How To Be An Earthly Idealist

This is an edited transcript of my recent talk, delivered to an audience of Ayn Rand fans, “How to Be an Earthly Idealist.”

What is earthly idealism?

When I tell Objectivists that I discovered Ayn Rand at the age of 15, many of them tell me how lucky I was. I was fortunate, but I think they imagine that in discovering Objectivism so young, that meant that I was free from the struggles they faced in trying to assimilate this incredible philosophy later in life. As if, in reading about Howard Roark at 15, I was able to effortlessly become like Howard Roark.

But that wasn’t my experience. Not at all.

At various points in my life I struggled with everything from not enjoying my work, to not having the relationships I wanted, to periods of self-doubt. Worse, my ideals were all too often a source of conflict and guilt rather than powerful tools for happiness, and I experienced morality as a straitjacket instead of an inspiring guide to joy.

Having been a part of the Objectivist movement for a quarter century, I’ve learned that I’m not alone.

And that leads to a question: why aren’t more Objectivists more happy?

This is a talk about idealism—about seeking the perfect, the best possible.

Ideals are what fuel us. They provide the target at which to aim and the motive power for the long range, effortful activity required to reach our target. In order to serve their function, however, those ideals must be achievable and worthy of being achieved. To live on earth, we need ideals—especially, a moral ideal—that we want to realize, that we can realize, and that, in realizing, rewards us with self-esteem, success, and happiness.

This is earthly idealism—the idealism we see embodied in Ayn Rand’s heroes: Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Howard Roark.

But most Objectivists aren’t Roarks.

On one level this shouldn't be surprising. Objectivism offers an achievable ideal, but it's a demanding ideal. It's hard to live up to. But on another level, it really should be surprising. Everyone in this room wants to be like Howard Roark, and if you want to be like Roark, and if it's possible to be like Roark, why do we so often fall short?

In my judgment, the answer comes down to two basic challenges. And to get at what they are, let me share part of my favorite Ayn Rand quote: her description of the virtue of pride.

[T]o 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.

If you achieve that, you have fulfilled the promise of earthly idealism. But in my experience, Objectivists struggle with two basic issues: how to desire the best in all things—and how to grapple with the challenge of moral perfection.

Let's call them the problem of value and the problem of virtue.

The problem of value

The idealist has profound, sacred values. In particular, he forms profound personal values. I'm an idealist to the extent I want the best for my life: my career, my romantic partner, my favorite music. But most of us don’t know how to form personal values.

We don’t know how to choose a career that fills us with joy. We don’t know how to choose a lover who means the world to us. And we don’t know how to form the much smaller personal values that pervade our day-to-day lives—what we eat, how we dress, how we decorate our apartment. We make choices in all these areas, but our choices don’t reflect that purposeful, soulful, “all-in” quality that we see in Ayn Rand’s heroes.

If I had to name the most common reason for this among Objectivists I would say: because our only model for following a philosophy is religion.

Even if you were not raised religiously, the default is for Objectivism to function in your mind like a religion: to be a set of dogmas that you have to obey rather than knowledge that helps you make sense of the world and navigate your way through it. Here’s how Ayn Rand puts it in The Art of Nonfiction:

The purpose of philosophy is to guide a man in the course of his life. Unfortunately, many Objectivists have not fully accepted, concretized, and integrated this principle. For example, in the presence of a given event, work of art, person, etc., too many Objectivists ask themselves, “What do I have to feel?” instead of, “What do I feel?” And if they need to judge a situation which I have not discussed before, their approach is, “What should I think?” instead of, “What do I think?”

Your philosophy exists to serve you. But for philosophy to perform this function, it can’t be a dogma. It has to be knowledge. You have to derive your philosophy from concretes so that you can apply it to concretes—to the specifics of your life and your actions.

This, in essence, is what Leonard Peikoff teaches us to do in “Understanding Objectivism” and “Objectivism Through Induction.” But even Objectivists who have listened to Leonard’s courses often struggle in the realm of forming personal values. They often ask, "What should I want?" rather than "What do I want?" As a result, their values are superficial, dutiful, unmotivating, impersonal.

