Dirty Harry and the Utopian Twinkie

From the days of our earliest recollection, the distant glow of our childhood, we remember them: The small assortment of kids on the playground who preferred to be in charge.   These seasoned six-year-olds did not group according to race or athletic ability. They did not unite to form an oligarchy, but rather tended to find their own sandboxes in which to hold forth. Tetherball, hopscotch, StarTrek role- playing; all had their kingpins. After all, somebody has to decide who gets to be Spock and who is relegated to Sulu.  Somebody has to decide if it’s ball contact only, or if ropesies get the green light.

We know these kids.  Their first lever of coalition was a particular deposit of social currency: the right shirt, shoes, lunch pail, or the coveted Twinkie within. Even better, an unassailable claim to exclusivity: “My dad owns the Twinkie factory”.  A likely fabrication but spoken with such conviction that few dare cast suspicion. The easy inference is that sticking with this kid will make the Twinkies flow.  “If you don’t believe me, come to my house and see all the Twinkies.” They come over. “Where are the Twinkies?” “They’re getting baked in the factory, you idiot.” The second lever of their superiority was not competency, but complexity: an assertion of ownership of a labyrinth of rules. Within this context, consider the following allegory.

Gabe got the tether-ball wrapped around the pole first, but little Harry confidently informed him of a rule he had violated, thus forfeiting the contest. Of course Harry knew he was a cheat, but was no less satisfied with victory by fraud than by merit.  The plum was simply to be on the uphill side of rolling dung. Harry’s self-indulgence was quickly transparent to Gabe, who had enough social and emotional currency to play somewhere else.   And, justifiably, Gabe called out Harry on the Twinkie factory fib.

But to Harry, such repudiation was in gross violation of the Cardinal Rule: Harry Is In Charge. Why? Because it makes Harry feel good.  This subordinated any other consideration.  Harry was not without recourse for retribution against such repudiation.  He knew he couldn’t win any kind of fair fight, so he learned the art of marshalling the kids who lacked the currency of the confident Gabe. They stuck with Harry because they wanted to be on a winning team of some sort, and there was the possibility of Twinkies in the bargain.

This would be their currency. With this currency they would be relevant. Relevance feels good. It feels so good that they find it difficult to challenge Harry’s agenda as long as he exudes confidence. So, Harry plotted with his little henchmen to poison Gabe’s friends against him with a smear campaign: Gabe is a bed-wetter. If enough people say it, it must be true.  Chalk up one for the Harryites. They are now relevant by being uphill from dung rolling right at Gabe. This feels good, too. But none of Gabe’s friends can recall a sour smell in his room, so the story fades quickly.

Fast forward: Harry has grown up now, he has branded himself with a degree from an elite university, he’s ambitious, and there is a game that has become intuitive to him. He has refined the art of marshalling the disenfranchised, to the point of creating the disenfranchised if none can be found otherwise. Who are the disenfranchised? Those who feel they have no currency to transact in the golden orb of relevance inhabited by people with the right shirts, shoes and Twinkie-holding lunchpails .  If they are not sufficiently dissatisfied, Harry will help them with that.

To continue in the vein of the allegory, Gabe is still out there somewhere, and Harry will never really feel like the score is settled. What score? Gabe violated the Cardinal Rule.  Harry needs some help to rectify things, so he gathers a bigger mob and convinces them they are party to Gabe’s ancient rejection. This rejection has somehow defined them. Gabe has taken their currency. This is why they are not relevant. They will not be relevant until they get their currency back from Gabe. It is crucial that they get it back, because Harry has given them an artful glimpse of Utopian relevance.

Now, the vision is clear.  All they have to do to claim their place on the pleasure orb is to unite with Harry in blaming Gabe and invest whatever squalid currency they do have, in Harry – emotional, spiritual and material.  That is to say they cede their will and their dignity to Harry. If they don’t already feel like their will and dignity aren’t worth keeping, Harry will help them see things more clearly. Harry will consolidate their human currency and forge it into a mighty lever that will lift heavy things and whack Gabe.

Our Harryites no longer have a lever of their own to do any lifting or whacking. But it’s OK, Harry has it covered.  And watching Harry – their anointed – doing the lifting and whacking will feel good.

But there is a basic flaw in Harry’s plan. Harry has sold the vision of universal relevance but in realty he sees relevance as a zero-sum game.  If anyone besides Harry has any, Harry has less than he might have. And since Harry’s governing principle is Harry, this is a situation that ultimately must be rectified.  More will not satisfy Harry, only all, and all is hard to come by. Just ask Alexander the Great and Adolf Hitler.

