Rand sacrifice

I ran across one of those Ayn Rand memes on sacrifice the other day, and remembered how I'd reacted when I first read about it fifty years ago. Contra Rand, a sacrifice isn't giving up a greater value for a lesser, but exactly the opposite: giving up a lesser value for a greater. A mother giving her child the last bread in the house isn't doing it because she values the child less but more. You sacrifice the party night to study for your electrodynamics exam because you value passing the course more.

The conflict comes when you value the lesser good more than the greater one--you don't love having good lungs better than you love cigars, or you don't love God in your neighbor more than your entertainments. The glory of the sacrifice comes from the glory of the higher good involved.

In her view, enlightened self-interest will always pick the greater value--but who enlightens that self? Someone who explains that good lungs are a great lifetime value, and that the world is wider and deeper than the simply physical universe--someone who does the sort of thing she complains about. Unless you are born and grow with perfect wisdom and enlightenment, you need someone to teach you. And WRT her strawman, I don't know anybody who says you should love a stranger more than your family--except politicians and Marxist theorists.(*)

She had a pretty fair understanding of what the socialist state involved, and what sort of people were attracted to it (she'd observed for herself) but I don't put any trust in her diagnoses and her prescriptions.

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(*) Elisha asked a widow to feed him first in honor of God, but then he backed it up with a miracle. We might be in a better place if we applied the rule about what to do with false prophets...