content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act hemust know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his foodwithout knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-orbuild a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it.To remain alive, he must think. But to think is an act of choice.... Reason does not work automatically;thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made byinstinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; thefunction of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are freeto think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from yournature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, whoare human being, the question ``to be or not to be'' is the question ``to thinkor not to think.'' You need ethics because you need values to survive, and you can onlydiscover those values through a volitional process of reason. Ethics, to Rand,was ``a code of values to guide man's choices and actions-the choices andactions which determine the purpose and the course of his life.'' Given that Rand held that values are rooted in the individual's struggleto survive, egoism follows naturally. As an ethical theory, egoism holds thatthe primary beneficiary of an action should be the actor. The primary goal ofeach individual should be to act to achieve personal happiness. The happiness offamily and friends are important to the egoist, but only in so far as it givespleasure in return. Being around a bunch of happy, mentally healthy people is areal joy; being around a bunch of complainers isn't. That selfishness implies acting for your own sake is usually understood;often misunderstood, however, is that this does not reveal which actions are, infact, in your self interest. Rand rejected the view that lying to, stealing from,and subjugating other...
