Hello from wine country

[Marc K.]

Hello from wine country -- the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY,

My name is Marc (the energy and imagination employed in deriving a screen name was incredible).

I had already made a few posts when I noticed the introduction topic. So here goes -- first things last:

Only in the last two years have I gotten heavy into Ayn Rand. I read “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” many years ago, mostly at the behest of my father (an avid objectivist). That was difficult reading for me. I knew there was a philosophy involved and I tried to absorb it while simultaneously attempting to process the story and enjoy the writing (big mistake). I struggled. Her novels are probably best read four or five times and like a detailed, foreshadowed movie, you garner something new each time. I felt satisfied upon finishing AS but I was not inspired to study Rand more. Years passed.

Then came a turning point -- 9/11. One of my friends was in the first tower, he survived, but I was MAD. Those FUCKERS !!!! (I hope I’m not offending anybody but I can feel my blood boiling right now). A PC crowd would frown upon this next, but I think a group of objectivists will understand when I say: I wanted to kill as many terrorists as possible. So I tried to join the Army and was rejected. I even wrote my Congressman; no go. I’m too old; no one over 35. Still, I wanted to help my country defeat this scourge. And after months of listening to moral-relativists, patriotic-America-haters, anti-war-anarchists and violent-pascifists spew their blame-America-first rhetoric, I knew what I had to do: fight irrationality. Fortunately I knew just where to go to train myself.

I have degrees in Geology and Engineering so I have a scientific, reasoning mind (though you’d be surprised how many irrational people infest these fields also; many engineers refute evolution and many geologists decry capitalism). Geology impressed upon me the scale of geologic time and grounded me firmly in the reality of earth’s history and the fact of life’s evolution. By considering the vastness of geologic time I was able to understand how such large scale change is possible via seemingly imperceptible steps. It also provided a base of knowledge fixed in the scientific method which was reinforced by my training in engineering. Engineering, like objectivist philosophy, showed me that everything is linked together. Mass and velocity, voltage and current, pressure and flow are all just different manifestations of the same forces. That most engineering problems can be solved by equating everything to energy and applying the law of conservation of energy reminds me of the irreducible objectivist axioms and their application in the refutation of most irrational arguments.

As training to fight irrationality I have in the past two years read “The Ominous Parallels”, “The Voice of Reason” and “Fact and Value” and many of the essays on ARI. I have also gotten through most of ITOE and OPAR though I am still trying to integrate them fully. I refer to them constantly and have begun highlighting certain passages. I’m sure I’ll have to read them several more times. Courses and lectures from ARI have helped immensely.

Now, how to fight irrationality? I thought a good place to start would be to address current issues from an objectivist viewpoint by writing essays for publication. So I trained myself to write by reading “The Art of Nonfiction” by AR (an excellently delimited, perfectly rational instruction) and “Writing a Convincing Editorial” by Robert Tracinski. I have written several essays on reinstating the draft, freedom in China, evolution vs. creationism, etc. (which I would love to have some of you vet) but I have found it difficult to get them published. I could fight irrationality’s violent agents directly by joining the Army (which failed) or perhaps the CIA, which I am giving serious consideration to. I am now joining the fight on a much more fundamental level: teaching earth science and math (the state bureaucracies are making this very difficult also without a certification). But I have been substituting and the schools are as bad as you have heard -- teachers, students, textbooks, the whole system needs to be overhauled, it desperately needs competition to evolve.

Whew!!!!!!!!!!!

So that’s where I am now. Struggling a bit but trying to fight.

Thanks for listening,

Marc