Is it time for Oscar to sing the trash song?
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Though I was being flippant, I would never think that. Remember that famous quote: “We are the civilisation you are fighting to preserve.”
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I’d previously read elsewhere that, of Rand’s works, Anrhem isn’t bad. Around 20 years ago, upon learning I’d never read anything by Rand, a co-worker gave me a copy for Christmas (which, based upon what I do know about Rand, doesn’t make much sense for at least 2 reasons). 20 years on, I have yet to read it (or anything else by Rand) as I have a bottomless stack of unread books, some of which have been in there longer than Anrhem. I’ll probably get to it one day but it’s never been near the top of the heap.
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I think it’s worth a read since it’s one of those rare short books that doesn’t wear on and works well on its ambiguities. She doesn’t answer how the world got the way it did, she keeps the situations as simple as possible, and she doesn’t keep you longer than she has to (it’s only 90 pages iirc). It’s sad the rest of her work gets more grating. I think in another timeline she would’ve been a middling author that had a bit of a romantic view of individualism, too bad she got into politics and philosophy which aren’t her strong suits.
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I think more like a tragic mis-allocation of resources. Someone with your abilities, aptitude, and skill-set properly directed could have been manufacturing way more wealth, allowing you to consume even more, thus helping employ even more.
Since the purpose of life is to maximize the consumption per person (maximize happiness? Don’t be silly. How do you measure that?), your efforts in non wealth-creation/non-consumption activities is just a tragic waste.
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I’m going to assume you’re being ironic/sarcastic here, since this could very much be an earnest point made by some people in the real world. What’s that called? Poe’s law?
I think my response here to someone who would propose this seriously is that a) I am not a corporation and I refuse to be “maximized” thank you, very much.
And b) There are other ways of helping society that don’t include an appeal to the bottom line of corporations. Perhaps just educating young people in the history of our shared world should be enough in and of itself. But for some people, history is an uncomfortable subject, because it often upends dearly held “common sense” notions that helped to build the modern world of nation-states and capitalism, as opposed to both things just being natural occurrences with a natural origin instead of a social one.
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