Every solution to a problem begins with a unified theory- Dr Gregory House
Ayn Rand was an emigre-Russian intellectual who died in 1982 at the age of 77. She founded an extremely narrow philosophy called “Objectivism” which you can look up, and if you do, you will be able to decide for yourself how unlikeable she might have appeared to just about everyone she considered beneath her…which was just about everyone. She had two successful novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), of which the former I liked best. I’ve even offered the film courtroom speech of architect Hoard Roark to the jury in September.
Inasmuch as I never considered her philosophy to be any broader than a personal philosophy, much like Libertarianism, and certainly not one to govern by, her self-righteous vanity for many years have kept her more beneficial skills hidden…by her own hand, so to speak.
But her observation- and analytical skills about the human condition were unequaled, and for my tastes can be better understood from her essays, not her novels.
Those essays were largely published first in her Objectivist periodical, then The Virtue of Selfishness, (up to 1964) and Return of the Primitive, (1971). I think Return of the Primitive belongs on every bookshelf of every critical thinker who can connect more than two dots, or wants to learn, especially interested in the antecedents to the social crisis we are now witnessing, for it outlines the social building blocks that our enemies have been using for nearly 60 years now to erect precisely the sort of system of human psychological management Miss Rand was attempting to warn us about over 50 years ago.
But being an avowed, in-your-face atheist, Miss Rand would never have dreamed that Evil-personified might also be reading her essays about Hate, and then slapping his hands together, and say, “Yeah, now that’s the ticket.”
That Evil is now staring us square in the face.
Return of the Primitive was first published in 1971, then reprinted in 1999 with additional essays by Peter Schwartz, Chairman of Ayn Rand Institute.
For reference, I found these essays of particular relevance to the discussion of the current attempted takeover of the United States:
- The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion”, about the Berkeley campus takeover in 1964 (important insights about the Nancy Pelosi generation, (1965) 36 pgs, and the source of Miss Rand’s “Haters, Manipulators, Appeasers an Profiteers” expounded upon years ago on this site. I continue to use it as an outline of the Enemy;
- The Chicken’s Homecoming, (1965) a 10-page report on the state of the academic philosophical wishy-washiness in America, and the ease by which it can be manipulated,, and why.
- The Comprachicos, (1970) a detailed account of a 17th Century historical group, and a how-to guide to totally disfiguring a group of young people once under your control, 48 pgs.
- Apollo and Dionysus, (1970) 20 pgs, comparing Woodstock with the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, and the dueling mindsets
- The Left, Old and New, (1970) 12 pgs, outlining how the over-indulged hippie-mindset of the Dionysian Left began stealing the Apollonian language of reason and logic, that presaged the 1976 takeover of the Democrat Party by the Left, in part led by a young 35-year old former-debutante and Democratic National Committee member named Nancy Pelosi;
- Racism, 1963, 10 pgs,
- Global Balkanization, 1977, 16 pgs
- Plus essays by Peter Schwartz on “Gender Tribalism”, “Multicultural Nihilism” and the “Anti-Industrial Revolution”, all from the 1990s, which also fit well with our theme here.
- The Age of Envy, (1970) 31 pgs, which provides important source material when married to Rand’s description of the ’64 Berkeley “children of the damned”, as a foretaste of future generational events she never lived to see, described more fully below.
You would be wise to keep this book close at hand.
These opening lines of “Age of Envy” announcing the marriage of Envy to Hate:
(Copied, from Ayn Rand Lexicon,):
Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.
To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.
That was 1970.
While the social condition “entitlement” was all around her, Miss Rand did not include this ingredient in her calculation even though it formed a strong base for the political Left movement of the 1960s…kids from wealthy backgrounds who were not accustomed to being denied their demands or their whims, and rarely if ever punished for their missteps. Nancy Pelosi would have been just such a prototype.
