One of the hallmarks of Classic Literature is that it expounds Truths that last through the eternities and, if abided by, can improve man’s happiness and freedom. In a way, the writers of Classic Literature are semi-secular prophets and prophetesses. This is the case with Ayn Rand in her book Atlas Shrugged (1957). Rational thinking beings have been perplexed at the Maelstrom Whirlpool of social entropy swirling down the toilet of common sense at exponentially increasing speed these last decades. Atlas Shrugged, in my opinion, is the best articulated explanation of the current insanity re-labeled “Cancel Culture”.
Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy was a welcome (IMO) “back to reality” from the surrealistic dogma offered by New Age pseudo-philosophers. In a sentence Rand’s philosophy was “Just because you believe in dragons doesn’t mean dragons exist.” Dostoevsky has a corollary to this in The Idiot – “You can be totally convinced –and still be totally wrong.” Both apply to the Cancel Culture. Like most “recent” labels, concepts and books dated after the 1960s “there is nothing new (especially out of East and West coast academia) under the sun.” Concepts – both false and true – that have existed for millennia are being re-labeled and touted as “new” when someone with a classical education – or reads the Classics on their own – recognize them from history.
“No one has the right to quit when there is so much at stake in the struggle for freedom.” So here’s some eternal Truths from Ayn Rand:
“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason – like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack; this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five senses. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception; they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.
They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension’, which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future’ which consists of denying the present. What identity are they able to their superior realm. They keep telling you what is not, but never tell you what is. All their identifications consist of negating. God is that which no human mind can know, they say – and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge – God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is not reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out. It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek to escape from the necessity to name its own nature – escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.
And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives,, the secret for which they pierce ‘their own eyes out and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality – is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy Absolute: their Wish.
Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of the desire. He says ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say ‘I want it, therefore it is.’ They want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence is not to be the object but the subject of their consciousness – they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim.
But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.
Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind.” – John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged
See also::
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951
- Serge’ Chakotin, Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda, January 1, 1940
- Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895
- Ralph B. Wagner, Public Relations, January 1944
