You say you want a better world? I want for your grandchildren to sail through the air on a tire swing hung from a tree you planted.Photo by: Jim Pennucci
Why does this matter? Objectivism’s errors are libertarianism’s errors, and taken together, they explain entirely why big-O or little, little-l or big, there is nothing left of either an Objectivist or libertarian movement.
These are the errors of enduring consequence in Ayn Rand’s philosophical praxis:
1. She made the wrong sales pitch
(since no one was ever scolded or scorned into better choices)
2. to the wrong people
(adults, especially Ci/INTJ proto-adults, few of whom even exist, with few of those few willing to change their deeply-ingrained habits-of-mind)
3. while having the actual decision-makers – the offspring of the converted – exterminated.
We can’t fault Rand (or Rothbard) for not knowing what it’s taken me most of my own life to work out, but it is nevertheless obvious that movements grow by childbirth and, accordingly, anti-family movements cannot endure.
The answer ain’t pretty, either way, but my vote’s on incompetence, rather than malice. Regardless, the poor dumb saps at the Ayn Rand Institute are by now left to sputter, “But we were promised that well-prepared undergraduates would grow on trees forever!”
#BrotherYouAskedForIt!
But: What’s done is done. What should you do now? Seed, breed, feed and creed your own. Childless people have a diminishing stake in the future and its portents, where a Hoplite father’s investments grow as they mature. And, regardless of that, the future will belong solely to the people who show up for it.
You say you want a better world? I want for your grandchildren to sail through the air on a tire swing hung from a tree you planted. Study me and you’ll learn how to win that prize and more, against lottery-ticket odds.
Family endures. Everything else is temporary. By getting that simple fact wrong, Ayn Rand, Objectivism and libertarianism have managed to get everything wrong.
