Philosophy from Atlas Shrugged

I've bee reading Atlas Shrugged, it having been recommended to me a number of times. It's a long book, 1168 pages, and takes a little while to get going, but I'm quite enjoying it now (pg 533). I've come across two monologues that I really liked. One was by the character Francisco D'Anconia, and it pertained to the true nature of money and how hard money (meaning things that were valued in and of themselves: gold, silver, etc) was a mark of a prosperous civilization. Without hard money a nation will never progress at a rate rapid enough to amount to anything. Our current system is based on fiat money, it has value simply because the government says it has value. While this is better than a barter system, it is still much more volatile than a hard money system. Fiat money systems can be controlled and manipulated by persons in power, simply by decreeing a change in the system. Anyways, I don't remember the whole monologue, but it was quite impressive, and didn't use the strict terminology I've employed here.

The second monologue I found just as interesting though, and provided a new look into the human mind. It begins on page 489 in my book, in the chapter entitled "The Sanction of the Victim"; it is also given by Francisco D'Anconia.

" ... The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think-- for the same reason-- that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you-- just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but is own enjoyment-- just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!-- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired, and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience-- or to fake-- a sense of self-esteem.

.....

Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws-- and he will have to cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.... He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex-- nothing but shame."

Just some things to think about.