by Jon Rappoport
July 19, 2021
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Here I’m republishing my 2014 article because, these days, beyond the manipulation of people and agendas, a few questions are still burned on the sky:
What is freedom?
What is freedom for?
What is justice?
These are not questions for people who believe they already know everything worth knowing.
“Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand behind it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so for themselves and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.” (my notes for The Underground)
The one glaring problem in Ayn Rand’s work is the overall effect of her hammering mercilessly on behalf of freedom and the individual—after 400 pages, her prose takes on a programmatic aspect. It grips the reader with iron. The moral imperative to be free replaces the exhilaration of being free.
On the other hand, she obviously wrote her two great novels in the middle of a feverish exaltation. Every page burned. Most characters went down in flames. A few rose into the sky. She knew she was up against the most powerful forces of society, and she was not going to compromise or relent one inch. She fully intended to destroy collectivism at its root. On the basis of that decision, she refused to suspend her attack, even for a moment.
Most people who brush up against her work can’t stop to consider the depth of her admiration for the independent and powerful and creative individual, or the nature of her aversion to the collectivist who can only borrow from such individuals, and then distort and undermine what they have misappropriated.
She means to be extreme. It is no accident. With no apologies, she splits the world down the middle. In her own way, she is an ultimate riverboat gambler. She shoves in all her chips on the self-appointed task of illuminating the great dichotomy of human history and modern life: the I versus the WE.
On a personal level, she possessed enormous ambition, and she wrote her two novels to achieve deserved recognition. Again, no apologies. She knew she and her work would be attacked by numerous critics who didn’t themselves own a tiny fragment of her talent. So be it.
To say she revealed “a thorny personality” in her relationships would constitute a vast understatement. In her later years, she no doubt contributed to bringing the house down on her head. But by then, her work was over. She stood behind it. She had achieved what she set out to create.
And every cultural messenger of her time reviled her.
“…nearly perfect in its immorality.”
Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
“…shot through with hatred.”
The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged
“…can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”
The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged
“[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.”
Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead
When people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in the battle for liberty?
What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by collectivism?
Yes the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what were those documents and that form of government there for in the first place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?
And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?
The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.
But not just the individual.
The FREE INDIVIDUAL.
But not just the free individual.
The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.
Which is why I’m writing about Ayn Rand.
To grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to borrow and steal worn-out ideas.
I write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.
Ayn Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She knew the consequences would be extraordinary.
The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.
Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.
Readers who hate Rand’s work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.
Rand’s major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They bow before no one and nothing. They invent. They decide. They imagine. They refuse to compromise. They leave the group and the committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the dust.
Society is ever more, over time, a mass concept. Society’s leaders, through illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The protection racket no long applies.
Once a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.
On the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe individual power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others and nothing more.
If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That’s what we’re told.
Civilizations are being made more puerile because it is children who are most vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those adults who buy the maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.
At this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer cares about the side of a building.
Ayn Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union would have cost her her life.
She was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters, brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full bloom of decay. Golden boy Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized architect-hack; Guy Francon, Keating’s boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey, prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who sold his soul.
Around us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized pretended hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together” sing-song collective mysticism.
Again, keep in mind that Rand’s two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to What Already Exists.
The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite non-profit foundations:
“What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…”
Rand was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.
Rand was also prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional DEPTH of her heroes’ commitment to their own choices, their own work, their own creations. She wasn’t merely dipping her toe in the water of that ocean.
Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:
“And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”
Parasites don’t want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp. The presence of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and confirm their deepest fear:
An individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.
Parasites want you to believe you’re just a drop of water in the great ocean, and once you attain “higher consciousness” you’ll give in and float in the sea, and you’ll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as Self. You’ll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.
In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I’M NOT VERY MUCH.”
Just that little phrase can open the door into the collective.
In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:
“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”
Keating, the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well, they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied about by “those who should know Quality.”
It’s a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.
And Peter is conventionally handsome, he’s the golden boy, he’s quick, he can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with others, he can look like he’s enjoying life, he’s good at parties, he’s congenial.
On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?
Unfortunately and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he’s the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without trying.
Keating returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help, to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.
Not determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him “the glittering world”—and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.
Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance…Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.
Here is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite: they’re committed to live on an insider’s rotting feast of mutual admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected with a clarity they’d assumed was impossible to construct. But there it is.
The very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination: characters riddled with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.
Keating is eventually reduced to an abject yearning: would that his life had been lived differently, better—yet at the same time he maintains a dedication to hating that better life he might have had. He’s consumed by the contradiction. He sees his own career fall apart, while Roark’s ascends. The tables are turned. Keating has administered a toxin to his own psyche, and the results are all too visibly repellent.
The Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find bigger and better manipulators to serve. It’s a cacophony of madness, envy, and immolation posing as success.
The world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because, as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused, over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!
She elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and decisions that advance life and those that squash it.
Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the featureless consensus versus unique individual creative power.
Creative power isn’t a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn’t live in the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no basis for life.
We are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic joke.
For those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It’s, in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty. And the strength of hypnotic trance.
The strategy is obliquely described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive following:
“…if I sold them the idea that you [an ordinary playwright] are just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they write.”
