I have been reading and thinking about one paragraph a day from “Galt’s Speech” from Atlas Shrugged. When I got to paragraph 75, I decided it needed two days of thinking. Then I decided I should share my chewing of this meaty and important paragraph with you.

Here is the paragraph:

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. (Ayn Rand, “Galt’s Speech,” paragraph 75)

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.”

Elsewhere Ayn Rand defines a whim as “a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.” The point here is that when you start with, “But I WANT it!” as an out-of-context absolute, you do not get to happiness. Desires are a product of your past choices and actions and your present state of awareness. They can be pointing you in a direction of self-destruction. Unless and until you introspect and understand the cause of each desire and validate that it is consistent with life and happiness, you are playing Russian Roulette.

“Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge.”

There can be a short-term pleasure when you indulge in something, say, overeating or overdrinking. But what makes it an indulgence is that you do this at the expense of bigger values — the obvious one being your health. You feel good temporarily, but you then feel bloated or headachy. And if you continue to indulge to excess, you start getting serious problems that affect your ability to concentrate, work on a regular schedule, and pursue other values. This kind of indulgence is a sacrifice of your happiness to a short-term relief.

“Happiness is a noncontradictory state of joy—a joy without penalty or guilt—”

Happiness is clean and pure joy. There are no conflicting emotions triggered — though there can be compatible emotions that intensify the joy, such as love, pride, confidence, and gratitude. And there are no thoughts that need to be pushed out of awareness to maintain that positive state. There is no background self-criticism or second thoughts. There is no background fear that if you examine this success too closely, you’ll find it’s not much of an achievement.

“a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction,”

To have a joy that “does not clash with any of your values,” all of your values need to be consistent with one another. There are two parts to this. First, your value-hierarchy needs to be integrated. Your values need to be organized into means-ends hierarchies and prioritized among each other, so that you can easily determine what matters most at any time. Second, the knowledge underlying your choices of values needs to be integrated without contradiction into a whole. Both your knowledge and your values need to be integrated.

Any failure to integrate your values and knowledge will work for your own destruction. First, it will create unending conflict, which is the most common form of suffering. If the conflicts get big enough, they lead to paralysis. Conflict is the biggest waster of a person’s life. The time and energy you spend in conflict are time and energy that result in no benefit to you. Conflict is an alert that you need to resolve some contradiction in your knowledge or set some priorities.

More deeply, if you don’t take the time to find and resolve contradictions and/or face the fact that you need to prioritize, you train your motivational system to fear and avoid these critical thinking processes. You set your emotional mechanism against your means of survival.

“not the joy of escaping from your own mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power,”

The joy of “escaping from your own mind” is the pleasure of buffering. Buffering means doing a pleasurable activity to avoid feeling negative feelings about something else. Buffering cannot make you happy!

If you are experiencing negative emotions about something, those feelings come from something. An emotion is based on all of your past choices, actions, and experience. The affect system has evolved to draw your attention to something that appears to warrant attention. You need to know what is causing the negative feelings and if there is something you need to do about the situation! You cannot avoid feeling bad by avoiding the most obvious negative feelings. Running away from feeling negative feelings creates vicious cycles that reinforce self-destructive behavior and make it harder to find out what caused the problem in the first place.

It is impossible to avoid all unpleasant experiences. That doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. Whether an unpleasant event contributes to happiness or not depends entirely on how you handle it. If you face unpleasant facts and figure out what is in your best interest to do about them, you mourn your losses effectively and develop a deep pride and confidence that changes the quality of the experience into something compatible with happiness.

Developing the ability to manage emotions and reorganize your knowledge and values to achieve your rational self-interest is how you use your mind’s fullest power. It is how you ensure that the thinking you do is as effective as it can be, given all you know.

“not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real,”

This one stumped me for a bit because I don’t remember nor can I imagine any joy in faking reality, even short-term pleasure. But I do know that when I was young, I wasted a lot of time getting joy in daydreaming — and that joy is nothing compared to the joy “of achieving values that are real.”

“not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.”

