitative data and formulate precise, quantitative laws.

How on Earth does Mangalwadi justify these claims? Would you believe he credits the anti-Aristotelian Condemnation of 1277? The Condemnation, says Mangalwadi, “formally rejected the Greco-Islamic idea that logic dictated what God could or could not do. They learned from the Bible that God was free. Therefore, neither the cosmos nor human logic could bind him. This was one cornerstone of the scientific principle: we need to empirically observe what God has done, not presume what he could or could not do based on our intuition and logic.” (238)

He goes on to quote from Willis B. Glover’s Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture:

The complete freedom of God with respect to the whole creation was a fundamental influence on late medieval thought. Since God’s creative acts are subject to no eternal truths, knowledge of the world could not be derived deductively from philosophy but must come through actual observation. It could not, moreover, be certain knowledge because no one could know for sure what God might do next. (239)

That last sentence is revealing. What Mangalwadi is arguing is that by removing logic from science, Christian thought police opened the door to observation and experiment. But this came at a price: far from laying the groundwork for the discovery of laws of nature it implied that there are no laws of nature. A law of nature would be a limitation on God’s freedom.

When genuine scholars look at the impact of the Condemnation of 1277, what they find is that it “adversely affected scientific development. In emphasizing God’s inscrutable will and his absolute power to do as He pleased, the conservative theologians encouraged a philosophical trend in which confidence in demonstrative certainty, and ultimately confidence in the ability of science to acquire certain truth about the physical world, was weakened.”

Led by William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349), many theologians concluded that neither reason nor experience could provide certain knowledge of any necessary connection between causes and their alleged effects. Both reason and experience were consequently deemed inadequate to demonstrate fundamental truths about God and his physical creation, both of which were generally perceived as less knowable during the fourteenth century than in the thirteenth. . . . While the latter were hardly skeptics, their attitude toward nature, when compared with that of thirteenth-century Scholastics, appears to mark a loss of confidence in human ability to acquire certain knowledge—apart from faith and revelation—about the true nature of God and the world. . . . In marked contrast, the key figures in the later Scientific Revolution—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton, to name only the greatest—were confident, perhaps naively, that nature’s essential structure and operation were knowable. (David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 87-90)

In other words, whatever unleashed the Scientific Revolution, it was not Church authoritarianism or the idea that there is no natural order because God can do whatever he wants.

What, then, did unleash the Scientific Revolution? Why did modern science arise in seventeenth-century Western Europe and not some other time or place? There is no consensus among historians of science, and far be it from me to offer a definitive answer where they haven’t. But I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that, while all of the ingredients were present in latent form in pagan science, it was only a self-conscious conviction that new knowledge could be discovered through active experimentation that could give rise to modern science.

The most important figure here was Francis Bacon, who formulated the idea of “conquering nature by obeying her.” For Bacon, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated or deduced from first principles, but something to be actively won—by systematically interrogating nature through observation, controlled experiment, and inductive reasoning. He urged investigators to vary conditions, isolate causes, and force phenomena to reveal their underlying laws. His vision helped legitimize and inspire a new experimental approach that would shape the emerging scientific culture of early modern Europe and influence generations of thinkers committed to the systematic discovery of new knowledge.

Cohen argues that while one could imagine a Galileo-like figure arising in Islamic civilization during its scientific Golden Age, the same cannot be said of a Bacon-like figure. And that does have something to do with Western European Christianity: namely, that by 1600, it had become remarkably this-worldly.

Islam and other world religions, as well as early, Eastern, and medieval Christianity, were all essentially other-worldly. The religious ideal consisted of renunciation and a turning away from earthly concerns, as embodied most fully by monastics. But by the time we reach the Renaissance, Western Christianity had evolved to make ample room for this-worldly ideals. Indeed, salvation itself could be attained through engagement with the world and even the pursuit of wealth (so long as it was “conducted without ostentation”). “In short,” Cohen concludes, “the empiricist/experimental approach to nature’s phenomena represents, in ways that the recovery of Greek learning did not, certain developmental features uniquely Europe’s own—-its outward-bound dynamism and its attendant, likewise extraverted, religious values. It is for all these reasons that, unlike with Galileo, a hypothetical, Bacon-like figure could not possibly have come forward in the civilization of Islam.” (H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, 261-266)

Are we then to credit Christianity with modern science after all? Absolutely not. This has been my point all along. Christianity has always been an other-worldly ideology that made concessions to this world. Every advance civilization has made since Christianity’s rise has happened precisely because of these concessions. The more ground Christians cede to this world, the more civilization moves forward—the more Christianity’s other-worldly ideals dominate, the more civilization falters.

Christians have made tremendous contributions to civilization, and they have often put their advances in religious terms, and even credited Christianity with their achievements. But the reality is that their achievements were only made possible by breaking away from Christianity’s other-worldly essence and instead leveraging the power of earthly ideals.

Christianity vs. Civilization

What is Christianity? Christian philosopher Robert Kraynak argues that “the claims of the Christian religion can be reduced to three doctrines: the Creation, Fall, and the Redemption through Christ.” (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, 38) Christianity divides reality into two worlds—God’s perfect, eternal kingdom and an inferior, created realm—and traces mankind’s fall to Adam and Eve succumbing to the temptations of this world. Tainted by original sin, human beings need to be redeemed, which can only be achieved through submission to Christ and subordinating the concerns of this life to the next.

Lurking behind each of these doctrines is a basic attitude toward the world that shapes Christian thinking on every issue: Christianity is essentially other-worldly. Christians, wrote one early apologist, “pass their days on Earth, but they are citizens of heaven.”

To sum up all in one word—what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. . . . The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. . . . The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens.

What most distinguished early Christians from their pagan contemporaries was that Christians deprioritized our means of knowing this world, placing faith and revelation above reason, and they deprioritized our enjoyment of this world, placing happiness in the next life above happiness in this life. In this they saw themselves as putting into practice Christ’s central message: this world will soon end and so your focus should be on making yourself fit for the imminent Kingdom of God. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus proclaims in his first saying in the earliest Gospel, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15 NRSV) The Kingdom of God “does not belong to this world,” and yet it is so valuable that you should be willing to give up all that you have in this world to obtain it. (John 18:36) “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and reburied; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matt. 13:44) Indeed, you should “hate . . . life itself” and be willing to throw it away altogether. (Luke 14:26) “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (Mark 8:35) For early Christians, to be a Christian was to sacrifice your earthly concerns and earthly happiness for an infinitely greater happiness to come.

Christianity’s other-worldly doctrine was not a wholly new viewpoint. Plato originated it and the Greek and Roman Stoics built on it. But it was Christianity that made other-worldliness the dominant ideal of an entire civilization, embedding renunciation, faith, humility, and the primacy of the next life into the foundations of Western thought.

While other-worldliness was front and center in early Christian thought, it did not vanish as Christianity matured. Thomas À Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, written in the early fifteenth century, was arguably the most widely read devotional work in Europe after the Bible. Its core message? “Our life upon the earth is verily wretchedness,” says Thomas. “[W]oe to those who know not their own misery, and yet greater woe to those who love this miserable and corruptible life.” In Thomas’s view, it is “foolish and unstable men” who exalt human beings, human reason, human prosperity, and human achievement. “[A]ll these worldly things are nothing.” The “highest wisdom,” by contrast, is “to cast the world behind us, and reach forward to the heavenly kingdom” by withdrawing ourselves “altogether from earthly desires.” Our rightful models are the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Virgins: “For they hated their souls in this world that they might keep them unto life eternal.” Indeed, “The saints of God and all loyal friends of Christ held as nothing the things which pleased the flesh, or those which flourished in this life, but their whole hope and affection aspired to the things which are above.” (Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.22.2, 1.13, 1.61, 1.223, 1.18.2, 1.22.4.)

Kempis was a monk who held withdrawal from the world as an ideal. A century later, Martin Luther would explain how to remain other-worldly while living in the world. Every human being, Luther held, has a “double nature”: he is a spiritual being and a physical being. The good Christian prioritizes the spiritual, even when he attends to physical concerns, “as Christ did when He washed the disciples’ feet, and Peter when he sailed his boat and fished.” The “fleshly” man, by contrast, is one “who lives and works inwardly and outwardly to benefit the flesh and in the service of his present life.” But flourishing in this world is of no importance—what matters is the state of your soul, which is threatened, not by imprisonment, or sickness, or hunger, or suffering, but only by a will that “wants to serve the world and seeks only what pleases it.” Yet Christians must live and act in the world. How, then, should they act? By sacrificing their earthly lives and values for others. “[I]n all his works, his thoughts should be free and directed only so that he thereby serves and benefits other people. He should conceive of nothing else than what is necessary for the other. . . . For whichever work is not directed toward serving another or suffering under his will (insofar as he does not force one to act contrary to God) is not a good Christian work.” A Christian, in short, is defined not by the pursuit of happiness in this world, but by faith in God and the systematic subordination of earthly life to selfless service. (Martin Luther, The Essential Luther, 76, 106-107, 76-94)

Nor did Christian other-worldliness vanish after the medieval period. Jonathan Edwards, the most important figure of the first Great Awakening, explained that “we ought not to rest in the world and its enjoyments, but should desire heaven.” To be sure, we may find happiness in “outward enjoyments,” such as our friends and family, but we must be ready “to quit them, whenever we are called to it, and to change them willingly and cheerfully for heaven.” Rather than work to achieve earthly joy, we should cultivate the virtues of “self-denial, mortification, obedience to all the commands of God,” and even “if we could go to heaven with the gratification of our lusts, we should prefer a way of holiness and conformity to the spiritual self-denying rules of the gospel.” Our model is Christ, and we should follow his example, take up our cross, and “wholly to subordinate all our other business, and all our temporal enjoyments, to this affair of traveling to heaven.”

Even in modern times, leading Christian thinkers have continued to emphasize Christianity’s other-worldly message. Consider one of the most influential Christian works of the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was disturbed by what he called “cheap grace”—the notion that because grace is the result of faith, not works, it makes no demands on how Christians live in the world. “The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world.” On this approach to grace, “my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.” True grace, he counters, is costly grace. It comes from a willingness to give up everything this world has to offer in order to follow Christ: “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” The only true life, of course, is the life that comes after death. As for a human being’s earthly existence, it should be defined by faith, which is not mere belief, but an active process of obedience to Christ rooted in self-denial. “Only when we have become completely oblivious of self are we ready to bear the cross for his sake.” To become disciples of Christ, we must abandon our attachments to this world, abandon our own will, take on the burden of others’ sins, and accept a life of suffering and rejection. Yes, we have a worldly calling, but “the Christian’s worldly calling is sanctified only in so far as that calling registers the final, radical protest against the world.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 51, 45, 88, 86-91, 49.)

Many Christians today de-emphasize Christianity’s other-worldliness and try to carve out room for worldly values. But this has always been true: from the start, Christians differed in how consistently other-worldly they were. Some early Christians, such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom spurned reason altogether, while others held that reason could play a supplementary role. Some preached a radical asceticism and practiced gruesome acts of self-flaggelation, while others held that earthly pleasures and earthly riches could be reconciled with a good Chrisitan life so long as they were subordinated to spiritual ends. What all agreed on—and what Christians agree on to this day—is that this world is of only secondary importance.

My central claim throughout this review has been that civilization has been built by those who value this world. It is only to the extent that an individual or a society values reason, as our means of knowing this world, and earthly happiness, as the insignia of flourishing in this world, that we advance learning, science, freedom, and progress. These values were first pioneered in Athens, not Jerusalem, and to the extent Christians advanced and built on them, they were building on a foundation fundamentally at odds with Christianity’s other-worldly essence.

While Christians have made vital contributions to the civilizing process, Christianity has been an obstacle, not an asset. The more consistently we embrace the other-worldly doctrines of Christianity, the more we descend into barbarism—and the more consistently we embrace an earthly idealism that prioritizes flourishing in this world, the more we thrive.

If I had to name the most plausible claim made in favor of Christianity’s contribution to civilization, it would be that it helped unleash modern progress.

That claim is plausible because, unlike reason, science, and liberty, which all had undeniable roots in ancient Greece, technological progress was new. Though the Greeks achieved relative prosperity in their day and the Romans achieved technological marvels, it was primarily in the Christian West that you saw the rise of labor-saving technology and, ultimately, the Great Enrichment made possible by the Industrial Revolution.

But to make the case that Christianity is the foundation of modern progress, you would have to contend with facts that Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World glides over: above all, Christianity’s anti-wealth, anti-progress track record. Just as Christians have held widely divergent views about reason, so they have held widely divergent views about production, and rather than grapple with that fact, Mangalwadi largely sweeps it under the table.

Did Christianity Invent Inventiveness?

Years ago I took part in a media training workshop. One of the principles the trainer laid down was: don’t answer the question they asked; answer the question you wish they asked. For anyone interested in the West’s distinctive contribution to civilization, the question is: what created the Great Enrichment that began with the Industrial Revolution? Mangalwadi sidesteps that question for one that better suits his purposes: why, he asks, did the West start developing labor-saving technology?

It’s a deft move. The Romans were technologically advanced, but they weren’t particularly interested in labor-saving inventions. Christian monks, meanwhile, were eager to make more time for prayer and so, while they celebrated work as a form of penance, they also embraced technology like the wheeled plow and the water mill that reduced the need for work.

According to Mangalwadi, they learned this lesson from the Bible. Invoking the work of the twentieth-century historian Ernst Benz, he writes:

Christendom pioneered technological creativity because the Bible presented a God who was a Creator, neither a dreamer nor a dancer, as Indian sages believed. God was the architect of the cosmos. He shaped man out of clay as a potter does, making man in his own creative image and commanding him to rule the world creatively.

Jesus Christ’s incarnation in a physical body and his bodily resurrection instilled into Christian philosophers the unique idea that matter was created for a spiritual purpose. Adam was created to take care of the earth, not to despise it or try to transcend it. Benz realized that the Judeo-Christian view of reality and destiny produced and nurtured technology in four ways: First, the Bible emphasized intelligent craftsmanship in the world’s design. Second, the Bible suggested that human beings participate in divine workmanship by being good artisans themselves. Third, the Bible taught that we follow divine example when we use the physical universe for righteous ends. And fourth, the Bible challenged the West to use time wisely, because each moment is a valuable, one-time opportunity. (96-97)

Mangalwadi acknowledges that “Scholars have qualified Benz’s thesis because not all versions of Christianity developed equally strong traditions of technology.” (97) But this hardly does justice to the matter. Many Christians have been actively hostile toward technology, and even the other major historian Mangalwadi leverages to make his case, Lynn White, admits that the inventiveness of the pagans and Chinese demonstrates that “Christianity obviously is not essential to technological dynamism.” (Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology, 237)

So we’re left with a rather modest claim: some medieval Christians interpreted Christianity in a way that encouraged them to develop and adapt technology. And yet we’re still overstating the case, because while Benz and White were certainly noteworthy twentieth century historians, Mangalwadi seems completely unaware that, in the decades since their work, the field has exposed important shortcomings in their scholarship that totally undermine Mangalwadi’s case.

For example, Magalwadi follows White in claiming that it was Christians who were responsible for the proliferation of the water mill (though acknowledging it was invented a century before Christ). “Water mills . . . became useful to power machinery by the invention of the crank, the most important invention after the wheel. . . . At the peak of their cultural development, the ancient and Greeks and Romans knew nothing about the crank.” (103-104) But archaeologists working near the end of White’s life concluded that the water mill was used in Rome more often than White allowed, and Romans were even familiar with the crankshaft many centuries before White thought it was invented. (David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin, Religion and the New Ecology, 38)

On the whole, concludes economic historian Joel Mokyr, “It is now widely agreed that White may have underestimated the technological achievements of classical Rome and exaggerated the discontinuity that medieval Europe presented in technological development.” (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 135-136) If Christians were not notably more inventive than their pagan counterparts, then there’s no grounds to look to Christianity to explain their greater inventiveness.

And even if we needed an explanation for Western inventiveness, the proposition that Christianity made the West more inventive is not a particularly good one. White’s basic claim is that pagan cultures were animistic, which led them to be wary about transforming nature for human purposes, and that this changed with Christianity, which put an end to animism and taught that God gave man dominion over the Earth.

But even before Christianity arose, the Greeks rejected crude animism and embraced human beings’ power to use reason to control nature. As the Greek Stoic Chrysippus wrote two hundred years before Christ:

Here somebody will ask, for whose sake was all this vast system contrived? For the sake of the trees and plants, for these, though without sensation have their sustenance from nature? But this at any rate is absurd. Then for the sake of the animals? It is no more likely that the gods took all this trouble for the sake of dumb, irrational creatures. For whose sake then shall one pronounce the world to have been created? Doubtless for the sake of those living beings which have the use of reason; these are the gods and mankind, who assuredly surpass all other things in excellence, since the most excellent of all things is reason. Thus we are led to believe that the world and all the things that it contains were made for the sake of gods and men. (Quoted in Peter Coates, Nature, chapter 2)

The ancient Hebrews, meanwhile, opposed animism but did not develop an inventive culture. As for the Christian West, it’s not even true that it had rejected animism, which could be found in the widespread belief in magic and even ideas from pagan science that dominated up until the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, the very idea that God giving mankind “dominion over the Earth” entitled human beings to transform the world for human ends is basically an anachronism. “An exhaustive study of medieval commentaries on Genesis 1:28 demonstrated that premodern Jews and Christians rarely, if ever, saw the verse as applying to technological domination of nature at all; rather, the exegesis of the verse typically dealt with issues related to God’s covenant and human sexuality.” (David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin, Religion and the New Ecology, 39-41)

So was the Christian West uniquely inventive before the modern era? Not really. And is there strong evidence to think that the inventiveness they did achieve was rooted in Christianity? No. All we can say is that a significant number of medieval Christians were open to invention, and saw some warrant for it in the Bible.

But let’s not forget, Christianity at its founding was an apocalyptic cult warning people to drop their earthly concerns because the world was about to end. Early Christian heroes were martyrs and radical ascetics who gained their fame by giving away their wealth and mortifying the flesh. It is utterly ridiculous to say that this was a movement urging people to innovate and prosper. If some strains of Christianity did develop such ideas (and some did), it was because they were adding something to Christian doctrine—not faithfully reading their Bible.

How Did the West Grow Rich?

Mangalwadi may find it convenient to focus on medieval technology. But for anyone concerned with a flourishing civilization, the goal is not to safeguard a culture that ekes out a few technological advances every century or so—it’s to nurture the distinctively modern rapid progress that lifted mankind out of poverty, extended lifespans by decades, and allows us to live richer, safer, more empowered lives than any human beings in history.

What is crystal clear is that the Great Enrichment was an Enlightenment achievement. As I’ve discussed at length, it was made possible by the free human mind applied to the task of improving earthly life. Or, as scholars of this transformation will often put it, it was made possible by institutions that secured thought, production, and trade—and by a culture that valued the development of “useful knowledge” and the deployment of that knowledge by profit-seeking inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists. As Mokyr puts it, the Enlightenment’s key themes were:

a culture of practical improvement, a belief in social progress, and the recognition that useful knowledge was the key to their realization. These beliefs were complemented by other cultural elements we see as enlightened: the idea of political power as a social contract, formal limits on the executive branch, freedom of expression, intellectual contestability, religious tolerance, basic human legal rights, the realization that exchange was a positive-sum game, the virtuousness of economic activity and trade, the sanctity of property rights, and the folly of mercantilist notions that placed the state (and not the individual) as the ultimate object of society.

The increased prevalence of these beliefs, which fit uneasily but conveniently under the big umbrella of the Enlightenment, was the cultural underpinning of economic growth, the scaffold on which new and more prosperous economic buildings could be erected. Of all those beliefs, the notions about the power of useful knowledge to transform the economy constituted the driving force in bringing about the Great Enrichment. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 266)

The institutions and culture of growth of the Enlightenment had earlier roots, of course. But they were hardly biblical. We’ve already discussed how the fundamental institution of political freedom was not an achievement of Christianity, so consider culture.

Mangalwadi’s case for Christianity as the cause of a technological civilization requires him to establish a robust continuity between the (allegedly distinctive) inventiveness of the Middle Ages and post-Enlightenment progress. Yet if we look at the state of the culture in the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, what we find is that it was in no way hospitable to modern growth.

First, let’s call to mind something that Mangalwadi denies: that Christians had maintained a deeply hierarchical society that regarded money-making as sinful. You cannot serve two masters, Jesus had insisted. Your attention is fixed either on this world—or the next. (Matt. 6:24) And this world is coming to an end. So do not store up false treasures here, but treasures in heaven. (Matt: 6:19-21) The desire for earthly gain is not just a distraction from what’s truly important—it is the antithesis of devotion to God. You should be content that your minimal needs are met—that you have food and clothing. To desire more is to plunge yourself into ruin and destruction. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim. 6:2-10)

And if you do have riches? If you do have more than your minimal needs? Here Jesus did not mince words. When a rich young man asked him how to achieve eternal life, Jesus did not respond with an enigmatic parable. He stated bluntly: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” As if that weren’t clear enough, he elaborated to his disciples: “[I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt. 19:13-29)

(Mangalwadi sweeps all this aside and invokes the parable of the talents, which in his narrative celebrated money-making and even created “our complex system of capitalism.” (324) But to thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, the parable was an allegory about using God’s gifts in accordance with God’s will, not a call to seek riches.)

These ideas were still dominant in Europe well into the early modern era. In historian Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life, he looks at England (where the Great Enrichment got its start) during the period of 1530-1780. In his account, England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still an essentially religious, hierarchical society. The purpose of life was to glorify God and perform the duties of one’s social station.

Contemporary moralists were hostile to most forms of social mobility. The Church of England taught that the social hierarchy was divinely ordained and that it was a religious duty to be content with one’s lot. “God hath appointed every man his degree and office,” declared the official Homilies, “within the limits whereof it behoveth him to keep himself.” The inequalities of this world would be blotted out in the next. Meanwhile, it was un-Christian for a yeoman to desire to be a lord or a gentleman. Even the vagrant, dying of starvation in the street, should not grumble at his lot. To be discontented with one’s position in life was a breach of the Eighth Commandment. (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 17)

This was a world in which ambition and acquisitiveness were vices, and where conformity was a virtue. To defy convention was to commit the sin of “singularity.” “‘Desire not to be singular, nor to differ from others,’ warned a Jacobean cleric, ‘for it is a sign of a naughty spirit, which hath caused much evil in the world from the beginning.” (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 18-27) Your job was to accept your ordained place in society, accept the job your parents chose for you, quietly go about your work, and not make trouble.

There were, to be sure, few legal barriers to social mobility, and an individual could be forgiven for rising through education; there was less sympathy for “those who rose by making money.”

In the Christian tradition, riches had always been regarded as an impediment to salvation. They were despised by all truly pious persons. Treasure was to be sought in heaven not earth. The only valid justification for great wealth was that it enabled the holders to do good works, by benefiting religion, the poor, and the common weal. (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 32, 111)

This was hardly an auspicious environment for economic growth. But there were countervailing forces. These came, however, not from Christianity, but above all from two thinkers who would champion the use of reason to discover the secrets of nature and wield that knowledge for humanity’s earthly betterment: Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

Bacon’s key idea, Mokyr observes, was that “[k]nowledge ought to bear fruit in production, science ought to be applicable to industry, and it was people’s sacred duty to improve and transform the material conditions of life.” (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 70) With Bacon’s program, English thinkers increasingly focused on improving human wellbeing on Earth: “the glory of the Creator took a back seat.” (Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, 41)

But Bacon was not a discoverer of new scientific knowledge. His belief in the power of useful knowledge was more of a hope than an established postulate. That would change with Newton.

His insights more than ever confirmed the belief in a mechanistic, understandable universe that could and should be manipulated for the material benefit of humankind. In some form, the anthropocentric idea of nature in the service of humans had been around since the Middle Ages, but what counted was its triumph over what their proponents regarded as obscurantism and superstition. Seventeenth-century science prepared the ground for the Industrial Enlightenment by stressing mankind’s relationship with the environment as based on intelligibility and instrumentality. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 103)

It’s true, as Mangalwadi points out (99), that most of the early technological achievements of the Industrial Revolution did not leverage the new science. (The steam engine is an important exception.) But that is not the point. The point is that Newton’s achievements helped build a culture with the knowledge, skills, and outlook that created a culture of growth.

Take the case of Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century English potter and entrepreneur. He was, notes historian Roy Porter:

one of a remarkable new breed of men conspicuous for pursuing business through enlightened thinking. Though of meagre formal education, he displayed a consummate faith in reason, and a passion for measuring, weighing, observing, recording and experimenting: all problems in ceramics manufacture would, he maintained, “yield to experiment.” . . . Becoming “vase-maker general to the universe,” he died worth half a million. (Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, 432)

The culture that Bacon and Newton helped create would see a transformation in attitudes toward productive work and profit-seeking. Regarding work, Bacon’s and Newton’s elevation of the pursuit and deployment of useful knowledge raised the social status of inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As a result, the best, most ambitious minds gravitated, not to the church or the military, but to business. (Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, 389-390)

To devote oneself to business was no longer seen as ignoble, and the desire to improve one’s station through productive achievement was no longer condemned as vain. Enlightenment thinkers rejected the Christian animus against money-making and riches, and instead saw them as vital contributors to human flourishing. As historian Ritchie Robertson puts it in his history of the Enlightenment:

The perpetual wars of medieval times, and the violent sports favoured by the nobility in intervals of peace, were contrasted with the quiet, sedate and inoffensive occupation of the merchant. It was in this sense that Johnson could say to Boswell: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” The rational interests of the businessman were seen as promoting peace and stability, in contrast with the unbridled passions of the aristocracy. (Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment, 523)

The Enlightenment outlook on production would be articulated most enduringly by Adam Smith, who saw himself as doing for political economy what Newton had done for physics. Smith rejected the rigid ideals of the status society, and argued that an economy governed by market forces rather than coercion would be one “where every man was perfectly free both to choose what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper.” The result would be that free individuals pursuing their self-interest would live prosperously and peacefully. “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I.7, I.10, I.4)

It was the Enlightenment, not Christianity, that created a culture of growth. Most of the thinkers responsible for this transformation were Christians, of course. The English Puritans, for instance, were important early champions of Bacon and the experimental sciences, and both Bacon and Newton were themselves religious. But the reorientation of English society involved breaking away from and redefining Christian orthodoxy.

As the cases of the Jesuits and orthodox Calvinists illustrated, Christianity could still be a barrier to embracing science and progress. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 228) England was able to embrace the new science and culture of growth in large part because, as historian of science Margaret C. Jacob put it, “A new religious outlook was being invented. ‘Natural religion’ and ‘natural theology’ became passwords to a distinctive religiosity. Miracles and divine interventions became rarer; being religious began to mean thought rather than prayer. A vision of order and harmony, God’s work, replaced biblical texts and stories, God’s word.” (Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, 74)

Christianity didn’t create Enlightenment progress—the Enlightenment defanged Christianity so that it would not stand in the way of Enlightenment progress.

Vishal Mangalwadi, in The Book That Made Your World, writes: “The scientific, technological, military, and economic success of the West came from the fact that it became a thinking civilization.”

Here we’re in complete agreement. The West moved humanity forward because it embraced reason. But why, asks Mangalwadi, did the West embrace reason? “Was its rationality a coincidence in history? Or did the Bible promote rationality because it informed the West that the ultimate reality behind the universe was the rational Word (logos) of a personal God?” (77-78)

That, of course, is a false alternative. But it is striking that Mangalwadi never once quotes the Bible as praising the power of reason or encouraging individuals to adhere to the laws of logic. No. Literally the only thing he cites from the Bible is its invocation that Christ is the logos, from which he deduces:

If God is Truth, if he can speak to us in rationally understandable words, then human rationality is really significant. The way to know the truth is to cultivate our minds and meditate on God’s Word. These theological assumptions constituted the DNA of what we call Western civilization. (82)

The logos is a concept that comes out of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, and later gets picked up by Jewish thinkers such as Philo, the author of John, and some of the early Christian apologists. The pivotal Christian account of the logos comes from Justin Martyr. As one Christian historian summarizes, “[T]he special functions of the Logos, according to Justin, are two: to be the Father’s agent in creating and ordering the universe, and to reveal truth to men.” (J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 97; see also Justo L. Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought, Vol 1, 45-46, 52, 101-109) The logos, for Christians, is an account of creation and revelation—it is not a call to follow reason.

What does the Bible actually say about reason? Precious little. But what it does say is consistent: reason is limited, dangerous, and must be subordinated to faith.

Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight [often translated as “understanding”].” 1 Corinthians 1:20–25 condemns the “wisdom of the world” and declares that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.” Colossians 2:8 warns that “no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” The Bible’s message is that faith—“the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1)—is a more reliable guide to life than the individual’s earthly reason.

Nevertheless, Mangalwadi wants us to believe that the Bible told human beings to be rational and that the Christian West therefore embraced reason and moved civilization forward. What about the Christian East? Mangalwadi doesn’t say.

As for why it took the Christian West so long to embrace reason, Magalwadi claims that the West fell into disarray due to the “barbarian conquests,” which depressed literacy and education from the fifth century to the ninth century. (208) However, the work of leading Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, and John of Damascus kept alive the values of reason, logic, and learning until their full re-emergence starting with the rise of Cathedral schools and universities and climaxing with the Reformation. (86-88, 208-212)

It’s a story based on half-truths and wild distortions that disguises the real lesson of history: Christianity has been reason’s greatest enemy.

Reason Discovered, Reason Shackled

Human beings have been using reason for as long as there have been human beings. But the discovery of reason as a distinct faculty, and the discovery of a method for self-consciously adhering to reason, was an achievement of the Greeks. The Greeks were the first to grasp that the world could be understood in naturalistic terms, and that this understanding was to be arrived at through argument, not authority.

The culmination of the Greek achievement came with Aristotle, who was the first to grasp that reason worked by forming concepts from observation and integrating them logically into a non-contradictory understanding of reality.

Mangalwadi is well aware of Greece’s role in the discovery of reason, because he notes, “Six hundred years before Christ, beginning with philosophers like Thales and Anaximander, the Greeks indeed cultivated the life of the mind.” But, he goes on,

That tradition continued as long as they respected logic. But it began to die out after they denied the existence of transcendent logos and yielded to Gnostic efforts to transcend rationality.

Professor Raoul Mortley examined the rise and fall of logos in ancient Greece. In the study From Word To Silence, he pointed out that the idea of logos, or the rational word, as the controlling feature of the universe originated in Greece with the pre-Socratic thinkers. It ended with the closing of the Athenian Academy in AD 529. (81)

I won’t try to unpack what is a rather bizarre series of assertions. I will simply note what Mangalwadi’s deft use of the passive voice disguises: that what closed the Athenian Academy was the Christian emperor Justinian I.

Let’s be clear. The Late-stage Athenian Academy was not exactly a bastion of reason. It was essentially a haven for neoplatonist mystics. But what it does highlight is how Mangalwadi leaves out of his story Christianity’s role in the decline of reason and learning as we enter the Dark Ages.

I said earlier that the Bible’s core message about reason is that it must be subordinated to faith. What the history of Christianity reveals is that this subordination can take many shapes. It can involve the subordination of reason across the board or in some realm where reason allegedly can’t achieve knowledge (typically, the mysteries of the divine realm). It can involve a dismissive hostility to reason or the view that reason is a useful supplement to revelation.

You can find both strands in early Christianity. Several times in his book, Mangalwadi invokes the research of Edward Grant, but whereas Mangalwadi presents Christianity as consistently pro-reason, Grant is under no such illusion. He catalogs two “conflicting Christian attitudes” toward reason. The first, best represented by Tertullian, was virulently anti-reason and openly rejected pagan knowledge as worthless. The second, embodied by thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria and later Augustine, embraced reason as a handmaiden to theology, and accepted pagan learning insofar as it did not conflict with scripture.

The sentiment that pagan philosophy could not be rejected arose from an early belief that pagan thought foreshadowed Christianity and that the latter might therefore receive guidance and insight from the secular knowledge and learning of pagan authors. The idea emerged that Christians might take what is of value in pagan thought and use it for their own benefit. . . . Another incentive for studying the philosophy and science of the pagans was to use their own words and ideas against them. (Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, 33)

Augustine, for example, held that reason can illuminate scripture, especially by resolving apparent contradictions, and that reason can also prevent Christians from making embarrassing blunders when defending their faith against pagans. But to say that reason is a handmaiden to faith is to say that it can never challenge revelation.

For example, pagans may believe that observation demonstrates that resurrection of the dead is impossible, and on those grounds dismiss Christian claims that Christ has risen. But this, says Augustine, only reveals why we must not begin our reasoning from observation. The correct starting point for logical reasoning is the infallibility of the Bible. “This can all be put very briefly as follows: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ risen again; but Christ has risen again; therefore there is a resurrection of the dead.” (Quoted in Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, 39) Similarly, in The City of God, Augustine mocks those who argue that the Earth is ancient. Scripture assures us that it is only 6,000 years old. (Augustine, The City of God, XII.11)

If the Greeks pioneered the process of reaching truth by argument, not authority, then Christianity represented a reversal: our most important truths are determined by authority, not argument.

Christianity, then, gets credit, not for injecting reason into the West, but for eliminating its supremacy. Even the most pro-reason Christians denied the sovereignty of reason, refusing to grant it license to question the tenets of faith, and many shared with Augustine the concern that the fascination with earthly knowledge would unleash “the lust of the eyes.” While the barbarian invasions certainly played a major role in bringing the West into the Dark Ages, Christian ambivalence toward reason had its role to play as well.

Were Christians bemoaning the decline of reason and learning during the Dark Ages? Boethius, perhaps, but what about Gregory the Great, who served as Bishop of Rome from 590 to his death in 604? He dismissed the classical tradition as mere “worldly wisdom” that all too easily unleashed pride and heresy. (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 234-5.)

Historian Jacques Le Goff argues that many medieval Christian thinkers chose to deliberately dumb themselves down in order to reach an increasingly ignorant community. The influential early-sixth-century bishop Caesarius of Arles, for instance, apologized to his educated readers for his “rustic expressions” and “down-to-earth language.” “Since the ignorant and the simple cannot raise themselves to the height of the educated, let the educated deign to lower themselves to their ignorance.” Le Goff concludes:

It is striking to see the most cultivated and the most eminent representatives of the new Christian elite, conscious of their cultural unworthiness compared with the last purists, renounce what they yet possessed or could acquire in the form of intellectual refinement so that they could make themselves accessible to their flocks. They chose to grow stupid in order to conquer. (Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization: 400-1500, 117.)

Arguably the most important way in which Christianity helped foster early medieval ignorance was simply through its shift in focus: even if it was not sinful to investigate nature, this world wasn’t important enough to deserve much attention. Consequently, few Christians devoted themselves to science, and few scribes bothered to preserve the work of those who did. Of the 264 surviving manuscripts we have from between 550 and 750 CE, all but 26 deal with religious subjects. Equally revealing, the library of Bede, the most learned man of his age, consisted of biblical commentaries, the works of the Latin Fathers, and a few secular works, such as Plinty’s Natural History, that were useful for biblical exegesis. (Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 317-318.)

How did the West Become Pro-Reason?

How did the West claw its way out of the Dark Ages? Not by reading the Bible, but by once again leveraging the Greeks—above all, Aristotle.

Boethius had kept Aristotle alive in the West by translating some of his logical texts into Latin. On its own, this amounted to very little in the way of cultural influence. But it made Western thinkers receptive to Aristotle and other pagan thinkers when their works were rediscovered by the West starting in the late eleventh century. (This, in essence, is the story Grant tells in God and Reason in the Middle Ages.)

I say it made the West receptive, but that’s an overstatement. Many powerful Christians were not at all receptive. At the University of Paris, conservatives banned Aristotle in 1210, then again in 1215, and once more in 1231. Then, in the late 1270s, the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, became alarmed by some of the more radical ideas proposed by Aristotelian scholars. In 1277 he formally condemned 219 doctrines. His goal was not to forbid Aristotle—an impossibility in any case—but to humble philosophers who dared speculate on issues reserved for theologians, including the immortality of the soul and the eternality of the universe. Anyone teaching the condemned doctrines—indeed, anyone daring to listen to them—was subject to excommunication. “The condemnations,” David Lindberg observes, “were a ringing declaration of the subordination of philosophy to theology.” (David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 248.)

Aristotle was hardly the only target. Though Magalwadi (and Christians more generally) credit the West for creating the university, they ignore that medieval universities were hardly bastions of free thought.

The new corporations of masters and students, known as studia generalia or universities, were allowed to govern themselves, under the mostly nominal authority of a bishop, in return for an undertaking that licentious behavior by students and dangerous speculation by masters—what we would call “intellectual freedom”—would be reined in. Thought-control was indeed the chief aim of the new corporations, at least initially. (James Hankins, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, 33)

Even so, the rediscovery of the ancients was transformative. Reason and learning were revived, enough to birth the Renaissance and lay the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution. But despite the progress toward a culture of reason, the West was still in the grips of the handmaiden view that held reason in fetters.

Mangalwadi acknowledges as much when he admits that this was an era of “intolerance and persecution,” marked by “the attempt to suppress dissent and bring about conformity by force.” (86) But, he says, the West was saved by “the open, questioning attitude of reforms like Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, who sought to make the Bible available to people so they could discover the truth for themselves.” (86)

Statements like this sometimes make me wonder if Mangalwadi is trolling us. As I noted last time, Luther and Calvin were hardly advocates of an “open, questioning attitude” toward religion. Indeed, it was precisely their influence that the West would have to escape in order to build the modern world.

Consider the case of England. Before Englishmen were liberated to read the Bible, Mangalwadi claims, “England was only a middling power. But once the English people began using logic to interpret the Bible, they acquired a skill that propelled their nation to the forefront of world politics, economics, and thought.” (88) It’s a nice, neat, simple story: read the Bible, discover the power of logic, transform the world. But it’s just not what happened.

In his history of the early British Enlightenment, philosopher Frederick Beiser notes that, “According to Luther and Calvin, the final standard of truth is Scripture, which contains mysteries beyond the ken of our natural light. The reformers sharply distinguished between the spheres of nature and grace, the earthly and the heavenly, and warned reason not to presume to judge faith.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 4)

No, they weren’t hostile to reason across the board, but reason needed to be kept in its place. Their rejection of the sovereignty of reason—of reason as our ultimate guide to knowledge in every domain of life—followed from their core religious doctrines. Beiser summarizes:

(1) That all human powers have been utterly corrupted by the Fall, so that it is not possible for man to attain salvation through his own efforts, or to know God through his natural reason.

(2) That the sphere of reason is possible experience alone, so that it cannot discover, explain, demonstrate, or refute any belief concerning the supernatural and spiritual realm beyond it.

(3) That the true meaning of the Bible cannot be understood by reason but by the spirit alone.

(4) That God completely transcends the nature of man, and is different from him not only in degree but also in kind, so that to apply rational discourse to him is only to indulge in anthropomorphisms. (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 21)

Officially, the Church of England supported this outlook and opposed the rise of reason in Britain during the sixteenth century. But by the eighteenth century, virtually everyone in England agreed that reason was “the highest authority, the final court of appeal,” such that it “takes precedence over every other source or standard of truth, such as inspiration, tradition, or the Bible,” and that it has “the power and right to examine all of our beliefs, even religious and political ones.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 3)

What changed? In Beiser’s account, there were two steps. First, English rationalists, who were for the most part clerics in the Church of England, found it necessary to embrace the sovereignty of reason in order to defend the Church. Second, “the growing authority of reason, though it served religious ends, eventually led to the decline of religion itself.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 17)

This was a fraught transition. Though press freedom had dramatically increased in the late 1600s, authors could still be prospected for blasphemy, imprisoned for denying Christianity, and unorthodox works censored and burnt. Englishmen had been executed for denying the Trinity as recently as the 1600s. (Roland Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 6-9)

But by the eighteenth century—that is, by the time England was “propelled. . . to the forefront of world politics, economics, and thought”—the general sentiment was that England had disclaimed Christianity. As historian Roland Stromberg puts it:

Hardly a single devout man, indeed, neglected to charge the times with abandonment of religion, and relatively disinterested observers added the weight of their testimony. Daniel Defoe believed in 1722 that “no age, since the founding and forming of the Christian Church, was ever like, in open avowed atheism, blasphemies, and heresies, to the age we now live in.” William Whiston declared that anyone with “a right sense of religion” must be aware of its “decay and disesteem in the world.” Swift was fond of noting sardonically how little the principles of religion were pursued in the world. Bishop Butler concluded that religion had fought a losing battle with unbelief. David Hume, who was perhaps an unwilling sceptic, agreed: England, he wrote, showed the most indifference to religious matters of all nations. (Roland Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 2-3)

This was, Stromberg points out, “petulance or hysteria.” The point is simply that, as reason gained authority, religion lost its grip on the English mind.

Mangalwadi is right: reason does explain the rise of the West. But reason’s triumph was a triumph over Christianity—not a triumph made possible by Christianity. The Greeks had discovered that reason is our means of knowledge—Christianity taught mankind to demote and shackle reason.

It was only because some thinkers were willing to challenge Christian dogma and face Christian persecution in order to uphold the sovereignty of reason that the modern world was created.

The attempt to resurrect faith is not only suicidal—it is an act of treason against those who build the knowledge, freedom, and progress we enjoy today.

“[C]ontrary to what my secular professors taught me,” Vishal Mangalwadi writes in The Book That Made Your World, “it was the Bible, not Greek political ideals, that fired the modern quest for freedom.” Greek democracies, he says, “always degenerated into mob rule. . . . Europe’s Reformation and democratization began with the sixteenth-century rediscovery of the Bible and a biblical understanding of governance. It led to America’s founders explicitly rejecting Greek democracy for a constitutional republic.” (335-336)

Forget Greece, says Mangalwadi: the Bible laid the groundwork for freedom, and once Christians got around to reading it 1,500 years later, they developed a more or less fully worked out theory of political freedom later picked up by the Founding Fathers.

The evidence? Well, there isn’t much in the way of evidence. Mangalwadi’s main tack is to assert his version of the story of liberty, which I’ll return to shortly. But he does note that, “Quantitatively, the Bible was most frequently quoted by America’s Founding Fathers, followed by Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.” (352)

Here he’s citing the work of political scientist Donald S. Lutz. But Lutz goes on to say, “About three-fourths of all references to the Bible came from reprinted sermons.” It is hardly surprising to find sermons quoting heavily from the Bible. If, however, we consider only secular works, the references to the Bible are “about equal to the percentage for classical writers.” (Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of the American Constitution, 140) Mangalwadi does not mention this fact, nor does he seem to know that Lutz’s work catalogs plenty of ways the Greeks and Romans shaped the founders’ political thought, to say nothing of the way they shaped the thought of Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.

All of which is to say, his major piece of evidence is not evidence at all. We cannot understand what led to the rise of political liberty simply by counting citations. After all, the enemies of Independence cited the Bible as much as the Americans. Bernard Bailyn, in his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, demonstrates how loyalists such as Thomas Bradbury Chandler and Jonathan Boucher leaned heavily on the Bible to champion obedience to the crown. For example:

Boucher sought, first and foremost, to establish the divine origins of the doctrine of obedience to constituted authority—a necessity, he felt . . . in view of the gross misinterpretation rebellious Americans had for years been making of that suggestive verse of Galatians V,I: “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” What had been meant by “liberty” in that passage, he said, was simply and unambiguously freedom from sin, for “every sinner is, literally, a slave . . . the only true liberty is the liberty of being the servants of God.” Yet the Gospel does speak to the question of public obligations, and its command could hardly be more unmistakable: it orders, always, “obedience to the laws of every country, in every kind or form of government.” (Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 314-315)

Every thinker in the Christian West cited the Bible, but as Shakespeare noted, “The devil can cite scripture for his purposes.” Assessing influence is an altogether different task.

The Philosophy of Liberty

Political liberty is the state that exists when a government is established to protect individual rights, including both intellectual and economic freedom. It is the state that exists when the initiation of physical force is barred from social existence, so that each human being can support his own life and seek his own happiness. It is, in essence, the ideals (if not always the practice) of the original American system.

To see how liberty came to fruition in America, let’s return for a moment to Lutz’s list of citations. On the one hand, we have prominent Enlightenment thinkers. I have written at length about how the Enlightenment transformed political liberty into an ideal. But here I’m interested, not in Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke, but in the sermons. Not that they cited the Bible, but that so many of our revolutionary documents were sermons.

Historically, Christian thinkers had generally been an anti-revolutionary force. We got a taste of loyalist religious arguments in the quote about Boucher, but this was hardly a British innovation. Take the original Protestant, Martin Luther.

In the Epistle to the Romans 13:1–7, Paul writes that every person must be “subject to the governing authorities,” because those authorities are “instituted by God,” and resisting them is tantamount to resisting God’s ordinance. The lesson Luther took away, historian Quentin Skinner explains, is that while you should disobey the ungodly commands of a ruler, you should never actively resist such demands.

Since all powers are ordained, this would still be tantamount, even in the case of a tyrant, to resisting the will of God. This harsh contrast between the equal duties of disobedience and non-resistance to tyranny is clearly brought out in the central section on the tract on Temporal Authority. If the prince commands you to do evil, you must refuse, saying that “it is not fitting that Lucifer should sit at the side of God.” If the prince should then “seize your property on account of this and punish such disobedience,” you must passively submit and “thank God that you are worthy to suffer for the sake of the divine word.” (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 15-19)

So how did so many American preachers end up supporting the American Revolution? The short answer is that the Enlightenment had transformed Christian thinking. The Enlightenment had elevated the values of reason, earthly happiness, and political freedom into ideals, and many Christian thinkers redefined Christianity to accommodate those ideals.

David Sorkin, a Jewish professor at Yale, outlines this shift in thinking in his book The Religious Enlightenment. In his account, Enlightenment Christians shared the general Enlightenment horror at “Reformation and Counter-Reformation militance,” and sought “an express alternative to two centuries of dogmatism and fantasticism, intolerance and religious warfare.” In particular, they sought to restrict the scope of scripture. The Bible was “not the supreme source of all knowledge,” not “a textbook of science and politics,” but simply a guide “to salvation and man’s relationship to God.” (David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 6, 14)

Above all, Enlightenment Christians sought to elevate the role of reason, formulating a doctrine they called “reasonable belief.” According to Sorkin:

The terms reasonable and reasonableness were already current when Locke popularized them in his 1695 treatise, The Reasonableness of Christianity. . . . To religious enlighteners, unreasonable meant an exclusive embrace of either reason or faith. Faith untempered by knowledge, or combined with excessively partisan forms, produced intolerant, dogmatic, or enthusiastic religion. They had in mind “inner light” Puritanism, Pietism, or convulsionary Jansenism; the polemical, scholastic theology of the major Christian denominations (Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics) in the seventeenth century; or, in the case of Judaism, an exclusivist and casuistic (pilpul) method of studying the Talmud. At the same time, religious enlighteners thought that unaided reason engendered immoral skepticism and unbelief. They were certain that morality without belief was neither desirable nor possible. (David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 11-12)

(There was another popular strain of religious thought during the revolutionary period, the evangelicalism of the First Great Awakening. The evangelicals were not pro-reason, but they did believe in the sovereignty of individual judgment in religious matters, and so were able to find common cause with Enlightenment thinkers. See Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, 178-179.)

