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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmericans Must Repudiate the Connection Between a Child-Murderer, Reaganism and Trumpism
The roots and brutality of the hard-right grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rands writingsMany Americans are baffled by the Republican Partys embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)
Theyre also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnells attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan.
After all, people are hurting. Were experiencing the worst pandemic in a century, and an economic downturn unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.
Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?
Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trumps program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages? Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote?
Why do they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?
But its not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in todays GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.
As a result, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted Americas middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that theyve embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah and politicians like McConnell and Stefanick as noble statesmen and -women.
The Libertarians
Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.
This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.
Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smiths reference to the invisible hand that regulated trade among nations.
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of welfare, deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal governments land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.
Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, [G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.
The child-killer who inspired a movement
Reagan wasnt just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rands objectivist view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.
Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Todays Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rands raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead.
It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions, he told Powers. That book relates to everything.
Ayn Rands novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
Powers added, He [Trump], told her that he identified with Howard Roark, the novels idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.
Rands hero Roark, in fact, raged so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.
Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in ones way to get the best for oneself.
On Trumps hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rands fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.
Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father back then about a years salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, The Fox.
After two days, Marions father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didnt know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me, he said. I just couldnt help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.
Hickman didnt hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.
But Hickman wasnt finished. After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parkers father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldnt come close enough to Hickmans car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it the most horrible crime of the 1920s. Hickman was Americas most despicable villain at the time.
Ayn Rand falls in love with a superman
But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student whod arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissas own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her fathers pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dads doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to the people.
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissas mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day shed become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.
Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the ideal man she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her lifes work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.
Hickmans words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, I am like the state: what is good for me is right, resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else even above friends, family, or nation the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickmans were, the best and strongest expression of a real mans psychology I ever heard.
Hickman the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl had Rands ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickmans murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the mediocre American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.
The first thing that impresses me about the case, Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.
Astounded that Americans didnt recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to societys rules, Rand wrote, It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman. He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.
He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord, Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob an extreme extremist. No respect for anything or anyone.
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell shed experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.
Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism
Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a grifter in charge of the Commerce Department. Trumps chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.
As Ayn Rand might say, Dont just ignore the rules; destroy them.
Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, the glorification of mediocrity in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness a glow-worm instead of a fire.
Sociopaths of the world, unite!
Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.
Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class looters, instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist producers, was throwing its best people under the bus.
In Rands universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a looter on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security particularly if it was taken at the barrel of a gun (taxes) was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, My whole life Ive been greedy, for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game selfishness was next to godliness.
Later in Rands life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named Objectivism and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.
Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.
You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life, Wallace said to Rand. Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will you scorn churches, and the concept of God are these accurate criticisms?
As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallaces fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didnt faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, Yes. (4:20 in the clip)
Were taught to feel concern for our fellow man, Wallace challenged, to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other now why do you rebel?
That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal, Rand answered. She added, [Mans] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.
Rands philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did in her lifetime achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rands philosophy is a central tenet of todays Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a looter in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickmans sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political partys embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.
The result so far is over a half-million dead Americans, an economy laid waste, and the collapse of this nations working class.
While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, its killing the rest of us.
A return to sanity
In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.
Today, 40 years of Ayn Rands ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharos in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of suckers, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.
When America was still coasting on FDRs success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rands or Kochs misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.
Now that libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 40 years to make their project work, were hitting peak libertarianism and its tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.
If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the greed is good ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions.
That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rands writings and libertarian Reagan Republicans have done to this country.
It will succeed if President Biden can overcome the cynicism and greed celebrated by McConnell, McCarthy and Stefanik, reclaim the mantle of FDR, and pull America out of the Second Republican Great Depression.
Original post with links and embedded video of Rand: HartmannReport.com
karin_sj
(818 posts)I thought I was pretty informed but this info is all new to me. Thanks for posting, Thom!
keithbvadu2
(37,061 posts)TheRickles
(2,104 posts)IrishAfricanAmerican
(3,831 posts)dlk
(11,606 posts)It was clear she was completely looney. Her writings have been adopted by those who are only looking to excuse their extreme selfishness & cruelty. Consider they type of intellectual midget who would use a book of fiction to justify their political beliefs and actions.
SleeplessinSoCal
(9,201 posts)Knowing how many twisted people admire twisted people is depressing as hell itself.
colsohlibgal
(5,275 posts)Ayn Rand was a deluded head case and now her selfish to the extreme philosophy has captured the Republicans.
We are up against an Ayn Rand inspired cult hooked up with greedy billionaires saying the Hell with the rest of us.
We are as close as ever to losing any semblance of our democracy....this is a four alarm fire.
Do what you have to do, get out and vote to thwart their attempts to stop you from doing so.
bucolic_frolic
(43,548 posts)moondust
(20,030 posts)I wouldn't be surprised to find out there is a warehouse or two someplace full of Ayn Rand "books" that were bought up by a few frightened anti-communist industrialists of the post-Russian revolution era. I believe that's been done with books by Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, probably the former guy, and others to boost their sales, try to get them onto best-seller lists, and thus popularize their message. After all, Ayn experienced the communists first-hand so she was a good tool with the cred to explain it all.
