Summer Storm

Thickening clouds. Darkening skies. Ominous foreboding.

This isn’t Hollywood. Instead, the atmospheric disturbance we call a thunderstorm passed over my domicile earlier today as I finished up, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Oomph of compressed air hitting the house. R-r-r-rattle of the window frames in ode to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi. All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.”

Tears flowing down my face at the reading of a fictional dying dog, named Karenin after a character in “Anna Karenina,” when I haven’t had a dog in my life since 1980. Seeing paragraphs that reminded me of “Atlas Shrugged” and the leaders of a capitalist society going on strike to take the jobs of day laborers:

After the three of them had had a good laugh, the editor told the story of how his paper had been banned, what the artist who designed the poster was doing, and what had become of other Czech painters, philosophers, and writers. After the [1968] Russian invasion they had been relieved of their positions and become window washers, parking attendants, night watchmen, boilermen in public buildings, or at best – and usually with pull – taxi drivers.

What drives people to such extremes, banishing intellectuals to work with their hands instead of their minds when some of the intellectuals would gladly trade their intricately complex minds running thoughts like the turbulent water over Victoria Falls for the enjoyment of a laborer’s life, with a job so automatic one could think with the lazy, cool waters of a spring-fed creek again? Why coerce when you can coax?

Why do we – why do I – create blogs like this one to expose our – my – minds? Do we wish to stir the hot and cold zones of others’ thought processes to create a tempest, a sudden summer storm? Do we seek to quench our vanity's searching thirst, instead? Or are we covertly coaxed into revealing our minds in ways no external form of punishment would reveal? Are we closer to the idea of the character Tereza?:

Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one’s ruins, one’s ugliness, to parade one’s misery, to uncover the stump of one’s amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother’s world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him – a fatal error on his part!) in a concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

And so it is we find ourselves accompanied in our lives by pervasive, intrusive, invasive, persuasive forms of media. Gentling coaxing us forward to the light, promising us much and delivering little. The light at the end of the tunnel turning into the barrel of a camera pointed back at us and recording all of our movements. Oh sure, you just want to post some private pictures on a social networking site for your friends and then don’t get a job because what your friends thought was acceptable is not considered acceptable by a prospective employer. Or, someone just wants to quietly share his thoughts “off camera” about a Presidential candidate, using words he had told others not to use in public (but anything goes in private, right?) only to find he’s been nailed to a tree like some crazy fool trying to skip over the River Styx on a monorail tour of Hades, described in the tourism office as a “fun and exciting trip through the layers of Dante’s Inferno.” Did he forget to read the fine print: “fees and tips not included”?

In “Democracy on Trial,” Jean Bethke Elshtain points out a similar issue:

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera tells a chilling tale. In a 1984 interview with Philip Roth, Kundera notes a “magic border” between “intimate life and public life…that can’t be crossed with impunity.” For any “man who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster. He would be without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life. For example, privately to you I can say of a friend who’d done something stupid, that he’s an idiot, that his ears ought to be cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his mouth. But if the same statement were broadcast over the radio spoken in a serious tone – and we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious tone – it would be indefensible.”

Can a man, who claims his public legacy by association with a great civil rights leader who himself claimed a legacy through his belief in the principle of civil disobedience laid down by the likes of Gandhi, survive a gaff spoken privately in a public place like some bad stage play about a person overheard in public when a PA microphone was not turned off during a burst of offensive ranting offstage? Not when that man’s legacy includes too much baggage stuffed with dirty laundry that others want to see, feel and talk about. Not when attention on him deflects attention from what a normal, sane, rational person would see as important political issues. Not when inimical sharks have been circling around him for years ready to rip into his carcass.

I hold no claim on reality or normality. I wake up each day and feel the aches and pains of a poor night’s sleep, not expecting anyone to have recorded my dreams, not expecting anyone to know my early morning wishes and would be watching and waiting to see which wishes of mine remained unfulfilled at day’s end. I can separate my reality and fantasy any way I wish because I am a relatively obscure writer. I have no duty to write a certain way for a paying public. I can spend days without writing a word, never worrying once about the lack of words to put food in my mouth. In other words, I value freedom. I value who I am, not who I am to others. I do not seek fame because I’ve seen the price one pays for having a public face.

