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Edited on Wed Apr-13-11 10:52 AM by drokhole
"Ayn Rand wrote a novel, Anthem, it's a dystopian novel where individual choice is banned and the collective rules society. There's a young man and his name is Equality 72521. He is an intelligent young man but he is been from achieving or reaching any sort of occupation that would challenge him. He is a street sweeper.
Over time he discovers an abandoned subway and rediscovers the incandescent light bulb. And he thinks, naively, that electricity and the brilliance of light would be an advantage for society and that it would bring great new things as far as being able to see at night, being able to read and the advancement of civilization.
He takes it before the collective of elders, and they take the light bulb, and basically it's crushed beneath the boot heel of the collective. The collective has no place basically for individual choice."
So that's why the Elders are forcing us to switch to CFLs!
Oh, and one of my favorite assessments of Ayn Rand is from the author Robert Antonio Wilson:
"I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison. I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference."
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