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A number of years ago, I found myself in a precarious position. Months before, I had quit an excruciatingly unpleasant job after years of struggling to find another, more satisfying position. A second college degree I had obtained while working had led nowhere. The small business I had started as a means to improve my economic situation had, instead, left me with a large debt I could no longer handle. With considerable trepidation, I had decided to undergo the slow torture of bankruptcy. Selling my house at a considerable loss, I had moved into a small efficiency apartment for the summer while I regrouped and tried to decide how to proceed with the next phase of my disrupted life.
My money ran out along with my lease. Believing my landlord wanted to inspect the apartment on the last day of the month, I asked a friend if I could stay with him and his wife that night after I turned in my key. His answer left me incredulous and angry.
"We don't get many evenings alone together because of our work schedules," he said, "so we don't want you to come over."
Standing in the phone booth from which I called, I told him that if they refused, I would have to sleep in my car (which did not even work at the time).
My friend (I'll call him Charley) told me that according to my own philosophy, I should realize that their personal, selfish desire to spend the evening together had to take precedence over my own needs.
Rather than argue, I hung up and called my landlord, prepared to face a night sheltered in my aging automobile. To my surprise, the inspection was delayed until the morning.
Years passed before I could bring myself to deal with my friend again.
Like many people who are vaguely familiar with Objectivism and who only imperfectly grasp its principles of individualism and selfishness, Charley did not truly understand what they mean or how to implement those ideas in the context of an actual relationship.
The stereotype of individualism Charley used to dismiss my concerns stands in stark contrast with the rational selfishness promoted by Objectivists.
Communitarians promote the straw man version of individualism that is so widely embraced and so roundly condemned in our society. Anything that smacks of "selfishness" is pronounced as evil and anti-social by these proponents of "community." This distorted, Nietzschean image of the atomistic individual who cares nothing for others or their situations, who blithefully plows ahead with his impulses regardless of his action's impact on those around him, is difficult to defend...which is precisely why communitarians constantly offer it as their foil. Their campaign against "selfishness" and "individualism" would be much more difficult to sustain if it honestly confronted the robust vision developed by Ayn Rand.
The power of false egoism in our culture was amply -- if perversely -- demonstrated when Charley appealed to it in deflecting my request. To him, I had no grounds to object. After all, he said, he was simply doing what he wanted to do. He had no duty to help me. How could I possibly complain about him placing his desires above my own when I constantly spoke of the importance of selfishness?
Charley was right, of course, that no duty required that he aid me. Yet an appeal to duty had nothing to do with my reasons for coming to him. Friendship and personal responsibility, however, did require that he accede to my plea.
As Ayn Rand said, "[T]here is no such thing as 'duty.' There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of 'duty': _the Law of Causality_.... Reality confronts man with a great many 'musts,' but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: 'You must, if --' and the 'if' stands for man's choice: '-- if you want to achieve a certain goal.'" ("Causality vs Duty," Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 98 - 99.)
What Charley neglected to consider was what it actually means to be a "friend." A friend is someone who shares certain core values with you and who acts upon those values; he is someone to whom you can turn for help upon occasion. If you are in need of assistance and it can be given non-sacrificially, then your friend should offer that aid, not out of any sense of duty but from loyalty to his own values as embodied in you. This loyalty is an example of implementing the virtues of integrity and justice.
"Integrity is loyalty to one's convictions and values...of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality.... If one's friend is in trouble, one should act to help him..." ("The Ethics of Emergencies," The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 46.) Friendship is the "spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character" ("The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, p. 31) and as such is an example of justice. A rational person "...honors scrupulously the obligations which he chooses. The obligation to keep one's promises is one of the most important elements in proper human relationships, the element that leads to mutual confidence..." ("Causality vs Duty," p. 101).
In refusing my request, my friend was implicitly telling me that he valued one evening among many with his wife more than he did helping a friend who was broke and had no place to stay. In essence, Charley wanted to "have his cake and eat it, too," i.e., he wanted to be able to call himself my "friend" without engaging in those behaviors which help constitute that very concept. By not honoring the obligations he implicitly accepted when choosing me as a friend, he violated the loyalty he owed me, violated the trust I had placed in him as a source of support if and when I fell upon hard times.
Eventually, Charley and I reconciled, but not before I made it clear why I took his earlier rejection as a betrayal and why I would not tolerate such disloyalty again. If he wanted to be my friend, there were certain standards of behavior he would have to uphold. Because a rationally selfish person cherishes the values he and his social relationships represent to him, he can accept no less from those who would call themselves his friends.
