Why Ayn Rand Still Resonates
By, Onkar Ghate
November 26, 2009
"The noblest act you have ever performed,"
declares the hero of "Atlas Shrugged,"
"is the act of your mind in the process of grasping
that two and two make four."
The convictions that ideas matter represents a profound dedication to self. It requires that you not passively absorb your society's moral views, however well-entrenched, but instead
question and study the entire field of good and evil.
"To take ideas seriously," Rand writes, "means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true," that you recognize "that truth and knowledge are crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life."
Any Rand stands alone. She argues that perfection is possible to man the rational animal, if you are ready to work for it.
Hold your own life as your highest value, follow reason, submit to no authority, pursue unwaveringly the true and the good, create a life of productive achievement and personal, selfish joy - enact these demanding values and virtues, Rand teaches, and an ideal world, here on earth, is "real, it's possible -- it's yours."
Thankfully, Rand had the courage to take on that world and challenge its rampant skepticism, eager cynicism and unyielding demand for compromise, to portray and explain -- at the most fundamental level -- the heroic in man.
What I tell my students is that they must never let that world extinguish their dedication to, in "Atlas Shrugged's" words, "the best within us."
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