For example, one of the most common issues Objectivists struggle with is choosing a career. I was once talking to a young man—very smart, very conscientious—who said: "I want to do work that's important. And Ayn Rand says that being an intellectual is the most important career, so I'm thinking I might become an intellectual."

When I heard that, I said: "Well, Howard Roark wasn’t an intellectual. He just built buildings. Was his work unimportant?"

The lesson, of course, was that Roark's work is the most important thing in the world to him. Buildings are what make the world beautiful, and making the world more beautiful is Roark's personal mission. Presumably Roark would grant that, from the perspective of humanity's flourishing, intellectuals make a bigger contribution than architects. But then he would shrug and go back to building.

This student was looking to philosophy to tell him what was personally valuable. Just as philosophy tells him to value reason, purpose, and self-esteem, he wanted philosophy to tell him what work to do. But philosophy does not answer that question, and you cannot deduce the answer from philosophy. Your personal values are personal and you have to form them.

And the crucial question is: how? How do you form personal values? I can’t give you a step-by-step formula for value formation because there is no step-by-step formula.

Forming values is a creative process—it is the process of self-creation. Just as there can’t be a formula for writing a novel or composing a symphony, there can’t be a formula for creating your life.

What I do want to talk about is one aspect of the value-formation process that is not obvious: setting firsthanded standards.

Here's what I thought was a completely non-controversial statement from Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. "Now, we must realize that valuing means to prefer a to b."

And here is the comment Rand wrote in the margins of her copy of Mises's book:

No, it doesn't! "Choice" means this. "Value" and "choice" are not the same concepts. . . . ("Valuing" means measurement by means of a standard.) "Value" cannot exist where there is no choice. But it is not the fact of choice that determines a value, it is the standard of value. Example: the "value" of a girl to a lover is not that he prefers her to other girls; he had to have a standard which made him prefer her; he could have chosen none if none filled his standard.

This came to me as a revelation. And yet this basic insight, that valuing means establishing standards and evaluating things by reference to a standard, is all over Rand's work. The most obvious case is the foundational principle of the Objectivist ethics: that the standard of moral value is man's life.

But this is not just an issue of the fundamental moral standard. All valuing consists of formulating standards in a given area and evaluating options by those standards. Roark, for instance, describes how his architectural philosophy involves coming up with a central idea for each building—a standard—which “sets every detail.”

Another way to put this is, to form personal values involves establishing personal ideals.

Philosophy gives us our fundamental standards—of proof, of value, of political organization—but those fundamental standards don’t provide us with enough resolution to make all of the specific choices we need to make to live our lives. That involves new creative acts.

In the case of personal values, part of forming standards involves your own unique standards for what you want from life.

Let's take career. Philosophy tells us that we have to build our lives around using our mind to create material values. It tells us that we have to choose a career that requires our "mind's full capacity." That rules out being a thief, a bum, or a regulator. But beyond that, Galt tells us, "your work is yours to choose."

To choose it, you must formulate your own standards for what you want out of a career—standards that are consonant with reality (not subjective) but not dictated by reality (not intrinsic). Standards that reflect a very personal assessment of what kind of work and what way of working will make up a life that you want to live.

Now we could do a whole lecture on forming personal standards, but let me highlight three crucial aspects:

1. Live

2. Reflect

3. Project

First, Live. By far the biggest reason Objectivists tend to adopt impersonal standards is because they don’t have enough life experience to draw on in some specific area of life. They will try to define their ideal man or woman before they’ve dated. They will try to define their ideal career before they’ve worked. But it is through living—going out and tasting what life has to offer—that you acquire the material that will allow you to decide what it is you actually want from life.

Second, Reflect. Living gives you the material for forming values, but reflection is what allows you to draw lessons from that material. Regularly take time to step back and ask yourself in every area of life: What do I like—and why? What don’t I like—and why? From that kind of questioning, you’ll start to spot patterns, and integrate your observations. Integrate them into what? Into your own personal standards. Your ideals.

