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Posted on 02/02/2007 11:18:17 AM PST by Ed Hudgins
I remember well the day I first encountered her ideas. I was wandering through a used bookstore in South Lake Tahoe back in 1990. I happened upon a book with a curious title, "The Virtue of Selfishness". I added it to my stack with little thought, paid the cashier and went on "home".
Home at the time was a sleeping bag on a cement floor of a friends garage, in between the garden rakes and the garbage cans. I didn't start reading it immediately, having much more excitement over one of the other books I purchased that day, a 1966 copy of "The Psychedelic Experience" by Leary, Alpert and Metzner. How is that for contrast? Leary was all "kill your ego" and Rand was obviously saying just the opposite. My excitement over the Leary book should give you some insight into the path I was on.
Thankfully, I eventually got to her book and read it intently. From that moment on, my life got better as I could no longer evade the many contradictions within myself. It was like I had encountered a truth that I could not hide from. Like the proverbial bell that cannot be un-rung, once exposed to these ideas I could not help but integrate them. Four years later I got my college diploma.
My son's eighth birthday is tomorrow. His name is Roark, so yeah, the lady inspired me :)
Well said, Ed!
Happy Birthday Ayn!
Happy birthday, Roark.
"...guess who is John Galt?" In my county, if your driveway is in excess of 300' long, you get to name it & the county puts up a road sign. Mine is, so I now live in Galt's Gulch.
-PJ
You are not correct. Her position was that the state can not be in the business of the "common good". She is not against unselfish acts. She was against an individual being forced into doing so called unselfish acts because then they are simply not. You can't be forced to be unselfish. The individual is the only entity that can know how their own efforts should be channeled.
Is it proper for you to be forced, coerced or influenced by a bureaucrat or politician into doing something that aggrandizes the bureaucrat or politician but in reality does harm to the common good?
Who is John Galt? (Sorry, I just had to say it.)
Ayn Rand is one of my early heros but I have to agree. Thankfully she wrote some great nonfiction like For the New Intellectual and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that get her point across without making you suffer through pages and pages of eye-rollingly bad dialog.
I read several Rand books in the 1960's when a relative was running the local Objectivist lecture series. It was one of the 5 or 6 most influential books in my lengthening life.
Her defense of the rational and enlightened self interest was of great value to me. I now see that the major problem is getting enough enlightenment to be reasonably certain of what constitutes self interest. Witness the current climate change controversy.
As I developed and discovered the concept of Right brain rationalism and Left brain intuitiveness, I realized Rand made a great case for the Right brain. Then I discovered Arthur Janov and Primal Therapy, and Daniel Casriel and his New Identity Process. These are basically Left brain therapies. Dr Casriel once said "We spend tens of thousands of dollars educating our Right brains, doesn't it make sense to spend a few thousand on the Left brain. After spending a few thousand I fully agree, and feel that what I have learned complements Randian knowledge.
At one point I had serious health problems and discovered Adelle Davis and other writers about the importance of nutrition in health. Her books Let's Get Well, and Let's Have Healthy Children enabled me to restore health and vigor and raise two healthy children. One is now in Special Forces and just came back from 8 months in Afghanistan. He is in his 30's and has never had a cavity in his teeth.
I'll stop with those books before I start boring people.
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Ayn Rand sure went as far as she could to keep religion out of politics in "Atlas Shrugged". That book was the only book to change my mindset as much as the Bible did. They still conflict, unfortunately.
RIP Ayn.
My Mother gave me Rand's books in paperback when I was 17. I suspect she wanted to counter some of the crap I was picking up in school. To this day, I consider it one of the best things she ever did for me. 25 years later, my Husband replaced my tattered and worn copies with a set bound in leather.
Of particular irony is the fact that her fan club titled their article with a celebratory cheer addressed to Ms. Rand, a devout atheist who didn't believe in an afterlife. If she was correct in this philosophy, then she's not just dead, she no longer exists!
Thank you.
Similar experience here, and you are an excellent wordsmith.
Thank you for that post.
Ayn Rand as a self-conscious, living person no longer exists. (For theists, try to imagine what it was like for you before you were born. You actually can't, even though you know that at some point you didn't exist. Well, that's death as well.)
Of course, as I wrote, on Rand's birthday "we celebrate her great achievements and the legacy that she left us all!" Such ocassions are for -- to use the title of Rand's great anti-communist novel -- we, the living!
Thank you for the explanation. No offense intended, but to the uninitiated the motivation sounds very similar to the old Soviet propaganda pushing the visitation of Stalin's taxidermied corpse. I guess even atheists feel a need to celebrate holy days for their saints. It must be universal.
Atlas Shrugged -- My Senior Year English teacher made us study that book in extreme detail. We spent most of a year on this book and it was probably the single most useful thing I learned in highschool. The ideas in that book just sunk into my core; without me even knowing it this excellent teacher had grounded me in a lifelong Libertarian outlook and undid all of the PC, revisionist, Marxist programming the schools had stuck in my head for the previous 16 years.
Certainly the longest movie ever in the planning process. I mean, a "future" world where the hero has to stop at a pay phone and ask for a long distance operator, and where a railroad company is at the forefront of technology? How will the screenwriters handle that?
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