Paul Ryan’s big intellectual influence was Ayn Rand, polemicist, philosopher and writer but who is Ayn Rand?
Rand was born Alissa (or Alice) Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905.
Growing up, she witnessed the revolution which brought the Communist state to ascendancy in 1917.
She experienced the consequences of collectivism and the worship of the state.
Graduating from college in 1926, she visited relatives in America and remained there. She died in 1982.
She held to the following philosophy about the essence of the human being:
‘No person is inherently a slave – or even a servant – to another. Our lives belong to us, not to our families or our neighbours, not to society or our country or tribe or any other group.
‘The individual is primary.
‘All other relationships – no matter how crucially important or central to a particular person – must be subordinate to this basic fact of social existence.
‘We must live our lives first for ourselves.
‘To be literally “selfless” is to cease to exist.’
I do not dispute the uniqueness of the individual in his/her isolation.
Having lived through the heyday of ‘Existentialism’ and its accompanying attractions, its vacuousness died in the aftermath of procreation and giving effect to what some see as the male’s only purpose ‘to pass on our genes.’
Being enamoured with the philosophy of Sartre, Camus, Beckett et al was a great trip in the late Sixties/early Seventies but the cold hard facts of life were very different.
Returning home after a late night shift to have my exhausted wife reach into my arms a little roaring baby girl.
Pursuance of the credo attaching to existentialism, logically, I would have thrown my baby daughter in a corner and let her cry, remaining remote and detached like Camus’s hero in L’étranger, adopting an agnostic presence in court while on a murder charge.
Just another experience.
Today there are many who cling to Ayn Rand philosophy, “greed is good.”
This Rand philosophy is a bigger part of our thinking in education in Northern Ireland than you realise.
The grammar school approach is geared towards ‘self aggrandisement,’ self and self again.
Where have you heard within that grammar school ethos a simple message: “your talent should be used to improve the quality of those less well off than you.”
You didn’t.
Rand’s philosophy – ‘to be literally “selfless” is to cease to exist’ – is a challenge to justice.
Shouldn’t life be about sharing, using our collective and individual resources to provide, physically, morally and socially for our fellow human beings?
Should it be about trampling on the weakest in society to reach the summit?
To judge by Mitt Romney’s confusing approach to life, Paul Ryan and his Rand philosophy suggest he is in the right camp – with a philosophy of ‘myself first, myself second and if there is anything left over, myself again.’
This is coming close to the theory ‘greed is good.’