All Harry ever really wanted was his right afforded by the Cardinal Rule. And he needed a bigger club with which to whack Gabe, because Gabe violated the Cardinal Rule.  He convinced his minions that if they would simply cede to him their humanity, he would remove their accountability for their own existence by beating Gabe into giving up the Twinkie in his lunch pail.  Simon was never really interested in the Twinkie beyond its barter value for the humanity of his minions, and the satisfaction of taking it from Gabe, both of which inflate his self-perceived relevance.  And he can never have enough of his own relevance.  Harry is so self-absorbed it is difficult for him to notice the helical human consumption of his own plan, a plan that ultimately will never produce enough Twinkies to sustain itself.

Gabe took the beating once and decided not to bring Twinkies to school any more. Others kids heard about the affair and did the same.  They were all happy without their Twinkies. This was the crack in Harry’s plan, the point that escaped him from the very beginning, that Gabe and his friends did not derive their identity from their Twinkies. He was sure that if he could convince one group to sell their soul for a free Twinkie, he could convince another to sell theirs, so long as they could keep some of their Twinkie some of the time.

Well, one Twinkie did not divide up very well amongst the minions, and sensing that no more Twinkies would be forthcoming, they surrounded Harry with the glaring countenance of the bitterly betrayed. Harry had attempted to perpetrate a Ponzi scheme of Utopian relevance in which all of the value would ultimately float to him.  They had given Harry their will and their dignity, but he had no more Twinkies for Utopian distribution.  The Twinkie was not free after all. How vexed was Harry when he saw that he could never sustain any real leverage over Gabe and his friends. There were no more Twinkies and Harry had to default on his contract with his minions.

The angry call for redemption of their will and dignity frightened Harry badly. He wet his pants in public and had to go away for a long time.  But he will never forget the ignominious defeat. He’ll be back. And when he comes back in glorious reiteration, he won’t just be coming for Gabe. And he will have found new minions with angry faces and short memories. Watch your Twinkies.

The Tea Party and Why Nearly all of my 60 College Students are Libertarian

If you were to ask my students about their party affiliation in a public forum, you would get hesitation.  None of them would want to commit for two reasons.  Most of them are disillusioned with the current major party dysfunction and are, consequently, non-committal.  The other reason is that those who do identify themselves with one of the major parties are ill-equipped to defend their choice should their party be challenged.  I believe that if I were to anonymously ask them to write their party affiliation on a piece of paper (I will do this next Tuesday), they would be bolder, but there would still be a large greater percentage of them (greater than you would find in the overall population) who would commit to no party.

There are several ways to read this.  You could argue that they choose political affiliation the same way they date, noncommittally.  You could argue that, due to a neutered public school curriculum, 90210 and a life of relative ease, they are not educated enough to formulate a position.  These may be contributors, but they are certainly not major drivers.  At least one major driver is the embarrassing dysfunction that the two major parties suffer.  My students would rather not go to the prom than show up with an ugly date.

There is a sociological way to find out party affiliation without asking the party affiliation question.  You could develop a survey of socioeconomic and political attitudes.  My informal, unscientific survey indicated that 80% of the students in my class are Libertarians.  They believe that government should be limited, and certainly smaller than it is now, and that government intrusion into other aspects of peoples lives is unwarranted as long as others are not hurt by their actions.

And why wouldn’t they be Libertarians?  Most of them have had severely inadequate training in civics and history, yet they do know about debt and about how stupid it is to spend now and pay later.  Most of my students also have some training in economics and understand that, contrary to what many advocates of healthcare reform say, profit potential drives efficiency and effectiveness.  They have also been exposed to psychology (unfortunately, they picked up a lot of intellectual guano along with the cool stuff they learned) which told them that people respond to incentives.  Government is remarkable effective at incentivizing mediocrity, sloth and entitlement.

So far, government power expanders like W, Obama, and congress have tiptoed into the national political bedroom to ask for a drink of water.  The pattern repeats itself.   The snoozing parents (you and me), dreaming of prosperous utopias shake off  just enough narcotic induced haze to say, nearly incoherently and halfway into the pillow, “just go get a cup and get some water from the faucet.”  Sleep quickly returns and the world is forgotten.  But then, one night, the child walked into the bedroom, asked for a glass of healthcare reform water, was given the same message as in other nights and, as in other nights, went to the liquor cabinet and poured a glass of vodka.  This time, the child’s emboldened carelessness caused the bottles to clang loudly enough to wake us.  Many of us awakened as if from an electric shock.  We are angry and embarrassed that we have not been better parents and vow to rehab the child and pay more attention.