Some want to be the fierce storm passing through people’s lives, drawing attention to the strength of wind, rain and lightning that one can throw down like Zeus. Some want to be the protectors, providing shelter during the storm. Some want to be the ones who go on missions to help restore the lives of others after the devastating storm has passed. I want to continue to live out my childhood dream of a mountain hermit, digging ditches for a living, asking nothing of others but a few goods and services I can’t produce in my cabin in the woods. I’ll leave you with my last hoorah for Rand’s opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” some of the twelve passages I’ve marked for future re-reading:

“So you think that money is the root of evil?...Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“Did you want to see [your work] used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves in any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay the bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in manner nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude – so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does any burglar. There is only one difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

“Market? I now work for use, not for profit – my use, not the looters’ profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with life-givers, not with the cannibals. … Here, we trade achievements, not failures – values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. … What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.”

Spirals

When we say something feels right, what do we mean? After burning my eyes on the word-covered pages of "Atlas Shrugged," finishing the epic love poem about Capitalism around 12:30 a.m. this morning, I understand much of the hype surrounding Ayn Rand. She put into words what many hold true who produce goods and services through their minds and bodies. But she would never say something feels right. Either it is right or it is wrong.

In the same way, I meet people or even just glance at strangers and know immediately whether they're right or wrong in their actions toward me. The only time I admit I'm wrong about what I know occurs when I look at someone who appears to look straight at me, and as I'm quickly determining that person's existence in relation to mine and come to a conclusion, I then realize that person was looking through me -- out into space, so to speak -- or at a person directly behind me.

How many people have we looked at, put into our mental circle of friends without hesitation, and then seen them walk away, forever out of our lives? Let's grab a cliché here and ask, "How many leaves lie on the forest floor?" While mobile phone adverts want us to pay for an electronic circle of friends, we spend our lives spinning through spirals of friends, known and unknown. Spirals that lock and unlock like strings of DNA, the touch of two spirals sparking new connections and friendships that will exist in the briefest of moments, a smile between two strangers passing by each other in an airport terminal, an embrace with a person offering free hugs on a busy street corner, a kiss on the cheek by a doting aunt, holding hands while conducting business in Saudi Arabia, sleeping huddled together in a tent with fellow hikers in the wilds of Alaska, introducing your lover to your ex who has become your best friend...

During my most recent lunchtime habit, I will turn on the television and tune in a movie I hadn't seen, for the time it takes to eat my food and let it get digested. Today's entertaining celluloid presentation is called in English, "Ginger and Cinnamon," or, "Dillo con parole mie," in the original Italian title. The script writer, Stefania Montorsi, also played the main character, Stefania, a 30-year old aunt who takes her 15-year old niece to a Greek island for vacation. I don't know anything about Stefania the person but I have met people like Stefania the movie character. In fact, while I watched the movie, I remembered a former girlfriend named Sarah, a woman born 13 years earlier than me, who regaled me with her views on philosophy while enjoying the poems I'd written to perfectly imperfect Greek goddesses like her. We met by chance in a computer class a lifetime ago. Through her, I met my next girlfriend, Frances, who also happened to be Sarah's best friend at the time, and I also made a new sports buddy -- you know, a guy who'll join you in whatever convenient sport you can find to let loose and enjoy some relaxing physical competition -- Sarah's soon-to-be ex-husband, Mike. All while staying friends with Sarah. Live and let live. Share and share alike. Of course, Mike didn't know I was involved with Sarah while she was divorcing him and Sarah didn't know I was involved with Frances after Sarah and I had decided to become friends. I never lied. I just didn't volunteer the information until after I was asked. I leave my life to chance at times -- I was willing to let my new relationships get discovered before I disclosed them. After Mike asked me if I had "been with" Sarah, he then told me, as he was sinking a shot in a game of HORSE, he would have killed me had he known that Sarah and I had "locked lips," as he said, while he was still married to her. Sarah didn't know what to say about my relationship with Frances. She never thought of Frances, me and her as the "three of us" anymore, although she agreed we all practiced the same form of philosophy. She laughed that she had introduced Frances to me and not the other way around. She inspired me to write the story, "Thus Spoke Sarah Through Straw," my Nietzschean tribute to her, based on a poem I had written her about Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy in, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

