In the 1960s, I entered university believing that I would be a nuclear scientist, philosopher or poet. I began to read books that prepared me for the role that I would choose myself, and thereby leave my fingerprints on world history. Luckily, and to satisfy my parents, I read, or tried to read, a philosophical novel called "Atlas Shrugged," by the philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand, an American of Russian origin. I got lost in the pages and could not figure out the plot. I got to the lines by a protagonist, and readers might not believe it if I said it was a sentence that became a 60-page speech out of a 1,200-page novel. I will not go into details about that damned novel, and I refuse to go back to it, even through other sources. I want to be accurate, as well, so I will say that it was an experience that brought me back to earth. I was convinced that my leading role in life required me to study political science and if it were not for journalism I would have been a school teacher, at 200 pounds a month. "Atlas Shrugged" was published in 1957 and it has returned in force to the media in recent days, after Mitt Romney selected Representative Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential candidate. Romney is on the right in the Republican Party and to compete against Barack Obama and his vice president a congressman who is on the right of the American right. This is not even the story, however. I referred to Romney's choice of Paul Ryan, and I found him strange. I then discovered that Ryan read "Atlas Shrugged" and thought it was the world's most important invention since the tire. As soon as Ryan was chosen, some people recalled (and wrote) that the Republican vice-presidential candidate said to the Atlas Foundation in 2005: "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." In referring to her novel, he said "there is no place better to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism." The latter word actually means being selfish. The author – who was Jewish, and her real name was Alisa Rosenbaum – promoted the mind, or maturity or perceptivity, and a new moral philosophy which was actually the philosophy of egoism, or concern with self. She considered the poor to be parasites and helping the needy was a "complete evil." Ryan forced those working with him to read the novel and said he gave it as a Christmas gift, even though the writer was an atheist and Christianity is based on helping others, advising its followers to undertake humanitarian acts that are not practical at all. Ryan realized his mistake and tried to worm his way out of his recorded statements of support and the image of Rand and her philosophy of egoism. He said he rejected her philosophy and her atheism (as if just having discovered it) and said he preferred Saint Thomas Aquinas, the study of whose works is considered fundamentally-important preparation for entering the priesthood. Naturally, a Catholic man of religious is better to Ryan than a female atheist, especially because the vice-presidential candidate claims that he is a committed Catholic who wants to help others, and not the follower of a philosophy based on selfishness, and that greed is good and useful. The candidate is convincing no one that he has changed his mind. I read a fierce attack on him by American clergymen and journalists, and even Jean Meyer in the New Yorker said Romney had chosen Ayn Rand as his running-mate. The choice was deemed "another Republican insult and injury to classic American ideas of fairness, squareness, and civic-mindedness." This is my opinion as well. The Republican voters now have to believe that the Republican administration, which the neoconservatives have led on behalf of George W Bush and generated an ongoing international crisis, is threatening to return with Romney and Ryan, to undertake other losing wars and destroy what is left of the economy of the United States and the world. [email protected]
