Ayn Rand stated in her essay 'Causality versus Duty': “God said: Take what you want, and pay for it”. As a student of IE, we are all aspiring a professional career, life-enhancing moments, relationships, and happiness in general. In my opinion, Rand’s moral model of objectivism is a necessary approach for our pursuit as a student. She explained in her essay that 'God' is actually the reality and “Take what you want” the values we have chosen. All the goals we have set for our future don’t come to us automatically. We have to work for them, in order to achieve them. Moreover, it means that we need a proper morality, so you should know what you want in life and how you can accomplish them. We also have to remember, that our principles are not subjective, rather factual requirements of our life, which means that they are given by nature. We are all complex human beings with specific needs. Our body, mind, as well as matter and spirit require different requirements. At the end, all of them derive together as a whole. But what does that exactly mean for us students?
The basic human needs are food, shelter, clothing and medicine. We are fortunately all provided with that. It becomes more complex if we talk about our spiritual values. The key is to reach an inner power of self-confidence and self-respect/love. Nowadays, we live in a world where individuality is hard to reach, because we are taught to live after specific sets of rules. Another important point is the political freedom, to be able to speak up and express the personal opinion.
Rand specified, that we have to stick to one important value, which is reason. Reason is an absolute and our only knowledge, which gives us the opportunity to have a basic living. Coherently, rationality is a matter of our principles. Rand’s “Take what you want” refers to the rational judgement, in order to reach our goals and lifetime happiness. This approach is really similar to Friedrich Nietzsche’s master morality. He describes that master morality evaluates actions based on good and bad consequences. Therefore, rational decision making is an important value, just as it was defined by Rand. In order to create values, you have to decide if it is useful or not, and therefore usefulness is goodness. The other way around, everything “what is harmful to you is harmful in itself”. It is the nobility for a strong will, which makes it possible to achieve your goals. The essence in master morality besides nobility is also open-mindedness, trust, and self-worth. Here we can also identify a similar approach to Rand’s objectivism. After being aware of the fact how these two philosophers defined morality, we can definitely find reasonable approaches for us students. As Rand describes the law of causality “..Pay for it”, means that we have to work hard if we want to achieve our goals. That means, if we want to achieve good grades, we have to put work in it and study. The same with relationships, being open-minded and honest is important to keep them up. Especially here at IE we strive to be an open community, because we all have different nationalities, backgrounds and grew up in different cultures.
So in order to sustain this community, we have to be aware of the things we do, use reason as an absolute and decide with our rationality if they are good or bad.