PLAYBOY: Miss Rand, your novels and essays, especially your controversial best seller, Atlas Shrugged, present a carefully engineered, internally consistent world view. They are, in effect, the expression of an all-encompassing philosophical system. What do you seek to accomplish with this new philosophy?

RAND: I seek to provide men -- or those who care to think -- with an integrated, consistent and rational view of life.

PLAYBOY: What are the basic premises of Objectivism? Where does it begin?

RAND: It begins with the axiom that existence exists, which means that an objective reality exists independent of any perceiver or of the perceiver's emotions, feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. Objectivism holds that reason is man's only means of perceiving reality and his only guide to action. By reason, I mean the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses.

PLAYBOY: In Atlas Shrugged your hero, John Galt, declares, "I swear -- by my life and my love of it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." How is this related to your basic principles?

RAND: Galt's statement is a dramatized summation of the Objectivist ethics. Any system of ethics is based on and derived, implicitly or explicitly, from a metaphysics. The ethic derived from the metaphysical base of Objectivism holds that, since reason is man's basic tool of survival, rationality is his highest virtue. To use his mind, to perceive reality and to act accordingly, is man's moral imperative. The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics is: man's life -- man's survival qua man -- or that which the nature of a rational being requires for his proper survival. The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself. It is this last that Galt's statement summarizes.

PLAYBOY: What kind of morality derives from this, in terms of the individual's behavior?

RAND: This is presented in detail in Atlas Shrugged.

PLAYBOY: The heroine of Atlas Shrugged was, in your words, "completely incapable of experiencing a feeling of fundamental guilt." Is any system of morality possible without guilt?

RAND: The important word in the statement you quoted is "fundamental." Fundamental guilt does not mean the ability to judge one's own actions and regret a wrong action, if one commits it. Fundamental guilt means that man is evil and guilty by nature.