 One of the things about Ayn Rand that usually like average people get pissed off is about the happiness, the selfishness, the kind of individual responsibility. Yeah, getting pissed off at happiness makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Why do you think there's so much people that are actually not willing to put time into their happiness and pursue their dreams, they rather be in a kind of negative echo chamber with all the destructive ideas? Well, I think it's a number of things. One is, unfortunately, a lot of people are lazy. Happiness requires effort and taking care of yourself requires real energy. It requires actually thinking about it, requires engagement. So there's real effort and energy required. I think the second is that it goes against all of our teachings, everything we're taught from our priests to our family to our philosophers. We are taught that to be happy is to be selfish. Selfishness we're taught is bad. Our moral responsibility, our primary ethical responsibility is to other people. And the most noble thing you can do is to be selfless. You become a saint or you become a good person by sacrificing, by giving up your time. And that is kind of baked in primarily through Christianity. But even secular people, while they have maybe abandoned the mysticism of Christianity, they hold on to this moral code because that is all they know. And they've been taught that the alternative, the only alternative to it is a kind of nastiness. That is, if you're not going to sacrifice, if you're not going to be selfless, you're going to be quote selfish, which means to them, you're going to lie and steal and cheat and exploit other people and just be a horrible human being. And between those choices, they don't want to be a horrible human being. So they give up on life in a sense and they'd rather do that. And it's hard for them to think that there's a third alternative. And that is to be self-interested in a kind of a rational sense, to be somebody who cares about one's own well-being. And that doesn't mean exploiting other people, quite the contrary. It means trading. It means creating win-win relationships with other people. But that's the Abokai's effort and it's hard. And it's a new philosophy. It's a new set of ideas. Look, for 2,000 years, since Aristotle, 2,500, 3,000 years, nobody has thought of morality as egoistic as a pro-self-interest other than Iron Man. So it turns out it's quite an achievement to think in those terms, particularly with the background of Christianity. So it's going to take a while for those ideas to filter through. So it's actually more moral to be egoistic in that sense. Well, I would say the only moral thing to do is to be egoistic, because the morality is for what? What's the purpose of morality? Morality is for the purpose of living a good life. Who would live a good life? You. Right? It's centered in you. This is Aristotle's whole view of morality is it's a set of principles to help you achieve a flourishing life, to help you achieve success in life. And that's Rand's view. It's how do human beings survive, how do human beings thrive? How do we achieve great things? Well, how do I survive? How do I thrive? So the beneficiary of your action should be you. That means personal responsibility. That means responsibility over your life and over your actions and over your thoughts. And that is morality. So the idea of self-sacrifice, the idea of being selfless, is in that sense, it's anti-morality. It doesn't make any sense. It's a morality of death. It's an anti-life morality, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, because the whole point of morality is to teach human beings how to live. Interesting. I think it's somehow correlating with the thing from that the people are too much tied to their bodies. And when you are producing always the stress and the stress hormones, it's just like sinking and you cannot get out. So basically, the more you are influenced by your body hormones, the less it's a chance that you can get out. So basically, the more ideas you are able to process, the less you are attached to your body processes. Because your body automatically wants you to basically feel the stress all the time and be destructive. And when you have some cheap meal, you want to go for 10 cheap meals and so on. So you're programmed for destruction inside your body. I don't think you're programmed for destruction inside your body. I think, again, bad ideas lead to bad body processes. So I think there's a mind-body integration. But self-control is hard. Yeah, but if you're taught, not to have self-control, but also if you're taught to follow your emotions, or if you're taught that reason and rationality are beyond you, you're not capable of them. If you're taught that your body is sinful, then all of that creates conflict and creates problems. But if you're taught the harmony of body and mind, if you're taught that pleasure is good, if you're taught that reason is what guides you towards proper pleasure, towards the long-term satisfaction and towards long-term happiness, then it's far easier to skip the silly temptations of the moment and to structure everything in terms of how of your long-term happiness. And you're not doing it in the name of anti-pleasure, in the name of something above and beyond the body, some mystical spirit. You're doing it because this is the best thing for your body and your mind. So it's all about the ideas we have. It's all about the habits we pick up as children, which are guided by our parents' ideas. So it's very much our bodies are guided by the set of ideas we have. And when we have conflicts in our mind, that manifests itself in stress because we have conflicts, then it manifests in conflicts in our body. Is this set of worldview, is this for like minority of people and it will never be mainstream? We have to always struggle to get the idea of reason out there? I don't think so. I think it can be a mainstream idea, at least in a certain sense. That is not everybody's going to be a philosopher, not everybody's going to dig deep into this. But if it becomes the norm in society, if the intellectuals hold these ideas and convey them to the public and people start doing them because that's kind of the norm, then I think they're self-enforcing and then I think it becomes a second nature. So I think that the fight really is, the battle really is, to capture the intellectuals or really to replace the intellectuals. It's to create a next generation of intellectuals so that what people hear are these positive messages about their self-worth, their positive messages about the effort required and the reward that the effort achieves. So if we can capture the intellectual high ground, if we can replace the current intellectuals then I think it's easy to get the rest of the people on board with these ideas. It's like managing well your finances, being the good health, basically the same thing as with ideas, right? Yes and it's funny because people do listen to podcasts about how to manage their health and how to manage their finances but that is all on a background in which says, don't take care of yourself too much, don't be too self-interested, remember you should feel guilty about your success because you're now being Mother Teresa, you're not going out into Africa and saving poor people. So it's this constant conflict inside of people's minds which generates guilt, which I think is part of what creates these disharmony within the body, the stress that relates to, on the one hand, yeah, I have this feeling I have to take care of my finances, I have to do self-help, I have to learn how to meditate, whatever but on the other hand I feel guilty because I'm taking care of myself and I'm supposed to do these other things and that creates all kind of cognitive dissonance. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me, you get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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