The Road to Moral Grayness
In last week’s short, I pointed out that, tragically, myriad people do not actualize their highest potential. Rather than remaining morally white, i.e. consistently moral, they attempt to take a middle-of-the-road approach and become gray. Sometimes, they judge independently, produce vigorously, and display genuine pride. At other times, however, they are dependent upon others, fail to create values, and live in a penumbra of self-doubt. These observations lead to the questions of when and why people breach morality and sacrifice (some of) their highest values.
First and foremost, it is interesting to note that most children and adolescents do not consciously engage in life-destroying actions. It is, of course, true that many adolescents make mistakes while growing up. At the same time, though, most of them are convinced that the world is an open place in which they can succeed if they make an honest attempt. “For the few brief years of his adolescence,” American philosopher Ayn Rand points out, “a young person’s future is urgently, though dimly, real to him; he senses that he has to determine it in some unknown way.”1
In order to achieve their values, here, on earth, and in reality, most adolescents make idealistic plans. They envision what life has to offer, pondering, for instance, which career they would like to pursue and which values and virtues their future partner should display. Optimistically, they then strive to realize these aims by studying and dating. As Rand explains this attitude:
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter. In one’s youth that conviction is experienced as a self-evident absolute, and one is unable fully to believe that there are people who do not share it. That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.2
Why do so many people display this life-affirming attitude in their youth yet sell out while growing up? The answer, as so often, is bad philosophical ideas developed, upheld, institutionalized, and propagated in our educational system.
Every child needs a proper education. Properly defined, education consists of helping a child learn how to make independent judgments in order to deal with real life. “The only purpose of education,” Rand writes, “is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality.”3 Tragically, modern education has failed dismally in providing philosophical and intellectual guidance to adolescents. Modern educators resoundingly reject the idea that education is supposed to teach a child how to think. Rather, its aim is to destroy the students’ minds. “The goal of modern education,” Read emphasizes, “is to stunt, stifle and destroy the students’ capacity to develop … an [intellectual] attitude, as well as its conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions.”4
According to modern educators, the purpose of education is to teach adolescents not how to reason on their own but how to socialize with others. Pace their theories, the success of a proper education is determined not by how well students can analyze and explain a problem but by how well they get along with their peers. Yet this process of adjustment is precisely what ensures that adolescents fail to make independent judgments, form rational convictions, and fight for life-affirming values. What matters according to modern education is not mind but feelings, not convictions but beliefs, not man but mob, not right but might. The result of this approach is that all the students who compromise their convictions due to peer pressure lose what Rand terms “the integrity of their minds.”5
It is this loss of integrity which is key to understanding why most people become gray over time. “Integrity,” American philosopher Leonard Peikoff succinctly states, “is loyalty in action to one’s convictions and values.”6 What the virtue of integrity demands is that, as Rand explains, man “may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him.”7
Like all other virtues, integrity is a necessary prerequisite for the achievement of one’s values and one’s happiness. After all, the achievement of one’s happiness presupposes that one both independently conceives of rational values and actively pursues them. As American moralist Tara Smith explains:
Integrity is essential for a person to reap the benefit of rational principles: the achievement of his values. It is only by abiding by rational principles that a person can achieve the various values made possible by honest action, just action, independent action, and so on. It is only by faithful allegiance to rational principles that a person can secure his happiness.8
Due to the influence of modern education, however, adolescents are continually disincentivized from thinking in principles and pursuing their own values. If their own convictions are not in harmony with the beliefs of the group, their teachers motivate them to sacrifice the former for the latter. Indoctrinated by the false belief that the pursuit of truth and values is meaningless, most adolescents sell out. Some give up as early as they enter kindergarten while others remain true to themselves for most of their adolescence—only to disintegrate in college. The pattern, however, remains the same. Disillusioned by modern education, each of these students who sacrifices his values becomes convinced “that the pursuit of knowledge is senseless, that education is an enormous pretense of some evil kind which he cannot understand—and thus he is started on the road to anti-intellectuality and mental stagnation.”9
Wanting to achieve their own values yet indoctrinated by the belief that it is noble to sacrifice one’s convictions for the belief of the group, most adolescents try to take a middle-of-the-road approach. Most of the time, they reason, they will judge independently, produce vigorously, and display genuine pride. Sometimes, though, they will default on virtuous behavior for it is good, they conclude, to adjust themselves. To gain social prestige, they are willing sometimes to sacrifice their own conclusions, sometimes to party with peers, and sometimes to pretend to be humble. The central problem with this approach is that it is unstable and leads to serious repercussions. As the late Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have once remarked, “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous, you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.”10
In short, the adolescent who attempts to only sometimes sacrifice his values for the sake of social conformity will end up sacrificing all of them. “[I]n morality,” Peikoff explains, “bad principles drive out good. If a man tries to combine a rational principle with its antithesis, he thereby eliminates the former as his guide and adopts the latter. This is the mechanism by which the conceptual faculty avenges itself on the unprincipled man.”11 The adolescent who gives in to peer pressure comes to gradually accept not life but social prestige as his standard of value. He might, for instance, start by going on a trip with his peers merely to win their approval, thereby spending the scarce resources he has on a vacation which is of no interest to him rather than investing them into something he truly cares for. Having become part of the group, he might then not study a subject he is interested in but rather just take the same courses as his peers to remain close to them. Ultimately, he might not marry the honorable girl he passionately loves but sacrifice her for the dumb blonde who is part of his group.
The standing order of the compromiser becomes not to engage in life-affirming actions but to win the favor of his peers. Gradually, he comes to give up all of his values for their sake. The ultimate manifestation of this approach is an utterly gray, valueless person.
Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Meridian, [1971] 1999), 80 [emphasis in the original].
Ayn Rand, “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,’” Return of the Primitive, 122 [emphasis in the original].
Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 88 [emphasis in the original].
Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 68.
Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 66.
Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, [1991] 1993), 259.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (London: Penguin, [1957] 2007), 1019.
Tara Smith, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 182.
Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 72.
Margaret Thatcher quoted in Jim Prior, A Balance of Power (London: Hamilton, 1986), 106.
Peikoff, Objectivism, 265.