Reduction to absurdity. An overall grayness called equality.
If the public is told the owner of a business didn’t create that business, but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is pushed and emphasized by others, eventually the absurd notion will take hold. Then it won’t matter what is done to the independent individual, because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just an invisible nonentity.
Contrast this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes during his climactic courtroom trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:
“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”
“We inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane…The moving force is the creative faculty which takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.”
“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”
We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY.
Obama is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the course of history. That timeline shows us the heroic struggle to replace WE with I.
From the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always there, emerged fully enough to overthrow criminals and murderers who were restraining the individual.
But now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past, through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy. The I is turning back into the WE.
To people who carry advanced technological devices around with them wherever they go, which give them the capability to communicate instantaneously with anyone on the planet, this prospect seems harmless or ridiculous or irrelevant or comfortable.
The “I turning back into WE” is happening because IDEAS are slipping away as useful and necessary instruments of survival.
New generations are being raised and schooled in a sulfurous atmosphere of slogans designed to dead-end, from a number of directions, in a foggy “share and care” terminal, where “everything for everybody” and other so-called humanitarian banners wave in the rafters above secular leaders, who speak like priests and assure us that, very soon, the world will be a better place because we, as individuals, are absolving ourselves of the need to think of ourselves as individuals.
O yes, thank God, we are melting down. We are becoming One with All. Why carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into the future of your best and most profound vision? Why bother? And why, therefore, allow others to do so and cause disordered, disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them equal. Make them empty.
Let us, as ancient Greek vandals once did, chop away our most sacred statues, the ones that represent the I, and then let us watch as WE is reinstalled at the entrance to every public building.
Within the WE, individuals can hide and escape and postpone and delay, and imbibe the drug of forgetfulness, and listen to the chimes of paradise.
Roark continues to mount his courtroom speech: “An architect uses steel, glass, and concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property.”
Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “Rulers of men…create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.”
Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander invented altruism.”
Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential.”
Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Ayn Rand could be viewed as a tragic figure, but she would deny it, even in her darkest hour, just as her character, Howard Roark, would deny it.
She not only knew where she stood, she fleshed out, to an extraordinary degree, that position, in two astonishing and unique novels. Bolts from the blue.
She and her books were hated and adored, as no other author and no other works of the 20th century.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12080.Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
Reading this excellent analysis of Ayn Rand’s work and vision brought me into that rare intellectual and emotional homeland I found while reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead…the feeling that men of insight and creativity still lived.
It has been a long time since I have read words that were heroic. Thank you.
That is how I felt when I read this excellent piece of writing by Jon. Well said. It brought me back to when I was 16 and began reading Rand. I haven’t read her in several decades now…. I am planning on doing a re-read.
Carolyn, I firmly believe that Ayn Rand was a prophet–not a religious one but a political prophet. She called it right down the line. I’m going to re-read as well.
SIZZLING.
All too comprehensive.
Need to reread many times.
—
As to just Obama fare, here is a video. Obviously, I can’t say if it is authentic. The video/audio seem slightly out-of-synch, but that could be technical in origin.
I think it chilling. Especially in light of This Piece.
https://www.gettr.com/post/p45k9l
Jon,
Wonderful article. I am glad that you resurrected it at this time when such understanding among the people and our leaders is truly wanting. I think that you are right that she took the risk of appearing programmatic in her desire to be strongly emphatic…a kind of literary device because of the importance of the individual that often gets lost in the collective. Now fast forward to today and she no longer sounds so programmatic.
Coincidentally I have been writing a piece of satire that is a real work in progress and addresses this issue to a certain extent. It is based on the character of Fielding Mellish in the Woody Allen movie ‘Bananas.’
“Future Revolution In the Future of course!
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
HOWARD COSELL:
Ladies and Gentleman today we’re in the charming little Latin American Country of San Marcos. We are awaiting some remarks by the country’s highly esteemed President, Fielding Mellish. Mr. Mellish took over for President Esposito who, as you may recall, went mad. Before becoming President of this small Latin American Republic, Mr. Mellish was a product tester in Manhattan where he grew up. I think I see the door coming ajar and now opening and here indeed is El Presidente stepping up to the microphone. Let’s listen to his words:
“My fellow San Marcosians, I am here today to report to you on a very grave matter. Our future is being threatened by a great evil….even greater than no sex… hahahaha. World freedom is at risk. The impulse to be free has been overthrown by a pernicious evil that has turned mankind into mad masked zombies of total equality, a race without individuality, without purpose, without hope. As such your President is going to grace the future with my good looks and bold ways. I have been contacted by the elements of the revolution who have been able to travel through time and have advised me on the situation. As we were able to overcome the forces of darkness with Former President Esposito leading our revolutionaries, I intend to lead this worldwide revolution to restore order in the world and to defeat this evil once and for all…”
[LOUD APPLAUSE FROM THE CROWD]
I remember something that President Esposito once said to me when I was considering becoming a freedom fighter for San Marcos and it is amazing that I did not flee immediately:
‘You have a chance to die for freedom,’ he candidly pointed out.
