One sees devotees of Ayn Rand from time to time who more or less seem to have appropriated from the philosophy the idea they don’t need to be polite if they don’t want to, or feel gratitude towards people who helped them. Economically, this makes some sense, in that people will not associate voluntarily with people whose company they don’t like, or do work for someone without recompense. Fair enough. They don’t owe anybody anything unless they entered into a contract with them, and vice versa.
But no man is an island. Take the famous skyscraper scene at the end of “The Fountainhead”. Howard Roark designed the building, but as the architect he would have done something close to nothing of the actual construction. Yes, every workman there was getting paid a wage, but can the building itself really be called the work alone of Roark? Would there not be good cause for him to locate himself within a social order, a team, a–God forbid–voluntary “Collective”?
Thoughts have, in my mind, textures. The vision I get from Ayn Rand is that all individuals are like little steel widgets. We can plug into one machine, or another. As we call combine in endless spontaneous forms, the capacity for large scale work emerges. One could homologize, I suppose, the building of a skyscraper with the system of planetary motion. Both are rule-governed, and the expression of an order which is latent, but quite real. But
In the end, though, everyone is alone, being the sole judges of merit (although such judgements can of course combine in the marketplace), and sole sources of creativity.
What is interesting about this to me is that Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum) grew up under the Soviets. As such, she was subjected to the alienation and moral atrophy that such regimes breed. They breed apathy, contempt for human life, conformity, and brutishness.
In my own conception, Leftism is like a permanent wave function. In physics, you have particles and waves. Matter can possess either attribute, depending on the question you ask it. Where Rand seems stuck in the particularizing, Leftists (who include of course “Fascists” and National Socialist) have a blanket mass narrative that applies to all people and all times. You “are” who you were born to be. If you are German under the Nazis, and you are not Jewish, gypsy, slavic, homosexual or handicapped in any way, that is from their perspective wonderful. If you are Jewish, your best destiny is death. People are fit into boxes without regard to their individual differences.
I saw a bumper sticker today which read: “Drive a Liberal crazy: work hard and be happy”. This is what sparked this train of thought. By what process of mind does one repeatedly impose policies which have never worked towards their stated end?
The simple fact is that these retards exists within a mass myth, withing a LARGE narrative that admits no details, and into which all counternarratives can be sunk, like so many safes in quicksand (with the bodies, as in “the Lovely Bones”).
By permitting details, and individual perception, Rand/Rosenbaum is of course much, much more useful than any conceivable leftist narrative.
At the same time, I feel there is a possibility of a balance. Neither side is balanced, although one is clearly superior to the other. You have to be able to go back and forth between being “atomic” and being general. This is what I have called Perceptual Breathing, and is the reason that concept exists.
That’s enough for today. That concept is discussed in the first essay, and the piece defining terms.