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Morality, What Is It? America’s Revolutionary Minds Wanted to Know. Some Still Do.

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“A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It” is the subtitle for C. Bradley Thompson’s 2019 book, America’s Revolutionary Mind. However, the concept of morality is a high-level abstract idea. Unfortunately, in a country whose education, media, and political institutions wallow in moral subjectivism, it means different things to different people. Today, America’s dominant philosophy can be summed as: There are no absolutes. Just be a nice person. Love is the answer.

This 1960’s Age of Absurdity nonsense is anchored by the ideas of 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who defined it as, “Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.” This ambiguity is supported by another German philosopher, Georg Hegel, who believed “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

This brings us to the most common view of moral questions, the difference between doing what is right and doing what is wrong. In the Christian tradition, pacifism is what is right: turn the other cheek, and St. Paul the Apostle, in his letter to the Galatians explains, “Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom.” Yet, both moral codes require humility and self-denial.

Its because the religious morality of the premodern world (ante Age of Enlightenment), and the secular morality of the postmodern world (post Age of Reason) are commonly accepted in 2020’s American culture, that the moral principles of America’s founding are virtually unknown. In an effort to solve this false dilemma, Center for Individualism has created a Facebook group whose purpose is to study each chapter of America’s Revolutionary Mind.

Our modest goal is to help members of our group and readers of this column answer the question below; one posed by Irina Dunaev in Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living. After being sentenced to ten years in a Soviet gulag (a slow, horrific death sentence) because her brother was a snitch for the socialist criminal gang (like there’s any other kind), she asked her cousin Kira Argounova,

There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that its something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now its over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone. But there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?

In order to understand the moral code that created the most tolerant and prosperous society the world has ever known, we will begin reading and discussing Thompson’s book the week of November 30th, and cover one chapter each week through the week of February 22, 2021. To keep the conversation robust, ice breaker questions will be offered and examples that relate to current events will be encouraged. This is an open group, and it can be easily found searching the group name: Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind.

Membership is automatic once three simple questions have been answered to confirm your participation, which simply means – have an active mind. The foundational precept of human beings with an active mind is: Existence exists. The universe is all there is, and Its a Wonderful Life. The only thing that can go out of existence is that which is living. Therefore, it is imperative that morality, at its core, promotes life at its most robust.

To quote the Buffalo football fan whose sign was caught on national TV after the Bills won a fourth consecutive American Conference championship in 1993, “Deal With It America!”  Americans of any nationality routinely do this. It, being reality.

Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind!

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In July, Center for Individualism created a Facebook study group centered on Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living. The group analyzed the novel’s characters and their circumstances, its historical backdrop, and the lessons that can be drawn for 2020 Americans from 1920s Russia. The weekly series of articles that resulted from the group’s analysis is titled Reliving We the Living.

The blog posts included the impressions of our study group members, and related the experiences of the novel’s heroine, Kira Argounova, to today’s Gen Z and Millennials. This combination of features had never been attempted or achieved, and was wrapped with the superlative bow of Natalie Schroder’s Foreword to the eBook, which was released last month. To Reliving Ayn Rand’s We the Living we added an essay about Stalinist Russia’s great poet Anna Akhmatova and occupied Poland’s poet laureate Czeslaw Milosz.

There are several reasons why we chose this novel, but none is more important than the necessity of great art, and particularly great literature, for living in a truly civilized society. As the wonderful educator Lisa VanDamme explains in her essay Teaching Values in the Classroom,

Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions, and what they made possible; of the classics of literature and the characters and situations they describe; these are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.

Yet a vicious assault on moral principles (not Puritan, but rational) continues to decivilize America, and it has only accelerated in the last twenty years. The evidence is stark – the New York Time’s 1619 Project in public schools, the anti-concepts “Wokism” and “Whiteness,” Modern Monetary Theory in universities, and the “peaceful protests” of the progressive left’s BLM and Antifa terror wings.

For those reasons, it is clear that the moral foundations of America must be retrieved from the dust bin of history, for us to shine bright lights on them, and to celebrate the Benevolent Universe they represent. To achieve that modest goal, we are forming a new Facebook study group, and its centerpiece will be America’s Revolutionary Mind by political science professor, C. Bradley Thompson. As he writes in his essay, What Exactly Was the Spirit of ’76?

Having made their case against despotism and for freedom, it should be clear why revolution was necessary for the Americans, why they would not compromise. They had to act because of who and what they were, and the moral law they chose to live by.

Our online forum is an open group on Facebook, and we will begin reading and analyzing this “Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It” on December 1st. The group is called Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind, and there are three simple questions to answer for automatic membership.

As Administrators, we will remove any member who is disrespectful to America’s founding principles or other members of the group. However, because it is an open group, membership will be visible, and not suitable for people lacking self-esteem. As John Adams also taught, “Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.”

Arbitrary power is what the progressive left, formerly known as Communists, represent. Yet the source of their power lies within us. They are weak; they rely on us to surrender ourselves as intellectual agents for our own self-determination. In Part II of Chapter 10 of We the Living, Timoshenko describes the progressive left’s character to Comrade Morozov,

Don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture that have learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you are not to be shot, but to be disinfected.

The choice and power are yours, and to learn more, please consider being active in our Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind study group.

Are We Reliving “We The Living?”Who is Kira Argounova? Gen Z’s Defense Against Losing Themselves to the Siren Song of Equality.

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Every Monday since early August, Mark Shupe has been sharing with Center For Individualism readers his study of Ayn Rand’s We The Living. This 1936 novel is based on Ms. Rand’s experiences in 1920’s Russia, after the Communist revolution. The heroine of the novel, Kira Argounova, is the age-equivalent of today’s Generation Z, and is determined to keep her life from being stolen from her. Are there parallels with today’s America? Please read the comparisons by one of today’s Gen Z and judge for yourself.