In the future we are being programmed to believe that equality is more important than freedom and, infact, that any notion of social justice must be based on total equality even at the expense of individual freedom. This is a mad illusion that is enslaving the world. Product testing and Latin revolutions are what freedom is all about. What would a world be without product testing? No recliners. Without Latin Revolutions? No bananas, that’s for sure. Reclining with a banana…that is the essence of freedom my friends! That is worth dying for don’t you think?
[Lighting up a cigar]
Now I am ready to fight for our freedom in the future. Adios!
HOWARD COSELL:
That’s it…Mr. Mellish has disappeared before our very eyes and is presumed to be in our future fighting the great evil that he spoke of.
[El Presidente arrives at the lead column of the BOD forces approaching WOKElandia]
This FoxNews covering the arrival of President Mellish to lead the BOD forces against WOKElandia. I’m Tucker Carlson. Mr. Mellish sir…Mr. Mellish…Mr Mellish may I have a word with you for our viewers on FoxNews?
PRESIDENT MELLISH:
Yes, Tucker, I see this as the final showdown between freedom and equality. Equality has been used as an excuse to take freedom, bit by bit, away from the people. We are truly freest when we are allowed to be unequal. That may be a principle that is hard for people to wrap their minds around. Equality creates the illusion of freedom because people equate equality with equal outcomes which in this life can never be guaranteed no matter how badly we want it. This erosion of freedom by the state has been done to make people feel more equal but what do we really mean by ‘equality?’ Can people ever be truly equal? We are all equally human that is obvious, we are all mortal and most of us like sex and a nice barbequed steak. This dynamic balance between freedom and equality has been upset by the notion that people must be equal to be truly free. This could not be further from the truth. To be free means to be able to realize one’s full potential as a human being. Each of us is unique and different in the end. We all must be equally free to excel and achieve our potential as human beings.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë
The net is the illusion of equality. We must be equally free to reach our full potential. To fly on the wings of independent will. Look at me, who would have ever believed that a simple product tester from Manhattan could rule a great Republic like San Marcos.
TUCKER CARLSON:
President Mellish you have made a good case for the efficacy of Freedom but is not the world a different place today? The entire structure of society has been reset to make us all seem equal and are we not better off for no longer having the stress of competing with each other?
PRESIDENT MELLISH:
True…although it has taken its toll on professional sports, the entertainment industry and online dating.
To be free we must value freedom above all else. Without the Free individual there can be no free state or society. Equality before the law is the best ideal to shoot for. People need to be able to excel in different ways which is the height of equality and fairness because it allows them to reach their full potential as human beings.
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON
Ayn Rand had to keep hammering her points because some people have short memories, some people need the same idea presented in different ways for better comprehension, and some people need the repetition to highlight resolve against the absurd.
“Reduction to absurdity.
An overall
grayness
called equality.”
~
If a painter, painted a painting, with oil paints, even the brush strokes would impart Depth. Motion, flow, height, soft & hard contrasting, could be delivered.
(As opposed to a water color work, which tends to be somewhat limited to 2D. NO disparaging against water color-ists).
If One, who is against, the Individual & his Works:
Someone could imagine that said One, might take Their fingers on the fresh work & stir around & about the canvas.
In short order, a non-distinct, grayish, dull & monotonous “order” would reduce the former.
Absurd.
Equality is possible only at the lowest common denominator. It is the opposite of sentient expansion.
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”
~ HARRISON BERGERON, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
The Evil of Egalitarianism – Murray Rothbard on the politics of envy:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/02/murray-n-rothbard/egalitarianism-as-a-revolt-against-nature-and-other-essays/
MORE: https://www.lewrockwell.com/?s=egalitarianism+revolt+nature+rothbard
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature (book)
By Murray N. Rothbard
https://cdn.mises.org/Egalitarianism%20as%20a%20Revolt%20Against%20Nature,%20and%20Other%20Essays_2.pdf
Oh, the irony of capitalism. The corporation demands loyalty, conformity, of its employees. True individualism is frowned upon.
Capitalism is Collectivist!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxqXXI_OTOI&t=6s
Rollerball: “In the Global Corporate controlled world of 2018, the individual free thinking spirit has been almost completely eliminated by the corporate bulldozer. The Caan character is a man where this individual expressive seed still stirs and under increasing psychological pressures from his corporate puppet masters, begins to recognize and resist the depth of control that is exerted on his own individual destiny and illusion of freedom.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mMcEjBhC4k
Where profit motive is concerned, logic is the first casualty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdXGUZnaLS8
Rand’s Howard Roark character was based on a real serial killer:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/mark-ames-paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls.html
Neoliberalism (economic fascism) is only interested in ECONOMIC freedom, at the expense of social freedom.
“Unfettered capitalism is destructive. I think that should be clear enough by now. The USA is a glaring lesson in this simple fact. The argument that the USA is not following true capitalism because market forces are being ignored is an unrealistic argument.
“Capitalism gives rise to wealth inequality. Wealth inequality leads to oligarchy. Oligarchy captures government and ignores market forces when those elements might work against its interests. It is a cruel yet inevitable sequence. Moreover, capitalism moves down that path very, very rapidly. It did so in the 1890s and again in the 1920s.