This one puzzled me a bit, too, because there are happy drunks and angry drunks. I think happy drunks get some relief because they drop all self-criticism. That can be a short-term pleasure. The angry drunks drop all self-responsibility and get a little pleasure in blaming others for their troubles — which is likely a relief from self-doubt.

In contrast, a producer has an objective basis for joy. He can see that he took responsibility. He took action. He can take action again. The results of his action are good. When he pays attention to these objective facts, he experiences pride, confidence, joy, and love.

“Happiness is possible only to a rational man,”

Note she says it’s “possible.” Happiness is not guaranteed even to a rational man. You can be rational even if you have some distorted motivation that creates ongoing conflict that you continue to deal with. For example, a person who has not yet weaned himself of pervasive self-criticism will not feel all of the joy of the producer described in the previous bit. His success will be undercut by self-critical thoughts such as how he could have done better, or should have done it faster, or now has to stop gloating and look at all the other things that need to be done. You can always find something to criticize.

The rational thing to do when this happens is to introspect the feelings, see if they are based on valid concerns (let’s stipulate they are not), correct any exaggerations or distortions, and then remind yourself how it’s more important to celebrate your achievement right now and that this is not the time for self-criticism. That helps you re-focus on your achievement and experience your deserved joy from it.

That said, this process is not a zero-effort, totally pleasurable undertaking. It is an investment in your future happiness that you do as a rational person because you value your mind and yourself, you know you deserve happiness, and you are willing to work for it.

“the man who desires nothing but rational goals,” 

You may be thinking, “Wait, you can’t control your desires.” True, but you control your goals. A goal is an intention you set to achieve a specific, real-world outcome. That intention needs to be rational and the outcome needs to be valid.

You do not desire a goal before setting it. You desire a value, then figure out a rational goal that you can achieve in the world by your action that will gain that value. It is after you figure out the goal that will do this that you immediately feel desire for the goal.

Bottom line: do not set goals haphazardly! They need to be rational! (Not that that is trivially easy. See my course on “Rational Goal-Setting” in the Thinking Lab.)

“seeks nothing but rational values,”

Goals are intentional. But you can have values that form in your memory banks as a result of experiences without your intentionally having chosen them. A rational value is one that has been vetted to see that it is in your rational self-interest.

For example, it is possible to form defense values without realizing it. A defense value is a value that has gotten disproportionately strengthened beyond its actual benefit to your life. So, for example, if you have a problem with overeating or overdrinking, likely eating and drinking are illogically important to you and drive compulsive behavior.

The point here is — yes, these are stored in your memory banks as strong values, and they will create strong emotions, but as a rational being you do not act on emotions. You stop to understand the underlying evaluation and vet it before acting. If you find that the value that caused an emotion is not rational, you stop seeking it! This is the #1 way that you reduce the strength of a stored value. (But of course, you need to do that without triggering a sense of self-deprivation. I don’t want to imply this is trivially easy, either. See my course on “Self-Direction: Theory and Practice” in the Thinking Lab.)

“and finds his joy in nothing but rational action.”

Is there joy in irrational action? Yes, unfortunately, there is. There is such a thing as the desire for destruction. This is the joy that haters get when they insult or hurt someone else. Or that looters get in wantonly destroying businesses.

If you, as a rational person, feel a desire for destruction, it’s a red alert. It does not mean you should feel guilty or embarassed. It means that you need to stop in your tracks and understand where it comes from because there is something for you to untangle. Good you noticed! This is your chance to disintegrate some old baggage that is messing with your life and happiness.

Bottom line: You must not act on a desire for destruction — not only is it an anti-life action, it will reinforce the self-destructive motivation that underlies it. Perhaps it also needs to be said that if you do act on it, you won’t get joy from that action because you will feel instantly guilty and horrified at what you’ve done. As with all mistakes, the sooner you stop and make reparation, the better.

Chewing Ayn Rand

That’s the paragraph, clause by clause. You can see how much is packed into a few lines. When I re-read this paragraph, I felt like it had taken me 30 years to understand it in detail, and I still had more to learn from it. That’s the value of chewing Ayn Rand’s writings, one paragraph — or one line — at a time.