Finally, Project. Valuing is not primarily backward looking. It is about projecting different futures you could create and then choosing which future to make real. All too often when I talk to Objectivists paralyzed by indecision and self-doubt, they are on the premise that there is one right future for them to create that’s in effect preordained by reality, and if they choose wrong, they’ve failed. But this turns valuing from a creative act into a passive act of divination. Your life is yours to create. You get to decide who you want to become and what life you want to live.

Let’s summarize where we are. To be an earthly idealist, we need a rational philosophy to give us a framework for choosing values that are achievable, genuinely good for us, that can fit together harmoniously with all of our other values so we can achieve happiness.

But philosophy doesn't dictate our specific values. We have to form them through an active, volitional process where the ultimate metric is: what kind of life do I want to create for myself?

If we don't do that, if we try to substitute philosophy for what we want, our ideals will be disconnected from reality and from us. They will not motivate us and, if we achieve them, they will not satisfy us.

So that’s my advice. Never forget that rational egoism is about what you want. Never let that fade from the forefront of your mind. Never accept an ounce of duty. Never act because you think your philosophy is giving you orders.

Act because there’s something you desire from life, something that matters to you, something that you love and crave and cannot live without—and then act with relentless dedication so that your life is filled with the best in all things.

Let's turn, then, to the problem of virtue.

The problem of virtue

An idealist is on a quest for moral perfection as a means to achieving and enjoying the best in all things. The problem of virtue is: how to grapple with morality's demands for perfection.

In one sense, there is no special problem of moral perfection. According to Objectivism, moral perfection is possible because it deals only with what is open to your direct choice. It means, in essence, choosing to use your mind as your guide to knowledge, values, and action. And there’s no reason not to do that 100% of the time: the good is the good for you.

And yet, I have often found it hard to act morally. I wish I could tell you that from the moment I discovered Objectivism, I never lied, never evaded, never treated someone unfairly, never placed an I wish over an it is. But it’s not true. Why?

And my answer is: an egoist morality is hard to practice when you believe you have to give up something desirable or do something undesirable—and it is very easy to think that morality requires you to give up desirable things or do things that are undesirable.

Let me tell you a story. A few months ago I was talking with a non-Objectivist friend of mine, and she confided that she was torn—she sensed she was drinking too much but couldn’t bring herself to quit. I recommended that she check out a book by Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Drinking. A few weeks later she called me up and thanked me: she had stopped drinking completely and did, indeed, find it easy.

What’s Carr’s secret? Most people, Carr argues, fail to give up habits like smoking or drinking because they think they are giving up something valuable. They may be convinced that the negatives outweigh the positives, but they nevertheless think these habits provide them with fun, relaxation, or some other positive benefit they have to surrender. Carr takes each of these alleged positives and argues that they’re illusory. These habits offer nothing but negatives, and so giving them up isn’t even a partial sacrifice.

Whether or not you agree with Carr’s assessment of drinking or smoking, we can take a profound lesson from his approach. We struggle to act morally when we believe that morality is asking us to surrender a real value. When we fall into what Leonard Peikoff calls the tradeoff view of ethics.

“That money would be really good, that affair would be incredibly pleasurable, staying silent while our values are attacked will keep us safe—but, alas, morality tells me that I can’t do it because there are hidden costs to taking the money, or having the affair, or staying silent.”

What Objectivism actually teaches us is not that dishonesty or moral cowardice have greater costs than the benefits they provide. What it teaches us is that there are no values to be gained by sacrificing rational principles. That “the unreal is unreal and can have no value.”

The challenge of moral perfection is really the challenge of making this fact fully real to ourselves at the moment of action. Not to grit our teeth and say, “I want it, but morality forbids it.” But to see—to really see—that there is nothing here worth wanting.

Or, since morality isn’t mainly about avoiding negatives: it’s to keep our eyes focused on the genuine values we seek and can only get through dedication to our ideals.

What does that mean in practice? The first thing that it means is that you really need to be convinced that the moral principles you hold are in your self-interest. You can’t take Ayn Rand’s word for it.