BigmanPigman
(51,674 posts)by Laura I galls Wilder. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was a heavy duty Libertarian at the same time as Rand and she wrote and traveled spreading the Libertarian philosophy. You can even notice her political agenda throughout the books she edited for her mother, who let her re-write most of her novels.
bucolic_frolic
(43,548 posts)In the Gaetz zone. Honestly it's like the worst sci-fi ever written.
Blue Owl
(50,599 posts)niyad
(113,995 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,797 posts)certainot
(9,090 posts)some excerpts:
SOWB
Sex on the wrong brain, or sowb, is what happens when impatient satisfaction-demanding sex energy fuels brain functions that require patience and objectivity.
Sowb is caused by masturbation with the right hand, which is connected to the left brain hemisphere. Motion of the right hand is controlled by and can stimulate activity in the left hemisphere. By default, most humans in modern developed societies have their first sexual experiences with the wrong hand. Continued sex with the right hand can program long lasting neural pathways that may continue to divert sex energy to the left brain long after real sex.
Sowb (as in robe) stimulates neural circuitry that increases greed and fear (see Certainty Deficit Disorder), rewards conformity, and inhibits creativity. It has been normalized in most modern human societies and is often wrongly referred to as human nature.
Although susceptibility to particular sowb symptoms may be inherited, the most important factor increasing individual levels of sowb may be left brain dominance and lack of right brain use.
SOWB VS Democracy
Democratic forms of organization can counter authoritarianism and other negative symptoms of sowb but are often thwarted before large scale implementation of the simple sex education lesson that can end large scale sex on the wrong brain.
Sex on the wrong brain offered survival benefits in times of scarcity and conflict and may explain right handed dominance in humans. Now, however, it threatens the planet with greed and authoritarianism.
COMMON SYMPTOMS
Certainty Deficit Disorder (CDD)
Impatient satisfaction-demanding reproductive impulses create a need for certainty that can supersede fact or reality. Certainty ends thinking and brings satisfaction through closure, finality, and premature conclusion. The irrational need for non-existent certainty requires avoidance of natural ever-present uncertainty which increases anxiety and fear and motivates a wide range of short and long-term coping strategies, such as denial and authoritarianism (see CDD table below).
Humans may cultivate thought patterns that reward lying and denial in order to create certainty and reduce uncertainty. Rationalization of certainty and denial of reality requires engaging the right hemisphere which releases trapped 'sex energy' as a reward. Certainty can become more important than truth.
Researchers studying 50 years of psychological profiles of conservatives identified 'avoidance of uncertainty' as a defining motivation ( Political Conservatism As Motivated Social Cognition, Jost, J.T., et al, 2003, May, American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin). Authoritarianism is sometimes measured with the Uncertainty Avoidance Index, or UAI.
Greed, objectification, materialism, and 'free market' capitalism
Definitions of "greed" commonly begin with desire for.....
With sowb, potent energy thats meant to fuel love and desire for a mate can interfere with brain functions involved in counting, quantifying, measuring, classifying, comparing, and putting things in order. That can cause obsession for objects and greed for more, bigger, and faster. Satisfaction, pleasure, and beauty may be measured in numbers, dollars, and inches.
Unregulated free market capitalism is a sowb-based strategy for reducing uncertainty while satisfying greed. Complicated social and environmental issues can be ignored or simplified with absolutes and numbers and 'market demand' can be used to replace democratically determined regulation with monopolistic greed and authoritarianism.
EVOLUTION, RIGHT HANDEDNESS, AND THE SOWB GENE
Anthropologists believe early human ancestors started out about 50-50 right and left handed, like the chimps and apes of today, but have had little success explaining why humans became increasingly right handed. Eventually about 100,000 years ago humans settled into about 90% right handed.
Right handed dominance is sometimes attributed to tool-making and language development but sex on the wrong brain has been part of human evolution for millions of years before those developments might have become relevant and may offer anthropologists and handedness researchers a better explanation.
Millions of years ago:
Life was short and reproduction began early. Low levels of masturbation and sowb generally.
Selection for sowb and right handedness would accelerate in areas where population densities and fluctuations in resources might cause conflict and favor authoritarian patriarchy over communal cooperation.
Sowb would begin to distort basic hemispheric brain asymmetries as brain complexity and language use increased. Left hemispheric participation increases as right hemispheric participation decreases, limiting patience and objectivity in evaluation and conclusion. Integration and promotion of preferred sowb symptoms begins to influence social structure as well as brain structure and function.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago:
Longer life, higher population densities, and more conflict over resources. Sowb symptoms like greed, fear, intolerance, and authoritarianism increasingly won over curiosity, community, and democratic cooperation. Sowb accelerated as our ancestors progressively began to delay the age of reproduction. Sowb eventually becomes human nature and normalized as left handed humans were increasingly ostracized and the proportion of right handed handed humans reaches a 90% dominance about 100,000 years ago.
