Meena Shrugged
So last night I was having a fit of boredom. I’ve been meaning to get a new book, so I went to the bookstore. After looking around for about 20 minutes and trying to ignore the 7 year old girl in the cd section with the headphones at max singing along at the top or maybe middle of her voice, I found a paperback copy (I love paperbacks. They’re more casual, more ME than hardcovers) of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. My friend Eric from upstate was the first person to suggest this book to me over 6 years ago, and I’d never gotten around to reading it.
So I bring my selection up to the counter, and there’s a young guy working, probably a few years younger than I am. I quickly wonder if he’s going to try to strike up a conversation with me, and if he does, if it’s flirtatious or just business. Being female does come with some built in skepticism. Anyway, I put my book on the counter, and he says “EVERYONE is buying Ayn Rand today. I dunno what it is!” I told him that I’d been meaning to read the book for some time, but just now got around to picking up a copy. He asks me if I’d read Anthem, another popular Rand novel, and I told him no. He said that they’re both “Heavy” reading, and that though he’s never read Atlas Shrugged, he has read Anthem, and he was turned onto them by a friend of his who’s read both and “is very heavy into objectivism.”
Uh huh. I nodded, completed my purchase, and walked out. Now I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, at least in so far as common sense. But when you wander into the realm of literary intellectualism, I’m pretty wet behind the ears. I read what entertains me, reading is a form of escapism for me mostly, so I tend to stay away from anything non-fiction, political, or otherwise boring-sounding. :p My point, if you’re still with me, is I had no idea what objectivism was. The conversation ended there because I had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t want to needlessly make myself look ignorant. So I did what any modern 20-something would do, I came home and googled it.
Turns out, I knew what objectivism was all along, and not only that, I’m a pretty close follower. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia (I know, not always 100% accurate, but mostly. ..):
Objectivism is a philosophy[1][2] developed by Ayn Rand in the 20th century that encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.[3]
Objectivism holds that reality exists independent from consciousness; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation; that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or “rational self-interest”; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform man’s widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and respond to.
See, I thought this was just common knowledge. Reality exists with or without you, you exist and can interact with reality through your senses, you gain knowledge about reality through your senses and thought processes, the most base purpose of life is to enjoy it, and art is your perception and reiteration of reality as you see it, or choose to reproduce it or it’s opposite to directly affect you or others by way of their sensory receptors.
I mean, duh. There’s a book about this?
I bought it before knowing the word “objectivism”, and because what I read on the first page captivated me. I wanted to know more about what was going on, and what was going to happen. I’m still going to read it, but I was interested to find that institutes and societies have been drafted based on something I have always took for granted, to promote ideas and beliefs that I never questioned. Interesting.
June 1st, 2008 at 3:12 pm
It is heavy reading. I’ve read The Fountainhead, and it was a great book. Atlas Shrugged is sitting next to me right now. I bought it a couple of months ago because someone suggested that it was a book to read after Fountainhead. Enjoy it.