And the second thing that it means is that, when you encounter a situation where you feel tempted to act in a way that seems at odds with what morality requires, you need to ask yourself two questions:

1. Why do I think this is a value?

2. Why do I think morally tells me not to pursue it?

What you’ll find, if you think it through, is that there is not actually a value to be gained—or that morality doesn’t actually tell you not to pursue it. This is what Leonard Peikoff means when he says in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand that:

The challenge of a man’s life 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.

But this still leaves one vital question unanswered: what do you do when you have taken an action that is unworthy of you? When you haven’t lived up to the demands of moral perfection? How, in other words, do you deal with earned guilt?

Here’s what not to do. I remember telling some lie or another to my parents as a teenager because I didn’t want to get in trouble for staying out late or something like that. Then I thought: Objectivism not only says I should be rational and honest, it says that to be rational and honest means to be fully rational and honest. Morality demands perfection. To be a liar is not to lie all the time, just a few whoppers, as Leonard Peikoff puts it. And I'm not perfect! So I'm completely immoral.

I think a lot of Objectivists hold something like this view, but it is wrong and poisonous. If you think about morality in this way, you will come to see it as a threat, and your idealism will die a slow, painful death.

This perspective reflects a religious attitude toward morality. Religion, of course, does not demand moral perfection. On the contrary, it tells you that moral perfection is impossible.

But on the religious model, you are taught to view sin as this mystical stain on your purity, and the only way to achieve purification is through some mystical process of atonement. And if you bring that orientation to Objectivism, you’re left with a big problem: there is no God to offer atonement.

So what's the error? Earlier I quoted Rand's account of pride from Galt's speech, but let me quote her account from “The Objectivist Ethics”:

[Pride] means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character.

What Objectivism rejects as fully evil is the person who is resigned to being moral "sometimes."

To reject a virtue is not to fail to practice it on some particular occasion. It is to view occasionally practicing a virtue as sufficient. It's to say, "Look, you can't be honest all the time, so, sure, I'm lying to my boss about working when I'm really watching YouTube, and I'm lying to my trainer about sticking to my diet, it's not a big deal because I'm honest about everything else. I'm honest enough." The moment you regard any of your choices as exempt from morality, you have rejected—fully rejected—morality.

But that's not usually how Objectivists fall short. It's precisely that we don't regard any of our choices as exempt from reason and morality that we feel guilt. So, how, then, do we correct flaws in our character?

It's important here to remember that guilt, like all emotions, has survival value. And the survival value of guilt is that it alerts us to the need to learn and grow. Let me triple underline that. The purpose of guilt is not to encourage us to beat ourselves up for infinity and ruminate on past wrongs that we cannot change. It is precisely to encourage us to change by communicating that we’ve done something unworthy of us.

What we need is not an account of atonement but of course correction.

Morality gives us a self-sustaining way of life, and immorality is going off that life-promoting course. The solution to earned guilt is to get yourself back on a life promoting course.

But notice that you can also go off course through errors of knowledge. Think of Hank Rearden. Rearden is fully moral, but when we meet him he is taking actions that are detrimental to his life. What we see him undergo is a process of course correction.

So what is the difference between that and course correcting after a moral error? It comes down to: self-trust.

Rearden was doing his best to guide himself through life, and discovered that his map was bad. But once he got a better map there was no question: am I going to follow it?

But when you’ve made an immoral choice, what makes it so daunting to deal with is that you had the right map but chose not to follow it, and now you face a question: how do I know I’ll follow it in the future?

And the answer is: you’ve got to rebuild self-trust. How? Here are four steps I’ve found helpful. Call them the Four Ps of Pride:

1. A probe

2. A promise

3. A plan

4. A pattern

Let me elaborate briefly.

A probe means: you need to understand your bad choice. Was it the result of momentary weakness or lack of courage? Was it due to a larger character flaw? How did you evade? Through context dropping? Rationalization? Lying? What were the results? The more you understand yourself and what’s self-defeating about your previous course of action, the more likely you will be to follow a better course of action in the future.