“Now we are here once again. A near-fatal downward spiral 3 times in 150 years indicates a very unstable approach. Left to its own devices, capitalism will destroy itself every time and it will take all of society down with it. It has the reliability and empathy of a meth addict (and that’s being cruel to meth addicts).
“The only forces that have ever managed to harness capitalism are socialist forces – government regulation and social programs like unemployment and medicare. These forces protect the people from the worst ravages of capitalism. Anti-trust laws, environmental regulations, oversight, unions, safety nets – these are the forces that created actual stability in the USA, leading to its vaunted “golden era” of prosperity from the late 1940s to the 1970s.
“From the 1980s forward, these protections were systematically dismantled. Union busting, deregulation, the corruption of oversight agencies like the SEC, and the attack on social welfare programs have ushered in the demise of the middle class and runaway wealth redistribution. A captive government has meant little or no real action from either political party. Neo-liberalism and modern conservatism are merely reflections of capitalism’s natural transformation to oligarchy.
“And that is why the USA stands on the verge of possible civil war. The culture wars are not real, but the outrage that fuels them is very real. What we are seeing is a population engaged in a collective primal scream. Two sides have clearly formed around manufactured issues and I don’t see how to avoid an ending drenched in blood. There are those in positions of leadership and influence who would be perfectly happy to see it descend into chaos, so long as they maintain power. In fact, many of them would never have achieved power in a more normal and sane political climate.
“As for the oligarchs, they don’t honestly care what the little people do to each other. Their wealth will survive, since they can step outside these national borders at a moment’s notice. The resulting chaos will likely provide a lucrative opportunity for them, to be honest. When the USSR collapsed in 1989, it was an almost instant transformation to criminal oligarchy. There is lots of opportunity in chaos.
“I believe the USA has reached the “5 minutes to midnight” moment – the last chance for any meaningful change to happen. That change will have to strike at the heart of the primary pain of the population – the belief that they don’t matter and that there is no way to achieve financial security for themselves and their families.
“This is a moment that calls for a Teddy Roosevelt, an FDR, or an LBJ. It requires an epic leader figure who can impose the necessary changes. The simple fact is that, each time, the changes required to pull the USA back from the brink are never popular with the oligarchs. Necessary changes are universally anti-capitalist and anti-oligarch. Anti-trust laws and unionization rights. Social Safety Net programs. Civil rights and environmental oversight. But this is what it takes to stop the downward spiral into self-destruction.
“Furthermore, I am honestly tired of the tendency to equate democracy with capitalism. Democracy gives voice to the people, who want wealth and opportunity. Capitalism and oligarchy try to take that voice away because it stands in the way of wealth accumulation. Democracy and capitalism are not compatible ideologies. They work against each other. I wish that was more obvious to people.
“Oligarchy is why voting rights are being attacked. It is why unions have been essentially wiped out. It is why government regulations have been consistently dismantled. It is why you have been told that “government is the problem”.
“The fact is that a healthy, functional government that is not in the pockets of oligarchs is your only true protection. And that is why oligarchs will always systematically enslave it – to remove your only real guardian. Once the government is crippled, all of your protections are laid bare, ready to be destroyed.
“I am simply pointing out the logical destination of the current trends in the USA – trends that have been in motion since 1980. The USA’s house is on fire. At some point, the fire will clearly be unstoppable and all we will be able to do is watch it burn this house to the ground. Anyone in California or BC knows that moment all too well. I feel like we are moments away from that collective realization. I hope not, though. I hope for a last-minute rush of bold leadership. I try not to have expectations. Only hope. A small hope, at that.
“In the event that the worst occurs, I hope that something healthier will rise from the ashes of the country where I was born.”
~ Jonathan Ginter
Yeah, I think Ayn was a bit singularly-minded about what power means. It doesn’t necessarily flow from something nominally termed “the State.” One can very easily imagine some future reality in which the scales tip and what were once termed corporations dominate every dimension of one’s life.
Besides, exaltation of the individual can be just as co-opted as exaltation of the collective. Power works with what it has.
Great article, bravo!! As a youngin I read everything. I can’t even list the authors I read at that age. Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, W Somerset, Sohlzenitzen, Hardy, Twain, Thoreau, you name it. But Ayn Rand knocked me over. Her books left me confused but inspired. I remember the demonization of her on the Jack Paar show. Loved that guy too.
This article brought it all back to me. Made me wish I had all those books which I long ago discarded after lugging them around for decades. Big mistake I regret. Now reading everything by E Michael Jones, David Irving and Richard Curtin.
Your articles are great. Look forward to them daily. And I promise, I will get to The Matrix revealed as soon as I get thru Jones’ latest tome The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, it is massive. Best regards.
Great article. Thank you Jon.
Great piece about Ayn Rand. Thank you.
Thank you for a brilliant piece, Jon. I had forgotten about the impact Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead had on me since reading it in 1977. It changed my life, as I so respected the integrity and creativity of Howard Roark that I wanted to direct my life, my creativity to that end.
I was reminded of that when I read your quote from Roark: “And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows…”
The cornerstone of my work as an Artist has been a minor shift in those words: “The Artist initiates while the parasite imitates.”
