liveonearth, you have a better grip on Rand than gavin6942, but you both need to better your understanding of selfishness. Your own life is all that you have and all that you are. Your purpose in life is to maximize the quality of that life and for as long as possible. But to pursue "quality" requires a system of values to guide and discipline your choices that determine how you interact with the rest of reality. Your values are the results that you seek to gain with your actions.
If follows that in order to maximize your life, you should never intentionally sacrifice a greater value in order to get a lesser value. But that is what altruism demands -- self sacrifice. You must instead always seek to gain a higher value by giving up a lower value. That is selfishness. If the values are rationally identified vis a vis your nature (as a human) and the nature of reality and they are consistently applied to your actions, that is rational selfishness.
Recognize that this relationship to yourself is equally true for each and every other human. Therefore your every relationship with and action toward any other human is implicitly granted by you to be proper for them to hold with or act out toward you. Consequently, by Rand's philosophy, theft and murder are acts of self-sacrifice, not of selfishness. Helping bright young students with their college expenses in order to live in a world with more intelligent people is an act of selfishness. Giving your friendship to an acquaintance, or your love to a spouse, because they embody your own sense of life is an act of selfishness.
In any uncoerced exchange between two selfish humans, each will give the other something valued less than that which is received, the price in such an exchange is inherently just, and both will profit. Therefrom springs the efficacy of capitalism.
no subject
If follows that in order to maximize your life, you should never intentionally sacrifice a greater value in order to get a lesser value. But that is what altruism demands -- self sacrifice. You must instead always seek to gain a higher value by giving up a lower value. That is selfishness. If the values are rationally identified vis a vis your nature (as a human) and the nature of reality and they are consistently applied to your actions, that is rational selfishness.
Recognize that this relationship to yourself is equally true for each and every other human. Therefore your every relationship with and action toward any other human is implicitly granted by you to be proper for them to hold with or act out toward you. Consequently, by Rand's philosophy, theft and murder are acts of self-sacrifice, not of selfishness. Helping bright young students with their college expenses in order to live in a world with more intelligent people is an act of selfishness. Giving your friendship to an acquaintance, or your love to a spouse, because they embody your own sense of life is an act of selfishness.
In any uncoerced exchange between two selfish humans, each will give the other something valued less than that which is received, the price in such an exchange is inherently just, and both will profit. Therefrom springs the efficacy of capitalism.