So also would have been a client and friend I had for over 10 years, named only Kathy. Miss Rand may also not have known (I sure didn’t at the time) that even back into the 1940s its was ordinary that the children of wealth, (New York’s Upper East Side, LA’s Bel Air, San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, Chicago’s Lake Forest) would have been visiting psychologists since teen-agers, and had grown up with a menu of prescription drugs for various anxieties. They were common back-stories in Hollywood films, about Manhattan in the 40s-50s-60s and California in the 80s; private schools, permissive home life, drugs, sex, and no real supervision in their lives. Several “Law an Order” television episodes were filled about them, albeit shown via the courtroom more than the culture, as well as the English murder series, “Midsomer Murders” mentioned recently about the “remorseless” condition now found in society-at-large, an which now that is three generations deep since Ayn Rand noticed it in the 60s.
My “Kathy” was one such rich-child-of-the-60s, raised in Lake Forest, along Lake Michigan, and my age. (Now that she has passed away, I may write her story in my “Famous Common People I Have Known” series once this election business is over.) I visited there often. She was a 60’s hippie runaway in Arizona, classically educated, and was so emaciated she could have been a poster-girl for why not to do drugs. Her father had been a very prominent lawyer in Chicago in the 50s, and when she joined a commune in the desert he placed her inheritance in trust managed by her sister. I first interviewed her in the 70s in Arizona, while doing some drug-bust defense work her friends living in a stucco commune called Apache Flats. In the 90s she tracked me down in Cincinnati and asked my help in getting this inheritance fund under her control. I hired and served as go-between with three downtown Chicago firms, attorneys. As she was a recluse, living on a small ranch, over 10 years I managed these three firms, which she fired in succession. And we got it all, about 10 million, she fired me, probably because of that $250K bonus she promised once the job was finished. But I’m certain she did better with than her sister with that money for she was a sheer genius in Wall Street math. Kathy was also an antiwar peacenik, drank Jack Daniels from the bottle, and also carried a Beretta in her purse, a big, big Second Amendment advocate. Her musical tastes ran from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Waldteufel (“Skater’s Waltz”). In town, children loved her, one of the sweetest people I have ever watched with children…until someone mentioned Jesus (which I did twice). Then, it was like someone pulled all the curtains. Her face would grow dark, and her voice sharper and an octave lower. Sheer hate. Kathy had other trip wires, including paranoia about the rays emitted from telephones, which made it impossible to talk to her on the phone any longer. Her son emailed me in 2009 to say she had passed away.
Thanks to Kathy I can personally trace this culture of hate back to the 60s, when its was not openly managed politically.
Being very anti-God herself, Miss Rand may have had no sense of the special hatred for Christians these entitled children of the damned felt toward religion among their own age group. But it wasn’t the ostentatiousness signs of religion; psalm-singing or Bible-clutching, for even Berkley had a Baptist Student Union and Newman Center in the 60’s. And I doubt a “Merry Christmas” would even have offended Ayn Rand in that period. It was that damned glow or forgiving smile that causes the haters to gnash their teeth, for it meant an unspoken testament that “I have something you don’t have” which so quickly flips on their hate switch, never allowing the Christian to get the chance to say “…but I sure wish you did, too.” If you look closely you see this conditioned knee-jerk in all sorts of attempted interactions, both facer-to-face and social media.
So, Christians don’t have to say “and you can’t have it” in order to push the hate-button.
Miss Rand went onto say, “Evil as the hating creatures are, there is something still more evil; those who try to appease them”.
But to discuss Appeasers, Manipulators, Profiteers and Protectors will require an equally long discussion, only it will revolve around a different kind of intervention, for while thousands of these young haters, without any real worry about paying for any of life’s necessities, are on the streets today breaking things and burning things, and in November I encouraged a policy of locking these kids away for as little as 2-weeks, no phones, no shoe laces, no service, just for observation. They will be easier to deal with if we destroy their more criminal support systems and their totems. Left to their own devices, we can literally hang them out to dry, where the occasional Leopold and Loeb will once again appear in a 2021 “Law & Order” remake, awaiting punishment without political intervention in a more conventional way.
There is much we can do at the grass-roots, for even in a town of 10,000 and only a county seat, it has many Appeasers, Manipulators, Profiteers and Protectors which can be exposed.
But first we will need to know whether we will still be on the horses…or afoot.
To be continued.
