Free Republic

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 5. The greatest love of all. When the subject of love and sex come up, our friends in the lab coats have a field day. For one thing, gibbons and other critters pair-bond for life, so they’re “just like us.” And for another, when you’re in the thrall of your best-beloved, your brain is all but drowning in pheromones and oxytocin and a mad obsession to rut yourself raw, so you’re no different from a house-cat in heat. Everything they have to say about you omits...

A reader sends in a classic Obama moment that I completely missed. Here's Ryan Lizza in a 2004 profile of Obama for the Atlantic: "I couldn't help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he'd doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself." You may have your own favorite scenes from the American Narcissus. Feel free to send them along to jlast[at]weeklystandard.com. Submissions will be accepted without judgment. This is a safe place, a nest of trust in a tree of understanding.

Egoism is a state of mind where a person values all things in terms of their value to the self. Egoism and selfishness are virtues, in fact the greatest of all virtues, as they enable life. All living beings are selfish. To survive, they must be. Without fulfilling one's basic needs of water, food, or protection, one would cease to exist. Although selfishness is a necessity, many people hold selflessness as their goal in life, and this altruistic thinking is a dominating and corrosive mainstay of today's society. If one were to give all of his money to charity or...

One of the most vexing problems that I have encountered in my experiences with Objectivism, is the fact that many people seem deathly afraid of our viewpoint – EVEN people with whom we should have most in common. They just don't seem to be able to understand it, even if we explain it patiently and calmly. Everything we say gets systematically distorted into something horrible. This used to bother me quite a lot, and still does to some degree. But I have come to a conclusion after a VERY long time thinking about it: When people misunderstand what Objectivism is,...

The following is a miniplay which emphasizes the central conflicts in today's aesthetics, and academia, focusing on the realm of music to carry its message: Characters: DR. PATRICK SILK, 51, professor and director of musical composition at Princeharvnell University. ATHENA MILTON, 19, student and amateur composer at Princeharvnell University. Setting: An early April evening in 2005, within the hundred-year-old office of PROFESSOR SILK, lined with wall panels and furniture of a finely carved but faded dark wood. An equally antique grand piano, having been turned into a condition of ideal sound, stands in the center of the room, alongside a...

I had established the foundations of philosophically verifiable etiquette in the Public-Private Ethical Distinction, which is explicated in an essay of the same name. Etiquette is thoroughly grounded in rational egoism; it is a scientific classification of the instances and categories of action which are best for an individual to keep solely to himself or within a self-defined delimited circle of pertinent associates and which it is to his advantage to seek the cooperation and contribution of others toward. That former treatise had addressed with considerable specificity the alternative of withholding or disclosing and how profoundly it permeates all public...

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Thus declared Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In the context of this statement, the private-public distinction is employed not in politicoeconomic terms (which are, however, derivative), but in an individual, ethical sense, pertaining to the objectively correct atmosphere which one should experience in and away from the company of other men. Any rational treatise, including this one, will undertake a definition of terms prior conducting their...

20th Century evil is hydra-headed. Lop off one head; it grows another. With the defeat of the Kaiser's welfare Reich, the menace of Nazism arose. With the defeat of Nazism, Communism menaced. With the collapse of the Reds, the Greens were waiting in the wings. Why? The short answer is that they are interchangeable. They posture as enemies, but they were (and are) each others' best source of recruits. That prompts another "Why?" The answer is that these evils are variants of a more fundamental evil. They are all mutations of nihilism–radical rejection of the good, absolutely and in principle;...