By Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D
The standard of mental health - of biologically appropriate mental functioning - is the same as that of physical health: man's survival and well-being. A mind is healthy to the extent that its method of functioning is such as to provide man with the control over reality that the support and furtherance of his life require.
The hallmark of this control is self-esteem. Self-esteem is the consequence, expression and reward of a mind fully committed to reason. Reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses, is man's basic tool of survival. Commitment to reason is commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one's understanding and knowledge, to the principle that one's actions must be consistent with one's convictions, that one must never attempt to fake reality or place any consideration above reality, that one must never permit oneself contradictions - that one must never attempt to subvert or sabotage the proper function of consciousness.
An unobstructed consciousness, an integrated consciousness, a thinking consciousness, is a healthy consciousness. A blocked consciousness, an evading consciousness, a consciousness torn by conflict and divided against itself, a consciousness disintegrated by fear or immobilized by depression, a consciousness dissociated from reality, is an unhealthy consciousness.
In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem: he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth. Anxiety and guilt, the antipodes of self-esteem and the insignia of mental illness, are the disintegrators of thought, the distorters of values and the paralyzers of action. When a man of self-esteem chooses his values and sets his goals, when he projects the long-range purposes that will unify and guide his actions - it is like a bridge thrown to the future, across which his life will pass, a bridge supported by the conviction that his mind is competent to think, to judge, to value, and that he is worthy of enjoying values.
The sense of control over reality is not the result of special skills, ability or knowledge. It is not dependent on particular successes or failures. It reflects one's fundamental relationship to reality, one's conviction of fundamental efficacy and worthiness. It reflects the certainty that, in essence and in principle, one is right for reality. Self-esteem is a metaphysical estimate.
It is this psychological state that traditional morality makes impossible, to the extent that man accepts it. Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrific is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive existentially and psychologically.
1)The maintenance of his life and the achievement of self-esteem require of man the fullest excercise of his reason - but morality, men are taught, rests on and requires faith.
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When a man rejects reason as his standard of judgment, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
To practice the "virtue" of faith, one must be willing to live with the unintelligible, with that which cannot be conceptualized or integrated into the rest of one's knowledge, and to induce a trancelike illusion of understanding. One must be willing to repress one's critical faculty and hold it as one's guilt; one must be willing to drown any questions that rise in protest - to strangle any trust of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the protector of one's life and cognitive integrity.
To introduce into one's consciousness any idea that cannot be so integrated, an idea not derived from reality, not validated by a process of reason, not subject to rational examination or judgment - and worse: an idea that clashes with the rest of one's concepts and understanding of reality - is to sabotage the integrative function of consciousness, to undercut the rest of one's convictions and kill one's capacity to be certain of anything. This is the meaning of John Galt's statement in Atlas Shrugged that the "alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind."
There is no greater self-delusion than to imagine that one can render unto reason that which is reason's and unto faith that which is faith's. Faith cannot be circumscribed or delimited; to surrender one's consciousness by an inch, is to surrender one's consciousness in total. Either reason is an absolute to a mind or it is not - and if it is not, there is no place to draw the line, no principle by which to draw it, no barrier faith cannot cross, no part of one's life faith cannot invade: one remains rational until and unless one's feelings decree otherwise.
Faith is a malignancy that no system can tolerate with impunity; and the man who succumbs to it, will call on it in precisely those issues where he needs his reason most. When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim to be: a tool of distortion.
2)Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality - but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.
3)His life and self-esteem require that the object and concern of man's consciousness be reality and this earth - but morality, men are taught, consists of scorning this earth and the world available to sensory perception, and of contemplating, instead, a "different" and "higher" reality, a realm inaccessible to reason and incommunicable in language, but attainable by revelation, by special dialectical processes, by that superior state of intellectual lucidity known to Zen-Buddhists as "No-Mind," or by death.
There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to percieve it, there is nothing else for him to percieve; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all.
The sole result of the mystic projection of "another" reality, is that it incapacitates man psychologically for this one. It was not by contemplating the transcendental, the ineffable, the undefinable - it was not by comtemplating the non-existent - that man lifted himself from the cave and transformed the material world to make a human existence possible on earth.
If it is a virtue to renounce one's mind, but a sin to use it; if it is a virtue to approximate the mental state of a schizophrenic, but a sin to be in intellectual focus; if it is a virtue to denounce this earth, but a sin to make it livable; if it is a virtue to mortify the flesh, but a sin to work and act; if it is a virtue to despise life, but a sin to sustain and enjoy it - then no self-esteem or control or efficacy are possible to man, nothing is possible to him but the guilt and terror of a wretch caught in a nightmare universe, a universe created by some metaphysical sadist who has cast man into a maze where the door marked "virtue" leads to self-destruction and the door marked "efficacy" leads to self-damnation.
4)His life and self-esteem require that man take pride in his power to think, pride in his power to live - but morality, men are taught, holds pride, and specifically intellectual pride, as the gravest of sins. Virtue begins, men are taught, with humility: with the recognition of the helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one's mind.
Is man omniscient? - demand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how dare he challenge the word of God, or of God's representatives, and set himself up as the judge of - anything?
Intellectual pride is not - as the mystics preposterously imply it to be - a pretense at omniscience or infallibility. On the contrary, precisely because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort, the men who assume this responsibility properly feel pride.
Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud: he has merely chosen the most humiliating way to reveal his humility.
Pride is one's response to one's power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one's own efficacy. And it is this that mystics hold as evil.
But if doubt, not confidence, is man's proper moral state; if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt, not pride, is his goal - then mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners, those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.
Humility is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality; it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.
Pride has to be earned; it is the reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to abstain from thinking - nothing else is demanded - and one will feel humble quickly enough.
--Excerpt from "The Virtue of Selfishness".
...and the rest of this eloquent, insightful and brilliant chapter can be read at your own leisure, in the aforementioned book.
-------------------- Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
Edited by SkorpivoMusterion (03/29/06 08:32 PM)
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