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