Gaea: Rands pregnant herione

[intellectualammo]

In AR' s Anthem, we have her only pregnant heroine, and the only hero and heroine starting to raise a family, I think it's noteworthy:

Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and nothing above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. Gaea is pregnant with my child. Our son will be raised as a man. He will be taught to say "I" and to bear the pride of it. He will be taught to walk straight and on his own feet. He will be taught reverence for his own spirit.

Dagny in Rands AS , sees two children with their mother in Atlantis in the following passage:

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley— two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world— a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence. “They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you’ve met my husband, he’s the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker’s oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

Edited April 4, 2013 by intellectualammo

[Harrison Danneskjold]

It is noteworthy, to say the least.  Children should be taught to stand on their own two feet; taught that reason conquers all natural obstacles, that joy is not a sin and that the world is theirs for the taking.  That's how I'm trying to raise my son.  (or, at least, I will once he learns to talk)

But your children are different from everyone else in the world.  You have an obligation towards them, unlike everyone else, because you are the cause of their existence.

 

(sorry; I assume this is leading back towards the duty of teaching people?)

 

Since a parent is directly responsible for the lives of their children, the quality of those lives is the parents' responsibility.  If you create a new life, you nurture it and cherish it and allow it to thrive, you've accomplished one of the most virtuous and beautiful things man is capable of.  If you create a new life, neglect it, allow it to starve. . . or never bother to show it what sort of world it inhabits, that's your own sin.  (think of Willy Wonka)

So it's the one exception I know of where you do actually have a duty towards someone else's happiness.  But it's not an arbitrary duty; it's a consequence of your own actions and decisions.  (namely sex)  And most children seem to start out happily anyway, by default; it's bitter adults with evil ideas that warp that.

[intellectualammo]

Thanks.

I had a child with my ex-wife. I was very vocal about my views on educating our daughter and raising her and it eventually led to me divorcing her over. Objectivism, Ayn Rand, had come between us to where our differences were irreconcilable.

Are you familiar with Rands essay "The Comprachicos"?

Or

Lisa VanDamme, at VanDamme Academy:

http://www.vandammeacademy.com/

See the writings of Lisa VanDamme:

http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/contributors/lisa-vandamme.asp

http://capitalismmagazine.com/author/LisaVanDamme/

Lisa VanDamme’s blog, Pedagogically Correct:

http://www.pedagogicallycorrect.com/

See Leonard Peikoff’s lecture, The Philosophy of Education:

https://estore.aynrand.org/p/64/philosophy-of-education-mp3-download

Edited April 4, 2013 by intellectualammo

[intellectualammo]

Prometheus spoke thusly to Gaea:

"And I have read of a goddess," I said, "who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods."

I wanted to mention that when I was looking at my Kindle edition of the Anthem graphic novel, ( http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rands-Anthem-Graphic-Novel/dp/0451232178 ) in it Gaea is shown pregnant, and when he spoke about his son, you see his son in two or three depictions. Edited April 6, 2013 by intellectualammo

[Harrison Danneskjold]

Actually yes, I just read The Anti-Industrial Revolution a few days ago.

Your ex-wife couldn't have been that bad, surely? 

[intellectualammo]

Your ex-wife couldn't have been that bad, surely?

I think technically I was worse regardless because of just how "vocal" I had gotten, let's just say, and other actions I had taken, in which she'd went to the police about and gotten an EPFA out on me then. But anyways, when in a marriage ones spouse can change their minds on important matters because of volition and they have the right to and I just did not deal with that when it happened properly.