What, you might ask, is wrong with this? Kant and Marx are evil, their ideas are a threat to life-clearly-why shouldn't we be moralistic towards such people? The answer is that there are many problems with moralism, both philosophical and psychological., and there is nothing rational to gain from it. I'll start with the philosophical. The philosophical problem with moralism is that it is incompatible with objectivity. As I said before, moralism masquerades as objectivity, but underneath it is an irrational, often unacknowledged emotional component. Your next question may be: Why is this emotional component irrational? Isn't it right to be angry at Kant? Isn't it inevitable that I be angry at Kant if I recognize that he is evil in that his ideas are a threat to life? At this point, I will advance the radical claim that there is no necessary connection between the recognition of evil and anger. Remember, moral judgment is simply the recognition of that which is for my life and that which is against my life. Moral judgment is essential to living a good life, but there is nothing inherently emotional about it. In other words, there is no necessary connection between moral judgment and emotion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between anger and moralization. In fact, I will go even further to say that the recognition of evil is perfectly compatible with compassion, understanding, and acceptance. I'll get to compassion, understanding, and acceptance later. For now, let me start with the connection between anger and evil. And to consider the role of emotions in human cognition, we have to go back from philosophy to psychology.

Let us turn first to evolution and neuropsychology. Ayn Rand knew very little about these two fields-just as she knew very little about psychoanalysis and Buddhism-so it is not surprising that her understanding of emotions was inadequate. Where, we might ask, did anger come from? For what purpose did it evolve in humans and other animal species? To understand how anger came about, we can't look to society today as a source of evolutionary data. Evolution takes time-millions of years, in fact-and as long as an environment is changing, we are never perfectly adapted to our environment. Natural selection is always a step behind. We are not living in our EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. We can't understand how the human species evolved by looking at the history of human civilization because civilization has been around for only a few thousand years, which is not long enough for significant evolution to occur. An example of a way in which evolution is behind civilization is our innate desire to eat lots of fat and sugar. Thousands of years ago, it was evolutionarily advantageous to desire fat and sugar as much as we do because these substances were in such short supply. It paid in survival value for cavemen to eat every ounce of fat and sugar available. Of course, nowadays excessive fat and sugar kill through diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis. And yet it takes much self-control to stop ourselves from over-indulging in donuts and pizza. The same, I would argue, applies to anger. Anger was very adaptive in our EEA, thousands of years ago, but it does more harm than good in society today. Consider the role of anger in our closest relatives-non-human primates. I've done extensive psychological research with two species of monkeys, cotton-top tamarins and rhesus macaques, and I've seen these critters get very angry first-hand. What's interesting is the intimate connection between anger and fear. Both anger and fear are responses to threat.