Ayn Rand viewed the American founding’s enshrinement of individuals rights as the greatest political achievement in human history. Yet the rising statism of the twentieth century dramatically undermined those ideals. In Rand’s view, America needed a moral revolution: one that renounced the ethics of altruism and embraced the morality of self-interest.
What would it take to achieve such a transformation? On Independence Day at the 2025 Objectivist Summer Conference, ARI fellow Ben Bayer took up this question in his provocative talk, “America Should Declare Independence from Altruism.”
Bayer argues that it is not enough just to affirm the morality of self-interest in words. Most people — even those who claim to support liberty — remain psychologically dependent on the morality of self-sacrifice and so are unwilling to defend freedom on principle.
To illustrate this dependency, Bayer offers an in-depth case study of the COVID lockdowns. He reminds us that these policies were imposed not just by Democrats but also by Republicans, the alleged defenders of American freedom. Republican leaders were cowed by moral pressure to impose shutdowns but have now worked hard to memory-hole their involvement.
Bayer argues that Republicans’ evasion of their own commitment to altruism dramatized underappreciated insights from Ayn Rand’s views on the psychology of altruism.
One of Bayer’s most thought-provoking points is that the common pejorative use of the term “virtue signaling” reveals a lingering psychological dependence on altruism: critics mock those who merely signal “virtue” because they are unwilling to challenge the content of the signalers’ moral beliefs directly.
In the Q&A period, Bayer addresses such topics as:
How altruism shaped America’s post-9/11 foreign policy;
Whether sweeping lockdowns can ever be justified;
The enduring relevance of Rand’s idea of the sanction of the victim;
The problems with the concept of “woke.”
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