The “virtue of selfishness” Randian types actually mean a lot like what you posted, Eliezer. Ayn Rand just sounded really really angry when she wrote it, and used “selfishness” as a technical term where someone else might have said “enlightened self-interest.” If you have not seen it, she wrote an essay about virtues that reads a lot like the virtues of rationality, except she tended to package it with her version of the “if you do not live up to nature’s demands, you die” essay. And then the angrier parts about how partial success is still death by degrees, and anyone against those values was a mystic of meat or muscle, a below-human creature richly deserving of its inevitable doom. (Or am I mentally combining several of her essays in the book of that title?)
With respect to “warm fuzzies”: I interpreted that broadly. Believers in the importance of manly honor and martial virtue would never call their sense of righteousness “warm fuzzies,” but they still have that warm glow of “I believe this, therefore I know The Good.”
The “virtue of selfishness” Randian types actually mean a lot like what you posted, Eliezer. Ayn Rand just sounded really really angry when she wrote it, and used “selfishness” as a technical term where someone else might have said “enlightened self-interest.” If you have not seen it, she wrote an essay about virtues that reads a lot like the virtues of rationality, except she tended to package it with her version of the “if you do not live up to nature’s demands, you die” essay. And then the angrier parts about how partial success is still death by degrees, and anyone against those values was a mystic of meat or muscle, a below-human creature richly deserving of its inevitable doom. (Or am I mentally combining several of her essays in the book of that title?)
With respect to “warm fuzzies”: I interpreted that broadly. Believers in the importance of manly honor and martial virtue would never call their sense of righteousness “warm fuzzies,” but they still have that warm glow of “I believe this, therefore I know The Good.”