Thursday, March 01, 2012

That Selfish, Greedy Ayn Rand Does It Again.

We all know what an evil woman Ayn Rand was—all we have to do is read the Internet. AlterNet gives us a two-minute hate period on Rand almost every day. They are obsessed with her. She may be no Emmanuel Goldstein, she was worse. Goldstein was a fictional character, Rand was real, and like Goldstein, her birth name, Rosenbaum, is sufficiently Jewish to give others additional reasons to hate her.

Rand wrote a screed to what she called individualism: The Fountainhead. In that novel her character tells a courtroom that 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.” She also claimed, “No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.”

Greed and selfishness exudes from every line. Recently, I discovered some lost passages from this speech, sections just as evil as the rest of it. They were perhaps a bit too redundant and edited out for that reason. But Randaphobes everywhere pay heed to the evil she expressed:

I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence.

The sentiments are so clearly Randian in nature I’m surprised they sat unobserved for so long. But, now is the time to expose her and her selfish creed of individual rights. So let me make it clear, here and now….

Wait a second.

…Oh, dear, this doesn’t look good. Hold on why I clarify something.

Damn, Google sent me down the wrong path. That quote sounds pretty much vintage Rand—with her awful creed that no man should live for the sake of others. But, apparently someone else wrote it. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less selfish or greedy. No matter who says it, the morality that church and state have been telling us for centuries damns these ideas as rank immorality.

Anyway, it’s unlikely you heard of the author, unless you went to one of those greedy schools where education isn’t free. The author was some old guy, from the days of the Robber Barons. So what else do you expect?

His name was Frederick Douglass and this little tirade about being selfish was in a letter he wrote to Thomas Auld. Auld and Douglass had a difference of opinion. Douglas felt he should be allowed to live for his own sake. Auld felt Douglass should be required to live for the sake of others—in particular for Auld, who legally owned Mr. Douglass, and from whom Douglass escaped to freedom in the North.

Pardon my confusion. They just sounded so much alike. Who knew that Frederick Douglas was so selfish and greedy? Serving others as one's prime purpose in life, is so enriching the blacks of the American South must have been blessed and truly joyous—not a day didn't go by when they didn't live for the sake of others, putting their selfish, egotistical desires last, right up until those horrid Abolitionists got their way and destroyed one of the institution of American life totally dedicated to the service of others.


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