[Note to self:  There are several candidates that deserve the 'narcotic sleep aid' label.  CNN, NBC, CBS, DNC, RNC, NYT and NEA come to mind.]

Some of  us, Massachusetts voters for instance, opt to give the child a good, hard spanking.

The Tea Party

David Brooks wrote the following in the New York Times:

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

Maybe I’m the last guy to learn what the “Educated Class” is.   I asked a friend who told me, “The Educated Class are people who are not mountaineers but buy a lot of North Face stuff.  They buy Volvo’s.  They eat edamame.  They see “films.”  They don’t bowl.  They pay too much for beer.  They would rather eat Shaq’s socks than drive an Impala.  They go to church for one week after Brad Pitt makes a televised plea for prayer.  They only got into fly fishing when Tom Brokaw copped to it.”  [Okay, so far I would have called them arrogant, elitist, spoiled snobs.  I'm still wondering where the "educated" part comes in.]  “They might talk to their parents more if Angelina Jolie started talking to Jon Voight again.”  [hmmm, still no discussion of education]  “They smoke pot but don’t get arrested for it.”  [At least that takes some education] “They believe conformity is okay as long as it’s expensive.”  The point is that the label, “Educated,” may be as shallow as the people it describes.

If there were a Tea Party poster child, it would be Glenn Beck.  If you have any doubt about Beck’s influence and power, check THIS out.  It may be that the data are skewed.  It may be that the data that I collected so unscientifically are a falsification of real phenomena.  You may say that the sample I drew the data from had too many rednecks to be representative.  You may say that the university where I teach is dangerously unenlightened.  Regardless of the maybe’s, my money is on the Tea Party’s continued rise.  My money is also on my students, which is pretty much the same bet.

Why You Should Learn Portuguese

I asked two French students in my Entrepreneurship class to give us their opinion of American foreign policy.  They were intelligent, conscientious women who had spent enough money to attend college in the United States. Their response was similar to what I heard from several friends throughout Latin America. The articulation of their response goes as follows:

After winning the Revolutionary war (with our help) you ignored Jefferson, listened to Hamilton and became a world power.  We were all happy with that, especially when it came to your help in WWII; you really came through for us.  We were always a little uncomfortable with your arrogance and although we were happy that you had enough military power to check the Soviets, in the back of our minds, the saying, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” kept repeating itself.  We were all very upset when you were attacked on 9-11.  We vowed to stand with you in bringing to justice, if it were possible, those responsible for the infamy.  But your response has been excessive and poorly aimed.  You are not fighting a country like England, Japan, or Germany or even Iraq.  Now you are fighting an ideology and you really stink at it.  With all of the billions you have spent, you have barely removed a few cupfulls from the ocean of terrorism.  In fact, you may have increased the number and the intensity of the terrorists by the reckless response that you chose to execute nearly alone.  If anyone else, like China or Iran had acted the same way you did, our condemnation of their actions would have been much more vocal.  We are giving you some benefit of the doubt.  Still, we wish that you would show more restraint and deliberation.  We wish that you would build consortia and work through diplomatic means.  We are afraid of people who want us dead at any cost.  At least in France, our nation is full of them.  However, we don’t think that the best response to the threat is primarily military.

I will certainly admit to foreign policy blunders and military missteps.  I may even agree that there are philosophical and ideological flaws in our policy, but you have to ask yourself how we achieved the status of most hated Western nation (Israel being perhaps the most hated but not Western).  It’s because we stand in unyielding and unrelenting opposition to all threats to freedom.  You may have to call on us some day to liberate you from human or natural calamity, which we will gladly do at great expense in lives and money.  When that time comes, you will not care whether or not we have deliberated or whether or not we have formed a consortium, and you will certainly not wish us to show restraint.

That said, you (the reader) are probably wondering what this has to do with learning Portuguese.  Pan American and European foreign policy have a tremendous impact on the world economy and on your personal prosperity.

Brazil

Brazil is months away from becoming the world’s fifth largest economy.  It has made strides in poverty eradication, it is an agricultural powerhouse and it has recently discovered several billion barrels of crude off shore.  It also has the luxury of existing in the Americas where it is protected by the Monroe Doctrine.  Brazil has been able to see the expensive effects of US foreign policy and has structured its own to do anything but match ours.  Recently, it has gotten cozy with Venezuela and Cuba and has criticized Colombia for allowing the US to use some of its military bases.

