The Battle Between Ayn Rand And Collectivism Reaches A Climax
this is an older article shared via Fuguewriter. The article was written in response to the mantra "You didn't Build That!" The attack on individualism has gone into even deeper veins including speech and against inventors. From AS, a conversation between Cherryl Taggart and James Taggart regarding an important inventor hero, Hank Rearden:
““‘Mr. Taggart, what is it that makes you so unhappy?’
“‘Why should you care whether I am or not?’
“‘Because–well, if you haven’t the right to be happy and proud, who has?’
“‘That’s what I want to know–who has?’ He turned to her abruptly, the words exploding as if a safety fuse had blown. ‘He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?’
“‘Who?’
“‘Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. *His* Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.’
“She said, puzzled, ‘But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?’”
Those who want to abolish patent rights and cry "trolls!" (ad hominem in place of objective criticism) are they, too, just zeros? It is the elevation of the critics above the creators.
““‘Mr. Taggart, what is it that makes you so unhappy?’
“‘Why should you care whether I am or not?’
“‘Because–well, if you haven’t the right to be happy and proud, who has?’
“‘That’s what I want to know–who has?’ He turned to her abruptly, the words exploding as if a safety fuse had blown. ‘He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?’
“‘Who?’
“‘Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. *His* Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.’
“She said, puzzled, ‘But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?’”
Those who want to abolish patent rights and cry "trolls!" (ad hominem in place of objective criticism) are they, too, just zeros? It is the elevation of the critics above the creators.
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The answer to Obama’s collectivism is given by Howard Roark in The Fountainhead:
““. . . the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act–the process of reason–must be performed by each man alone. . . .
“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.”
President Obama seems to know his enemy: individualism. It is time for those who did “build that” to recognize the battle lines he has drawn and to stand up for individual achievement and the moral principle that protects achievement: individual rights.
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How utterly appropriate this is today.............
"President Obama seems to know his enemy: individualism. It is time for those who did “build that” to recognize the battle lines he has drawn and to stand up for individual achievement and the moral principle that protects achievement: individual rights."
way back in the day I built a small ISP/BBS ( very early 1996 ) it involved building everything at as close to a 0 dollar budget as one could get. That meant working obnoxiously long days and occasionally wishing I was dead. Still, it got done because I put my head down and pushed through that mess till it was working. At no point did any member of "the public" come in to take any portion of the load off. In the meantime I was doing things like inventing a billing and security system from scratch while getting apache virtual hosting and dns up and running...
Next I built a professional services and support department at a super-regional ISP. Again this was back in the 90's. Most of the stuff I was doing had never been done. We were up against Tier 1 service providers and killing them on things like price and service. I also came up with the idea of defined service level agreements. For the first year, It was essentially me alone as the technology guy dragging an inexperienced sales department behind me. Again, the hours were really long, I drove from one end of the Midwest to the other but it was exhilarating to see the sales coming in and happy customers up and running. Still I don't remember "the public" asking me if they could pick up lunch.
Next I saved a hosting/webdev company from early death. They were the largest open relay in North America, and were essentially being used to spam the world. I got there a couple of days before they were shut off, and quickly re-architected their mail servers. This again required some serious thinking outside the box and some big piles of code to fix things. Again, that was a couple of days of nearly no sleep. Again making the solution was exciting... But again, I do not remember "the public" which I saved from a lot of porn spam, Viagra spam and pyramid scam emails ever even saying "thanks"
We need to make "Its a Horrible Life' in the movie Barry is about to jump off a bridge because no on believes him.. So, Clarence Odbody shows him what the world would be like if the people who didn't build that actually didn't build that.
I don't impress easily, but I'm impressed. I hope you were rewarded for your efforts.
The movie idea is good but how about "It's a Collectivist Life" instead. Mayor Obama jacks up everyone's taxes and at the ensuing town meeting tells Jimmy Stewart he doesn't deserve to keep his money because he didn't build the Building and Loan, everyone else built it. Later, drunken Jimmy wavers at the bridge until ghostly Ayn Rand shows him what the town will be like after 8 years of mayor Obama - after which Jimmy jumps and ends it all.
I said that.
(and by that I mean it makes it look as though Ayn Rand is an ally of the collectivists...)