 How would you respond to someone who calls people like Oscar Schindler altruists? I try to explain to them why they're not altruists. Why people like Oscar Schindler were egoists in a sense that they cared about their own lives, they cared about their own values, and they didn't want to live in a world in which they did not do. They didn't want to live with themselves. So you have to understand the concept of integrity. And why integrity is so crucial to being selfish, and how integrity is so crucial to being moral, to being happy, and to being successful as a human being. And to live in a world that Oscar Schindler lived in, to know you could save people who are murdered for no reason, to not stand up in the face of one of the greatest injustices in human history, would be self-destructive. So what Schindler exhibits is the characteristics of integrity, of integrity to his personal values. He wasn't an objectivist, he wasn't an egoist, but what he did was not sacrifice himself for something beyond himself. He took a risk, he risked in life for his own values, for his own virtues. He acted out his virtues, he acted out his morality. And his morality was that one does not stand adderly by when a massive injustice happens. And I think that is an egoistic value. Now even if he did not hold it as an egoistic value, it is an egoistic value. Now it's true that sometimes it's difficult in the motivations of other people to identify what is altruism and what is not. It's hard. I'll give you an example. So I put up the movie, I put up my review of the movie a couple of days ago, of It's a Wonderful Life. And I hate that movie because I think that the hero of the movie is an altruist and has sacrificed everything that he holds dear for the sake of other people. And people say, no, no, you don't get it, you missed it all. Yeah, he had a hard time and he gave up stuff. But in order to achieve a greater value family and community and the love of his clients and I think that's complete nonsense. And if you see the movie and if you see exactly what happens in the movie and what's the motivations on, what motivates him and why he's trying to commit suicide and how he runs his bank and how everything he does in his life, he does not consider his life important and he's living for the sake of others and it's destroying him and it's why he wants to commit suicide. And he is an altruist. But see, when you grow up with altruism, you're inculcated with this idea that no, no, no, no, no, because nobody, this is the point I want to make. Nobody actually advocates for altruism. Nobody actually advocates for altruism except a few philosophers and maybe a few priests on Sunday, but most Protestant Christian priests don't. If you walk into an evangelical church today, they don't advocate for altruism. Choir altruism, that is, they don't advocate for complete self-negation. They don't advocate for living for the sake of others purely and never thinking of yourself. They don't advocate for real self-sacrifice like Jesus on a cross, suffering for the sins of others, bleeding, suffering, dying for the sins of other people committed. Nobody except a few philosophers and a few preachers advocates for that because it is an unbelievably unpopular view. Nobody actually wants to hold that. Nobody wants to live that way except Mother Teresa. So what do they preach? They say, look, if you sacrifice, I mean, Jordan Peterson does this. Anyway, so what do they say? And this is why altruism is so insidious and so sneaky and so tricky and so difficult to identify. What they say is the joy you get from other people is so immense. It's so wonderful that a small sacrifice today is rewarded by massive benefits in the future. Or you should make a lot of money. Jesus wanted you to make a lot of money. Go and listen to some of these evangelical preachers. And then when you make a lot of money, give it away. Give it to these other people, right? Remember, Jesus made it possible for you to have a lot of money. So you have to share that money with them. So they've given you guilt. They've given you that you did not really earn it. Jesus made it possible for you to have a lot of money. You didn't make it yourself. So it's always, always portrayed as you'll either have a better life in this world because of the altruism, because of the sacrifice, because of helping other people. Or you'll benefit in an afterlife. I mean, Christianity was very sophisticated and understood that nobody is motivated by altruism. Nobody is motivated by pure sacrifice and suffering. So they said, oh, no, no. Judaism wasn't the sophisticated. I think one of the reasons Christianity is so much more successful than Judaism is because of this. Judaism says, whatever happens on this earth happens on this earth. There's no real afterlife. Christianity said, oh, no, no, no, no. You see, we want you to suffer in this world. We want you to sacrifice in this world. We want to give, you're going to give everything up in this world. We want the meek to inhabit the earth. We want you to help the meek and do everything we can for the meek and risk everything for the meek. But we'll give you an afterlife. So every ideology that's been successful, Marxism, fascism, communism, Christianity, provides an egoistic motivation in the afterlife. Or, you know, in the end of its wonderful life, all the people around. Oh, what a wonderful person you are. Clap, clap, clap. We all give you a little bit of money to help you out. Do I care about you people? Is this really a value to me? Are you a value to me? Is this important to me? Nobody asks those questions, but it makes you feel good. That's the reward for the years of sacrifice. For not going to Paris, for not doing the things he wanted to do, for entering a profession he didn't want, for having a career he hated, for running a business badly and into the ground because he cared about people and not about money. So he never, you know, what's the word? Called in alone when people weren't paying it, right? But you see what altruism does. Is it embeds in your subconscious? It embeds in your hierarchy of values, false values. How the community is. How other people think of you. Whether you're loved by other people. Family is a family of some floating, wonderful, intrinsic value. A million other values that you don't actually choose. You have never really thought about, you've never really analyzed, you've never really rationally figured out, are these really values for me? Is what my depositors in my bank think of me important to me? So when you see it's a wonderful life and so many of you see it's a wonderful life. Ah, these are wonderful values. It's worth all the suffering to achieve them. Where? Why? Why is it so valuable? Who said? Where did these values come from? You've thought it through, you've figured it out. Are they really the most important things in your life? And you interpret the movie to be positive because, so altruism doesn't come out as what I imagine portrays altruism as, right? It is that, but nobody preaches that. They always preach an egoistic motivation. Your life will be better in some way, either in this world or in another world. And it's not. It's not. What egoism says is not, egoism doesn't place how you treat other people as the central focus of your life or as a central focus of ethics. What ethics according to Rand means is, how do I live the best possible life for me? And what Iron Man says is, that is not obvious. That you can't just absorb from the culture. That you're not going to get from religion. That you're not going to get from your neighbors. That has to be firsthand. You, you, every one of you, has to, in a first-handed original way, figure it out for yourself using reason as your guide. You have to abandon all the junk you were told as kids, all the junk the status told you, your families told you, preachers have told you, philosophers have told you, your friends have told you, you've read in books. And you have to examine your life in a fresh, first-handed way. First-handed means you, your mind, your values, and discover, figure out what are your values. Why are they values? You need to be able to explain why they're values. What are you willing to pursue then? What's more important and what's less important? You should have a whole hierarchy of values. Why? You have to be able to answer why. Not as some rationalization to justify a value you absorbed from the culture or from your parents or from your preacher. But why rationally is this a value in your life for you to make you happier, to make you living a better life? Why is it necessary for your survival as you, as a human being that has your particular characteristics? That's what's unique about Iron Man. That's what's unique about Objectivism. And that everything else is infected with altruism. Now, was Oskar Schindler infected? I'm sure some of his motivation might be a feeling of guilt, unearned guilt, maybe earned guilt, because he helped the Nazis. But I think most of his motivation, the little I know about Oskar Schindler, was basically a human decency, a integrity, a sense of justice, and those are selfish, self-interested values.