Daily Pundit

Against Compassion @ AMERICAN DIGEST

once gave to all who asked. Now I give to none. Once a year I write checks to funds for widows and orphans of police, firemen, and soldiers killed in the line of duty. Beyond that, I find I can no longer spare a quarta. And when I hear, in the back of my mind, the old Depression anthem “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” I find that although I can spare it, I no longer want to give it.

It has taken decades of ceaseless hectoring but at long last my compassion account in the Bank of Human Kindness is overdrawn. I’m tapped out. I still try to care but I find, if I am honest, I couldn’t care less.

I suppose this makes me a bad person. In the land that is more and more ruled by those eager to cadge money from me or pick my pockets “for the common good” I’m just no damned good to any of them. It doesn’t bother me any more. I have become, as the song says, “comfortably numb.”

I’ve been told, so often and so stridently, to feel this and to feel that and to feel for the downtrodden of the world, that I find I no longer feel anything at all. I don’t think I’m alone in not caring. I think caring and compassion, now that it has been institutionalized enough to demand caring and compassion, has finally found its limit.

It’s really quite simple: Ayn Rand had it figured out a long time ago.

Altruism — Ayn Rand Lexicon

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that
man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only
justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral
duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of
others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism
makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is
self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial,
self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless
as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not
give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do
or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue
is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who
might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the
first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue
is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of
self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

Forced altruism turns everybody involved into slaves.