Sidebar:  The Cuba thing, I like.  The fastest and most effective way to get Cuba to behave would be to completely open trade with them.  Just my opinion.

The most unpalatable Brazilian alliance is with Iran.  Brazil seems to be unconcerned with Iran’s growing involvement in Latin America via Venezuela.  Iran and Venezuela have a lot to to gain from trade.  Besides their mutual US hatred (Chavez, at least, would do about anything to annoy America, even if it cost him), Iran can ship nuclear technology to Venezuela in exchange for Venezuelan uranium.  They are also drawn together by oil policy.

Brazil hopes to increase trade with Iran, and as an act of good will,  President Lula hosted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Brazil. He has said that he supports Iran’s non-weapon nuke technology and claims that there is no evidence that Iran is making anything but the non-weapon stuff.  While an argument can be made that Brazil’s position is foolish and wrongheaded, as long as it does not push the US to the point of sanctions, its strategy is at least economically sound.  It wants to treat everyone, including enemies of the US, as trade partners.

Brazil has two economic advantages that the US does not. One is that it has more trade partners by virtue of the fact that it is has less exclusionary foreign policy. The other is that Brazil is enjoying a budget surplus and has done so for several years.  Thanks to the last nine years (and counting) of drunken spending orgies, the US economy will struggle to recover for at least a decade and maybe more if the current administration and congress get their way.

While the US stagnates for a while, Brazil will grow economically, militarily, technologically and commercially more powerful.  What this means to you is that trade with Brazil will become more profitable over time.  As always, language skills will enable business.  That’s why you should learn Portuguese!

Apple Cider Syrup Recipe

1 Cup Sugar

2 TBS Corn Starch

1/2 tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice

2 Cups Apple Cider

2 TBS Lemon Juice

Mix Sugar, Corn Starch and Spice.  Combine Apple Juice and Lemon Juice.  Mix with Sugar mixture and bring to boil.  Serve

G-Man’s Contribution to the War Post

I went to college with G-man. He is a professor of English in North Carolina and one of my closest friends.  G-man and I often (this word has a silent ‘t’) disagree as to causes, means and methods of socioeconomic and political angst.  A good example is that, while I blame Vietnam dysfunction on political stupidity and self-aggrandizement, he believes that blame should be shared by business greed. He has a point.

It may be fruitful to ask the question, “Who are the relative suppliers and demanders of war?” Dubner and Leavitt, authors of Superfreakonomics, discuss the stupidity of decommissioning the the suppliers of the drug trade rather than the demanders. Their argument is that as long as there is demand, the economy will produce enough supply to meet demand at some price. If you take away a section of suppliers, Colombia, say, then the price of the commodity (cocaine) will go up due to a shrunken supply. The price increases will encourage new entrants. They seem to be correct. With the retreat of Columbian supply, Mexico has stepped up to fill the gap. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/12/world/AP-LT-Drug-War-Mexico.html

Singapore understands the supply/demand drug phenomenon.  Several years ago, as I was preparing to land in Singapore, I was handed a customs form for entry into the country.  In big, bold letters, at the top of the form were the words, “DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICERS.”  The message is, “You traffic drugs, you die.”  Singapore, at least then, had no drug problem.  If war, in fact, as G-man mentions, has a strong economic component, who are the suppliers and who are the demanders of war?  If we could impose a penalty to the demanders stupid war, like cutting their bottoms off or something, the war demanders would certainly demand less war overall.

(Non drug-induced)Flashback:  About twenty years ago while I was in college, I walked by a student war rally.  I could hear cheering and shouting inside a packed ballroom, and a very charismatic speaker at a microphone.  A friend walked out of the ballroom, saw me and said, “Isn’t it great, we are going to war!”  I was dumbfounded.  War ALWAYS has severely negative, unintended consequences.  One of the problems was that the Vietnam was historically remote enough that most of the crowd had no past war experience to lend needed perspective.  I am certainly not anti-war per se, but I do believe that war should be approached deliberately, reluctantly, and in the face of greater threats than the one Sadaam was posing to Kuwait.  The hype and hysteria were politically generated and designed, in Hitleresque fashion (I really hate to pull the Hitler card here, but the speaker really did remind me of what I had seen of Hitler on film.  There was podium banging, shouting, blaming, and a call to national pride), to create a sort of bandwagon mania.  Thought, logic and debate were not enough to carry the day, so emotion (pathos) was evoked and the crowd complied.  The rally ended with the great, patriotic song by Lee Greenwood.