The last few thousand years:
Longer life, more right handed masturbation and more sowb. Sex on the wrong brain became an increasingly dominant part of the long-lasting authoritarian civilizations which, by default and/or design, created social structures to enforce sexual repression and increase frustration. Populations and cultures could select for particular sowb symptoms that were advantageous for a particular situation or environment, such as for building armies.
So-called civilized Old World populations with centuries of sexual repression and frustration might be expected to have more sowb symptoms than New World populations and their descendants today. Are differences in cultural attitudes toward nature, uncertainty, and greed apparent in brain function or structure consistent with more vs less sex on the wrong brain?
The last hundred years:
While democratic forms of social organization help growing populations reduce and regulate sowb symptoms like authoritarianism and greed, increased affluence allows more privacy and opportunity for masturbation. The problem is exacerbated by access to mass produced sources of sexual stimulation, such as pornograpy, and use of sexual stimulation for commercial purposes.
Sowb genes?
Geographical, environmental, and cultural preferences for particular sowb symptoms may manifest as inherited characteristics in brain structure and function.
FEMALES HAVE LESS SOWB
Along with differences in sexual organs there are mechanical differences in hand, finger, and arm motion motion and technique for masturbation. Those differences will effect the degree of connection between the hand and brain, brain components involved, neural associations, and degree of activity. Use of a vibrator could reinforce and complicate hand-brain connections.
Females would also be more likely to involve both hands or try the non-dominant left hand.
Such differences might help explain evolution of gender differences in brain function and organization, as well as the timing of laterality in brain development observed in humans passing through adolescence and into adulthood.
Misogyny, patriarchy
Lower sowb levels in females may be perceived as threatening sources of uncertainty that need to be controled. Long term general differences in sowb levels between genders has resulted in institutionalized misogyny and patriarchy.
Martin Eden
(12,887 posts)Thing one:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year olds life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Thing Two:
[link:|
^^Paul Ryan extolls the morality of Ayn Rand's books and ideas^^
alterfurz
(2,476 posts)ancianita
(36,240 posts)Last edited Sat May 8, 2021, 05:04 PM - Edit history (1)
Most Republican voters might buy some version of this in their leaders because they haven't read. But even if they did read Rand and got it, they'd still not be able to justify the hell we've lived in, and split of their religious beliefs, and they'd be ignorantly caught up in the same binaries they're stuck in now. Nowhere in their darwinian jungle outlook is respect for life, others' free will, human dignity or innocence, or how they'll end up 'looters'.
misanthrope
(7,436 posts)I don't see how any adherent of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the Gospels can hold loyalty to libertarianism. They seem in direct conflict with each other.
ancianita
(36,240 posts)That population is the dissociated, schizophrenic core of libertarian believers. Their very existence in a democratically run society must be hell for them.
misanthrope
(7,436 posts)She is a hardcore Southern Baptist but also likes telling people how great she thinks "Atlas Shrugged" is, professing to having once read it as if it is a mark of intellectual status.
Then again, my mother has some pretty heavy mental health issues that resulted in psychological abuse of her kids. So maybe her disconnect is perfectly expected then.
dalton99a
(81,708 posts)Thanks for posting!
BComplex
(8,094 posts)with each one of those points you made, ThomHartmann. You nailed every part of this problem.
I_UndergroundPanther
(12,511 posts)I felt a visceral nausea as I read it.
Never finished it. I threw it in the trash.
There is another equally nauseating author these republican fucks read .
His name is Leo Strauss,another criminal writing books.
His book I read was as nauseating as rand's book.
He thinks it's morally good when leaders lie to the people to control society.
The known unknowns quote from rumsfelt is where Strauss leads you. Along with full spectrum domination as a nessecity. It's disgusting. Just another randian type "philosopher".
ymetca
(1,182 posts)Ayn Rand suffered a childhood trauma. Her way of coping, finally, seems to have been to "embrace the monster within". But her trauma was imposed by others traumatized by Czarist Russia. On and on it goes, all the way back to our foraging days of the ancient past. Our collective "epigenesis" as a species --hard won and tragically lost, over and over again. The Great Wheel of Suffering, as Buddha might say.
Thousands of years of human carnage, cruelty, suffering and survival will not be undone so easily. We know there is enough to go around now, and it would be rational to distribute resources fairly to everyone on this planet. The only thing that holds us back is all that goddamn trauma we keep meting out to each other.
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Martin Eden
(12,887 posts)Her life's work was driven in reaction to trauma, but her heroes think nothing of inflicting trauma on others.
Enlightened self interest should be built on justice and compassion that floats all boats. Othetwise,Otherwise, the historical cycle of trauma will continue.
I_UndergroundPanther
(12,511 posts)Response to thomhartmann (Original post)
ExTex This message was self-deleted by its author.
LiberalLoner
(9,762 posts)I love this video. Says it all, to me.