What is so notable about revolutionary America is that both secular and religious thinkers adopted Enlightenment ideals.

Political liberty cannot arise in a vacuum, but depends on certain philosophic fundamentals. Above all, it depends on a respect for reason, for it is reason that liberty liberates. It is only because human beings can think and need to think to arrive at the true and the good that liberty is a value—which is precisely why every step in the direction of liberty was taken by a champion of reason.

Luther, for example, called reason “that clever whore,” and held that faith “wrings the neck of reason. . . . It holds to God’s Word: lets it be right and true, no matter how foolish and impossible it sounds.” (The Essential Luther, 20; W. T. Jones, Hobbes to Hume, 64) Unsurprisingly, when he turned to politics, his concern was not liberty, but submission and obedience to authority. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 12-19)

By contrast, Locke held that “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” Even revelation, he held, must be subjected to reason: reason must decide what counts as genuine revelation, it must be the tool that fixes the meaning of revelation, and if any supposed revelation conflicts with reason then it cannot be true, “[f]or faith can never convince us of anything, that contradicts our knowledge.” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.XIX.14; IV.XVIII.5-6.) It’s no accident that he became one of history’s greatest champions of liberty.

This is why, in the end, Christianity cannot claim credit for the rise of liberty. Christianity, as a doctrine, subordinates reason to faith and worldly happiness to obedience to God. To be sure, Christians have differed in how consistently they embraced Christianity’s other-worldly doctrine, but that’s just the point: it was only to the extent that particular Christians elevated reason and sought out the rational requirements of earthly flourishing that they became champions of liberty. It was not the teachings of revelation that opened the way for Locke and the Founders—it was the extent to which they used their minds to examine the facts of this world. Consistent Christianity is consistently anti-freedom.

It would be absurd to pretend a single essay (let alone a book review) could fully prove that. What I will say is that Mangalwadi’s approach to making the alternative argument is hopeless. He starts with a goal—to show that Protestants discovered liberty by studying their Bible—and then musters whatever facts (or “facts”) support his theory, while systematically ignoring any and all evidence that would counter it.

We can see that in three crucial points he makes about the development of political liberty:

1. The Hebrew Bible is the source of pro-liberty ideas

2. Athenian democracy was not a source of pro-liberty ideas

3. Protestant radicals invented modern liberty

Is the Hebrew Bible the Fountainhead of Political Liberty?

According to Mangalwadi, the story of freedom begins with the Bible.

The process of losing and recovering freedom recorded from Genesis through Chronicles, gave birth to political ideas that were received during the sixteenth-century European Reformation. They are the most important pillars of modern democracy. In Genesis, Abraham was told that he would become a great nation because he would teach God’s ways to his descendants. The giving of the Ten Commandments is recorded in the Bible’s second book—Exodus. Moses put that Law into the Ark of the Covenant and placed it at the very heart of the nation to make the point that durable freedom is possible only under the rule of God, the rule of law, and the rule of elders (representatives). (337)

Is Moses the original freedom fighter? It’s worth noting that in the NRSV translation, the word “freedom” appears in the Old Testament only once. Leviticus 19:20 states: “If a man has sexual relations with a woman who is a slave, designated for another man but not ransomed or given her freedom, an inquiry shall be held. They shall not be put to death, since she has not been freed.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of political freedom.

Indeed, while Mangalwadi claims that “Oppression and slavery” were “evil because they were contrary to all that God had intended for human beings made in his own image” (337), he ignores that the Old Testament is completely at home with slavery. It’s true that Moses led the Israelites out of slavery, but as political scientist Michael Walzer notes in In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible:

this experience did not lead Israelite legislators to abolish slavery. According to the covenantal and Deuteronomic codes, Hebrew slaves cannot be held longer than six years, a rule that effectively turns slavery into a form of limited indenture (Exodus 21:2–6; Deuteronomy 15:12–18). Nothing is said of foreign slaves, however, for whom the sabbatical year presumably brings no release. Leviticus is explicit in permitting the permanent enslavement of foreigners: “they shall be your bondmen forever” (25:46). (Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, 25)

Of course, the Greeks were also at home with slavery, and the leading American founders, while regarding the institution as morally odious, did not end it. On the other hand, they did not have the advantage of direct revelation from God; one would have hoped for more from the Almighty.

But it is not only on the issue of slavery that the Hebrew Bible is at odds with liberty. When we look at the content of Mosaic law, we do not find anything like a concern for individual rights and freedom. As I noted in an earlier essay, “The Jewish God, far from bestowing freedom on his followers, insists on the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, idolatry, and even cursing your parents.”

In Deuteronomy 13, for example, we are told:

If anyone secretly entices you—even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend—saying, ‘Let us go serve other gods,’ whom neither you nor your ancestors have known, any of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other, you must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion, and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them and afterward the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

In a similar vein, Leviticus 24 tells the story of a man who publicly curses God’s name during a quarrel, and is held “until the decision of the Lord should be made clear.” The Lord then makes his decision quite clear: “Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . let the whole congregation stone him. . . . One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death.”

The reason it took more than a millennium for Christians to formulate the concept of individual rights was not because they failed to read the Bible closely. Scrutinize the Bible as carefully as you’d like: you will never find the passage that announces an individual’s right to seek his own happiness free from force.

What about the Ten Commandments? Most of them are about religious obedience, not individual rights (God even manages to work in a tacit endorsement of slavery in Exodus 20:10). Only three of the Commandments—do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness—are compatible with individual rights, but these weren’t Jewish innovations. You can find them prohibited in the Code of Hammurabi and the laws of Solon. It does not take omniscience to know that a society cannot function if people are free to slaughter, pilfer, and deceive each other.

The Israelites objected to oppression by another people, but one tribe bristling at being enslaved by another tribe is not the same thing as endorsing individual freedom. The Israelites had no concept of individual rights. Neither, of course, did the Greeks. But they did make a crucial contribution to political liberty, which Mangalwadi completely distorts and evades.

Was Athenian Democracy a Failed Experiment in Mob Rule?

If reason and freedom go together, then it’s illustrative that the first society to elevate reason to top value was also the first to take major strides toward liberating the individual through its establishment of the first democracy. But according to Mangalwadi, “Greek democracies never worked for more than a few decades. They always degenerated into mob rule. Plato experienced Greek democracy as the social chaos that murdered his mentor Socrates” (336)

It is certainly true that the death of Socrates is an eloquent illustration of the difference between unchecked democracy and a government based on individual rights (though this is a point Mangalwadi has no right to make, since the regime he lionizes sentenced people to death for their speech, not as an unusual exception, but as a matter of principle).

But it’s totally false that Greek democracy broke down in a matter of decades. Athenian democracy was relatively stable for roughly a century: it flourished from the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE to the death of Pericles in 430, and was still mostly functional until 411. (Greek scholar Paul Cartledge argues in Democracy: A Life that, interruptions aside, Athenian democracy actually functioned until 322.) And during that time, what the Athenians achieved was something unprecedented and profound: in a world that had only known subjects, it introduced citizens—self-rulers who had unprecedented control over their political fate.

Contrast that with the Hebrew Bible, which describes patriarchies, theocracies, and messianic kingships, but never democracies, let alone rights-protecting republics. (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, 46-52) (Mangalwadi argues that if you squint really hard, the recurrent mention of biblical “elders” reveals that the Bible really advocated for representative democracy. But the Bible says virtually nothing about who these elders were, how they were chosen, and what role they played in governance. It certainly doesn’t say that they were elected by the people, or even had much say in important political decisions. See chapter 11 of Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible.)

No, the Greeks had nothing like the modern concept of individual rights. But it is a gross mischaracterization to treat Athenian democracy per se as mob rule. In law professor Brian Tamanaha’s On the Rule of Law, he writes of Athenian democracy:

The danger in a popular system of this kind is that democracies can be as tyrannical as absolute monarchies. Protecting against a populist tyranny, the law was accorded a status that set it apart, rendering it not easy to modify by the popular courts and legislative assemblies. The role of these courts and assemblies was to respect the law and act as guardians of the law, not to declare the law as they pleased. Seen as the reflection of a transcendent order that stands behind the lived community, law enjoyed a sanctified status. “Greek philosophers and statesmen, like others before and after them, were beguiled by the dream of putting on record some system of basic law which would be so perfectly adapted to the true interests and the actual social conditions of the society for which it was framed as to be venerated as eternal and unalterable.” The phrase “the laws of Solon,” a reference to the legendary monarch who in the sixth century BC established a body of laws and the popular courts, was used to stamp particular laws as ancient and untouchable. New laws could be passed, and old laws changed, but such enactments were subject to review. Proponents had to demonstrate the inadequacy of existing laws as a condition of passage, and all decrees of assemblies were examined for consistency with preexisting law. If legislation was found to be in contradiction with preexisting valid laws, the proponents of the legislation could be fined. The result of these various mechanisms and standards was to maintain a democratic system “while subordinating the principle of popular sovereignty to the principle of sovereignty of laws.” (Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 8)

Law, procedure, norms, and accountability all limited in practice the exercise of political power. This meant that, despite having no concept of individual rights, Athenians did have an unprecedented degree of de facto liberty, being free to do anything that was not expressly prohibited by law. (Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 10)

By historical standards, Athens took enormous strides toward political liberty—and did far more for its eventual triumph than Moses ever did.

Did Protestant Radicals Invent Freedom?

According to Mangalwadi, Christians basically ignored the Bible’s allegedly pro-freedom message for a millennium and a half, until the Reformation. It was then that the Huguenots—French Protestants (mostly Calvinists)—formulated the modern theory of liberty:

The Huguenots’ traumatic experience on Saint Bartholomew’s Day gave birth to three books that triggered a veritable revolution from the medieval form of government to the modern form of constitutional government. François Hotman, Theodore Beza, and possibly Philippe du Plessis-Mornay wrote the three treatises. The transition unleashed by these writings ensured that the rule of law and the rights of the people took precedence over the tyranny of monarchs and popes. The primacy of the law and the authority of the people were expressed in concrete institutions such as parliaments and courts that were no longer subject to the whims of kings. These three books, collectively referred to as the ‘Trilogy of Freedom,’ demonstrate the role the Bible played in giving birth to modern liberties. (345-346)

What’s so unfortunate about Mangalwadi’s treatment is that these thinkers actually deserve far more attention than they typically get in the story of liberty, and it is good to see them elevated in importance. But an honest examination of these thinkers and their influence reveals that Christianity was a barrier to the development of freedom—not the driving cause.

First, some context. By the sixteenth century, authoritarian Popes and Christian kings had ruled Western Europe for about a thousand years. In 1517, Martin Luther sparked the Reformation, which would break the Catholic Church’s monopoly. There was little reason to think this would lead to anything like political freedom. Both Luther and Calvin, for instance, supported the coercive suppression of heresy. Indeed, Calvin famously backed the execution of Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity, which Calvin’s leading disciple Theodore Beza—none other than the same Theodore Beza Mangalwadi cites as a founder of freedom—defended in his 1554 tract The Punishment of Heretics by the Civil Magistrate. (Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 72-82, 93-132.)

And, of course, the Reformation did not in fact lead to political freedom—certainly not in the short term. Instead, it helped spark Europe’s wars of religion, the deadliest in Europe’s history to that point, and the Counter-Reformation, which intensified the Inquisition’s war on free thought. The Enlightenment, as we’ve seen, was in many ways a reaction to the devastation unleashed by the Reformation.

This brings us to the Huguenots, and the major problem they were grappling with. On the one hand, they rightfully feared extermination by the French state. On the other hand, Protestants had inherited a doctrine from Luther and Calvin that demanded obedience to rulers, however tyrannical. We’ve seen how Luther rooted his opposition to political resistance in Romans 13; Calvin took a similar line.

“We are not only subject to the authority of princes who perform their office towards us uprightfully and faithfully as they ought, but also to the authority of all who, by whatever means, have got control of affairs, even though they perform not a whit of the princes’ office.” Calvin admits that this hard doctrine “does not so easily settle in men’s minds,” but this only prompts him to repeat it with greater emphasis. Even “a very wicked man utterly unworthy of all honour” must be “held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects” as “they would hold the best of kings if he were given to them.” The reason is that “they who rule unjustly and incompetently” have been raised up by God “to punish the wickedness of the people.” This means that even tyrants are deliberately ordained by God to fulfil his designs, and are not less “endowed with that holy majesty with which he has invested lawful power.” This in turn means that even if “we are cruelly tormented by a savage prince,” or “vexed for piety’s sake by one who is impious and sacrilegious,” the same hard lesson still applies: we are “not allowed to resist,” but must turn the other cheek, recognising that “no command has been given” to us except “to obey and suffer.” (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 194)

This was clearly suicidal, and as the wars of religion wore on, Protestant thought began evolving and thinkers struggled to develop a doctrine of resistance. In essence, what they were looking for was an argument that said a tyrannical king was not a legitimate ruler and could therefore be lawfully resisted. Importantly, that argument needed to have appeal to a wider constituency than French Protestants, who by themselves would not be able to take on the French state. According to Skinner:

The solution adopted by Beza, Mornay and the other leading Huguenots in the face of this dilemma was an obvious but nonetheless a paradoxical one: they turned to the scholastic Roman law traditions of radical constitutionalism. They rejected the characteristically Protestant tendency to suppose that God places all men in a condition of political subjection as a remedy for their sins. Instead they began to argue that the original and fundamental condition of the people must be one of natural liberty. This in turn enables them to abandon the orthodox Pauline contention that all the powers that be must be seen as directly ordained by God. Instead they inferred that any legitimate political society must originate in an act of free consent on the part of the whole populace. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 320)

Mornay, for example, makes something like a social contract argument for political authority. But whereas social contract theorists like Locke would propose a single contract at the foundation of society, Mornay proposes two. The first is a contract between God on the one side and the king and the people on the other side, through which the community becomes a church obligated to offer proper worship to God. The second is a contract between the king and the people, through which a state is created—a state where the king is bound to rule justly and the people are obligated to obey the king so long as he rules justly. As Mornay puts it:

The first covenant concerns an obligation to piety; the second concerns an obligation to justice. In the first, the king promises to serve God faithfully; in the second, to rule the people justly. The first obligates him to pursue God’s glory with everything he has; the second obligates him to advance the people’s welfare. The first carries an explicit condition: “If thou keep my Commandments.” The second carries its own: “If thou distribute Justice equally to every man.” (Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 133).

In both cases, then, the king’s authority is conditional. The religious contract implies that Christians have a right (indeed a duty) to resist a king who violates God’s law. The secular contract implies that people are bound to obedience only so long as they are under the protection of a just, lawful government. The king’s power was delegated to him from the people, and he continues to hold that power only with the people’s consent.

The problem is the two justifications are ultimately at odds. The religious justification entails a semi-theocratic regime, while the secular justification leans in the direction of genuine freedom.

According to Mornay’s secular justification, human beings are born into a state of natural liberty. “[H]uman beings naturally love freedom and hate being controlled. We are born more to lead than to follow, and we would never have willingly accepted being governed by others, surrendering what nature gave us.” Why, then, do human beings form political societies, which involves surrendering some of their natural liberty? Because “we expected some significant benefit in return.” Specifically, we expect our rulers to “uphold justice and defend by force of arms both the public order and individual citizens against harm and wrongdoing.” (Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 133). The king, therefore, far from being an all-powerful sovereign, is only an agent of the people, and if he threatens their life and liberty, they have a right to depose him. (This did not mean, as it did for Locke, that the people had a right to revolt against a tyrannical king. They can only exercise their right to depose him indirectly, through inferior magistrates.)

In very broad outlines, then, Mornay’s secular argument anticipates the viewpoint of Locke and the Founding Fathers. But it’s important not to exaggerate how pro-liberty Mornay is. Intellectual historian George Sabine is insistent that Mornay’s work

was in no sense a claim of popular rights inhering in every individual, nor did the Huguenot party from which it emanated stand for popular rights. It stood rather for the rights (or ancient privileges) of towns and provinces and classes against the leveling effect of royal power. The spirit of the Vindiciae was not democratic but aristocratic. Its rights were the rights of corporate bodies and not of individuals and its theory of representation contemplated the representation of corporations and not men. . . .

The author had no conception of a state which could abstain from making itself responsible for religious truth and purity of worship. In particular, its defense of the right to resist was not in the least an argument for popular government and the rights of man. (George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 383)

Perhaps that’s overstated.1 But it remains true that despite the important contribution of Huguenot thinkers to the idea of liberty, their ideas as formulated in the sixteenth century could not have produced the United States of America.

Equally important, their advances in a pro-liberty direction came from shedding distinctively religious arguments. As Skinner puts it:

With the publication of the major Huguenot treatises of the 1570s, Protestant political theory passes across a crucial conceptual divide. Hitherto even the most radical Calvinists had vindicated the lawfulness of resistance in terms of the paramount duty of the powers that be to uphold the true (that is, the Protestant) faith. But with Beza, Mornay and their followers, the idea that the preservation of religious uniformity constitutes the sole possible grounds for legitimate resistance is finally abandoned. The result is a fully political theory of revolution, founded on a recognisably modern, secularised thesis about the natural rights and original sovereignty of the people. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 338)

It was not radical Huguenots who discovered political liberty, but Enlightenment thinkers. Yes, Enlightenment thinkers were building on earlier traditions, but these traditions themselves were either pagan or involved Christian thinkers pulling away from Christian orthodoxy and from Christianity’s other-worldly orientation.

If Christians wish to argue otherwise, they will have to look to a better guide than Mangalwadi.

In a recent Twitter exchange, my claim that Christianity has contributed nothing positive to human civilization was countered with a recommendation: “There is a book titled The Book that Made Your World where the author goes into the impact of Christianity and the Bible on the world. It would challenge that statement.”

And so it would. Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book that Made Your World is one of countless books making the case that Christianity deserves credit for everything that is good in Western Civilization. It is not the best of these books—David Bently Hart’s Atheist Delusions and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual are more thoughtful and informed. It is also not the worst—here the sewers run too deep to itemize. But it is representative and covers more or less the entire territory of apologist claims.

The core claim is familiar: the choice we face is Christianity or nihilism—or, to use Mangalwadi’s favorite symbols: it’s Bach or Kurt Cobain. (His bizarre and error-riddled treatment of Nirvana’s lead singer is worthy of its own critique.) Christianity, Mangalwadi argues, is responsible for every positive value associated with the West: humanism, learning, science, freedom, progress, morality. To abandon the Bible is not to search for a rational foundation for these values, but to reject values as such. We can have the Bible and Bach—or we can reject the Bible and numb ourselves with the meaningless noise of a suicidal Buddhist (sic) junky.

So many commentators today are beating this drum that one would think the evidence is overwhelming and the argument is airtight. In reality, it’s a castle built on sand.

In this post, we’ll start with Mangalwadi’s first major claim: that Christianity can claim credit for discovering human dignity.

Did Christianity Discover Human Dignity?

What brought about the rise of the West? According to Mangalwadi, “My secular professors taught that the secret was the West’s ‘discovery’ of human dignity during the Renaissance. That is true. But they also taught that the Renaissance humanists discovered this concept in the Greek and Latin classics. That is a myth. Although classical writers held many noble ideals, the inherent value and dignity of each human being was not among them. This unique idea came from the Bible.” (59-60)

The idea of human dignity was not tucked away in some obscure biblical passage, says Mangalwadi, but follows directly from Genesis 1 (“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’”) and from the incarnation of Christ: “the incarnation was the ultimate proof of man’s dignity: of the possibility of man’s salvation, of a man or a woman becoming a friend and child of God.” (71)

But this creates a problem for Mangalwadi. If human dignity is front and center in the Bible, one would expect Christians to have noticed in relatively short order. But Mangalwadi claims that human dignity was a Renaissance discovery. How can we possibly account for it taking Christians 1,500 years to realize that human beings are valuable? Mangalwadi has an answer. “[T]he biblical view of man was buried under Europe’s pre-Christian paganism, the Greco-Roman cosmological worldview, and Islamic fatalism.” (66)

This is an astonishing claim. This means that Tertullian, Clement, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodore, Gregory the Great, Anselm, Abelard, Lombard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and an endless string of Popes were so blinded by pagan and Islamic thought that they did not grasp the plain meaning of the first book of the Bible and the whole of the Gospels. I have many criticisms of these thinkers, but that they did not understand Christianity isn’t one of them.

Why Christians Opposed Human Dignity

A more plausible explanation of the dignity time gap is that there is something in Christianity itself that is at odds with human dignity. But to get at that we would have to do something Mangalwadi does not do at all: look at what Christian thinkers actually said prior to the Renaissance. What we find is not an appeal to pagan and Islamic ideas, but to concepts central to Christianity: the Fall, sin, and grace.

Yes, thinkers such as Augustine held, man was created in God’s image—but pride led the first man to disobey God. “That one sin,” Augustine wrote, “was itself so great that by it, in one man, the whole of the human race was originally and, so to say, radically condemned. It cannot be pardoned and washed away except through ‘the one mediator between God and men, the Christ Jesus.’” (Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 290)

Original sin has rendered human beings incapable of acting without sin absent God’s grace—and we can do nothing to earn God’s grace. It is a gift he either bestows on us or doesn’t. Hence Augustine’s doctrine of predestination: “As the one who is supremely good, he made good use of evil deeds, for the damnation of those whom he had justly predestined to punishment and for the salvation of those whom he had kindly predestined to grace,” including, it must be noted, babies who died without baptism. (Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 297)

If human beings are fallen, incapable of choosing the good through their own volition, but instead helplessly dominated by sin, what becomes of human dignity? Should we be surprised when St. Benedict declares that a good Christian monk should tell himself, “I am a worm and not a man, a shame of men and an outcast of the people”? Should we be surprised when Bernard of Clairvaux claims that “Humility is a virtue by which a man has a low opinion of himself because he knows himself well”? (Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility and Pride, 30) Is not Thomas À Kempis correct when he insists that “He who knoweth himself well is vile in his own sight”? (Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.2.1)

The point is not that this is the “correct” interpretation of Christianity. The point is that it took Christian thinkers 1,500 years to discover the value of the individual, not because they were under the influence of pagans and Muslims, but because they followed the logic of central Christian doctrines.

Why Renaissance Thinkers Embraced Human Dignity

The question, then, is why Renaissance Christians veered in a different direction. Why did they stop viewing man as essentially powerless and sinful and instead conclude, as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola put it, that man is “with complete justice, considered and called a great miracle and a being worthy of all admiration”? (Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 3-5).

The traditional answer has been that Renaissance thinkers had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman writers and artists, leading to a rebirth of humanism. But this is precisely what Mangalwadi denies. “[T]he Renaissance writers quoted classical writers (more Romans than Greeks) to garnish their treatises on man. But they could not and did not derive their high view of man from the Grecco-Roman worldview. It was the Bible’s vision of what man was created to be, and saved to become, that became the commonsense view in the West.” (72)

How does he justify this claim? Mostly by referencing Charles Trinkaus’s 1970 study, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. According to Mangalwadi, “He concluded that although Renaissance humanists read, enjoyed, quoted, and promoted Greek and Roman classics and Islamic scholarship, their peculiar view of human dignity came out of the Bible in deliberate opposition to the (sic) Greek, Roman, and Islamic thought.” (67)

Allow me to say, I find this style of argumentation annoying: your key piece of evidence really should not consist of “go read this other book.” But if that is how you wish to proceed, you at least have an obligation to accurately characterize the book you cite, and to let the reader know how representative it is of the scholarly consensus. Mangalwadi does neither.

It is true that Trinkaus sees the Renaissance view of the dignity of man as rooted primarily in the Bible, but he does not claim this view was “in deliberate opposition” to classical thought. Instead, he argues that Renaissance humanists read classical authors within a Christian framework, using them to develop ideas about human dignity that they believed ultimately came from the Bible.

It is also true that Trinkaus’s conclusion has been incredibly influential, and yet most scholars believe that he understates how much the Renaissance marked a real shift from medieval views of man, and that the recovery of classical philosophy played a far greater role in shaping the Renaissance conception of human dignity than his account allows.

A more honest account of the Renaissance would acknowledge that, whatever led to its distinctive view of man, it cannot simply be “the Bible,” which for 1,500 years had led Christians to a very different view of man. At most, it was the Bible re-interpreted by thinkers engaging with the ideas and art and the classical world that sparked a sea change in the West’s attitude toward human nature.

Human Dignity Before the Renaissance

But that re-thinking actually began far earlier than Mangalwadi imagines. The literature here is vast, but Mangalwadi demonstrates no awareness of scholarly classics such as Walter Ullmann’s The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, Colin Morris’s The Discovery of the Individual: 1050 -1200, or R.W. Southern’s Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, who all date the emergence of humanism to as early as 1100—precisely the moment when the West rediscovered the works of antiquity.

Southern is worth quoting at length. He writes:

I have said that there can be no humanism without a strong sense of dignity and intelligibility of man and nature; and if God exists, the same qualities must characterize the relations of God with his creation. These phrases could almost be taken as a description of the programme of the medieval secular schools. These terms are rare in the eleventh century, but very common in the twelfth. They meant that man’s powers of reason and will, cultivated as they can be by study, give him a splendour which survives the effects of sin and degeneration. . . .

This view of the nature of man and his hopes for the future was based on man’s apparently unlimited capacity for knowledge. It may seem strange that scholars who had so recently emerged from an extremely pessimistic view of human capacities, and who believed that man’s faculties had been grievously impaired by sin, should rush to the other extreme and proclaim that everything, or almost everything, could be known. But in intellectual affairs almost all revolutions are violence, and this was no exception. Scholars discovered that there existed a scientific basis for optimism. They learnt from their sources that man’s affinity with every part of nature gives him the power to understand everything in nature; that his elements and humorous, and the influences playing upon his birth and development, are the raw materials for the whole universe. Hence man, being the epitome of the universe, is built to understand the universe. Despite the ravages of sin, he can still intellectually trace the primitive perfection of the creation and collaborate with God in its restoration.

The instrument of this collaboration with God in the regeneration of nature is reason. With comprehensive enthusiasm, the secular masters of the early twelfth century began to let fall such dicta as these: “The dignity of our mind is its capacity to know all things”; “We who have been endowed by nature with genius must seek through philosophy the stature of our primeval nature”; “In the solitude of this life the chief solace of our minds is the study of wisdom”; “We have joined together science and letters, that from this marriage there may come forth a free nation of philosophers.” These were ancient thoughts, but for the first time in many centuries we find men confident that all those things could be done and that nature could be known. Hence the future seemed bright. (R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, 39-41)

Two things should jump out from this excerpt: first, that Southern finds the deepest sources of human dignity in the elevation of reason to understand this world—an idea that came ultimately from the Greeks; second, that Christianity was a barrier to the reemergence of the idea of human dignity because of the centrality it placed on man’s nature as a sinful being.

Renaissance thinkers certainly read human dignity into the Bible, but they were reading the Bible through a lens that had been shaped for centuries by the ideals of antiquity, and by self-conscious attempts of earlier Christians to reconcile Christianity’s vision of man as fallen with the pagan view of man as capable.

What Is Human Dignity?

The pagans, to be clear, were not consistent on this front, nor did anyone in antiquity fully grasp the implications of human dignity. But neither, then, does Mangalwadi. As with most Christians who credit Christianity with discovery of human dignity, he conflates two incompatible claims:

1. That each human being has the right to exist for his own sake

2. That we have a duty to sacrifice ourselves to other human beings

That first claim is the foundation of individual rights—it holds that human beings are not born in bondage, that they are not servants to be sacrificed to God or society, but that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was the idea that led to the creation of the United States and that fueled modern progress.

But when Mangalwadi talks about “the inherent value and dignity of each human being,” he oscillates between referring to the West’s embrace of individual rights and between the Christian ideal of selfless service to others. Example:

Traveling through Africa and Asia, and especially seeing the work of Mother Teresa, the late British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge noted that faith in Christ’s incarnation had inspired many Christians to give up their comforts and risk their lives to serve the poorest of the poor. Even though Muggeridge was an atheist at the time, he observed that atheistic humanism had not inspired anyone to devote his or her life to serve the dying destitute of Calcutta.

The West became a humane civilization because it was founded on the precepts of a teacher who insisted that man was valuable. (75)

If what it means to regard human beings as valuable is that you must set aside your own happiness in order to “serve the dying destitute of Calcutta,” then Christianity can claim credit for the idea of human dignity. But that was hardly what America’s founders had in mind when they created a government dedicated to individual rights. For them, to treat someone with dignity was to treat him as a self-ruler: as a sovereign agent who could follow his own judgment and live his own life without bending the knee to either king or pope.

Does Christianity deserve credit for that? Stay tuned for the next installment, when we’ll look at Mangalwadi’s discussion of liberty.

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Let’s consider collectivism’s “warmth.”

Socialism, as a moral doctrine, holds that the individual exists to serve society. Historically, it was a response to the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—as interpreted through the prism of anti-Enlightenment philosophy inaugurated by Rousseau. Anti-Enlightenment thinkers declared that the French Revolution had revealed the bankruptcy of reason and individualism—and that the Industrial Revolution was revealing the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment’s political achievement, capitalism. The founding fathers of socialism—François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf, Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier—offered as a solution a new political ideal that would subordinate the individual to the group, liberate human beings from the self-interested pursuit of profit, and create a world of peace, brotherhood, and equality.

Each of these thinkers came at socialism in his own way. Babeuf, appalled by Robespierre’s betrayal of the working poor, launched one of the first explicitly communist movements, advocating total economic equality. Saint-Simon, more attuned to the needs of production and progress, envisioned a technocratic order led by scientists and industrialists, which he called the “New [secular] Christianity.” Fourier, more Romantic, imagined a society organized into self-sufficient communities devoted to cooperative living and the harmonious fulfillment of human passions. These three strands—revolutionary egalitarianism, technocratic modernism, and utopian romanticism—eventually would be combined with German philosophy and synthesized into a new socialist doctrine: Marxism.

Marx’s Nihilistic Theory

Whereas previous thinkers had tried to define and defend a political ideal, Marx does not claim to be an advocate for socialism. Instead, he claims that he is a scientist who has uncovered the laws governing history. To understand how history has evolved—and to divine how it will evolve—we have to understand the driving force of history: economics. As Engels explains:

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes in all social change and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. (Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 316.)

Mankind, according to Marx, begins in a state of hand-to-mouth existence. As a savage, he can gather and hunt, but he can produce no surplus over and above his immediate survival needs. That changes as he develops new tools and productive methods. The decisive moment, according to Engels, is the development of large-scale agriculture driven by the cattle-drawn plough, which “created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions.” (Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 56.) This great achievement unleashed a great evil: slavery.

When each individual could only produce enough to support his own family, a slave was of no value. But agricultural abundance enabled a division of labor—the slaves who produced, and the enslavers who lived off their produce. This was the beginning of private property, social inequality, and the class warfare that would characterize all of subsequent history. It was mankind’s original sin.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Each historical epoch is defined by an irresolvable conflict between those who own the means of production and those who do not. The owners constitute a ruling class, who exert control through the state and through ideologies that support their interests. This creates a more or less stable situation—for a time.

But, says Marx, “at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” New tools and technologies emerge that make the old ways of organizing work and ownership obsolete. The class that uses or controls the emerging technology becomes conscious of itself as a class and organizes, presenting its program as a cause that will advance the interests of society as a whole. The result is a revolution that propels history into its next epoch.

In Marx’s account, the shift from slavery to feudalism occurred as the Roman Empire declined and its slave-based economy could no longer sustain itself. As the empire expanded, it relied increasingly on the conquest of new territories to supply slaves and wealth. But when expansion stalled and external pressures mounted, the system began to break down. Large slave estates became less productive, urban trade declined, and the empire fragmented. In this vacuum, a new system emerged: landowners began granting protection and land use to peasants in exchange for labor and a share of their produce. These peasants were not slaves but serfs—legally bound to the land and to their lord. A new class dominated—a new class was oppressed.

Then came capitalism. Marx actually gives different accounts of the birth of capitalism, none of which is especially important. What is important—what Marx devoted his life to explaining—was the nature of capitalism and why it would eventually and inevitably give way to Communism.

Capitalism, for Marx, represents the conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat—between the class that owns the means of production and the workers who use them to produce—between capitalists and “wage slaves.”

Capitalism, Marx grants, has created unprecedented progress and wealth.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 477.)

But these achievements, Marx thinks, have come at a steep price. The source of all value, the cause of all these achievements, was the labor of the workers—and yet instead of rewarding them for their achievements, capitalism has left the proletariat alienated and exploited.

Christianity had explained human alienation through the story of the fall: through his original sin, man became cut off from God, “a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.” Marx secularizes the concept of alienation, but in his telling, alienation refers not to our separation from God—but to our separation from our work and the products of our work.

True humanity, for Marx, consists of the ability to exercise our creative powers without regard for our material needs, and to function as a part of a community bonded not by self-interest but by love. Under capitalism, however, the worker works, not in the manner of an artist but in the manner of a slave. He produces, not to express himself, but to secure his mere survival. Under the division of labor, he plays some small role in the creation of commodities that belong, not to him, but to the capitalist. These products are like foreign objects to him, and come to dominate him. “It is the same in religion,” says Marx. “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object.” Just as the worker becomes alienated from the products of his labor so he becomes alienated from the process of labor. “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.” (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 72-74.)

Alienation, for Marx, describes how the worker experiences work under capitalism; exploitation explains why the worker suffers alienation at the hands of the capitalist. Marx rejects the notion that the worker is exploited because he is paid less than his labor is worth. The worker, indeed, is not paid for his labor at all. Instead he is paid for his ability to labor—what Marx calls his labor power.

The value of the worker’s labor power is determined, not by how much the worker can produce, but by how much it costs to produce him, i.e., by the cost necessary to keep him and his family alive. This follows from Marx’s labor theory of value: the theory that the value of a commodity is determined by the labor time required to produce it. But labor power has a unique feature that makes it possible for the capitalist to profit from this transaction: each worker is capable of producing more than is required for his own subsistence. Everything a worker produces beyond what is necessary for his family’s survival represents surplus value—and this surplus value represents profits for the capitalist.

Here’s how this works. A capitalist hires you for a day’s work. Everything you produce belongs to the capitalist. In six hours, you produce enough to keep yourself and your family alive for the day. But your working day isn’t over. Everything you produce in the hours that follow also belongs to the capitalist—and it is this unpaid labor that generates his profit. He has not paid you less than your labor power is worth—and yet you are exploited because he owns and profits from your surplus value.

All of this, it must be said, is false. The economics profession would come to reject the labor theory of value with the so-called marginal revolution of the 1870s, and Marx’s broader economic theory would come under withering critique by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in 1896. Capitalists, economists would argue, don’t profit by exploiting workers, but by entrepreneurial risk-taking and acting as the guiding intelligence directing and coordinating productive pursuits. As part of those pursuits, they hire and pay workers, and competition for labor leads capitalists to pay wages aligned with their best estimate of a worker’s marginal productivity. The more productive workers are, the more money they’ll make. If Marx can be excused for not anticipating these insights, what he cannot be excused for is evading the fact that working class wages at the time he was writing were not stuck at subsistence—they were rising.

Marx published the first edition of Capital in 1867. In the two decades preceding the publication, average wages in England had risen by 30 percent, and would continue to climb. (John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics, p. 133.) Damningly, Marx tried to conceal evidence of the increasing prosperity workers were enjoying. As Leszek Kolakowski notes in his book Main Currents of Marxism, “Bertram Wolfe has pointed out that in the first edition of Capital various statistics are brought down to 1865 or 1866, but those for the movement of wages stop at 1850; in the second edition (1873) the statistics are brought up to date, again with the exception of those on wages, which had failed to bear out the impoverishment theory.” (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 238.)

Ultimately, the evidence was so overwhelming that capitalism improved the material well-being of workers that Marx was forced to amend his claim that capitalism would keep them at the level of bare subsistence. Instead, he damned capitalism for its relative impoverishment of workers and the spiritual degradation it supposedly inflicted: workers were growing more prosperous under capitalism, but not as quickly as the capitalists—and that prosperity did nothing to quell their alienation.

In any case, said Marx, capitalism faced other challenges that rendered it unsustainable. Economist Thomas Sowell summarizes Marx’s view:

The historic role of capitalism is that it creates the economic preconditions of socialism and communism. . . . But although this productive potential was created by capitalism, it could not be utilized for egalitarian and humanitarian purposes under a system which Marx and Engels saw as funneling its benefits to a few capitalists, while keeping the workers overworked despite labour-saving machinery. This made it desirable, from their perspective, to change to a collectivized economy and society. What made it necessary was that capitalism was inherently incapable of continuing as it was indefinitely. Its own inner stresses—“internal contradictions” in Hegelian language—would metamorphose it into a new social system. (Thomas Sowell, Marxism, pp. 71-72.)

What were the “internal contradictions” that would cause capitalism to self-destruct? Just as capitalism allegedly immiserated workers, it also thrust more and more bourgeoisie into the working class as larger capitalists outcompeted smaller ones. “One capitalist,” says Marx, “always kills many.” Meanwhile, the capitalists operating under capitalism’s “anarchy of production” would struggle to produce products in the right proportions, unleashing recurrent economic crises that “put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 437, 478; Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 327.)

For a long time, Marx and Engels believed that it was just such a crisis that would unleash a Communist revolution. Alas, the revolution did not come and Marx would later lose confidence that crises would unleash a Communist revolution. But he did not lose faith that capitalism would ultimately self-destruct and the proletariat would revolt, seize political power, and abolish private ownership of the means of production. “For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation,” he told the Communist League. “[N]ot the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 505.) It would, Marx insisted, be a violent revolution. It had to be because the bourgeoisie would not go down without a fight.

Above all things, the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, the bourgeois endeavours to allay the storm, and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. Their actions must be so aimed as to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but the leadership of them taken in hand. (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 507.)

This bloody revolution would unfold in two phases. First would come the socialist phase of the revolution, where a dictatorship of the proletariat would take over the means of production and deploy physical force to tear down the former ruling classes. In this initial phase, workers will be rewarded according to their productive ability. Ultimately, however, rewarding people according to their ability was a “defect” resulting from the fact that the newly emerging Communist society had emerged from capitalism and was “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Only in the “higher” phase, after the abolition not only of private property but of the entire division of labor, can “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” (The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 529-531.)

For all the thousands of pages Marx wrote about the evils of capitalism, he had virtually nothing to say about how a Communist society would function. In urging the proletariat to wage a bloody war to “expropriate the expropriators” he offered no positive guidance on what kind of society they ought to create. Production would be centrally planned by the state (now labeled an “administration of things”), but how would that planning work and how would it be enforced? On these crucial questions Marx was utterly silent. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, and Pol Pot would have to answer them on their own.

Marx’s silence on these issues is no accident. It follows from his driving motive. His aim was not to build, but to tear down. Not to create a Communist utopia, but to smash the immoral system the Enlightenment had created. Marxism is an essentially nihilistic doctrine. “[T]he theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 484.) Marx saw capitalism, the system of private property, as irredeemably immoral and the goal of everything he wrote was to burn it to the ground.

Marx’s Nihilistic Motive

Marx himself denied that he was offering a moral critique of capitalism. Moral concepts like “justice,” he says, are part of the ideological superstructure of society. Nevertheless, he makes it abundantly clear that what he objects to in capitalism is that it is the system of self-interest, and that Communism’s virtue is precisely that it replaces self-interest with the collectivist ideal of self-sacrifice.

This is spelled out in one of his earliest and most controversial works, On the Jewish Question. On the Jewish Question was written in response to debates among German intellectuals during the 1840s over civil rights and the role of religion in the modern state, particularly concerning whether Jews should be granted full political emancipation. It was prompted specifically by an argument from Marx’s early mentor, Bruno Bauer, that Jews must abandon their religion to achieve emancipation. Marx, despite his Jewish origins, was not all that interested in the fate of the Jews. The real goal of his piece was to offer a broader critique of Enlightenment freedom and capitalism.

The Jew, said Marx, represented selfishness and greed. “What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 48.) But—and this was Marx’s real point—those are precisely the characteristics that define capitalism.

“Let us consider,” he says, “the so-called rights of man.” The right to liberty? It is, Marx says, founded, not “upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man.” Enlightenment liberty meant you could deal with others voluntarily or go your own way. “It is,” and Marx means this damningly, “the right of such separation.” The right to property? That, says Marx, is “the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will: without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest.” The right to political equality? It is the right “that every man is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad.” And so: “None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, as an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 40-43.)

In establishing egoistic rights as the foundation of the social system, capitalism unleashed selfishness: its most conspicuous manifestation was the profit motive. “The god of practical need and self-interest is money.”

Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.

He concludes: “The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 50.) The question, then, is not whether to grant political emancipation to the Jew, but whether to achieve true human emancipation by obliterating the evil the Jew represents: capitalism.

If the evil of capitalism, for Marx, is that it protects the right of individuals to pursue their own happiness, including their own material abundance, then the great virtue of collectivism is that it eliminates self-interest and dispenses with rewards on the basis, not of achievement, but need.

To say that Marx is a collectivist is not to say that he openly called for extinguishing individuality and turning human beings into anonymous cogs in the machine. In his nirvana, he insisted that the individual could exercise his creativity to its full capacity. Under capitalism I am forced to specialize in order to earn my living. But under communism I will no longer have to work in order to live, and can instead develop all of my personal aptitudes according to my whim: a Communist society “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” (Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 53.)

Communism, Marx protested, won’t obliterate the individual but will instead lead the individual to equate his own interests with those of society. Here Marx was not regurgitating Adam Smith’s conception of enlightened self-interest, where the social system will channel my selfishness into the public interest. For Marx, the individual will serve the group because he fully identifies his interests with the group. He will not have to sacrifice himself for society because there will be no division in his mind between what he wants from life and what’s good for society. “Contrary to views of the liberal Enlightenment,” writes Kolakowski,

social harmony is to be sought not by a legislative reform that will reconcile the egoism of each individual with the collective interest, but by removing the causes of antagonism. The individual will absorb society into himself: thanks to de-alienation, he will recognize humanity as his own internalized nature. Voluntary solidarity, not compulsion or the legal regulation of interests, will ensure the smooth harmony of human relations. (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 147)

The reality, however, was that Marx’s vision could only be achieved by compulsion. Insofar as an individual does not want to serve society, does not want to sacrifice his property, does not want to be rewarded for his need but his achievement, he is left without the protection of individual rights. And when he objects to the commissar nationalizing his business or throwing him in a gulag, he will be told: your true interests are the interests of society—you say you are being forced, but you are being forced to be free!

What would this collectivist “freedom” lead to in practice?

Marxism’s Nihilistic Practice

Marx’s first success was also his first failure: the first Communist state would arise, not out of the ashes of capitalism, but in the backwards, semi-feudal autocracy of Russia. Nor did it emerge from a proletariat uprising, but from a daring putsch by a vanguard of middle class intellectuals. Its leader was a bourgeois revolutionary from Simbirsk, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to history as Lenin.

Lenin was a devout Marxist. Though he would adapt Marx’s doctrines to fit the conditions of Russia and the needs of his revolution, he saw himself and his movement as the only truly orthodox school of Marxism. The question is not whether he was right, any more than the question is whether Luther or the Catholic Church represented “true” Christianity. All religions—including secularized religions—are open to interpretation, and Lenin could find the justification for his doctrines and acts in Marx just as easily as could his Menshevik opponents. The question is what he sought to justify—and this was every essential of the Marxist program: a revolution to tear down the bourgeoisie, eliminate private property, and establish Communism.

Lenin recognized that a Communist revolution would require violence. “Revolutions,” he said, “are festivals of the oppressed and exploited. . . . We shall be traitors to and betrayers of the revolution if we do not use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardour to wage a ruthless and self-sacrificing struggle for the direct and decisive path.” That path consisted of establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” led by Lenin, of course, where the proletariat would enjoy “unlimited power, based on force, and not on law.” Socialism, he insisted, “can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie.” (James Ryan, Lenin’s Terror, p. 58.)

From the start, the Bolsheviks practiced what Lenin preached. One of Lenin’s first actions upon seizing power was to found the Cheka, secret police unrestrained by law who could do his bidding, which consisted of smashing any threat to Bolshevik power, whether it be state employees refusing to work for the new government, “class enemies” guilty of the crime of prosperity, or any worker or peasant unwilling to serve the state. In this, the Bolsheviks were inspired by the French Revolution’s Jacobin Terror. “Not only prison awaits our enemies,” said leading Bolshevik Leon Trotsky near the end of 1917, “but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 59.)

The Terror would come, and it would kill upwards of 200,000. But the Russian Revolution was not to be a replay of the French Revolution. The French Revolutionaries had been divided about what they would build once they tore down the Old Regime. The Bolsheviks had no doubt: they were building Communism. The first glimpse of what that meant in practice came with the so-called War Communism of 1918 to 1921.

With War Communism, Lenin anticipated the economic system Stalin was to build in the 1930s. The Bolsheviks nationalized virtually every private business, sought to ban private trade and collectivize agriculture, and even flirted with abolishing money and replacing it with a system of rationing. They envisioned an economy run like a military, with workers conscripted into regiments of laborers. This, they insisted, would allow Communism to outperform capitalism, since conscripted labor directed from above would replace the chaos of the market with the discipline of the state. But wouldn’t free workers seeking their own prosperity and happiness outperform slave labor? “If this is so,” Trotsky said, “then you can put a cross over Socialism.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 722-723.)

In fact, the results were disastrous. Productivity collapsed, hordes fled the cities, and workers went on strike in droves. The Bolsheviks responded by arresting and shooting the strikers, but that could not erase the fact that their policies had brought factories to a standstill and left millions hungry. By the end of 1920, writes historian Orlando Figes, “even those on the first-class ration were receiving only just enough to slow down the rate of their starvation. Thirty million people were being fed, or rather underfed, by the state system. Most of the urban population depended largely on work-place canteens, where the daily fare was gruel and gristle. Yet such were the trials of finding a canteen that was open, and then of standing in line for its meagre offerings, that more energy was probably wasted doing all this than was gained from the actual meal.” But, Figes notes, the Bolsheviks did have one success they could trumpet. “If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own—and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 727, 522.)

Facing unrest in the cities and outright rebellion in the country, the Bolsheviks risked losing their grip on power. Lenin responded by calling on the only force capable of restoring some measure of prosperity to Russia: capitalism. In March 1921, he announced his “New Economic Policy.” The NEP was hardly full capitalism, but by reintroducing money, denationalizing smaller enterprises, taxing grain instead of confiscating it, liberating peasants to sell their surplus grain on the market, and legalizing private exchange more broadly, a country on the verge of collapse was saved from utter ruin. The activist writer Emma Goldberg observed that, “The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place. Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 771)

The NEP, however, came too late to stave off a brutal famine that hit in 1921 and lasted through the following year. (The Soviet regime was only saved thanks to support from American humanitarians and American taxpayers.) But by 1924 the Soviet state was stable and by 1926 production levels reached peaks not seen since before the first World War. But the NEP was untenable as a permanent solution. The Bolsheviks had seized power in order to establish Communism, not some bastardized mixture of capitalism and socialism, and it was only the Communist ideal that justified their iron rule. Ultimately, they would have to change course. With the death of Lenin in 1924, that task would fall to his successor, Joseph Stalin.

