A very old friend of mine, a fundamentalist Christian who seems fiercely opposed to Obama, said this to me:
“I see selfishness and greed as something so very ugly. I have seen a lot of it in my day and I must say I do hate it.”
I replied:
“Have you not heard our communist/fascist/socialist/racist VERMIN festering in that cesspool of the nation, that axis of evil, the White House? Have you not heard him agree with you? And you with him? Look at this: Obama: Redistribution Must Replace “Era Of Selfishness & Greed”
“As I said, I won’t argue. My mission is to expose. To expose the evil of the bastard’s ideas. And to try with my dying breath to show those who don’t know that they hold the same fundamental philosophy, be it religion or Communism, that they do!”
I offered a quote by Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise” in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p.145 (SC):
“In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.”
I’ve found that one cannot reach even an intelligent person when she “hold[s] the same basic principles” as her professed enemy. I feel like yelling, as Bogart did in The African Queen: “Well I ain’t sorry for you no more, ya crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid!” (Except she’s not an old maid. She’s a mother and grandmother.)
However, I shall try with two more quotes from Ayn Rand, in what I suspect is an exercise in futility, to try to reach a single active mind out there in the blogosphere. Anyone who might be persuaded to stop unknowingly collaborating with the enemy.
Have You Lost Your Marbles?
Robert Tracy
Oils on canvas
10 x 8″
1985
“I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible-I saw that any man’s desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed….”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p.766 (HC)
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
Ayn Rand, “Introduction,” The Virtue of Selfishness, vii.
Where have you been hiding, my Marine brother?
Here and there. I’ll let you know. Seems you’ve been away too, but not from your blog.
Semper Fidelis, Marine!