Ripped From the Headlines
Not really, but certainly ripped from the pages of Any Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
Now that we are a mere 33 days from the 2022 mid-terms, I keep thinking about all that has happened since the elections in 2020 and this verse from Chapter 11 of Second Corinthians keeps coming to my “top of mind” (as the first openly gay, immigrant, black, female White House spokespronoun would say.)
“For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.”
G.K. Chesterton, the famous English writer and Christian apologist, explained this Biblical admonition thus:
“There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time.”
As are many I know, I am growing tired of fools and idiots who are given standing to critique and otherwise criticize rational behaviors while exhibiting, as my grandfather would say, “the lack of enough good sense to get out of the rain.” It is becoming increasingly difficult to “laugh with them and laugh at them at the same time”.
As Chesterton said, we have erred in placing incorrect emphasis on the “suffer”. We have become so politically correct that dismissal of the harebrained and thick witted is unfashionable and society at large has assigned such a disproportionate amount of deference and tolerance to these imbecilic behaviors that it has allowed these same fools and idiots to ascend to heights of power, achieve an unearned level of status and control academia, government and public policy.
Yesterday, I posted about Billy Eichner and how he accuses the audience of being the reason his movie failed and it reminded me of something from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas”.
In Chapter VI, The Non-Commercial, Rand describes a party where one of her characters, Balph Eubank is holding court. Eubank was called “the literary leader of the age”, despite the fact that he has never sold more than three thousand copies of his books. He complains that it is disgraceful artists are treated as peddlers, and that there should be a law limiting the sales of books to ten thousand copies because it is just “unfair” that the reason of free market choice does not properly appreciate his “brilliance”. Eubank suggests that such a limit “…would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books.”
Based on his tweets, I can see Eichner agreeing that people should be forced to see his movie like Eubank would have them forced to read his books.
Eubank, fancying himself as some sort of philosopher, continues:
“…Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They’re too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed.”
At the same party, Dr. Simon Pritchett , the head of the Department of Philosophy at Patrick Henry University is also addressing a group of eager listeners. Pritchett is considered the leading philosopher of the age and believes that man is nothing but a collection of chemicals, reason is a superstition, it is futile to seek meaning in life, and the duty of a philosopher is to show that nothing can be understood.
Pritchett opines:
“It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult,” said Dr. Pritchett. “Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more . . . tractable.”
He shrugged and reached for another canapé, a businessman said uneasily, “What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.”
“Oh, that?” said Dr. Pritchett. “But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.”
“But, look . . . isn’t that sort of a contradiction?”
“Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid.”
Once again, we are living in the margins of Ayn Rand’s epic novel, “Atlas Shrugged”. It bears repetition as Rand’s opus succinctly foretells our current devotion to the irrational.
We are living in an age where people like Elie Mystal and Michael Eric Dyson – actually the entire prime-time lineup of MSNBC -- and others like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Barack Obama and his surrogate, Joe Biden, are elevated to levels of undeserved status and authority based more on the fashion of the day and less on actual accomplishment.
These people are contemporary, real world examples of Rand’s characters Simon Pritchett and Balph Eubank with their illegitimate “scholarship”, their faulty reasoning and fallacious logic, all of which are disconnected from reality.
Once again, from the Anti-Dog Eat Dog to the Equalization of Opportunity Acts, Rand’s “Atlas” foretold the future.
I often have discussions on the parallels in todays screwed up world with my wife… Motivated to read Atlas Shrugged again. If someone repeats BS long enough they begin to believe it.
You're like me, you can't watch or listen to these people without seeing the ridiculous characters of Atlas Shrugged performing like caricature.