Stalin’s economic program had two pillars: rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. Rapid industrialization would lead to the wealth needed to establish Communism’s economic and military superiority—forced collectivization of agriculture would provide the state with the cheap food and exports necessary to fuel industrialization. Both reflected a deeper commitment to replacing the free market, such as it was in Soviet Russia, with central planning.

As of 1928, efforts at voluntary collectivization were an embarrassment: collective farming enterprises worked only 1 percent of the Soviet Union’s arable land. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 10.) Driving the peasants onto state-controlled communal farms would require an iron fist and piles of corpses—justified in the name of a great cause: class warfare.

The targeted class, in this case, was the so-called kulaks—allegedly any well-to-do farmer, but in reality any peasant who was not utterly destitute or who offered resistance to collectivization. Stalin called for “the eradication of all kulak tendencies and the elimination of the kulaks as a class” and sent 25,000 party activists into the country to liquidate the kulaks and drive the peasantry onto collective farms. In practice, this meant literally stealing the clothes off the backs of “kulaks,” along with anything else of value, from water pitchers to babies’ pillows. Reports compiled by the secret police spoke of plunder, rape, and power lust by the so-called 25,000ers. As one 25,000er put it: “If I command it, you must do it, whether to jump into water or fire, otherwise it’s a bullet in the forehead.” (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 37; The Black Book of Communism, p. 148.) Years later, a Soviet defector, Victor Kravchenko, would recall:

What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been . . . left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital . . .

The most terrifying sights were little children with skeleton limbs . . . Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces . . . Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their facies and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless. (Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief, p. 50.)

Anyone labeled a kulak, usually for resisting this barbarism, was deported to a Soviet gulag—at least two million people, with hundreds of thousands dying while being shipped to the far reaches of the regime. But the true horror would reveal itself in the Great Famine produced by Stalin’s collectivization campaign.

As Stalin drove peasants onto collectivized farms, he became increasingly frustrated by the failure of these farms to meet their production targets. In reality, the main problem was that the state was demanding an increasing share of what the peasants produced—from the 15 to 20 percent the peasants had willingly sold during the days of the NEP to 30 percent, 40 percent, or even more in some areas. Stalin, however, concluded that the peasants were concealing food, and demanded the state take its quota without concern for whether they would have enough to feed their animals, feed themselves, and replenish their stock seed for the next harvest. (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, p. 199; The Black Book of Communism, pp. 160-161.)

The suffering triggered by the Great Famine of 1932-1933 is truly beyond comprehension. As many as 70 million Soviets would face the prospect of starvation. Roads were littered with human corpses, and desperate parents would abandon their children in cities before returning to the countryside to starve. In Kharkiv, the Italian consul reported that people on the verge of death “are moved out in goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they can die out of sight.” (The Black Book of Communism, pp. 164-165; Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 122.)

Cannibalism became common. Sometimes the recently deceased would be robbed of their organs. In other cases, the cannibals didn’t wait for their victims to die. According to historian Stephen Kotkin, “Reports on cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it. The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: ‘This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.’” (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 122.)

All told, roughly six million people perished in the famine, and millions more came close to starvation. But from the perspective of the Communist leaders, forced collectivization and the famine it produced were a success. By 1936, 90 percent of peasant households were collectivized. By the standards of Communism—by the standards of abolishing self-interest, the profit-motive, private property, capitalism—this was indeed a success.

Even here, however, Communism revealed its bankruptcy: the Soviet regime reluctantly agreed to allow peasants to farm small individual plots for themselves, and this small touch of capitalism turned out to be dramatically more productive than the collectivized farms. In 1937, these plots amounted to about 5 percent of cultivated land and yet produced around 25 percent of the Soviet regime’s food. (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, p. 200.)

As for industrialization, the Soviet Union did manage to industrialize: the 1930s saw the creation of steel mills and coal mines and oil wells and electrical plants and heavy equipment factories. Even these achievements, such as they were, were not the achievements of socialism, but copies of Western achievements. The Soviets produced inferior copies of Western products using inferior copies of Western factories, with none of it translating into a higher standard of living for Soviet citizens.

How could it be otherwise? There was no incentive for workers to produce, let alone invent. As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 339.)

Ultimately, Stalin found that the only way to extract some productivity out of the workforce was to end the Marxist policy of egalitarian wages and threaten laggards with the gulag. But this was hardly enough to unleash the forces of self-interest. Instead, Stalin preached the necessity of sacrifice: the worker must sacrifice for a future where the Soviet Union would surpass the United States. But American progress had not been paid for in sacrifices—at each step, capitalism lifted workers to greater and greater heights while building a better and better future. The Communists, by contrast, had to revert to the old Christian formula. The Christians vowed that sacrifice today would lead to happiness beyond the grave—Stalin vowed that sacrifice today would lead to earthly prosperity someday.

But as with Christianity, while the sacrifices were real, the rewards were not. Crash industrialization was not followed by prosperity—it was followed by the Great Terror, a mass murder campaign that took more than 600,000 lives and left the Gulags overflowing.

The Poverty of Communism

Understandably, atrocities like the Great Famine and the Great Terror overshadow the much more widespread and much more enduring consequences of Marxism on the Soviet population. But those consequences cannot be glossed over. Stalin’s frenzied murder spree came to an end—the suffering of Soviet citizens did not. Trapped in a hell where they were not free to think and produce, hundreds of millions of people lived and died in an inhuman system.

It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. Capitalist business leaders make decisions based on profit—a market signal that tells them whether their actions are genuinely valuable to other people in the economy. Communist central planners had no way of judging whether projects were valuable. Their five year plans were inevitably based, not on profit, but on output, leading to such perversities as oil workers digging shallow holes that allowed them to meet their quota for “meters drilled” while inevitably producing no oil, and a shoe factory that produced boys’ shoes rather than men’s in order to meet its shoe quota in the face of a limited supply of leather. One Soviet cartoon depicted a factory meeting its nail quota—measured in weight—by producing a single giant nail. (Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette, Meltdown, p. 10, 15.)

Such absurdities were laughable. The results for everyday Russians were not. They lived in cramped apartments with uneven floors and collapsing roofs. They often weathered the bitter cold without heat and counted themselves fortunate if they had access to electricity some of the time. They spent their lives waiting in line for half spoiled vegetables and (if they were lucky) decaying meat; they would get into fights with other customers over soap and shampoo; goods were so dear that people would jump into a line before bothering to ask what the line was for. Eventually, TVs became widespread, but Russian TVs were so shoddy that it was not uncommon for them to burst into flames. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that, vodka and oil aside, the Soviet economy had been stagnant for twenty years. Decades after an earlier Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told the West, “We will bury you,” an American welfare mother enjoyed more income in a month than the typical Soviet worker earned in a year. (David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith, p. 99.)

As the Bolshevik’s sorry record of brutality and privation became well known and undeniable, the champions of Marxism declared, “That’s not real Communism. Real Communism has never been tried.” It was not tried in Communist China, where 65 million were left dead. It was not tried in Vietnam, where one million were left dead. It was not tried in Cambodia, where two million were left dead. It was not tried in North Korea, Eastern Europe, or Latin America, or Africa, or Afghanistan, where millions more were starved and murdered by “not real Communism.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 4.)

And yet Communism was tried in each and every one of these cases because there is only one way to implement collectivism: whether Communists come into power through revolution or through the ballot box, the only way to create a society based on the moral principle that the individual must serve the group is to force recalcitrant individuals to serve and sacrifice for the group. The only way to get people to surrender their property is to expropriate their property. The only way to enforce a five-year plan is with a five-year prison sentence (or a death sentence). Marx had said that the Communist program could be summed up in the sentence “Abolition of private property.” That program was put to the test and, for anyone whose moral goal is human flourishing, it failed that test again and again and again. Marx had named his moral goal as, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” What could such a formula possibly mean in practice except the destruction of ability and the proliferation of need?

Mamdani wants to talk about the “warmth of collectivism”? Let him reckon with the reality.

[S]horn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve.

What greater victory could you hand to the postliberals, national conservatives, neo-monarchists, and sundry racists swarming like flies around the remnants of the American experiment than to declare that human equality depends on blind belief, and that the rational, scientific conclusion is that some are born to rule others?

Yet Soloveichik’s claim is historically and philosophically bankrupt.

Point 1: Biblical thinkers were not the first to champion human equality

It’s true that most Greek and Roman thinkers denied human equality. Aristotle famously defended the notion that some were natural slaves. But it’s nowhere near true that the Greeks and Romans had nothing to offer those thinking about political equality.

The Greeks pioneered the first democracies, which regarded Greek citizens of the polis as self-rulers rather than subjects. It was obviously not a universal notion of equality, denying equal standing to women, slaves, non-Greeks, and even metics. But the notion that human beings could govern themselves rather than be subjected to an unaccountable ruler was a profound achievement that opened the possibility that all human beings are properly regarded as free and equal self-rulers.

But that’s not all. The Stoics—who in most respects pioneered the most irrational, poisonous philosophy of antiquity—nevertheless grasped that all human beings were capable of living by reason and articulated a more universal conception of morality. Cicero captured the Stoic position best, insisting:

For there is nothing so similar one-to-one, so equal, as all persons are among ourselves. But if the perverting of habits and the vanity of opinions did not twist weak minds and bend them in whatever direction they had begun, no one would be so similar to himself as all persons would be to all persons. And so whatever the definition of human being is, one definition applies to all persons. That is enough of an argument that there is no dissimilarity within the species; if there were, no one definition would encompass all. And of course reason, by which alone we excel the beasts, through which we are effective in [drawing] inferences, through which we prove, disprove, discuss, demonstrate something, make conclusions—it certainly is in common, differing in education, while decidedly equal in the capacity to learn. For the same things are grasped by the senses of all persons; and the things that move the senses move them in the same way in all persons; and the things that are imprinted upon minds, about which I spoke before, the rudimentary conceptions, are imprinted similarly upon all persons; and speech, the interpreter of the mind, differs in words but is congruent in thoughts. There is no one of any nation who cannot arrive at virtue when he has found a leader.

Morally and politically, the Stoics held, human beings are equal in that we all share the capacity of reason. We are therefore properly bound by the same moral and political law, which they called ius naturale or natural law. This was hardly a full theory of political equality and individual rights, but it in no way amounted to what Soloveichik calls “a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve.”

Point 2: Biblical thinkers opposed political equality for two-thousand years

If the Greeks pioneered democratic self-rule and the Stoics came to see rationality as the foundation for human equality, what did the Bible offer?

As political scientist (and self-described “believing and practicing Catholic”) Robert Kraynak catalogs in his book Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, for most of history, Christianity was illiberal and undemocratic.

The Old Testament, Kraynak points out, offers no model of a liberal democratic regime rooted in political equality. There are patriarchal regimes, theocratic regimes, and kingships, but nothing approaching even the primitive democracies of Greece. The “divine law revealed to Moses,” he quips, is “the Ten Commandments,” not “the Ten Bill of Rights.” The Jewish God, far from bestowing freedom on his followers, insists on the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, idolatry, and even cursing your parents. (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, pp. 47-49)

The New Testament, by contrast, is essentially apolitical because it is essentially other-worldly. Jesus is concerned with outlining our duties to God, not the state’s obligations to us. Indeed, it is we who are obliged to obey the state.

In the Epistles and Book of Acts, Christ’s distinction between duties to God and duties to Caesar provides support for most earthly governments, regardless of their structure. According to Paul and Peter, the Roman emperor is a human authority instituted by God to restrain man’s sinful nature, requiring conscientious obedience, though the Book of Acts adds the qualification than when the human authority conflicts with God’s law “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). A further refinement of the Christian attitude to political authority is Paul’s notion of Christian freedom. Yet, as Paul indicates, Christian freedom and political obedience to Caesar are compatible with each other because true freedom is inner freedom—the mastery of one’s sinful desires by having the spirit triumph over the flesh and the emancipation of Christians from the obligations of the Mosaic law in favor of Christ’s free gift of grace. Christian freedom in these senses is a moral and spiritual concept, and it is compatible with obedience to external political authority, even with political oppression. (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, p. 53)

What about the Bible’s insistence that we are created in the image of God, which has often been invoked as the basis for political equality? It is of course possible, once the concept of political equality has been discovered, to read it back into the Bible—what viewpoint hasn’t been read into it? But that is not how the Bible was read prior to the Enlightenment.

That we were made in the image of God meant, for the earliest interpreters, that human beings possess a special relationship with God and as a result, a spiritual dignity. But, Kraynak observes, this “permits and even requires different degrees of dignity in the created and fallen world. . . . [O]bedience to emperors and masters, who are a part of the fallen world, . . . does not violate the dignity of the Christian believer because true dignity lies in the possession of an immortal soul and interior freedom.” (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, p. 61)

The Bible didn’t mandate that its followers embrace political equality—and for most of history, societies rooted in the Bible have emphatically rejected political equality.

Take the issue of slavery, the ultimate case of declaring that “there were those destined to rule and others born to serve.”

Prior to the Enlightenment, virtually no one questioned the morality of slavery. This seems utterly incomprehensible to us today, but that is precisely because we live in a post-Enlightenment civilization. “In a hierarchical world,” notes one scholar, “where various degrees of restraint on liberties seemed natural, slavery aroused no special opprobrium, no particular abhorrence.” (Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 4, p. 88)

Christianity certainly was no countervailing force. Prior to the Enlightenment, Christian clergy would sometimes encourage manumission of slaves, and they were sometimes successful. But most Christians accepted slavery and the Church itself owned slaves. Isidore of Seville attributed slavery to divine providence: it was, he insisted, punishment for original sin.

Though Christians upheld the spiritual equality of individuals, that did not translate into support for earthly equality. In this fallen world, man’s sinful nature could only be brought under control by a social hierarchy where each individual was answerable to the ranks above him. The slave answered to his master, his master answered to his ruler, and the ruler answered to God. If in some spiritual sense a slave was equal to his master, on Earth he was morally obliged to bow his head and obey. As the eminent British Protestant Morgan Godwyn explained in 1680:

It [Christianity] established the authority of masters over their servants and slaves . . . exacting the strictest fidelity . . . requiring service with singleness of heart, as unto the Lord. . . . And so far it is from encouraging resistance, that it allows them not the liberty of gainsaying, or making undutiful replies to their masters. And referring them to future recompense in Heaven, for their faithful service done to them upon Earth. (Quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, pp. 204-205.)

But didn’t slavery make a mockery of the Golden Rule? Not in the least. “[B]oth Catholics and Protestants,” historian David Brion Davis observes, “were able to reconcile slavery with the Golden Rule by piously affirming that masters should treat their bondsmen as they themselves would be treated, should they have the misfortune of becoming slaves.” (David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, pp. 308.)

It was only after the Enlightenment that political equality became a defining ideal, helping to unleash a burgeoning abolitionist movement. And it took another century of Christian defenses of slavery before America was able to end the institution.

Point 3: Political equality is an Enlightenment achievement

It is astonishing to find that in Soloveichik’s entire exploration of the ideas that fueled the American Revolution, he does not mention the Enlightenment once. And yet it was Enlightenment thinkers who were the first to articulate a full defense of political equality.

It was Locke, above all, who championed political equality as a foundational principle, and it is notable that he first did so in a polemic directed at a Christian opponent of equality: Sir Robert Filmer.

In Locke’s First Treatise, he makes an argument for political equality rooted in Scripture (appropriate given that Filmer’s defense of the divine right of kings is rooted in an appeal to Scripture). But what’s revealing is how Locke uses Scripture. As political scientist Thomas Pangle explains:

Locke is after the divine right of kings, but he is also after bigger game. Behind the more or less respectable screen of an assault on Filmer, Locke dissects the Bible—revealing what he regards as the absurdity and inhumanity of its authentic teaching, while showing the way to a new, “reasonable” reading (i.e., rhetorical exploitation), in the service of a new, reasonable conception of nature’s God. (Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 135)

Locke’s method of biblical interpretation, in other words, is to say that we must read the Bible in the light of reason. If reason leads us to the conclusion that human beings are politically equal, then it cannot be the case that the Bible opposes political equality. Reason, then, is primary: it sets the terms for how we read the Bible—the Bible does not set the terms for what we conclude is true. “By proceeding in this way,” Pangle continues, “he is able to speak of the Bible always in terms of the highest respect while quietly but unmistakably demonstrating how grotesquely the Bible must be stretched in order to make it accord with the natural light of reason.” (Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 136)

What’s crucial, then, is not that Locke offers religious reasons for embracing human equality, but that he offers rational, earthly reasons. In the state of nature, Locke maintains, all humans are equally free and independent because no one is born with natural authority over another; political subordination therefore cannot be presumed but must be justified. This equality follows from the fact that all humans share the same rational capacities and are subject to the same law of nature, which obliges everyone equally not to harm others in their life, liberty, or possessions.

Individuals may differ in intelligence and ability, on this view, but these differences in degree do not amount to a difference in kind. As a result, no one is born with an inherent right to rule over others, and no one is born with a duty to serve and obey. As Jefferson would put it, “Because Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” Human beings are born equally free.

Revealingly, when the Founding Fathers gestured at the foundations of equality, they did not cite Scripture, but pointed to the same earthly facts as Locke. John Dickinson, for example, writes that:

Nature has made us all of the same species, all equal, all free and independent of each other; and was willing that those, on whom she has bestowed the same faculties, should have all the same rights. It is therefore beyond doubt that in this primitive state of nature, no man has of himself an original right of commanding others, or any title to sovereignty. (Quoted in Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, p. 89.)

To say, then, that equality rests on faith is not merely false—it is a repudiation of the American achievement itself. The Founders did not stake the republic on revelation or submission, but on facts about human nature accessible to reason: that human beings are rational agents, capable of self-government, lacking any natural title to rule one another, and therefore entitled to live as equals under a law that binds all.

This was not an inheritance from the Bible, nor a gift of tradition, but a radical Enlightenment discovery that broke decisively with the ancient and Christian worlds alike. To deny this is to concede the intellectual field to those who would resurrect hierarchy, authority, and rule by the “worthy” few. Equality does not require God to command it; it requires only that human beings look honestly at one another and recognize what they are. That recognition—rational, secular, and revolutionary—is the true foundation of the American creed.

Love is inherently selfish, Ayn Rand once told Playboy magazine. So-called selfless love:

would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

To love someone is to care about them, to want the best for them, to take joy in their happiness, and to suffer when they suffer. You love someone, not for what they can do for you in some instrumental sense—not for the promotion they can help you get or the status they can help you acquire. You take pleasure in their sheer existence, and in sharing your life with them. Depending on the nature of their relationship—whether they are friends, or lovers, or children—their interests become co-mingled to a greater or lesser degree with your own.

To the extent altruism has any plausibility, this is the reason: other human beings are enormous values. If you love your life, you want to see others flourish, and want to help them flourish. And if you love another person, you will often do things that superficially seem like sacrifices: you skip that ballgame to tend to your sick spouse, you spend a long day helping your friend move, you forego a new car to help your kids pay for college. But these only seem like sacrifices if you drop the context—the context that what you are doing is nurturing a relationship that means the world to you.

Altruism, though, encourages people to engage in genuine sacrifices. Far from expressing love and nurturing relationships, these sacrifices poison relationships. When a friend or family member takes advantage of me, demands more of my time than I truly want to give, demands more of my money than I can truly afford, and I accede to these demands, that doesn’t strengthen the relationship. It only stokes hidden resentments that reveal themselves in avoidance, in angry outbursts, in passive-aggressive remarks.

Sacrifice has no place in human relationships. Relationships should be mutually fulfilling, rooted in a deep spiritual affinity, where neither side exploits the other nor allows themselves to be exploited. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. We aren’t mutual servants but independent equals, coming together to share values and share lives.

The rest of this lesson is about human relationships—about why they are so supremely crucial to our happiness and how to nurture them so they are truly mutually fulfilling.

Friendship

You’re born into a community—a group of people you interact and spend time with. In forming friendships, you build a chosen community. You select the people with whom you’ll share your life. People vary in how much selectivity they exercise in this regard. Some form friendships in childhood, mostly by happenstance, and those childhood friends remain their only friends. What remains true is that friendship offers you the ability to create your ideal community—to surround yourself with people you enjoy, respect, and admire.

Friendships exist on a spectrum. All of them involve some degree of mutual caring, intimacy, and shared activity—but they can vary wildly in all three respects.

Some friendships are narrow—a bond over a shared activity. The friend you watch baseball with, the friend you play video games with, colleagues at work, and workout buddies at the gym. These friendships may involve little in the way of self-disclosure. Conversations may rarely travel beyond the shared interest. Such friendships represent real bonds, but the values that constitute those bonds are thin. If you move to a new town or give up an old hobby, the relationship moves from present tense to past.

Other friendships have depth. They are friendships of the soul that can have nearly the strength and intimacy of romantic love. Though they may start out with or involve a bond over a shared activity, the connection stretches far beyond that. Your interests may change. Your friend may move away. You may not see each other for months or even years. But the bond remains because it is rooted in love for who your friend is. Your friend is, as Aristotle put it, “another self.” They embody your values in a profound way.

To say this is not to say that your friend is just like you. On the contrary, your closest friends often embody those traits that you value and yet are underdeveloped in your own character. I think of the friendship between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson was bold to the point of recklessness and took comfort in the solidity and cautiousness of his best friend Madison. I think of my tendency toward introversion—and my love of friends who electrify a room and energize me with their outward enthusiasm. Such friendships spring from a shared universe of values but are heightened by complementary differences that help round you out and bring out latent facets of your personality.

Why are friendships so valuable? What need are they meeting? It should be abundantly clear that friendship isn’t utilitarian. A friendship I cultivate in order to help my career or enhance my social standing is not a friendship at all. To be sure, friends do help friends. Reciprocity is one way that human beings nurture emotional bonds. I help you move. You pay for dinner. But such reciprocity isn’t the purpose of the friendship. The reason you are my friend is not because you buy me dinner—you buy me dinner because you are my friend.

There are relationships you form for practical, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” reasons, but these aren’t friendships—they are alliances. There is nothing wrong when people network to find potential business partners. We need such alliances, and they can sometimes even evolve into friendships. But in a friendship, it is not something external to the friendship we are seeking. The value is in the relationship itself.

A crucial part of what you seek from a friendship is visibility. Just as art makes your most abstract values perceptually real, so, too, does friendship—but in a crucially different way. A friend embodies the values you care about and the virtues you admire. You see in their flourishing the kind of life and world you want to live in and create.

But this isn’t all. Your friend is not simply acting in the world, the way a character acts in a novel. Your friend is interacting with you. Listening to you. Responding to you. Showing understanding, care, and affection. With your friend, you don’t just see—you are seen. When they celebrate your successes, those successes feel more real. When they share your sorrows, you feel understood. When they praise your virtues, you feel appreciated. When they laugh at your jokes, they heighten your joy.

Whereas art allows us to experience our values as perceptual objects, other people, in Nathaniel Branden’s words, allow us “to experience ourselves perceptually, as concrete objects ‘out there.’” He goes on:

Our psychology is expressed through behavior, through the things we say and do, and through the ways we say and do them. It is in this sense that our self is an object of perception to others. When others react to us, to their view of us and our behavior, their perception is in turn expressed through their behavior, by the way they look at us, by the way they speak to us, by the way they respond, and so forth. If their view of us is consonant with our deepest vision of who we are (which may be different from whom we profess to be), and if their view is transmitted by their behavior, we feel perceived, we feel psychologically visible. We experience a sense of the objectivity of our self and our psychological state of being. We perceive the reflection of our self in their behavior. It is in this sense that others can be a psychological mirror.

And like an actual mirror, one of the benefits of this visibility is not simply in helping you experience yourself, but in helping you discover yourself. It is through friendship that you come to learn about your blind spots—hidden strengths and hidden weaknesses, virtues you didn’t know you had and flaws you didn’t know you needed to correct. It was my friends who helped me see that I could be conflict avoidant and childish in the face of disappointment. And it was my friends who helped me see that I am unusually loyal, generous, and funny.

Friendships, finally, help you create yourself. It is through friendship that you can be inspired to grow and improve in new ways—when you see virtues in your friends that you want to emulate. My friend Lisa VanDamme has an unusual talent for making people feel appreciated and understood. My friend Yaron Brook has a magic ability to combine deep moral seriousness with a friendly approachability. My friend Doug Peltz is infectiously curious and enthusiastic about the world. These people make me want to be better and have helped me discover new ways to grow.

But all of this presupposes a solid foundation: that you select friends for their virtues. This doesn’t necessarily mean perfect people. But it does mean that you deal with people on the basis of their virtues, and that you acknowledge forthrightly any vices. That may mean delimiting the relationship, it may mean encouraging them to do better, but what it certainly means is that you don’t surround yourself with people who help you rationalize and evade your own shortcomings. If I find comfort in being around liars because they tolerate my dishonesty, if I find reassurance in being around losers because they won’t judge my lack of ambition, if I seek approval from people with low standards because I’m unwilling to hold myself to high standards, I will not achieve the benefits of friendship. I’ll simply build for myself a human casket.

Romantic Love

Religion is theft. It takes our highest concepts and emotions—the sacred, reverence, exaltation, worship—and binds them to a supernatural fantasy world beyond our reach. They are products of the next world—not this profane world; they are what we feel for God—not human beings. What garbage. At root, these concepts and emotions refer to our attitude toward a moral ideal, to an earthly ideal, to man at his highest potential, to a potential we have the power to actualize. These emotions belong on earth—and we experience them most powerfully on earth in the form of romantic love. We worship in the bedroom.

Romantic love—sexual love—is a response to your highest values embodied in another person. This includes morality—the universal values and virtues that should guide human life—but it includes much more than that. You fall in love with someone’s core values—not as empty abstractions, but as expressed and embodied in every detail of a person. You fall in love, writes Rand,

with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.

To say that you fall in love with a person’s soul is to say that you fall in love with their self-made soul. Romantic love is a testament to free will. If you truly viewed someone as a deterministic robot, a puppet of forces outside their control, you could not love them. What you love in a person is their chosen values—their soul as they have made it, their character as they have crafted it. Even their physical appearance, though shaped by genetics, is an expression of their choices: how they dress, how they move, how well they maintain their body, how they outwardly express their inner self. Absent free will, your lover would be little more than an animated sex doll.

You cannot fully know a person’s soul at first glance, but it is amazing how much you can know. Precisely because a person’s style of soul is contained in their smallest gestures, you can become enraptured with a person the moment you set eyes on them. This is not love, but it’s not mere physical attraction. Most of us have had the experience of finding someone physically attractive and losing interest once they open their mouths. No, you’re responding to a much richer source of information. Just as an artist can capture their subject’s personality in a single, unmoving frame, so you can see a glimpse of a person in your first encounter.

But whether it’s in that first encounter or something that evolves over time, the first hints of love emerge in a unique awareness of the other person. They seize your attention, your curiosity, your fascination. When they’re in the room, you have trouble looking away. When they’re gone, they dominate your thoughts. You find yourself trying to weave their name into every conversation. You look for opportunities to spend time with them. You want to know about them—anything, everything about them. The most trivial details captivate you. Your life becomes heightened, electrified, buoyant—you feel alive.

If the interest is reciprocal, things progress. Often, what’s happening remains underneath the surface. The growing attraction is unspoken and takes place in between the lines. A gaze held. Shoulders or legs brushing and neither person pulling away. At one level, what’s happening is all too clear. And yet, doubt remains. The doubt is excruciating—and thrilling. Does he? Doesn’t he? Does she? Doesn’t she?

And then the switch is flipped. You put the cards on the table. The relationship has been happening, but now, for the first time, you talk about the relationship. What are we to each other? Where is this going? How do you feel about me? You make a commitment—a more or less clearly articulated agreement to put energy into the relationship, to put time into the relationship, to treat it as a value to be cultivated and not too easily abandoned.

Intimacy increases. Physical intimacy—you share a kiss, then more than a kiss, then the unrivaled intimacy of love-making. But emotional intimacy as well. You begin to reveal hidden parts of yourself. Your private thoughts, secret desires, fragile vulnerabilities.

As the days and weeks and months pass, you let more of yourself be seen and you see more of your partner. You start collecting a shared history—a life lived together. And more: you envision a shared future. A life you’ll build together. Not your dreams and my dreams but our dreams. You don’t just share your life with them, you integrate your lives. You remain independent, and yet in a profound sense you are dependent on them—they become an irreplaceable component of your personal happiness. Their joy is your joy. Their suffering is yours. You inhabit a shared, private universe that others can glimpse, but never truly see.

You then make a full commitment: you intend to build and maintain your shared universe for the whole of your life. That as the easy passion of an early romance fades, you’ll do the work of keeping that passion alive, maintaining your commitment through life’s ups and downs, that you’ll be fully honest about who you are and what you want, that you’ll aim to grow together, to make each other better. Your lover has become irreplaceable to you. If you should lose them, yes, you could love again—but there would always be a hole, a part of your happiness that could not be replaced because it would be love, but not their love.

At any point, the process can break down. I don’t feel the way you feel. I don’t want what you want. You are not who I thought you were. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Few things are as painful. But the pain is only an insignia of the far greater rewards love offers. It offers you the ability to see your values made real in another person’s character—and the unique experience of someone seeing your character and treasuring it. Romantic love is visibility par excellence. It is the one area of life where you can be fully vulnerable, fully open, and, therefore, fully seen.

But like all values, romantic love has to be earned. And the price of entry is the achievement of self-esteem and the cultivation of a moral character that makes self-esteem possible.

Absent self-esteem, you cannot truly experience love. For the person of low self-esteem, love involves an irreconcilable conflict: the joy of love is rooted in visibility—a person who lacks self-esteem finds this kind of visibility intolerable. Love offers them a mirror—and they can’t stand their reflection. Such a person will still usually seek out a relationship, only now that relationship will be aimed, not at reflection, but evasion. They’ll seek a partner who doesn’t see them, but the phony image they want to project. They’ll seek a partner who will tolerate their vices because their partner lacks virtue. They’ll seek a partner they can exploit in some way—someone who will cater to their neediness, or bow to their domineeringness, or play the role of mommy or daddy, or increase their social standing, or provide them with financial stability. They will form relationships—they have no clue how to love or be loved.

This doesn’t mean that love must wait for the day when you achieve a spotless moral character and untainted self-esteem. It does mean that any flaws in you or your partner will be an impediment. If you both are honest about those flaws, if you both work to grow and improve, and if you have a bedrock of virtue, a core of self-esteem, then that is a solid foundation for romantic love.

And this, then, is the most important piece of advice for anyone who desires romance and hasn’t found it. Make yourself worthy of love. Build up your own soul. Perfect your character. Fill your life with values and ambition. I say this, not to deny or trivialize the pain of loneliness. I’ve been there. I remember walking through the streets of Laguna Beach in my mid-twenties, watching the couples wander past, and I can still feel that aching longing that seems like it will never go away. You cannot fully control when you’ll meet someone. What you can control is who you’ll be when you do meet them. Will you be virtuous, open, optimistic? Will you have built a world they’ll want to enter, a life they’ll want to share? Or will you have become a stew of resentment and entitlement that will send good people running for the exits? That’s your choice.

Searching for love can sometimes feel hopeless, like it will stretch into infinity. But it’s not and it won’t. Philosopher Harry Binswanger is fond of saying that your emotions are bad predictors of your future emotions. Loneliness carries with it a sense of eternity. Set that out of your mind. Know that it’s only temporary. And when you finally meet someone who becomes your whole world, you’ll look back and think how small a sliver of your life you spent waiting to meet them.

Children

With friends, we build a chosen community. With a lover, we build a chosen family. When that family includes children, we choose to bring into the world pieces of ourselves and our partner—who are at the same time unique, distinct, autonomous individuals.

It is hard to write about children without resorting to clichés, because the clichés are all true—and because having children is an experience so unique that you cannot compare it to anything else. There is nothing like looking down at a person you helped create, feeling the inconceivable weight of being responsible for that person’s life, and watching them look back at you, smile, and begin a new, unrepeatable life.

And this is what I see as the central value parenthood offers: the opportunity to get to know someone through the whole of their life, to help shape that life, to help them realize their full potential. So much of the reward (and suffering) of parenthood is rooted in the fact that a child is largely unactualized potential. You see in them what they might become. It thrills you—and, at times, it terrifies you.

But you also see what they are right now. Unself-conscious joy, innocence, curiosity, wonder, amazement. You get to marvel in their uniqueness. My daughter: bold, creative, anxious, drawn to art and fashion. My son: intelligent, headstrong, affectionate, drawn to puzzles and technology. Parenting is not molding clay. It is mentoring and discovering—it is helping a child on their way to self-creation, and finding joy in discovering the kind of soul your child is creating.

Traditionally, parents have seen their role in different ways, but a common theme has been that their job is to rein in a child’s selfishness. Nothing could be more wrong. Your actual job is to cultivate the child’s budding rationality. To help them become thinkers whose lives are rich with values and who can start to think about their interests in more expansive, long-range ways.

I don’t have much to offer in the way of parenting advice, but one thing I’m confident in saying is: treat children with respect. To impose your religion or your philosophy, to try to make them develop interests because they’re your interests, to try to nudge them to pursue the dreams you want them to pursue (or wish you had pursued), is to treat children, not as individuals, but as objects. Children have free will, their lives belong to them, and while it’s your job to help them grow, to trespass on their sovereignty is to cripple their ability to grow.

Should you have children? This is such a hard question to answer. In many respects, there is no joy more profound. But there is also no job more demanding. My general view is that you should not have children unless you’re certain you want children. And yet I also believe that you cannot really know what’s it’s like to have children until you do. So I will say this: don’t allow yourself to be pressured by outside forces either way. Know that there is a profound, unique, unrivaled adventure to be found in parenthood—but know that it’s not an adventure to be taken up lightly. The stakes—for you and for them—are too high.

Sex

This has been a book about morality and happiness, and so it’s appropriate that we end with the most intense form of happiness: the act of sex.

Traditional morality saddles sex with prohibitions. Sex is what tempts us away from morality’s demands. It is what drags the religionist down to earth. It’s what the saint renounces. We elevate virginity and treat its loss as a loss.

If anything, those who defend sex today are worse than those who condemn it. They treat sex as an amoral physical act. They reduce it to an animal urge and tell us to indulge without thought or standards. Men should rack up numbers. Women should rid themselves of their “hang ups,” which include not only a sense of guilt for sexual enjoyment, but sexual standards.

Both sides are profoundly wrong, and they are wrong in the same way. What they fail to grasp is that sex is the reward for and expression of our most profound, selfish values. Great, passionate, guiltless, meaningful sex is morality’s greatest reward. Not the sanitized, neutered sex Christians talk about—the kind aimed primarily at making babies or strengthening a marriage. No. Sex. Real, raw sex aimed at intense physical and emotional pleasure, undertaken solely for the sake of that pleasure.

Sex, in Rand’s formulation, is “a celebration of yourself and of existence.” Recall our discussion of core beliefs in Lesson 2. At the root of your emotional mechanism is a view of yourself and the world. To achieve happiness you must cultivate self-esteem and a benevolent view of the universe—the view that you’re able to achieve happiness, worthy of the happiness you achieve, in a universe open to achievement. Sex’s special power is bringing these beliefs into full awareness—to allow you to experience them here, now, as fully realized and fully satisfied. If morality is aimed at pursuing happiness, sex is the pinnacle of that pursuit.

Sex, then, isn’t just a physical pleasure. All pleasure, for a human being, has a spiritual dimension. It’s why you’re not content to wolf down food in the back of a taxicab but seek out beautiful restaurants that create a mood. Sex is the ultimate union of the physical and the spiritual. Each heightens the other, each is indispensable to the other. It’s part of what distinguishes art and sex. Art is the pleasure of contemplation—it is something external to you. You are looking out at a world and forgetting yourself. Sex is a form of self-awareness—your awareness of yourself as a total being, mind and body, able to achieve joy in this world.

The spiritual dimension of sex is best revealed by the crucial importance of your partner. You’re not content with a sex doll, even if such a doll had the power to recreate or even surpass the physical sensations of a human being. You desire another consciousness. And more than that, a certain kind of consciousness. If you were to sleep with someone and discovered mid-sex that they were an imposter, the physical sensations wouldn’t change, but what you would experience wouldn’t be pleasure. No, the physical pleasure would intensify your emotional revulsion.

In order for you to experience sex as self-celebration, you need to be with a partner who shares your values, who embodies your values. This is why the best sex, the most fulfilling sex, is possible only in the context of romantic love.

But that doesn’t mean that anything less than the best is bad. The fact that sex is best in the context of a serious romantic relationship doesn’t mean that you should spurn the realm of sex until you fall in love—let alone until you get married. You build a sex life over time, and it may take years before you’re able to fully realize what’s possible in the bedroom.

Our first inkling of sexual pleasure comes with the discovery of masturbation. Historically, masturbation—maybe more than any other form of sexual pleasure—has been infused with guilt and shame. Why? Precisely because it is so selfish. Its only justification is your own pleasure and happiness. Religionists have condemned it as immoral. Kant secularized this religious hatred, arguing that it amounted to treating yourself, not as a moral being, but as an amusement park. Self-help gurus have commanded us to forego masturbation and “sublimate” our sexual desires so we can be better at making money. Jordan Peterson has said that masturbation weakens us. May they all rot in hell. Masturbation is a vital part of sexual discovery and sexual happiness.

But masturbation is only the first step toward sexual discovery. As you move into adolescence, you have the opportunity to interact with partners. To tell young people to forego sexual experimentation until they are ready for an adult romance is insane and self-defeating. What young people need to be taught is to treat sex with respect, which means: to approach it on the basis of values. Do I know and trust the person I’m with? Am I comfortable with what we’re doing or am I being pressured into something I’m not ready for? Am I aiming at enjoyment? Or proving something about myself (that I’m desirable, that I’m manly)? Or achieving some external result (make this guy like me, impress my friends)? As with all pleasure, the question is not: “Is this okay?” The question is: “Do I think there are real values to be gained here—and why?”

All of this applies to adults as well. As an adult, you know more about what you want from a partner and from sex. But you may not be able to find your ideal partner. Again, this does not mean you should forego sex. But you should look for a partner you know, trust, respect, and admire. Not because God said so. Not because some authority figure will disapprove. The reason to reject casual sex is causality. The issue is not that you’ll be a bad person if you sleep around—it’s that you won’t actually get the value sex has to offer. In order to experience sex as a value, it has to be based on values.

But within a context of trust and respect, sex should be treated as a guiltless adventure. For consenting adults who do know, trust, and admire each other—anything goes. Whether it’s fun sex, rough sex, loving sex, loud sex, imaginative sex, oral sex, anal sex, straight sex, gay sex—whatever brings you and your partner pleasure represents a virtue.

It is, in fact, your reward for virtue.

A Final Lesson

I don’t often think about death, but recently it occurred to me that the conventional wisdom, which says that no one knows what happens after we die, is 100 percent wrong. We have all experienced death. We spent an eternity not existing before we were born. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t tragic. There is nothing to fear.

But how many of us have truly experienced life?

That’s what frightens me. Not death, but the failure to live. The failure to enjoy my brief time here on earth. That would be the tragedy.

But whether or not I enjoy my life is under my control. And whether or not you enjoy your life is under your control.

You have free will. You have the power to think, to learn, to grow. You have the power to chart your own course. And, armed with a morality of happiness, you have the power to create a self and a life that you love.

Will you do it?

The choice is yours.

     Out of the night that covers me,

     Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

     I thank whatever gods may be

     For my unconquerable soul.

     In the fell clutch of circumstance

     I have not winced nor cried aloud.

     Under the bludgeonings of chance

     My head is bloody, but unbowed.

     Beyond this place of wrath and tears

     Looms but the Horror of the shade,

     And yet the menace of the years

     Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

     It matters not how strait the gate,

     How charged with punishments the scroll.

     I am the master of my fate:

     I am the captain of my soul.

     (William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”)

Words. Just words. Hardly more than one hundred of them. And yet think of the power of those words. They helped sustain Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. Helped sustain American POWs in Vietnam. Helped sustain civil rights heroes as they fought for equality.

Human beings need spiritual fuel. We have no instincts, including no survival instinct. We have to continually stoke the flames of our desire to live and our commitment to taking the actions life requires. Recall Ayn Rand’s statement, which I cited in Lesson 1.

Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reality—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.

To shape the world and ourselves in the image of our values means to work to create our ideal self and our ideal world. To envision the best possible and to strive to bring it into existence. But how do we envision the ideal? How do we keep it real to ourselves in the midst of our daily trials and tribulations? When we are knocked down by obstacles, how do we summon the desire to get back up and try again? When we are overwhelmed by the ugliness we see in the media, how do we remind ourselves that what really matters in life—what’s really important—isn’t the latest scandal or the latest tragedy, but achievement, virtue, happiness, love?

We turn to art.

Man’s search for meaning

The physical world around us is rich in meaning. Bright color and light represent energy. The outdoors represents freedom. Candy stores represent abundance. An upright posture represents pride and virtue. Across cultures, our emotional language is tied to the physical in predictable ways. To be sad is to feel blue. To experience joy is to feel light. Elation comes from the Latin elatus, which means elevated—raised up.

None of this is arbitrary. In her book Joyful, Ingrid Fetell Lee writes about the way that everyday places and objects can evoke intense emotions, and how this has its roots in our nature as evolved beings. The bright lights and colors that energize us, she argues, are in nature indications of literal energy in the form of calorie-dense food. Or take our love of harmony and symmetry. Lee writes:

Putting objects with similar features together taps into a principle of gestalt psychology called similarity, which says that the brain tends to perceive similar objects as a group. The individual feathers or leaves or toys cease to be seen as independent objects. Instead, they become modules in a larger composition. According to gestalt theorists, the brain does this to simplify and make sense of information coming in through the visual system. After all, similar objects often have a practical relationship to one another, not just a visual one. A group of similar leaves likely belongs to the same plant, and it’s simpler to look at a forest and see a hundred trees rather than millions of individual leaves. According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.

As conceptual beings who survive by viewing existents as units—as members of a group of similar members—we experience pleasure in viewing things as units. In seeing “like with like,” we experience the joy of a well-organized world, which evokes the immeasurable value of a well-organized mind.

Wherever we look, we see what is—but we can also see more than what is. A while back, I was watching a baseball game. My favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies, was down by one in the final inning of a game against division rivals, the Atlanta Braves. They were down to their last out when a young man stepped to the plate. Luke Williams was playing in his second professional game—the first start of his career. With one man on, and all the pressure in the world on his back, he hit a towering home run to left to win the game.

My reaction—and the reactions of countless other Phillies fans—went far deeper than the joy of winning a single baseball game. Many of us were brought to tears as we witnessed a moment of triumph against great odds. We witnessed a young man live though a moment he had been dreaming about, hoping for, struggling for, his entire life—and we saw the joy on his face, and his teammates’ faces, and his family’s faces, and we felt: this is the stuff of life.

Human beings have the ability to find deeper meaning in the objects and events around us. A home run isn’t just a home run but a story about grit and perseverance. A building isn’t just shelter but a monument to human ingenuity. A smile isn’t just a smile but a testament to innocence, or joy, or seduction. These things and moments crystalize our abstract values, make them tangible and real, bring them down to earth so that we can experience them with an immediacy that otherwise eludes us. It is one thing to value courage—it is another thing to watch a lone man in Tiananmen Square confront a line of oncoming tanks.

Sometimes, as with Luke Williams’s home run, the meaning of a moment hits you over the head. It forces itself on you. You’re overcome with emotion and may not even know why. “It’s just a baseball game. Why am I crying?” But you can also prime yourself for such moments, cultivate them, actively pursue them. You do this through the act of contemplation.

To contemplate is to pause on something, to seek its deeper meaning. To contemplate is to take the concrete and ask yourself what it conveys about life. Poet Sylvia Plath eloquently described the act of contemplation in a diary entry:

On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquility that comes from dwelling among primal things.

Contemplation is not a wasteful activity. It is a vital one. It serves two purposes—one mental, one emotional. Mentally, you need to be able to experience your abstract ideas and values as if they were perceptual concretes. Only concretes exist, and for you to be able to keep your abstractions tied to reality, you need to be able to experience them as if they were concretes. Emotionally, contemplation can give you the experience of living in your ideal world. The world where your values are not out there in the future, waiting to be achieved, but where they have been achieved, here and now. Where the work of living is done—if only for a moment.

Though you can gain some of these mental and emotional benefits from contemplating objects and events, there is only one field of human endeavor designed to concretize your deepest ideas and values and refuel your soul—a field that exists that exists solely for the purpose of contemplation: art.

What art is

Think of the difference between Michelangelo’s David and the hunched-over figure of Rodin’s The Thinker. Think of the difference between the twisted, deformed Pietas of the Middle Ages and the proud, upright figure of Mary in Bouguereau’s Pieta. Think of the difference between the stirring, triumphant melody at the climax of the 3rd movement in Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony and the ominous, crashing notes that kick off Beethoven’s 5th.

You could say that these works stir very different emotions, and you would not be wrong. But it would be more accurate to say that each conveys a different kind of world. An artist builds a unique world, a universe that conveys: “This is life as I see it.” An artist recreates reality, but in a very different way than a photograph recreates reality. A photograph copies reality—an artist stylizes reality. She selects every detail—of a story, a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a song—and says to us: This is what’s important in life. This is what counts. This is what’s possible to human beings and worthy of contemplation.

Our daily lives are swamped by the journalistic, the accidental, the incidental. An artist cuts through the trivial and says: here’s what life is really about. That is what makes art, art. Because every element is selected, every element carries a meaning—and the meaning is, “This is what man is, this is what the world is, this is what life is.”

And this explains the profound emotional reactions we have to art. We fall in love with art when the artist’s view of life matches our own. “Yes, that is life as I see it.” We recoil in horror in disgust when we encounter a work and think, “No! That’s not how I see life.” All of this happens automatically and subconsciously. It’s not primarily an intellectual judgment, but an emotional reaction. It flows instantaneously from our core beliefs. It can take an enormous amount of work to understand and articulate what an artist is saying, and why it resonates or clashes with our own view of ourselves, the world, and man.

As with any act of contemplation, contemplating art fulfills a mental and emotional need. Mentally, Rand explains, art provides “a confirmation of [a man’s] view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.” Emotionally, “the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.”

Start with the mental need art satisfies. If I told you that you should practice the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, you would have only a vague sense of what that means. You would struggle to understand how a person would apply those abstractions to the concretes of his life. But what if I told you the story of Christ and you asked yourself, “What would Jesus do?” Suddenly, your mind would grasp with enormous clarity the relevant virtues and how to apply them.

Similarly for the moral code I have outlined in this book. I have strived to explain what a morality of happiness requires—the values you should pursue and the virtues you should practice. I have strived to give examples to make these concepts vivid and clear. But the truth of the matter is, you can’t really understand the guidance this book offers unless you have read Ayn Rand’s novels. As Rand herself notes:

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. . . . This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.

