Conference Could Help Your Business

"I've got mine, the hell with you"

I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail from various think tanks with a political axe to grind and some of the wackiest stuff comes from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. In case you've not heard of these folks, the Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." The late author wrote in "Atlas Shrugged," "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." So as I understand it, the folks who follow this philosophy prize selfishness as a virtue something that I believe goes counter to having a society that actually works. Anyway, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, billed as "the foremost authority on Objectivism," had quite a little screed about Christmas. He wrote in part, "All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness. "America's tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration." Wow. Now isn't this what makes America, America? The fact you can support a way of life that emphasizes putting your own interests above all others and that you can insult a holiday observed by the bulk of nation. While I find this viewpoint repugnant on a variety of levels, I salute folks like Peikoff for exercising his free speech. I hope he'll salute me when I write that his way of thinking is what has put this nation in the economic turmoil it now faces. Selfishness and greed are not good, contrary to objectivism. The concept of "I've got mine, the hell with you" has led to the kind of mess we are now in.