The entire crowd sang along and waved their arms.  The rally was a masterpiece in persuasion.  It had all of the elements rhetorical manipulation.  I really have to hand it to the organizers; it was a stroke of persuasive genius to end with that song.  By associating the pro-war message with a song that powerful, any pro-war detractor, pathos would have you believe, is against patriotism.

So, who organized the rally?  If G-Man is right, and I think he is, it is largely the interests of particularly greedy companies and individuals with a profit motive along with a complicit Congress.

Liberal/Socialist Stupidity

I concede the point that particular, selfish economic interests contribute to war mongering.  However, I certainly do not concede the point that big business and profit are, therefore, a national problem.  In fact, the opposite is true.  It is precisely profit and productive commerce, enabled by selfish business people that is key to prosperity.  It is precisely profit that improves process and production.   Remove the profit incentive and commerce and prosperity will retreat or a black market will thrive, or both.  The market is the check to bad decisions.  When market forces are removed, inefficiency and ineffectiveness inevitably follow.  I’m sure that G-man has colleagues that are “dead wood.”  The University system, out of fear or I don’t know what, has chosen to insulate itself from market forces through tenure.  You just can’t rid yourself of University dead wood and it hurts the education process.

Identifying the supplier of war is not easy.  Was it Hitler or Churchill or both in WWII?  The demand question is even more difficult.  In the end, I think that the war demanders are people who vote, hence the dire need for civics and history education in educational curricula.  A heavy dose of logic and economics wouldn’t hurt either.

Thanks to G-man for his post.  Here is his contribution to my list of good protest music. It is as good as he says.

A Churchill Quote

But what of the future? What is the great danger to our national trade and prosperity with which we are confronted at the present time? It is purely the rapid growth in numbers, in influence, in prestige, of a great body of our fellow citizens who are being taught to repeat and believe in the false doctrines of Socialism, which, if ever seriously put into practice, would reduce this island to chaos and starvation.

Now it is in the face of this danger that I ask: How long are we going to continue to allow the artificially fomented jealousies and quarrels of Conservatives and Liberals to play into the hands of the Socialists? How long are the interests of the country to suffer from sterile party conflicts in the presence of an advancing peril? How long are the Liberals and Conservatives to paralyse each other so that both may be ruled by a Socialist minority?

The deliberate policy of the Socialists is, of course, to prevent any common action between Liberals and Conservatives in order that Socialism may progress and devour the Liberals at leisure.  All their tactics are conceived with this intention.

HOW SETH AND BILL ARE LIKE NEIL AND BOB

During a recent three hour road trip with the family, I sat in the passenger seat, plugged in my laptop, hooked up the FM transmitter and gave my children a lesson in some of the best music ever written.  During the music appreciation course I exposed them to war protest music.  Between songs I would teach them Vietnam history, the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, First Amendment rights, war justification, war cost and government stupidity.  The music is powerful and passionate.  Here are some examples:

My children were riveted.  What a travesty that, unless I intercede, they may never learn the complexities of war policy in general and Vietnam policy in particular.  War, every war, is subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Leavitt and Dubner outline the law in both Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics.  They argue that the Americans with Disabilities act, for example, has hurt Americans with disabilities far more than it has helped.  They argue that employers, out of fear that they will no longer be able to discipline or fire bad workers are reluctant to hire disabled workers.  Yet, public war debate is so politically charged that a discussion of unintended consequences, weighing of costs and benefits, realistic past war experience and other balanced discussions never take place.  My children, unless they seek it out will likely never be exposed to fundamental historical lessons.  Traditional education sources, like most private and public schools, cannot and will not deliver the proper education forum…thank heaven for long trips with captive children.

Vietnam protests have a parallel today in both people and content.  The climate of influence has changed with the emergence of cyberspace.  It is the present and it is the future.  Cyberspace is the last bastion of rights to free speech and of free markets, and, consequently, it is the locus of modern protest against stupidity, oppression, thievery, exploitation and conquest.  Today as in times past, the protests are aimed at government stupidity, arrogance and the individual self-aggrandizement of its cogs.  Today, as then, imperialism is a core issue.  Today as then, there are repeated attempts to marginalize the protesters.  Today as then, the protesters have created works of art the deserve the attention of every freedom-loving citizen.  Here are a few of their names and works.