Rand’s point and mine is not that art exists as a didactic moral guide. No. Art’s primary function is not to teach, but to show. It is for the sake of contemplation, not education. And not all art deals with moral issues. What all art does gives us is a view of life—a concretized philosophy.

This is what Jordan Peterson is hinting at when he discusses the importance of myth. Stories, he says, are inchoate philosophy. They provide us with a guide, long before we can articulate explicit philosophic principles. But Peterson’s view differs from the one I’m outlining in two important respects. Peterson seems to think that the very age of stories—that they have survived—validates them as guides to action, and that we are doomed if we have the hubris to rationally question them. My view is that art doesn’t validate—it concretizes. And it complements philosophy—it doesn’t replace it.

Art and philosophy go together. Each needs the other. As Leonard Peikoff explains:

An art work does not formulate the metaphysics it represents; it does not (or at least need not) articulate definitions and principles. So art by itself is not enough in this context. But the point is that philosophy is not enough, either. Philosophy by itself cannot satisfy man’s need of philosophy. Man requires the union of the two: philosophy and art, the broad identifications and their concrete embodiment. Then, in regard to his fundamental, guiding orientation, he combines the power of mind and body, i.e., he combines the range of abstract thought with the irresistible immediacy of sense perception.

What, then, of the emotional need fulfilled by art? The answer should now be clear. We experience our life as a process—a process of shaping the world and our own soul into our image of the ideal. Art gives us an image of this ideal. It allows us to live inside a world where our values have been achieved, where the best possible is realized, where we can look out and see what we’re trying to build fully finished.

The critics of happiness are wrong. We aren’t stuck on a treadmill where each achievement is meaningless because it unleashes our desire for still greater achievement. We can fill our lives with moments where our work is complete and we experience, in the act of contemplation, the fact that life is an end in itself.

How to love art

Art, at least some of it, can be enjoyed without effort. You turn on your favorite record or read your favorite novel or watch your favorite TV show and you’re instantly swept away. What took me a long time to discover, what some people never discover, is that you can get more out of art—if you put in the work.

Art can be more than candy to your eyes and ears. It can have a profound impact on your life and soul by exposing you to new worlds and new emotions. You can experience the heights of joy, beauty, and reverence—and the depths of grief, rage, and despair. You can examine the most profound questions of human existence and become transfixed and transformed. But you need to know how.

I first discovered this point in 2008 when I went on an art tour in Boston with a guide named Luc Travers. At that point, I had never had a significant emotional reaction to a painting. And not for lack of trying. I had visited the best museums in France, Germany, and Washington, DC. But all I had felt when looking at works by Da Vinci, Vermeer, Dali, and Van Gogh was a faint sense of: “That looks nice.” I would read the plaque, stand there for ten seconds, get bored, and move on.

I thought going with a tour guide might be different. Luc could tell me about the history of the painting and share some stories about the artist. That would be interesting. I love history. I love biography. But that’s not what Luc did. Not at all. The first thing he told us? Don’t look at the plaque. We weren’t there for a history lesson. We were there to learn how to see.

We arrived at the museum and despite the fact that it was filled with hundreds or perhaps thousands of paintings, Luc told us we were only going to look at four. “This is going to be a short tour,” I thought.

We stopped in front of a painting. Nothing special. Just a man seated next to a woman. “What do you see?” Luc asked. Someone started to brainstorm what the painting meant, but Luc interrupted. “No. I’m not asking you what you think this painting means. I’m asking you just to tell me what you see. Just start naming things.”

“The woman has her face pressed against the man’s.”

“They’re both looking down at something he’s writing or drawing.”

“They’re holding hands.”

It went on like that for a long time, with no detail too trivial. Sometimes, when an observation was inferential rather than self-evident, Luc would push us to justify our observation. “His face is serious. Hers is peaceful,” someone said. “Peaceful?” Luc replied. “Wouldn’t it be more peaceful if her mouth was closed?” “No, you’re right. Not peaceful. Reverential.”

He went on to ask other questions, like:

• “What words would you use to describe the mood of this place?”

• “Did he go over to her to show her something, or did she come over to him to see him working?”

• “Does he want her to be there? Or does he feel like she’s disturbing him? Can you find three clues in the body language that suggests he does?”

• “Where is his primary focus? Where is her primary focus?”

• “What is she thinking at this moment?”

• “Can you find five, subtle details that show how much they intimately care for each other?”

• “When have you had a moment like this?”

• “Can you think of any moments from movies, literature, that are similar?”

• “What background music can you imagine fitting the mood?”

As the discussion went on, the painting became richer and richer with meaning. I could see more and more of it, and more and more in it. I felt emotions stirring, the same way I would watching a romantic scene in a powerful movie.

Finally, Luc gave his reading of the painting, which I’m going to quote at length because I don’t know of any other way to capture the power of that moment:

A young couple sits together in a golden light. They are intimately close, heads touching, holding hands, and her shoulders drawn into his. But they aren’t looking at each other. Their eyes are looking down at the large board he has on his knees where he seems to be writing or drawing. Did he come over to show her something? Or did she go over to him to see what he was working on?

I imagine he might have been sitting in this corner by the open window, taking advantage of the sunlight to illuminate the sketches he is working on. Then his beloved walked into the room and over to him, curious about what he was doing and wanting to be close to him. He doesn’t put his board down, nor does he tell her not to disturb him. Rather, he draws his legs back so that she can pull up close to him.

He tilts the board towards her, and he takes her hand, inviting her to observe what he is doing. She leans over, barely aware of the touch of his cheek on her brow, or even of his hand as her fingers loosen in his. Her attention is drawn towards what her lover is doing. The intimacy between the two is there, but it’s not at the forefront of their awareness. What is she thinking in this moment? It’s not so much, “You are wonderful!” but, rather, “I see how you are doing that.”

What is he working on that is keeping both of their attention? He might be showing her something that she’d be keenly interested in, like plans for their future home. Or he might be working on a project all his own that she might admire. In either case, he isn’t presenting to her a finished gift. He is sharing something perhaps more intimate—he is having her observe his process of creation. This is not a pristinely manicured poem he displays for her, rather; rather, he invites her to see his thoughts come as he paints. . . .

It’s hard to imagine a more romantic scene than in this painting: the early-evening sun shining, a secluded home, a cozy corner, the smell of ripe citrus in the air, and a couple who make me think of what Romeo and Juliet might have been in their late 20s. To add to this mood, I like to imagine a Chopin ballade playing in the background. Yet, in this scene imbued with romance, the intimacy between the two is understated—a subterranean river flowing beneath their shared moment. The title of this artwork is The Painter’s Honeymoon.

What I felt was rapture, and I remember the group walking away from the museum in awed silence.

Luc wasn’t there to spoon-feed us: he was teaching us how to have an esthetic experience.

One of the people with me on that tour was my friend Lisa VanDamme. If Luc Travers taught me to see, Lisa taught me to read.

Of course, I knew how to read in the sense of grasping the meaning of words on a page—just as I had been able to look at the paint on a canvas. But what Lisa showed me was: there is so much more hidden in the pages of a story than I could get merely by looking at the words on the page.

An artist, Lisa said, is saying something. He or she has selected every detail in accordance with this message. To get the most out of literature, you have to become a detective, putting together the clues until you understand the artist’s aim and vision. To be a reader is to be an active-minded integrator.

To be active-minded is to seek to understand: Why did the characters act the way they did? What made them tick? What did the story mean? What was the author trying to say? How did every detail support the message? What about that weird scene at the beginning that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the plot? Why was that there?

Here is an example from one of my favorite novels, Les Misérables. The story starts with a long section about the Bishop of Digne. Victor Hugo spends 60 pages telling us everything about the Bishop we could possibly want to know before introducing the book’s main character, Jean Valjean. After a brief encounter with Valjean that kicks off the book, we never hear from the Bishop again. The question is: Why? Why would Hugo write what amounted to a novelette about a seemingly minor character? It’s a question I had not asked on my first reading of Les Misérables. Lisa taught me to ask it.

Les Misérables tells the story of a man’s redemption. Jean Valjean begins as a criminal and spends the rest of his life on a quest to become a good man. And so Hugo must, at the start of the book, give us an image of what a good man is—of the ideal Jean Valjean will strive to become. (The first book of the novel is called “The Just Man.”) Grasping the purpose of the Bishop not only makes the novel more coherent, it makes the novel more enjoyable.

Great art isn’t inscrutable. On the contrary, what makes it powerful is that it can be understood—and this understanding deepens and enriches our experience. The more we understand intellectually, the more powerfully we react emotionally. And, what’s more: we learn how to take this same method of carefully observing events and extracting meaning from them, and apply it to our own lives. As Lisa explains in her riveting lecture, “Literature and the Quest for Meaning”:

Without great literature, we run the risk of living our lives like an indifferent crowd, of looking at things only with the naked eye, of failing to see beyond the surface of our experiences to their spiritual significance. But Hugo, and great artists like him, help us to develop a more penetrating perception.

Great literature is a spiritual microscope, that allows us to examine life minutely and marvel at that which had previously gone unobserved; or a telescope that lets us take in grand, new, and distant vistas in a single glance; or a stethoscope that gives us access to the very heart of life and allows us to know its pulses. All of these metaphors work, because art gives us the power to go beyond the barriers of our ordinary perception, and to see more. . . . [T]o see more means to see within our everyday experiences a connection to high ideals.

That is the power of literature and of art more broadly. Learn how to love it. And if you don’t already know how, seek out powerful guides. I am grateful to Luc and Lisa for teaching me how to love art—and I continue to return to them, to help me see more deeply into the universe of visual art, literature, and poetry, and so more deeply into my own life.

Find your guides. Learn to see, to read, to listen. Then enter your ideal world.

Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome. If I win, I will be happy. If I don’t, I won’t. It’s an if-then, cause-and-effect, quid pro quo standard that we cannot sustain because we immediately raise it every time we attain it. See, happiness demands a certain outcome. It is result reliant. And I say if happiness is what you’re after, then you’re going to be let down frequently, and you’re going to be unhappy much of your time.

There’s a lot that’s right about this. Happiness is about cause-and-effect. It is the emotion that proceeds from achieving your values. And it’s also true whenever you achieve a value, you are quickly if not immediately focused on the next challenge, the next goal, the next value. There is often a gap between what you think achieving a goal will feel like—and what it actually feels like.

Psychologists refer to this as the hedonic treadmill. You chase after things that will make you happy—and they don’t. Not for long. And the problem isn’t just the pursuit of “conveniences,” like a new car, a new dress, or a new home. The same pattern seems to show itself in your pursuit of your most inspiring goals. Achieving a goal doesn’t satisfy you—it merely spurs you to set a more ambitious goal.

In my own case, my driving goal up until the age of twenty-nine was to author a book. For years I would imagine what it would be like to hold a book with my name on it in my hands. When I would visit bookstores, I would often hunt for the place on the shelf where my book would eventually sit. And then it happened, and what I felt was not the ecstasy I had imagined, but only a quiet sense of satisfaction—and the desire to write more books, that would reach more people, and would tackle more ambitious themes.

This phenomenon has led some people to argue that happiness is illusory. You chase goals thinking they’ll make you happy—and then discover that they don’t. The solution? Focus on something other than happiness, something better than happiness.

It’s the wrong conclusion to draw.

Here is the root of the problem. Life is a process—an ongoing process of pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values. Why? So that you can continue pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values. The work of living is never done. You must continually grow or you’ll deteriorate. Stasis is precisely what you can’t achieve. You’re becoming stronger—or you’re becoming weaker. You’re raising your sights—or you’re razing them. You can tread water, but with every kick you’re wasting energy and bringing yourself closer to drowning. Thus, your emotional mechanism drives you forward, from one goal to the next, encouraging you to a summit you can never reach.

And, yet, psychologically, you need the experience of summiting. You need to experience your life, not only as a process, but as a series of victories. Yes, you can and should enjoy the process of pursuing goals, of growing, of making progress. But if nothing counts as achievement then nothing counts as progress. You need, throughout your life, the experience that now, today, at this moment life is an end in itself.

Ayn Rand puts it this way:

Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther.

How can you attain such moments? How is it you can experience life as an end in itself?

One popular answer today is: mindfulness. Mindfulness has as many interpretations as it does advocates. But the basic idea is that you learn to block out the mental tape playing in your head—the one ruminating about past regrets and future worries—and focus on the here and now. To stay in the moment and take joy in the sheer fact of being alive.

Mindfulness practices can be extremely valuable. They can calm you, recharge you, bring you into the present. But to truly experience life as an end in itself, what you need is the experience of pleasure.

When you get a massage, or become immersed in your favorite novel, or play with a puppy, or kiss someone you love, it’s not because you think those activities will have some further benefit down the road, but because they feel amazing in the moment. They are moments that are worth living through for their own sake. Nathaniel Branden puts it this way: “Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting.”

And not only that. Branden goes on to note that pleasure gives you a sense of your own efficacy. To feel good is to feel that you are able to meet the demands of reality, that you are in control of your life. To feel pain, by contrast, is to feel helpless and impotent. “Thus, in letting man experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence.”

The point here is not that anything pleasurable is good. You can value things that are bad for you and set your pleasure/pain mechanism in reverse, the way a junkie does, moving yourself toward destruction. If you want to live, you must choose and pursue pro-life values. The point here is that the only reason to pursue pro-life values, the motive and reward for the hard work of living, is enjoying yourself in the here and now. Pleasure is the form in which you directly experience the fact that life is an end in itself—that life is a value and you are a value.

Achieving happiness is a long-range endeavor. You err when you trade pleasure today for destruction tomorrow. But you also err if you focus so much on the long term that you never enjoy today. That’s a mistake for the very simple reason that all you have is today. Tomorrow is always out there, one step beyond your grasp. It would be a fool’s errand to spend your life living for the long term by denying the short term, in the hopes that in the last moments of your life you could look back at your years and get a jolt of orgasmic pleasure. No. So long as you aren’t sacrificing your future well-being, then your policy must be to squeeze as much pleasure out of every “today” as you can.

Too often people live life as if someone is watching and giving them a grade: their lover, their parents, God. When I’m ruled by external “shoulds,” pleasure can seem like an indulgence. If I’m working out, or learning something, or producing something, then I can feel good about what I’m doing. But if I’m playing video games? Or eating a delicious meal with my best friend? Or taking a warm bath? Or watching my favorite sports team? Those are just my “guilty” pleasures.

Bullshit. If these moments are not escapes from a life that is going nowhere, if they are woven into the fabric of rational, long-term value pursuit, then there is nothing to feel guilty about. This is the stuff of life. Morality isn’t about gaining some authority’s approval. It is a guide that allows you to achieve as an adult what you probably achieved so effortlessly as a child: pure, unadulterated enjoyment.

Morality gives you a roadmap that helps you build such a life. It keeps you from sacrificing what’s important to what’s not important. It keeps you from pursuing fool’s gold—shiny objects that seem desirable, and yet that leave you unfulfilled, hung over, guilt-ridden. It orients you toward genuine values—the real gold that can bring you pure, unadulterated joy.

Of course, morality doesn’t do this by giving you some concrete list of values. Morality isn’t religion. It doesn’t tell you what foods to eat on which days, or whom to sleep with after which ceremonies. It gives you abstract principles that you have to apply to your own life. Unfortunately, we aren’t taught how to live by principles. We’re taught to ask for permission.

When people are first learning Ayn Rand’s morality, it is common for them to ask questions like, “Is it okay to masturbate?” “Is it okay to like rap music?” “Is it okay to do drugs?” The answer to all such questions is: they are bad questions. They all reflect a religious or authoritarian mindset. Your life belongs to you. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do what you want. The question is not: “Is this okay?” The question is: “What value am I after—and is that value rational?”

Take the question of drugs. Morality doesn’t take a position on drug-use per se. What it does tell you is how to assess any activity. It tells you to respect identity and causality. This means asking yourself: What is this drug? What are its properties? What will it do to me? What might it do to me? And, with this knowledge in hand, it teaches you to ask: Given these properties, is there a real value to be gained here, and under what conditions?

Let’s say the drug under consideration is alcohol. Like all drugs, its potentialities depend on dose. At small quantities, it can relax, calm, energize, heighten social interactions. At higher quantities, it can wipe out your ability to make good decisions, shut down your capacity to think, make you sick, or even kill you. Over time, it can become addictive, with all that implies. To act morally means, first and foremost, that you make the decision with your eyes open—that you think about the issue. You don’t bow to peer pressure. You don’t drink or abstain because that’s what people in your culture or your family do. If you decide to drink, you do it to achieve a legitimate value, like relaxation, not to avoid facing reality, which is wrong for the same reason that any form of evasion is wrong. And it means that you do it in a way that’s consistent with achieving positive values—that is, you don’t get so sloshed or drink so often that you threaten your values.

But what if you’re wrong? What if you think there’s a potential value to be gained—and discover that actually there wasn’t? What if you pursue a potentially rational pleasure, but get carried away and do it to excess? Again, it’s the religious view that teaches you to be terrified of making mistakes. It teaches you that the safe path is to just say no. You’ll never be blamed for saying “no” to a potential pleasure. But life is not about winning virtue points by saying “no” to things. It’s about saying “yes” to values.

Discovering your values often requires experimentation, and experimentation often entails failure, disappointment, and regret. So long as you act with your eyes open, so long as you have good reason to think that an experience might add to your life, so long as you aren’t evading or giving in to peer pressure, so long as you aren’t being reckless and threatening your long-term values, so long as you’re willing to own up to and learn from any mistakes, then go out there and sample life.

The world is filled with potential values. Your job, your only job in this world, is to find them and enjoy them. Seek out things that bring you pleasure—big and small, physical and emotional. Fill your days and hours with pleasure. Aim at the long range but stop seeing life as some painful struggle. Life does involve pain and struggle, but that is not what life is about. Life is about moments of delight. Moments when you look back and think: that was worth living through.

Happiness, to put it differently, often remains in the background. To truly enjoy your life, you need to regularly bring it to the foreground. You need to experience, viscerally, emotionally, that life is an end in itself. You need to experience the value of your person, the value of this world, the value of life. That is the role of pleasure.

One of the foundational pleasures of life we’ve already discussed: productive work. When you get lost in creative thinking and time vanishes, you experience the efficacy of your mind and the intense joy of creativity. When you stand back and reflect on your achievements, you feel an intense pride.

But there are two more foundational pleasures we have not discussed: contemplation and connection.

Emotions carry with them an implicit evaluation of “for me” or “against me.” Inherent in those evaluations is an evaluation of the “me” involved. Self-esteem, in other words, shapes your every emotion. If your pleasure/pain mechanism is your body speaking to you about the physical state of your being, then the voice of your soul is your self-esteem.

“Self-esteem (or the lack of it),” Nathaniel Braden writes, “is the reputation a man acquires with himself.” It’s your core belief about your ability and worth, and it impacts every emotion you feel, and every choice you make.

Think of when you procrastinate. Sometimes it’s because the task is unpleasant, like going to the DMV. But often it’s because you feel you can’t do what you’re supposed to do—not that you lack some concrete skill, but that you as a person are incompetent to deal with life’s challenges—and so your mind rebels at doing something that feels fruitless. That is your soul lacking confidence. Or think of when a friend or partner mistreats you and you don’t speak up or walk out because you don’t think you deserve better or can do better. That is your soul lacking worth.

To set ambitious goals, to stick to them in the face of obstacles, and to take joy in their achievement requires self-esteem. It requires self-confidence and self-respect. Without such self-esteem, you’ll lower your sights, give up on your values, and, if you do achieve them, self-sabotage to restore a sense of proportion between what you have and what you feel worthy of having.

Where does self-esteem come from? It doesn’t come from people telling you that you’re perfect. It doesn’t come from deluding yourself about your own abilities or blinding yourself to your own flaws. Self-esteem has to be earned: you develop your core beliefs about your ability and worth through the choices you make.

Your self-judgment is both a metaphysical judgment and a moral judgment you pass on your choices. Metaphysically, the more you choose to think, the more confident you grow in your ability to deal with the challenges of life. The more you shun the responsibility of thinking and act blindly on your emotions, the more out of control and incompetent you’ll feel. Morally, to the extent you live up to your ideals, you’ll feel worthy of respect, love, and happiness. To the extent you betray your ideals, you’ll feel guilt, self-loathing, even self-hatred.

But as with any emotion, self-esteem isn’t automatically in touch with reality. You have no choice about reaching some evaluation of your ability and worth—but you do have a choice about the standards you use to measure your ability and worth.

For example, some people judge their ability, not by the degree to which they choose to think, but by their competence at some specific skill: “I’m good because I’m a great programmer,” “I’m good because I know how to fight.” But self-esteem isn’t about any specific ability you’ve cultivated; it’s about your general ability to navigate reality.

Other people judge their ability by impossible standards of perfection: “I’m good if I don’t make mistakes.” But measuring your self-esteem by unattainable standards constitutes a profound contradiction: your need for self-esteem comes from the fact that you are the author of your choices, and so assessing yourself by a standard that is not open to your choice means saying, “I couldn’t have done better but I should have done better.”

Or take worth. Some people judge their worth, not by whether they live honestly and with integrity, but by some external or comparative standard: “I’m good because I’m smarter than other people,” “I’m good because I’m more beautiful than other people,” “I’m good because people like me.” But self-esteem is internal: it’s about your own estimate of your relationship to reality and morality. To base it on other people in any way is to make it vulnerable and self-defeating: you can’t seek self-esteem if you’re crawling on your knees or sneering down at inferiors.

Other people judge their worth by self-sacrificial moral standards: “I’m good because I put others before myself,” “I’m good because I’m not selfish.” But this, too, represents a contradiction: “I’m worthy of happiness because I recognize that other people’s happiness is more important than mine.” Healthy self-esteem requires that you dedicate yourself to moral principles aimed at human flourishing, not self-effacement.

Judging yourself by wrong metaphysical and moral standards is damaging. Sometimes such mistakes are mistakes. It’s understandable that a person could confuse his need for competence with a need for unachievable flawlessness. It’s understandable that a person who has been taught that morality consists in selflessness would judge herself by the degree to which she’s set aside her values for the sake of others.

But for people who are characteristically irrational, wrong standards of self-esteem are more insidious. Precisely because self-esteem is a need, they are driven to pursue a substitute—pseudo-self-esteem. Pseudo-self-esteem isn’t merely self-esteem gauged by a mistaken standard. It is an attempt to fake self-esteem rather than acknowledge that you lack it. It’s a pretense of self-esteem. Branden observes:

A man’s pseudo-self-esteem is maintained by two means, essentially: by evading, repressing, rationalizing, and otherwise denying ideas and feelings that could affect his self-appraisal adversely; and by seeking to derive his sense of efficacy and worth from something other than rationality, some alternative value or virtue which he experiences as less demanding or more easily attainable, such as “doing one’s duty,” or being stoical or altruistic or financially successful or sexually attractive.

Just as a fraud who counterfeits money has to twist himself in knots to conceal the truth, thereby making the truth his enemy, so the person trying to counterfeit self-esteem faces constant threats to his pretense. A pretense is hollow. There is an underlying tension that never leaves, amounting to the constant fear: “The clock is ticking. Someday, the truth about me will come out.” When you see someone become triggered by something seemingly innocuous—the tiniest slight, the mildest criticism, the faint scent of rejection—you are seeing someone whose pretense at self-esteem has been threatened.

Genuine self-esteem, on the other hand, is solid: it is based on the clearest perception possible of the truth about yourself, including your flaws and failings. You want to become aware of your flaws so that you can seek to improve them.

If self-esteem is something you earn by making moral choices, the virtue that encourages you to make good choices and form the best possible moral character is pride. Pride, in this context, is not the feeling of achievement, but the quest for achievement—the achievement of a healthy soul. Ayn Rand describes the virtue of pride this way:

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself.

Pride makes possible self-esteem. But to practice pride requires doing something few people take the time to do: defining a moral ideal to aspire to. To achieve self-esteem requires thinking deeply about what morality actually demands of you—and then striving to live up to those demands. To live up to them, not partially or part time but fully.

To practice morality full time and so cultivate the virtue of pride means to exhibit unbreached rationality. This doesn’t require omniscience. It requires consistently acting with your eyes open. It means never evading your knowledge and constantly striving to expand your knowledge—above all, your moral knowledge. To practice pride is to love morality, to be interested in moral issues, to want to know what’s right—not so you can preach it but so that you can practice it. Pride is the desire to cultivate a virtuous character and so achieve, in Peikoff’s words, “the best possible spiritual state.”

In conventional ethical systems, the basic moral challenge is temptation: you know what’s right, but you don’t want what’s right. Living up to morality’s demands, on this view, is impossible, but your job is to struggle to achieve the impossible.

But if morality is a guide to happiness, then temptation becomes a real but trivial issue. The challenge is not to desire the good but to see it. Imagine that before you made any choice, you were able to watch a movie that showed you the full consequences of each alternative. You could see how overcoming your fear of strangers and walking up to the girl in the library would lead to a passionate romance. You could see how phoning in sick to work so you could go out golfing would lead to you running in to the company CEO and ruining your career. You could see how standing up for your ideals in the face of an online mob would set you on a path of lifelong courage, while cowering and apologizing would cripple your self-esteem and nurture an ever-growing sense of resentment and self-loathing. If you could grasp, with total certainty, the full consequences of your actions, there would be no issue of temptation—what’s right and what’s desirable would be one and the same.

You cannot see all of the specific consequences of any of your choices. Temptation occurs when you see a situation out of context. You see with vivid clarity some short-term reward—sex with an attractive person, a brownie smothered with ice cream—but only dimly glimpse the long-term cost—divorce, diabetes. Or you see with vivid clarity some short-term cost—the blistering pain of the dentist’s drill, the brutal difficulty of a workout—but only dimly glimpse the long-term benefit—dental health, strength and energy.

But while you cannot see all of the specific consequences of your choices, you can project the consequences in principle. You know that evading what you know will harm you, even if the fact in question is painful to confront. You know that telling the truth in a difficult situation will benefit you, even if the short-term consequence will be a fight with your spouse or a poor grade in a class. Morality—a pro-happiness morality—gives you the only crystal ball there is. But it is up to your free will whether you use that crystal ball. “The challenge in life,” writes Peikoff, “is not to struggle against immoral passions, but to see the facts of reality clearly, in full focus. Once a man has done this in a given situation, there is no further difficulty in regard to him acting on what he sees.”

The fact that a pro-happiness morality is practical, that there’s no incentive to violate pro-life moral principles, means that you can live up to morality’s demands. Fully, consistently, without exception.

Morality, remember, is a guide for your choices. As a result, morality can’t require of you anything that’s outside your ability to choose. It can’t require you to make a certain amount of money or experience certain emotions or know what’s unknowable. It can only tell you to do what is under your direct volitional control. Rand puts it this way:

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul.

When morality is about what’s good for you, and when it doesn’t demand the impossible of you, then there is nothing barring you from doing what’s right without exception. There is no reason to settle for less than your best because there is nothing to gain from less than your best. There is no reason to engage in willful self-destruction.

Rand calls this attitude “moral ambitiousness.” Since morality is good for you, you should strive to understand and practice what’s moral. Not because you’re supposed to. Not because some authority will send you to Hell if you don’t. But because the more moral you are, the more successful and the more happy you’ll be.

To say that living a fully moral life is possible is not to say it’s easy. It requires effort. It requires accepting short-term discomfort for long-term benefits. Most difficult of all, it often requires overcoming past mistakes and traumas. By the time you are able to self-consciously think about moral issues, you may have developed all sorts of baggage that makes doing what’s good for you extremely difficult. You can become invested in psychological defenses—approval seeking, projecting a phony self-image, numbing negative feelings with drugs or sex or frantic busyness—and the anxiety of defying them can seem more terrifying than living a life without happiness. Dedication to happiness takes courage.

In encouraging you to strive for a fully moral life, I’m not saying you should continually ask yourself if you’re perfect and flagellate yourself for any shortcomings. That is a recipe for guilt and depression. What I’m really talking about is cultivating a commitment to continual improvement. If you have moral flaws, the question is whether you’re committed to eliminating them over time or whether you surrender to them.

If you do violate your moral principles, what should you do? What does moral redemption look like? It requires more than a resolve to do better in the future. Many a person has woken up with a hangover vowing to never drink again, only to crack open a bottle a few weeks (or a few hours) later. A resolution, by itself, isn’t enough.

Moral redemption starts with self-honesty. You say to yourself: I told that lie. I took that action. I’ve engrained this negative character trait. Self-honesty isn’t about settling for where you are today or liking where you are today, but about fully acknowledging the reality of where you are today. It means not pretending that “the real me” is different from the “me” who lashed out at my friend, or cheated on the test, or lied about believing in God, or peeked at my partner’s private journal. Self-honesty means seeing myself as I am, right now, at this moment.

Next, moral redemption requires fully accepting the consequences of my actions. Irrationality, we’ve said, means seeking to cheat cause and effect. Moral redemption, in essence, is reasserting respect for cause and effect.

If I was seeking effects without causes, then redemption requires taking responsibility for where I am and getting what I want. Even if I have been the victim of injustice or bad fortune, it means that I distinguish between fault and responsibility. It may not be my fault that I’m poor, but it’s my responsibility to rise out of poverty. It may not be my fault that I’m depressed or anxious, but it’s my responsibility to improve my psychological well-being. I must accept where I am today, including the role my choices played in bringing me to this point. Then I must stop blaming others and stop making excuses, knowing that getting what I want is in my own hands.

If I was enacting causes while trying to escape the effects, then moral redemption requires taking responsibility for what I did. If I took credit for a project at work I was hardly involved in, it means saying to my boss, “By the way, Paige really did most of the work on that one.” If I stole Ramen from my dormmate, it means fessing up and replacing what I took. If I cheated on a lover, it means not staying in the relationship under false pretenses of fidelity.

If I was seeking to reverse cause and effect, then moral redemption requires taking responsibility for my own desires and motives. To face the truth: I’m sleeping with people to prove I’m worthy of love, I’m pursuing wealth to prove I have ability, I’m a bully who tries to exert power over others to convince myself I’m not powerless. It means accepting that I lack self-esteem and have to rebuild it by pursuing only rational values and practicing virtue.

Then, moral redemption requires striving to understand my poor choices and undesirable character traits. Why did I lie to my boss about how far along I was on the project? Was I afraid she’d get angry—and if so, do I have an irrational fear of people’s negative emotions? Or is there something deeper at work? Perhaps I feel the need to project an image of myself as a superstar at work, because deep down I feel incompetent. Self-improvement requires getting to the deepest “why” I’m capable of, so that I can make the biggest correction I’m capable of.

Next, moral redemption requires a plan of action. This is the only kind of resolution to do better that matters. A plan can mean anticipating future scenarios where I’ll experience the temptation to repeat my past mistakes and coming up with a strategy to avoid repeating them. Or it can be a positive series of steps I’m going to take to instill a new habit or character trait. For example, a lot of people find themselves getting into angry arguments on social media. They come away feeling like they were the worst versions of themselves. To improve, they need a plan such as: I’m not allowed to post anything when I’m in an emotionally charged state.

Finally, moral redemption requires action across time. I cannot think my way to a better character without action. It’s action that allows me to assimilate and automatize a new set of behaviors. If you’ve ever quite smoking, you know that the hardest part is dis-integrating the link between smoking and different settings and activities. You go to have your cup of coffee and it feels unsatisfying, like something’s missing. It takes time to break the link between coffee and nicotine. Then, after several weeks, you’re starting to enjoy being a non-smoker, only to go out to a party. You’re overwhelmed by the sense you won’t be able to enjoy late night conversations without lighting up. You have to break that connection as well.

For any habit, including moral habits, you cannot short-circuit that process. You will encounter situations where the old desire will re-emerge, and you will have to consciously remind yourself of your new resolve and will yourself to follow your plan of action. But over time, it will become easier. Over time, the new way of acting will become second nature.

This isn’t easy. Although it can feel safer in the moment to suffer internally than to confront your fears, your guilt, your shame, it’s not true. Negative emotions tell lies. Alcoholism tells you that you can never enjoy life without your crutch. Depression tells you that you will never find enjoyment in life. Anxiety tells you that you will not be able to cope with whatever fear terrifies you. You need to be able to set those feelings and fears to the side and act on your knowledge: that happiness is possible, that life can be amazing, that confronting your worst fears will make you feel better not worse. That is courageous. That is what it means to lead a moral life.

I have no doubt that you can make sense of a lot of human behavior by seeing it as a competition for social status. I’m thinking of the men who shake hands like they’re trying to break bones and of women who throw shade on the mom who can’t afford whatever yoga pants are in fashion this spring. I’m thinking of people who buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like. I’m thinking of parents who shame children for not pursuing “respectable” careers or marrying “respectable” partners.

But human beings aren’t lobsters. We don’t have to play status games—and we shouldn’t. We create values—we don’t compete for them. We bond over shared values—we don’t fight for the most reproductively fit partners. Status games are games played by losers for prizes not worth winning.

Your means of survival is reason, and to live rationally means having as your primary focus, not other people, but reality. It is to practice the virtue of independence.

Independence doesn’t mean that you ignore other people, detach yourself from them, refuse to learn from or cooperate with them. It means that you take responsibility for your own thinking and you take responsibility for supporting your own life. You want to know what’s true—not what other people think is true. You want to know what’s right—not what other people think is right. You want to live by the work of your own mind—not copy a routine created by others, or feed on the crumbs of their handouts, or get rich by defrauding and robbing them of what they’ve created.

Independence, in this sense, is hard. It requires effort to think for yourself and to support your own life. It requires responsibility: if you’re independent and you make an error, there’s no one else to blame or to pay for your mistakes. It sometimes means coming into conflict with the opinions and judgments of others—provoking their disapproval or animosity. But independence is hard only in the sense that working out is hard—both involve short-term discomfort that buys massive benefits over the long run. As the saying goes: “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

One of the most independent people I know is my friend Alex Epstein. In his late twenties, Alex became fascinated by the issue of energy. He had grown up with no particular interest in the subject and shared more or less the conventional view: that fossil fuels were outdated, that solar and wind were the energies of the future, that climate change was very likely going to be a major problem. But once he realized the importance of energy—that it is the industry that powers every other industry—he began questioning the conventional wisdom.

Why is it, he wondered, that we only ever hear negatives about fossil fuels, and we only ever hear positives about solar and wind? Don’t we need to take an unbiased look at the positives and the negatives of all the alternatives to make good energy decisions? Why was it that the media covered catastrophic predictions about the future from the same thought leaders who had made failed catastrophic predictions in the past? Maybe they’re right this time, but shouldn’t their track record at least give us pause? Or why is it that we talk about whether climate change is real rather than whether those changes would be catastrophic? Doesn’t making good decisions require precision?

It was this persistent questioning that led Alex to formulate a new environmental philosophy, and eventually write two bestsellers: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future. Later in his career, Alex would sometimes be called a stooge for the fossil fuel industry. But the funny thing is that, when he developed his philosophy, he didn’t know anyone from the industry. And even when he did, what he found—and I saw this with my own eyes—was that he was usually far more positive about fossil fuels than people who worked in the industry. They often accepted the conventional narrative that fossil fuels were a necessary evil. They didn’t shape Alex’s thinking—he reshaped theirs.

The image that best captures Alex’s approach to life came just before the publication of his first book. New York City saw the largest climate march in history. Hundreds of thousands of people stomped down the streets of Manhattan chanting, “Hey, ho, fossil fuels have got to go.” And Alex? He stood alone facing the oncoming crowd, quietly holding a giant sign that read: “I Love Fossil Fuels.” That is independence.

The need for independence is, like every virtue, rooted in the fact that you survive by reason. Reason is an individual faculty. You can’t delegate your thinking—not even to people who are more intelligent than you are—because they, like you, are fallible. Intellectually, dependence means: I’m going to follow others on faith, I’m going to obey them—and I have no clue whether they’re in contact with reality. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, maybe they’re evil, I don’t know—but I’m going to follow them rather than my own judgment. Existentially, dependence means: I’m going to put my life at the mercy of other people—of their generosity, their gullibility, their weakness. Dependence, in short, means surrendering control over your own life.

Contrast that with a truly independent person. She’s forming her own conclusions about what’s true and what’s good. As a teenager, she’s questioning: Do I agree with my parents’ views on religion? Do I respect the things my peers admire? What do I find sexually attractive? What kind of activities do I find engaging? What kind of career do I want? Is this true? Is this good for me? The independent person is building her own view of the true and the good. She’s cultivating a strong sense of responsibility: “I am in control of my mind and my life and therefore I’m responsible for my mind and my life.” She isn’t looking to be handed anything, but to earn what she wants. And, through this process, she’s developing a strong sense of self. She knows what she believes—and why. She knows what she values—and why. She forms a self by means of reason—and then sets out to achieve an integrated set of values that will constitute her life.

As the independent person proceeds on her quest for values, she will have to navigate a world of other people. People who have free will. People who can shape their soul into something positive, rational, and creative—or who default on that task. Potential allies in the quest for happiness—and potential threats. Here another virtue is required, one that will guide her in distinguishing the good from the bad, that will help her benefit from the best that people have to offer and protect her from the worst that people have to offer. That virtue is justice.

Justice, writes Leonard Peikoff, “is the virtue of judging men’s character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man what he deserves.” Today being “judgmental” is stigmatized. You’re supposed to be tolerant—not just politically, not just in the sense of respecting someone’s right to live however they choose, but tolerant personally and morally. That is suicidal. The people you surround yourself with help shape who you are and how your life goes. To remain agnostic about the character and conduct of those people is the equivalent of drunk driving through life.

What makes non-judgmentalism plausible is equating judgment with irrational prejudice. Yet what justice demands is rational judgment. To hire someone based on his skin color, to refuse to hire someone because of her sex, to assume someone is dumb because he has an accent, to assume someone is honest because she is attractive—justice forbids such shortcuts. It says: judge people by rational standards and apply those standards with rigor and care.

And then, justice says: act accordingly. Treat people as they deserve. Admire those worthy of admiration. Ostracize those worthy of being shunned. Praise good deeds and condemn bad ones. Meet the good with rewards—withhold rewards and, where appropriate, dole out punishments to the bad. In Rand’s words:

The basic principle that should guide one’s judgment in issues of justice is the law of causality: one should never attempt to evade or to break the connection between cause and effect—one should never attempt to deprive a man of the consequences of his actions, good or evil. (One should not deprive a man of the values or benefits his actions have caused, such as expropriating a man’s wealth for somebody’s else’s benefit; and one should not deflect the disaster which his actions have caused, such as giving relief checks to a lazy, irresponsible loafer.)

Just as justice demands judgment so it bars mercy. Mercy is the view that a person should deny people what they deserve. It is to sanction unearned forgiveness, and thereby reward evil while callously ignoring evil’s victims. When atheists praise Christian morality, when Jesus is held to be a moral exemplar, what they ignore is the vile center of Christian ethics: the demand that we turn the other cheek, forgive, and love the evil. To love the evil is to spit in the face of the good.

“No, we don’t love the evil. We hate the sin, love the sinner.” This means nothing. Man is a being of self-made soul—you are what you make yourself. This is precisely what evil people seek to evade. Criminals often say of their crimes, “That wasn’t the real me.” Christians say: “Yes, you’re right.” A morality of happiness takes morality seriously—it says, to the rapist, the child molester, the thug, the dictator: “That is the real you—and you deserve to suffer the consequences of your immoral choices.”

Does justice allow for forgiveness? Yes. If it’s earned. To earn forgiveness requires more than an apology. Forgiveness is earned when a person has genuinely changed and proved that he’s changed. When he’s repaired whatever flaws in his character allowed him to conduct himself in an unworthy manner. For a trivial misdeed, very little is required. For a serious grievance, it may take years or even decades to trust someone again. For serious acts of evil—not only crimes, but even something like long-term, conscious deception—there is no path to forgiveness.

If all of this sounds too harsh, it’s because we forget the stakes. Justice is not ultimately about condemning and punishing the evil. It’s about praising and rewarding the good. The reason evil cannot be forgiven is out of fidelity and love for its victims. “[M]ercy to the guilty,” Adam Smith noted, “is cruelty to the innocent.”

The essence of justice, its heart and soul, is this: I’m on a quest for values, and I’m on a quest for those who are on a quest for values. Justice isn’t primarily about condemning the wicked. It’s about telling your kid you’re proud of her when she fesses up to a mistake. It’s about standing up for the victim of an online mob and letting him know he’s not alone. It’s about being an ally to the true and the good.

We have now grasped the essentials of self-interest. Your interests consist of living rationally, creating values, and dealing with others as independent equals. But valuing your own interests—valuing your life—does not happen automatically. Like every other value, it must be earned. How do you earn it?

In Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, the heroine expresses this attitude: “It’s a rare gift, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.” In saying that this feeling toward one’s own life is “rare,” part of what Rand is stressing is that reverence for your own life has to be earned. It is not automatic but the product of your choices.

To honor your self you need to have a self. You have to cultivate convictions, values, and strong desires. You have to conceive of a life you have a burning desire to lead—a human life aimed at a hierarchy of pro-life values, including reason, purpose, and self-esteem. You have to build your self-esteem by pursuing that life through virtue, i.e., an unwavering commitment to rationality. It is through thinking—through choosing to turn on the light that is your mind—that you come to form a self and value your own life.

What a pro-happiness morality says is: do it. Create a self and a life that you love, and honor that life. Your life matters. You are an end in yourself, not a means to the ends of others. You have a right to exist for your own sake. You have no duty to serve others, just as they have no duty to serve you.

In this lesson, we’ll see that self-interest is not the antithesis of morality, but the heart and soul of morality. It is only your desire to create a self and a life that you love that gives you a reason to be moral—and it is only through your dedication to morality that you can achieve the self-esteem that is the foundation of joy. And, I’ll add, the foundation of healthy human relationships.

The Meaning of Effective Egoism

A pro-happiness morality is one that upholds Effective Egoism. It’s egoistic in that it says you should live for your own happiness. It is effective in that it says the only way to achieve happiness is through fidelity to rational values and virtues. Values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Virtues like rationality, honesty, integrity, and productiveness.

Egoism is the most misunderstood concept in morality. We therefore need to be clear about what it means and what it doesn’t.

Effective Egoism is not psychological egoism

Psychological egoism is the idea that everyone is inherently selfish. There’s no point in telling people to be egoistic (or altruistic) because we always do what we most want to do. Mother Teresa was supposedly selfish because she wanted to serve the poor. On this view, we have no choice to be anything other than egoistic because we come hardwired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Psychological egoism has an enduring appeal to economists, psychologists, and a surprising number of intelligent laymen. But in philosophy, the position never quite recovered from the critique of David Hume. His pen dripping with sarcasm, Hume describes the ultimate absurdity of psychological egoism:

By a turn of imagination, by a refinement of reflection, by an enthusiasm of passion, we seem to take part in the interests of others, and imagine ourselves divested of all selfish considerations: but, at bottom, the most generous patriot and most niggardly miser, the bravest hero and most abject coward, have, in every action, an equal regard to their own happiness and welfare.

It is simply not true, Hume thinks, that we can “explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances.” To claim that Christian ascetics who ate only grass, sentenced themselves to solitary confinement, and castrated themselves were really trying to maximize their own pleasure is to empty the word “pleasure” of all meaning.

To argue that we always pursue our own interests because we necessarily act to seek pleasure and avoid pain ignores one crucial issue: values. Beyond physical pleasure and pain, which explain almost none of our actions, pleasure and pain are the product of our values, and our values are the product of our choices. And here our free will gives us the power to decide: Am I going to choose my values by my best assessment of what’s genuinely good for me—or am I going to choose my values by what some authority tells me to do—or am I going to choose my values by copying what other people care about—or am I going to give the issue no thought, picking up values blindly and at random?

Effective Egoism is about your ultimate motivation. To be a principled egoist is to direct all of your choices toward the moral end that is your self-interest. An Effective Egoist selects his values according to what he is rationally convinced will be good for his life, formulates a hierarchy of values, and then strives never to sacrifice a higher value for a lower value. Does everyone do that? Most people don’t have any self-conscious ultimate motivation. They aren’t egoists, they aren’t utilitarians, they aren’t altruists—they’re not seeking to implement any ethical theory. They’re still influenced by moral notions and make choices that carry moral weight. But they aren’t self-consciously striving to realize any particular moral end.

To be an Effective Egoist is to self-consciously aim at your interests. That requires two things: you need to formulate what your interests are and then aim at them in your actions. You need to conceive of a life based on rational moral principles and then strive to realize it.

Psychological egoism is, in the end, a version of determinism. In reality, though we cannot act without some motivation, we are the selectors of the values that motivate us. Those values can either be chosen rationally for the purpose of attaining happiness—or they can be chosen on some other grounds—or we can default entirely, and allow our values (or, more precisely, our whims) to arise by accident.

Effective Egoism requires valuing other people

Other human beings are obviously of tremendous “practical” benefit. They are sources of knowledge and trade. It is clearly easier to flourish in a free, technological society than on a deserted island. But that is hardly the sole or even the primary benefit we gain from other people. Companionship, friendship, love—these are among the greatest pleasures life has to offer. Near the top of any Effective Egoist’s hierarchy of values will be the people who matter most to him.

I’ll have more to say about how and why an Effective Egoist should form meaningful human relationships shortly. What I want to stress here is this: to uphold Effective Egoism is to say that you are your own primary value—it’s not to say that you are your only value. Every action an Effective Egoist takes should be aimed at the preservation of his life and the achievement of his happiness. He isn’t a resource for others to exploit, just as they aren’t resources for him to exploit. But other people matter to him.

An Effective Egoist has a generalized positive attitude toward others rooted in respect since, like him, they are human beings. Think of the best moments of your life: the morning after you’ve fallen in love or the evening after a major success at school or work. That joy tends to spill over into a wider feeling of goodwill: you hope that others could experience the happiness you’re experiencing. The Effective Egoist, precisely because he loves himself and his life, carries with him a similar feeling throughout his life—not some phony “love for humanity,” but a generosity of spirit that expects the best from people and hopes to find it. Other people are seen as spiritual allies—until evidence convinces him that they are not.

But what an Effective Egoist feels for the specific people who matter to him is far more profound. The primary benefit we receive from the people we love is joy in their existence. Just as we can become invested in our favorite fictional characters, sharing their joy and sorrow, so we become invested in our favorite people. Their happiness makes us happy. Their interests become, to an important extent, our interests.

The point isn’t that an Effective Egoist can care for others as much as a committed altruist. The point is far stronger: only an egoist is truly fit for love and friendship. When people are riddled with self-doubt and unhappiness, friendships can become one-sided or co-dependent. Painted on smiles can conceal hidden jealousies. When people view self-sacrifice as a moral duty, they tend to oscillate between resentful service and presumptuous demands (since their friends, too, have a duty to sacrifice). Self-confident, happy people aren’t takers: they’ve created lives of abundance and so they are free to express kindness and generosity. Principled people are solid. You can rely on them. They’ll tell you the truth. They’ll keep their word. They aren’t trying to prove something about themselves, so they can take joy in your joy, and be open and empathetic when you need to share your fears and frustrations.

