Ayn Rand on Love

A few months ago I mentioned on here I was beginning to read the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Well, I am nearing the end of this endeavor and have been trying to drive through the last 100 or so pages (I have a lot of problems with from a world view standpoint so the read is a bit tougher for me). I plan on blogging on that in particular once I am done. As you can imagine, I have lots to disagree on with Ayn Rand, an atheist… but interestingly, there is more that I do agree with than not. Over 1,100 pages, it’s tough to break that down into a quantifiable assessment.

This is also the reason I’ve been a bit distant on the blog and YouTube site as of late. But since from the comments and massive activity we are getting I felt I needed to get on tonight before I went to bed. For those of you who are new, from time to time we have specific topics where we seek a discussion with responses and back and forth exchanges. So this would be an opportunity where we are looking for you to post your PG rated and passionate comments, and others can feel free and safe to respond without hearing words like bigot, racist, hate-group and other non-productive (and honestly, tiresome) responses.

So, without further delay, I just read this passage from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand about Love. These aren’t my words, but those from a very thoughtful Atheist in the 1950s who left Russia around 1917 as a young girl under a just budding communist regime. She obviously just talking about love in either a personal relationship sense or even a society-based sense. I am not insinuating anything other than that. Feel free to share your thoughts and reflections on this.

Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtue of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from the values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to  love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them – the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love – the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue – and if you can bring your sould to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

Such was your goal – and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshiping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?” (Rand, 1957, p. 1034)

Rand, Ayn (1957). Atlas Shrugged. Penguin Group. New York.