Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, (among other books) has been a motivating force throughout my life. If you have read her work, please let me know whether she in any way supports or contradicts “Mother Culture.” Your thoughts would help tremendously in cleaning up a thought process I am unable sort out myself.

Ayn Rand and I both want to wake people from the doze Mother Culture’s lullaby produces. Mother Culture murmurs, “Everything’s as it should be, nothing’s wrong, there’s nothing you can do, you can’t change the world, just relax and take it, whatever it is.” Clearly we have different ideas about what wakened people should do.

Her ideas matured during a period when it was still taken for granted that humans could do whatever they pleased to the earth without any limit whatever. Despite her quarrel with Mother Culture, however, she accepted without reservation Mother Culture’s chief teaching, that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. If it doesn’t already do so, I suspect that history will ultimately see her as a relic of the nineteenth century–the last prophet of Rugged Individualism.

ID: 419
posted: 15 Jun 1999
updated: 15 Jun 1999