To my way of thinking the permanent temptation with Artists is to imitate. To break free from that and initiate is the challenge. To achieve it is to find success… and not necessarily in monetary terms.
That challenge continues to this day. The plandemic has made marketing my work more of a challenge than ever, but the creative proess continues as that is what matters to me. Success is about achieving my dreams irrespective of the directives of those who only want to exploit what I have created.
Thank you for this reminder of Rand’s greatness. I never understood the condemnation directed at her some years ago. I didn’t break it down, as you have so eloquently done, but I knew that I wanted nothing to do with a mindset that promoted imitation and exploitation at the expense of creativity and the integrity tht drives that process.
BARTENDER…A *BOOSTER* FOR EVERYONE IN THE HOUSE!!!
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/19/mrna-flu-vaccines.aspx
Canadian Doctor: 62% of Patients Vaccinated for COVID Have Permanent Heart Damage
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/no_author/canadian-doctor-62-of-patients-vaccinated-for-covid-have-permanent-heart-damage/
Want to be on the right side, the winning side of things and events? Then you just need to memorize one word and use it everywhere: “Liar” Don’t think that will do anything? Try saying that when any politician speaks. You don’t need to amplify or explain. Just keep repeating “Liar”. When any mainstream news source is quoted as reliable: “Liar”. When someone says “We’re all in this together.” “Liar.” When people try to justify a bad position/decision about any subject, “Liar.”
It’s a can’t-lose position. Everybody lies. They lie first and most often to themselves. Then they have no reason not to lie to others. “Liars.” Liars one, liars all. It’s easy to check and hard to accept, but all you have to do is really examine how and why you make decisions that need justifications. Liar. The truth needs no justification. And, thinking “Everybody lies” doesn’t justify anything; it’s just a confirmation that you lie.
Things will only get worse until people stop lying. Liars!
This wouldn’t post the first time, so I added these few words:
I confess I haven’t read Rand’s books and I’ve meant to and I will.
I admire Jon’s take on her work and his fervent presentation of it. Such fervor is needed now when the individual is obviously being more and more subsumed in Woke idiocy, i.e. rehashed Marxist garbage.
So we need that. As we each need to cultivate our eagle within that soars beyond the b.s. strictures of the crowed, afraid to take off and explore on its own.
But–I believe we also need to just show a little–caution’s not the right word–Thought–that “the Individual” doesn’t become a Cult in its own right. That could become just as much of a trap as getting swallowed by the Crowd.
The Individual is the source of all our greatest productions. Yes. But we ARE all connected and ultimately one. We need all our limbs. Balance.
Any important idea or belief can easily be turned into a cult. And I think many of the “followers” of Rand did just that, by becoming entranced and mesmerized by the grand ideas rather than recognizing that they need to be lived and applied in day-to-day action.
The age of Covid is the supreme challenge to individualism. Do you want others to die (supposedly) just so you can be free? Do you want to insist on having the freedom to make your own choices even if hypothetically you are wrong and others would die for your mistake? The danger of being mistaken and causing death is supposed to get us to abdicate thinking for ourselves.
Those who can still think know this is a false premise. “Check your premises” was one of Rand’s well-known maxims. No one can do your thinking for you. The Virtue of Selfishness was the title of one of Rand’s non-fiction books. Now it is clear what is needed is selfishness (preferring to trust your own thinking and actions) and courage (to not fold when the stakes are high).
Brilliant!!! This is full of powerful words from you, Jon, as well as Rand and her characters. Characters I got to know when I was 16, 40 years ago! But the words in this article that hit me the most were these:
“The dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite non-profit foundations:
‘What do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn’t think. There is no such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You see, you don’t hypnotize a person into some deeper region of himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The Group…'”
Something hit me when I read the words, “There is only mass impulse. And we could administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board.”
This is IT! This is the insight I needed to see more clearly how “they” control this modern world. The essential trick is to create a fictional “we” and then create a false division within the fictional “we” (ie right vs left politics). By employing these two basic strategies, a castration and confusion is created. First, the only real source of power that any human can tap into, his or her very Self, is essentially castrated. Then, to keep this castrated human occupied and docile, the mind is diverted into being consumed with a dramatic but false conflict between “the left and the right”.
Interestingly, duality must be emphasized while “oneness” is declared. They will declare that serving the collective is the moral choice, but at the same time create a “good vs evil” drama on the TV. People need their fix of “good and evil” and “left vs right” because DEEP DOWN all humans know that the individual does matter. Bad guys and good guys exist, we all know this. But it’s just entertainment. It’s not real. We aren’t expected to play “bad guy vs good guy” in the REAL world. We are expected to get a job. Not be heroes. The heroes are the politicians, actors, celebrity scientists that are on the TV, and now embedded in the phones in our pockets.
So the real evildoers thrive behind a wall of denial that they have carefully crafted. It’s a psychological wall, because the real game is ALWAYS psychological.
Humans (individual humans, the only kind that exists!) are incredibly powerful beings. Each of us is endowed with incredible power. The means by which to control such powerful beings is highly sophisticated… because it has to be! The control mechanisms must be subtle and crafty and intelligent in order to work.
The power must be hidden from the very being who is the rightful owner of that very power.