The key to understanding how an Effective Egoist treats human relationships is to keep firmly in mind what a sacrifice truly is. It is not a sacrifice to help someone you care about. It is not a sacrifice to let your friend choose the movie. It is not a sacrifice to pick up the check, or bear an inconvenience, or lift someone up when they’re down. A sacrifice means surrendering what you find personally valuable for what you don’t.

One insignia of sacrifice in human relationships is when you act out of guilt. When you let your brother mooch off you after he’s made a mess of his life and shows no inclination to fix it, that is a sacrifice. When you stay in a sexless marriage because you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings, never mind how they’re torturing yours, that is a sacrifice. When you allow your cousin to use you as a source of free day care, when he could easily afford to pay someone, that is a sacrifice. When you lie to your parents about attending church because you don’t want to hurt their feelings by admitting you’re an atheist, that is a sacrifice. Whenever you give in to someone else’s irrational emotion, that is a sacrifice.

There is a flip side to acting from guilt, a form of sacrifice that’s more insidious because it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. If your motive for doing something for others is the jolt of self-worth you get from helping them, that is often a sacrifice in disguise. Your internal conversation amounts to: “This isn’t what I selfishly want to do, but doing this will make me feel like a good person.” This can be difficult to distinguish from the inevitable positive feelings that come from doing someone a favor. Here your only protection is a clearly defined hierarchy of values and careful introspection.

To value others, ultimately, is to respect and aid their own egoism. When my friend and mentor Alex Epstein started his own business and was trying to raise funds for a debate with environmentalist Bill McKibben—a debate that would ultimately launch Alex’s career into the stratosphere—I donated $500, which was a ton of money for me at the time.

Alex replied: “Don, if you ever try to start your own one-man army, you’ll realize just how rare people like you are. I certainly do. And the difference between rare and none makes all the difference.”

I said, “Thank you Alex. But I should say, I regard this as an investment in my future. If you succeed, it will be infinitely easier for me. $500 is a ridiculously small price to pay.”

“Well, yes,” he said, “I was praising you for being selfish. That’s what’s rare.”

Ineffective Egoism isn’t egoism

If you were truly selfish, wouldn’t you steal a million dollars if you knew you’d get away with it? This question and questions like it reflect a deep-seated view that self-interest entails predatory and unprincipled behavior. But nothing could be more utterly unselfish than manufacturing human victims.

Let’s start by reversing the question: why would you think that it is to a person’s interest to steal a million dollars? You might point to the things a person could buy with the money. Fine. But that does not answer the question. A person’s interests, remember, are defined long range and full context. They consist, not of isolated goods or positive feelings, but of a way of life—a constellation of pro-life values that fit together into a non-contradictory whole so that he can achieve non-contradictory joy, “a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction.”

The question is not whether you can buy desirable things with stolen money. You can. Nor is the question whether it’s possible to steal a million dollars and get away with it. It’s possible, though baldly asserting that a thief “knows he’ll get away with it” is ridiculous. Every thief thinks he can get away his crime, but his guilt is a fact, and like all facts it is in principle discoverable. No. The question is whether the life of a criminal or of a creator is to your interest. We don’t choose between isolated actions but between kinds of lives.

Choosing the life of a creator makes the creative intelligence of other people an asset and the facts of reality your ally. Choosing the life of a criminal means volunteering for people to use their creative intelligence, not to offer you values in trade, but to expose and punish you. It means willingly making truth and intelligence your enemies instead of your allies.

People don’t choose the life of a criminal because they are rationally convinced it is to their interest. We all know in some terms that the human way of life requires thought and production. We understand that a nation of thieves would have nothing to steal and would quickly starve to death. The criminal’s whole game is become a hitchhiker on other people’s thought and production—on the way of life that actually allows human beings to flourish.

Any confusion on this point only comes from pretending that we don’t have to choose between ways of life. That we can view an action out of context. That there is such a thing as a rational, productive person who steals once in a while. But a person who steals “once in a while” is a criminal and is living the criminal way of life. Leonard Peikoff puts it this way:

The power of the good is enormous, but depends on its consistency. That is why the good has to be an issue of “all or nothing,” “black and white,” and why evil has to be partial, occasional, “gray.” Observe that a “liar” in common parlance is not a man who always, conscientiously, tells falsehoods; there is no such creature; for the term to apply to a person, a few whoppers on his part is enough. Just as a “hypocrite” is not a man who scrupulously betrays every idea he holds. Just as a “burglar” is not a man who steals every item of property he sees. Just as a person is a “killer” if he respects human life 99.9 per cent of the time and hires himself out to the Mafia as an executioner only now and then.

Why isn’t it in your interest to steal a million dollars? For the same reason you don’t cheat on your lover. It’s not because “you might get caught.” It’s because that’s not what you’re after in life. You want an open, honest, fulfilling marriage, where the love and admiration in your lover’s eyes means something. In the same way, the reason you don’t go around looking for opportunities to steal isn’t fear of ending up in prison. It’s that you are focused on a life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem—on living a human life. Anything that detracts from that, that threatens that, that undermines that has no value to you.

An Effective Egoist, in sum, is committed to pro-life values and the virtues required to achieve them. Morality is not a restriction on self-interest, not a limitation or a constraint. It is the only way to flourish.

You might call the conventional view of self-interest “Ineffective Egoism.” It’s ineffective because what achieving your own interests actually requires is fidelity to a morality of happiness. But, in the final analysis, it’s not even egoism: the person who “thinks only of himself” and is willing to do anything to anyone to get what he wants doesn’t, as we’ll soon see, even desire the best for himself.

Cruel and evil people aren’t selfish

As human beings, we need to understand the world around us. This has often led us to invent and embrace non-explanations that seem like explanations for things we do not understand. Primitive peoples saw lightning and wove tales of angry gods. Today, we laugh at their ignorance. But when it comes to explaining human behavior, we, too, are stuck with primitive just-so stories. We look at dictators, terrorists, murderers, rapists, thieves, addicts, manipulators, jerks, power-lusters, social climbers, thrill seekers, prickly geniuses, successful investors, and ambitious entrepreneurs and we attribute to all of them the same ruling motive: “selfishness.”

A motive that explains everything, explains nothing. There is nothing important that unites a murderer and a jerk, let alone a murderer, a jerk, and an Effective Egoist. Labeling everyone who isn’t selfless “selfish” prevents us from answering a difficult but important question: What does explain human cruelty and human evil? If it’s not driven by a preoccupation with oneself, what is it driven by?

To understand evil, start with this: have you ever been in a room with someone who is strikingly beautiful and become self-conscious about your weight? Have you ever seen a happy couple and become aware of your relationship failures? Have you ever been angry and the sight of someone else’s happiness made you angrier? Other people can make us aware of our perceived flaws and short-comings. For healthy people, these are fleeting moments of pain. More often, the sight of other people’s virtues and successes sparks positive feelings: the desire to admire, the desire to emulate, the desire to achieve what they have achieved.

For evil people, it’s different. Filled with a perpetual and overwhelming sense of self-doubt and shame, they spend the lion’s share of their time and energy trying to quell their feelings of worthlessness. Typically this takes the form of seeking out feelings of superiority. I’m tougher than others, I’m sexier than others, I’m richer than others, I’m smarter than others, I’m more powerful than others, I’m more terrifying than others. (Different people will gravitate to different pretenses at superiority based on which pretense seems easiest to obtain or which aspect of life makes them feel most insecure.) They secretly feel like a nobody, and so they become fixated on proving they’re a somebody.

What happens when this sort of a person encounters someone who actually possesses the values he pretends to possess? Resentment, envy, hatred. The sheer existence of strong, confident, healthy, happy people makes him feel deeply inferior, and his ruling desire becomes the desire to destroy. Ayn Rand called this motive “hatred of the good for being the good.”

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . [T]hey are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul.

This is so ugly a motive that a person cannot admit it—to others and above all to himself. He needs rationalizations. And here conventional morality provides evil people with the two most powerful rationalizations: “I don’t hate him because he’s good—I hate him because he’s selfish”—and, “My destructive acts are moral because my motive isn’t my own welfare, but the greater good.”

If you’ve ever seen Breaking Bad, the core story is the descent of an average man into pure evil. At every stage of his descent, the anti-hero, Walter White, justifies his actions by saying, “I’m doing this for my family.” I’m selling drugs—for my family. I’m lying to everyone I know—for my family. I’m killing anyone who threatens to expose me—for my family. In the final episode, White cannot maintain that rationalization any longer. He admits to his wife: I didn’t do it for my family, I did it for myself.

You might think that’s a confession that his ruling motive was selfishness. But the show reveals the true meaning of his confession. From the beginning of the show, we see that White feels a deep sense of emptiness and inferiority. He feels pushed around by his cocky brother-in-law, by his overbearing boss, by his naggy wife. He feels resentful toward his former business partner who got rich after White had left the company. His motive wasn’t selfishness—it was the attempt to cope with his insecurities and resentments by the cultivation of power and the destruction of anyone and anything that threatened his pretenses.

To move from fiction to real life, think of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Communism and fascism rose to power by preaching that individuals have a moral duty to serve and sacrifice for the greater good: for the proletariat or for the volk. Hitler put it this way:

This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise of every truly human culture. . . . The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call—to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness—idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.

But these appeals to the greater good were only rationalizations for destruction, which is why, despite years and decades of achieving nothing but destruction, those nations never stopped to reconsider their systems. They never said, “our ideology isn’t actually achieving a greater good, we need a better ideology.” Because their ideologies and systems were in fact achieving exactly what they were intended to achieve: destruction.

Now ask: Does this motivation have anything in common with someone who desires, not to destroy, but to create? Who builds cars or phones or computers instead of gulags and gas chambers? Who seeks the achievement of personal happiness instead of the quelling of envy and self-hatred? Who is committed to a life of reason, purpose, self-esteem rather than manipulation, fraud, and exploitation? No? Then how disastrous to our moral thinking is it to label both kinds of people “selfish”?

Our conventional notion of “selfishness” is a package deal. It teaches us to equate Bernie Madoff and Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes and Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and Ayn Rand. Every package deal works by uniting things based on superficial similarities. Here the fact that neither criminals nor creators are out “for the good of others” is used to blur an essential distinction: the distinction between the person who sacrifices others and the person who respects others in his quest for personal happiness.

Instead of reaching lazily for the term “selfishness” to describe every bad actor, we should cultivate a richer moral and psychological vocabulary. And we should reserve the term “selfishness” for those rare people who take their genuine interests, and the pro-self morality that identifies their interests, seriously.

What, then, does an Effective Egoist morality have to say positively about how we should relate to other people? If it’s not true that we should sacrifice others in order to amass money, power, and status, how should we relate to them?

Creativity is your power to rearrange the elements of reality in new and valuable ways. It is usually viewed as the private property of artists, but any time you discover a new idea or create a new product or build a new company or solve a new problem or improve an old process you’re engaged in creative thinking. Whatever your field—whether you’re a writer or teacher or software programmer or math professor or FBI agent or entrepreneur—this kind of creative thinking is the hallmark of mastery and the key to success. It is not some mystical talent possessed by an elect few. It is an ability we all have the power to cultivate.

What creativity is

The best portrait of creative work I’m aware of comes from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. The novel features two architects as lead characters. Peter Keating graduates from college at the top of his class. Not because he is creative but because he is excellent at following the rules laid down by his teachers. His approach to architecture is not to create, but to copy. He wins accolades because he excels at imitating the kinds of buildings that traditional standards say are good.

But from the start, we see the limits of this approach. Keating is paralyzed whenever he comes to an architectural problem not covered by a teacher’s concrete rule. He has no way of judging what’s good or bad because he has no reference point for atypical building situations. The person he turns to for advice in such moments is an innovative young architect, Howard Roark.

Roark is not popular. In fact, he gets kicked out of college because he refuses to imitate the architectural styles of the past. His new approach to building stupefies most of the people around him precisely because it is creative rather than imitative. Early in the novel, Roark explains his philosophy of architecture:

“Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

Here we get some crucial elements of how Roark creates. Every building has a theme or central idea the architect uses to select every detail about the building. This is partly why Roark is not paralyzed when he encounters a new problem with no inherited rule to guide him: he isn’t guided by inherited rules but the central idea that “sets every detail.” And the central idea—the standard of value—itself is neither inherited nor arbitrary. The architect chooses it in light of the materials available, the site where he intends to build, and the purpose the building is to serve. It’s this integration of every element of a building around its central idea that makes it beautiful.

For example, late in the book, Roark is tasked with building a low-income housing project, Cortlandt Homes. Rand describes the final design:

The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture.

Philosopher Gregory Salmieri summarizes Roark’s approach this way:

[Roark] must first understand the relevant architectural problem by identifying the proposed building’s function and location and the nature of the available materials, then he must conceive some central idea as a specific solution to this problem, and then select every detail of the building in accordance with this central idea, thereby integrating the building into a harmonious whole.

This, in pattern, is the process creative work follows—not just in architecture, but in every field.

When I wrote my first novel, I Am Justice, I started out with a purpose. I wanted to write a thriller that showed how a normal person might realistically evolve into a Jack Reacher-type hero. I needed a central idea that would allow me to achieve that purpose. I knew my lead character had to start out as far from a vigilante hero as possible, so I made her a college student. That raised a question: if a typical college student became entangled with a crime, she wouldn’t try to solve it—she would go to the police. So I had to have a strong reason why she couldn’t go to the police—why she would have to take responsibility for solving the crime. Well, I thought, what if she was partly responsible for the crime? That led to me to my central ideal: a college student kills a classmate but is terrified when the next morning police discover three dead students in what appears to be a gruesome hate crime. To keep her secrets buried, she has to find out the truth about what happened that night. That central idea, then, acted as a standard of value to guide me in selecting everything about the novel: the characters, the plot, every line of dialogue, every word choice.

Architecture and writing fiction are obviously creative tasks. But this same process of creative thinking applies even to seemingly non-creative fields. Take the case of Darwin. On the surface, his work wasn’t about creativity but discovery. But look deeper. He started with a rich and messy set of facts about living organisms, including the growing conviction by scientists that species hadn’t shown up one day in their final form, but had evolved into their current form over millions of years. What scientists couldn’t do was explain evolution. They could not answer the question: by what mechanism do species evolve? Darwin’s great insight came from reading the work, not of a biologist, but an economist.

Thomas Malthus had argued that agricultural yields grow arithmetically while human populations grow exponentially. This, thought Malthus, necessitated a struggle for survival by human beings, with large portions of the population dying from starvation. Re-reading Malthus’s essay, Darwin made a creative leap. He saw how a similar struggle for survival among animals would mean that those most fit to thrive in their environment would tend to survive and reproduce. Small survival advantages would propagate over time leading to large changes over large stretches of time.

Darwin spent the next two decades taking this revolutionary insight and using it to make sense of a wide set of questions a theory of evolution needed to answer. He had to make sure it fit and could explain the fossil record, the geographical distribution of different species, the degree of natural variation among offspring, the extreme perfection of vital organs, etc., etc.—and that no competing theory could account for all of these facts.

Moving from science to business, consider the case of Steve Jobs and the mental process that produced Apple’s numerous breakthrough innovations. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, his first breakthrough innovation was the iPod MP3 player. But Jobs quickly became aware that the iPod would be irrelevant as soon as a phone maker figured out how to put a quality MP3 player onto a phone. One device beats two. So he conceived of a new idea—a product that combined a phone, a music player, and an internet browser. He and his team then went about figuring out how to build that device, which required solving countless new problems, and making countless new creative decisions. Jobs famously oversaw every detail of the project, making sure that it would give the use the best experience possible.

Though creativity cannot be boiled down to a recipe or a necessary order of steps, we can identify several key elements of the creative process:

• Problem: Creative thinking involves problem solving. Roark aims to design a building given the building’s purpose, location, and materials; Darwin aims to explain why species evolve; Jobs aims to forestall a competitive threat to the iPod.

• Solution: Creative thinking involves a central idea that solves the creative problem and acts as a standard of value. Darwin conceives of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution; Jobs conceives of a device that combines the function of a phone, a music player, and an internet browser.

• Integration: Creative thinking involves selecting every detail in accordance with that central idea (or, in the case of a scientific discovery, checking to see if all of the relevant facts do integrate with the solution).

This is the creative process. But how do you identify problems, formulate solutions, and integrate everything around that solution?

How to think creatively

Creative thinking, like all thinking, consists of asking questions and answering them. And when you ask questions and answer them, what you are really doing is searching and judging. You set out to answer a question, or solve a problem, or achieve some purpose. Then you go about your task by querying your subconscious and your environment for raw materials—and judging the results. True or false? Right or wrong? Good or bad? Am I headed toward my goal or away from it? This process of searching and judging continues until you achieve your goal: a theory, a novel, a painting, an app, a new product, a crucial business decision.

The difference between an amateur and a master is not, at the deepest level, a difference in process—but in the quality of the process. The master conducts more fruitful searches and makes more efficient and refined judgments. And, importantly, this ability is not innate. It is an achievement cultivated through practice.

Searching

Edgar Allan Poe once explained the process he used to craft his famous poem, “The Raven.” In his telling, “no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”

For example, take the poem’s most famous line: “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” Poe knew he wanted a refrain that would “produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining for the most part, unvaried.” But what should the refrain be? It must be short, he decided—ideally a single word. But which word?

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was of course a corollary, the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the most producible consonant.

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had pre-determined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact it was the very first which presented itself.

What Poe describes is a process of explicit reasoning. He consciously worked out, step-by-step, the needs of his poem and the best way to satisfy those needs.

A similar approach was taken by Thomas Edison to the discovery of a usable light bulb. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. Instead, he made it useful and economic by finding an affordable, long-lasting filament. Edison’s approach was to brute force his way to a solution by testing out thousands of different materials until he got the idea of trying carbonized materials like cotton, which worked far better than other materials. He carbonized everything from hickory to boxwood to the fibers of tropical plants sent to him by biologists until he found the one that worked best: carbonized bamboo.

What’s striking about these examples is how uncreative they seem. We typically associate creativity, not with step-by-step reasoning or running a series of trials, but with creative leaps. A creator approaches some problem and has a moment of insight that takes him beyond where explicit reasoning would lead.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell opens with a story about a Greek statue that was authenticated by scientists. Yet when a number of art historians looked at it, they instantly judged it to be a fraud. The experts couldn’t immediately articulate why they were so sure, but further testing showed that they were right. They didn’t reason their way to the correct answer—they leaped to it.

There’s no question that creative leaps typically do play a crucial role in creativity. Archimedes sits in the bathtub and screams “Eureka!” as he realizes that he can measure the volume of irregular objects using water displacement. Darwin reads Malthus’s essay on human population growth and discovers the principle of natural selection. Mozart scribbles out the overture to Don Giovanni the morning of its opening performance. Newton grasps the law of gravity watching an apple fall from a tree.

Creative thinkers make creative leaps. But the reason I started with explicit reasoning is because creative leaps should be understood, not as moments of mystical insight, but as lightning-like counterparts to explicit reasoning. They are best thought of as implicit reasoning. Looking backwards, a creator can, in principle, reconstruct a reasoning process that would have led to these insights and discoveries. Gladwell’s art experts, for example, were ultimately able to reconstruct what facts they had grasped intuitively that had convinced them the Greek statues were fraudulent. Even artists, who seem to make creative leaps that defy explicit reasoning, can often reconstruct why they made the creative choices they did—even if they didn’t explicitly reason their way to those choices during the act of creation. What you want to cultivate is the master’s ability to skip over many of the steps in order to find solutions.

You already have the ability to take creative leaps in some areas of life. If you’ve ever watched a movie to TV show and predicted the ending, it probably wasn’t because you sat down and reasoned out what would happen. Instead, your mind leaped to an answer based on pattern recognition. Looking back, you could probably reconstruct the implicit reasoning that led you to the answer, but you didn’t engage in that reasoning consciously. Your subconscious simply fed you the answer.

This is precisely what masters are able to do in their profession. It’s not that they sit down and effortlessly solve a difficult problem or create a flawless masterpiece. But over time they are able to put themselves in a position where they eventually do gain a creative insight (or a whole series of them) that leads to a creative achievement.

Masters typically start by immersing themselves in a problem or task. They don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. They create a fertile garden for creation. In Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works, he starts with the story of how a design firm came up with the idea for the Swiffer—essentially, an improved mop. The team was originally tasked by Procter and Gamble with an open-ended assignment: come up with a new floor cleaner. The team started by watching film of people cleaning their homes. “This is about the most boring footage you can imagine,” one of them said. “It’s movies of mopping, for God’s sake. And we had to watch hundreds of hours of it.” Boring, yes. But that process of immersion ultimately led them to the insight that existing mops were unnecessarily messy and burdensome.

Or take the case of Darwin. His creative leap after reading Malthus came only after spending five years on the HMS Beagle traveling the world: Paul Johnson notes that “no other scientist had traveled anything like so long as Darwin making studies on the spot or had observed so wide a variety of phenomena on land and ocean.” During the voyage, the first germs of his theory took shape as he watched finches on the Galapagos islands and noted in his diary, “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” It would be another three years before this inkling culminated in his creative leap to the theory of natural selection.

Contrast this immersion with the kind of person who says, “I want to start a business. I’m just waiting for an idea.” Ideas don’t arise in a vacuum. They arise in the context of observing and learning about the world. If you want to start a new business, often the best thing is to go work in one. Not only for the general business skills you’ll acquire, but because you’ll find specific problems faced by your company or its customers and be in a position to come up with ways to better solve those problems. You’ll have the raw materials for thinking.

Once a master has identified a problem, he can begin searching for answers. The foundational skillset here is, surprisingly enough, remembering. When you try to remember something, you query your subconscious. For example, in The Mind’s Best Work, D. N. Perkins asks us to think of ten white things. Now, he says, add more conditions: “Remember and list several things that are characteristically white, and soft and edible.” Finally, he asks us, “Remember and list vegetables whose names start with the letter c.” He concludes:

Certainly all this identifies some interesting capacities, but what do they have to do with creating? Simply that in creating one often has to think of things satisfying several conditions, and furthermore, the conditions frequently lie on both sides of the boundary between thing and name.

The example Perkins gives is a poet, who strives to say something about reality—yet must choose words in part based on their sounds. But the larger lesson is that when you search for answers, you do so by asking for material from your subconscious that meets one or more conditions. This isn’t some foreign skillset masters have. Everyone engages in this kind of remembering day in and day out. Instead, what distinguishes masters is the quality of their queries and the results of those queries.

When I work with young writers, for example, I find that they typically don’t know how to judge their piece. They’ll write something, reread it wondering, “Is this good?” and if nothing jumps out at them as bad, they’re ready to sign off. One of the first things I teach them is a method for judging their own writing, starting with a series of questions, such as, “Who is the audience?,” “What is your conclusion?,” “What is your argument?” I’m teaching them how to query their own work. Instead of asking, “Is this good?” they learn to break down “good” into components so that their subconscious will start feeding them more useful information. When they ask, “Who is the audience?” they may realize that they are skipping crucial steps their audience needs to understand their argument, while in other cases they are belaboring the obvious. Their queries become more effective. Over time they’ll automate the process so that when they write a draft, their subconscious will feed them material that’s largely targeted to their audience, that’s relevant to their conclusion, and that makes a coherent argument. (That doesn’t mean masters turn out perfect drafts. It just means that their drafts are of a far higher quality than a novice’s.)

What I’ve been describing you can think of as “targeted remembering”: the goal is for your subconscious to feed you the right answer. But sometimes you cannot remember anything that satisfies your conditions, or you’re not fully clear on all of the conditions that need to be satisfied. In these cases, what you want to remember is not quality answers, but a large quantity of answers. The master’s tool here is brainstorming: generating as many possibilities as possible without pre-judging them. You apply your conditions only after you have a wide range of options on the table.

For example, in my novel, I Am Justice, there is a crucial scene where the heroine is subjected to torture. The question was: How would she be tortured? My query had several conditions: it had to be original, it had to bring her to the brink of death, but it couldn’t incapacitate her for an extended period of time. But nothing great came to mind—presumably because I have little first-hand experience with torture. So instead of trying to come up with good ideas I sat down with goal of coming up with a lot of ideas. I filled pages of my journal with every manner of torture I could dredge up from my subconscious then supplemented that with research into unusual torture techniques from history. (Yeah, thriller writers are weird.) Once I had that list, I was able then to assess each item to decide which best met my conditions.

Observe that I supplemented remembering with fresh data. This is an example of another creative skillset: noticing. “Noticing” is searching your environment for solutions to problems. Sometimes this means actively doing research, but it can also happen seemingly by accident. When your mind is focused on solving a creative problem, solutions can jump out at you from surprising places. Think of Darwin reading Malthus’s essay. Because Darwin was actively thinking about the mechanism for evolution, he was prepared to notice that Malthus’s notion of a struggle for survival held the key to the answer. Same for Newton and his apple. Same for Archimedes and his bath.

Whether it’s remembering or noticing, mental leaps tend to come when you’re not engaged in concentrated thinking. A master struggles to solve a difficult problem. The problem seems hopeless. The master plows ahead, pushes, but still cannot make progress. And then? Then she goes for a walk, or takes a shower, or takes a nap and suddenly, the solution appears. According to Lehrer, this isn’t an accident. It’s precisely the act of relaxing our mind that opens us up to such insights:

Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease—when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain—we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights.

I said earlier that our default mental state is one of drift, in contrast to focus. And I stressed that focus is not the same thing as concentration. Lehrer’s point helps us hammer home the crucial difference. Breakthrough thinking rarely takes place when you are concentrating. But it also doesn’t take place when you are drifting. Instead, breakthroughs tend to happen in a state Lehrer calls “daydreaming.” It’s similar to drift in that your subconscious “blends together concepts that are normally filed away in different areas. The result is an ability to notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook.” The difference is that with drift, you don’t maintain sufficient awareness to notice a creative thought when it occurs. Lehrer again:

The lesson is that productive daydreaming requires a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, translating boredom into a relaxed form of thinking leads to a thought process characterized by unexpected connections; a moment of monotony can become a rich source of insights. On the other hand, letting the mind wander so far away that it gets lost isn’t useful; even in the midst of an entertaining daydream, you need to maintain a foothold in the real world.

I would put it this way: daydreaming is a state where you’re still exercising mental management. Only it is not a state of concentration but mental oversight. You’re self-consciously allowing your mind to wander instead of zoning out. You cannot reach breakthrough ideas if you passively drift—but you will often not reach them if you stay stuck in a state of concentration.

I learned this while writing my first book. I found that whenever I got stuck on a hard problem, there was a surefire way for me to solve it. I would define the problem as clearly and precisely as I could and then I would go on a walk and allow my mind to wander. I would find the solution during the walk roughly 80 percent of the time. The walk was crucial, but so was the first part. If the problem was vague or fuzzy, a walk would sometimes help, but often not. The more guidance you can give your subconscious, the better it will perform.

One final point on searching. Often your thinking becomes stuck in a closed loop. To reach an answer, you have to break free of (often hidden) assumptions that are keeping you searching for answers in the wrong place. One way to break out of closed loops is to use what I call “questions of imagination.” These are questions designed to help you expand your thinking and come up with creative insights, particularly if your thinking feels narrow and you’re hitting dead ends or running in circles. Examples include, “What if this problem were easy to solve?,” “What if the opposite were true?,” or simply, “What would be a completely different way to think about this issue?”

When I was writing I Am Justice, I would regularly prod myself with these kinds of questions, even when I anticipated that they would be fruitless. “I’m assuming this person is my protagonist. What if she were the villain?” “I can’t think of a way for my protagonist to defeat the villain. What if she made him an ally?” In most cases, these questions led nowhere. But in a few cases, they dramatically changed the direction of the book and made it far more surprising and original than if I had not self-consciously attempted to break out of my assumptions.

Judging

Though searching and judging aren’t fully distinct processes, we’ve been focused primarily on searching so far. What, then, can we say about judging?

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects. . . . All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Searching gives you possibilities and sometimes leads you to insights that feel like revelations. But the search process cannot be disentangled from a constant process of judging. You query and you assess the results of your search. You ask yourself a question and you evaluate the quality of the answer that occurs to you. You formulate a hypothesis and then check it against the facts. You type out a few words and hit the backspace key when they don’t convey what you want to express.

Though we typically think of judgment as coming at the end of a creative process, Perkins notes that:

judgment applies not only to close editing of the final product but to decisions made much earlier in the course of creating. Is such-and-such a problem worth pursuing? Is such-and-such a theory worth developing? What initial approaches seem most fruitful? Questions of these sorts are answered, at least implicitly, at the beginnings of a creative effort, and the answers send the maker down one or another path. Failures of judgment in those early decisions therefore constitute just as much of a limit on a maker’s creating as failures of judgment later on.

Though masters are excellent searchers, the sine qua non of mastery is excellent judgment. A master has clearly defined, demanding standards. We’ve already seen how in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark holds that a building’s shape must be determined by the “purpose, the site, the material,” and that “Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail.” When Roark says these words, he is not yet a master.

Shortly thereafter, he seeks out a job with the architect he most admires, Henry Cameron. When he shows Cameron his drawings, Cameron responds:

“So you think they’re good? Well, they’re awful. It’s unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look . . . look at that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you? . . . Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you’ve got to learn?”

What’s going on here? Roark knows the basic principles of architecture. He studied the foundational skills in college and understands the basic process of selecting a single theme for a building that will set every detail. What more does he have to learn?

What Roark is missing is all the lower-level architectural premises he needs to implement his architectural principles. Yes, he knows the central idea of a building should set every detail, but he doesn’t know how to translate the theme into the countless sub-decisions designing a building involves: for example, whether or not to indent a plan. Without worked-out standards for when to indent a plan, he has to rely on what strikes him as “pretty.”

Mastery requires establishing a rich universe of premises of judgment. And it takes time, effort, and practice to develop these premises. By the time I became a professional writer, I understood that every piece had to have a theme—it had to add up to single idea—and that the theme had to be made clear and convincing to the audience. What I couldn’t do was assess whether I had achieved the clear communication of a theme to my audience. It took me more than five years of feedback from my editors before I gained competence at assessing my work objectively—before I could say with confidence whether the words would communicate what I wanted to the reader.

In the act of creation a master is constantly judging his progress, but he also knows when and how to judge. Judgment, if not exercised with care, can paralyze the search process. A writer, for instance, learns to separate out drafting and editing. To draft, you need leave your subconscious free to put words on the page—the raw material you later craft into something clear and beautiful. It is only when you turn to editing that you put your conscious, critical mind in charge. Many a writer has been stopped by demanding that every word he put on the page be perfect from the start.

When it does come time to judge, masters rarely self-consciously apply critical criteria. Nor do they blindly and intuitively make choices. Perkins refers to creative judgment as “realizing reasons.” A painter looks at her work-in-progress and realizes that the vividness of the blue undermines the emotional tone she is aiming to achieve. A writer reads his manuscript and realizes that his protagonist’s actions aren’t consistent with that character’s values. A teacher realizes that the example she planned to use to illustrate a point is too advanced for her class and hunts for something simpler. These realizations often come to the master automatically, without effort.

Sometimes, however, a master will not be able to immediately identify the reasons for a positive or negative judgment. He’s received messages in the form of feelings. Recall Malcolm Gladwell’s art experts looking at the Greek statue. Georgios Dontas, head of the Archeological Society in Athens instantly knew the statue was fake because “when he first laid eyes on it, he said, he felt a wave of ‘intuitive repulsion.’” Emotions, particularly cognitive emotions such as confusion or boredom, can give the master clues that something is amiss (or that something is working particularly well). These are not infallible, but they are critical hints—they are leads to further thinking.

The conditions of creativity

Creative thinking, I’ve stressed, is not some foreign act. It’s really about learning to harness familiar mental processes in pursuit of demanding and inventive goals. What, then, stops people from reaching their creative potential?

Above all, fear. In their book Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland describe the kinds of fears that stop artists. Most of what they say is applicable to everyone attempting to engage in creative work.

[I]f making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you’re not up to the task—that you can’t do it, or can’t do it well, or can’t do it again; or that you’re not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all—and for those who do, trouble isn’t long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms:

I’m not an artist—I’m a phony

I have nothing worth saying

I’m not sure what I’m doing

Other people are better than I am

I’m only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]

I’ve never had a real exhibit

No one understands my work

No one like say work

I’m no good

Fear is valuable. It alerts us to threats and helps prevent reckless mistakes. But it can also stop us from taking intelligent risks. It can even cause us to see risks where none exist. When I decided to turn down a job and try to build a career for myself as an independent writer, my then-wife was apprehensive. She understandably wanted the stability of employment. But I argued that stability was illusory. After all, I had been employed only to find my job erased when market conditions changed. Self-employment, I noted, actually reduced our risks because now instead of effectively having one customer, I would have many. There is no risk-free career. And yet how many people want to start their own business but cling to a job they dislike because it gives them the illusion of safety?

The reason fear has so much power to stop you from achieving your goals is because you misconstrue how best to deal with it. You believe that to move forward, you first must conquer your fear. But this is like the person who says, “I’ll start working out once I’m motivated.” More often than not, motivation doesn’t precede action—it follows from action. You dread the thought of going to the gym—until you’re there, moving your body, building your sense of efficacy and progress. Something similar is true of fear. Fear is not to be conquered—but harnessed.

That’s the lesson former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb drives home in his book Mastering Fear.

Far too often, we focus on that awareness of danger, and by focusing on it we magnify it, cause it to expand until it starts filling the space in our heads. We start having the wrong conversation about it. We spin this story and then keep telling and retelling it, like that hamster running on its wheel, over and over. Rather than our mastering fear, fear masters us.

Fear stops you when you lose control of your internal conversation. When you focus on everything that could go wrong, everything that you do not want. You cannot think of anything else. The fear fills your whole world and you will do anything in your power to escape it—usually by surrendering what you want. Fear makes that easy. It feeds you excuses: not to try, not to take chances, not to create.

You master fear by accepting it. By putting it in its proper place. You tell yourself: “These fears are normal. Their job is to keep me alert as I move forward. But I must move forward—focused, not on the fear, but on my aim.” If you’re paralyzed by fear, then the solution is simple: start. Move forward. Keep going. Don’t quit.

There is one more creativity killer to discuss—one that has become all too common today—and that is: distraction. Creative work is hard. It takes long stretches of unbroken time. And yet how often do we give ourselves those stretches? We’re bombarded by email, texts, and Slack messages. At the first hint of boredom or discomfort we reach for stimuli. What are people saying on Twitter? What are people posting on TikTok? Externally and internally, we allow ourselves to be pulled away from our creative task.

Cal Newport calls the process of building and using rare and valuable skills “deep work.” One of the biggest lies of the success genre is that the key to productivity is spending long, exhausted hours grinding. To succeed, you supposedly have to optimize every minute. “Shave three seconds off emails by not signing your name! Over the course of the year you could save three hours!” I will grant that some jobs require grinding and that every job probably requires periods of intense, non-stop effort. But busyness isn’t what creates value. It’s thought—intense, creative thought—that creates value. And that, as Newport notes, requires “a state of unbroken concentration.”

Deep work is so demanding that you cannot do it for eight hours a day, let alone ten or twelve. For most people, four hours is the absolute max. But what they can achieve in those four hours is far more valuable than what others can achieve in forty. The key is making those four hours count. And that means eliminating distractions.

You must set aside time for deep work and protect that time. Turn off your phone. Close your email. Close Slack. Immerse yourself in your creative task. Learn to accept boredom and look forward to the mental pressure. You’ll be rewarded with ideas that just might change your life.

That’s not to say I remained laser-focused on becoming a writer. I went through periods where my obsession was martial arts, or baseball, or music. But writing always lingered in the background. When I discovered philosophy at the age of thirteen, my interests shifted from writing poetry and fiction to nonfiction. I started writing essays on religion, philosophy, and politics just for fun. I wasn’t yet on the road to mastery—not self-consciously, anyway. I was just enjoying myself.

The first true step on the road to writerdom came in my senior year of high school, when my journalism teacher, Brooke Nelson—a feisty ex-journalist who loved to cover my drafts in red ink—introduced me to the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Zinsser’s main piece of advice was that good writing isn’t fancy and ornate but clear, simple, lean. He advised writers to kill verbal clutter and reach for vivid verbs. This was the first time I can remember self-consciously working to develop a writing skill.

By the time I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to become a writer. But I had no idea how to become one. I had no clue what kinds of jobs existed for young writers and no clue how I could get those jobs. Looking back, I shudder at how passive I was. I didn’t ask my writing teachers at college for advice. I didn’t hunt down writers online and ask them what I should do. I didn’t search for articles or books on how to become a writer. In truth, my desire to write for a living wasn’t a goal, but a fantasy. It was something I hoped would happen, but I was doing nothing to make it happen.

That’s not quite true. The one thing I was doing was writing. I ran a blog, penned a (bad) novel, and later started my own publication for fans of Ayn Rand. I also started taking classes on communication and philosophy from the Ayn Rand Institute. That’s what finally led to my break. ARI was looking for a new writer to join their staff and when they asked the writing teacher, Keith Lockitch, who his best student was, my name was at the top of the list. I got an email inviting me to apply for a job and three weeks later, I was driving across the country from Virginia to California to start my career as a pro writer. I was ready to begin my apprenticeship.

When I started at ARI, the first thing I discovered was this: I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. I had been studying Ayn Rand’s philosophy for a decade, and yet being around experts like Onkar Ghate, Yaron Brook, and Alex Epstein quickly revealed to me that my understanding of Rand’s ideas and how to write about them persuasively was hopelessly primitive. I had arrived in California feeling like a wunderkind and now felt like a novice. At one level, the experience was disheartening. But at another level, I felt inspired by the discovery of a mountain I wanted to climb, and I made the commitment to do whatever it took to climb that mountain.

What it took almost broke me.

For the first two years, virtually nothing I wrote was publishable. I would sit at my computer for hours, carefully crafting two paragraph press releases, only to find them sent back by my editors time and time again. When something eventually would make it through the editing wringer, the final product would reflect only a few of my words—the rest had been rewritten by my colleagues. And that was the easy part. The hard part is that sometimes I would get something through the editorial process and then, at our weekly editorial meeting, our lead intellectual Onkar would explain to me in front of the group why it was wrong and ARI shouldn’t have published it.

These were painful, frustrating experiences. But I remember telling myself: pay the price. Eventually, you’ll get good. I would spend hours after work reflecting on that day’s feedback, struggling to understand why my editors had made the changes they’d made, to understand how Onkar had seen what I hadn’t seen. I would read books, listen to lectures, stay up late into the evening trying to sharpen my thinking and improve my prose. I was engaging in what psychologists call “deliberate practice”—the painstaking work of skills development that pushes you outside your comfort zone and subjects you to rigorous feedback. It is how you become good at your work.

One of my biggest assets during this time was my colleague Alex Epstein. Alex would eventually go on to become the world’s leading champion of fossil fuels. In those days, he was just getting started, and yet he already seemed to be decades ahead of me. He was able to take complex issues and make them simple. To present ideas with a level of clarity and persuasiveness that no one else could match. He was doing the kind of work I wanted to do the way I wanted to do it, so I started going to him with questions, asking him to critique my work, studying his writing until I felt I understood every word choice and every comma. I even let him use me as a practice dummy for his hobby of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, just so I could soak up more knowledge about philosophy and writing. In effect, I was trying to reverse engineer his success, the way that tech companies will try to reverse engineer a competitor’s breakthrough product.

Alex was not one of those mentors who couched every criticism between two items of praise. He never attacked me, but if my work was bad, he was blunt and to the point. One evening I had him listen to a radio interview I had done during the financial crisis of 2008. His feedback: “It sounds like this guy”—part of how he made his feedback impersonal was to direct it to “this guy” instead of “you”—“It sounds like this guy is talking out of his ass.” And it was true. I was trying to explain why the financial crisis wasn’t the result of the free market, and while that much was accurate—the market was highly regulated—I really had no clue how the Federal Reserve worked, how Wall Street worked, how derivatives were regulated, and a lot else besides. Alex stressed that I had to make it a policy never to say anything I didn’t fully understand. “This may cause your interviews to be rough at the beginning, but they will be more interesting because the audience will be hearing you—not some guy parroting talking points. There’s no need to present yourself as an expert on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, let alone everything in the world. Just be honest: ‘I’m a guy who has thought about a lot of things and knows a lot of things, and although there’s a lot I don’t know, I’d like to share with you what I do know.’” Pills like these were tough to swallow, but I swallowed them on the premise that “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

But I would be lying if I said that I displayed unwavering grit. There were moments during my first few years at ARI where I felt as though I wasn’t making progress. That I simply was not cut out to be a professional writer. I never quite got to the point of giving up, but I did sometimes wonder whether I should give up. And yet at the same time, I knew I was getting better. For long stretches I would stay at a plateau, but every six months or so, a bunch of things would click into place and in a matter of weeks I would rise to a higher level of ability. I could think better and write better. The improvements were palpable. The growth was intoxicating and made it easier to endure the long slogs where it felt like I was treading water.

A turning point came when ARI’s then-president, Yaron Brook, tasked me to work with him on a book on the morality of capitalism—what would eventually become our national bestseller Free Market Revolution. I found the experience of working on a book liberating. Because there wasn’t a deadline attached to the project, I felt free to experiment, free to rewrite drafts nine or ten or twenty times in order to get them right. I would spend weeks researching a point and thinking about it to make sure I truly understood it.

My biggest breakthrough came late in the project. Alex had written an essay on the morality of capitalism that I found explosively powerful and persuasive. Meanwhile, another writer I knew wrote a similar essay, only I sensed this one was completely ineffective. I spent hours comparing the two essays side-by-side, and comparing them to the work I was doing on my book. Suddenly, it hit me like a revelation: I could now articulate exactly what distinguished clear and persuasive writing from writing that would leave an audience cold. In particular, I saw that you couldn’t write from your agenda. You had to start from where the audience was and build a bridge, step-by-step, to where you wanted them to be. I saw how great writing had to anticipate the questions your readers would have and the objections that would occur to them. I saw how to use my philosophy to clarify an issue, rather than use an issue to try to sell people on my philosophy. For the first time, I felt in control of my writing and thinking in a way that had eluded me before.

That was the moment my apprenticeship ended and I started the second phase of my journey: experimentation and refinement. I was now a pro-writer. I knew what I was doing and could reliably turn out publishable work. But I still had holes and blind spots. I hadn’t fully formed my own style and approach. I still relied on editors to save me from embarrassing mistakes. I had control over my writing but not full control. The best way I can describe it is that I was good but inconsistent, and I didn’t have the toolkit to identify and overcome my own flaws.

Over the next six years, that’s the space I lived in. I wrote more books, each time pushing myself to be more ambitious and experimental. I continued studying communication and philosophy, but now I was putting more of myself into it. What’s my way of tackling this issue? What’s my way of communicating this idea?

I was becoming more creative, but in 2017, I hit a roadblock. My third book, Equal Is Unfair, had come out the year before. It was the best thing I had ever written and I had expected it to catapult me into the national spotlight, the way Alex recently had with his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. That didn’t happen. In part, I blamed my publisher, who had done nothing to market the book; they hadn’t even gotten the book into bookstores, which is really the only thing publishers contribute nowadays. But I also knew that ultimately the failure was mine. The book was good—very good—but it wasn’t great. And yet I had no clue how to make something great. I went through a period of months where I felt deflated and hopeless.

The best way I can explain it is this. In high school, my main passion was guitar. I loved writing music, but I hit a point where my conception of what good music was went beyond my ability to play. My creativity was limited by my toolkit. That essentially led me to give up music. But I wasn’t going to give up writing. What could I do to reach the next level? Thankfully for me, that’s when Alex reached out with a job offer.

Alex had left ARI a few years earlier and had turned his advocacy of fossil fuels into a thriving business. He wanted me to help him. It would mean leaving ARI, a place that I loved dearly. It also meant stepping back from the spotlight. Instead of writing my books, giving speeches about my ideas, going on radio and TV to discuss my work, I would be behind the scenes helping Alex increase his impact. It would also mean taking a big risk. Alex’s venture involved far more uncertainty than working for a nonprofit that had been around for decades. I took the leap because I was confident that working closely with Alex would give me the skills I needed to reach the next level of my career.

It was the right decision. And it was brutal.

For the first year, I felt like a beginner again. Alex was demanding and the work was fast paced. At ARI I could lock myself in my office for weeks working on an article. With Alex, I’d have to turn around a major project in a day. And still: every word would have to be perfect. To make matters worse, meeting Alex’s standards meant hitting a moving target. Alex’s standards for “good” keep rising as he improved, and so every step forward I made left me further behind. And you have to remember: we weren’t simply writing op-eds for a newspaper. We were creating messaging for energy industry clients paying us five and six figures. If what I did wasn’t good, it mattered.

What’s more, I was no longer just a writer. Alex tasked me with research, marketing, sales—areas where I had minimal experience and minimal aptitude. The challenge, responsibility, and pace of the work was crushing. For the first year or so, I felt terrified I was going to get fired, which is particularly frightening when your only skill is writing about ideas no one agrees with.

And yet, just as had happened at ARI, I started to improve. I learned how to present ideas in a way that was truly persuasive. I learned how judge my own work with a far greater degree of objectivity. I learned how to continually raise my own standards rather than rely on someone else to catch my mistakes. And I also learned the art of intellectual entrepreneurship. I saw how to make my ideas valuable on the market, how to find high-paying opportunities, how to conduct myself when dealing with powerful people. After three years working with Alex, I’d built precisely the skills I had hoped to acquire. I had achieved mastery.

And thank God. Because that’s exactly the moment when it all fell apart. In spring of 2020, oil prices crashed and we lost most of our clients overnight. Then came the pandemic and Alex’s high-priced speaking gigs dried up. He made the hard decision: I would have to find another job.

Only I didn’t. I decided that to have the career I wanted, I would need to roll the dice and go out on my own as a freelance writer and communications coach. But by now I had the knowledge and skills to do it. I was able to make a living—a better living than I had ever made—writing and helping others overcome their communication challenges.

I tell this story at such length because, while the details are unique, the essential contours of the journey aren’t. Everyone who achieves a career that they love has gone through some version of the same process: discover what they want to do—and develop the skills to do it well.

That’s it. That really is all there is to it.

What makes a career fulfilling

This lesson is about building a career that you love. But what does it mean to love your work? Just as pursuing happiness requires understanding what happiness is, achieving career success requires understanding what success consists of. Essentially, there are four ingredients that determine how fulfilling your work will be: money, mastery, autonomy, and mission.

Money

One of the ugliest features of our culture is that it teaches us to disdain money. Or, rather, it teaches us that we ought to disdain money. Since you cannot live without money, the actual result is to prevent you from discovering what a healthy attitude toward money would look like.

Let’s start with the obvious: it is deeply unhealthy to treat money as your supreme value. Money is a tool, and the question is always: how can I use this tool to serve my values? It should go without saying that you shouldn’t work a job you hate just so you can brag about your paycheck and drive a fancy car.

But if morality is about the pursuit of happiness, then it’s good to desire wealth, it’s good to earn wealth, and it’s good to enjoy the wealth you’ve earned. Is the problem, then, the desire for “too much” wealth? No such thing. There is no upper limit on how much money a person should pursue. The fact that you have earned a million dollars or a billion dollars does not by itself demonstrate that you have your priorities wrong. J. K. Rowling became a billionaire because millions of people loved her books. If you are doing work that you’re passionate about, then all else equal, the more money the better.