A promise means: to recommit yourself to your ideals. Often when you sacrifice your principles, what you’re really doing is deciding that avoiding pain or fear is more important than your happiness. To make a promise means to decide that you will not settle for less than the best for yourself and from yourself.

A plan means: the specific steps you’ll take to implement your promise. For example, if I have the tendency to post things in social media in anger that I later regret, my plan might include getting off social media completely, deciding to schedule all my posts for 24 hours in the future so that I have time to rethink them in a calmer light, or making a public declaration that I’m not going to engage in that kind of behavior going forward. In making a plan, you’re seeking to increase the friction involved in repeating bad behaviors and reduce the friction involved in establishing more rational behaviors.

A pattern means: a habit of acting in alignment with your moral principles. You cannot merely think your way to a good moral character and healthy self-esteem. Your character is a product of action. It is through action across time that you make morality second nature, and form the self-trust that you will not throw away your map.

If you do that, if you acknowledge your bad choices and do the hard work of correcting them, then you are entitled to regard yourself as morally perfect. You are entitled to let go of guilt.

Let me add one more point. I find it helpful to think about perfection as an active term: of perfecting. The question I ask myself isn’t: am I perfect? The question I ask is: am I continually improving my moral character so I can achieve and enjoy values? Or am I settling for less than the best?

That's the key. Wherever you are, whatever the state of your moral character, don't settle.

Right now, some of you are sitting here with a pit in your stomach, thinking of some change you need to make, some issue you need to resolve, some area of your life where you need to improve.

And what I’m urging you is: do it. Stop putting it off. Face it now, as soon as you can. Because if you do deal with it, whatever the short-term pain, the end result will be a life more amazing than you thought possible.

The end

To become an earthly idealist is, in essence, to move from religion to philosophy. Or, to put it another way, it’s to move from duty to causality.

In her essay, “Causality vs. Duty,” Ayn Rand contrasts Kant’s duty-centered ethics with what she calls an ethics of final causation. A duty, Rand says, is “the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.”

It’s to do something because God—or Galt—said so.

By contrast, Objectivism holds that causality, not duty, must be the guiding principle for choosing your actions.

Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “you must if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.

To put it in the most fundamental terms, the solution to the problem of values and the problem of virtues is to reject duty in favor of causality.

It’s to stop seeing your philosophy as something you must serve and obey and see it as causal knowledge to help you decide what you want and figure out how to achieve it.

It’s to see morality, not as a scarecrow chasing away your pleasures, but as a map to guide you toward the pleasures that make life worth living.

The great evil of religion is that it teaches that idealism is at odds with your life and happiness here on earth. That the true idealist must have the courage to sacrifice what he wants and serve a cause greater than himself. That courage consists in throwing your life away.

What Ayn Rand showed us is that idealism does require courage: not the “courage” required to sacrifice what you want, but the courage to go after what you want, price no object.

Let me end with a story. Leonard Peikoff has talked about one of his favorite memories of Ayn Rand. They were walking through the streets of New York, on their way to visit Random House, which would soon be publishing Atlas Shrugged. During the walk, Rand stopped and turned to Leonard and told him, “Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.”

It took me a long time to realize why that moment meant so much to him. But now I want to take you to early 2020.

COVID hits and I, along with so many other people, lost my job. To make matters worse, I was about to close on my dream house—that was gone.

And now I faced the question of: who is going to hire an Objectivist writer in the middle of a pandemic? I remember going on long walks and ruminating over the real possibility I would have to give up working as an intellectual, at least for a while, take some mind-numbing office job, if I could find one, and write on the side. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

And then came good news. I got a job offer. It was a good job offer.

But there was just one problem. It wasn’t what I wanted to do.

And so I decided, no, I’m going to try to build something on my own. I turned down the job. I turned down a safe, sure thing to see if I could build a business around communication training and coaching.

Why? Because I wasn’t willing to settle for less than the best in all things. I wasn’t going to settle for less than the ideal.

That choice is what led me to coaching, and ultimately led me to my dream job in my current role at the Ayn Rand Institute.

So let me end by saying to you: figure out what you want from life, and never settle for less.

It is worth it.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.