I’ve been very negligent. I let the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged slide by unnoticed, by me anyway. I hereby do my richly deserved, and probably lengthy, penance.
Like everyone else I have a biological mother, but like a more select group I also have a spiritual mother: Ayn Rand. A woman whose work reached into the drain I was swirling around and pulled me out, even though she had gone to her grave. She confirmed to me what some of us had long suspected: Intellectually and philosophically, the landscape of the 20th Century was a few islands of sanity in an ocean of the barking mad.
My only regret? Not getting to her sooner. I had been given a chance by a beloved high school teacher who recommended the novel in the strongest terms. I put it on my to-do list, but was far more interested in getting wasted and becoming a teen-aged father.
Years later, in my early 20s, when I had been driven to the brink myself, she died. I learned of it in a surprisingly sympathetic editorial in my hometown’s far-left rag of a newspaper. Purely to keep my long ago promise, I walked down to the bookstore to buy the book. I was appalled at the sheer size of the novel, so I decided to substitute her smallest, Anthem, instead. I read the slim volume in less than two hours, and with a sense of building excitement, I walked back to the bookstore and bought, “The Virtue of Selfishness”. I spent the rest of the day and most of that night finishing it. All the while saying to myself, “This is it!, This is it!”
The next morning I walked down to the bookstore once again and purchased everything they had and spent the next few months devouring them. I felt the pall of gloom lift from me. Mostly because I finally realized that I was not alone, and because I realized that sometimes, no matter what your angry relatives tell you, the rest of the world is wrong and you’re right.
As I was absorbing the lessons of Objectivism, I felt something I had never felt before. The urge to proselytize. I finally understood all of the annoying missionaries who had come to my door. They didn’t intend to annoy me. They just had found something that gave meaning and hope to their lives and wanted to share it. So I set out to bring up the subject whenever it could reasonably be worked in to a conversation.
I discovered a horrifying thing. Lots of people were aware of this—and had rejected it. In fact, most of those that were aware of it assumed it to be so obnoxious that no decent person would even mention it. Even those that were unaware of it cringed in horror and disgust at learning even the first few most basic principles. As for me? I was filled with rage at how many people I knew that had known of this and not shared it with me. Even my own mother, when she saw me reading one of the books, rolled her eyes and said, “Oh dear God! Please tell me you’re not getting into that!” I still love her, but I’ve never forgiven her.
I’ve applied what I’ve learned to my own life. I almost never let an absurd statement pass unchallenged, especially if an impressionable audience is present. When I’m told everybody knows something, I demand to know who everybody is, much to the speakers chagrin. If some collectivist low-life throws out some reason-evading buzzword, I demand that he define exactly what is meant by the term, and then that they defend it. Most of all, I demand to know by what right they think that they can reach into another’s wallet and confiscate the fruits of his labor. They’ll hate you for it, of course. Because you force them to face the fact that they live their lives by substandard values that they’ve passively absorbed from the environment, and don’t even understand.
Ayn is frequently condemned for being a polarizing figure, as if that were a sin in and of itself. She could never help but be such a figure. A person who refuses to live her life in the gray between right and wrong is a terrifying threat to those who do. I miss her.
