… if I agree with Dagneyism or The Shrug™.*
Yeah, this video is old news; but it’s fundamental to grasping the philosophical chasm we face at this point in American history, if not World history:
Clearly, The Ash Heap of History™ needs another addition.
~ vid ~
The jackassery of the Obama puppet show and its peanut gallery made me think of these:
“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards – never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.
[insert more quotes to the point of inserting half of The Book™]
Or, you could kick things off by reading Hayek. It’s a lot shorter, but there is a danger of going down the slippery slope to von Mises, etal. Still, that’ll probably take less time than reading Atlas Shrugged, I guess; but Rand certainly describes the enemies of freedom and individualism better than anyone I’ve ever read.
Does anyone know of a novel that makes the point of Atlas Shrugged but with a third of the words and with a realistic, non-fantasy solution?
* Sorry, but if you haven’t read The Book, my point may be obscure. *sigh* I started highlighting quotes in the actual printed book, but that used up all my highlighters. Besides, it still requires reading or listening to The Book™ to understand it’s point. Once one has done that, though, the quotes are eerily prescient for Obamunism’s/Progressivism’s America (or, in the case of the Soviet Union, deriviative). The Shrug™ is a powerful concept; but in reallity, it devolves into just another fantasy.
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14 Comments!
Doug,
I was a fan of Heinlein before I discovered Ayn Rand. “Moon’s a Harsh Mistress” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” seemed to cover his political and philosophical ideas pretty well.
Guess I ought to dig ‘em out and re-read.
I just received from Amazon, “The Fortunes of Permanence”
Partly an exercise in cultural pathology, The Fortunes of Permanence is also a forward-looking effort of cultural recuperation. It promises to be essential reading for anyone concerned about the direction of Western culture in an age of anti-Western animus and destructive multicultural fantasy.
$23.10 w free shipping. If our culture didn`t need recuperation, KisP would not exist!
The Shrug IS happening. It just isn’t something that can be organized the way Rand dreamed off.
I’m giving “The Road to Serfdom” to my Big Lefty brother-in-law this Christmas. That should be fun.
On the other hand, Hayek is a far better writer than Rand – and Austrian economics won’t lead you to becoming an Objectivist.
Rand had some excellent ideas in places, but her overall philosophy, when looked at in toto, isn’t all that compelling – too much “my preferences are obviously The Only Way”.
Which is a shame, because as shown her philosophy of liberty and free action is solid.
(And if we’re talking fiction I’ll second Heinlein, especially early-mid Heinlein, which is better than the late stuff.)
Somebody really needs to write a version of “Atlas Shrugged” that drops out all the turgid prose and concentrates on the philosophy. Galt and Dagney leave me cold, and Rand was no Hemingway.
leelu: Heinlein was a better writer than Rand, but even he was a bit preachy. Some good ideas – like, how one gets to be a voting citizen.
Here’s a “glad-you-mentioned it” moment: Another quote attributed to RAH: ” An armed society is a polite society”.
This makes for a nice sound bite, but Japan (and perhaps Afghanistan) is a great counterexample.
Now consider this: the contrapositive of Heinlein’s quote is “A society that is not polite should not be armed”.
[Refresher: "The contrapositive of a conditional statement is formed by negating both the hypothesis and the conclusion, and then interchanging the resulting negations.
In other words, the contrapositive negates and switches the parts of the sentence. It does BOTH the jobs of the INVERSE and the CONVERSE.
If the original statement is TRUE, the contrapositive is TRUE."]
Now I ask, are we a “polite society”? (Not the “we here”, but rather the “them out there”.)
It’s not really an “if-then” or a “P imples Q” statement, but it has two parts, but you could reword it as
“If a society is armed, then it will be a polite society”
COL Jerry: “Fortunes” is on my get-it-next list. (Too many damn books……)
Yes – overly wordy, with pomposity a plus, apparently. Turgid, in a word. But parts were very far-seeing.
leelu: I started digging out and re-reading Heinlein a while back. It’s pretty dated in spots, of course; but it is not only a lot of fun, it reminds me why I loved to read as a teenager.
ZZMike – the problem with the aphorism is not that it’s incomplete, it’s just not absolute.
If there are other factors (Islam, other highly regimented societies like Japan (which has a violence problem, BTW)), they may outweigh certain factors, like an armed citizenry.
It’s an “all else being equal” thing.
The thing about Ayn Rand was that she was great at analyzing the problems but not so good when it came to solutions.
Altruism is good if it is voluntary but become evil if it is driven by the government’s legal monopoly on the use of force.
My favorite Heinlein is “Starship Troopers”
Want to send people a condensed version of Hayek:
The Road To Serfdom
Doug,
Rand has a book out called “We the Living”. It details what happens when the commies actually get their way. It covers the areas of the Soviet empire around 1920 when they were first forming up and handing out ration cards and all. It’s a VERY depressing read. I, like you, have my books on iPod from Audible. This one was harder than any part of Atlas Shrugged to get through because it was so depressing. It should be mandatory reading for all high school students…
Thank You, Col. Jerry!!!
Heinlein ahh yes so long ago they’ve been pushed thru the sieve in the brain to make room for so many more since. There are still parts of Stranger in a Strange land that linger.
Imagine putting such a sign up in Russia or China or just about any country in Africa or Asia or many countries in South America.
“God Bless America” is not just a worthy wish – it is a statement of present fact. Let’s not throw it away for a mess of pottage.