Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. | Galt’s speech
06
Jan 2012
Weekly Rand
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09
Dec 2011
Weekly Rand
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There is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you call a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man. | Galt’s speech
The winners of the 2011 Atlas Shrugged essay contest have been announced, check here if you are interested in reading the victorious essay.
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25
Nov 2011
Weekly Rand
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Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation. | The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 23, 1
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18
Nov 2011
Weekly Rand
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?”You–who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings to the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators–it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.” | Atlas Shrugged P3C7
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04
Nov 2011
Weekly Rand
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The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.) | “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 178
Also check out Onkar Ghate’s column from the beginning of the week, How Did Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Predict an America Spinning Out of Control?
Nearly thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s novels continue to be wildly popular—”Atlas Shrugged” alone is selling more today than it did when it was first published in 1957 — more than one million copies have sold since the 2008 elections.
Especially among Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand is being hailed a prophet. How could she have anticipated, more than 50 years ago, a United States spinning out of financial control, plagued by soaring spending and crippling regulations?
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02
Sep 2011
The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect.| Atlas Shrugged, P3C7
Alongside today’s Weekly Rand quote, I wanted to invite our PubliusNM readers to consider an interesting essay by theologian John Piper. Initially drafted in 1979 and updated in 2007, Piper’s essay takes an in-depth look at Rand’s philosophy from a Christian perspective. As he explains in his intro:
In the late seventies, I went on an Ayn Rand craze. I read most of her works, fiction and non-fiction. I recall sitting in the student center at Bethel College as a young professor of Bible reading Atlas Shrugged. An Old Testament professor from the seminary walked by and saw what I was reading. He paused and said, “That stuff is incredibly dangerous.” He was right. For a certain mindset, she is addicting and remarkably compelling in her atheistic rationalism.
To this day, I find her writings paradoxically attractive. I am a Christian Hedonist. This is partly why her work is alluring to me. She had her own brand of hedonism. It was not traditional hedonism that says whatever gives you pleasure is right. Hers was far more complex than that. It seems so close and yet so far to what I find in the Bible. So in this essay, my goals are to introduce Ayn Rand, to describe briefly her impact as a novelist and philosopher, and to assess her ethical theory from a Christian perspective—specifically from the perspective of Christian Hedonism. Though the original form of this essay was written almost thirty years ago, I have had to change very little.
Cogent Christian responses to Ayn Rand are few. Positive Christian assessments are almost non-existent. I aim for this treatment to be both Christian and primarily positive, even though Ayn Rand was an atheist and outspokenly anti-Christian. I trust I will be forgiven the presumption of stepping outside my own specialty: My field is neither literary criticism nor philosophy but biblical, theological and pastoral. I write this because I take pleasure in extending to others the delight I have had in learning from Ayn Rand.
I encourage you to review Piper’s full essay and stop back here with your thoughts.
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26
Aug 2011
Weekly Rand
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[Related to the anti-concept: "consumerism"] There is no such thing as “consumers’ rights,” just as there can be no “rights” belonging to some special group or race and to no others. There are only the rights of man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals. | The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1962, 20
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19
Aug 2011
Weekly Rand
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People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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05
Aug 2011
Weekly Rand
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The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not “selflessness” or “sacrifice,” but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. | “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 46
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29
Jul 2011
Weekly Rand
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The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. | “The Anatomy of Compromise,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 149