House of Eratosthenes

I wonder what she’d say if she had lived to see all the events that came after her eventual demise in 1982, especially Bill Clinton’s presidency. All these presidential trends that came post-Carter. The crying for the cameras, the thumbs-up — surely she’d have to amend this thing about suppression of male emotions. We’ve started living, since she passed on, in a Phil Donahue type of world, and I have to doubt she could be quite so chummy with him if she could see all the wreckage from the consequences of his ideas.

I know exactly where she’s going, though, and she’s right. A big manly man way out in the wilderness goes out to protect his family from a bear, and if he has fear he doesn’t show it — that’s being tough and strong. Then he comes home and, rather than thank him for shooting the bear, the wife yells at him for tracking blood and dirt in on her nice clean floor…which hurts his feelings…the natural thing to do, seems to follow-through on being tough and strong, and not say anything. Which shows the kids that real men kill bears, but then they do whatever their wives tell them to do and if they’re unappreciated — or even insulted — those real men should learn to live with it.

Here’s where I disagree: It isn’t the suppression of emotions that is the problem. It’s some of the crap women fling at men that is the problem. If a bear is nearby and has shown itself to be dangerous, for a man to defend his family is a logical, rational thing to do. For a woman to open a can of smack on her man for getting the floor dirty, after he’s saved her life, is not. Society has created the problem of which Ayn Rand speaks, not by insisting he suppress emotions, but by denying him all other options: For him to point out that it’s inappropriate to berate him for dirtying the floor after he’s just finished protecting everyone, is seen as something on par with back-handing her. We’ve embraced a false dillema: He can beat the crap out of her physically, or hunker down, accept her insults, and beg for more. We’ve deprived men of all options in-between.

In Installment 2 she makes a lot more sense, I think because Donahue allows her the latitude to state where exactly the problem begins — the problem being in “western civilization” we think you have to sacrifice in order to be a decent person. (I would call that arena “the world,” Phil, eastern half first, western half last). You really have to keep your hand on the volume dial because the audio in this chapter is all gunnybags and bollywonkers. She says it comes from spending lavish portions of finite resources on “special” children, for example, the handicapped — what we’re really trying to do is make everybody the same, when they’re not. She sounds like a character out of one of my favorite movies, The Incredibles: If everybody is special, the nobody is.

Her atheism is troubling to me. She does such a thorough job of substantiating all, or at least most, of her other beliefs. But when it comes to atheism she says it is the one true religion because we shouldn’t doubt the evidence of our senses. I know of no Ayn Rand statement, in written or in voice medium, providing an explanation about how that critical chasm is bridged: Senses being unable to provide any evidence supporting any religion, the atheism religion included, how does it win out? Like so many atheists who have engaged me on the innernets, she seems to just pull it out of her butt: There is no God because I just woke up one day and decided that.

Donahue says she’s very close to the dictators she deplores. He illustrates the folly of post-modern liberalism right there: Her resemblance to dictators is that she’s figured out what she wants everybody to do. That’s exceptionally weak. Everybody who has an opinion, regardless of how they have come to it, resembles the dictator in this way. People of Donahue’s persuasion escape this scrutiny by putting on little theatrical puppet shows, in which they pretend to extrapolate their instructions from some fuzzy phantom, usually “The Will Of The People.” Or that if we don’t do what France and Germany want, our “allies” might get cranky.

Hmmm…maybe that’s the real genesis of this destructive altruism in which we find ourselves submerged. Conservatives and liberals both have ideas about what people should do, and in that sense both resemble dictators very weakly — but liberals busy themselves with compiling excuses, and put on a convincing show that they’re just acting in the interests of somebody else.

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Ayn Rand on Phil DonahueWednesday, March 19th, 2008

Ayn Rand on Phil Donahue
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008