"The Virtue of Selfishness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)
2. Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice
by Nathaniel Branden
The standard of mental healthЧof biologically appropriate mental functioningЧis the same as that of physical health: manТs survival and well-being. A mind is healthy to the extent that its method of functioning is such as to provide man with the control over reality that the support and furtherance of his life require.
The hallmark of this control is self-esteem. Self-esteem is the consequence, expression and reward of a mind fully committed to reason. Reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses, is manТs basic tool of survival. Commitment to reason is commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of oneТs understanding and knowledge, to the principle that oneТs actions must be consistent with oneТs convictions, that one must never attempt to fake reality or place any consideration above reality, that one must never permit oneself contradictionsЧthat one must never attempt to subvert or sabotage the proper function of consciousness.
The proper function of consciousness is: perception, cognition, and the control of action.
An unobstructed consciousness, an integrated consciousness, a thinking consciousness, is a healthy consciousness. A blocked consciousness, an evading consciousness, a consciousness torn by conflict and divided against itself, a consciousness disintegrated by fear or immobilized by depression, a consciousness dissociated from reality, is an unhealthy consciousness. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled УObjectivism and PsychologyФ in my book Who Is Ayn Rand?)
In order to deal with reality successfullyЧto pursue and achieve the values which his life requiresЧman needs self-esteem: he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.
Anxiety and guilt, the antipodes of self-esteem and the insignia of mental illness, are the disintegrators of thought, the distorters of values and the paralyzers of action.
When a man of self-esteem chooses his values and sets his goals, when he projects the long-range purposes that will unify and guide his actionsЧit is like a bridge thrown to the future, across which his life will pass, a bridge supported by the conviction that his mind is competent to think, to judge, to value, and that he is worthy of enjoying values.
This sense of control over reality is not the result of special skills, ability or knowledge. It is not dependent on particular successes or failures. It reflects oneТs fundamental relationship to reality, oneТs conviction of fundamental efficacy and worthiness. It reflects the certainty that, in essence and in principle, one is right for reality. Self-esteem is a metaphysical estimate.
It is this psychological state that traditional morality makes impossible, to the extent that a man accepts it.
Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrifice is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive existentially and psychologically.
(1) The maintenance of his life and the achievement of self-esteem require of man the fullest exercise of his reasonЧbut morality, men are taught, rests on and requires faith.
Faith is the commitment of oneТs consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.
When a man rejects reason as his standard of judgment, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
To practice the УvirtueФ of faith, one must be willing to suspend oneТs sight and oneТs judgment; one must be willing to live with the unintelligible, with that which cannot be conceptualized or integrated into the rest of oneТs knowledge, and to induce a trancelike illusion of understanding. One must be willing to repress oneТs critical faculty and hold it as oneТs guilt; one must be willing to drown any questions that rise in protestЧto strangle any trust of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the protector of oneТs life and cognitive integrity.
Remember that all of manТs knowledge and all his concepts have a hierarchical structure. The foundation and starting point of manТs thinking are his sensory perceptions; on this base, man forms his first concepts, then goes on building the edifice of his knowledge by identifying and integrating new concepts on a wider and wider scale. If manТs thinking is to be valid, this process must be guided by logic, Уthe art of noncontradictory identificationФЧand any new concept man forms must be integrated without contradiction into the hierarchical structure of his knowledge. To introduce into oneТs consciousness any idea that cannot be so integrated, an idea not derived from reality, not validated by a process of reason, not subject to rational examination or judgmentЧand worse: an idea that clashes with the rest of oneТs concepts and understanding of realityЧis to sabotage the integrative function of consciousness, to undercut the rest of oneТs convictions and kill oneТs capacity to be certain of anything. This is the meaning of John GaltТs statement in Atlas Shrugged that Уthe alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.Ф
There is no greater self-delusion than to imagine that one can render unto reason that which is reasonТs and unto faith that which is faithТs. Faith cannot be circumscribed or delimited; to surrender oneТs consciousness by an inch, is to surrender oneТs consciousness in total. Either reason is an absolute to a mind or it is notЧand if it is not, there is no place to draw the line, no principle by which to draw it, no barrier faith cannot cross, no part of oneТs life faith cannot invade: one remains rational until and unless oneТs feelings decree otherwise.
Faith is a malignancy that no system can tolerate with impunity; and the man who succumbs to it, will call on it in precisely those issues where he needs his reason most. When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of oneТs consciousnessЧand oneТs mind becomes an organ one can not trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
(2) ManТs need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over realityЧbut no control is possible in a universe which, by oneТs own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.
(3) His life and self-esteem require that the object and concern of manТs consciousness be reality and this earthЧbut morality, men are taught, consists of scorning this earth and the world available to sensory perception, and of contemplating, instead, a УdifferentФ and УhigherФ reality, a realm inaccessible to reason and incommunicable in language, but attainable by revelation, by special dialectical processes, by that superior state of intellectual lucidity known to Zen-Buddhists as УNo-Mind,Ф or by death.
There is only one realityЧthe reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all.
The sole result of the mystic projection of УanotherФ reality, is that it incapacitates man psychologically for this one. It was not by contemplating the transcendental, the ineffable, the undefinableЧit was not by contemplating the nonexistentЧthat man lifted himself from the cave and transformed the material world to make a human existence possible on earth.
