Feeling Rather Randy

Sipping spiked tea – black tea, mango green tea, “limon” vodka and gin – while unfocused thoughts go by. Just finished watching, “Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D,” starring Brendan Fraser – great movie for kids, or even for adults who fondly remember creative adventures in their backyards and back alleyways. Jules Verne’s tales, written in the mid to late 1800s, held a spot on my mental bookshelf as a young boy in the 1960s, 100 years after Verne originally spun his yarn, Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Now, I sit here in the master bedroom, laptop computer propped on top of a wooden bed desk, Bose QC2 headset shutting out the sounds in the house, letting the tea churn in my stomach as I contemplate what to say.

I finished reading, “The Fountainhead,” a couple of days ago. Very good to read the mindset of the author, Ayn Rand. I liked the idea of people skipping over the socially correct things to say and jumping straight to the point. The author implied that only movers and shakers behaved in this manner but I’ve observed this behavior in many levels of society. Labels pop in to mind such as “straight shooter,” “crass,” “rude,” and “socially unacceptable.” How about telling it like it is, huh?

Here in 2008, Rand’s influence on everyday social life has faded somewhat, with most of her cohorts long gone or out of active participation (e.g., Alan Greenspan). Does “The Fountainhead” hold anything for today’s reader? I suppose so, even if the Soviet-style collectivism that silently served as the political enemy of independence in the novel no longer threatens the political entity of the United States of America; even if freedom, white picket fences and apple pie no longer serve as primary American desires; even if privacy takes second stage to security. Rand’s literature can still stir the soul and help people formulate questions about the definition of reality.

For instance, what defines a marriage partner? Do we seek compatibility, as matchmaking television adverts tell us? What do we really want? In “The Fountainhead,” a strikingly beautiful woman born relatively high in society, with seemingly no particular personal opinion except independence for independence’ sake, Dominique, marries a star of architecture and the popular press, with seemingly no particular personal opinion except popularity for popularity’s sake, Peter. When Peter realizes that Dominique’s personality appeared to die when they married, he confronts her about it – “it’s like death. You’re not real.” He goes on to say, “You’re not here. You’ve never been here. If you’d tell me that the curtains in this room are ghastly and if you’d rip them off and put up some you like – something of you would be real, here, in this room. … You’re not alive. Where’s your I?”

Dominique asks, “Where’s yours?” and then points out what many people discover in their marriage, sometimes immediately, sometimes decades later:

“Shall I make it clearer? You’ve never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want to show it. You wanted an act to help your act – a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. You didn’t like what I said about [a colleague]. You liked it when I said the same thing under cover of virtuous sentiments. You didn’t want me to believe. You only wanted me to convince you that I believed. My real soul, Peter? It’s real only when it’s independent – you’ve discovered that, haven’t you? It’s real only when it chooses curtain and desserts – you’re right about that – curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you’ve never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you wanted. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being – only with the trimmings. I didn’t go around spouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment – I said I had no judgment. I didn’t borrow designs to hide my creative impotence – I created nothing. I didn’t say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind – I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death – I’ve imposed it on you and on everyone around us. But you – you haven’t done that. People are comfortable with you, they like you, they enjoy your presence. You’ve spared them the blank death. Because you’ve imposed it – on yourself.”

And that, dear reader, sums up what most of us become, holders of no personal opinions of our own but instead of those given to us by so-called experts because we have no incentive to think otherwise. Independent thinking and/or independent action rarely gives us a good life. After all, we live not on a deserted island but on a planet covered with many dense pockets of people, a total of nearly seven billion people. Most of us aim to please our fellow humans, using our cultural breeding. We spent the majority of our youth learning the culture of our forebears. Why trash it? Even if we realize the many faults of our teachers, we absorb the lessons they give us because we have no discernible alternative. Sure, we can run away from home, move to another city, another state, another country. But we still end up on the same planet somewhere, always close to other humans.

Therefore, let us learn from our mates. Let us read books that we like or that other people tell us we’ll like. Let us discover the thought processes of others so that we can continue to grow our network of friends, our circle of influence. Let us observe what others have observed. Let us look at our neighbors with new eyes given to us by writers. Let us beware the innocuous ones who pretend to care for the wretched or the poor but they themselves drive an expensive car or wear expensive clothes, like the character Ellsworth in “The Fountainhead,” who preached equality but lived in relative wealth, who saw a way to rule the world through deception:

“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it – and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip – he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse – and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it’s done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue – and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey – because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way. Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at [your better competitor] and hold [your lesser self] as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture. Hold up [a popular mediocre writer] and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail [a bad playwright] and you’ve destroyed the theater. Glorify [a bad reporter] and you’ve destroyed the press. Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity – and the shrines are razed. Then there’s another way. Kill the laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul – and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to his obedience – anything goes – nothing is too serious. Here’s another way. This is most important. Don’t allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul – and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song – ‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy – and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace – lie on a bed of nails – go into the desert to mortify the flesh – don’t dance – don’t go to the movies on Sunday – don’t try to get rich – don’t smoke – don’t drink. It’s all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don’t have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’ – ‘Eternal Spirit’ – ‘Divine Purpose’ – ‘Nirvana’ – ‘Paradise’ – ‘Racial Supremacy’ – ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Internal corruption, Peter. That’s the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice – run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself – that will be the man who’s not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you’ll scream your empty heads off, howling that he’s a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, ‘It stands to reason.’ Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil – though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something about it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’ – ‘Feeling’ – ‘Revelation’ – ‘Divine Intuition’ – ‘Dialectic Materialism.’ If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn’t make sense – you’re ready for him. You tell him that there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t need any thinking men.”

