The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. She argues that selfishness, properly understood, does not mean doing whatever you feel like doing or exploiting others, and that altruism does not mean benevolence or goodwill but the opposite. Rand consciously saw herself as a moral radical and revolutionary, who challenges both the conventional damnation of selfishness as evil and the conventional glorification of altruism, the doctrine that man must live for others, as good. AYN RAND, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” Philosophy: Who Needs It Nature is the metaphysically given - i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity. To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness).

“It is an enormous and glorious power - and it is the only meaning of the concept ‘creative.’” “The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses,” Rand writes. But our capacity for thought gives us the ability to understand reality and the choice to use this knowledge to create the new and the life-sustaining. We tell him that he must sacrifice for the state.' The fact that Eisenhower couldn’t defend ‘the noblest, freest country in the history of the world’ as a matter of principle against a puppet of ‘the bloodiest dictatorship in history’ infuriated Rand.In Rand’s philosophy, reality exists as an objective absolute, impervious to our wishes or desires. Everything that is selfish in man you appeal to…. The article quoted Eisenhower as saying, ‘I was hard put to it when insisted that system appealed to the idealistic and completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position because he said: 'You tell a person he can do as he pleases, he can act as he pleases, he can do anything. The two had been debating the strengths of their respective forms of government.

She was indignant over a 1957 Time Magazine article recounting a 1945 meeting between General Eisenhower and his Russian counterpart, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, in Berlin. Rand liked McCarthy and detested Eisenhower, ‘a conservative who lacked principles and backbone’.

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