Was the hero, John Galt, really a selfish character?
The first three separate Google dictionary definitions of the adjective “selfish" are”
“lacking consideration for others”
“having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people”
“devoted to or caring only for oneself”
According to these definitions:
You can not be selfish if you have consideration for anyone else.
You can not be selfish if you have concern for anyone else.
You can not be selfish if you care for anyone else.
So if John Galt was selfish, he must have lacked confederation for Dagny, had no concern for Dagny and did not care for Dagny.
There is a contradiction here. Either John Galt was NOT SELFISH or the common definitions for “selfish" that most of the world uses are WRONG.
Can most of the world be wrong? Is that a rhetorical question?
“lacking consideration for others”
“having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people”
“devoted to or caring only for oneself”
According to these definitions:
You can not be selfish if you have consideration for anyone else.
You can not be selfish if you have concern for anyone else.
You can not be selfish if you care for anyone else.
So if John Galt was selfish, he must have lacked confederation for Dagny, had no concern for Dagny and did not care for Dagny.
There is a contradiction here. Either John Galt was NOT SELFISH or the common definitions for “selfish" that most of the world uses are WRONG.
Can most of the world be wrong? Is that a rhetorical question?
Can a person that takes this kind of "selfish" oath have any consideration, concern, or care for any other person? The answer is an obvious, yes.
"The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment."
See the rest of Rand's explanation here:http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html
Sad thing is, most of the world would not agree with you. Even after proving a simple logical contradiction, most of the world won't care or is too irrationally arrogant to admit they could be wrong.
Rearden smiled contemptuously. "Aren't you one of those damn altruists who spends his time on a non-profit venture and risks his life merely to serve others?"
Ragnar: "No, Mr. Rearden. I am investing my time in my own future. When we are free and have to start rebuilding from out of the ruins, I want to see the world reborn as fast as possible. If there is, then, some working capital in the right hands -- in the hands of our best, our most productive men -- it will save years for the rest of us and, incidentally, centuries for the history of the county. Did you ask what you meant to me? Everything I admire, everything I want to be on the day when the earth will have a place for such state of being, everything I want to deal with -- even if this is the only way I can deal with you and be of use to you at present."
Think of it this way. It was his philosophy that brought about the Gulch in the first place. In order to "right the world" it had to be destroyed first. That was the most important part of his plan. Imagine convincing the best and the brightest to turn their back on the world as it is. Imagine understanding a life philosophy in a few hours. He delivered everyone but Dagny ...and then finally Dagny. "It" had already fallen apart. The speech explained why.
I learned that as a teenager from the works of Ayn Rand. Thirty years later, I was granted a literary award on the nomination of a Smithsonian curator because I doubted the _EB_ story for the origins of coinage. (Coins were not invented by merchants, no matter what "everyone" says.) You asked rhetorically whether everyone in the world can be wrong. "Yes!"
Please understand that the purpose of a dictionary is to report what most people mean by a word. Words change meaning. It is why we can read Shakespeare, but need the notes. We argue about the Constitution because the meanings of some words changed in 200 years. I have an 1828 Webster's Dictionary just to help me with those kinds of problems. My two standard dictionaries - Mirriam Webster and World Publishing - are from c. 1960. But my wife is an editor and she always has the latest on her shelf and we do go around a bit sometimes on experts versus experts.
I also speak several languages, as does my brother; and he beats me up over my Langenscheidts; but I took a red pen to my Oxford Paperback. So...
Even in Rand's time, selfishness had the same connotation. In this respect, she made a fundamental mistake in terminology.
From the Introduction to The Virtue Of Selfishness: "The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?"
"To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it."
She writes further: "It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word "selfishness" is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual "package-deal," which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind."
She made no apologies for her terminology and explained her rationale.
If you want to make yourself acceptable to most people in most places, you are going to cease being whoever it is you are inside.
That is not what Rand meant by selfishness. Rational Selfishness are acts that rationally further your life. Going to church does not rationally further your life, voting for Obama does not rationally further your life, but people do these things consciously.
Overall, I agree. Yet, other replies from my post above would challenge that statement. Without all parties accepting the formal rules of debate, arguments can go on seemingly forever. People can easily waste lifetimes fruitlessly debating whether or not something like faith in the supernatural is a valid tool for winning a debate.
Isn't that like saying political affiliations have no effect on others?
Moreover, when you say that you are "talking about the human animal, not Rand Philosophy" you are asserting your _own_ philosophical estimate of the "human animal" as if that were unarguable.