Living a Rational Life in an Irrational Society – Book Club

Summary

Ayn Rand says one important part of living rationally in an irrational society is to pronounce judgment.

In short, if someone attacks your values, say something! Especially if silence could be mistaken as sanction of evil.

If you don’t pronounce judgment, both good and evil know they can’t expect anything from you. So by default, silence favors evil and betrays good. There’s no such thing as moral neutrality or ‘grayness’.

To pronounce judgment, you don’t need to be omniscient or infallible. But you do need integrity.

Many people are afraid of being judged. They like to say “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” They hope to get a moral blank check by writing one for others.

But the reality is that people have to make choices. To make choices, they need moral values. So moral neutrality hurts their ability to make choices. It’s also a slippery slope toward evasions. When people are morally ‘gray’, they say things like ‘no one is fully good or fully bad.’ That just helps evil along.

The moral principle people should adopt instead is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

Judging means “evaluat[ing] a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” It’s not easy and you can’t do it automatically through feelings. It requires deliberate, rational thought. It must be well-reasoned and can’t be arbitrary.

Judging does not mean going around offering your opinion unsolicited or saving others. It does mean two things: “(a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.”

Sometimes you can just say you disagree, other times you may need to state your views more fully. It depends on your interlocutor and on context.

Pronouncing judgment protects the clarity of your thoughts against society’s irrational background.

Ultimately, society is run either by “the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values” or by “the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.”

So speak out when someone attacks your values.