Thank you for posting your comment
I once said Atlas Shrugged is the intellectual and artistic equivalent of lighting one’s own farts. At the time I leaned toward the left, which has now abandoned individual freedom including that of speech. I can’t disagree about individual independence since my basic belief is that I have a moral code basically Christian with stoic overtones, i.e. everyday is a trial, you pass or fail everything else is secondary.
My problem with Rand is that her prose is ugly, her work is thematic and she’s working in the wrong genre. Her work reminds me of literal allegories ala Pilgrims Progress wherein characters have names reflective of their traits, e.g. Piety. In my mind we are created in the image of God even if We created God. Therefore fictions is about character not theme. If you want to preach, write a sermon or compose an essay, but don’t insult Tolstoy’s fourteen year old drummer boys marching into bayonets by calling yourself a novelist.
Jon, I really admire your thinking and your courage. Keep up the great work.
This world is a counterfeit. It’s a tiny, tiny, speck of consciousness within the Great Infinite Reality that has turned away from it, and dreams up a world and “life’ that is contrary to Truth.
The Truth Is wherever Life Is, but It can be suppressed and disregarded to varying degrees…but what then occurs is a suppression and repression of True Self and a seeming disconnection from What Is and a perception and experience of *what*is*not.
It inverts/distorts principles and ideas inherent in Reality in a self-serving/predatory/parasitic way. The principles and ideas inherent in Reality are part of our essential Being, basically I/We are part of Reality(Heaven/Body Of Christ/Son/Creation/Infinite Consciousness), “We” are Ones within THE ONE. (this egoMatrix tries to offer up a substitute, an alien version, naturally INFERIOR).
The virtual reality is in both denial of Truth and attempts to copy it, surpass it, destroy it… this effectively also works to discredit It in the minds of those who observe the distortions without realizing the bigger picture and how this thing is operating.
The world of consuming to live(and false principles/premises), intends to “consume”(assimilate) and thereby possess the consciousness of this little part of the Consciousness/Life/Being of The Son.
“Collectivism” “here” is a distortion of something very different in Reality.
The tumorous dream shrinks. It cannot grow. Desperation is blatantly obvious. Failure is inevitable. It’s own nature ensures it.
The individual retains freedom of movement/freedom of action…and also the freedom to dismiss/discard the untrue and unreal, and re-establish conscious contact with Reality(GOD).
The best this world has to offer ….is past.
GODISLOVE
LOVEISGOD
ps: Thank You for your work. Your sharing and caring…
Reading this article on Ayn Rand (whose writings I dearly favor) by Jon Rappoport (whose writings I dearly favor) has made me more interested in Jon Rappoport!
Ayn Rand also wrote an earlier novel “We the Living”, just as “on point” as her later, magisterial works. I have no first-hand knowledge. I did hitch-hike from Richmond, Indiana — in the dead of winter — to New York City, one objective (!) to visit the Nathaniel Branden Institute and the apparent nerve center of “Objectivism”. I met up with neither Ayn Rand or Nathaniel Branden. I lurked for half an hour in a well appointed front office devoid of humanity, sterile, with windows looking across other skyscrapers. I pawed through multiple pamphlets and brochures displayed for the taking. I would date the decline of Ayn Rand as a social and philosophical force for and on behalf of the individual to the formulation of yet another “ism”, “Objectivism” and to the influence over her of her “handlers”, especially Nathaniel Branden.
Beginning in high school and into college, Ayn Rand’s books and essays left in me indelible impressions, future molds into which to pour experiences of a lifetime. I would like to boast that, never thereafter, did I fall for false political dialectics of “capitalism v. communism”, “left v. right”, “Repugnut v. Demonrat”, “fascism v. socialism”. Not all philosophies and religions and other frameworks (prisons) of thought come with a handy “ism” to give a head’s up! I got fooled again, more than once.
Lagging Jon in years by about a decade, today, with a maturing, better tested perspective, I view also “I versus We” as a [if not “the”] penultimate dialectic from which to release one’s (use of) Mind. Beneath the hordes of I’s — for example, collectivizing as many do in France currently [have the guillotines put in their appearance yet?] — overlaid by patchwork, suffocating quilts of WE’s, we find the remarkable experience-based concept of separation.
If, as taught both in Occult and, at present, “New Age” Esoterica and, increasingly, out in the wilds of individual humanity, ONE becomes TWO through THREE, then we would seem still in search of a process, a creative LAW by which all that occurs can happen as IT may will AND through which ALL returns to ONE, no separation any longer. In actuality, we face the prospect of there never ever having in being “separation” as we conceive IT. For want of a better term, this GOD would also to manage omnipresence, among many other divine attributes! As Yogi Bhajan suggested as a mantra, “GOD and me, me and GOD, are ONE”.
I therefore opine that our personal (human), seemingly direct experience of experiences described as “cosmic consciousness”, “oneness with GOD”, some higher, much higher state of consciousness of IT-SELF, given our nature and substance (density!) and structure (bodies within bodies), have to remain fleeting, evanescent, “other worldly”, a mere glimpse, a “near-death” experience.
Else we would have to leave behind our aging, fraying coats of flesh and all the denser material contained therein! That’s a tough trick to pull off smoothly, peacefully, if you haven’t had some spiritual practice and, most importantly, discipline.
