'Self-Esteem' and 'Self-Defense' By Ayn Rand

Self-Esteem

"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life:

Reason — Purpose — Self-esteem.

Reason, as his only tool of knowledge

Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve

Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living."

- Ayn Rand

"By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.


Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality." - Ayn Rand

Read more about Self-Esteem @: Ayn Rand Lexicon

Self-Defense

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.


If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it. - Ayn Rand

Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked.

But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service

which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life.

- Ayn Rand

Read more about Self-Defense @ Ayn Rand Lexicon