And the reverse is true. The fact that your income is modest doesn’t prove you have your priorities in order. There are people making $40,000 a year who overvalue money, refusing to take a pay cut to move to a role that is more fulfilling. The question isn’t: “How much?” The question is: “What role does money play in your life?” Philosopher Tara Smith puts it this way:

While there’s plenty to lament in contemporary society’s prevalent priorities, money is not the fundamental problem. In our eagerness to teach that money is not the most important thing in life, we have swung too far in the opposite direction, denigrating money as if it were worthless. While money and material goods are not inherently good, it is equally mistaken to dismiss them as inherently bad.

That’s because, she adds, “Making money (in the literal sense of creating wealth) is the very process of achieving values.” Money ought to be the insignia of creating value doing work you love—and it ought to be used in ways that genuinely promote your well-being. You shouldn’t sacrifice higher priorities to money, like career satisfaction and your most vital relationships—but nor should you treat your desire for wealth as a shameful secret.

I love money. I love the security it buys me: I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to pay my mortgage or feed my children. I love the freedom it buys me: I can fly off to California to celebrate my friend’s birthday and turn down work I find tedious and unsatisfying. I love the health that it buys me: I can visit the doctor regularly and hire a personal trainer to help me get in shape. I love the knowledge that it buys me: I can fill my shelves with books and hire brilliant teachers to coach me. I love the pleasure that it buys me: I can fill my home with beautiful art and treat myself to delicious food and relaxing massages. I love the time that it buys me: I can pay someone else to do my taxes and hire an Uber so I can work or sleep while I travel.

But I never forget my hierarchy of values. No amount of money can make up for an unrewarding career and an unfulfilling life. I long ago vowed that, unless I was in a situation where I literally couldn’t afford to put a roof over my head or food in my mouth, I would never place financial considerations above career fulfillment. I made the hard-nosed decision to establish a lifestyle that fit my income, instead of striving for an income that would support my lifestyle. For example, in 2017, I moved away from Southern California to a more affordable part of the country in part so that I could take more career risks.

But I don’t want to overstate the point. We face tradeoffs between career satisfaction and financial success much less often than people think. If you become good at your work, more often than not, you’ll be able to command a healthy income because you’ll be creating an enormous amount of value.

That’s been my experience. Early in my writing a career I was introduced to someone who worked in my previous field of business proposal writing. He wanted to lure me away and was willing to pay me a six-figure starting salary—far more money than I had ever made. I declined without a second thought. The reason I made that decision is because career enjoyment was more important to me than money. But I also believed that, once I honed my craft, I would eventually make far more money doing what I loved. And that turned out to be true. It took more than a decade, but I eventually reached the point where the major limit on my income was not what people were willing to pay me, but how much time I wanted to spend working with clients versus working on my own material. That’s not unusual. That’s the logical result of having lots of value to offer.

Mastery

The best jobs offer two intimately related kinds of spiritual rewards: practice pleasure and performance pleasure.

Think of a musician. Most of a musician’s time is spent practicing. Not practicing the way I used to practice guitar, where I’d sit around for hours strumming my favorite songs. No, professionals engage in serious, demanding practice where they push themselves out of their comfort zone in order to acquire new skills. In his deeply insightful book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport describes the practice regimen of a professional guitarist he met:

At my request, Jordan laid out his practice regimen for this song. He starts by playing slow enough that he can get the effects he desires: He wants the key notes of the melody to ring while he fills the space in between with runs up and down the fretboard. Then he adds speed—just enough that he can’t quite make things work. He repeats this again and again. “It’s a physical and mental exercise,” he explained. “You’re trying to keep track of different melodies and things. In a piano, everything is laid out clearly in front of you; ten fingers never getting in the way of one another. On the guitar, you have to budget your fingers.”

He called his work on this song his “technical focus” of the moment. In a typical day, if he’s not preparing for a show, he’ll practice with this same intensity, always playing just a little faster than he’s comfortable, for two or three hours straight. I asked him how long it will take to finally master the new skill. “Probably like a month,” he guessed. Then he played through the lick one more time.

This process is pleasurable, but not in the same way as performing on a stage. Performance pleasure is the pleasure of flow—of getting lost in a task that’s pushing you to the maximum of your potential without overtaxing your mental resources. It’s the pleasure musicians feel when they flawlessly play a song they recently mastered—or when they stand on a stage in front of a capacity crowd. Practice pleasure is more akin to the way you feel after a great workout. The workout itself was uncomfortable and grueling, but it leaves you feeling strong, confident, efficacious. It’s the pleasure of making progress and improving.

Bestselling author Daniel Pink calls this element of a fulfilling career mastery: the best jobs fulfill our “desire to get better and better at something that matters.” It combines our cultivation of rare and valuable skills, achieved through a challenging practice regimen, with the exercise of those skills, which results in flow experiences.

Not every job offers the opportunity to pursue mastery. If you’re stuck in a job you don’t know how to do, it can be deflating and anxiety inducing. I once was put in charge of implementing some new software for tracking business proposals. As someone who barely knew how to use Microsoft Word, it was one of the most unpleasant work experiences of my life. But by the same token, if a job is too easy, it becomes monotonous and mind-numbing. The best jobs hit the sweet spot: they force us to stretch and grow—but they don’t stretch us so much that we break. They give us the opportunity to perform at the peak of our current skillset—not struggle to do things we’re utterly incapable of or mindlessly repeat a simple routine.

Note that this is seldom inherent in the job. Whether or not a productive role offers the opportunity for mastery depends as much on us as on the job. This is why you’ll often need to change jobs whenever the opportunity for increased mastery vanishes. I spent eleven years at the Ayn Rand Institute. But I reached a point where I noticed my skills plateauing. Even though I loved the work, the organization, and my teammates, I made the hard decision to leave in favor of a role where I’d be in unfamiliar territory and need to develop new skills. In the short-term, the decision was costly. I went from feeling capable to feeling like an incompetent beginner. But in less than three years I had developed a new set of skills that made it possible for me to take the next step in my career: to work for myself. And that turned out to be the most important career move I ever made because it gave me the one thing that had been missing from my career: autonomy.

Autonomy

That challenging new job I took after I left the Ayn Rand Institute? As I mentioned, I lost it during the 2020 pandemic, just as I was about to close on my first home. I spent several terrified days thinking I might have to find a job doing something other than writing just to make sure my family could make ends meet. Then I got a call from a previous employer. They were eager to rehire me. I turned them down.

Or to be more exact, I made a counteroffer: I would work half the week for them freelance. Looking back, I’m surprised I had the courage to turn down the full-time role. The income from one client would not be enough meet all of my financial commitments and I had no idea whether I’d be able to find more clients, particularly in the midst of the pandemic. But the reason I insisted on a freelance arrangement was simple: I wanted control over my career. I wanted autonomy.

Autonomy is not a matter of whether you’re working alone or collaborating with others—it’s about the degree to which you are in charge of what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and who you do it with. In my case, what I was most interested in was being able to work whenever I wanted to work, and to say whatever I wanted to say. That’s why, despite the risk, I was willing to reject a generous job offer from an organization I admired.

(Full disclosure: during the writing of this book, I returned to ARI to help build a coaching program for their educational institution, Ayn Rand University. I have less freedom than when I worked for myself, but ARI still offers a lot of flexibility and, more importantly, I have a lot of autonomy with respect to how I build the coaching program. I point this out to highlight that autonomy doesn’t mandate working for yourself.)

The desire for autonomy is rooted in the fact that you have free will. As psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan put it, “Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice, whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.” The more say you have over your career, the more satisfying your career generally is because it is your own judgment and values that are shaping your life, not externally imposed duties. Even when things are hard, even when you’re busy, frustrated, flailing, and failing, you have the sense: I am the master of my own destiny. This is the course I chose because I believe it is the best one.

It’s easy to undervalue autonomy because control is often taken for granted. “Of course I need to have someone tell me when to show up to work and what tasks I need to work on. Isn’t that what a job is?” Worse, autonomy is seldom granted—it has to be seized by going into business for yourself, or negotiated for, often at the expense of the more conspicuous benefits of a higher salary. Daniel Pink notes that some of the most apparently successful workers—high-powered attorneys—often suffer emotionally because their jobs are generally extremely low autonomy. “Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little ‘decision latitude.’”

By contrast, many tech companies recognize the value of employee autonomy to both happiness and productive success. They tend to be more flexible in terms of when employees come to work. Netflix, for example, has no policy telling employees when to show up or how much vacation to take. They’re treated as professionals: so long as the work gets done, it doesn’t matter when or how they do it. Similarly, Google encourages its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on a side project of their choice. The result is many of Google’s most notable products, including Gmail and Google Translate.

We’ll see shortly how to gain autonomy in your career. The point here is simply to underscore the fact that if you want a career you enjoy, it is often not the particular industry you’re in that matters most, but the amount of freedom you have to direct your work.

Mission

Mission is the belief that your career adds up to something—that you’re pursuing some larger, positive purpose than meeting this quarter’s goals. Many people, including Pink, equate mission with finding “a cause greater and more enduring than themselves.” Such sentiments reflect the influence of anti-self moralities—not any reality about what satisfies people at work. Cal Newport’s characterization of mission is far superior:

To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. Staying up late to save your corporate litigation client a few extra million dollars can be draining, but staying up late to help cure an ancient disease can leave you more energized than when you started.

Yes, although there are lawyers whose mission is to fight for the often-maligned corporations who spearhead human flourishing and human progress. But the larger point is that mission has nothing whatever to do with looking for something outside of yourself that justifies your life. It is instead about shaping the earth in the image of your values. My own mission is to help people learn, live, and advocate ideas I believe are true. That mission drives me, inspires me, energizes me—and yet it is deeply selfish. I’m working to make the world a better place—a better place according to my standards for the sake of me and the kind of people I care about.

Almost any career can offer a sense of mission. When I worked with Alex Epstein at the Center for Industrial Progress, one of our goals was to teach members of the fossil fuel industry that their work wasn’t a necessary evil, but that in providing the world’s best source of low-cost, reliable energy they were promoting human flourishing for billions of people. By helping industry members see the larger purpose their work was aimed at, we empowered them to formulate inspiring personal missions that deepened their enjoyment of their work. We received thousands of messages thanking us and crediting our work for changing their lives. Mission, in other words, isn’t something reserved for so-called mission-driven companies.

But by the same token, it does take time, thought, effort, and choice to create a career directed toward a mission that resonates with you and inspires you. As much as I value the fossil fuel industry’s work intellectually, it doesn’t resonate with me spiritually the way it does for Alex. Working at CIP was valuable because it helped me build the skillset I needed to achieve my personal mission, but it didn’t allow me much scope to pursue my personal mission. That’s fine. Early on in your career, don’t expect to be in a position to formulate your mission. Focus on developing the skills that will lead you to mastery. But once you formulate your mission, fulfillment depends on making that the purpose that will direct your career choices.

How do you formulate a mission? By reflecting on what goals and activities actually energize and motivate you, and working to integrate them into a single, unified whole. I said that my mission is to help people learn, live, and advocate ideas I believe are true. I reached that formulation by noticing that there were a few activities that I found completely enjoyable to do and fully rewarding having done: writing (fiction and nonfiction), public speaking, editing, and mentoring people who shared my interests, convictions, and values. At first, these activities felt scattered. Sometimes I was creating my own content, other times I was helping people create theirs. But once I grasped that the kind of content I most enjoyed creating aimed to help “young versions of me,” I realized they were all part of the same mission: to empower those who share my ideas.

That’s what it means to build a career you love. It means to achieve a career filled with mastery, autonomy, mission, and enough money that you aren’t worried about money. In Pink’s words, “The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.” But how do we do that?

Follow your passion—or create one

The main career advice we’re offered today is to “follow your passion.” Even family members who quietly nudge us in more “respectable” and remunerative directions will usually pay lip service to this advice. And it is not always bad advice. I more or less knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was six, and I knew I wanted to write about philosophy from the time I was fourteen. Many professional athletes and musicians and soldiers have similar stories. If you know what you want to do, do it.

But what if you don’t know? Too many people go to college as a default then stumble on a job, asking themselves, “Does this feel like bliss?” And inevitably they’re disappointed, because almost no job feels like bliss at the start. Though there’s a deep satisfaction that comes from being on the path toward doing what you love, the early years are inevitably filled with tedious work assignments, difficulty, and struggle. I spent the first few years as a professional writer feeling like I had no idea what I was doing, receiving blistering feedback on my work, staring at a computer screen having no idea how to fill it with words worth reading. At several points I found myself questioning my path: maybe I would be happier as a teacher, or a psychologist, or an entrepreneur. It was only after I had mastered my craft, more than a decade later, that I could honestly say without reservation I had chosen the right path.

My experience isn’t unique. Cal Newport warns of the dangers of what he calls the “passion hypothesis,” the view that we achieve a career we love by first figuring out what we’re passionate about and then seeking out a job that matches our passion.

The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.

Trying to decide “am I passionate about this?” is a dangerous question early in a career because entry-level positions, “by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later.”

The passion hypothesis says that your ideal career has been decided for you and your job is merely to find it. Worse, it implies that you don’t have to do anything to become worthy of that career: once you discover it, you are entitled to it. Both points are wrong. A career you love isn’t something you find—it’s something you create. It is less like stumbling on an abandoned treasure and more like fashioning a stone into a sculpture. You decide the final shape, but not through a mere wish. You have to work to make your vision a reality. The difference is that with a career you can start creating it before you know the final form it will take.

How is that possible? Because successful careers all have a similar shape. Their final form will be distinctive, but they universally share one fundamental characteristic: they all consist of value-creating activities. If you live on a self-sustaining farm, you’re trading your time and effort for the crops you need to sustain your own life. In a division of labor economy, you’re trading what you produce for what others produce, mediated through money. This is the trader principle: to get what you want from other people you must give them something they want.

Newport points out that often people who “follow their passion” fail because they are totally focused on what they want without genuinely thinking about whether they have something valuable to offer in return. They want a high-paying job—but don’t think about how to increase their company’s profits. They want a successful blog—but don’t think about how to give readers valuable content they can’t find anywhere else. They want a successful business—but don’t think about how they’ll be providing superior value to their customers, compared to existing alternatives.

The point is not that you should ignore what you want and fixate on helping other people on the premise that their happiness is more important than yours. No. A trader is not a servant. The point is that you live in a division of labor economy, and if you aren’t creating value for other people, then expecting them to provide you with rewards means treating them as your servant. It’s not billionaire CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who are exploiters—it is anyone who believes they are entitled to have their needs and desires fulfilled without offering anything of value in return. In Rand’s words:

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange—an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment.

The trader principle is the key to creating a career you love. As Newport observes,

The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. . . . Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

This means that whatever it is you ultimately want to do, the foundation will be cultivating rare and valuable skills that allow you to offer something compelling in trade. Pick any field you find interesting and ask yourself: if I were world class in this field, would I have any difficulty creating a career that I loved? If I were an elite salesperson, or an elite singer, or an elite chef, or an elite software engineer, or an elite lawyer, wouldn’t that virtually guarantee I could design a job that would fill me with joy?

That’s the starting point of creating a career you love: developing rare and valuable skills. But which skills should you seek to develop? Even if you don’t have an intense career passion, you almost always have abundant career interests. There are fields that intrigue you and questions that excite you. Such nascent interests are signals to explore further. And the main thing you should be exploring is: how do I enjoy using my mind?

Every productive activity involves a distinctive way of using your mind: writing computer code is different from writing marketing copy. Agriculture is different from sales. Accounting is different from playing in an orchestra. It’s not simply that the industries are different, or the outputs are different, but the mental processes involved are different. What you’re striving to find are the kinds of processes where you most feel at home.

Harvard University neuropsychologist Howard Gardner has identified eight forms of intelligence. I don’t endorse his entire theory, but I find his categories useful for identifying the kind of productive roles that can fill your life with joy.

1. Logical-mathematical (think: software programmer or financier)

2. Linguistic (think: writer or public speaker)

3. Spatial (think: architect or taxi driver)

4. Musical (think: composer or music producer)

5. Bodily-kinesthetic (think: baseball player or construction worker)

6. Intrapersonal (think: poet or psychologist)

7. Interpersonal (think: salesperson or teacher)

8. Naturalistic (think: veterinarian or biologist)

When you’re deciding what kind of rare and valuable skills to build, you can be industry agnostic—but you can’t be mental process agnostic. Someone who feels most at home introspecting and reflecting on their emotional life (intrapersonal) will likely be unsuccessful and unfulfilled in a career relying primarily on logical-mathematical skills. Someone who feels most at home working out and dancing (bodily-kinesthetic) will likely be unsuccessful and unfilled in a career relying primarily on linguistic skills.

What you have to identify is the way of using your mind that feels most natural—the kinds of mental activities where time vanishes, where you’re fully engaged and fully alive. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls this state “flow” or, a term I much prefer, “optimal experience.”

The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.

If you’re not sure where to find this kind of satisfaction ask yourself this: What do you do when you don’t have to do anything? What do you do when you’re supposed to be doing something else? It’s possible that your answer will be some form of passive mind-numbing, like frittering away your life on TikTok. But more likely there are activities that absorb you and compel you. Sometimes this will point you directly toward a specific career. For me, I spent every moment I could reading and writing about ideas—and I created a career reading and writing about ideas. More often what you’ll find is not a ready-made career path, but insight into the kind of mental work you enjoy.

Once you know how enjoy using your mind, then you can focus on building rare and valuable skills that are centered on using your mind in this way.

Develop your skills

Ira Glass is the creator of NPR’s revolutionary radio show This American Life. When he talks about his path to success he notes that he, like every creator, started out with a problem: there was a dramatic gap between his taste (his ability to know what good work looked like) and his skills (his ability to create good work). He succeeded because he kept working on his skills until he closed that gap. Most people fail because that gap is so painful and involves so much self-doubt that they give up.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

For every field, there are foundational skillsets that are the price of entry. To be a musician, you have to be able to play your instrument. To be an accountant you have to understand bookkeeping. To be a real estate agent, you have to understand real estate contracts and the basics of sales.

The first steps on the road to mastery consist of identifying the skills your field requires and acquiring them. You identify them through reverse engineering. You acquire them through deliberate practice.

Reverse engineering means studying how others in your field became great and searching for patterns that you can emulate. It can be tempting to resist this kind of modeling in the name of originality, but originality doesn’t come from doing something that’s wholly new, but from building on what came before, adding your own spin, adapting what has worked in the past to your own unique context.

My screenwriting teacher, when he was getting started and wanted to improve his style, would copy, word-for-word, screenplays he admired. The idea was that this would help him internalize what it felt like to write lean, gripping dialogue. Cal Newport talks about spending weeks analyzing an important academic paper in his field until he understood it better than anyone else. The best way to do original work is by learning to do good work, and that means focusing not on originality, but on acquiring the skillset possessed by past masters. That’s where deliberate practice comes in.

The key word there is “deliberate.” I spent years “practicing” guitar, but I stopped improving because I was staying in my comfort zone, playing the same songs over and over again. Repeatedly doing something doesn’t lead to improvement, which is why most of us have driven cars for years or decades but aren’t elite drivers.

Deliberate practice, by contrast, means identifying a new skill you want to acquire or a weakness you want to overcome and then stretching yourself beyond your current comfort zone to build that skill. If I wanted to improve at guitar, I should have committed to learning songs slightly above my level of ability. I should have worked at playing them slowly until I could play every note perfectly. Then, I should have started speeding up, a bit at a time, only increasing the tempo when I could play without mistakes.

The reason I didn’t do that is because pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone is uncomfortable. You can strum your favorite songs for hours. Deliberate practice involves such intense mental focus, tension, and stress that you can only do it for two or three hours a day before you’re depleted.

For deliberate practice to lead to improvement, it must involve feedback: you have to know when you’re succeeding and when you’ve made a mistake—and ideally that feedback should come as rapidly as possible. With a musical instrument, you usually know immediately when you’ve made a mistake. In other cases, you have to rely on mentors to guide you. A surgeon in training, for example, will have a senior surgeon watching their every move and giving real-time advice. As a writer in training, my task was harder. I usually depended on feedback from editors, which would come hours or even days later.

As you reflect on the skills you need to develop to achieve mastery in your field, think about how you might go about practicing those skills. How can you push yourself outside your comfort zone in a way that involves the feedback necessary to gauge your progress? Then commit to a practice regiment that will supercharge your growth.

This is the foundation of success. The only way to do good work . . . is to work.

Crash your career

A major myth claims that there are “tracks to success,” and that you’re in constant danger of falling off this track: by not getting that high prestige job straight out of college, by not getting into an Ivy League school, by not graduating at the top of your elite high school, by not getting into the elite pre-school. This is madness.

Success has nothing to do with social status. It has to do with creating a career that you love, and unless your mind, heart, and soul compel you to make partner at a top law firm or work at Goldman Sachs, then anyone who tells you that your future happiness depends on following some pre-determined track is lying to you.

I became obsessed with philosophy when I was fourteen and spent all of high school doing the minimum necessary to get by while I devoured the works of my favorite thinkers. I graduated with mediocre grades, selected a mediocre university, and ended up finishing college at a less-than-mediocre night school. My first adult job wasn’t at McKinsey. It was packing boxes in a shipping warehouse. And yet, despite no impressive credentials, by the time I was thirty I was a bestselling author writing about philosophy.

Or take my friend Chad. Chad moved from Iowa to southern California after high school and was working in the mail room of a nonprofit when he met champion bodybuilder Mike Mentzer. Chad studied Mike’s unique approach to bodybuilding and used that knowledge to start his own gym in Hollywood.

Or take my friend David. He was a self-described computer geek who was obsessed with swing dancing. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had become so prominent in the swing dance community that he was able to make a living teaching people the Lindy Hop and Balboa.

Or take my friend Keith. He dropped out of college to become a serial entrepreneur. His latest venture was as co-founder of a company that creates online science lessons that more than 50 percent of elementary schools in the US use. In 2020, Keith sold the company for $140 million.

Success is not a track someone else paved that you have to walk down. It is an open-ended path you have to carve. You need to view your pursuit of productive passion as an adventure. You don’t have to know where to start. You can plunge in anywhere.

But how do you get started? How do you launch your career when you can’t create much value?

The traditional answer is: earn credentials, submit job applications, go on job interviews. Often this approach is paired with a sense of entitlement: I have a degree; I deserve to make $50,000 a year.

No. You deserve only what other people find it in their self-interest to pay you. To build your career, you have to stop thinking like a bureaucrat checking boxes and start thinking like an entrepreneur. To be an entrepreneur, you know that you’re entitled to nothing and that what matters is not your credentials but your ability. Your orientation must be to demonstrate that you can create value.

In almost every case, you won’t be able to create much value at first. That’s fine. That’s a problem your journey toward mastery will solve. Your competitive advantage at the beginning is your ability to work cheap. If you don’t cost much to employ, you don’t have to create much value to be profitable to employ. For those who can afford it, a tried-and-true method to get started in any field is the ability and willingness to work for free.

But just as important as your willingness to work cheap is your eagerness to grow. An employer can typically select among cheap entry-level workers. What will make you stand out, whatever skills you have or lack, is hunger. Ambition is the trait great employers look for in young people—above all, the ambition to learn.

When I watched young writers at the Ayn Rand Institute, I had one rule of thumb for judging them. Did they proactively seek out opportunities to learn? Did they devour the works in our library? Did they come to me or other senior writers with questions and for feedback? Did they implement our advice or look for reasons to dismiss it?

Of course, demonstrating that you’re hungry requires getting your foot in the door. Writing “ambitious” on your job application accomplishes nothing. You have to learn to signal ambition and ability. In my case, the whole reason I got hired by the Ayn Rand Institute is because I had been blogging about Ayn Rand’s philosophy for years. I created a public record, not only of my writing ability, but of my commitment. You can imagine ARI’s leadership saying, “If this is what he does in his free time without pay, imagine what he’ll do full time for a salary.”

You can do the same thing in any field you want to enter. Stop thinking in terms of credentials and start thinking about how you can demonstrate your ability to create value—how to demonstrate that you have the skills, hunger, and salary requirements to be profitable to a company from day one.

Find your path. Take your first step. Then move forward by leveraging your increasing set of rare and valuable skills into increasingly satisfying work.

Leverage your career capital

You have only one fundamental career bargaining chip: your rare and valuable skills. This is your career capital. As you amass that capital—as you become so good they can’t ignore you—people will want to hire you and work with you because you can help them get what they want. But it’s this career capital that will allow you to get what you want, and a common mistake is to trade away that capital solely for financial rewards.

Often a better approach is to leverage most of your career capital in exchange for more fulfilling work: work that will take you further on the road to mastery, work that will give you more autonomy, work that will bring you closer to the achievement of your mission.

The most straightforward path here is to start your own business. Once you have sufficient career capital to do valuable work, starting your own business puts you in the driver seat of your career. By business, in this context, I’m including everything from working as a freelancer to launching a Silicon Valley startup.

I’m convinced that many more people should go into business for themselves. Too often they overestimate the risks and underestimate the benefits. The risks seem magnified because many who do start businesses don’t begin by building the career capital that makes success far more likely: they don’t know the industry, they don’t know their market, they don’t have rare and valuable skills, they don’t have a competitive edge—they’re going on nothing but hope and a prayer. This rarely works. Even entrepreneurs who are successful at a young age, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, have almost always spent years building relevant skills, and typically have seen success before they formally launched their enterprises. Zuckerberg, for instance, started Facebook as a hobby and left Harvard only when the company was growing so fast that making it his full-time career was the only way to keep the company going.

But what if you don’t want to work for yourself—at least not yet? You can still pursue mastery, autonomy, and mission. Newport tells the story of Lulu Young, a highly talented software developer. Her first work project after college was in quality assurance. She used what on paper was a boring job with minimal upside to automate the testing process and save her company a bunch of time and money. She continued to innovate and add value to the company, but after a few years she stopped using her career capital to bargain for a promotion or a raise and did something else.

To regain some autonomy from a succession of micromanaging bosses who had been tormenting her, she demanded a thirty-hour-a-week schedule so she could pursue a part-time degree in philosophy from Tufts. “I would have asked for less time, but thirty was the minimum for which you could still receive full benefits,” she explained. If Lulu had tried this during her first year of employment, her bosses would have laughed and probably offered her instead a “zero-hour-a-week schedule,” but by the time she had become a senior engineer and was leading their testing automation efforts, they really couldn’t say no.

That’s the method: build career capital, then bargain for a more fulfilling role at your current company or a new company—a role where you have more opportunities to learn and grow, more control over your work, and more chances to tackle projects aligned with your personal mission.

We’ve now seen the process that will lead to a career you love. If you discover the way you enjoy using your mind, pursue mastery, and leverage your career capital into roles that enhance your autonomy, creativity, and mission, you won’t have “found” your passion—you’ll have created it.

Don’t lose focus

I’ve been stressing the central importance of work in life, and the virtue displayed by dedicating yourself to productive achievement. But I know a lot of high achievers who are unhappy and unfulfilled, or at least filled with a vague guilt that they should be achieving even more.

So let me start by distinguishing devotion to career from workaholism. Workaholism isn’t primarily a matter of how much time you spend at work, but why. Is work, for you, a source of creative joy or is it an escape from personal problems? Do you love the work itself or do you love the image of yourself as a high-powered attorney, a business mover and shaker, an altruistic crusader? Is your standard of success your own enjoyment—or is it comparative: being richer, more powerful, more admired than others? Workaholism is an addiction, and what a person is addicted to is escape from negative feelings—above all, feelings of self-doubt.

In From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks tells the story of a woman who had achieved enormous success on Wall Street, but who was not particularly happy.

Her marriage was unsatisfactory, she drank a little too much, and her relationship with her college-age kids was all right . . . but distant. She had few real friends. She worked incredibly long hours and felt physically exhausted a lot of the time. Her work was everything to her—she “lived to work”—and now she was terrified that even that was starting to slip.

Brooks asked her why she didn’t do the obvious thing and cut back on her work. It was, after all, making her miserable. She replied: “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy. . . . Anyone can do the things it takes to be happy—go on vacation, spend time with friends and family . . . but not everyone can accomplish great things.”

The first time I read that line—“I would prefer to be special rather than happy”—my blood curdled. Because what it means in practice is: “I want to throw my life away so that someone will pat me on the head and tell me I’m important.”

Work plays a crucial role in building healthy self-esteem. It’s through your work that you take responsibility for your own life, grow your capabilities and confidence, and gain a sense of efficacy. But it’s a tragic mistake to tie your self-worth to some conventional image of “success.” My admiration for achievement is limitless, but success without happiness doesn’t make your life special. It makes it tragic.

Even those who avoid the trap of workaholism can often find themselves experiencing work as a burden or a source of guilt. Shonda Rhimes gave a commencement speech where she noted that people often express awe at how she manages her life as an in-demand screenwriter and mother of three. “[P]eople are constantly asking me, how do you do it?” Her answer: “I don’t.”

Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath and story time at home. If I am at home sewing my kids’ Halloween costumes, I’m probably blowing off a rewrite I was supposed to turn in. If I am accepting a prestigious award, I am missing my baby’s first swim lesson. If I am at my daughter’s debut in her school musical, I am missing Sandra Oh’s last scene ever being filmed at Grey’s Anatomy. If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other. That is the tradeoff. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel a hundred percent OK; you never get your sea legs; you are always a little nauseous. Something is always lost. Something is always missing.

I don’t think it has to be this way. It all comes down to how you judge yourself. Too often people hold themselves to impossible standards. They judge their performance in one area of life as if it were the only area of life: What kind of mother would I be if I were nothing but a mother? What kind of husband would I be if I were nothing but a husband? What kind of creator would I be if I did nothing but work?

But a standard that’s impossible to meet is a bad standard. A mother’s responsibility is not to be there for every moment of her child’s life. A CEO’s responsibility is not to reply to emails twenty-four hours a day. Your responsibility is to envision a whole life; a life that involves work, and connection, and rest, and recreation; to structure your life so that you attend to your most important values; and then, when you are at work or you are with your children, to be fully present. You will miss things, and that will suck. But it should not be a source of guilt.

That, really, is the lesson I want to leave with you. Work should never be a source of guilt. I love stories of intrepid creators who chain themselves to their desks in pursuit of ambitious goals. I’ve admiringly told many of those stories in my books. But that is not what the virtue of productiveness demands, and you should not feel bad if you work your ass off from 9 to 5 then clock out and attend to your other interests. What productiveness does demand is that you center your life around productive achievement, in whatever way and to whatever extent fits your vision of what you want from life. There is no moral obligation to limit your work to forty hours a week if what you want demands far more of your time and attention. But there is also no moral obligation to become a slave to your work.

In fact, the more I’ve gotten to know high achievers, the more I’ve been impressed with how many of them jealously protect their non-work time. They work more than the average person, sure. But when they sign off, they sign off. No Slack. No email. No one foot in, one foot out. Their self-image isn’t wrapped up in pretending to be some machine that does nothing but work. They’re out to live—not to impress anyone or prove something about themselves.

And when they are at work? What they strive for is not ceaseless, frantic activity but what Alex Epstein calls relaxed productivity. Yes, anyone whose work matters to them will face times of stress and tackle projects that demand long hours and limited rest. But the producers I most admire don’t wear such moments as a badge of honor. More often, they view them as a failure: had they planned better and executed better, they wouldn’t have had to resort to Herculean measures.

So whether you end up working forty hours a week or eighty hours, keep in mind: the measure of your success is not how much you work—but how much you enjoy your work . . . and your life.

To achieve happiness, Demartini argues, we need to be guided by our highest values. Your highest values aren’t something imposed on you by an external authority. They are “the very essence of you: what you’re drawn to, what you inevitably seek out, what you live for.”

In Demartini’s account, you discover your highest values, not by sitting down and envisioning a life that you think you would be passionate about ex nihilo, but by examining your actual life to discover what you genuinely value in practice. To identify your highest values, Demartini recommends asking thirteen questions, and supplying three examples for each:

1. How do you fill your personal and professional space?

2. How do you spend your time?

3. How do you spend your energy?

4. How do you spend your money?

5. Where do you have the most order and organization?

6. Where are you most reliable, disciplined, and focused?

7. What do you think about, and what is your innermost dominant thoughts?

8. What do you visualize and realize?

9. What is your internal dialogue?

10. What do you talk about in social settings?

11. What inspires you?

12. What are the most consistent long-term goals that you have set?

13. What do you love to learn about the most?

According to Demartini, these questions will help elicit the top values in your life—things you already value that you can now purposefully choose to build your life around.

I regard Demartini’s advice as extremely useful for helping you discard pointless duties and unearthing what you truly value. But it’s not sufficient because even if you throw away external “shoulds,” it’s all too easy to adopt values that are inconsistent and bad for your life. In philosophical terms, Demartini replaces intrinsicism (duty) with subjectivism (feelings). Demartini believes that moral codes as such are at odds with personal values, and that the only test that matters is whether you already value something. But the truth is that a rational, pro-life, pro-self moral code is the only way to choose and achieve personal values that lead to happiness.

Pursuing your happiness means focusing on the achievement of pro-life values, and the achievement of pro-life values means practicing the virtue of rationality—it means being a thinker. A thinker goes after what he wants, but he doesn’t decide what to want lightly. When selecting his values, he applies three crucial tests over and above answering the kinds of questions Demartini would have us ask: the reality test, the cost test, and the integration test.

(1) The reality test. The thinker only pursues goals that are achievable. This doesn’t mean easy to achieve. The thinker is ambitious. He wants the best possible. But that also means he wants the best possible.

In part that means possible to man; he has no sympathy for those who yearn for a life free from effort, struggle, failure, or death. In part that means possible to him. As a child I wanted to be a professional baseball player. But after it became clear I didn’t have the speed, strength, eyesight, or hand-eye coordination to give me even a fighting chance, playing pro ball no longer represented a value to me.

The reality test involves more than working to achieve goals that are realistic—it means valuing values. It means that you don’t chase after whatever you happen to desire, but you’re interested in whether your desires are genuinely good for you—whether they work to keep you in reality.

Human beings are capable of pursuing goals that work to our detriment. We can pursue relationships that leave us drained and diminished. We can consume substances that weaken our bodies and subvert our minds. If we do not examine our desires to ask ourselves why we want what we want, we can pursue seemingly legitimate values in self-destructive ways: we can want a job, not because we love it, but because it will impress people. We can want a lover, not because we’re in love, but because we want others to envy us. Our actions can lead us, not to the achievement of life-promoting positives, but to a hollow collection of trophies displayed in the entryway of an empty house.

Every value is both an end and a means to some further value. The thinker examines every value to see the ultimate ends it is aimed at fulfilling. Are they pro-life—or not? He works to see the full ramifications of what he’s after on his life—and will not tolerate anything that will weaken him or subvert his life. Or, to put it positively, he sees every value in its full light, and only endorses those values that brighten his life and his ability to deal with reality.

(2) The cost test. If a value is achievable and pro-life, the thinker identifies the means necessary to achieve it. He never embraces a value without assuming responsibility for the effort required to achieve it. If he’s considering whether to become an entrepreneur, he will want to know: what’s required to become an entrepreneur? And he will ask himself: is that a price I’m willing to pay? For great values, he’s willing to pay a great price, embracing the fact that every value requires effort. But if he isn’t willing to pay the price, then he will not adopt the value.

(3) The integration test. We don’t pursue values in isolation. At minimum, time spent in the pursuit of one goal means time taken away from other goals. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy, where the achievement of one value doesn’t entail the frustration of another. The thinker works to bring his values into harmony. If a potential value cannot be integrated with his other values, then he will not adopt it.

Years ago I saw the documentary Still Bill, about the musician Bill Withers, who quit music at the peak of his fame. The most striking aspect of the documentary was Withers’ clear, independent sense of what he was about. He had a vision of what he wanted from life, and fortune and fame meant nothing to him if it wasn’t consistent with that vision.

That is what it what it looks like to be a thinker. It’s not simply having a few values that you go after; it’s building a life. It’s conceiving of what you want your days to add up to, then saying “yes” to everything that moves you toward that vision and saying “no” to anything that doesn’t.

Life and happiness are not the result of achieving a single value, but a code of values—a systematic constellation of values that fit together into a self-sustaining whole. Not everyone has a code of values. Not everyone knows what they’re about. The values they do have are chiefly held in emotional form, intermingled with duties and compulsions and fears. If they do have clear, crisp values, these are often compartmentalized into the sphere of life where they feel most in control (usually work). But their pursuits don’t add up to anything—or don’t add up to anything consistent.

In her notes for an early novel she planned but never wrote, Rand describes this mentality:

Most people lack [the capacity for] reverence and “taking things seriously.” They do not hold anything to be very serious or profound. There is nothing that is sacred or immensely important to them. There is nothing—no idea, object, work, or person—that can inspire them with a profound, intense, and all-absorbing passion that reaches to the roots of their souls. They do not know how to value or desire. They cannot give themselves entirely to anything. There is nothing absolute about them. They take all things lightly, easily, pleasantly—almost indifferently, in that they can have it or not, they do not claim it as their absolute necessity.

You cannot be all-in on your values if they aren’t clearly defined and integrated into a consistent whole. Instead, your desires become muted, contradictory, and all-too-often self-defeating. The lethargy and bland conventionality and ostentatious shallowness and unhappiness you encounter in most people finds its roots here: it is an intellectual failure. They have not made the commitment to being goal-directed, have not thought about what they want, and so they “do not know how to value or desire.”

The purpose of this lesson is to teach you how to value. It’s to teach you how to achieve a truly purpose-driven life—a life rich in meaning, passion, and joy. A life that you love.

Create your value hierarchy

The basic challenge of integrating your values is arranging your life so that all of your crucial needs get met. Even if your values are rational and fit together in principle, it is all too easy to neglect crucial values in practice. You allow work to rob you of human connection or you allow your family demands to trump self-care. To pursue a life is to treat all of your vital needs as sacred, and, to the extent you can, structure your life so that you can tend to all of your major values.

What that means in practice is establishing a value hierarchy. Rand explains:

A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.

A hierarchy of values allows you to make decisions about how to live your day-to-day life because it identifies what’s most important to you—and it allows you to see how smaller, even trivial decisions relate to your highest, most long-term goals. For example, a fulfilling marriage is not the result of a single grand, sweeping gesture. It is the result of countless small actions: actively listening while your partner tells you about his day, a meaningful compliment as she leaves for work, sharing a secret, playing a game of Scrabble, a thoughtful birthday gift. These concrete activities are how you create a fulfilling marriage, and they are what a fulfilling marriage consists of. Someone who claims to love his partner, and yet rushes out the door in the morning and holes up in a man cave at night, who cannot make time for his partner, who cannot make it through a shared meal without checking his work email, does not actually value his marriage, whatever he might claim.

To honor your values, you have to identify their relative importance in your life and then translate that into specific concrete actions, never sacrificing a higher value to a lower value.

How exactly do you form a hierarchy of values? A hierarchy of values is, in essence, a time hierarchy. To value something is to spend time on that pursuit. This doesn’t always mean that your most important values get the most time, but they do get first claim on your time. I might, for example, spend more time watching baseball each week than having sex, but sex is a higher value because it gets prioritized over watching the Phillies. In forming a value hierarchy, the question I’m trying to answer: what are my priorities? What has first claim on my time, energy, and resources?

To form a time hierarchy, you can’t simply make a list of all the things you value and try to rank them from 1 to 10,000. How would you compare going to the gym to listening to Bach to a new pair of shoes? At that level of analysis, your values are incommensurable. Instead, you need to start by identifying broad categories of values that capture all the things you have to achieve to live a secure, fulfilling life. For example, your list might consist of:

• Creation

• Connection

• Recreation

• Self-maintenance

These are the areas in which you have to divide up your time. The fact that creation is more important to you than connection doesn’t mean you want to spend all your time creating. Since you have to meet all your important needs to achieve happiness, what it means is that your creative work has the primary claim on your time.

Within a given category, then, you can make a ranked list of concrete values. Take the value of connection. You might think: I’m going to devote most of my afternoons this week to connecting with the people I value. And my hierarchy of companions might be: my romantic partner, then my kids, then my best friend, then my other friends. So most of my time is going to go to my girlfriend and kids. Then I’m going to spend Saturday night with my best friend and hop on a Zoom call with an old college buddy on Sunday.

In most value categories, you’ll want to identify subcategories before creating ranked lists of concrete values. For example, you might break recreation down into exercise, inspiration, learning, excitement, pleasure—and then make ranked lists of specific values. Once you’ve gotten your hour of exercise for the day, for example, you’re not going to use any remaining recreation time to go for a hike—you might watch a documentary or listen to Swan Lake.

Figure 1 shows a rough sketch of how you might work out part of your value hierarchy.

Your value hierarchy doesn’t have to be this formalized and detailed. What’s crucial is that you have a general ranking of all your most important values and that when conflicts arise or when you notice some of your needs going unmet, you can step back and clarify for yourself what matters most.

You can think of this as a top-down approach to your value hierarchy. But there’s also what you can call a bottom-up approach. When you’re contemplating something you want to do or feel you have to do, you might not have a clear sense of where it belongs in your hierarchy of values.

Here it’s crucial to remember that all values stand in a means/ends relationship to other values. Right now on my to-do list I have “set up a Health Savings Account.” To see where this fits in my value hierarchy, I need to ask, “Why is this a value? What will I gain by doing this or what will I lose by not doing this?” In this case, an HSA will save me money by allowing me to pay my healthcare bills with pre-tax income. That means it belongs under “financial health,” which is near the top of my “self-maintenance” hierarchy. When I sit down to focus on my financial health, which I typically do at the end of each month, I’m going to see that making the time to open an HSA is a high-leverage activity: it will take about an hour or two to set up, and yet could save me hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. That’s going to take precedence over a lot of other money-saving activities.

One of the benefits of formulating a hierarchy of values and seeing how every activity fits within your hierarchy is that the world becomes value rich. The smallest value takes on an elevated level of meaning and importance because you see its role in serving your highest values.

For example, I spend most of my life in my home office. By seeing my home office as intimately connected to the career that I love, it becomes more than a place to sit down and type. I can see it as a sacred environment where I do what I love. And that encourages me to create the kind of environment that helps me do my work and enjoy my work. In front of me, there’s a window which I’ve fitted with a scarlet curtain (my favorite color) and next to it a portrait of Ayn Rand (my favorite author). On my desk is a soothing water fountain with tea lights. At my feet is a yellow carpet that makes me feel as if I’m stepping into a bright, energized, but relaxed universe every time I enter my office. I’m surrounded by books that make me feel as if I’m living among history’s great minds.

That is what it means to fill your life with values. You can turn every area of your life into a slice of personal heaven. You can turn your home into your ideal universe. You can make your wardrobe an expression of soul. You can fill your kitchen with your favorite food and choose a car that serves and expresses your lifestyle. You can—and you should—rearrange the world so that it comes closer to your vision of the ideal world. You can create a stylized universe of your own making—a universe that elevates you, heightens the mundane, and accentuates the exceptional.

When you make your life value rich, something else happens as well. Most of your highest values are long range and abstract. But when you come to see the means to those values as themselves being values, you have the continuing experience of successfully achieving values. My most important career value right now is to write this book. But I cannot sit down and “write this book.” What I can do is set as my value spending three hours a day writing. Each day that I’ve invested those three hours is an achievement of one of my values. Contrast that with people whose life is a series of obnoxious duties performed in the hopes that one day far in the future they’ll get what they want. You can get what you want today—by seeing what you can achieve today as serving your long-term vision.

The virtue of productiveness

I’ve left out one crucial ingredient of a value hierarchy: the purpose at its center. Without a central purpose, you cannot formulate or follow a hierarchy of values. According to Rand:

A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find.

Only one kind of purpose is fit to be a central purpose: a productive career.

Our need to work is often blamed on capitalism. Absent capitalism’s delusions, we would exist in harmony with nature, spending a few hours growing fruit and the rest of the time relaxing with friends and family and playing folk music or whatever. That part is never too clear. What is clear is that, according to capitalism’s critics, the time and attention we give to our careers is a disease motivated by an unquenchable desire to consume. “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like,” Chuck Palahniuk tells us in Fight Club.

But it’s the critics of work who are delusional. Non-capitalist societies are idealized only by people who don’t have to live in them. It’s capitalism and the technological innovation it generates that liberated us from endless grueling hours in the sun, the countless dangers of farming, the primitive ignorance of people who had not built universities and the printing press, the nasty, brutish, short lives that people led in prior ages. Capitalism doesn’t delude us into working—it liberates us to do the kind of work we want, the way we want to do it, and to live better than kings did a few centuries ago. Capitalism increases the material and spiritual rewards of work. But the need to work? That’s built into us.

Biologically, we need material values in order to survive—productive work is how we create them. Human beings can’t live “in harmony with nature” the way animals do. Animals are programmed to consume the resources in their environmental niche (with many members of a species dying in the struggle for a fixed supply of resources). Human beings lack that kind of programming. Venture out into to the wilderness without the tools of modern civilization (or just read Into the Wild) and you’ll quickly find that living “in harmony with nature” really means dying in harmony with nature.

We don’t consume ready-made material values—we create them through productive work. We look around our environment, figure out how to make the raw material of nature useful to us, then exert the effort to bring new resources and values into existence. We don’t just pluck fruit off wild bushes—we plant crops. We don’t just hunt animals—we breed them. We don’t live in caves—we build houses. We don’t scratch words into the dirt—we create the printing press and the Internet. We use reason to project a better future and use reason to bring that future into existence. This is why there’s no need for the “less fit” members of our species to die off: we don’t fight for a fixed sum of resources—we create abundance.

Productive work isn’t just one activity human life requires, but the central activity. Life is a process of self-sustaining action. Most human activities—even important ones—consist of consuming values. Visiting the doctor, pursuing a hobby, traveling with friends, taking your partner on a date all involve expending resources. A self-sustaining life requires the continual replenishing of our resources, and only productive work can accomplish that. As a result, when we formulate our hierarchy of values—when we decide how we will apportion our time among the various things we care about—productive work has to have first claim on our time and energy. Our central purpose must be a productive purpose. Productive creation is what makes a human life self-sustaining. It’s how we bring new values into existence.

The insignia of productive work’s unique place in life is the pleasure we take in the process of creating values. Famed educator Maria Montessori observed that this joy in work can be seen even in children. Children, she notes:

don’t consider what they do to be play—it is their work. . . . If the mother is making bread, the child is given a little flour and water too, so that he can also make bread; if the mother is sweeping a room, the child has a little brush and helps her. They wash clothes alongside the mother. The child is very, very happy.

But the pleasure of work depends in large measure on the extent to which it uses the full resources of our mind. For an adult, baking bread and washing clothes can be drudgery. We need work that challenges us, that requires us to learn, grow, think creatively. But if we do find such work, then, like children, it can become an all-consuming source of passion and pride.

This is the virtue of productiveness. The essence of a moral life is using your intelligence to create values. This sets your central purpose, and allows you to build a life, rather than to drift through a series of disconnected days. As Rand puts it:

Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. “Productive work” does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.

