ese, for he knows that happiness and self-esteem can't be stolen atthe cost of others: they must be earned through hard work. If altruism is so bad, and altruism is based on mysticism, then what isRand's alternative, and what does it have to do with reason? For her own ethics,Rand started at the very beginning: why do you need ethics anyway, she asks,what is it for? Her answer to this question can be analyzed in two parts. First, Rand said that values ought to be objective facts about reality.She noted that life is conditional, and that it requires a specific course ofaction to maintain. She concluded that something can be good or bad only to aliving organism acting to survive: the good furthers life, the bad hinders it.Second, Rand noted that humans, unlike other animals, need to discover theirvalues. Consider the life of a squirrel: collect nuts, hibernate, eat nuts,repeat. Not very exciting. Animals just repeat a built-in cycle of action overand over. The drama of human life is that people have to decide what action totake, and their decisions have real, long-range consequences. How do you decide? Reason. Values are objective facts about reality, andyour means for knowing reality is reason. Reason is the fundamental valuebecause it's your means of discovering your other values. What do you do withreason? In large part, produce the goods needed to survive. Unlike animals thatsimply take what they need from the environment, humans produce what they need.But, as Francis Bacon once said in a quote Rand was fond of repeating: ``nature,to be commanded, must be obeyed.'' Through reasoning, people can come tounderstand and harness the forces of nature. So reason and production are the primary values of the Objectivistethics. Rand summed it up this way: Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survivalis not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given tohim, its...