I entered this year much in the same way that Kira Argounova enters Petrograd at the beginning of We The Living: hopeful, spirited, and blissfully unaware of the horrors that were to come. When I first read We The Living at the age of fourteen, I was of course struck by the unimaginable desolation of life in the Soviet Union, and Kira’s burden of being forced to live in a world that targets anyone who dares not to submit to the control of the masses.

But never would I have ever thought that I would one day see parallels between Kira’s life and my own. Reading it again at eighteen, the same age as Kira when this story begins, I find myself a different person in a world completely unfamiliar to me. I never wanted to see the slightest bit of similarity between Kira’s world and mine, but now I must watch as history begins to repeat itself once again. 

My experience of attending college and interacting with people my age is strikingly similar to Kira’s. As the newest generation of voters, and during an election that is almost an intellectual civil war, everyone is quick to take a side, and quick to proclaim their hatred for anyone who does not agree with them. And the side that recruits the overwhelming majority of devoted followers is the Left. The Left has come to bear a striking similarity to the Proletarian movement, claiming to call for equality while ultimately just retaliating with vengeance against anyone they deem an oppressor.

They pledge their allegiance with the same fanatical, cultish fervor as the Proletarian students of Kira’s world. It seems as though every thought, every conversation, every interaction is tainted by Leftist propaganda. It is the subject constantly bubbling under the surface, threatening to breach at any given moment. And if you do not actively take the pledge, agree with everything said by the Left, and regurgitate every bit of propaganda to anyone who will listen, then, just like a suspected bourgeois, you place a target on your own back.

Like Kira, I refuse to be bound to any collective. I will not adhere myself to either side. My highest priority is my own freedom as an individual, the freedom to choose my beliefs rather than have them chosen for me. But to my peers, that is almost worse than choosing the opposite side. To them, it is incomprehensible. They mistake independence for indifference; they preach that neutrality is even more evil than active hate, all while not even realizing the immensity of their own hate. 

Their most powerful tool for controlling their people is guilt. Guilt for being born with any kind of privilege, guilt for not sacrificing yourself to the collective, guilt for even daring to think of yourself. If they can make you feel guilty simply for existing, they can control you. Social media is the perfect vessel for this tactic, a step up from the posters and slogans plastered across the walls of Petrograd. Many of those same slogans can now be seen all over Instagram, along with cartoonish, candy-colored infographics explaining things like systemic racism, white privilege, and the evils of capitalism. 

I see these things posted by my own friends, people whose kindness and compassion have been exploited, people who are victims of the extreme guilt-inducing mind control techniques of the Left. I understand why they do it. They have been made to feel so incredibly guilty that they sacrifice their individuality just to try and rid themselves of a fraction of that guilt. In time, the guilt diminishes and is replaced by a sense of self-righteousness that comes from employing the very same tactics that crushed them in the first place. They feel they are doing the right thing, they feel morally just and good. They don’t care if it means losing themselves in the process. 

Even I am not immune to the guilt. I am not as solitary as Kira; I rely on the comfort and security that comes with having friends. And when I see my friends shaping their entire identities around Leftist causes, believing in them so fervently that it hurts, I feel guilty. To them, finding out that someone they consider a friend does not buy into all of these same causes would feel like betrayal. I don’t want to cause them that kind of pain. 

I’d like to hope my future is not as bleak as Kira’s. To read this book while watching the world morph into it is unnerving. I read about Kira’s experiences as a student and see my own. I watch her struggle to survive in a world that aims to destroy her and wonder if my own world will ever come to that. I see her ultimately lose the battle, and hope that I will never see a similar kind of fate. Kira mentions that she has always felt that something was promised to her, a great future full of all her highest values. She is denied that promise. I don’t want to be denied the same.

I don’t know what awaits me in the future, or whether I will ever get to see the future I’ve always dreamed of, but I will continue to believe that it is possible. Though so much is uncertain, I can still have certainty in myself, certainty that no matter what happens, I know who I am and what is important to me, and nothing and no one can take that away from me.

 

Natalie Schroder, 19, currently resides in Southern California. She is in her first year of college and plans on majoring in health sciences with a long-term goal of attending medical school. Natalie also has a strong passion for writing, and has had her work published multiple times.

Reliving We The Living

Devotion To Your Rational Life Is The Primary, Essential Force For Human Peace and Prosperity.

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Chapter 17, Part II is the chilling story of Kira’s escape to Latvia in Ayn Rand’s 1936 epic novel, We the Living. In a principled life of motion and purpose, she chose an arduous journey from the mental and physical torture of the east, and toward the modern, classical liberalism of the west.

After what seemed like endless days and nights on a desolate train ride, Kira’s journey necessitated a brief rest stop to change clothes and eat.  Ahead of her lay the night-long, final trek across a barren, winter frontier. It compelled only the essentials, so Kira gambled on a safe-house,

She knocked at a door. A man opened it. She slipped a bill into his hand and tried to explain. She did not have to explain much. Those in the house knew and understood.

In the previous chapter, and in a chance meeting on her way to the train station, Gen Z’s Kira ran into her beloved Uncle Vasili on the streets of Petrograd, now Leningrad. While he desperately clung to hope that Europe will somehow rescue Russians from Soviet slavery, Kira told him,

Uncle Vasili . . . over there . . . where I’m going . . . I’ll tell them about everything . . . It’s like an SOS . . . And maybe . . . someone . . . somewhere . . . will understand . . . .

Prior to that, Andrei had surrendered his body to Soviet totalitarianism in Chapter 15, and Leo was surrendering his mind. After learning of her relationship with Andrei and being released from jail, Leo explains, “Because, you see, that sets me free.” Kira then asks, “Free . . . from what Leo?” He answers, “From a little fool who was my last hold on self-esteem.” Millennial Leo had been defeated by overwhelming, government-enforced selflessness.

Conversely, it seems hatred of President Trump is rooted in his refusal to be defeated over his love for America. His resilience and perseverance in the face of desperate and virulent opposition is not unlike Kira’s, and his arrogantly confident egoism befits Leo. As a result, Trump represents a grave threat to 2020 America’s war and welfare statists. Taking his turn, former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich threatened on October 18th,

When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.

Despite greed and cowardice being the hallmarks of ‘Democratic’ Socialism’s exponents, Joe Biden being the exemplar, as reported by the New York Post on October 14th, Leo finally asked Kira, “Have you nothing to say?” She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered, “Only this, Leo: it was I against 150 million people. I lost.” Men against Man.

Yet, Kira had not lost her fitness for living or right to moral justice. Because self-esteem is a matter of life and death, pride defends the meaning of Kira’s life, her most precious ideal,

She had to walk west. That was the only problem, that was the total of all problems. She did not have to think. She had to get out.

Here, Ayn Rand has identified Kira’s singular goal and its essential action. To live demanded the reason of Western civilization because the mysticism of the east meant death by altruism or force. For Kira, her devotion to logic led to one thing – the energy of her mind and body coordinated in pursuit of her ultimate goal, and it was time to act.

While all other options had been exhausted, Kira had been here before. At the end of Part I, chasing every possibility offered by the Soviet socialist criminal gang, she got Leo to a sanitorium in Crimea to save his life. Now, it was Kira’s turn, and this is the extraordinary and beautiful message of We the Living. Your life and happiness are your highest value; not Society, not God, not others, and not retribution.

This is the essence of the Preamble to America’s Declaration of Independence, and also the advice received from Leonard Peikoff (author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand) by teaching impresario Lisa VanDamme, and posted online on October 16th,

A few years in, I considered getting out of education. I sought guidance from people I respected. The worst advice: Figure out where you want to make an impact; to change the world. From Leonard: Reflect on your week. What made you the most happy? Extract principles about what activities bring you satisfaction. Pursue a career that features those.

However, for most 2020 Americans, Kira’s message from Uncle Vasili and millions of Russians is not getting through. Public education is grounded in public service, social justice, non-profit work, and giving back. All based on the false premise that there is “something greater than yourself.” While Robert Reich may be an irrelevant turd from the 1990’s, the depravity of “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” have been popular among government elites in over 40 countries and three decades.

Perhaps the most egregious example is the aftermath of terrorist Nelson Mandela’s “Democratic Socialism” disaster. As Martin van Staden, Head of Legal Policy at the Free Market Foundation of South Africa wrote in 2017,

We were supposed to move away from the Apartheid mentality. Instead, we have doubled down. The so-called Prevention of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill of 2016 is perhaps the gravest threat to freedom of expression which South Africans have ever faced.

Kira Argounova’s attitude and behavior offer the glorious alternative to fighting for reparations or revelation – pride. When Leo asked her, “What is there to bind me?” She looked straight at him, and only her lips moved as she answered with the greatest calm of her life: “Nothing Leo.” Chapter 16 ended, “Well good-bye, Uncle Vasili” . . . “Good-bye, Kira.” She walked away without looking back.

Never letting setbacks get in the way of her aspirations, and with freedom on the horizon, in defense of man against men, Kira’s mind, body, and spirit achieved its ultimate clarity,

She smiled, as if she had lived it. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be. A moment or an eternity – did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

Existence Proves America’s Independent Virtues and Servant Leadership’s Sacrificial Vices.

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The eleventh week of our We the Living Study Group on Facebook ended with Part II – Chapter 15, and with Gen Z’s Kira asking herself about Andrei’s suicide. While attending his state sponsored celebration of the ultimate self-sacrifice, “Kira Argounova stood without moving and listened attentively. Her eyes held a question she hoped the world could answer. She wondered whether she had killed him, or the revolution had, or both.” Yet, among the crowd there was widespread ambivalence,

The Field of Victims of the Revolution was in the heart of the city, on the shore of the Neva, a vast, white desert stretching a half mile. A bald spot on the scalp of Petrograd. A woman hissed, “What do they have to commit suicide about? Who the hell was he, anyway?”

Andrei Taganov was someone who had not yet failed the Krylenko test. Nikolai Krylenko was president of the supreme tribunal for prosecuting military trials in 1920’s Soviet Russia. As the leading enforcer of “socialist legality,” his courts determined a person’s continued existence on political whim.

Today we call it social justice, and it’s most prolific apologist is Edward R. Murrow award winner Keith Olbermann. One week after leaving Disney owned ESPN, this perfect storm of anger, ignorance, and arrogance declared on October 8th,

The task is twofold, the terrorist Trump must be destroyed, and he and his collaborators – the Williams Barr’s, the Kyle Rittenhouse’s, and the Amy Coney Barrett’s must be prosecuted, convicted, and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it!

For contrast, on October 15th, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, giant of philosophy and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, was celebrated on the occasion of his 87th birthday as the perfect storm of reason, humor, and generosity. In a small aside during his first-ever zoom conference, he inserted independently, “I am voting for Trump, thank you.” Yet last week, the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary committee proceeded to give Judge Barrett the Krylenko treatment, implicitly demanding she toe their Party line for approval to the US Supreme Court.

Hoping to crack her independent virtues, Judge Barrett was steel, and steel doesn’t lie. The moral corruption and hubris of these Senators was best described by Kira’s cousin Victor at Andrei’s memorial. A Soviet sellout himself,

Our only aim is the honest toil which profits no one, but all. The lesson we are to learn here today is a Party that rules by sacrificing itself to those it rules.

Today we call it servant leadership, “for a more just and caring world,” by golly. As its progenitor Robert Greenleaf explained, “The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.” Of course, “other people” is ambiguous, and one’s highest priorities are their own, if they so choose.

Servant leadership implies we are poor, dumb slobs in the chaos of existence; desperate for benevolent dictators in a malevolent universe, or as Kira protested to Andrei in Chapter 13, “you’ve tried to tell us what we should want.” No matter, the important thing is for the independent virtues of the leader to be sacrificed for the “goodness of humanity.”

In contrast, when Kira first met Leo early in Part I, her subconscious mind immediately recognized his independence,

Kira leaned against a lamp post, looking straight at his face, and smiled. She did not think; she smiled, stunned, without realizing she was hoping he would know her as she knew him.

When Kira subsequently met Andrei, she subconsciously also recognized his independence,

She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger. For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.

However, Kira did not smile at Andrei. Instead, during their second encounter, she asked, “Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Comrade Taganov, how much you have to learn!” After Leo’s arrest by Andrei’s goons in Part II – Chapter 13, she tells him,

No, you didn’t know. But it was simple. Go where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. (Leo) wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know.

For Kira, her life, and Leo’s, were primary standards of value. The alternative was to cease to exist. They were exceptional because they took ownership of their futures. “Now look at me! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. Something that knows how to want, isn’t that life itself?” Regarding the State as the highest standard, she asks Andrei, “Do we want the crippled, creepy, crawling, broken monstrosities that we’re producing? Are we not castrating life in order to perpetuate it?” 

In the Red cities of 2020 Democratic party teacher’s unions, their creepy monstrosities march, chant, loot, burn, and kill. These selfless “peaceful protestors” are the State heroes for Victor Dunaev’s “honest toil which profits no one.” No kidding. Yet, Kira demands Andrei recognize the ones who may be fighting for their own independence,

Aren’t those who know how to live, aren’t they too precious to be sacrificed in the name of any cause? What cause is greater than those who fight for it? And aren’t those who know how to fight, aren’t they the cause and not the means?

This amazing chain of events, masterfully crafted by Ayn Rand, begins in Chapter 10. There, Timoshenko delivers Poetic Justice to Morozov’s face when he learns that he’s the ultimate victim. In Chapter 11, Andrei exposes Pavel’s corruption to his Soviet chief, and in Chapter 12, Leo challenges Andrei’s veneer of integrity. Yet it is in Chapter 13 when Kira blows up their entire house of cards. She tells Andrei how and why she had to use him to save Leo,

There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me, why couldn’t one aristocrat die in the face of the USSR? I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you – he did it first!

Now Kira wondered if the revolution had ended Andrei’s existence, or had she? Neither, Andrei had chosen reverence for the other-worldly ideals of “others” that necessarily suffocate the human spirit.

Pursuit of Happiness and the Virtue of Selfishness, Or Politics of Pull and the Vices of Selflessness.

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Chapter eight of Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living, Part II ends with Gen Z Irina’s dreams crushed in a Siberian gulag, and Chapter nine begins with her millennial brother Victor’s Communist Party promotion. The two are related, he engineered his sister’s devastation despite insisting “I want you to realize that my party membership is a sacred trust not to be utilized for purposes of personal advantage.”

On her way to prison for the crime of being good, Irina asks Kira a question she might have asked her pragmatic brother, “There’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?” In our We the Living online forum, Clementine contributes part of a conversation with her teenage daughters,

My younger daughter was analyzing the question of what is happiness, and realizing the contradictions in altruism. What’s the point of living? Why are we alive? Who do we live for?

Victor’s reward is little different than Joe Biden being awarded the Democratic presidential nomination for ravaging the reputations of Judge Robert Bork in 1987 and Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. After all, as Victor tells his new bride Marisha, “My dear, we must never forget, our social duties come first, above all personal considerations.” For contrast, later in chapter nine, Kira tells her boyfriend, “Leo, I can’t reproach you. I can’t blame you. I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re doing it. But listen: its not too late.”

Leo had given up on his future; living for the present was his only option. Refusing to submit, Kira can’t reproach him because of Andrei, to whom she says, “You were the best your Party had to offer the world.” Andrei replied, “Say I’m a traitor. Maybe I am. And maybe I’ve just stopped being one. You see, I feel certain of nothing in that involved mess they call existence, of nothing but you.” He was going in the opposite direction of Leo, but for similar reasons.

Leo gave in to the mystics of muscle whose duty is to Society; Andrei to the mystics of the mind whose duty is to God. To them, existence was no longer real, they had become selfless. To Kira, existence was primary and human ideals follow. Her virtue was selfishness, Leo was the higher value, and her life and happiness an end in itself. Conversely, 2020 America’s Democratic party is dominated by the Bernie Sanders & Sandy Cortez coalition of baby boomers and millennials (Motto: Go Pound Sand!) who share a perverted sense of romance about the Soviet ideal of self-sacrifice.

In Chapter 10 of this 1936 novel, former Soviet naval officer Stepan Timoshenko prophesizes them by telling us how this works, “You know more about it than I do, more than millions of young fools do, that watch us from all over the world with worshiping eyes. We had fools who thought in their doomed hearts that we made it for all those downtrodden ones who suffer on this earth. But you and me, Comrade Morozov, we have a secret.” In this wonderfully crafted scene by Ayn Rand, Timoshenko brings the reader in on their two big secrets,

With a smile that frightened Morozov more than the laughter: Don’t look so scared, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m nothing but a wretch, beaten by you, Comrade Morozov.

The terror Morozov felt is the same terror Kira had felt in the Petrograd train station when she witnessed Morozov condemning a desperate old woman to Soviet police. Except there’s one big difference: Kira was selfish – she wanted to live as people were meant to live. Instead of pounding sand in a society of zeroes, Kira wanted to turn it into cement and glass, or maybe silicon wafers some day. Morozov’s looting evades reality because it produces nothing. No self-esteem is selflessness.

Evading reality was his death sentence in the court of moral justice, and Timoshenko was the officer of the court delivering the verdict. Last week, officers of the court Joe Biden and Kamala Harris gave clear indications of their intention to pervert America’s justice system – pack the US Supreme Court into a super-legislative political instrument for Soviet-style class warfare. A “bonehead idea” according to Biden in 1983, and that’s saying something.

In Chapter 11, Andrei tells Kira about his plan to report Syerov’s black market operations with Leo and Morozov to his chief, “I’m expecting the highest integrity from the men I am going to face. Don’t make me face them with less than that on my part.” Andrei didn’t want to know what Kira might have known about Leo’s business, and Chapter 12 reveals the integrity charade. While begin arrested by Andrei and his goons, Leo questions their pretense, “I realize that one should know how to respect the grandeur of authority under all circumstance. No matter how trying to the self-respect of those in power.” Leo and Andrei both understood the scam rooted in fear.

Equally absurd, last week, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an inane 25th Amendment commission for removing President Trump. As only he can, Trump exposes this, “Crazy Nancy is the one who should be under observation. They don’t call her Crazy for nothing! She’s gone crazy, she’s a nutjob. I think they put it in so they can put Kamala in, replacing Biden.” In a similar vein, Andrei’s plan was to get the Soviets to expose their own looting, and him regain his self-respect. He explained to his chief, “It will also be important to explain how a penniless aristocrat laid his hands on the very heart of our economic life.”

The economic life of 2020 Democrats is their Green New Deal – a cabal of crony corporatists, environmental lobbies, socialist foundations, progressive think tanks, and government agencies looting human productivity under the guise of saving the planet. Biden, Sanders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton come to mind as famous examples among many thousands of politicians who became wealthy from “public service” careers that produced nothing. Because of this, the productive virtues of the individual mind are the greatest threat to Party ideology, except the selfless kind.

Accordingly, President Trump is reviled by political elites and their loyal voters whose minds were stunted by The Comprachicos of progressive government education. Fortunately, our Facebook study group proves the remedy exists, and its rooted in the volition of human consciousness, as Clementine explains,

Gen Z is searching for answers in the collectivist “serving something greater than yourself,” and sensing that has no real purpose. My daughter was working her way to that conclusion as she started reflecting on the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

Pragmatism, Good Intentions, and Proletariat Lives Are All That Matter. To Avoid Death. For Now.

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In week one of our We the Living Study Group, we were introduced to year five of the Soviet Revolution: “the State’s New Economic Policy (NEP) had allowed a temporary compromise.” It is 1922, and in Part 1, Chapter 2 we were also introduced to Kira’s Gen Z cousin, Irina,

A door crashed open and something came flying into the anteroom; something tall, tense, with a storm of hair and eyes like automobile headlights; and Galina recognized Irina, her niece, a young girl of eighteen with the eyes of twenty-eight and the laughter of eight.

Representing Soviet temporary compromises was Irina’s brother Victor, who tells his family,

The days of confiscations are past. The Soviet government has a most progressive policy outlined. The most promising career for a woman is offered by employment in a Soviet office. One has to be practical nowadays – as you ought to know.

Here, Ayn Rand has used an economy of words to illustrate the implied threat in every sentence: there will be future confiscations, ambiguous centralized economic power equals progress, and female careers outside a Soviet office are not promising. Practicality means pragmatism, rational principles be damned.

Irina’s principles were still being developed, yet she knew she wanted to live. More precisely, to learn what it was like to be really alive. Upon seeing her cousin Kira for the first time in four years, she excitedly asks, “Did you eat fresh fruit in the Crimea? I’ve been dreaming, yearning and dying for grapes. Don’t you like grapes? Victor, they’re wearing the funniest things in the south. Did you notice Kira’s wooden sandals?”

While Kira’s dream was to build, and work with steel because it doesn’t tell lies, Irina’s was to work with music and paint because great art reflects her highest values. Victor’s highest aspiration was to conform, to do anything necessary under the fog of Soviet dictates, and volunteer for the dirty work needed to enforce the equality of their social justice.

To attain power, the Soviets preached ‘equality,’ for the ‘goodness of humanity.’ It was a world-wide proletariat lives matter movement after all. In Chapter 2, Kira asks Victor what his “stupendous whole” called society really means,

I don’t understand it. To whom is it that I owe a duty? To your neighbor next door? Or to the militia-man on the corner? Or to the clerk in the cooperative? Or to the man I saw in line, third from the door, with the old basket and the woman’s hat?

Yet, mindless duty is nearly universally accepted in 2020 America. In Chapter 1 of Part II, Ayn Rand explains that “the people” does not have a mind. In 1776, Adam Smith explained further in his classic treatise on economics, An Inquiry in to the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

However, in order to rationalize government power, the 1920’s Soviets and 2020 American Democrats chose the 19th century economics and philosophy of Karl Marx,

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure. The less you are, the more you have.

This quote from Marx was intended to demonize capital, and capitalists, yet it became the ideal behind Soviet control of every day life in 1920s Russia. In this case, “treasure” belongs to Communist Party insiders and Washington political elites. With the removal of Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1925, pragmatic five-year New Economic Plans (NEP) became the norm.

Likewise, in Part II, Chapter 8 of We the Living, Victor Dunaev betrays everything he had ever claimed about self-sacrifice being a virtue and self-interest being a vice. He paid his dues by informing the Soviet secret police about his sister Irina’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ behavior. In order to get ahead in Party politics, Victor snitched that Irina was hiding her boyfriend Sasha in their apartment.

Victor’s father-in-law knew betrayal, and the Soviet big secret very well. During the wedding party in the previous chapter, Kira had heard Lavrov’s wife grunting about Leo Kovalensky’s new-found display of wealth, “And they say private traders don’t make no money . . . Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lavrov growled, and spat loudly.”

Irina, still desperate to learn what it was like to be really alive, was arrested, taken to prison, and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian gulag. Upon being hauled away, she faced Victor,

Her eyes stopped him. They were looking at him fixedly; they looked suddenly like the eyes of Maria Petrovna in the old portrait. She turned and followed the soldiers. Without a word. She went first.

Her life now ended before it had really begun, Irina’s eyes had acquired the consciousness of the living dead, something Ayn Rand had described when Kira noticed a Soviet guard at the Petrograd train station, “His eyes were austere and forbidding like caverns where a single flame burned under cold, gray vaults. The soldier looked at her coldly, indifferently, astonished.”

The soldier’s vision was closed to a future for himself, and he was surprised to see it in another human being. Irina’s father Vasili was finally broken too; not by Maria’s kind of submission to God or Victor’s to Society, but by the 18th century moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant that combined both and dominated Soviet culture,

Many years ago, I felt sure of what I thought. I knew when I was right and I knew when to condemn. I can’t do it now. I don’t know that I can condemn anyone for anything. You’re my son Victor. I love you. I can’t help it, as you can’t help being what you are.

Vasili has submitted to the idea that we can not know what is objectively true, so principles are subjective. We do not possess free will, so good intentions are all that matter. Here, We the Living becomes the ultimate mystery novel. While visiting Irina in prison, before her transport to Siberia, Irina asks Kira,

There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that its something so precious and rare, so beautiful that its like a sacred treasure. Now its over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone. But there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?

What?

The Price of Priest, Potentate, or Party ‘Protection’ Is One’s Mind, Happiness, and Future.

/in /by

Part II of Ayn Rand’s epic 1936 novel We the Living began with an abstract about the history and consciousness of St. Petersburg, Russia. In our Facebook study group, a member introduced us to the 1986 TV miniseries, Peter the Great. In an early scene of the movie, Czar Peter asks the assistant priest to the head of the Russian Orthodox church,

Our Lord told the Jews that the world must come to an end, and man come to judgement before the death of his last disciple. Correct? Correct, sire. Yet the last disciple has been dead for 17 centuries. Why hasn’t the world ended? Hmm, God, like a Czar, might change his mind. Very good, Father. Very resourceful!

From God to the Czar to the Party, and inevitably the individual, Chapters 4 – 6 illustrate the death spiral of socialism’s vortex. It begins with Kira coming to face to face with the ‘speculator’ she first met at the train station in Part I, Chapter 12, the one who had caused her subconscious mind to experience terror.

Now, this speculator was in her apartment with Leo, and recruiting Leo to front a private food store in Petrograd. It would be supplied with contraband from Soviet insider Pavel Syerov. Much like President Obama’s 2012 hot mike moment with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, “after my election, I have more flexibility,” Kira responded,

A lamp stood on a table; in its glow, she could see Morozov’s face leaning toward Leo’s, his slow words muffled to a sly, guilty whisper. “What are you talking about?” Kira threw at Morozov with the violence of a slap in the face. “A little business deal, Kira Alexandrovna.”

After Morozov left, Kira asks Leo, “This isn’t a joke you’re playing on me, is it? Or have you lost your mind entirely?” Leo replies, “I’m glad to find some use for it.”  This neutering of the mind continues at Pavel Syerov’s house party, the one celebrating Morozov’s deal with Leo that will make them wealthy,

Pavel Syerov can afford anything now. Anything on this God-damn earth! He can buy you all, guts and souls! I’m going to be a very great man! No one appreciates me, I’ll show ’em who’s got the whip! I’ve got a secret, a great secret! But I can’t tell you.

Protecting us poor dumb slobs, 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden can tell us: “I’m the guy, said we follow bin Laden to the gates of hell. I’m the guy who helped bail out the automobile industry. I’m the guy that ran the Recovery Act. I’m the guy that set up drug courts. I’m the guy that helped put together the Iran deal. I’m the guy that got the Brady Bill passed. I’m the guy that asked the CDC to keep detailed reports.” And the guy who invented water?

What he can’t tell you, as reported last week, is that Hunter Biden got wealthy exploiting his power of political pull with Russia and China. “C’mon, man?!”

The keeping of secrets becomes the essence of daily life when avoiding reality dominates everyone’s mind. Chapter 5 begins with Kira leaving a meeting of her excursion guides and telling a colleague,

“Yes, a splendid speech. Of course, our cultural duty to the proletariat is our primary goal.” It was easy to say. It was easy after she looked straight at Leo and laughed: “Leo, why those foolish questions? Don’t you trust me?

In 2020 America, the sadistic treatment and ensuing death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police preceded a summer of riots, looting, Molotov cocktails, and murder. Yet Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison withheld video evidence of Floyd’s arrest. Why? Ellison is a trained Communist who will instinctively lie to protect the Party.

Conversely, Kira was forced to lie to protect herself and Leo from the Party. At her cousin Victor’s wedding party in Chapter 5, his new father-in-law, Ilyitch Lavrov, explained this and exposed the effects of Pavel’s and Victor’s great secret,

I still see the people starved and ragged and crushed under a boot. Only the boot is red. I didn’t go to Siberia to fight for a crazed, power-drunk, bloodthirsty gang that strangles the people as they’ve never been strangled, that knows less of freedom than any Czar.

In the wake of the ensuing commotion, Victor’s father Vasili approached Lavrov, “Let us drink to our children’s happiness.”

Yet last week’s death of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, and the ensuing threats of blowing up the system if President Trump nominated a replacement, was reminiscent of the paranoia that opens Chapter 6,

Comrades! The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is surrounded by a hostile ring who watch and plot for its downfall. But no external enemy, no heinous plot of world imperialists is as dangerous to us than the internal enemy of dissension within our own ranks!

Of course, shipping Party loyalists to Siberian, or Minnesotan gulags doesn’t help much until after the Party holds absolute power.

In that spirit, 2020 Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is swelling the Party ranks. His offer to pay the outstanding fines of 32,000 Florida felons, and regain their voting privileges, is designed to help secure that state’s large electoral college. The elegant duplicity of the Communist loyalty and purgatory package-deal was explained at a Soviet Party meeting,

We must follow, with absolute discipline, the program dictated by our Party . . . We don’t need the obstinate, unbending Communist of iron . . . Idealism, comrades, is a good thing in its proper amount.