Thank you, Jon, for the inspiring words you wrote concerning Ayn Rand, a grand boost forward, a past “hit” welcomed to hearing once again — and appreciated newly!
“What is freedom?”
The state of being untouched by all conditions that seek to impose restrictions on a living spirit including those being self-imposed.
“What is freedom for?”
All living spirits who seek it.
“What is justice?”
The state of ‘Rightness’ and ‘Balance’ in all things that is the normal State of Being when restrictions are not being imposed.
“The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL. But not just the individual. The FREE INDIVIDUAL. But not just the free individual. The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.”
This is certainly true. But when one considers the lessons of Quantum Physics, one basic reality that is quickly manifest is that there is in a sense nothing… ‘Individual’. Everything and Everyone exists in ‘State of Relationships’ with everything else. We are connected to people, events, forces, energies, and influences known and unknown that give the ‘Individual’ a sense of existing at all.
We are each unique and timeless ‘Individuals’. But while honoring the idea of being a free individual person and soul, this cannot exist without the understanding that the ‘Individual’ is but another form of ‘Relationship’. Not in the sense of a ‘Collective’ that drains the life and specialness out of a person, but in the sense that an Individual alone and apart as a fully self-contained spirit is not even possible in this Universe.
You can be and act as an Individual in the sense of resisting The Collective. But just try to be an Individual as in severing your Relationship to the rest of Universe and you’ll quickly learn… That Ain’t Happening.
To maintain one’s integrity and sanity and freedom, one must reject the intrusion of ‘The We’ if that means being submerged into some demonic Borg-like soup of Nothingness. But in another sense, we can never stop being part of ‘The We’ in relationship to All That Is in the Universe.
A critical and life-saving distinction and understanding.
You have made some excellent points.
“Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”
Swap “second-hander” with “proletariat” and “the man who made the gifts possible” with “the worker”, you’ve got Marx!
Marx was an individual!
The problem with all political “isms” is that people like to morph abstractions into concrete things, individuals and consensus alike. This is where the trouble begins…
I read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ more than fifty years ago. I thought Rand was a great story teller with some interesting ideas.
The question of “Who is John Galt?” which works its way through her novel is one that should reverberate within all of us as it induces us — hopefully — to ask the same question of ourselves. Unfortunately, the central question Rand is asking is being dismissed all too quickly by all too many — ironically — individuals who do not seem to want to deal with the existential nuances of life and, instead, appear to be far too eager to cede their essential agency and, as a result, tend to just go along in order to get along and, in the process, disappear into the crowd.
Consequently, such individuals never seem prepared to be willing to struggle with questions about the nature of human essence and potential. This issue is actually at the very heart of — among other possibilities that could be mentioned here as well — the whole COVID-19 scenario.
For those who are so inclined, you might take a look at
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fpxyBHx6prNx/ .
The foregoing semi-documentary seeks to critically explore some of the themes of liberty, rights, epistemology, and hermeneutics that are entangled within the U.S. Constitution while, eventually, also presenting a critically reflective review of some of the data concerning SARS-CoV-2 as an alleged public health issue that cannot be considered independently of Constitutional considerations.
The whole trend in COVID-19 toward forced compliance and sacrifice of the individual for the supposed sake of the many that is present in this on-going saga is to revisit Rand’s “I versus We” problem, yet, once again. Thanks Jon for your many creative efforts that have sought to address the foregoing set of issues and repeatedly have sought to remind your readers about what is at stake.
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”—Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was and still is extremely polarizing. I’ve read her works and ‘Atlas Shrugged’, I think, is my favorite. I have the book and the three part movie. The only distraction with the movies is that they change the actors in each, but it still holds to the book.
“Ayn Rand was and still is extremely polarizing.”
“One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is ‘polarization.’ Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of ‘argument from intimidation’: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .”
—Ayn Rand
“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
D”o you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.”
—Ayn Rand
A most excellent article :
Judicious timing, to re-release this work.
Very much appreciated, Jon.
The drones do not want freedom. They only want what TV tells them. All the parts that do not serve the machine was removed from their brain. They cannot think, cannot feel, they are unaware of reality almost completely. Just go to a supermarket and watch them.
“…shot through with hatred.”
The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged
So, what they are saying is that they hate Rand and all she stands for. That’s why they see hate, because that’s what they are feeling.
Jon,
Please read and study this Judge’s decision, take notes a please consider writing a series of articles about this courts/Judge’s decision. If someone like you does not write an article to help attorneys across the USA, win on appeals, the USA is over. The number of serious injuries and deaths that will result from not winning this specific cases appeals or other cases, will result in next level type of holocaust of USA Children and young adults.
https://www.compuserve.com/news/story/0002/20210719/KBN2EP26F_1
Here is the Big Pharma Ruling, not the Judges ruling
https://www.wishtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IU-vaccine-ruling.pdf
Regarding “This judges decision”
100 percent guaranteed this judge or this judges team did not write it. How is that? He and his staff did not have enough time to put all of the details, (i.e. case law, overcoming every argument imaginable text, etc.) that are written into this decision. This decision was written by 5-10 of the most brilliant attorney scholars in the USA, all on Big Pharma payroll.