Seth Godin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Godin

Seth Godin gets it.  Seth is able to see and describe both the past and future of commerce and persuasion.  His latest free ebook, a must read, is a protest song. You can download it here.

Bill Whittle

Bill Whittle and his group at PJTV have multiple high quality, cutting edge protest pieces that are intelligent, well-presented, thoughtful and educational.  My favorite to date is Iconography.  It is a must watch.

There are several others that deserve mention. As this post is meant to encourage dialogue, please insert your favorite protesters. How interesting the shift over the last 50 years or so from the predominant number of protesters being liberal to the predominant number being conservative and libertarian.

Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged

First, I LOVED it.  Very well written.  It reminded me of the Brother’s Karamazov in several ways.  It was similarly dark and contained expositions on various worthy topics.  The Brother’s K is famous for the Great Inquisitor and one of the best discussions of the problem of evil (how can God be both all good and all powerful and yet allow for the existence of evil?  Dostoevsky does not provide an answer but beautifully sets up the problem to be discussed.).

Fyodor Dostoevsky

My friend Carol Morgan, when I offered my observation that Rand is a beautifully creative writer and a shoddy philosopher, opined that it is nearly impossible to have both deft creative and philosophical capability in writing.

It’s not the purely philosophical problems to which I take issue; its the ontological/existential problems.  Rand suffers from the misguided metaphysical notion that individuality is fundamental ontology.  Like all writers, Rand sits on a pile of presuppositions delivered to her by a linguistic/philosophical tradition, in this case, Cartesian metaphysics.  Although generally regarded as most successful of all metaphysical constructs, there are viable alternatives.

Side note: Most modern academic economists begin with the assumption of individuality when postulating economic theory.  They begin by saying, “The fundamental economic problem is that individuals have insatiable wants and limited resources.”  At least 99% of students and academics gloss over the stated assumption that individuals comprise fundamental economy and dive right into a discussion of wants and resources.  Some groups, such as one that has espoused Post-autistic Economics, have started to re-think the ontology of economics.

What about the children?

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” –  Atlas Shrugged

Problem:  Substitute “another man” with “a carrot.”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of a carrot, nor ask a carrot to live for mine.”

This appears nonsensical, however it exposes the fundamental, natural law that sacrifice of one for another is fundamental to existence.  The carrot lives for the man and is sacrificed receiving nothing in return.

Suppose we do a classification of “things that are exempt from the above rule and therefore not an exploitation of them and therefore is not considered a pledge violation” and “things that apply to the pledge.”  Said another way, we can start to eliminate “things that don’t apply to Rand’s fundamental rule.”

If we restrict “things that apply” to “man” (males and females) we can ask the question about “children.”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of a child, nor ask a child to live for mine.”

Looks like we will have to exempt children as well, or at least hold children in bondage and servitude and account for all they are given and require them to pay it all back before they can participate in normal societal relations.

Then what of old people?  We must exempt them or implement a robust plan to euthanize them.  What about stupid people?  What about teenagers?  Soon we restrict our list of valuable people to tiny numbers.  What do we do with everyone else?

Marriage

By default, Rand despises marriage.  There is no marriage where there is equal exchange at all times.  There is a word for people who attempt to enforce equal exchange in marriages, it’s called “divorcees.”  Rand’s straw man of the cannibalistic, looting nature of marital sex and the purity of Dagny’s and Hank’s extramarital affair assumes no societal angst over the proliferation of such an attitude.  In her view, an affair may be the purest option available.  (So, Mr. Woods, which came first, the affairs or the love of Rand?)

The end of the road

I watched a web discussion of a group of Rand enthusiasts.  Words like sacrifice, redemption, benevolence, mercy, forgiveness and soft were anathema.  Words like mine, me, trade, produce, hard, self, pay, owe and fight, were elevating.  An anti-Rand world is hardly like the straw man that she portrays in the book.  It would look a lot more like America in 1776 when public virtue ran at an all-time high, when men sacrificed fortunes and position for the good of the new republic and died in poverty; Robert Morris comes to mind.

Robert Morris

I can see Randian discipleship only ending in misery and psychosis.  Misery from lack of community and psychosis for denial of ontology.

Redemption

I began by saying that I loved the book.  It has changed me in some positive ways.  Since reading it I am more motivated to work and produce.  My statements and conversations are more focused.  From a literary standpoint, it stands near the top of my preferred reading list.  I plan on reading Fountainhead and Anthem when I am finished with Superfreakanomics.  I recommend Atlas Shrugged primarily because of its relevance in topic and because it is referenced so much in contemporary society.