“ There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States. ”
Ayn Rand
“ If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights—which means: the politico-economic system of capitalism. ”
Ayn Rand
Out of all the tags I follow, the Ayn Rand tag is the one filled with the most idiotic bullshit I have ever had to read from people who are not Ayn Rand followers, or readers, or any one who has ever bothered to read anything she ever wrote and take, word for word, their views written by hack journalists who have not read Ayn Rand as well.
I never take the time (because I have more important things to do) than go spam the socialism, liberal, idiot tag about shit I have not read either to come off as some sort of “wit” and pretend to myself and others I have something to say (though socialism is one of those topics that generally has no worth anyway). But the Ayn Rand tag is always filled with pretentious cocksmokers from the leftists who have no idea what they are talking about and it blows my mind every day.
I really sometimes believe that the opposition of Ayn Rand is filled with people that think they somehow have some sort of knowledge-by-osmosis that they do not have to even bother reading to know what it is being talked about. I suppose it’s one of those “collective mind” things where they do not even have to bother thinking or reading to think they know something. Fucking halfwits.
And I don’t mind if people hate Ayn Rand or don’t agree, but I would expect, at least, these supposed “intellectuals” would actually take the time to know what they are talking about before they go spouting off like adolescent children thinking they have some universal wisdom handed down to them from their friendly hack writers and that it somehow gives them warrant to act like imbeciles. I am not quite sure why they act or behave like this, though their chosen personal philosophies seem to indicate the same sort of thinking that those who hold Faith as their foundation for epistemology.
One of the points I stress when I talk about entitlements is that poverty is a production problem. What brings a person out of poverty is more wealth. If you want to see poverty end—and who doesn’t?—then your main concern is to discover how poor individuals can produce more wealth for themselves.
But many people today treat poverty as a political problem to be solved by transferring wealth from people who have produced it to people who haven’t.
Michael Katz is one of the leading authorities on the history of poverty and government anti-poverty efforts in America. The other day I started reading his book The Underserving Poor and quickly ran into this line: “But poverty, after all, is about distribution; it results because some people receive a great deal less than others.”
Poverty is all about distribution? Were cavemen poor because animal skins and arrowheads were not evenly distributed?
“It was World War II that destroyed collectivism as a political ideal. Oh, yes, people still mouth its slogans, by routine, by social conformity and by default—but it is not a moral crusade any longer. It is an ugly, horrifying reality—and part of the modern intellectuals’ guilt is the knowledge that they have created it… .
Today, their perfunctory advocacy of collectivism is as feeble, futile and evasive as the alleged conservatives’ defense of capitalism. The fire and the moral fervor have gone out of it. And when you hear the liberals mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or that it was all Stalin’s fault, or that socialism never had a real chance in England, or that what they advocate is something that’s different somehow—you know that you are hearing voices of men who haven’t a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some vague hope that “somehow, my gang would have done it better.”
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the “selfishness” of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason—no reason that a mystic moralist could name—why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets—for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat’s latest five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity.
”
Ayn Rand
When people say that Ayn Rand has become a cornerstone of the “conservative” political philosophy…and then you read quotes like this:
Today’s “conservatives” are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.- Ayn Rand
Or:
Today’s culture is dominated by the philosophy of mysticism (irrationalism)—altruism—collectivism, the base from which only statism can be derived; the statists (of any brand: communist, fascist or welfare) are merely cashing in on it—while the “conservatives” are scurrying to ride on the enemy’s premises and, somehow, to achieve political freedom by stealth. It can’t be done. - Ayn Rand
Considering she detested the conservatives, did not support them, and attack their philosophical premises, it leads me to realize that most people who speak of Ayn Rand at all are those who actually have not read any of her work, or maybe picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, or Anthem and then somehow believed this is what it’s all about and that they hate it for some reason and then regurgitate anything said against her as truth and fact.
As I’ve said before, I am not particularly against people being against her or not liking her, but it’s one thing to disagree with her philosophy (and other Objectivists) and to do it in a intellectual fashion as good people are prone to do…it is another when you have non-intellectuals who have not read anything, who do not bother thinking, and throw out bromides other people write so they can second-hand some feigning of “wit” they think they might have.
“Sex is one of the most important aspects of man’s life and, therefore, must never be approached lightly or casually. A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important … .
[Sex should] involve … a very serious relationship. Whether that relationship should or should not become a marriage is a question which depends on the circumstances and the context of the two persons’ lives. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives—a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one’s choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values.
”
Ayn Rand
“The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value …
The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem … . Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.
”
Ayn Rand
“ Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims - as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force - he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason - and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it. ”
Ayn Rand
“ She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—-and never worried about it again. ”
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged