Ayn Rand is a marvel. She might be the only American philosopher of
note, having formed her own very persuasive philosophy of Objectivism. And there’s no denying her talent. I read The
Fountainhead in college and last week I decided it was time to a crack at Atlas Shrugged. I’m still not finished yet but I can already say
with conviction that she was one of the most talented authors ever published in
the Twentieth Century. There is good
reason for her books to still be bestsellers, even after all these years.
She shirks on nothing. Her settings are vivid, the plot is clear and
demanding, and her characters are always memorable. I don’t have greatest memory for details;
within a year, I tend to forget who is who in a story, especially since I don’t
reread books much. I still vividly
remember the people and the drama from The
Fountainhead, and I have every reason to expect that will remain true with Atlas Shrugged. Even when they’re not complex, the characters
are still strong and refuse to be ignored because of the life Ayn Rand gives
them.
Her novels were told specifically to put her
philosophy into practice, show it works in our world and the relationships and
contentions the come with it. She worked
long and hard to make a case for her beliefs and many are still following it
today. I understand why.
It’s such a shame that everything she believed
bothers me to the bone. Her espousing
the “virtue” of selfishness is the core theme in her stories, philosophy, and
the way she lived her life, and the more I learn about her, the more troubled I
become because I understand now how her philosophy penetrated our modern
culture. Since I was a child, I’ve
listened to friends, neighbors, and even some family members make the same
arguments and statements Rand makes to justify their greed and scorn for the
poor. Not that many of them, if any,
would know that Rand came up with the arguments first (I sure didn’t until I
read her books and watched television interviews she gave). They don’t need to know it came from her; her
philosophy penetrated our culture so well that many live it, something I’m sure
would have given her no small satisfaction.
I didn’t write this just to rag on her, tempting
though it was. She gets enough attention
as it is. No, the reason I decided to
write this post is because I finally found one statement I agree with
completely from Atlas Shrugged, and I
wanted to pick it out for my own reasons.
Here’s the statement in part:
“[D]o you know the hallmark of the
second-rater? It’s resentment of another
man’s achievement…They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking
that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them—while you’d give a
year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of
greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that dream is the
infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement
would not be able to bear.” (Atlas Shrugged, p. 358)
I have long felt that jealousy is among the ugliest
of sins, and one that baffles me every time I come across it. There’s only been one time I can recall
anybody being envious of me; living an unremarkable life usually does wonders
in how many things you don’t have to deal with.
I remember it being incredibly frustrating, especially because it ruined
what could have been one of the greatest friendships of my life.
That’s the worst part of jealousy: it tends to be
directed at the people we’re closest to.
Time and again, I’ve seen a coworker, a classmate, or a neighbor be
honored for something they did, earn an award of some kind, and it becomes their
friends who talk behind their
back. It’s their friends who start to
ignore them, treat them like they didn’t deserve the attention, when in the
end, the friends are angry that they
weren’t in the spotlight.
Jealousy is the opposite of charity, for where one
seeks to give and receives more in return, the other seeks to take and spends
more for nothing.
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