We all know the Internet has opened the borders of many countries in ways that tanks and bombs cannot. We see political entities like China adapting to this new change, where their citizenry have access to ideas and concepts not normally taught by the mass media in their part of the world, and thus the leaders use good press agents and PR people to turn the leaders from dictators into feel-good topics in the popular press. We also see the “free press” exploit access to these countries (a/k/a new sales territories) in order to help foreign industry promote capitalism and boost product sales. We see the instant-access, online world spreading to include the world population, where it makes sense economically. We see the abuse of power exposed in countries like Myanmar (Burma) and Zimbabwe. At the same time, we see a connected world that will give more virtual power to people like Ellsworth in “The Fountainhead”:

“You see it practiced all over the world. Why are you disgusted? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought – and so on, Peter, around the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbors who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who’ll have no desires – around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster – prestige. The approval of his fellows – their good opinion – the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. Judgment, Peter! Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes – since no individuality will be permitted.”

So, yes, Rand’s book does have a place with current readers. Her ideas captured in character’s speeches teach us to look at mass media with a hand on our wallet or purse. Since we know no one has any opinion, we know we can look for trends that someone else’s non-opinionated creation started and others will follow obediently. We can analyze the trends for potential financial gain for ourselves – for instance, which stock should we buy to take advantage of the new trends? Right now, housing stocks are down but oil stocks are up. When oil is too high, we look for the next “safe” place to stick our money – something like the growing popularity of “green” technology stocks. When “green” technology loses its cool, we go back to blue chip companies which have become ‘lean and mean’ in the years that their stock wasn’t popular and have growth spurts ahead of them again.

Rand and her colleagues wanted a world of laissez-faire or “hands off” capitalism. In other words, they wanted less government intervention. I understand the desire for less government. After all, who believes that the dollar they earned should be taken away and given to someone else? Unfortunately, government is an organization and organizations tend to grow bigger – bigger government implies higher taxes to pay for the government’s daily operations. The less money you have in your pocket of your dollar and the more money the government has of your dollar means the government has more spending money. As long as a government is run by people, you will have people like Ellsworth who want the power to spend other people’s money, even if they have none of their own, and thus will try to get a job in government so they can keep getting more and more of your earnings to spend how they wish.

So what does that mean? Well, while you’re tracking down the best way to build up your wealth, some anonymous face in government is finding a way to make it smaller by increasing next year’s budget in their government office. Likely, that anonymous face hides behind the public face of an elected government official, hoping that the public official or someone with similar government policies will keep getting elected. Doesn’t matter which political party to which you claim allegiance. Their leaders will work to get the most projects to their constituents. We expect no less. In fact, we usually expect more. More roads. More schools. More this. More that.

As our economy slows down, can we ask our government leaders to decrease the size of government? Probably not. After all, doesn’t conventional wisdom say that government growth in bad times spurs growth of the private sector to create good times again? But why be conventional, right?

I’m not a Randian, even though I’ll probably read, “Atlas Shrugged,” in the next week, putting two of Rand’s novels in front of my eyes in a few days. After pondering the subject of the purpose of government ever since Economics class in high school, I have concluded that although I only have one vote, I have one more important object in my possession: my voice. When I see something I don’t like or don’t understand, I speak up and ask, “Why?” I don’t see the local/state/national political entities and think Government, as if I’m looking at an impenetrable fortress that dictates to me. I see people who’ve taken their “Why?” and run for office to answer the question with the statement, “For me,” but I also see people who work at a government job like any other job and just do their job without asking questions. Ultimately, I see people whose opinions can change. When a political issue is important to me, I work to change the opinions of government workers, whether they’re public or hidden in layers of bureaucracy, to my way of thinking because I’ve found if a political issue is important to me, it’s important to a lot of other people, people who are too tired, too busy or just apathetic enough not to do anything to express their opinion about an important issue. I don’t care whether government grows or shrinks to accommodate my viewpoint on the issue although I’d rather the government not change in size at all for me. Like the architect in “The Fountainhead,” Howard, who designed buildings to his liking, I don’t seek fame, fortune, or power to get my way. I just know my way is right. I don’t want or need others to follow me to prove it because until they’re wrong about an issue in my eyes, they’re right in their way, too.