Faith and loyalty to scripture and doctrine is demanded, for now, maybe, at least until God, Czar, or Party changes its mind. Exiled Democratic Minnesota Senator Al Franken knows how this works, and so does the exiled Baltfleet naval officer, Stepan Timoshenko (the one who had arrested Leo and Kira in Part I, Chapter 10 while they were escaping to Germany).

Drunk, Timoshenko tells his last Soviet friend Andrei, “I’ve never felt better in my life. Free and finished. No worries of any kind any more. How many years you got left at the Institute? Think you’ll need it? The learning?” Timoshenko, mind finally severed from future, asks Andrei,

Have you ever seen a woman falling on the street, vomiting blood on the cobblestones, dying of hunger? I have. Did you see the limousines speeding at night. Did you see who’s in them?

Pavel Syerov and Stepan Timoshenko were drunk and boasting over the same great secret – the Party was nothing but a protection racket promising “freedom to all suffering humanity!”

“Did ever occur to you, Comrade Taganov, what a peculiar thing it is so many of our Party comrades are dying of overwork? Suicides. Only the papers will never say it.”

Intolerant of Independent Minds, Class and Race Theorists Demand a Return Of The Primitive

/in /by

The Return of the Primitive, originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, is a 1971 collection of essays by Ayn Rand that analyzes the culture, schools, and politics of 1960s America. This was about 50 years after Russia was consumed by class theory criminal gangs, and 50 years before America’s Democratic party was consumed by race theory criminal gangs. Both theories are fatal to the faithful, and fatally flawed to those who obey reality.

The first three chapters in Part II of Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living, are a literary description of how avoiding reality appeared to those who lived in 1920’s St. Petersburg, Russia. By 1924, the city had been renamed Petrograd by war, and then Leningrad by committee. The absence of logic in a society dominated by religious, and then political mysticism was illustrated frequently in Chapter 3. For example, Kira’s mother Galina said of her own brother, formerly wealthy by dealing with the reality of the Siberian fur trade, “Vasili has never been practical. What do we do now? We have the complex method.”

Take last week for instance. Our subject was Factory. The history class taught the development of factories. Physics class taught all about machinery. The arithmetic teacher gave problems about production and consumption. The art class drew factory interiors.

Simply put, the minds who invented machinery, the entrepreneurs who created demand, the technical savvy of skilled workers, and the efficiency of complex supply chains had been replaced by bozos. In 2020 America, think Venezuela, Cuba, Minneapolis, and Portland.

What is considered fine art also reflects the dominant culture, and Chapter 3 introduces us to a friend of Leo’s, one he met while spending the summer regaining his health in Crimea. Ayn Rand laughs as Antonina describes a popular, new verse as “thoroughly delightful. Such depth of emotion, yet so – essentially modern: ‘My heart is asbestos that remains cool over the blast furnace of my emotions’ – or something like that – it is really superb.”

Galina had also described the predictable progress of the Method,

Our distribution of commodities has not yet reached a level of perfection. The sunflower seed oil I got last week was so rancid I couldn’t use it. But then, this is a transitional period. Of course, I get a better ration cards because I’m in a preferred class of pedagogues.

Today’s preferred class of pedagogues are pushing their complex method called Critical Race Theory (CRT), which replaces individual talent and lives of meaning with the damaged souls of tribalism. At its core, CRT claims the Western ideals of justice are inherently racist, ethnicity has no biological grounds, and ‘white society’ uses law to handicap non-whites.

This is mind-blowing self destruction, and last week President Trump directed the Office of Management and Budget to issue cease and desist orders where CRT has infected federal agencies. Yet its infestation of corporate America is another matter. Many of them actually fund the race theory criminal gangs that loot and destroy their urban retail stores and innocent small-business owners.

As Kira explained to Andrei at the end of Chapter 3, “It’s possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does it mean we have to prepare for it?” Like too few American corporatists, Andrei knew he was preparing his own possible death sentence, but earlier in Chapter 2, Kira had met Irina’s friend Sasha Chernov, who was anxious to end the Soviet domination and get on with his life,

“Sasha was thrown out of University for trying to think in a country of free thought.” Kira said, “I’m sorry,” feeling that she liked him. Sasha drawled, in a tone of conviction, “It was really not essential. There are some values an autocratic power can never subjugate.”

Lurking in the online forum, Clementine explains,

Sasha knows, and Kira, that there is a sense of self within each individual that a collective can never reach and never control. The University and the Party can try to bring Sasha down and cast him out, but they can’t stop him from thinking and living as an individual.

Kira then asks Sasha,“Aren’t you playing a very dangerous game? The people has claimed too many victims already – of your kind.” Sasha replies, “Russia has a long revolutionary history. They know it. They’re even teaching it in their schools.” Reflecting on 2020 America, The Padre adds,

In the time of COVID, state instrument teachers’ unions are refusing to teach. Parents, who relied on the union teachers to babysit their kids are now contemplating alternatives. They’re an escape from the propaganda mill. Perhaps Sasha was right – there is hope.

It seems Sasha’s naivete is similar to what Kira’s was at the beginning of the novel. He thinks the revolutionary history of Russia will be the downfall of the Soviet insurgents when he asks, “Do you think the Russian worker is a beast that licks its yoke while his mind is begin battered out of him?”

Which brings us to the opening sequence of Part II, and Ayn Rand’s artistic description of St. Petersburg – a manifestation of the human mind, body and spirit in material form, that is being abused in the ensuing chapters.

Peoples know nothing of the spirit of man, for peoples are only nature, and man is a word that has no plural. Petrograd is not of the people. It is a stranger, aloof, incomprehensible, forbidding. Petrograd does not need a soul; it has a mind.

To comprehend the power of Ms. Rand’s depiction of St. Petersburg that “is the work of man that knows what he wants,” Clementine helps the study group by adding,

St. Petersburg did not start with a cathedral to honor God. I remember a TV miniseries about Peter the Great. Asked if he’s naming the city after himself, “No, for the Saint, of course.” Then he gives such a wicked grin that I remember laughing, “yeah, right.”

