The Anatomy of Compromise Book Club
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People are losing their ability to think and act on principles. But they need principles to set long-range goals and make decisions. Without them, people become their own destroyers. Modern philosophy is to blame because it attacks reason.
To stop this suicidal trend, we need to understand the following rules about principles and the relationship between principles and goals:
First, when two men or groups are in conflict while having the same basic principles, the more consistent one will win.
Since they are in conflict, at least one of them must be inconsistent. So the one with the clearer vision of his goal, who more consistently works toward it, will win. The less consistent one just hastens his adversary’s victory and becomes weaker in the process.
This dynamic applies regardless of the merits of their shared principles.
Example: republicans vs democrats. Both agree that the government should interfere with the economy. They just disagree on implementation details. Democrats are more consistently committed to growing government power; the republicans just end up “me-too’ing” them. Recent example.
As a result, government control has been growing over the decades. It will continue to grow until the communists replace socialists and ‘achieve’ “universal immolation”.
This trend can seem inevitable. Some people mistake it for historicism, but it can be reversed by a change of basic principles.
Second, when two men or groups collaborate while having different basic principles, the more evil or irrational one will win.
Mixing opposing basic principles favors bad ones and drives out the good ones. “What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?”
When good and evil collaborate, it hurts good and helps evil. The good has nothing to gain from evil, while evil stands to gain everything from the good.
Example: collaboration between an honest businessman and a swindler. The swindler does not contribute to the success of the business; the honest man’s reputation ends up luring in more victims than the swindler could have fooled on his own.
Another example: membership of the Soviet Union in the UN. The resulting collaboration between the West and the Soviet Union gave the latter unearned respect, moral sanction, and access to resources. As a result, the Western world has been swallowed by “cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt…”
Third, defining opposite basic principles clearly and openly helps rationality; hiding or evading them helps irrationality.
The rational side of a conflict wants to be understood. It’s in harmony with reality, so it has nothing to hide. But the irrational side “has to deceive, to confuse, to evade, to hide its goals.”
The good, the rational must be actively upheld; the bad, the irrational is achieved only by default, by not acting. Construction is hard; destruction is easy.
Lessons
Adhere to your principles with consistency.
Never mix opposing basic principles! Leave irrational/evil people to the consequences of their errors.
Be open and transparent; don’t hide things.
A criticism that I often hear when people try to live by their principles is something along the lines of "you think you're better than us?" This kind of criticism has often stopped people from defending and living by their principles, especially if they have been seen violating their own principles.
A defense against this is that if someone continually brings up past mistakes in order to hang them over another person, then it might be in that person's best interest to end the relationship. Give warnings, and be clear, but if no change is observed, one has the right and the obligation to end the relationship. And as for being better than others, I view it as another form of wealth. Some people are better than others financially. But that isn't because "that's who they are" or "born that way" or "got lucky." It was because they had the skills to make money. Being in a better place morally is both possible and desirable.
Further reading:
@lola-trimble (as I recall) asked, what is an example of a principle? There’s the principle of pronouncing judgment when silence could reasonably be interpreted as sanction of evil: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/how-does-one-lead-a-rational-life-in-an-irrational-society/
@tom-nassis asked, when can you compromise? https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html
It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one's product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one's demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one's product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.
There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one's property.
Rand writes (p. 161):
The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil), except a share of its failures and crimes; the irrational has everything to gain from the rational: a share of its achievements and values. An industrialist does not need the help of a burglar in order to succeed; a burglar needs the industrialist’s achievement in order to exist at all. What collaboration is possible between them and to what end?
…
Consider the case of a business partnership: if one partner is honest and the other is a swindler, the latter contributes nothing to the success of the business; but the reputation of the former disarms the victims and provides the swindler with a wide-scale opportunity which he could not have obtained on his own.
I agree with her message that good shouldn’t collaborate with evil, but I don’t think this example works well. The reason somebody might go into business with a swindler is that they are tempted because the swindler does have something to offer them.
Maybe the swindler has a lot of money and offers to invest. The honest man might be too tempted to pass that up.
I do think the honest man should look for money elsewhere. But in such a case, it’s not true that he had “nothing” to gain from this partnership. It might be more accurate to say that there’s a net loss, or that overall the partnership is not worth it.
As I recall from some of the characters in Atlas Shrugged, Rand knew all this – it might just be a matter of wording things more clearly.