WHY DOES FREEDOM MATTER SO LITTLE NOW?
AYN RAND BRIEFLY REVISITED
NOVEMBER 2, 2010. When Ayn Rand exploded on the scene with her two massive novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), she was momentarily embraced by the political Right, until the discovery was made that she was an atheist. Her underlying philosophy of the primacy of the individual had nothing to do with religion.
Oops. There ensued an attack on her by William Buckley’s magazine, The National Review.
Despite the ever-burgeoning legion of Rand readers, the centers of political debate in this country excluded Rand and her ideas.
It didn’t matter that her dramatization of the individual versus the group was the deepest and most compelling in the history of American literature.
Then came the 1960s.
Eastern Thought was run through a spiritual meat grinder, reduced, grilled, and served on a bun to American and European youth; the message was fast-food happiness:
You are a unit of joy in the encompassing Cosmic Joy.
Translation: the individual is nothing; the spiritual collective is everything.
“Self is a fiction.”
“The Universe has a plan.”
“If it didn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.”
“It’s Karma, baby.”
And now, as a derivative of that brand of thought, we have December 21, 2012. The last day of the Mayan calendar. The end of time. The apocalypse. The entrance of New Everything For Everybody.
I personally don’t care what people believe. Cosmic Beneficence, a pink bunny on Mars, soup for supper.
But when beliefs marginalize the individual and his freedom and his power and creative force, then we are looking at spiritual collectivism.
And politically, of course, there is a nice fit. Witness the union-sponsored national riots in France, fomented because the government, teetering on brink of financial insolvency, wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to a savage 62 and move the full pension trigger from 65 to an unmerciful 67.
It’s all about group entitlement. What the herd deserves. What the herd demands.
Well, group paradises always collapse. And for good reason: the individual and freedom are pushed out.
Karl Marx preached a dictatorship of the Proletariat and then the glorious withering away of the State. The dictatorship turned out to be the old-fashioned kind: iron fist, prisons, mass executions. Nothing withered.
Let’s face it. Preserving freedom of the individual against what people long for—protection by the group—is tough sledding. And now the sled is heading downhill fast and it’s out of control.
People have lost the thread.
They don’t remember what freedom is.
And if they did, would they be able to make their home there and expand its territory?
The lights are going out.
And yet…there is a primal urge for freedom that never goes away.
No matter who the elites are and what they doing to squash it and contain it and regulate it and redirect it and distract it, it remains. Even against people’s own “better judgment,” they sense that desire for freedom within themselves.
Ayn Rand has been praised, admired, attacked, reviled, spat on, accused, elevated, worshipped, pummeled, and read in private hours like a subversive text by people who fear discovery, as if the shame would be too great, the exposure too embarrassing, the punishment by peers too horrific.
Walk down the street with a copy of Atlas Shrugged in your hand, and sooner or later a sheep will approach you, remove his mask, and turn into a slathering wolf who’s after your flesh and bone marrow.
Howard Roark, Rand’s hero in The Fountainhead, was a brilliant architect who simply wanted to do his work. He refused to compromise his vision for the sake of attracting clients.
Roark knew. He understood the dimensions of the war. He was fully aware, although he didn’t parade his knowledge, that there was a growing expanding fungus of a collective that wanted nothing to do with freedom or the individual. The collective needed lowest common denominators in every field of endeavor to survive.
Guided by a slimy newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey, this apparition of an America floating through doors and windows like a death fog, obscuring the free man, demanded permanent status as an underclass of victims—glimpsing the very real possibility that their needs would be the new ruling standard of the nation. Without end.
From that conflict, freedom versus the collective, everything in the novel flows.
Rand was not only dangerous to the political consensus, she was a distinct threat to the closed literary world, in which tiny personal quirks and clever moments and anarchic bellowing were the trading currency.
Critics claimed her prose was wooden, her relationships stone-like, her depictions of sex outrageously violent. They found many “problems” in her work, not the least of which was her adulation of the free individual—a cruel and bitter betrayal of humanity.
Almost no one in literary circles dared to compare the ideas of The Fountainhead with the founding principles of the American Republic. That would have been very risky territory.
From the opening page of The Fountainhead, you are drawn into Rand’s war. Roark, Peter Keating, Dominique Francon, Toohey, Gail Wynand—they force you into intense hate or admiration. The emotions run as deep as the ideas.
How free is freedom? How free can the individual be, and what ideas and philosophy will sustain that freedom and expand it beyond any machinations of the demanding mob?
I don’t believe an exploration in this direction is anything less than heroic. But of course, we need to know what’s happening in the black hole in the center of this galaxy on December 21, 2010, and how it will change everything for everybody in the grand spiritual parade of the New Age. Yes, we need to prepare for the external event that is going to dwarf all our ambitions and desires. We need to empty our minds and stand on a cliff and create NOTHING. We need to ready ourselves for the breakthrough destiny has unwrapped for us. Because it is simply ego that has made us believe the individual can be free and enormously creative. That was the old paradigm. Now we can all join and experience the pulse of cosmic infiltration. We can reject, each one of us, any pretension to power, because power is wrong, unless it is melted down and shared by the collective, braying: WE NEED. WE NEED.
JON RAPPOPORT
Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. He is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for home schools and adults. For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com