If it is a virtue to renounce oneТs mind, but a sin to use it; if it is a virtue to approximate the mental state of a schizophrenic, but a sin to be in intellectual focus; if it is a virtue to denounce this earth, but a sin to make it livable; if it is a virtue to mortify the flesh, but a sin to work and act; if it is a virtue to despise life, but a sin to sustain and enjoy itЧthen no self-esteem or control or efficacy are possible to man, nothing is possible to him but the guilt and terror of a wretch caught in a nightmare universe, a universe created by some metaphysical sadist who has cast man into a maze where the door marked УvirtueФ leads to self-destruction and the door marked УefficacyФ leads to self-damnation.
Is man omniscient?Чdemand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how dare he challenge the word of God, or of GodТs representatives, and set himself up as the judge ofЧanything?
Intellectual pride is notЧas the mystics preposterously imply it to beЧa pretense at omniscience or infallibility. On the contrary, precisely because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort, the men who assume this responsibility properly feel pride.
Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud; he has merely chosen the most humiliating way to reveal his humility.
Pride is oneТs response to oneТs power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in oneТs own efficacy. And it is this that mystics hold as evil.
But if doubt, not confidence, is manТs proper moral state; if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt, not pride, is his goalЧthen mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners, those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.
Humility is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality; it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.
Pride has to be earned; it is the reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to abstain from thinkingЧnothing else is demandedЧand one will feel humble quickly enough.
(5) His life and self-esteem require of man loyalty to his values, loyalty to his mind and its judgments, loyalty to his lifeЧbut the essence of morality, men are taught, consists of self-sacrifice: the sacrifice of oneТs mind to some higher authority, and the sacrifice of oneТs values to whoever may claim to require it.
It is not necessary, in this context, to analyze the almost countless evils, entailed by the precept of self-sacrifice. Its irrationality and destructiveness have been thoroughly exposed in Atlas Shrugged. But there are two aspects of the issue that are especially pertinent to the subject of mental health.
The first is the fact that self-sacrifice meansЧand can only meanЧmind-sacrifice.
A sacrifice, it is necessary to remember, means the surrender of a higher value in favor of a lower value or of a nonvalue. If one gives up that which one does not value in order to obtain that which one does valueЧor if one gives up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater oneЧthis is not a sacrifice, but a gain.
Remember further that all of a manТs values exist in a hierarchy; he values some things more than others; and, to the extent that he is rational, the hierarchical order of his values is rational: that is, he values things in proportion to their importance in serving his life and well-being. That which is inimical to his life and well-being, that which is inimical to his nature and needs as a living being, he disvalues.
Conversely, one of the characteristics of mental illness is a distorted value structure; the neurotic does not value things according to their objective merit, in relation to his nature and needs; he frequently values the very things that will lead him to self-destruction. Judged by objective standards, he is engaged in a chronic process of self-sacrifice.
But if sacrifice is a virtue, it is not the neurotic but the rational man who must be Уcured.Ф He must learn to do violence to his own rational judgmentЧto reverse the order of his value hierarchyЧto surrender that which his mind has chosen as the goodЧto turn against and invalidate his own consciousness.
Do mystics declare that all they demand of man is that he sacrifice his happiness? To sacrifice oneТs happiness is to sacrifice oneТs desires; to sacrifice oneТs desires is to sacrifice oneТs values; to sacrifice oneТs values is to sacrifice oneТs judgment; to sacrifice oneТs judgment is to sacrifice oneТs mindЧand it is nothing less than this that the creed of self-sacrifice aims at and demands.
The root of selfishness is manТs rightЧand needЧto act on his own judgment. If his judgment is to be an object of sacrificeЧwhat sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, or serenity of spirit will be possible to man?
The second aspect that is pertinent here, involves not only the creed of self-sacrifice but all the foregoing tenets of traditional morality.
An irrational morality, a morality set in opposition to manТs nature, to the facts of reality and to the requirements of manТs survival, necessarily forces men to accept the belief that there is an inevitable clash between the moral and the practicalЧthat they must choose either to be virtuous or to be happy, to be idealistic or to be successful, but they cannot be both. This view establishes a disastrous conflict on the deepest level of manТs being, a lethal dichotomy that tears man apart: it forces him to choose between making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living. Yet self-esteem and mental health require that he achieve both.
If man holds life on earth as the good, if he judges his values by the standard of that which is proper to the existence of a rational being, then there is no clash between the requirements of survival and of moralityЧno clash between making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living; he achieves the second by achieving the first. But there is a clash, if man holds the renunciation of this earth as the good, the renunciation of life, of mind, of happiness, of self. Under an anti-life morality, man makes himself worthy of living to the extent that he makes himself unable to liveЧand to the extent that he makes himself able to live, he makes himself unworthy of living.
The answer given by many defenders of traditional morality is: УOh, but people donТt have to go to extremes!ФЧmeaning: УWe donТt expect people to be fully moral. We expect them to smuggle some self-interest into their lives. We recognize that people have to live, after all.Ф
The defense, then, of this code of morality is that few people will be suicidal enough to attempt to practice it consistently. Hypocrisy is to be manТs protector against his professed moral convictions. What does that do to his self-esteem?
And what of the victims who are insufficiently hypocritical?
What of the child who withdraws in terror into an autistic universe because he cannot cope with the ravings of parents who tell him that he is guilty by nature, that his body is evil, that thinking is sinful, that question-asking is blasphemous, that doubting is depravity, and that he must obey the orders of a supernatural ghost because, if he doesnТt, he will burn forever in hell?
Or the daughter who collapses in guilt over the sin of not wanting to devote her life to caring for the ailing father who has given her cause to feel only hatred?
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