The person or team who wrote this also made a few wise ass comments, in this overall document. A Federal Judge would not do that, with a case like this.
This is the number one most important case in the history of humanity and in the number one most important case in the history of USA. It is the first modern case in history on the subject of, mandatory medical interventions for customers/consumers not health care employees. Big difference. The Big Pharma attorneys who wrote this decision for this Judge are saying between the lines, F Off, we own the courts, we own the world, we are going to prove it right now. THERE WERE WAY TO MANY COUNTER ARGUMENT DETAILS in this Judges decision. To be able to write an opinion like this it would take, months of research even for a 5-10 team of brilliant legal scholars. The oral arguments were last week. This is so easy to see. The timing of the filing of this case is very suspicious too. Perfect filing timeline and decision, just in time for the start of fall 2021 semester.
Lol, Pure Evil. Over 505 Colleges have been illegally mandating this vaccine across the USA. Where is law enforcement?????
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/19/covid-vaccine-mandate-indiana-university-upheld-federal-judge/8017457002/
Marvellous article – again. The relationship (regarding totally contrasting attitudes to life both internally and externally) between Roark and Keating is very similar in makeup to that between Ulrich (a truly creative mind of tremendous perspicacity) and Arnheim (a brilliant man without the gift of originality whom society constantly rewards) in Robert Musil’s epic novel The Man Without Qualities.
The ‘greater good for the greatest number’ can only amount to communism, for who is to decide what that greatest good is? You? Me? But everyone shall yield a different opinion! And so it must ultimately be left for the State to decide on everyone’s behalf.
Those that dictate the current social agenda ‘from above’ are very slug-like in appearance. This is perhaps no accident. One of Jung’s greatest pieces is a critique on Joyce’s Ulysses, which he argues is a creation of the ‘tapeworm’ variety (not that he disputes Joyce’s genius). That is, you cut off the tail, and it simply grows another one. An endless proliferation of the reptilian type, which strikes me as the artistic template, or character blueprint, of those bureaucratic types currently running the show: Gates, Schwab, Fauci, they all share this slug-like cold-blooded characteristic, and indeed, their kind pop up without end.
But…I dare say that we perhaps require these half-baked monsters. For as Jung also stated, nature works through the intellect, and arguably the greatest delusion is to imagine that we can ‘think outside’ of nature’s influence. In turn, the previous age – which (for me) was a monstrous trivialization of everything (and not an age that I personally would ever wish to return to, much as I loathe so much about conditions right now. Montaigne wrote for every good reason that we ought consider the trivial as among life’s sufferings) – we were arguably headed for assured self-destruction, at very least owing to our total unpreparedness for war. And let’s face it, you couldn’t have a better demonstration as to how switched off we have been than now, what with alarm bells ringing all over the place, and even then, so many refuse to budge…
I frankly think we were doomed along that previous road; whether it would have taken one-hundred or two hundred years’ time, our assured destruction is probably not an option for nature at this stage . Now, despite appearances to the contrary we at least have a fighting chance. And always remember what Holderlin wrote:
Where danger lies,
Grows the saving power, also.
PS
For sake of clarity, Jung refers to the tapeworm (in his critique of Ulysses) as something that can reproduce other tapeworms ‘in inexhaustible qualities’, and does not discuss their being cut up etc (my mistake, I was referring from memory).
Also, my own mention of the ‘reptilian variety’ is only utilized to draw attention to the cold-blooded aspect of such creatures: it goes without saying that they do not actually belong to the class of reptiles.
Absolute perfection, Jon!…you have analyzed her so well. While we in America were asleep at the wheel concerning what was going on; she saw it long before in her native country. She knew what was rearing it’s ugly head here.
Whew! I just could not have said it better.
Rand, and just about everyone else, doesn’t grasp that this is a fallen world. A fallen world is one where the most uplifting individual productive actions are going to affect someone else in a negative way. And that on the other hand horrible things do indeed produce happy results for some people, some of the time, i.e., disasters end up creating paying jobs in private industry repairing damage. For just one examplle. That is the yin and yang of things. It can’t be just about that noble, creative individual doing his own thing and thereby reaping his just rewards.
If Ayn Rand were alive today, I wonder what she’d made of the whole Corona business. I have no reason to think that she was such an individualist, such a creative, rational, individual thinker, that she would reject the Germ Theory of Disease. Very, very few of us “get it” – that the “germ” is not our enemy, but merely a marker of something deeper happening within each of us. I say she’d be the first in line for The Shot.
Now, about collectivism VS individualism. In tribal (paleo or early neolithic) societies, people do indeed think alike and want the same things.
Intereting that she phrases it “I and We”…. “I and Us” or ‘Me and We” might be more telling… or not : )
Fantastic article stating the one simple truth that explains to true creators/thinkers/adults, the often incomprehensible and unfathomable actions of the world’s parasites/zombies/juveniles/narcissists.
Thank you, Jon! A reminder and empowerment against the doubts that a lone ranger sometimes struggles with surrounded by and swimming in a sea of unconscious gullible co-beings who try to drag one into the “group” or otherwise consider one insane.