And isn't this the whole point? To leverage your inborn talent and abilities to generate the means to support yourself? A person that's good at math and becomes an accountant isn't accused of selling out, is he? What about the athlete that can throw a 95 mph fastball? Is he selling out when he agrees to a $5 million contract to throw fastballs for your professional baseball team?
No, 'selling out' is how we desparage musical artists that have become too successful. I say 'too successful' because we have convinced ourselves that our newfound tallent should make some money. We are willing to pay the $20 cover to listen to him at the bar. Or drop a dollar into the bucket while he performs on the street corner. You may have even dropped a cool grand to have him play at your wedding. But all this barely kept a leaky roof over his head. You weren't the guy that offered him millions of dollars if he was willing to play for him exclusively and let the rest of the world hear it.
You used to be able to impress your girlfriend by taking her to one of these cheap venues where you heard a catchy new sound that anchors a special moment between the two of you--a first date, a first kiss, the look of each other's faces in the dim lighting--so that you relive the moment every time you hear it.
Now, you have to pay a king's ransom to watch this performer on the jumbotron from the back row of a stadium with thousands of other people. And when you balk at this legalized version of highway robbery, your girlfriend wonders what happened to the man she fell in love with. But she doesn't understand, does she? Only you can decipher the meaning of the lyrics. Only you can appreciate the technical aspects of his performance. Only you recognize the innovations he brought to the genre. And because you connect with all this on such an emotional level you actually thought you owned him.
There's only one word for this: envy!
But you don't own him, of course. He has the same right to pursue his own happiness as you do. While money may not buy happiness, it's difficult to live a happy life without it. Hence the urge to leverage your skills to acquire money.
Our founding fathers wisely understood that the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right--a right so fundamental to human existence that it is self-evident and an immutable property of God's creation of man. A government cannot grant such rights anymore than it can give a zebra its stripes. A primary function of government is to protect such inalienable rights from being violated.
According to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, man's moral purpose in life is to pursue his own happiness. She illustrated this concept with allegorical stories such as Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. Such stories depict protagonists using their gifts to better themselves as heroic figures in noble pursuit. According to Rand the purpose of artists are to reproduce ideas in a form that others can comprehend and respond to emotionally. An artist does have a responsibility to create art in such a way for others to perceive his message. Art that the people can't find meaning in doesn't make the artist misunderstood or ahead of his time, it simply means he's a bad artist.
How can you tell a good artist from a bad artist? The good artist is envied. He's accused of being privileged. They accuse him of selling out because he refined his craft in a way that millions of people can comprehend. It means that our government has functioned well to allow such a message in the first place. And God has heard our prayers by placing a man on this earth for our benefit. All while an imperfect man has found a morally righteous pursuit.
There's a reason why envy is one of the deadly sins. It utterly poisons one's self on a deeply spiritual level, making it nearly impossible to perceive beauty in the world and to execute one's own moral purpose: the pursuit of his own happiness.