The criminal gang of Soviets imposed a new religion on Russia’s people, enslaved their bodies, and tried in vain to deface the city that does not need a soul – because it has a mind, as Ayn Rand illustrates in We the Living, 

A poster hung high on a wall. On the poster, a huge worker swung a hammer toward the sky, and the shadow of the hammer fell like a huge black cross over the little buildings of the city under its boots.

What today’s race theory criminal gang didn’t learn is that independent minds can not be subjugated by the complex methods of bozos.

Reverence for One’s Life Is Essential for Justice. Reverence For the Greater Good Is A Life Sentence.

/in /by

The frigid Russian winter, an apartment with little heat and less food, and endless hours standing in lines, day after day, searching for work that didn’t exist, was finally rewarded – a diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis for Leo. As his doctor told Kira at the beginning of Chapter 16 in Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living, “Tuberculosis is a serious disease, citizen. In Soviet Russia – it is a fatal disease. If that young man is dear to you, send him south. If you have a human possibility, or an inhuman one – send him south.”

Later that day, Leo had decided “Don’t let’s think about it. There is nothing we can do.” To which Kira replied, “Nonsense, Leo. You’re going south.” Kira’s focus and determination is essential and normal to her life premise, not calamity. Misfortune is to be handled quickly and forgotten. It is human nature to take rational action, to control one’s environment, to live. Gen Z entrepreneurs know this. President Trump really knows this. Nineteen years ago last week, on Flight 93, Todd Beamer and his compatriots knew this and declared, Let’s Roll!

Over the next two weeks, Kira waited hours in “ghastly lines of deformed creatures – the smell of the morgue” at three hospitals. At the State Medical headquarters, it was “hours of waiting in dim, damp corridors that smelt of carbolic acid and soiled linen.” Reminiscent of President Obama, it was a teachable moment; “a mystic absolute, one had to be a member of a Trade Union and get a dispatchment to a Trade Union Sanatorium.” Or qualify for healthcare.gov marketplace subsidies.

After countless meetings with Trade Union heads, their secretaries, recommendation letters, exceptions begged, and bribes demanded, Kira asked for help from her cousin Victor who replied, “I want you to realize that my party membership is a sacred trust not to be utilized for purposes of personal advantage.” Kira remained undaunted, “She was firm, erect, her voice did not tremble. She was not afraid to beg. It was her mission, her quest, her crusade.” What Kira wanted was rooted in her highest values – her life, and she loved Leo.

Earlier, in Chapter 14, Kira had been called to visit her Aunt Maria who had become deathly sick from a hemorrhage,

She jerked up. Eyes were wide open with a horror beyond all human dignity. Staring at Kira, she screamed, I want to live! I want to live! She fell back. Her hair jerked like snakes on the pillow and lay still. Nothing moved but the black that slithered down the skin of her throat.

Following doctors’ orders, and desperate to help Leo, Kira paid an unannounced visit to her Soviet friend Andrei in Chapter 17. He then tells her that she is his highest value, “My life is twenty-eight years of that for which you feel contempt. I’d give everything I have – everything I could ever have – for something you can’t give me!” She breathed, “What did you say Andrei?”

It was terror in her eyes, a terror of the thought she had seen for a second so very clearly. She was not thinking of him; she was not thinking of Leo; she was thinking of Maria Petrovna and of the red bubble on dying lips.

Aunt Maria Petrovna had lived her life preparing for death. Her moral choices were guided by the mystics of the mind – the Church. Upon facing imminent death, Maria realized her error and turned to the only person she knew who chose to live. Andrei’s moral choices were guided by the mystics of muscle – the Party. He lived his life for the battle, one that could only end in death, yet he was beginning to realize that he was wrong.

While Kira admired Andrei’s masculinity and independence, which is President Trump’s offense, and qualities of Leo, she abhorred Andrei’s values. Kira understood that Andrei’s devotion to her and the Party would lead him to a similar fate as Aunt Maria’s sacred trust in miracles and the Church. For Kira, the much higher value was her life, and to the extent she could succeed, her future with Leo.

This is in sharp contrast to the conditions that exist in a society that adopts ‘Democratic Socialism.’ When a criminal gang controls prosecutors offices or court benches, transparency disappears, along with evidence and witnesses. Last week, the US Department of Justice disclosed that senior staff on Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team had erased data from over 20 smartphones. This is the kind of obstruction for which they accuse others, and use it to justify middle of the night, no-knock SWAT raids on their political targets.

One of the several targets whose life and treasure have been ruined is Julian Assange, who has been held in a high security prison since last spring, following years of exile in an embassy in London. His extradition hearing to the United States began last week, and he faces up to 175 years on espionage charges. While Assange exposed corruption at the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he’s been under criminal investigation by the Obama Administration since 2010.

It seems Assange had published information that harmed the sensitivities of Obama era CIA and Pentagon officials over ‘misinformation’ regarding their war machine. In We the Living, millennial Leo Kovalensky also faced the consequences of Marxist class warfare, and Kira’s efforts with the Soviet Administration exposed the chaos and impotence of social justice,

“Because . . In a kitchen with a spoon . . In a corner saloon he belched . . In a bed stained with yellow, a child slept . . On a sack of flour they rolled . . A pale forehead knocked the stone floor . . In the roar of machines men swung arms – Leo was sentenced to die.”

The connection between Leo’s universal health care death panel, and the shamelessness Ayn Rand assigned to the others in this paragraph, is a profound achievement of We the Living. These characters demonstrate zero self-esteem. They have no reverence for their own lives. Because of that, they create no values and have no respect for the baby or anyone else. When living loses the happiness of purpose, and muscles do the work of machines, society decivilizes, and the ideals of Western justice disappear.

This is the essence of self-sacrifice, of reverence for Society or God. When the moral ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is replaced with the greater good, there is no sustainable moral code.

 

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