Morality is movement. If the moral sense is not vital, it is dead. Persisting absolutism in specifics is death. I say this in particular with regard to people like Ayn Rand, who I now realize qualified on all 9 diagnostic criteria as having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One trait of such people is that you are either with them or against them. There is no gray.
This trait in her appealed to many people, drifting as they were (and are) in a world of moral relativism. You are confused, and you want someone to cry out “this is wrong, and this is right”.
This is, however, the social basis of Fascism, whether of the nationalistic, racist, or classist (Communistic) variety. The cry for Absolutism is the cry to be submerged into a uniform and very dull mass of people all saying the same thing. If they are all saying: we are unique and elite individuals–as Objectivists under Rand’s direct influence did, and as many seemingly even now do–they are still chanting in unison.
As I see, there are two principle meaningful sources of happiness: effective work, characterized by “Flow”; and effective love, characterized by taking pleasure in the happiness of others.
Now, we see this demand from time to time that our role in life is to “serve others”. I don’t accept that this is our primary task. It is rejection of this idea that Objectivists find so appealing in Rand’s philosophy. What if you don’t WANT to serve others? What if it pisses you off? What if the people you are supposed to serve are whiny, self indulgent jackasses?
I have an answer for this, in motion. As I often do, I will use the analogy of the particle and the wave: you must be both, and be able to transition back and forth. To be interesting, to be someone whose entire sense of personal value does not depend on others, you must have the capacity for de facto narcissism, in the self absorption of hard creative work. When you are a creative INDIVIDUAL, you are particulate, you are separate.
Even clinical narcissists, in the throes of real creativity, are intensely interesting, and pull people in. That is what Rand did.
But the monad is alone; it can never be fully satisfied without regular absorption in something larger: hence the wave, the satisfaction of helping other people also learn how to do effective work, which includes the “work” of being happy with you, and the work you do being happy with them: being empathetic, supportive, comforting when it is needed, and cajoling when that is needed.
Above all, one must remember the principle that growth is the task–growth as individuals, growth as members of a social group, and eventually growth by default as a global community. This in my view is the nature of Goodness, which I view as the most USEFUL purpose of life.
I will reiterate that I do have absolute values, but that these values can get deployed in such various ways, that they should enable people to keep their eyes on the goal, and not get stuck in dogmatism. Those values, again, are: the rejection of self pity; perseverance (whose most basic element is not killing yourself); and perceptual breathing/perceptual movement, which in its most basic form is the persistent and habitual rereconciliation of abstractions with observable reality, and in particular of the connection (or not) between intention and outcome.
As an interesting exercise of that last, one might I think productively ask what Ayn Rand’s philosophy has “acted to”, in Hayek’s sense. It is clearly not all bad, but much of it is. Plainly it acts to build narcissists, since that is her ideal.