One Cheer for the Russian Rage
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation -- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused in place where your mind's wings should have grown."
-- Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (p. 6)
Here is what I learned from Ayn Rand: that hypocrisy is a cardinal sin and that living life with integrity is what makes one a mensch rather than merely a persona; that pride in what you do is what will sustain you when nobody else cares, or even when they resent you; that how far a society escapes barbarism is proportional to its reverence for entrepreneurship; that philosophy is inescapable and consequential and that it's better to have it out in the open than obscured; that much evil in the world occurs simply because people don't think hard enough about what they say; that because it's right is a good enough reason for doing anything -- indeed, the only good reason; that one's aesthetic taste runs deeper than most people appreciate or care to admit; that Rachmaninoff is brilliant; that every excuse you make, whether for failure or for excellence, is a little death; and that extremism in the war against mediocrity is no vice.
Well, the true things anyway. God bless her, she was a thinker in the style of Wile E. Coyote who just did not know when to call it a day, combining Nietzsche's bombastic iconoclasm (minus his depth of sensitivity) with Aristotle's method and exhaustiveness (minus his pragmatic cautiousness). The world didn't want her, but it did need her.
-- Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (p. 6)
Here is what I learned from Ayn Rand: that hypocrisy is a cardinal sin and that living life with integrity is what makes one a mensch rather than merely a persona; that pride in what you do is what will sustain you when nobody else cares, or even when they resent you; that how far a society escapes barbarism is proportional to its reverence for entrepreneurship; that philosophy is inescapable and consequential and that it's better to have it out in the open than obscured; that much evil in the world occurs simply because people don't think hard enough about what they say; that because it's right is a good enough reason for doing anything -- indeed, the only good reason; that one's aesthetic taste runs deeper than most people appreciate or care to admit; that Rachmaninoff is brilliant; that every excuse you make, whether for failure or for excellence, is a little death; and that extremism in the war against mediocrity is no vice.
Well, the true things anyway. God bless her, she was a thinker in the style of Wile E. Coyote who just did not know when to call it a day, combining Nietzsche's bombastic iconoclasm (minus his depth of sensitivity) with Aristotle's method and exhaustiveness (minus his pragmatic cautiousness). The world didn't want her, but it did need her.