Happy 100th to America’s Greatest Moral Philosopher
by Toolboxnj
America was the only nation born from the Enlightenment of men that believed in the sanctity of freedom, liberty and individual rights. The Founders’ great experiment called the United States of America flourished into the greatest civilization since the Ancient Greeks because its limitations on government and an uncompromising vision that society must be subordinated to a moral law. Since the greats like Jefferson and Madison did not identify with a particular moral philosophy, America was left vulnerable to the nihilistic ideas from the ideological sewers of Europe. Luckily, the destructive ideologies of Kant and his contemporaries never laid root in America but instead fostered the gas chambers and gulags of Europe and Russia; this is in part due to America’s distrust and ambiguity toward so-called “intellectuals” that exists to this day.
Nearly two centuries after the Boston Tea Party and the signing of the Declaration of Independence America adopted her first great moral philosopher, a Russian émigré by the name of Ayn Rand. A woman who witnessed the bloody horrors of Communism in Soviet Russia, she fled to the United States with her Aristotelian knowledge settling down as a screenwriter in California. She wrote We The Living chronicling her early life and escape from Soviet Russia in 1936. The Fountainhead was her first major release, in which she authored the tale of architect Howard Roark; her last novel was the great Atlas Shrugged, the mystery of a man named John Galt and the strike by the men of the mind. After Atlas, she worked on non-fiction including a full-length book on Objective epistemology. Her novels continue to sell nearly half a million copies a year and interest in Rand’s works of fiction is enjoyed by readers young and old.
Since the dawn of history man has been a sacrificial being to the altars of God or the collective. The Aztec and Inca civilizations practiced human sacrifice in order to please their gods; the Inquisitions and witch hunts of the Catholic Church killed countless in the name of their God. In the 20th century we stood witness the gas chambers of the Nazis, the gulags of Soviet Russia, forced famines in China and the killing fields of Cambodia. In all cases, individual was sacrificed for the sake of the collective, whether it was the class, race or nation. On September 11th, 2001 the resurgence of religious sacrifice was accented by the murder of nearly three thousand Americans by nihilists who used airplanes as missiles. The United States has mostly been spared from the horrors of collectivism due to the respect for the rights of the individual – the most vulnerable minority.
Ayn Rand rejected the mysticism that allowed for the sacrifice of the individual to the “public good” or “common interest”. Her philosophy, Objectivism, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute (Atlas Shrugged).” Ethically, man’s life is its own standard, reason is man’s method of gaining knowledge and the supernatural is rejected in favor of objective reality; the result is the politics of laissez faire where the initiation of force is banned, all property is privately owned and the rights of the individual are respected and protected.
Today, one can refer to John Galt’s speech at the climax of Atlas Shrugged: “Yes, this is an age of moral crisis… Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality… but to discover it.” Students have a choice; it is more than “liberal verses conservative” or “Democrat versus Republican”, but rather freedom, individualism and egoism against statism, collectivism and sacrifice. George Bush’s sacrifice of American troops in Iraq is no worse than Hillary Clinton’s call for the wealthy to sacrifice for the “common good”. Libertarianism is not the answer, as the whimsical anarchists who preach nihilism and gang warfare nothing but plagiarize Rand’s message.
It is up to the students, the new intellectuals of America to read Ayn Rand for themselves, despite of the calls that rain from the “intellectual” community and religious leaders. In order to defend liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness we must ascertain its root. Ayn Rand lays down the foundation; it is up to you to discover it.