The virtue of productiveness tells us that we need to produce in order to live—and that if we want to enjoy life, our work must be a source, not only of wealth, but of joy. As the hero of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead says, “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture.”

Too often we settle for a job that pays the bills, a job that makes us lust for Fridays and fear Mondays. That is ghastly. We should not tolerate torture. We should not tolerate one ounce of needless suffering. If our goal is to live and enjoy life, then we need to create for ourselves a career that we love. But how do we do that?

But just as we’re born not knowing how to walk, we’re born not knowing how to think. The difference is that everyone eventually learns how to walk. You don’t find freshmen rolling down the halls of their high school. You do, however, find plenty of grown men and women uninterested in what’s true, or unable to see through lousy arguments and bullshit claims.

Becoming a thinker starts with caring what’s true. And here the biggest risk isn’t that you’ll openly declare, “To hell with the facts, I want this to be true.” It’s that you’ll engage in self-deception through motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning isn’t true reasoning, but the pretense of reasoning: the goal is not actually to reach the truth, but to prop up your current set of beliefs, defend your self-image, protect yourself from painful emotions, and look good to your peers. You seek out evidence to confirm what you want to believe, ignore evidence that conflicts with what you want to believe, and reinterpret what you can’t ignore to avoid changing your mind.

I find that I’m much more prone to this on personal issues than intellectual issues. On intellectual issues, particularly when I know my views are outside the mainstream, my natural inclination is to wonder: Why do I think I’m right and so many intelligent people are wrong? Are they seeing something I’m not? What are the best arguments against my position? What biases do I have that might prejudice me? But on personal issues, I’m much more likely to dig in my heels and become defensive if I’m being criticized. “What do you mean I’ve been aloof and ignoring your needs? I asked you last Thursday how you were doing!”

Motivated reasoning is such a seductive trap that it’s not enough to set genuine reasoning as an intention. You have to actively work to expose and uproot any self-deception. Charles Darwin, for instance, made this an explicit policy as he developed his theory of natural selection.

I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.

In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef recommends using various thought experiments to push back against motivated reasoning. Whenever you’re thinking through an issue or making a decision, you should ask yourself: If my incentives were different, would I reach a different conclusion? If I was an atheist, would I find this argument for God persuasive? If I was in my partner’s shoes, would I consider withholding this information a lie? If my peer group held the opposite view, would I still defend my current view? If this study didn’t support but contradicted my position, would I still find it persuasive?

Galef says this last question dramatically changed her approach to her book. During her research, she found a paper claiming that motivated reasoning causes people to have more success in life. She was certain it must have major methodological flaws, and sure enough, she found them. “Then, somewhat grudgingly, I did a thought experiment.” She asked herself, what if the study had supported her thesis? “In that case, I realized, my reaction would have been: ‘Exactly as I suspected. I’ll have to find a place for this study in my book!’” This realization led her to reexamine all of the studies she was planning to cite with the same rigor she would have used had they contradicted her thesis. “Sadly, this ended up disqualifying most of them.”

It’s not enough to feel that you’re being rational. Rationality requires actually being rational. It requires putting in the work to ensure that you’re following the evidence wherever it leads rather than stacking the deck in favor of what you want to believe.

Becoming a thinker doesn’t just mean caring about what’s true in some narrow sphere. It means cultivating a deep curiosity about the world, other people, and yourself. In particular, a thinker is curious about causality: he wants to understand how things work. Not only to know who won the Battle of Shiloh, but to understand why the American Civil War was fought, why the Union won, why Reconstruction failed, how that impacted black Americans in ways that continue to have effects today.

At a more personal level, let’s say you’re a student struggling to maintain good grades. Or maybe you’re acing your classes but at the expense of any fun or social life. To be a thinker is to ask why? Why am I struggling while others succeed? Why am I in the library twelve hours a day while some of my classmates are thriving in class and out of class? Can I do better?

When Cal Newport, now the best-selling author of books such as Deep Work, arrived in college, he noticed he was spending hours and hours on his schoolwork, reading and re-reading textbooks and class notes until the information (hopefully) made its way into his head, constantly feeling behind, and pulling no small number of all-nighters.

It was a truly chaotic existence. But when I looked around, all of my friends seemed to be having the same experience—and none of them seemed willing to question it. This didn’t sit right with me. I wasn’t content to work in long, painful stretches and then earn only slightly above-average grades for my efforts.

So Cal became curious: how could he become more efficient? He started experimenting and ultimately found a method that allowed him to achieve straight A’s while spending less time studying. “By my senior year it got to the point where, during finals periods, I would sometimes pretend to be heading off the library just so I wouldn’t demoralize my roommates, who were preparing for yet another grim all-nighter.”

He didn’t stop there. Cal started questioning other students able to perform at a high level while remaining relaxed and engaged with college life, trying to assess what causes they were enacting to achieve these effects. He would go on to write a book on strategies for overcoming procrastination, taking targeted notes, preparing efficiently for exams, and writing standout term papers. Being curious about cause and effect is how we learn—and how we thrive.

But curiosity is itself a skill we can practice and improve. It involves asking questions, and we can learn which kinds of questions are most fruitful to ask. Some of the most important questions a thinker asks include:

• “What is it?” This is the question that helps us identify the nature of the things we deal with.

• “Why?” This is the question that helps us think causally and allows us to understand the past.

• “What for?” This is the question that allows us to project long-range purposes and invent the future.

In the rest of this lesson, we’ll probe the kinds of questions and strategies that allow you to gain, validate, and use knowledge. The questions and strategies that will help you distinguish truth from falsehood and integrate what you know into an ever-expanding sum.

Learn to conceptualize

Reason operates by concepts. Aside from proper nouns, all words stand for concepts. Dog, cat, computer, neutron, justice—these and countless other concepts reflect our ability not just to see and hear the things in front of us, but to grasp increasingly complex relationships between the things we see and hear (and the complex relationships between things so small, large, or distant that we can never see or hear them).

A full theory of how and when to form concepts is outside the scope of this book. For those interested, I recommend starting with philosopher Harry Binswanger’s book How We Know. For our purposes, the key idea is that we can’t just arbitrarily group things together using concepts. Taking dogs, trash, and sulfur and calling them all “stinkies” is a mental dead end. Almost nothing you learn about a dog will apply to sulfur.

Concepts work by grouping together things that are essentially similar so that we can apply what we discover about some of the units to the others. We couldn’t grow food if seeds didn’t share certain properties. We couldn’t generate electricity if turbines didn’t share certain properties. If we weren’t confident there were essential similarities between airplanes, then no way in hell would we risk stepping aboard a passenger jet.

But the fact that concepts aren’t automatically valid carries with it an enormous responsibility. We have to do the work to make sure our concepts are valid. Most people don’t. Our most disastrous thinking errors often are not the result of fallacies like appeal to authority or begging the question, let alone formal deductive fallacies like affirming the consequent. All too often, our most disastrous thinking errors come from embracing illegitimate concepts.

For a concept to be valid you have to be able to answer the question: “What facts of reality give rise to the need for this concept?” You need to be able to know clearly what the units of the concept are, what they’re being distinguished from, and why it’s legitimate to treat them as units, i.e., why they are essentially similar. Many concepts don’t meet these criteria.

Some concepts don’t refer to anything at all. This includes concepts that are mystical in nature (“god,” “angel,” “afterlife”). It also includes bad philosophic concepts, like Kant’s “noumena” and Hegel’s “dialectic.” And it includes certain scientific concepts, such as “epicycle.” The point is not simply that these concepts refer to things we can’t perceive. We can’t perceive electrons. But we can infer the existence of electrons from what we do perceive. Concepts that lack units refer to things that cannot be connected at all to perceptual reality. (We do have legitimate concepts for imaginary things, like “wookie,” but in this case the units are “an alien species in the fictional world of Star Wars.”)

Far more important are concepts that misclassify things that do exist. Sometimes, for example, we treat superficially different things as essentially different. For example, people who argue that gay couples shouldn’t be able to marry because marriage “is between a man and a woman” take an essentially similar phenomenon—a legal union of romantic partners committed to building a life together—and insist on an artificial distinction between opposite sex couples and same sex couples. Or take the concept “racism.” Some argue that racial minorities cannot be racist—that racism equals prejudice plus power. But this means making an artificial distinction between something that’s essentially similar: judging someone based on skin color.

The most common conceptual error, however, is treating superficially similar things as essentially similar. Rand calls these “package deals.” “‘Package-Dealing’ is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or ‘package,’ elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.”

Package deals are everywhere. “Stakeholder,” for example, treats as essentially similar a company’s shareholders, employees, customers, local communities, and the government. All of these are people “affected by the business,” ignoring a crucial distinction between the owners of a business, who have the right to control and profit from it, and groups whose main choice is whether to voluntarily deal with the company or not. The concept “stakeholders” obliterates that difference in order to strong-arm business owners into surrendering control and profits to non-owners.

Or take the concept “judgmental.” This concept treats as essentially similar uninformed, prejudicial judgments about people and informed, rational judgments. It equates someone who says, “Zoomers are lazy and entitled” with someone who thoughtfully concludes, “Lucas is lazy and entitled.” The result is that we’re taught to view all negative judgments, particularly negative moral judgments, as wrong per se (except the negative moral judgment that someone is judgmental).

Or take the concept “selfishness.” People often call two radically different kinds of people selfish—the short-term, predatory huckster, and the virtuous person who seeks his own happiness rationally; an Elizabeth Holmes and a Steve Jobs. The implication of this package deal is that our basic moral choice is either to lie, cheat, and steal without regard for other people—or to sacrifice our own interests for other people. There’s no category for the person who pursues his own interests, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself.

The test for package deals is to look at how the concepts are used in practice, to look at the specific concretes the concept is meant to apply to, and ask: do these things really belong together? Or is there some important difference that’s being ignored or denied? Is it equating the moral and the immoral, the true and the false, the rational and the irrational, the important and the unimportant?

Bad concepts equal bad thinking. To use a concept is to make a declaration: “This is the right way to look at the world.” Don’t be a conceptual slut. Do not use a concept unless you know exactly what it means and you’re rationally convinced it gets reality right.

Validate and Connect

Your senses give you direct access to reality. Your concepts allow you to go beyond what you perceive, to acquire knowledge that applies to all human beings, all organisms, all matter. You use your concepts to make judgments: this is true, that is good, this is false, that is bad.

Just as your concepts aren’t automatically legitimate, the judgments you make with these concepts aren’t, either. You need to work to ensure your ideas conform to facts. At the most basic level, this means distinguishing the cognitive from the non-cognitive: drawing a line between what I observe and infer on the one hand—and what I feel and what others say on the other.

Typically, this is what people mean when they talk about objectivity. Being objective means going by the facts—regardless of your (or anyone’s) wishes, hopes, fears, or desires. That’s a great start, but it’s only a start. To truly be objective, you need to self-consciously apply a method that validates your knowledge—a method that keeps your ideas connected to facts and that allows you to reliably go from what you perceive to what you don’t.

All genuine knowledge consists of what you directly perceive or what you logically infer from what you perceive. But what does it mean to be logical? Traditional logic classes focus on deductive arguments. You start with a general proposition and apply it to a less general case. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. At each step you’re guided by the basic law of logic: the law of contradiction. Since A is A, the same thing cannot be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect. Since contradictions can’t exist in reality, they must not exist in thought.

Deductive reasoning is vital, but logic is about far more than deduction. “Logic,” in Rand’s definition, “is the art of non-contradictory identification.” It includes both deduction and induction (forming generalizations). And, importantly, logic isn’t primarily about evaluating a single argument out of context. To be logical is to seek to integrate all your knowledge into a consistent whole—a whole rooted in the world you perceive through your senses. To achieve that goal requires two basic processes: reduction and integration.

Reason requires reduction

What ties your knowledge to reality? Think of a chain you use to tie your dog to a tree. If you wanted to know with total confidence that your dog wouldn’t escape, you’d start at her collar and check each link. You’d go back, link by link, to make sure the chain was strong, until you reached the starting point, the tree.

We learn by building more abstract knowledge on less abstract knowledge. We learn to count. Then we use that knowledge to learn to add and subtract. We use that knowledge to learn to multiply and divide. Then algebra. Then calculus.

Conceptual knowledge exists in a hierarchy—more abstract knowledge is built on less abstract knowledge. To validate conceptual knowledge means to reduce it by going back through that hierarchy, working to take less solid knowledge back to more solid knowledge—ultimately to what you can directly perceive.

Think of Darwin. After years as a naturalist, he developed a hypothesis about the origin of species: they evolve through the mechanism of natural selection. But he didn’t stop there. He wanted to know: is this really true?

After Darwin developed his hypothesis, he spent the next two decades trying to establish whether it was true. To do that, he had to be able to answer questions like, “Why do I believe that there is sufficient natural variation in organisms to allow for natural selection to take place?” He confirmed that in part by spending the better part of a decade studying barnacles and concluded that, yes, you do observe significant variation among specimens.

Or, “Why do I believe that natural processes can account for the global distribution of species?” He wondered whether it was possible for a seed to float large distances across the ocean and take hold in a far-off location. When botanists told Darwin the salt water would kill the seeds, he ran his own observational tests and found that, in fact, seeds could be immersed in salt water and still germinate a month later.

Or, “Why do I believe that the minor variation we see in nature is capable of producing an entirely new species?” One line of evidence came from what he called artificial selection. He found, for example, that selective breeding of pigeons by human beings could produce a new species over the course of only a few centuries.

Whether you’re assessing a complex scientific theory, a political policy, or a career change, the key to making sure your ideas are connected to reality is to ask of any idea you hold: “Why do I believe this is true?”

For example, you read an article claiming that we need socialized medicine in the United States, and you find yourself getting angry. You say to yourself: “I disagree with this, but why do I believe that socialized medicine would be bad?”

Let’s say you can’t come up with any reasons. What you don’t do is google “why socialized medicine is bad,” click on the first study you see, and conclude: ah hah! Socialized medicine is bad because the Journal of Truth did a study that shows Canada’s system has longer wait times for cancer treatment than the US! That’s a prime example of motivated reasoning.

What you’re trying to get at is the actual reasons that persuaded you of an idea in the past. If you really can’t recapture that, or if you never did go through a thought process where you considered the evidence for and against socialized medicine, then you have no business believing it’s bad (or good). You have to file that conclusion as “A plausible idea I need to think more about.”

Now, let’s say you ask yourself, “Why do I believe socialized medicine would be bad?” and you do come up with an answer: socialized medicine destroys medical progress. Great. Now why do you believe that? You think: socialized medicine makes healthcare “free” at the point of purchase. But it still has costs: the medical staff, the medical equipment, the drugs, the hospital, the electricity that powers the hospital. So, you think, what’s the impact if a person can use these resources without paying for them?

Just as a “free” restaurant would see its costs skyrocket as everyone ordered steak and lobster, so socialized medicine would cost taxpayers an unsustainable amount as people demanded the best tests and the most expensive treatments. Eventually, the government would have to control costs by rationing care. You’d get huge waiting lists for treatment, as we see in Canada and the United Kingdom. Drug companies and medical-device makers, meanwhile, would have to accept a tiny fraction of what they earn today, meaning they could do less R&D, and certainly wouldn’t invest in highly expensive, speculative treatments—say, like mRNA vaccines—since they wouldn’t be able to recoup their costs. You might think: this is why most medical innovation happens in the US: precisely because drug prices aren’t fixed by the government.

In most contexts, that’s a sufficient reduction. You’ve taken your idea, “socialized medicine is bad,” and you’ve made it more precise, closer to what you can perceive. It’s not a full reduction because you’re not literally going all the way down to the perceptual level. If you later get into an argument or want to write a book on freedom in healthcare, you might have to do more work to fully reduce the idea. But for now you’ve done the work to know what you believe and why you believe it.

Reason requires integration

The most obvious fact about great thinkers is that they see connections no one else has noticed. Maybe the most striking example in history is Newton grasping that the same force that causes objects to fall to the earth causes the motions of planets in the sky. But more relatable examples abound. I always think of a young Steve Jobs helping to explain computers to a world unfamiliar with them as “a bicycle for your mind.”

Mental connections are integrations. All knowledge involves integration. Concepts integrate percepts. Generalizations integrate observations. Principles integrate generalizations. Philosophy integrates principles into a single, unified, consistent view of the world.

With each step you can see more of reality and see it more clearly. When Newton integrated planetary motion with terrestrial motion, that allowed us to apply what we learned about terrestrial motion to astronomy and vice versa.

Integration doesn’t just expand your knowledge—it checks it. Integration is how you discover contradictions among your ideas. As Rand puts it, “No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”

We’re all familiar with people trying to trap us in an argument by showing that we’re contradicting ourselves. “You believe this. You believe that. But this and that are inconsistent, so you must be wrong about this, that, or both.” People pointing out your inconsistencies isn’t always fun, but it is a gift. To the extent the contradiction is real, your critic is helping you integrate.

But the value of integration in rooting out contradictions goes far beyond intellectual debates. How many times have you been tempted to tell a “white lie” to a friend to protect their feelings? “Oh, no. You haven’t gained weight.” “That haircut looks great on you.” “Bro, someone needs to call the police because those guns should be illegal.” But think about what you’re actually doing when you tell these kinds of lies. On the one hand, you want the best for your friend. On the other hand, you’re not giving them the information they need to make good decisions. You’re treating them as children incapable of handling the fact that their weight is unhealthy, their haircut isn’t flattering, their workout regimen isn’t panning out. Well, that’s a contradiction. “I want the best for my friend” and “I’m lying to my friend” don’t integrate.

Integration doesn’t happen automatically. It requires volitional effort. You have to choose to integrate—you have to actively work to relate your knowledge. What does this mean in practice? Integration doesn’t mean that every time you hear an idea you sit down and go through every other thing you know in search of connections and contradictions. At the simplest level, it just means asking yourself questions: “What does this remind me of? What other things is this related to? Do I sense that this is connected to anything else I know, and if so, can I make that dim sense more vivid?”

Integration is what makes knowledge useful. An idea disconnected from the rest of your ideas isn’t knowledge. Your intellectual firepower consists of your ability to bring the full sum of what you know to every issue you encounter.

Follow evidence

One of the most important thinking skills you can develop is “mental filing.” Most people engage in haphazard mental filling. Every idea in their head has the same standing: “Stuff I believe.” So whether it’s 2+2=4, slavery is evil, Epstein didn’t kill himself, matter is made up of atoms, the FDA saves lives, there is life on other planets, or a vegan diet is the healthiest way to eat, they make no cognitive distinctions. Same for when they encounter new ideas: their reaction is binary: “I believe this” or “I don’t believe this.”

Mental filing means expanding your cognitive vocabulary and then carefully assessing ideas accordingly. For example, it’s valuable to have a file for “Interesting things I’ve heard.” These are ideas that are plausible, but where you haven’t done the work to assess them. “The world is made out of atoms.” You’ve heard it since you were a kid, but unless you studied at least some of the steps scientists went through to prove it, you don’t know it.

Another valuable file is, “Things I find confusing.” Typically, people treat anything that confuses them as false. Worse, if it comes from an authority they respect, it can get labeled in effect as, “Something I believe but don’t understand.” Proper mental filing means putting stuff that you don’t understand into the “confusing” folder until you eventually come to understand and evaluate it.

Maybe your most important set of folders is for ideas where you have to assess evidence.

Assessing evidence

Some ideas are binary: you either know them or you don’t. “There’s milk in the fridge.” There’s no collecting of evidence—you just go look in the damn fridge. But many ideas require you to collect and assess evidence over time, and there your knowledge moves through stages. You start out not knowing something. Then you get a little evidence for it—it’s possible. You get more evidence—it’s probable. You get sufficient evidence—it’s certain. Good thinking requires knowing where you are in that progression and filing ideas in the appropriate evidentiary folder.

One of my favorite shows is the History Channel’s Pawn Stars. It’s about a real pawn shop in Las Vegas that specializes in rare, high-end items. In one episode, a guy brings in a guitar he claims was owned by Jimi Hendrix. The question is: Is this really Hendrix’s guitar? The pawn stars bring in an expert.

The expert examines the guitar carefully. It’s a white ’63 Fender Stratocaster, and Hendrix was known to have played that type of guitar. At this point the expert might think: it’s possible this was Hendrix’s guitar. It’s the right kind of guitar from the right time period. That constitutes some evidence. But it’s not sufficient. There were lots of ’63 Fender Stratocasters not owned by Hendrix.

Next, the expert observes that the guitar has scuff marks on the top of the neck, which indicate that it had been played by a left-hander. The guitar also has a whammy bar that’s been straightened, which Hendrix was known to have done. The owner then shows the expert photos of Hendrix playing a guitar that looks exactly like the one in the shop. Now the expert can say: this is probably Hendrix’s guitar.

Finally, the owner shows the expert documents that explain the guitar’s “chain of custody” from Hendrix to intermediaries and finally to him. Once the expert sees that the guitar’s serial number matches the serial number listed in the documentation he has sufficient knowledge to conclude: “Yes, this was Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar. I’m certain of it.”

Notice what the expert is doing. He is taking the idea, “This is Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar,” which he doesn’t yet know to be true, and connecting it to what he does know. He is able to see that everything about this Strat is consistent with the claim it was owned by Hendrix, nothing is inconsistent with the claim it was owned by Hendrix, and there is sufficient evidence to meet the standard of proof used to authenticate memorabilia.

That, in essence, is the process that’s involved in assessing evidence: you define a standard of proof, and then you evaluate the extent to which the evidence you have meets it. If you meet the standard of proof, then there are no longer rational grounds for doubting the conclusion.

Note that it isn’t easy to define a standard of proof. It takes real thought and expertise. For example, an authenticator has to know a lot about what can and can’t be faked by counterfeiters and formulate the standard of proof in such a way that it mitigates against fakes. Similarly, a scientist can’t leap from “the evidence is consistent with my hypothesis” to “therefore the evidence supports only my hypothesis.” He has to know enough to be able to say, “This is the range of rational hypotheses, and so this evidence supports my hypothesis and only my hypothesis.”

The case for certainty

Certainty has a bad rap today. The one thing you’re allowed to be certain of is that no one can be certain of anything. But that’s because almost everyone misunderstands what certainty is.

The basic building block of epistemology is the concept “fact.” A fact is something that accurately describes the world whether we know it or not. Three hundred years ago, it was a fact that matter was made up of atoms—but it was a fact that nobody knew.

The concept that distinguishes ignorance from our grasp of a fact is “knowledge.” Knowledge, as Rand puts it, is “a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation.” A scientist who understands the evidence for the atomic theory has knowledge, “Atoms are real.”

“Fact,” then, is a metaphysical term. “Knowledge” is metaphysical and epistemological. “Certainty” is a purely epistemological term: it says that you’ve met the standard of proof and are entitled to regard your conclusion as knowledge. It is illogical not to believe the conclusion.

But this has an important implication: you can be certain of something—and later discover that your conclusion was imprecise or wrong. “Certainty” doesn’t mean you’re omniscient or infallible. It means you’ve gone through the process to achieve knowledge, and there are no longer grounds for doubt.

But human knowledge doesn’t stand still. You continue to learn and to expand your knowledge. This can lead you to qualify a past conclusion. For example, Newton discovers the laws governing the behavior of macroscopic objects. Einstein later comes along and qualifies what Newton discovered: his laws only apply under small relative velocities and a weak gravitational field to a certain degree of precision. This new knowledge doesn’t overthrow old knowledge—it expands it. Einstein didn’t invalidate Newton: he discovered something more than Newton.

But new knowledge can also uncover old errors. I served on a jury once in a spine-chilling stalking case. The evidence for the defendant’s guilt was overwhelming. He briefly dated the woman in question. Then he started acting strange and aggressive and she broke off the relationship. After that, she started receiving threatening texts—from a disposable cell phone bought with the defendant’s credit card. The cell phone company could place the defendant’s regular cell at the location where the texts were sent. The victim saw the defendant around her house at odd times. Fliers were plastered around her work calling her a slut and whore—and police confirmed that someone who looked like the defendant was seen passing them out. The defense blamed the defendant’s twin brother (who had never met the victim and didn’t live in the area), but said they couldn’t locate the brother to have him testify. We convicted the defendant.

I regard our conclusion the defendant was guilty as certain. But now suppose years later I learned that there was evidence the twin brother was in the area, and that he hated the defendant and told people he wanted to frame him for a crime. And, let’s even say the twin felt remorseful after a decade and confessed that he concocted the whole scheme. I would conclude: I was certain—and I was wrong. I made a mistake based on incomplete information that was apt to mislead.

If it’s possible to be certain and wrong, then what good is certainty? Why not just say the best you can do is achieve probability? Well, for starters, you can’t assign something a probability if you have no idea what would count as certainty. If you have no clue what it would mean to prove something, then you have no clue whether something counts as evidence, i.e., whether it tends to prove a hypothesis.

But, second, you need a concept to distinguish when you have rational grounds for doubting a conclusion from when you don’t. When you lack sufficient evidence for a hypothesis, you have rational grounds for doubt. In a jury context, this is precisely what counts as reasonable doubt: there’s some—maybe a lot—of evidence implicating the defendant. But not enough to meet the standard of proof.

But when you do have sufficient evidence, there are no longer rational grounds for doubt. The only doubts that can be offered are irrational “maybes.” “I don’t have any evidence, but maybe the twin brother did it.” “I don’t have any evidence, but maybe there will be new evidence that overturns the hypothesis.” “I don’t have any evidence, but maybe another hypothesis nobody has thought of explains these facts.” “I can’t point to any errors you’ve made in reasoning, but maybe you’ve made one.”

“Maybe,” Leonard Peikoff has said, is a fighting word. Just as you need grounds to say something is true, so you need grounds to say it might be true. Just as you need grounds for belief, so you need grounds for skepticism. Every assertion, no matter how tentative, requires you to have reasons. An assertion—any assertion—made without grounds, without evidence, without reasons is a claim based on emotion. Claims based on emotion aren’t possible, they aren’t probable, they aren’t certain—they’re arbitrary.

Beware the arbitrary

An arbitrary claim is devoid of evidence. It’s any kind of claim where the person’s attitude amounts to, “I can’t prove it, but prove it ain’t so.” The right response to arbitrary claims is to dismiss them without consideration.

Why? Because there’s no logical way to consider them. You can’t integrate them or reduce them because there’s no evidence you can use to relate the idea to reality. They’re not possible, not probable, not certain—they’re not even false. They’re worse than false. To conclude that an idea is false is a cognitive assessment: “This contradicts what I know.” The arbitrary is something you can’t bring into any relation with what you know. You can’t evaluate it because there’s nothing to evaluate.

Imagine a court proceeding where the arbitrary was allowed.

• “The phone was purchased with the defendant’s credit card.” “Maybe someone stole his card and bought the phone.”

• “The defendant was seen passing out the threatening fliers.” “Maybe it was his twin brother.”

• “His twin brother was in China.” “Maybe he bought a plane ticket under a false identity.”

• “The defendant was caught on tape talking about how he was the one who committed the crime.” “Maybe the tape was doctored.”

• “The defended confessed to the crime.” “Maybe the confession was coerced.”

Any of these “maybes” could be legitimate if evidence was offered for them. But to the extent there is no evidence, there’s nothing the jury can do to process them. The proper approach: ignore them. Pretend nothing has been said because, as Peikoff explains, “cognitively speaking, nothing has been said.” If you make a claim about reality, it’s your job to support it.

Not every proponent of the arbitrary openly says, “I have no evidence, prove it ain’t so.” Often they’ll give the appearance of giving reasons. Conspiracists, for example, will bombard you with an overwhelming amount of what can superficially appear to be evidence. Religionists will go through the motions of giving arguments for God’s existence. But these aren’t cognitive acts. It can take work to see that they aren’t cognitive acts, and that the arguments and evidence offered up are rationalizations for emotionalism, not part of a quest for truth. But once you see that, then you don’t have to examine the one billionth “news story” claiming that Trump actually won the election or the one billionth argument for God’s existence. You can reject the entire approach as arbitrary.

Now, you might think: Isn’t the fact that we can make mistakes some evidence that Watkins got his jury verdict wrong? Isn’t the fact that elections can be stolen some evidence that Biden stole the election from Trump? No. The evidence for a capacity is not evidence that capacity has been actualized in a particular case. The fact that elections can be stolen is not evidence that this particular election was stolen.

In sum, you need to assess evidence. Once you’ve formulated a standard of proof and met it, then the conclusion is certain. The only kinds of doubts left are arbitrary doubts. But the fact that a conclusion is certain does not mean that you never revisit it, and that you ignore new genuine evidence in order to neurotically protect your conclusion. Logic gives you an ongoing process for knowing—not one that eliminates the possibility of error, but one that minimizes and corrects errors over time. (This is one major difference between reason and faith, mysticism, or emotionalism: reason is self-corrective; other alleged sources of knowledge are not.)

Any concept that demands you be omniscient or infallible in order to achieve knowledge is out. Certainty can’t mean, “Impossible ever to overturn” because it’s only omniscience that would make a conclusion impossible to overturn. The challenge you face in life is not to distinguish conclusions where error is impossible from conclusions where error is possible. It’s to distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge given your lack of omniscience and capacity for error.

Learn from experts

Today it’s popular to urge people to “listen to the science.” Rarely does this mean: dig into the scientific literature and make up your own mind. Instead, it’s taken to mean: accept the conclusions of (some) scientific authorities without question. But blindly listening to scientists is as irrational as blindly listening to the Pope. Scientists, and experts more generally, should be seen as advisors—not infallible authorities.

We need experts. Just as the economic division of labor makes us all far more productive than we would be if we were all self-sufficient farmers, so the intellectual division of labor makes us all far more knowledgeable than we would be if we could only make use of knowledge we ourselves had discovered. But relying on experts doesn’t mean blindly accepting what they say.

So how should you go about rationally assessing claims made by experts—claims that you, as a non-expert, often cannot verify independently?

For starters, you need to develop baseline skillsets that allow you to make (relatively) independent judgments about expert claims. Above all, this means having a basic understanding of how to assess data-based claims like the ones that we hear in discussions of health, science, economic, and political issues. “Vaccines cause autism.” “Coffee is good for your health/bad for your health.” “Inequality hurts economic growth.” “Climate change will lead to devastating droughts.”

Data-driven claims involve three components: data, data processing, and interpretation. It turns out that though you can’t assess data-driven claims the way experts can, you can often spot problems at the data-level (input errors) and the interpretation-level (output errors) without expert-level knowledge. You might not understand the complex statistics that go into the claim that coffee is unhealthy, for instance, but you might be able to figure out that that conclusion was based on a small sample of elderly people. Or, on the output error side, you might find that though the media reported a causal connection—“coffee causes cancer”—the actual study simply reported a correlation between coffee consumption and elevated cancer rates. This kind of assessment isn’t enough to reliably draw true conclusions without the aid of experts but is often enough to protect you from many of the false claims you hear on social media. (The best introduction to data analysis skills I’ve found is Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West’s Calling Bullshit.)

But while improving your B.S. detector is an invaluable foundation, it still doesn’t tell you everything you need to know in order to use experts to help you reach the truth. For that, you need some further steps.

First, you have to judge the state of the field. Some fields have plenty of self-proclaimed experts, but the field itself is illegitimate (think: astrology). In other cases, the field might be at too primitive a state of knowledge to give reliable guidance. I suspect this is true in the field of nutrition, given the complexity of the problem they’re trying to solve, and the lack of consensus around even seemingly basic questions like what causes weight gain. In still other cases, the field has become politicized. In the field I’m most familiar with, climate science, funding, publication, and hiring decisions tend to encourage catastrophic predictions about CO2’s climate impact. This doesn’t mean that we should totally ignore nutrition and climate experts, but it does mean we have to be wary—especially if they are recommending radical changes like going vegan or rapidly eliminating fossil fuels. (For an outstanding guide to using experts to make sense of energy and environmental issues, see Alex Epstein’s book Fossil Future.)

Second, you have to judge the supposed expert(s). You need to assess whether they understand the field and whether they’re trustworthy. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, for example, I saw people sending around videos from random general practitioners, based mainly on whether they liked the conclusions the GPs had reached. That’s like asking your dentist how to treat your throat cancer. In my case, I happened to be friends with Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins who specializes in pandemics.

Amesh not only has expert credentials. He’s an expert explainer. Part of what establishes whether an expert is trustworthy is how clearly he can explain things to a layman. That means not only explaining his conclusion, but his reasoning. It means explaining his degree of certainty, explaining how much consensus there is among experts in his field, and why various experts might disagree with his conclusions. It means being able to answer your questions in ways that are clarifying. As a general rule, a trustworthy expert’s primary goal isn’t to try to convince you that he’s right—it’s to act as a guide to help you understand an area of knowledge that you cannot assess independently.

What should emerge is a reduction—not a full reduction that gives you a complete picture of an idea’s tie to reality, but a reduction based on expert testimony. When you have good reasons to trust the expert, and the expert explains his conclusion and the reasoning behind it in terms you can understand, then you have established an idea’s tie to reality to the extent that’s relevant given your context and purposes.

Note that you don’t need to rely on experts in every field of knowledge. In some fields, you’ll have sufficient expertise to reach independent judgments. In particular, philosophy does not require experts. Or, rather, we rely on professional philosophers to develop philosophical systems, which takes a lifetime (and genius). But philosophical knowledge doesn’t make use of specialized knowledge. It uses only knowledge available to everyone. An ethicist can help you think through a difficult issue by drawing your attention to arguments you had not considered. But there’s no specialized knowledge an ethicist has that you lack. You can judge his arguments independently.

Follow reason. Treasure your mind. Use your mind to gain knowledge about the world, other people, and yourself. That is the path to success—and to joy.

It’s obvious, for example, that lying on a job application could help you get the job. It’s not obvious that you’ve injected into your life a quiet but pervasive sense of anxiety, as every sideways look or hushed conversation makes you worry you’ve been found out. It’s not obvious that your willingness to lie on the job application makes other lies easier, and that you may be setting yourself on a course that will wreck your marriage, career, or reputation a decade later.

One of the most compelling examples of what happens when someone tries to live by the seat of their pants, without moral guidance, comes in Don Winslow’s novel The Force, which tells the story of a dirty cop. The protagonist Denny Malone didn’t start out corrupt. He started out idealistic, wanting to do good. “How did you get here?” he asks himself at the end of the novel, as his lies have spiraled and his life has fallen apart. Then he answers. “A step at a time,” starting with accepting small, seemingly harmless favors and bribes.

Thought it was a joke when they warned you at the Academy about the slippery slope. A cup of coffee, a sandwich, it leads to other things. No, you thought, a cup of coffee was a cup of coffee and a sandwich was a sandwich.

But that first step down the slope of bribery and corruption? It makes it easier for Malone to take—and rationalize—the next step.

Plainclothes is where it really started.

You and Russo walked into a stash house, the skels took off and there it is—money on the fucking floor. Not a lot, a couple grand, but still, you had a mortgage, diapers, maybe you wanted to take your wife out someplace that had tablecloths.

Russo and you looked at each other and scooped it up.

Never said anything about it.

But a line was crossed.

You didn’t know there were other lines.

But there were other lines. First, targets of opportunity. You don’t seek it, you just take it if it’s there and rationalize it away, “Because what harm did it do?” But those rationalizations help you take the next step and the next.

You knew you’d make the transition from scavenger to hunter.

You became a predator.

An out-and-out criminal.

Told yourself it was different because you were robbing drug dealers instead of banks.

Told yourself you’d never kill anyone to make a rip.

The last lie, the last line.

Malone thought he was taking actions that were good for his life, but ended up destroying his life, step by imperceptible step. He could see the obvious consequences of his choices—a little money that no one would miss, then a lot of money no one would miss—but he couldn’t see the full range of consequences of those choices, the impact those choices would have on his life long range and full context. But that’s precisely what he needed to see.

If we want to live, we need to conceive of a self-sustaining way of life. We need to be able to determine which kinds of goals and actions move us forward—and which weigh us down. Which will enhance our life—and which will harm it.

I want a Coke. Okay, simple enough. I go to the fridge and grab a Coke. But I want far more than a Coke. I want a successful career. I want a fulfilling, enduring romantic relationship. I want passion and adventure and joy. I want self-esteem. How the hell do I get that? How can I figure out how the actions I take today will impact me today, next week, next month, or decades in the future? How can I figure out how a given choice will redound across every element of my life—across all my values, my relationships, my character, my mind?

Well, notice that it’s at root a knowledge problem. I’m trying to grasp a causal relationship between my actions and their impact on my life. In the physical sciences, you start out with simple observations—balls roll, objects fall—and work over time to grasp fundamental principles that explain motion in general. Virtues are the causal principles of human flourishing. “‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep,” writes Rand, “‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it.”

There is a crucial difference between moral virtues and the principles of physics. Moral principles can only govern your chosen actions, and your choices aren’t the only factor involved in the achievement of your values. Virtues don’t guarantee you’ll achieve your values, the way Newton’s laws guarantee a dropped brick will fall. Virtues, instead, are the necessary conditions for the achievement of values: they guarantee you’ll achieve your values over time and barring accident—and they guarantee that you cannot achieve your values any other way.

How do you discover what virtues do make up the human way of life? By taking stock of crucial facts about human nature in light of the choice to embrace life as your ultimate value. If you want to live, you must take the actions human life requires.

In essence, there is only one fact that underlies all of human virtue—the key fact about human life: reason is your basic means of survival. If you want to live, then you must live by reason.

Rationality is your key to flourishing

“The virtue of Rationality,” in Rand’s definition, “means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.” Happiness comes from being a thinker—from following reason all the time, on every issue, in thought and action, no matter what. Everything else there is to say about virtue is only an elaboration of this basic principle.

Rationality entails choosing to think and never evading

In the last lesson we saw that to value reason is to value your survival faculty. But what does that mean? If your rational faculty is a vital organ that has to be cultivated and maintained, how do you cultivate and maintain it?

First and foremost, you have to use it. You have to put reason in charge by exercising your basic power of choice and focus. The virtue of rationality urges you to focus, not on occasion, not when it suits your emotions, but as a way of life.

When you focus you bring a higher level of awareness to every aspect of life. You understand your environment—the world around you and the people that inhabit it. You can see more clearly what’s possible to you, what’s impossible, and what among the possible is worth striving for.

When you focus, you can make informed decisions about what you want and devise intelligent strategies for getting it. When you encounter obstacles or changing conditions you haven’t anticipated, you can adapt and find new and better ways to reach your goals.

When you focus, you can also understand your inner world. Rather than be deluded about what you know and what you don’t, or what you desire and what you don’t, or what you’re capable of and what you aren’t, you are in touch with the reality of your self and your soul. You are in a position to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, since your motivations are no longer vague and mysterious. You’re in a position to be moved by values rather than by fears because you’re not passively and blindly reacting to whatever urges bubble up from your subconscious.

The opposite policy is evasion—deliberately turning away from reality, lowering your level of awareness, struggling not to see what you see and know what you know. When you evade, you say, in effect, I’m unwilling to live in reality, which means: I’m unable to live in reality and I’m unworthy of living in reality. But there’s no other place to live. Evasion means choosing to make death, rather than life, your goal.

If you do choose to think, the goal and the result is an ever-expanding sum of knowledge. To be rational is to revel in the pursuit of knowledge—not as an end in itself, but in the conviction that understanding reality gives you power in reality. The more you understand, the more you can achieve. Rationality encourages you to be curious, to seek out connections, to constantly integrate your knowledge so that your control over your life continually deepens and makes possible continually expanding ambitions.

In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch makes this point startlingly vivid when he notes that anything not barred by the laws of nature is achievable—“given the right knowledge.” With the right knowledge, Deutsch argues, human beings could in principle make even the farthest reaches of intergalactic space habitable.

No human today knows how. For instance, one would first have to transmute some of the hydrogen into other elements. Collecting it from such a diffuse source would be far beyond us at the present. And, although some types of transmutation are already routine in the nuclear industry, we do not know how to transmute hydrogen into other elements on an industrial scale. Even a simple nuclear-fusion reactor is currently beyond our technology. But physicists are confident that it is not forbidden by any laws of physics, in which case, as always, it can only be a matter of knowing how.

Coming back down to earth, the only thing that keeps you from achieving any goal you want to reach—health, prosperity, love, joy—is lack of knowledge. And the only thing required to remedy that lack is thinking.

“[T]he process of thinking,” observes Rand, “is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections.” Rationality encourages you to be a disciple of causality. Not just to relentlessly seek out cause and effect relationships, but to build your life around them.

Being a disciple of causality means never seeking effects without causes: if you want something, you accept full responsibility for doing what’s required to achieve it. If you want to be a writer, then you study the principles of writing and sit down every day at your desk. If you want to make a fortune, then you study the principles of business and create something of value. If you want to have a great sex life, then you make yourself worthy of love, find a partner you admire, and make love with wild abandon.

Being a disciple of causality also means never enacting a cause without assuming responsibility for all of its effects. You don’t have kids and abandon them, or get married and ignore your partner’s needs, or take on a project at work then pass the buck when it fails. You expect the rewards for your achievements, and so you willingly pay the costs—and willingly accept the penalties for your failures. You do not try to “get away” with anything.

Being a disciple of causality means, finally, never attempting to reverse cause and effect: to treat an effect as proof you possess the cause. You do not treat money, gained through fraud, as proof of your ability. You do not treat sex, gained by negging a drunk girl into bed, as proof of your attractiveness and personal value. You do not treat admiration, gained through a phony image you project to the world, as proof of your virtue.

Every form of irrationality involves evading the fact that reality is what it is and pretending your whims and delusions control what is. Rationality is the opposite: it is the policy of never placing an “I wish” above an “It is.”

Rationality means harmonizing reason and emotion

Conventional wisdom equates rationality with non-emotion. To be rational is to be like Spock, operating as if emotions didn’t exist. But that is neither possible nor desirable. Emotions are the voice of your values. You cannot pursue what you want unless you know what you want. To be rational isn’t to ignore your emotions—it’s to understand and assess them.

An emotionalist’s error is not that he experiences emotions or pays attention to them. It’s that he treats his emotions as a substitute for reason and acts on them blindly. Often when you ask children why they did something dumb and impulsive their answer is, “I don’t know.” And that’s an honest answer. But adults can act with that same lack of self-awareness (often accompanied by rationalizations to pretend they aren’t acting blindly). They jump back into an unhealthy relationship because they feel that this time it will be different. They spend more than they can afford on the latest iPhone because they feel that they have to have it. They go to church because they feel that going to church is what good people do. But an emotion, as we’ve seen, is an evaluation; that evaluation may be true or it may be false. Rationality consists of never acting on an emotion or desire whose source you do not understand and have not validated.

Consider the realm of romance. To pursue romance rationally doesn’t mean conjuring up some list of sensible traits a lover should have and checking off boxes. The more common pattern is that you meet someone who attracts you, who fascinates you, who takes your breath away—often for reasons that aren’t easy to pin down. To be rational is not to ignore that evidence or to follow it blindly. To be rational is to ask yourself: Why do I feel what I feel? If the answer is, “This person is so lousy that I feel superior by comparison” then that’s a big problem! But if the answer is, “I’m falling in love because they are confident, and witty, and radiantly serene” then your mind and your heart are in harmony, and you can move forward in the relationship without reservation.

Emotions are not your enemy. But they are not a substitute for reason. They are, instead, a vital source of information about what you care about—and the form in which you experience the reality of your values. If you harmonize reason and emotion, then you’ll be free of the inner conflicts that pervade most people’s lives, and instead be able to give yourself fully to your values. It is this form of deep commitment that allows you to experience the most profound emotions human beings are capable of: joy, worship, exaltation.

Rationality entails honesty

People don’t usually engage in pure evasion. They deploy strategies to assist with evasion. One of the most common is dishonesty. If evasion means denying facts, then dishonesty means creating a fantasy world of facts as a substitute. You find sexually tinged texts on your lover’s phone. Your lover doesn’t deny the texts exist—but he pretends a friend sent them as a joke.

Dishonesty is the handmaiden of irrationality. Without dishonesty, many other irrationalities could not be indulged in, at least not for long. Imagine trying to be an honest murderer, or an honest thief, or an honest philanderer, or even an honest heroin addict. The destructive effects of your course of action would be too immediately obvious. Dishonesty gives you the illusion you can escape cause and effect. As Sam Harris observes:

Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others—How did you get that bruise?—would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others’ noticing.

The problem with dishonesty is that you can’t escape cause and effect. Your phony reality doesn’t wipe out actual reality. On the contrary, when you lie to escape some unpleasant fact, you only add a new set of facts that threaten you, namely, the fact of your lie. Reality is interconnected—every fact is related ultimately to every other fact—and so lies create ripple effects: one lie necessitates more lies, putting you in conflict with more and more facts, and making you more and more vulnerable to discovery.

It’s interesting, in this regard, to observe how police interrogations work. Unlike the movies, the police don’t start out shining a light in your face and calling you a scumbag until you confess. Instead, they simply ask to hear your side of the story. They want you to commit to a set of facts—as many facts and as specific a set of facts as possible. They’ll ask you to repeat your story again and again, forwards and backwards. They know that a liar will inevitably contradict himself or contradict some fact of reality. He’ll forget what he said the first time around, or he’ll say something the police can prove is untrue. It’s at this point the interrogation becomes adversarial, as the cops lean on the contradiction, force the suspect to confess or change his story. Telling the truth is easy—inventing a fantasy world and keeping people from seeing how it clashes with reality is extremely difficult. Ultimately, it’s impossible.

Honest people sometimes think that the liar must be filled with guilt, unable to sleep at night. This isn’t true. When people lie as a way of life, they don’t feel guilty for lying. They can even come to enjoy it. The act of manipulation gives them a feeling of power over others. But this actually makes the liar more vulnerable. The liar comes to believe he is smarter than others, more clever, more cunning. This self-delusion leads him to become more brazen in his lies, and his ability to assess the likelihood of getting caught in a lie becomes warped and distorted. Typically, the serial liar gets caught doing something completely reckless.

If it stood in the liar’s mind as: “facts are facts, they’re out there to detect, and I’m not the smartest person in the world so I can’t fully predict how people will detect me,” his chances of avoiding detection would be much greater. But, then, if that’s how the issue stood in his mind, it would be hard for him to bring himself to lie at all. The liar’s pretense at superiority, his feeling that he is a master manipulator, would be replaced with the recognition that his dishonesty made him the puppet. As Rand puts it:

[A]n attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee. . . . [The liar becomes] a dependent on the stupidity of others . . . a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling.

To be rational is to be fully committed to honesty. If rationality entails devotion to the truth and the whole truth, honesty entails devotion to nothing but the truth. Honesty means the refusal to engage in any form of pretense: in the quest for values, you don’t fake reality to yourself or to others. Why not? For the very selfish reason that the unreal is unreal and can have no value. If happiness requires a constellation of values that are achievable and harmonious, seeking the unreal means rejecting happiness as your goal.

