Virtue

For years, my mind has been plagued with questions, asking what virtue in the context of individual rights means.

For too long, men have believed that if and when an individual is truly free, it is his or her responsibility to care not for his or herself but for others. It is said by almost all major religions and philosophies that all men should sacrifice themselves for their fellow men. Such religions will say: This is the doctrine given to man by the lamb who was slain. This is the doctrine for which one shall enter heaven. This is the doctrine of true enlightenment. This is altruism, to which we shall all surrender. For nothing is greater.

And yet, this is the doctrine of slaves. It is the scripture followed by disciples, by sheep who require a herder, by men who simply cannot and will not think for themselves. They surrender their minds and bodies to gods, to governments, to masses, to groups of men no more deserving of the adjective virtuous than these philosophies best representatives: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

For virtue is not born of so-called philosophical intuition or of passionate but irrational desires of the heart. Rather, it is born of the mind, where existence exists, A is A, and no man is required to surrender his own life for anyone or anything. That is rational egoism. That is virtue.

And to virtue's best representative, I turn not to a historical figure but a man born in fiction, an individualist created by a woman of liberty, a woman of virtue. As Howard Roark states in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead: "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."