Former George W. Bush speechwriter and now opinion columnist at the Washington Post, Michael Gerson just penned a review of both the new movie Atlas Shrugged & Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. What makes it particularly complicated for me is that he is pretty close to being the last person I think who would outline precisely my concerns with Libertarianism and Objectivism. What’s more galling is how much better written it is than I have done covering much the same ground…
Gerson puts his finger on the deep problem with Libertarianism, which as I see it, is merely the mirror problem with socialism. “(B)oth libertarians and Objectivists are moved by the mania of a single idea — a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness. This unbalanced emphasis on one element of political theory — at the expense of other public goals such as justice and equal opportunity — is the evidence of a rigid ideology. Socialists take a similar path, embracing equality as an absolute value. Both ideologies have led good people into supporting policies with serious human costs.”
But, as is relevant for our times, he gives the close eye to Objectivism, the particular social poison of our time and place.
“Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, ‘hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.'”
This is the hidden ideology that drives too much of the social dialogue going on in our country today.
And I find it very distressing…
But enough cut and paste.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In