It’s not simply that lies make you vulnerable to getting caught—it’s that dishonesty means subverting your mind. But everything that makes life possible and worth living comes from your mind. To pursue happiness means to come up with a vision of life—of the values you seek and the actions that will help you realize them. A million dollars at the price of a lie is worthless because the actual price is throwing out your vision of life. You can live the life of a liar or the life of a thinker—you cannot live both. You can live in harmony with the facts or you can go to war with them—you can’t do both. You can make the minds of the people you deal with your ally or your enemy—you can’t do both.

Jordan Peterson has noted that to lie is to use “words to manipulate the world into delivering you what you want.” Honesty is the recognition that anything worth wanting can’t come from manipulating. Love gained through manipulation isn’t real love. Admiration gained through manipulation isn’t real admiration. Money gained through manipulation may spend just as well as honestly earned cash—but it came at the price of your soul and becomes nothing more than an insignia of your loss. Who would want to be Michael Corleone, sitting alone in his mansion and hating his life?

What, then, about so-called white lies? It’s easy to see that being a manipulator and a con man puts you at war with reality and starves your life of values. But what about the small lies people tell to avoid conflict, grease the wheels of social interaction, protect their friends and family from hurt feelings?

Honesty doesn’t require telling everyone you meet every thought you have. Indeed, honesty is compatible with outright lying in certain cases. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued you owe the truth to a killer seeking the location of his victim. But honesty’s advice is not to always tell the truth no matter the circumstances: it’s to never attempt to gain a value by faking reality. When I refuse to tell the Nazis that Anne Frank is hiding in my attic, I am not the one at war with reality. I am engaging in self-defense, and if I have the moral right to use my fists to protect myself and others, then obviously I have the moral right to use words.

“White lies” can seem like lies of self-defense. But in reality, they are lies aimed at gaining values through pretense. And their consequence is to destroy the values you claim to be seeking. You claim you’re lying to protect your friend—in reality, you’re harming your friend and your friendship. You’re robbing them of feedback they need to improve their lives on the insulting assumption that you know what’s best for them and they aren’t capable of dealing with reality. Take the standard “do I look fat in this dress?” example. Sam Harris replies compellingly:

Your friend looks fat in that dress, or any dress, because she is fat. Let’s say she is also thirty-five years old and single, and you know that her greatest desire is to get married and start a family. You also believe that many men would be disinclined to date her at her current weight. And, marriage aside, you are confident that she would be happier and healthier, and would feel better about herself, if she got in shape. A white lie is simply a denial of these realities. It is a refusal to offer honest guidance in a storm. Even on so touchy a subject, lying seems a clear failure of friendship.

Rationality demands you place our allegiance with reality. And that requires an allegiance to honesty.

Rationality requires rational action

Thinking is not an end in itself—it’s for the sake of action. Rationality entails taking the mental actions necessary to achieve knowledge and using that knowledge to guide your existential actions. It means having integrity.

Socrates thought that to know the good was to do the good. But Aristotle recognized that isn’t always the case:

[W]e speak of knowing in two ways; we ascribe it both to someone who has it without using it and someone who is using it. Hence it will matter whether someone has the knowledge that his action is wrong, without attending to his knowledge, or he both has it and attends to it. For this second case seems extraordinary, but wrong action when he does not attend to his knowledge does not seem extraordinary.

The virtue of integrity tells you to attend to your knowledge when you act: to form principles, apply them to specific instances, and to implement that knowledge in reality. Its root meaning is “intact.” Integrity means you are whole, undivided—a union of mind and body. To have integrity is to never allow any breach between thought and action. No matter what you feel, no matter what other people say, you face every choice by asking, “What do I know that’s relevant?” And then you act according to your best understanding.

We often think of the man of integrity as putting his principles above his interests. But that’s wrong. If your principles are based on reality, if they reflect a clear-headed understanding of what’s genuinely in your long-term interests, integrity is the only way to achieve your interests. Remember why we need morality: the values that life and happiness require are not obvious. They consist, not only of food, clothing, and shelter, but of reason, purpose, self-esteem, and much else besides. They stretch across every aspect of life and across the whole of your lifespan. Without principles, you don’t know what your interests actually are.

There’s a pivotal scene in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead that drives this point home. The hero, Howard Roark, is an innovative architect, but precisely because his approach is so revolutionary, he finds it difficult to find clients. He has one last chance to secure a commission before he will have to close his office, but the potential client will not hire Roark unless Roark agrees to make changes to his design that Roark thinks will ruin the building.

[Roark] spoke for a long time. He explained why this structure could not have a Classic motive on its facade. He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why—if one smallest part committed treason to that idea—the thing of the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.

The client is unmoved and insists that Roark accept the commission with their changes or reject it.

“Yes or no, Mr. Roark?”

Roark’s head leaned back. He closed his eyes.

“No,” said Roark. . . .

“I want you. We want your building. You need the commission. Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it?” . . .

Roark smiles. He looks down at his drawings and says: “That was the most selfish thing you’ve ever seen a man do.”

Conventional wisdom says that it’s self-evidently to Roark’s interest to accept a commission, particularly when he’s in financial dire straits. What Roark recognizes is that his interests are bound up in a certain kind of life: the life of an architect. “The only thing that matters,” he says, “my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way.” Not only will Roark gain no joy from designing this particular building, but sacrificing his artistic integrity will make it harder for him to achieve the kind of career he wants. He will never find his kind of clients—the kind who want a Roark building—if he starts putting up buildings that compromise his vision. That’s what makes his action selfish: he kept alive his knowledge of what was truly valuable to him.

Integrity, then, is the virtue that prevents rationality from being nothing more than mental masturbation. It stresses the need to form reality-based principles and to implement them in practice. It is your reminder that there can be no breach between the moral and the practical.

If you want to live, if you want to achieve happiness, if you want to take control of your life and enjoy the values that constitute a human life—then rationality, in all its aspects, is the virtue you have to cultivate.

But to fully cultivate rationality, we need to go deeper because “reason” is one of the most disputed concepts in philosophy. Plato said he was for reason. Aristotle said he was for reason. Aquinas said he was for reason. Descartes, Locke, and Kant said they were for reason. Yet all of these thinkers had wildly different conceptions of what reason is and how it works.

To complete the case for rationality, we need to ask: What is reason and how can we use it to reach reliable knowledge?

What morality can and should offer us is an ideal—the highest vision of what is possible to us as human beings. An inspiring vision that renders life not a meaningless series of disconnected days, but a meaningful, adventurous, exalted sum.

Not morality without happiness or happiness without morality but a morality of happiness.

In my view, the most robust morality of happiness was developed by Ayn Rand. In the popular culture, Rand’s moral views have been reduced to “be selfish,” which in turn gets translated into: “Screw other people, get rich, and brag about your Lambo.” But Rand’s conception of what a person’s interests consist of is radically different from, and far richer than, the straw man her critics love to dismiss, attack, and mock.

Her conception is, at root, about selfishness of soul—about cultivating a reverence for your own life through a commitment to demanding virtues and deep, meaningful, material and spiritual values. “My philosophy, in essence,” she wrote, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

The symbols of Rand’s theory are not Gordon Gekko and Donald Trump but the intransigence of a Frederick Douglass and the curiosity of a Richard Feynman and the passion of a Steve Jobs and the courage of a Jackie Robinson and the adventurousness of an Ernest Shackleton and the independence of an Alexander Hamilton and the creative intelligence of a Maria Montessori and the ambition of a Jeff Bezos. It is, for those who have read Rand’s novels, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, Francisco d’Anconia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt.

Embrace Man’s Life as Your Standard of Value

Happiness sets the purpose of ethics: it is your ultimate value or ultimate goal. But a goal is not yet a guide. To translate that goal into actionable advice you need a standard of value to help gauge what will lead to happiness and what won’t.

Any time you’re pursuing a goal, you’re relying on some more or less well-defined standard of value. For example, when Domino’s Pizza launched, its motto was: “Fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed.” Every business decision was made in light of the question: Will this slow down or speed up the delivery of our pizza? The pizza’s taste and cost were secondary considerations. Speed of delivery was its standard of value.

Coming up with a standard of value for morality is challenging because it has to be general enough to encompass all the fundamental components of a happy life, but it can’t be so general that it’s devoid of content. “Do what makes you happy” isn’t a standard—it’s a bumper sticker.

Happiness, moreover, is an emotional state. As we’ve seen, emotions depend on our values. To say, “Do what makes you happy” amounts to saying, “You should value whatever you happen to value.” That’s not guidance—it’s a declaration that you don’t need guidance.

So what’s the solution? It’s to realize that happiness is intimately connected to successful living. Pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, are signals calling attention to the life-and-death stakes of our actions. We feel good when life is going well—when our needs are met or when we’re on the way to meeting them. “He’s so alive” we say of the happy person. By contrast, pain and suffering warn us that our life is going in the wrong direction, that we’re failing to meet crucial needs, that we’re heading toward death. “My life’s a mess,” we tell our therapist. Human beings are biological organisms and happiness is a biological signal. It is what the experience of pursuing and achieving life-sustaining values consists of. As Rand explains:

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it.

To seek your own happiness as your ultimate value is to treat your own life as your ultimate value. This means much more than that you don’t want to die. It means that you seek the best possible state for your life: materially, mentally, emotionally. Just as a healthy marriage isn’t one that barely avoids divorce court, a healthy life isn’t one that barely avoids the morgue. It’s a life where you’re satisfying your most important needs and strengthening your capacities to meet tomorrow’s challenges. To treat your life as your ultimate value means being committed to growth and achievement in every aspect of your life and throughout your time on earth.

In grasping the connection between happiness and successful living, we now have an objective way to assess potential values: Does this further or undermine my life? And this, in turn, points us toward an objective standard of value for morality. We simply have to ask: Is there some basic thing human beings need to do in order to live? We already know the answer to that. As we discussed in Lesson 2, our basic means of survival is reason.

If you want to live, then you must live by reason.

Rand calls the moral standard reflecting this fact “man’s life,” or “that which is required for man’s survival qua man.” It means “the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice.” She elaborates:

The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.

The difference between “standard” and “purpose” in this context is as follows: a “standard” is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose. “That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose—the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being—belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own.

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.

If man’s life is our moral standard, then what is the nature of the good? The good is anything and everything that is proper to the life of a being who survives by reason. What is the evil? Anything that opposes or harms the life of a rational being.

This standard will help us identify the human way of life, and so enable us to select a particular way of life that will add up to our own, unique, individual happiness.

The Supreme and Ruling Values: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem

If man’s life names “the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan,” then what are those terms, methods, conditions, and goals?

Altruists like David Brooks often define “self-interest” as the pursuit of money, status, and power. Their understanding of the values life requires is on par with primitive doctors who thought health came from balancing bile, blood, and phlegm.

Rand names three cardinal values “which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life”: not money, power, and status, but reason, purpose, and self-esteem.

Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.

Like all values, reason, purpose, and self-esteem are both means and ends. As ends, they are the realization of a human life—to live is to nurture reason, to act with purpose, to have self-confidence and self-worth. As means, they make possible everything else that you value, from your career to your relationships to your ability to put food on the table. If the goal of morality is to give you an ideal at which to aim, then a life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem is that ideal.

Reason

To value reason is to value your survival faculty. We often hear how important it is to value your health and to treat your body like a temple. To value reason is to treat your mind like a temple. It’s to recognize that everything you want and everything you care about comes from your ability to think, and so to devote yourself to the cultivation and maintenance of your mind.

Philosopher Onkar Ghate has analogized valuing reason to the attitude of a frontiersman or a soldier toward his gun. He knows that without his gun, he’s finished—and so he treats his gun with an almost sacred respect. Recall the mantra recited by the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket: “This is my rifle. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.” That is the attitude a valuer has toward his rational faculty. Your mind is your best friend. It is your life. You must master it as you master your life.

In the next lesson, we’ll look in detail at how one gains and keeps the value of reason. Here we can simply say that to value reason requires not taking it for granted. Your capacity to think is given to you—but the development and maintenance of that capacity is a matter of choice. If you choose to live, then you have to work to understand what reason is, what its proper functioning requires, and then to devote yourself to the use and development of that faculty. To love your life requires loving your mind.

Purpose

To value purpose is to value the exercise of your free will. Whereas animals are programmed to pursue life-sustaining values automatically, human beings are not. Setting aside automatic biological functions like respiration and circulation, your actions are volitional and your default state is one of passivity. Valuing purpose means a commitment to act to gain and keep a state of full focused awareness across your lifespan. It means exercising the effort to conceive of the values that will sustain you across a lifetime and working to realize those values across a lifetime. As philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

The principle of purpose means conscious goal-directedness in every aspect of one’s existence where choice applies. The man of purpose defines explicitly his abstract values and then, in every area, the specific objects he seeks to gain and the means by which to gain them. Whether in regard to work or friends, love or art, entertainment or vacations, he knows what he likes and why, then goes after it. Using Aristotelian terminology, Ayn Rand often says that this kind of man acts not by efficient causation (mere reaction to stimuli), but by final causation (“fines” is Latin for “end”). He is the person with a passionate ambition for values who wants every moment and step of his life to count in their service. Such a person does not resent the effort which purpose imposes. He enjoys the fact that the objects he desires are not given to him, but must be achieved. In his eyes, purpose is not drudgery or duty, but something good. The process of pursuing values is itself a value.

Valuing purpose starts with rejecting passivity. It means embracing the goal-directed activity life requires. That doesn’t entail ceaseless frantic activity. Rest is a vital component of an active life. It is purposeful, when used as rejuvenation. It is only when rest becomes an escape from value pursuit that it represents a default on purpose.

Purpose isn’t about stress or struggle (though it can sometimes entail these for short bursts). It’s about knowing what you want and taking responsibility for getting it. Take something as simple as being invited to a party. To act without purpose is to act on impulse. You say yes without thinking about competing obligations or what you want to get out of the party. You show up, wander around in a daze, carelessly stuffing your mouth with food or a few too many drinks.

Someone who values purpose, by contrast, doesn’t have to be a stiff who stays home or shows up with a party “to do” list. But before she says yes, she asks herself: What do I want to get out of this party? Will it give me a chance to unwind after a hard week at work? Will it give me the chance to have stimulating conversations with interesting people? If there is a potential value at stake, she’ll ask herself: Is this the best use I can make of my time?

When she arrives, she knows what she wants and goes after it. If she’s wants to meet new people, she won’t cling to the friends she knows, but will approach strangers. She might relax with a glass or two of wine, but she won’t get sloshed. Nor will she compulsively check her phone for work emails. She’s all-in on what she came for. She can be fully present because she knows why she’s there and has no divided loyalties.

Self-Esteem

To value self-esteem is to value yourself. Your need for self-esteem is rooted in the fact that you have free will. Because you shape your character and your life—and because on some level you know it—you can’t help but pass a verdict on whether you’re fit to live in this world—on whether you’re able to live and are worthy of happiness. That is self-esteem. To value self-esteem is to aim at a state of confidence and cleanness. Confidence is crucial motivation to pursue values; cleanness is what allows you to enjoy the values you do achieve.

To value self-esteem is to work to achieve self-confidence—not the localized self-confidence of being able to achieve some specific value, but a generalized self-confidence that comes from being able to deal with reality as such. Such generalized self-confidence can only come one source: confidence in your tool for dealing with reality, i.e., your mind. You build confidence by developing and exercising your basic tool of survival in the quest for values. You nourish self-esteem by nurturing the values of reason and purpose.

If you characteristically choose to think, you gain a sense of efficacy and control over your life. You learn that if you set your mind to the task of getting what you want, you can get what you want. Normally, this leads naturally to the sense that you are worthy of getting what you want. A farmer who plants and tends his crops doesn’t wonder, “Yeah, but do I deserve them?” He put in the work, he made the crops possible, they are his.

But this attitude toward life isn’t inevitable. You can accept wrong standards of self-worth. You can measure your worth, not by the extent to which you choose to think and take responsibility for getting what you want, but by things outside of your control. I’m worthy if I make the team; I’m worthy if people think I’m attractive; I’m worthy if I never make mistakes; I’m worthy if I never show vulnerability; I’m worthy if I’m richer than my neighbors; I’m worthy if I outperform my colleagues. Most damaging of all, you could embrace standards of worth that are at odds with personal happiness: I’m worthy if I set aside what I think and I want and do what God says; I’m worthy if I treat other people’s lives as more important than mine; I’m worthy if I’m selfless.

This is one reason why having an explicit, rational code of morality is so important. A rational code of morality puts the good on the side of your personal happiness, and it demands of you only what is possible to you. As we’ll see in detail in the next lesson, what morality demands is ultimately one thing and one thing only: rationality. Your choice to think does not simply make you able to live—it is that choice that makes you worthy of happiness.

Personal Values

Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the supreme and ruling moral values life requires—but they are far from the only values life requires.

Moral values are fundamental, universal values that apply to every human being and pervade a person’s life. They are what shape your life and how you approach all of your other values. But many of your values will be concrete, specific, particular. Consider three of the most important personal values.

Career. Morality tells you that you need a career—a central productive purpose to organize your life around. But it doesn’t tell you which career to choose. That choice is up to you, given the unique context of your interests, abilities, and life situation.

Romantic love. Morality tells you that romantic love is a vital component of happiness and it tells you about some of the broad conditions of romantic love (for example, that it be based on mutual admiration, not codependency). But it doesn’t tell you which partner to choose. It doesn’t tell you whether they will be a man or a woman. It doesn’t tell you what body shapes are desirable or which sex acts are fulfilling. These are personal matters.

Art. Morality tells you that you need art to keep your spirit alive—but it doesn’t dictate what art should fill your life. Music or literature (or both)? Tool or Tchaikovsky (or both)? J. K. Rowling or Ayn Rand (or both)? These are personal choices that will flow from your deepest core beliefs.

As we’ll see in later lessons, morality is not silent on how you choose and pursue your personal values. It demands certain virtues—above all, rationality—that will shape how you make every choice. The point here is (1) you can’t deduce your personal values from morality, and (2) the fact that a value is personal does not mean that it is unimportant. Your life is your values, including your personal values. And your highest personal values can be so crucial to your happiness that you’re willing to die to protect them. I have two children, and I would not hesitate to throw myself in front of a car to save their lives. Not because I value them more than my life—but because my life is in crucial part the life of Livi and Landon’s father. My interests are bound up in theirs, and watching them perish if I were in a position to save them would empty my life of much of what makes it worth living.

What emerges from a morality that upholds man’s life as the standard of value is not a list of ethical rules but an integrated way of life: a harmonious constellation of values and virtues based in reason that work together to sustain you.

Existentially, this way of life keeps you in existence—psychologically, it leads to happiness, which is the result, reward, and fuel for living by a rational code of ethics. “Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”

In defining a code of values to guide your actions toward life and happiness, Rand’s ethics unapologetically urges you to pursue your self-interest. This is not an “anything goes” approach to self-interest. It is not a predatory form of self-interest. It is not a misanthropic form of self-interest. It is, instead, a principled conception of egoism, which holds that your life matters and you have the right to make the most of it. You don’t exist to serve others, just as they don’t exist to serve you.

We now have our agenda for the rest of the book. In Lesson 4, we’ll look more carefully at the value of reason, and some of the virtues that living by reason requires. In Lesson 5, we’ll look at the value of purpose, and see how to choose and achieve a central productive purpose that fills your life with meaning. In Lesson 6, we’ll look at the value of self-esteem, and why it requires proudly embracing and practicing an ethic of Effective Egoism. Finally, in Lesson 7, we’ll see how an Effective Egoist can extract every ounce of joy possible from life.

Happiness is your highest spiritual state—and your most demanding. It’s not a string of transitory pleasures that comes from satisfying short-range desires. It takes precious little experience and reflection to see that a life made up of nothing but vacations, massages, and Netflix binging is not a life worth living. Pizza is delicious, but it won’t cure misery.

This has led some to declare that satisfying your desires is irrelevant to happiness. Under the influence of Eastern philosophy and Stoicism, much of today’s conversation about happiness equates it with absence of desire. On this view, desire leads to frustration, and happiness is really about avoiding frustration and other negatives. Stop wanting anything and you’ll have everything you want. As Ryan Holiday, a champion of Stoicism, puts it:

The key to happiness, to success, to power—any of these things—is not to want them really bad. It’s not putting what you’re after on a pedestal. The key to happiness and success is realizing at a granular level that the things most people desire actually suck.

That being rich isn’t that great. That getting lots of attention is a chore. That being in love is also a lot of work. That the prettiest view in the world still has mosquitos or a biting chill or it’s hot as hell.

There’s another word for people who think that life has little to offer: depressed. The view that life is suffering and desire is suffering and happiness is to be found in becoming someone who cares for nothing can’t lead to happiness. It means giving up on happiness.

Achieving desires, if they are rational, is vital to happiness. They aren’t empty, they don’t suck, they are that great. Your goal should be to value deeply, passionately, and rationally—not squelch your desires. Your aim should be to care so much for your values that you will live for them and, if necessary, die for them—not to turn yourself into an empty vessel who experiences meeting the love of your life and watching the love of your life murdered with the same equanimity.

Happiness is not “not giving a shit.” It’s an enduring form of joy that comes from achieving your values and being on the road to achieving even greater values. Externally, it means being engaged with life, tackling meaningful goals, and realizing them over time. Internally, it means being proud, confident, and serene. You feel good about who you are, sure of what you can do, worthy of what you achieve. Happiness is love of being alive.

You can see that state, or the precursor to it, in children, who typically face life with a sense of eagerness, wonder, playfulness, and delight. Their attitude amounts to: the world is here for my fun and enjoyment. At the adult level, I like to think of the attitude projected by famed scientist Richard Feynman, who conveyed a childlike zest for life, that same passionate playfulness, but encompassing a much wider and deeper sense of the fun and enjoyment that life offers. And I also think of people I know who are quiet and serious. Their happiness doesn’t leap out at you, but you can sense it if you pay attention—it’s a calm but unmistakable radiance that comes across as an ease in living, an unself-conscious pride, an air of dignity earned through virtue. Happiness comes in varieties, and it whispers as much as it yells, but its indelible mark is peace and passion.

A common mistake is to view happiness as a sense of finality, where the work of living is done. Social scientist Arthur Brooks commits this error when he equates happiness with satisfaction and observes that no matter what you achieve, you’re never truly satisfied. He recounts a conversation with his teenage daughter:

As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. . . . Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes.

There is no great paradox here. The reason no single value can satisfy you for eternity is because the work of living is never done. Happiness is a perspective on the ongoing life process. It’s not about achieving one goal and then living happily ever after; it’s about being the kind of person who continually sets goals, achieves them, and sets still further goals. You can and must satisfy your desires—but you will never satisfy desire. What would be the point of living if you could?

This, then, is what it means to commit yourself to happiness: to draw a line in the sand and say, “I’m going to do everything in my power to make the external and internal conditions of my life as good as possible. I’m going to settle for nothing less than the best life I can create.”

Not everyone does that. Not everyone makes the commitment to be happy. Everyone may wish to be richer than they are or feel better about themselves than they do. But all too often people tolerate failure, frustration, and fear. Forget about what they wish and judge them by their actions: their lives don’t matter to them.

Happiness is a goal you have to embrace by choice.

To pursue happiness, you must conceive and achieve a life you want to live. You have to formulate a vision of the particular values that will constitute your life—and then take responsibility for everything that’s required to achieve those values. To quote a Spanish proverb Ayn Rand was fond of: “God said: Take what you want and pay for it.”

Happiness is about getting what you want. But reality and human nature impose limits on the kind of wants that can be achieved. You cannot achieve the impossible: success without effort, self-esteem without virtue, love without self-esteem. Attaining happiness requires choosing a life that is attainable. Nor can you achieve contradictory goals, since the fulfillment of one aim will frustrate your other aims. If you desire health and fitness, you cannot also eat and drink whatever you feel like. If you desire to save adequately for your future, you cannot also buy whatever you want whenever you want. If you desire a fulfilling romantic relationship, you cannot also jump into bed with any attractive person you meet. To achieve happiness, you need to conceive of a life where all your goals and the actions required to achieve them fit together into a harmonious whole. Only then can you realize “that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” Rand elaborates:

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

What are rational goals, rational values, and rational actions? How do you know what sorts of aims and actions can form a rewarding, achievable, non-contradictory whole worthy of your striving? The science that answers these questions is ethics, or, the study of moral principles. Morality is the subject that helps you conceive and achieve a life filled with joy.

That is the purpose of this lesson. To define a morality of happiness to guide your choices to that you can build a self and a life that you love.

Many of the goals and actions that will constitute your life will be particular to you. Morality doesn’t tell you whom to marry, where to live, or what kind of work to do. Instead, it takes a mountaintop perspective on human life and identifies the broad categories of needs, goals, and activities that constitute the human way of life. It gives you an abstract summary of what human flourishing consists of, and then leaves open to you the particular ends and means that fit your unique context.

You can think of morality as a travel guide. It doesn’t dictate your vacation. Instead, it lays out for you all the desirable places you might wish to go (and how to get there) and warns you about the dangerous places you should avoid. It’s up to you to choose from among those options based on what you want.

This isn’t how we’re taught to think of morality. We’re taught to think of morality as a set of rules and prohibitions keeping us from doing what we want and commanding us to sacrifice ourselves. It’s not that we’re taught this conception of morality is true, and other conceptions of morality are false. What’s drummed into our heads since birth is that morality means giving up what we want. This amounts to equating the subject of morality with a particular conception of morality we’ve inherited from Christianity. Morality simply is something that places limits on what we want. What we want? That has nothing to do with morality. That is mere prudence and practicality. Morality is about setting aside prudence and practicality in order to obey God’s plan or serve other people or do our duty because it is our duty.

But most people do want to live and enjoy their life here on earth. They yearn for guidance. But what the culture has offered them, tragically, is a false alternative: happiness without morality—and morality without happiness.

Happiness Without Morality

“Do what makes you happy.”

If you’re under the age of 50, you’ve probably heard that message all your life. From your parents, your teachers, your friends, the media, popular entertainment. Maybe you’ve even heard it at church. Sure, you’ll also be told to share your toys, to love your enemies, to serve a cause greater than yourself, to think of others first. But declaring that you want to be happy will not exactly send shockwaves through your community and transform you into a counter-cultural rebel. It won’t even get you canceled on social media.

Probably.

What is true is that the pursuit of happiness is not seen as a moral quest, and the advice offered to help you achieve happiness is not moral advice. Happiness is seen as a perfectly fine thing to want, but that has to do with the practical side of life. The side that involves getting a job, making money, seeking out pleasure and fun. And the people we turn to for such advice aren’t moral philosophers. More often than not, we turn to the self-help industry.

Self-help can definitely be helpful. My own shelves are filled with books by Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Brian Tracy. And if we extend “self-help” to include success advice more generally, then I sometimes wonder where I would be without Cal Newport’s productivity advice, Dan Kennedy’s marketing advice, or John Gottman’s relationship advice.

The problem is not that the success field is unhelpful. It’s that it’s hit or miss. Take today’s most successful self-help author, Tony Robbins. For every good idea about goal setting or breaking out of self-destructive patterns there are an equal or greater number of ideas that are pure junk science—from his obsession with “neuro-linguistic programming” to advice from one of his early books to eat nothing but fruit for the first half of the day because something something alkaline.

Even books that aren’t filled with bad advice are generally superficial. I mentioned goal setting, which shows up not just in Tony Robbins’s work but in probably 50 percent of the self-help literature. I’m a fan of goal setting, but these books almost never answer vital question like: What goals should I set? What is truly worth going after in life? What kind of goals are achievable and how can I select goals that fit together so that I can build a life worth living? Answering these questions is left to the reader—yet these are the hard questions. Yes, it is difficult to get what you want. But knowing what you want, and knowing that it’s worth wanting? That is life’s most daunting challenge.

Given the shortcomings of the self-help genre, more and more people are turning to psychology for guidance. Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman concluded that psychology had focused for too long on helping people escape negatives like depression, anxiety, and addiction. Didn’t it have advice for people who simply wanted to be happier?

Unlike self-help books, psychology promises a scientific approach to happiness. Psychologists use “happiness studies” to attempt to understand the sources of happiness and unhappiness. That seems sensible enough, but the results have been underwhelming.

Happiness studies try to establish a science of happiness basically through polling and statistical regressions. What traits are associated with people who report being happy—and what traits are associated with people who report being unhappy?

Some of these polls literally just ask people how happy they are. Others try to break happiness into components. Here, for example, is the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, which is typical. People are asked to rate themselves 1–6 on each of these, with 6 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree.

Oxford Happiness Questionnaire

1. I don’t feel particularly pleased with the way I am. _____

2. I am intensely interested in other people. _____

3. I feel that life is very rewarding. _____

4. I have very warm feelings towards almost everyone. _____

5. I rarely wake up feeling rested. _____

6. I am not particularly optimistic about the future. _____

7. I find most things amusing. _____

8. I am always committed and involved. _____

9. Life is good. _____

10. I do not think that the world is a good place. _____

11. I laugh a lot. _____

12. I am well satisfied about everything in my life. _____

13. I don’t think I look attractive. _____

14. There is a gap between what I would like to do and what I have done. _____

15. I am very happy. _____

16. I find beauty in some things. _____

17. I always have a cheerful effect on others. _____

18. I can fit in (find time for) everything I want to. _____

19. I feel that I am not especially in control of my life. _____

20. I feel able to take anything on. _____

21. I feel fully mentally alert. _____

22. I often experience joy and elation. _____

23. I don’t find it easy to make decisions. _____

24. I don’t have a particular sense of meaning and purpose in my life. _____

25. I feel I have a great deal of energy. _____

26. I usually have a good influence on events. _____

27. I don’t have fun with other people. _____

28. I don’t feel particularly healthy. _____

29. I don’t have particularly happy memories of the past. _____

The problem? A lot of these questions are irrelevant to happiness (“I laugh a lot,” “I can fit in (find time for) everything I want to”), some of them are arguably negatively correlated with genuine happiness (“I have very warm feelings toward almost everyone,” “I find most things amusing”), and if you take into account the way that people rationalize immorality, roleplay to themselves and to others, and poorly introspect then you would conclude that this whole approach to understanding happiness is hopeless. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire wasn’t developed to study happiness: it was, according to its authors, originally “designed for clinical application with the purpose of diagnosing manic and depressive states of mind.”

To teach us anything about happiness, psychological studies have to decide how to define and measure happiness. But how to define happiness is a philosophic question. For example, is happiness the avoidance of pain? Or is it the achievement of joy? Is happiness temporary jolts of positive emotion? Or is it an enduring state? Is it easy to know whether one is happy? Or does it take an ability for introspection and self-honesty that most people lack?

Here is one example that illustrates why trying to understand happiness while ignoring philosophy can lead psychologists to produce extremely misleading results. A research team led by Katherine Nelson-Coffey performed an experiment where they divided participants into four groups. Group 1 was asked to perform “random acts of kindness” for themselves (for example, going shopping); Group 2 was asked to perform “random acts of kindness” for other people (for example, visiting an elderly family member); Group 3 was asked to perform acts of kindness to improve the world (for example, donate to charity); Group 4, the control group, was asked simply to track their daily activities. Can you guess the results? Groups 2 and 3 rated higher on a happiness questionnaire given to them in the weeks following the experiment, while Group 1’s results were indistinguishable from the control group.

Studies like this one have led many psychologists to conclude that serving and sacrificing for others is part of the formula of happiness. What nonsense. For one thing, being kind to other people is definitely not the same thing as serving and sacrificing for them. Even charity need not be a sacrifice: part of how we pursue our interests is by helping the people and causes we care about. It’s as if you observed that people who owned guns were happier than people who didn’t and concluded that murder leads to happiness.

But there’s also a subtler problem. We live in a culture where people have been taught since birth that serving and sacrificing for others makes you a good person. Most people base their self-esteem, at least in part, on that idea. So should we be surprised that when they see themselves as acting unselfishly, this leaves them feeling good, at least for a while? That is precisely what an advocate of self-interest would predict.

The question is not whether something makes you feel good for a few days or a few weeks, but whether something is good for you in the full context of your whole life. Think of a man whose sense of self-worth is based on the idea that “I’m good because women desire me.” He may very well bask in the glow of his latest conquest for a while, but that only masks the deeper sense of inadequacy he’s trying to compensate for. Altruistic acts perform a similar role for people without a secure foundation of self-esteem, only it’s more powerful because the whole culture tells them that self-sacrifice really does make them good. It’s as if the seducer lived in a society of pick-up artists, where every notch in his bedpost won him lavish praise from his community. Would his positive affect prove that promiscuity was a pillar of happiness?

Emotions, we’ve seen, emerge from your values, and if you achieve something you value, you will experience that as an emotional positive, regardless of whether it’s genuinely good for you. This means that it is a fundamental error to try to establish what you should value by asking, “What makes you feel good?” The answer will be: whatever you happen to value. Irrational values do leave a mark: a positive feeling one day will be followed by a hangover the next; momentary relief from suffering will be followed by worse suffering in the future; the satisfaction of one desire will conflict with other desires. But those second- and third-order effects won’t be captured by a psychologist’s survey. Could happiness studies have any value? Maybe. But their value would depend on first reaching a philosophic understanding of what happiness is and the fundamental values it requires.

The clearest evidence that our conventional approach to happiness doesn’t work is that it hasn’t worked. In a world saturated by bestsellers promising happiness without morality, what we’ve seen is sky-high rates of addiction, depression, loneliness, anxiety, unhappiness.

This has led a growing number of voices to proclaim that we’ve been pursuing the wrong thing. The pursuit of happiness has failed, they argue, because concern with your own personal happiness is the wrong goal. The reason people are so unhappy is because they’re trying to be happy. Instead, they should try to be moral.

The most eloquent spokesman for this view is New York Times columnist David Brooks. A moral person, says Brooks in his bestseller The Road to Character, “wants to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and one’s own possibilities.” Instead, most of us are “career-oriented, ambitious.” We want to “build, create, produce, discover things.” And the tragedy is that our culture has encouraged this ambitious, creative self-assertiveness at the expense of a moral concern with self-sacrifice.

As I looked around the popular culture I kept finding the same messages everywhere: You are special. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Movies from Pixar and Disney are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Commencement speeches are larded with the same clichés: Follow your passion. Don’t accept limits. Chart your own course. You have a responsibility to do great things because you are so great. This is the gospel of self-trust.

The result, Brooks says, is a culture that turns people into shrewd, crafty, fame-hungry narcissists who lead shallow, lonely, empty lives.

Is he right? Is the cause of our unhappiness seeking happiness? And is a morality that preaches selflessness and self-sacrifice the cure?

Morality Without Happiness

One of the laziest, and most common, rhetorical techniques is to offer your audience a choice between false alternatives. When President Obama was promoting the Affordable Care Act, he would often say that his opponents thought the status quo in healthcare was fine, and anyone troubled by problems with the existing healthcare system should support his plan. The possibility that some of his critics recognized the very real problems in American healthcare but thought the ACA would make them worse? Inconceivable.

David Brooks and other crusaders for sacrifice play the same game. You can either lead an empty life of self-interest, which consists of accumulating money, power, and status by any means necessary—or you can recognize that there are things more valuable than money, power, and status and embrace selflessness and self-sacrifice.

To drive home this alternative, Brooks tells the story of two football players: Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath. “Unitas grew up in the old culture of self-effacement and self-defeat,” says Brooks. As a result, he was “unflamboyant and understated,” an “honest workman doing an honest job.”

Namath, by contrast, “lived in a different moral universe” that celebrated the individual, and he embodied this new ethos. Namath was brash and braggadocios, viewing himself as “bigger than the team.” The man titled his autobiography I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow ’Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day.

Without a reticent bone in his body, he’d bring reporters along as he worked his way through bottles of scotch the night before games. He openly bragged about what a great athlete he was, how good-looking he was. He cultivated a brashly honest style. “Joe! Joe! You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!” he shouted to himself in the bathroom mirror of the Copacabana one night in 1966.

Who do you admire more? Who do you want to emulate? Brooks, of course, intends the answer to be self-evident. And maybe it is. But it leaves out a third alternative: a conception of self-interest that doesn’t involve the amoral pursuit of money, power, and status. A conception of self-interest that takes morality seriously. A conception of self-interest that doesn’t counsel hiding your insecurity behind a mask of false confidence, but which teaches you how to achieve true self-confidence—the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself because it comes from the conviction not that “I’m better than others,” but that “I’m good.”

That is the concept of self-interest I’ll be presenting in the rest of this book. Before we turn to that, however, I want to make clear what it is the opponents of happiness advocate as the alternative to self-interest. Because just as they give us a distorted picture of what it means to pursue your own interests, they paint a distorted picture of what it means to altruistically sacrifice your own interests. When they speak of altruism, they call to mind a vision of people who are warm, joyful, caring, benevolent, helpful. People whose lives are rich in meaning and whose strong moral character challenges and inspires us. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the advocates of morality without happiness are selling is poison. It has nothing positive to offer you.

Even though we’re taught to equate altruism with caring about others or helping others, that’s not how the term is used in practice. Consider this: who is more celebrated for their altruism—Moderna or Mother Teresa? Thanks to its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna has saved millions of lives. And yet no one calls it altruistic. Why not? Because it profited by helping others. In fact, The Intercept named Moderna and BioNTech executives the worst Americans of 2021 because . . . their revolutionary life-saving vaccines made them billionaires. Mother Teresa, by contrast, is the symbol of altruism. Not because of how helpful she was to the world’s poor, but because of how much she sacrificed for the world’s poor.

Take a simpler example. Who would get the most moral credit? A billionaire who gave away a hundred million dollars to charity—or someone who gave his entire $50,000 life savings to charity? The person who helped the most—or the person who sacrificed the most?

And it’s not just about moral credit. What about moral blame? In late 2021, YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, created a real-life contest modeled after the show Squid Game, and the video quickly gained more than 100 million views. MrBeast, in case you don’t know, is famous for videos in which he gives away enormous amounts of cash (and for charity drives that regularly raise tens of millions of dollars). In his first viral video, for example, he gave away $10,000 to a homeless person. What was the response to his Squid Game video?

WTF? Your bio says “i wan to make the world a better place before i die” but you are wasting money and resources on building some random SQUID game??? You could give millions of dollars to everyone so no one is poor but instead you waste it on this stupid game.

The backlash was so widespread even the media covered it. “YouTube Star MrBeast Criticised for $3.5 Million Real-Life ‘Squid Game’” read one headline. The message was clear. It doesn’t matter if you give away tens of millions of dollars: if you do anything that benefits yourself, you’re selfish and immoral.

Altruism is not a synonym for “nice.” It means, as one dictionary reports, “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.” The term was coined by the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. “Thus the expression, Live for Others, is the simplest summary of the whole moral code of Positivism,” he wrote. Comte is largely forgotten today, but he was highly influential in the 19th century. Even many of his critics happily embraced his moral ideal, which was seen as a substitute for Christian ethics at a time when religion was a waning influence among the era’s thought leaders. Religionists warned that the death of God would mean the death of morality. The altruists said not to worry: instead of serving God, we can simply serve humanity. Indeed, altruists claimed to be morally superior to Christians, who selfishly demanded personal immortality as a reward for virtue. A truly virtuous person, said Comte’s follower John Bridges, believes that “Our duty is to annihilate ourselves if need be for the service of Humanity.”

Though people today are seldom that explicit about the meaning of altruism, it is Comte who they are echoing when they condemn Moderna and MrBeast. Ayn Rand summarizes the doctrine this way:

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether or not the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

What makes it hard to pin down the meaning of altruism is that few people today explicitly advocate it. Not because they don’t believe it—but because everyone believes it. It’s the same reason why you won’t find many Southerners defending racism in the early 1800s. There was no one to defend it against. One person who does publicly champion altruism today is Peter Singer, who The New Yorker has called “the most influential living philosopher” and who was named by Time as one of the “100 most influential people in the world.” His argument is precisely that everyone believes altruism to be true, but almost no one seriously tries to live up to its demands—no one except the burgeoning movement of Effective Altruists.

In his popular book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Singer describes some of the activities that characterize Effective Altruism, a movement that encourages people to “do the most good we can.”

Effective altruists do things like the following:

• Living modestly and donating a large part of their income—often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe—to the most effective charities;

• Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators;

• Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so that they can do more good;

• Talking to others, in person or online, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread;

• Giving part of their body—blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney—to a stranger.

By way of illustration, he tells the story of a promising philosophy student who abandons a career in philosophy to work on Wall Street so he would have more money to give away. He tells the story of Zell Kravinsky, who gave away most of his $45 million fortune and, convinced he had not sacrificed enough, donated a kidney to a stranger. He tells us about a young woman named Julia Wise, who struggled with the decision of whether to have children: “she felt so strongly that her choice to donate or not donate meant the difference between someone else living or dying that she decided it would be immoral for her to have children. They would take too much of her time and money.” (Singer reassuringly says altruism is compatible with having children since they too might grow up to be altruists.)

What altruism requires of us is not the occasional donation to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Indeed, Singer thinks it’s morally dubious to give money to make dying children happy when that same money could be used to stop other children from dying. But his main point is that altruism demands radical sacrifice. To take altruism seriously, you don’t need to give up everything—but you should give up virtually everything.

[I]n 1972, when I was a junior lecturer at University College, Oxford, I wrote an article called “Famine, Affluence and Morality” in which I argued that, given the great suffering that occurs during famines and similar disasters, we ought to give large proportions of our income to disaster relief funds. How much? There is no logical stopping place, I suggested, until we reach the point of marginal utility—that is, the point at which by giving more, one would cause oneself and one’s family to lose as much as the recipients of one’s aid would gain.

What could possibly justify this moral outlook? Why should you treat your career, your wealth, your children, your internal organs, your life as nothing more than a means to the ends of others? Don’t you matter? In his earlier book The Life You Can Save, Singer claims his radical conclusions follow from moral premises everyone accepts. Here’s his argument:

First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

Second premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing something nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

Conclusion?

[Y]ou must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as preventing malaria—like giving so much that you can no longer afford an adequate education for your own children.

How, asks Singer, can a nice house, outfits that make you feel attractive, romantic meals at fancy restaurants, a hard-won vacation to Telluride, or even a savings account large enough to provide enduring financial security be more important than the lives you could save by giving away that money? How can you justify living a middle-class lifestyle when your income could prevent the poorest people on earth from dying?

Singer’s conclusion makes many people uncomfortable, but they can’t spot any flaws in his reasoning. The trick is hidden in his second premise. Singer claims, “If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing something nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.” The question is: more important to whom? Isn’t my life and my happiness more important to me than the life and happiness of a stranger I’ll never meet?

Singer’s basic assumption is that I should not value my own life more than the lives of other people. But why not? Placing priority on my own life doesn’t mean I regard other people as servants or resources I can exploit. On the contrary, to assert my right to exist for my own sake is to recognize that other people have a right to exist for their own sake. On that view, I won’t sacrifice for other people for the same reason I don’t expect them to sacrifice for me.

To the extent Singer’s second premise is plausible it’s because we take it to mean: if you can help someone in an emergency situation without great cost or risk to yourself, you should. And that’s true. Other human beings are values to us. Even strangers are fellow human beings, and absent evidence to the contrary, we see them as potential allies in the quest for happiness. We want them to thrive and to succeed. We don’t want them to suffer. If I see a child drowning and I’m in a position to save him, I will. Not from some sense of duty, not because some professor will castigate me for not helping, but from my love of my own life.

When you love your life, you love human potential and seek to encourage and honor that in action. To save a drowning child when there’s no significant danger to yourself is not a sacrifice. But that doesn’t mean you follow the kid home, and assume responsibility for his food, his housing, his education. It doesn’t mean that you abandon your career and travel around the world in search of drowning children.

Singer is pulling a bait and switch. He brings to mind situations where helping is not a sacrifice and then asks us to draw a moral principle that demands total sacrifice. Here is the correct principle: be loyal to your values, never sacrificing a greater value to a lower value. This may very well mean helping someone in an emergency, but it can’t mean treating human suffering and misfortune as such as a claim on your life.

The reason to help others is precisely because emergencies are rare and exceptional. You can provide aid in emergencies without diverting yourself from pursuing your own happiness. Most people, most of the time, to the extent a country is free, have the power to support their own lives. And they should. They should not surrender their own lives to us—and we shouldn’t surrender our lives to them.

For all their focus on global poverty, Effective Altruists rarely talk about the cause of that poverty. The reason that a billion people continue to live in extreme poverty is not because we’ve given too little to charity: it’s because they don’t live in free countries. If you truly wanted to do “the most good you can,” you wouldn’t promote Effective Altruism. You would promote freedom.

All that said, the practitioners of Effective Altruism are in a sense an aberration. They try to faithfully implement altruism’s demand for sacrifice. But altruism really isn’t intended to be practiced. The best way to understand it is not as a code of morality, but as a psychological weapon. When people invoke altruism, it’s usually not because they genuinely want to help others—it’s because they want to control and exploit you. And the point isn’t that they’re misusing altruism—it’s that this is what altruism is designed for.

Consider this: no one—not even Peter Singer—demands that you sacrifice yourself consistently. To practice altruism consistently would entail suicide, since every bite of food you take is needed more by someone else. A consistent altruist would be a dead altruist.

Altruists will let you get away with living most of the time. But when they want your wealth or your obedience? That’s when they’ll demand that you sacrifice. They will rely on your guilt. You don’t want to be selfish, do you? Who are you to object to my demands? You’re no moral paragon. You’ve been out there enjoying your life while others suffer—now it’s time to serve.

I recently spoke to a young woman whose sick father is insisting that she place her life on hold to take care of him. Doesn’t she realize that’s her moral duty to the family? That is what altruism looks like. A truly moral person may ask for help. But to demand it as a duty? That is depraved, and yet it’s precisely what altruism preaches. If you are in need, other people are your servants.

You might wonder: Aren’t those demanding others serve them being selfish? And isn’t that inconsistent with altruism? Economist Thomas Sowell once posed the puzzle this way: “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” In other words, if the good is the “non-good for me,” doesn’t that mean that we all should sacrifice—and that no one should be able to collect on those sacrifices? Isn’t altruism self-contradictory since you’re supposed to serve others, but from their own standpoint, they aren’t “others”? They are people bound by the same moral code, which says that the good is non-them? Rand puts the paradox this way:

Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

But, Rand goes on to point out, this is only a paradox—not a contradiction. The morality of altruism allows you to collect sacrifices and gain values—provided you don’t earn them. If you’re a producer, you don’t have a right to what you produce. That’s greedy. But if you’re a parasite who produces nothing? That is precisely what gives you a moral right to what others produce. “It is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself.”

According to altruism, if you earn values, you have to give them up. What entitles you to values? The fact you didn’t earn them. A need you’re unable or unwilling to satisfy is what entitles you to have your needs fulfilled by other people’s efforts and at other people’s expense. A lazy bum who makes excuses for his failures is morally superior to the affluent relatives he mooches off of—he is a needy victim while they are selfish and greedy for only sacrificing a small portion of their wealth for him. This is the actual meaning of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

When altruists say they are champions of “the good of others” what they really mean is, “the worst people get to demand to have their wishes satisfied by the sacrifices of the best people.”

This is the dead end of morality without happiness. It has nothing positive to offer, nothing uplifting to sell.

You do need morality—but not a morality that teaches you to throw your life away.