OPEN LETTER: WE ARE ATLAS

When I was in high school, I loved classic rock, and I loved Ayn Rand. We all make mistakes.

We used to go to my friend’s house. He was an only kid. His dad was a pretty successful local musician, who taught at the university, and spent the summer...

...going to places like Norway and Alaska on cruise ships as part of a band.

His dad would come back with bags of money, so this kid had everything. I coveted his state of the art receiver and multi-disc CD player. It looked like technology straight out of Blade Runner...

...industrial and futuristic at the same time. And he had speakers that were as tall as me. They sent blasts of sound right through you, like some pentagon super weapon. He had piles and piles of CDs the rest of my little crew could never afford.

What type of classic rock did a bunch of kids from a blue collar suburb of Buffalo love most? Progressive Rock. Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd. And being a only long swim from Canada, boy did we love Rush.

@rushtheband

We’d analyze the words as we played Super Mario and Zelda—the 8-bit version, which was new then. And we’d drawn inspiration from the songs, as we trudged through the snow to school, trying to stay warm, and trying to stay hopeful among the rust and decay around us.

We were living in the aftermath of early globalization and heavy industry blight that had sunk its teeth deep into Upstate New York.

Rush, from Hamilton, a town not dissimilar to Buffalo, was inspired by Ayn Rand, the woman who had escaped from Soviet Russia, seeking the glory and opportunity of America as a screenwriter and novelist.

Her work not only inspired some gifted young msicans from Hamilton, but it was like the glowing torch of the Hamilton steel mills to a world of others looking for meaning, hope.

What was her message? Her most famous works are the “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which is about corporate titans leaving society and allowing the world economy to halt in the absence of their talents.

She wrote about failing, misunderstood students, who really had masterworks contained within their soul. She wrote about star crossed lovers, who were resisting the system of outdated rdogma forced upon them by sci-fi overlords.

In other words, she wrote about stuff that really appealed to teenage boys that played video games, and had no job, no car, no girlfriend.

What I like about Ayn Rand still—even to this day—is her zest for life. You can feel it, in the best parts of her work (not the bad 1950s sci-fi parts about death rays and super steel). She believes that “happiness is the moral purpose of life.”

The problem is, I don't think Ms. Rand really understood happiness at all. Overall, Ayn Rand has had an immensely negative effect on America. Her philosophy (and she did grow from being a novelist to some sort of philosopher) is too often venerated by the right.

Libertarian and neo conservatives, like Alan Greenspan, Rand Paul (namesake), and Paul Ryan treat her like one of the Founding Fathers.

But I do not agree with her vision of a world of misunderstood supermen and the women that love them.

I do not agree with her view that life is about selfishness, and only though selfishness can we benefit others. And I do not agree with her contention that government benefits, including social security, are some form of theft.

She was so obsessed with individualism that she wanted people to be completely self-sufficient in every way, thus completely denying the purpose of society itself. We are not a country of roaming nomads, who look at one another only as threats or opportunities.

Moreover, there are no children in her novels, no sick, no infirm. The suffering is all earned. The joy is all just. It’s a fantasy, just like most Rush albums from the seventies.

The poignant twist is that Ms. Rand herself died living off the kindness of strangers (her many acolytes and admirers) and supported by social security. She never committed to her convictions and sought a land truly free of any form of government compulsion.

If she wanted no mutuality, only independence and the power of might, she could have found it easily—just not in America. There are many war torn lands across our suffering world for her to have chosen from.

I believe we are in this together. All of us. Happiness can only come from the reliance and commitment of individuals to a network of kindness and service, i.e., good government. I certainly believe in the power of individuals to change society.

But we can’t have a society at all if our happiness comes only from our selfish pursuits. I see the fingerprint of Rand (whether people know it or not) when I see politicians proselytizing about the importance of individuality over civic duty;

when I see them call social security and entitlement, when I see their repulsion to masks in this moment of pandemic crisis as some sort of bow to tyranny. How completely absurd.

I am no socialist. I want a nation of markets, established by rules that not only serve the most elite, but serve the general welfare and the common good.

As a trained corporate attorney, I am well aware of the power and influence the mighty exert to manipulate tax laws, bankruptcy laws, and every other aspect of our aspect of our supposed “free market” to benefit themselves.

The threat to our country is not from creeping socialism, or big government. Indeed, the government (and the deficit) is bigger than ever under Trump. It’s just not serving us.

The threat is from extreme corporatism and oligarchy that dominate our laws, markets, and even your democratic voice.

What we are living in is form extreme corporatism that tells you your needs and concerns do not matter, because you are weak. Th supposed “supermen” are not the Rand-inspired geniuses.

They are the coddled children of oligarchy who hide behind gates, and bullet proof glass, in servile curls to sneer with disdain at those who strain muscle and mind to do the actual work.

REMEMBER, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s not that the one percent are our benefactors who uphold our civilization.

We see now clearly that they need the rest of us to go to work, go to school, go to get a haircut and go to the movie, or else it all stops. When Atlas shrugs, it’s us doing the shrugging.

You are not weak. You are strong. You deserve a fair wage for a fair day’s work. You deserve healthcare. We need to keep you strong. And most importantly, our children deserve a chance. Every child deserves to be born in a society where they can become Superman and Superwoman.

Put on a mask. Vote blue. Crank the Rush. Even they grew out of Ayn Rand.