Wally: Alix gave your spare tire to a HOMELESS FAMILY?
Val: Along with food and clothes from our house!!
Wally: How'd you raise such a great kid??
Val: Now we all have to try and live UP to her.
When inherited wealth is abolished, when the best educations are made available to those who can best profit from them rather than those who can best afford them, when social networking and family connections no longer provide the best opportunities for success to those who are already successful, when material wealth is given to those who contribute to society rather than those who’ve learned how to bleed it, when we truly have the “level playing field” that both the Left and the Right claim to want, when the advantages gained by accident of birth are finally corrected for, then perhaps I will take Ayn Rand seriously and consider “greatness” to be an indication of merit and desert. Until that point, “Atlas Shrugged” and the rest of its ilk are self-satisfied, poorly-written, sloganeering claptrap. It is the apologia for the doctrine of “Might Makes Right”. It is class warfare waged from the top down. It is rooting for the New York Yankees against your company softball team.
Homo sapiens rose to become Masters of the Planet (pardon the expression) through cooperative survival strategies. When it is realized that the individual’s best chance of thriving is to help the community thrive, and stop treating survival as a zero-sum equation, then we are TRULY on the threshold of our next evolutionary stage, not Nietzsche’s Ubermensch who can only perceive “success” through domination of others.
Pick your cliche, they’re both true:
“There but for the grace of God go I”; or
“We’re all in this together.”
When inherited wealth is abolished, when the best educations are made available to those who can best profit from them rather than those who can best afford them, when social networking and family connections no longer provide the best opportunities for success to those who are already successful, when material wealth is given to those who contribute to society rather than those who’ve learned how to bleed it, when we truly have the “level playing field” that both the Left and the Right claim to want, when the advantages gained by accident of birth are finally corrected for, then perhaps I will take Ayn Rand seriously and consider “greatness” to be an indication of merit and desert. Until that point, “Atlas Shrugged” and the rest of its ilk are self-satisfied, poorly-written, sloganeering claptrap. It is the apologia for the doctrine of “Might Makes Right”. It is class warfare waged from the top down. It is rooting for the New York Yankees against your company softball team.
Homo sapiens rose to become Masters of the Planet (pardon the expression) through cooperative survival strategies. When it is realized that the individual’s best chance of thriving is to help the community thrive, and stop treating survival as a zero-sum equation, then we are TRULY on the threshold of our next evolutionary stage, not Nietzsche’s Ubermensch who can only perceive “success” through domination of others.
Pick your cliche, they’re both true:
“There but for the grace of God go I”; or “We’re all in this together.”