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For my niece’s 21^st birthday, I gave her a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness. The morning papers were filled with the hysteria of a world gone mad: bloody communal rights, war, corruption, mass suicides, political vandalism – and I thought: here’s a book that will illumine the world for her, help her understand why it seems to be collapsing and why a new rational code of morality is needed, provide her with a fresh perspective on love and happiness, show her what it means to be a complete individual, guide her to becoming a better human being.

At its most basic The Virtue of Selfishness can be called an intellectual chicken soup for the soul. Though supporters of Ayn Rand’s philosophy might howl at the blasphemy, this is a self-help book in the true and fullest sense of the word: an extraordinary collection of essays that offers a worldly philosophy on how to be happy and how to live a life that is in harmony with man’s true nature. The powerful principle upon which Rand’s credo spins is something the world seems to lose faith in everyday. Not faith itself, but Reason.

Yet, as Rand points out, it is by reason alone that man has created his world. Without his ability to reason he would have perished, for unlike lesser organisms man cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. An animal survives instinctively, but man must discover for himself how to plant and grow food, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to perform an appendectomy. Everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him, by his own choice, effort and mind. Man does not even think automatically. He has to make an effort. He can choose not to think, and often does, but he is not free to avoid the consequences.

Perhaps this is why the morning papers make you feel the world is going mad. People clearly choose not to be rational. Pure reason and knowledge as a guiding light have been substituted by desires and feelings, and by this very nebulous thing called spiritual faith. The outcome of all this is a surfeit of negative emotions: fear, aggression, hate, confusion. We blame it on stress and the tensions of modern life, the breakup of families, the loneliness of city life, even something called spiritual bankruptcy. The overall feeling is one of having lost control. This sense of helplessness leads man to forget himself in alcohol, drugs, in orgies of eating, in partying and shopping, sexual escapades, religious fervour. People run to gurus and godmen, to temples, because they don’t want to think for themselves any more, nor take responsibility.

Why is this happening? Because the old morality has failed. Because chaos or madness reign where reason has been dethroned. Because the old moralists claim that ‘ethics is a subjective issue outside of reason and reality.’ As a result, says Rand, in the choice of his values, his actions, his pursuits, his life’s goals man has always been guided (misguided is a better word perhaps) not by the clear light of reason, but by feelings, by whim in short. Whether his own or whether the whim of a presiding society or religion.

But if civilization is to be saved, it is this premise of ethics that must be challenged, declares Rand. But the first, the vital, question is: does man need a code of values at all – and why? And here you begin to get to the core of Rand’s moral philosophy. At the most basic level, the functions of all living organisms, including man, are actions generated by the organism itself, which are directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life. The ultimate value, therefore, for all living organisms is Life. Taken logically to its conclusion, man’s life is the standard of value for him: that which furthers his life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

An animal’s senses provide it with an automatic code of values, an automatic knowledge of what is good or benefits him, and what is evil or what endangers its life. Unlike man it instinctively avoids that which is bad. Unlike man it cannot choose to destroy itself. Man does not know automatically what is good and what evil; he has to discover it for himself – using the only tool he has, his reason – and he must discover it because on such knowledge his happiness, his very survival depends. And this is the task and necessity of ethics. To answer: which are the right goals for man to pursue? which are the values his survival requires? Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, it follows that that which is proper to the life of a rational being is considered the good, and that which negates or opposes it is the evil.

According to Rand’s Objectivist ethics, man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man – in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life. Rational happiness, in short, is the psychological goal, and suffering, a destructive state to be avoided. There are three cardinal virtues: rationality, productiveness and pride. Through productive work you make possible the fullest and the most purposeful use of your mind to sustain life. Pride, or moral ambitiousness, recognises that just ‘as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.’

But rationality remains man’s basic virtue. The basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocusing the mind, the refusal to see or to know. Rationality as a virtue means the acceptance of reason as the only source of one’s knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. By being rational, you become a person of integrity, one who is independent, honest, and just. But in a conservative society like ours independent thinking is not encouraged. Most young people (as a recent survey showed) accept without question the inherited prejudices, beliefs and values of their parents. The concept of individualism barely exists, and if it does it is largely what Rand calls counterfeit individualism – the desire to be different and cool, which is expressed in meaningless affectation, in token rebellion or surface unconventionality. But the essence of an individualist is intellectual independence; he is the one who declares, ‘I believe it because I see in reason it is true’.

There is much such wisdom in The Objectivist Ethics, the first essay in The Virtue of Selfishness. And it is filled with many startling insights like this one: ‘The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.’ Or this one: ‘Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from another man’s character.’

I believe this is a book everyone – young people especially – should read in all seriousness, absorb, and try to live by. By this I do not mean it offers The Complete Answer to the problems faced by mankind. No philosophy, book or faith can do that. To believe so is to make a mockery of it, and to elevate Ayn Rand herself into some kind of a guru, albeit a rational one. Those who accept someone as their guru give up thinking for themselves, and no self-respecting individual should ever do that.

My problem with Ayn Rand is that she makes no allowances for the frailties of human nature. The cult of moral grayness, she calls it. Good and evil, black and white, these are all she will allow, much as the creators of children’s fairy tales. In her novels, which purport to demonstrate her philosophy in action, the protagonists are all superheroes. I read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead as a schoolgirl, more than twenty years ago. But what I still remember is how unreal her characters were. Romantic, yes, but cold and, ultimately, unconvincing and uninteresting.

What Rand fails to integrate into her philosophy, into her understanding of human nature is the vital component called imagination. Without imagination, man would not have thought it necessary to invent the wheel or find a cure for cancer. The same imagination which led him to invent a god, led physicists to theorise about the creation of the world. As Samuel Johnson writes: ‘There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason. . . No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.’ We might not even have love, for surely the capacity to love has much to do with our imagination no matter how coldly one might try to assess it? ‘The heart has its reasons,’ wrote Pascal, ‘which reason knows nothing of.’

The question is how does one judiciously combine the two, how does one temper reason with imagination? We can leave it to our intuition and to our feelings: ‘Much madness is divinest sense’ wrote Emily Dickinson. But as rational beings we should choose reason to provide us with the answer, and be grateful that we have the ability to reason at all. Because loss of reason, as demonstrated in the truly insane, is possibly the most terrible, the most heartrending thing that can happen to any human being. Use your imagination to think about it.