INDIVIDUALIST ETHICS

philosopher Ayn Rand's perhaps greatest achievement was to devise an ethical code for what constituted the individualist/trader syndrone, tho she was not aware of it as such... she was just aware that the code which had been used since before recorded history was an inhuman code at base - and she wanted one which fitted the proper nature of a human being... in so doing, of course, she was upsetting and altering the course of history of the past twenty-five hundred years... she rejected the sacrificial view of humanity, proclaiming that each person has theright to exist for his/her OWN sake, not to be a slave/serf and exist for the sake of others... she pointed out that this was a sum-plus world, not a zero-sum one - but that it required CREATORS to increase the wealth, not thieves, and that the only way this can be achieved is if each person is free to do what, in effect, comes naturally [tho it has to be learned]: use the faculty of reason... bridging the 'is/ought' problem that confounded philosophers for centuries, she proclaimed that what is rational is for the good, and what is irrational is the evil - because a human's primary means of survival as a human is to be rational, even tho that is a matter of choice [the 'free-will' factor] and the alternative is suicidal being... she pointed out, in other words, that the proper way of looking at the world is not thru the lens of 'otherism', but thru the eyes of one's own - 'selfism'... furthermore, that to do so would NOT result in the acting of a brute - as her detractors smeared - but that of the trader, who gives value for value, non-coercively...all of the philosophies of 'otherism' were and are anti-worldly... only a philosophy of 'selfism', which observes the world OBJECTIVELY, and is for the benefit of and well-being of a person in THIS world, the world that counts - the REAL world... this is because, in her system-building of a non-contradictory view of existance, she tied the ethics in with the metaphysics of the primacy of existance, thereby eliminating any supernatural necessity or implication what so ever - ALL of that was a fantasy, inimical to the well-being of any human, and should be discarded... what repercussions has this to Art?