Cultivate Virtue

Lesson 4: Follow Reason (1 of 2)

When philosophy severs happiness and morality, the moral and the practical, what’s good and what’s good for you, it teaches that happiness can be achieved by the seat of your pants. You don’t need guidance to get what you want (or to decide what you should want). But it’s not obvious how to get what you want—not when your values stretch across a lifetime and encompass every aspect of life.

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?