I basked in the glow of the memory of Sarah as the movie ended, and walked out of the living room to the master bedroom to eliminate today's waste as well as the undigested remnants of fried pieces of chicken soaked in habanero sauce from yesterday's afternoon meal at Beauregard's with my wife. [Call it crude but all I can say about yesterday's endorphin rush is that it'll get you coming and going, if you know what I mean!] I grabbed a book to read in the bathroom since I'd just finished Matheson's short story collection, "I Am Legend," yesterday (I should review that book one day but I'll say my favorite story is...actually, no, I won't say my favorite, although "Funeral" was downright hilarious). One of the books I'd bought at Unclaimed Baggage ended up on the bottom of my "To Read" stash and I had forgotten about it. As I glanced at the books, I reached to the bottom and pulled out "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," and started reading about Nietzsche. Which spiral connected Sarah to that novel? Who knows and who cares? I don't have to feel anything to know it's right. Rand would be proud -- she completely understood the spirals that connect our lives and inspire us to create something new and useful -- now, if I could just produce something tradable in the process. ;^)

How about this? How long will "green" technology remain a popular investment if the price of oil and gold drop quickly? What would make oil and gold drop quickly? An election of the head of a major political entity? Strange movements by legislative bodies to protect mortgage houses for their foreign friends. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. In the lag of time between now and such an occurrence, can the Halliburtons of the world, no matter how much dark contempt they hoist on their shoulders, bring a little sunshine into one's financial holdings? After all, the fun-to-love stocks like Apple just don't seem reliable enough to hold their own on a short-term basis. Don't ask me, I'm not a betting man. I don't gamble. I invest for the long-term. I don't buy stocks because they feel good. I buy them because they're right. In other words, I want a planet my great-grandnieces and nephews can live on, no matter what spirals they find themselves enjoying. Green is always gold, if you know where to look.

One year of retirement

Happy Anniversary to me! As of today, 20th July, I have wallowed in the warm mud of retirement like a happy pig for one full year. A year ago, I reached the plateau of middle age and stopped to enjoy the view without asking for permission from myself. I stole the time from active members of society to whom I could have contributed my skillz without any desire to repay. I look back on that time and remember a phrase from many years ago:

"people deserve to live their lives without fear of people like me, a leech"

[from chapter 12 of the novella, "Passing the Time"]

Ah, a leech, indeed, a person who writes because:

I will always be attracted to someone like you. At the same time I will be repelled by your inadequacies, your humanness. I sit down to write, though, and I only think of you, you who is a reflection of me, a human, yet never completely like me because you are human. How can I ask you to be perfect?

If you stood in front of me right now, I would consume you like a can of soft drink, sucked dry and discarded. You would only provide temporary relief from my thirst and then I would want another. I consume you now, burning my thoughts of you to fuel the writing machine within my head.

[ibid]

I don't create. I deconstruct. Am I just a second-hander in the eyes of a Randian?:

Men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[from: http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/secondhanders.html, accessed 20 July 2008]

Of course the question tells the answer:

Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison . . . . They’re second-handers . . . .

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and
nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason.

[ibid]

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy flounders like a fish flapping about in a dried-up lake, reminders of the warnings of the consequences of global warming and accumulating too much debt. So be it. The days of U.S.'s post-WWII saber-rattling have been tempered by the overseas' ownership of our mortgaged weapons. Hmm...if I was China, would I let the U.S. know how much of the U.S. debt I'd loaned to countries like Iran for "safekeeping?" Makes for a good novel storyline, at least.

In the meantime, I recall the line a friend of mine gave me. He placed a finger on my shoulder and said, "A great leader can touch you like this and Poof! you're gone. That is the only definition of power." Power, of course, means knowing when and where to use that magic finger.

I carefully weigh my options and smile, knowing that as a writer (never an artist), I have a similar magic finger. Use it wisely, I tell myself, and end this writing session.

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.