 Now, the answer that I think we can give, the reason why I think this is, we can possibly recapture this, is that I think Inran has given us, the philosopher, the novelist, Inran has given us an idea of the self that actually is more compatible and, in fact, builds on that Enlightenment tradition. So many of you probably have heard of Inran, she wrote the books, Alice Shrugged, The Fountainhead, etc., some of you have probably read them. But it's her idea of the self, I think, that transcends a lot of these errors, that builds into the idea of self-making, and there's a great line that she has, one of her characters and one of her novels in Alice Shrugged says, and this is a brilliant example of how she brings together the idea of the self in a way that hadn't been done since the Enlightenment. As man, she writes, is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul. By soul, she simply means character or what you are, your consciousness, who you are as a person. As man is a being of self-made wealth, he is a being of self-made soul. In a sense, what she's saying is that human beings, by their nature, have a very, very deep set of requirements of how they have to go about living their lives. Number one, obviously we have our physical sustenance to attain to. We have to go after proper nutrition, proper physical culture. You need to be healthy, you need to do the things that maintain your physical self, and you have to do that yourself. Famously, there's another line where she explains, you can share a meal, but you can't digest together. We can sit down and split a steak. I'd love to do that. Hey, somebody wants to break out a steak, let's go. But you can't eat that steak and say, oh, I'll digest it for you. That's an individual operation. Ultimately, getting that steak, how we acquire it, whether we earn the money to go to the store to buy it, or whether we hunted ourselves, or whatever it happens to be, or whether we steal it from lions after they've made a kill. If you guys have seen this National Geographic video, these Bushman and Africa, they actually steal from lions. It's amazing stuff. No matter how you do that, you have to do that. This is the perspective, you ultimately are responsible for your own physical survival. Whether that means earning the money by working for someone else in order to pay for the housing, the clothing, the shelter, all of the things, the food that provide your sustenance, the workout sessions, whatever it happens to be. Like that, she says, you have a psychological self that is also self-made. You are, in a sense, your character, your soul, as it were, is just as important a thing to cultivate, who you are as a person. Now, this idea that she has fits right in with Franklin's idea, that passage that I read. And Rand calls this moral ambitiousness, right? She calls it the virtue of pride, it's moral ambitiousness. The idea that you set up your own set of values, you're not born with those values, right? As an infant, borrowing Locke's phrase, she says, you're born tabula rasa, you're born as a blank slate, right? You don't have any values that are automatically given to you. You have certain needs, right? Physical needs, psychological needs, etc. But how do you attain those? You have to figure that out. And you have to figure out what values you want to attain. Believe it or not, people can pursue different values, right? People can have different goals in life. We don't all have to be engineers, or we don't all have to play basketball, we don't all have to do the same thing. What I ran says is you have to define what you want. Figure out the means of getting it, and then pursue it. And pursue it not just half-heartedly, but as she says, with this moral ambitiousness. To define what type of person you want to be. And to do so with reference, not just to the internal, as the subjectivists often do, right? As they say, just go find yourself, man. If you need to drop some acid to do that, or if you need to just sit around for a while, or do whatever, find yourself, right? She says, find yourself within the context of something that's actually successful for your life. Figure out what values that you can pursue that are consonant with the life of a rational being that you want to pursue. Who are you? Going back to that question, who are you? When you tell someone your career, your values, your interests, that's what she means. And crucially, she says, those things are subject to, in a sense, your dominion. You get to have say over those. You, in a sense, are the ultimate arbiter of yourself. Who you are, who you become, and ultimately, crucially, the self-esteem that you derive from that, the picture of yourself. If you were to sit down, as Benjamin Franklin did, and author an autobiography, tell the story of who you are as a person. It would be much better than biography, because you get to pick and choose. What did those crucial moments along the path of your life mean to you? When did you choose those values? How did you overcome the background, right? Everybody gets those values, right? Your parents give them to you, your churches give them to you, your school gives them to you. But there's a point in your life, whether it's in your teenage years or your 20s, or some people it doesn't happen until they're much later in life. There's a point in your life where you ultimately have the choice to say, is this who I am? Do I accept or reject it? Does this make sense for me? And guess who this standard is? The standard is not your parents, your church, your school, whatever. The standard is you and your view of how that works in reality. Reality is the ultimate arbiter. Can you do this and be successful? Can you make a self that's vibrant? Or as Aristotle used to say, the philosopher Aristotle, the idea of flourishing, you don't just want to succeed in life. You want to flourish, bear physical survival, bear career survival, right? There's a lot of people that are just going on autopilot, right? They're healthy enough, they're happy enough. They have a decent enough relationship. They have a decent enough set of career goals. But are they really flourishing? No, why not? Because those goals, those relationships, that health, all of those things basically have been determined from the outside for them. They have no autonomy. True happiness, true fulfillment, true flourishing, Fine Rant says, comes from making conscious decisions about all of those issues in our lives.