Discovered Today! 06/23/2008

• Objectivism on One Foot — Ayn Rand Lexicon

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  • My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

    
    
    
    
    

    1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of
       man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

    
    

    2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by
       man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of
       knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

    
    

    3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.
       He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
       sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest
       and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

    
    

    4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a
       system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as
       masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual
       benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by
       resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force
       against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s
       rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who
       initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full
       capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete
       separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as
       the separation of state and church.