WorldCity Essays
Discussing World Economy and Finance

 
Far West? How Ayn Rand Instead
Scripted You for No Man's Land

by Wendell Solomons

 
It is claimed that such a traveling robe makes you unassailable and criticism-proof.

Nihilism ("nothingness") is a robe intended to create an ultimate cynicism towards anyone else's conduct and morality.

Nihilism can be distinguished from seeming analogue, anarchism. The latter targets a procedure of government. Anarchism is exemplified by Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up British Parliament (anarchists' own communes have not succeeded for want of social substance.)

As paradox would have it, nihilism was imported into 20th Century U.S.A. from Russia. The attitude had arisen in the special firmament of Tsarist Empire (a) to temper and (b) to foil rationalism. Among those famed for adopting nihilism or reflecting it in their publications were Chernyshevsky, Turgeniev, Pisarev and Schapov.

Firstly, old Russia, extending from Europe into Asia and little diluted by representative, elected legislative councils, saw the largest subjugation to monarchy in the world. Though large in number too, British colonial subjects fell under the day-to-day virtual supervision of Cabinet and Parliament.

Secondly, Tsar Alexander II -- the U.S. Civil War ally who sent in two flotillas at the request of slave emancipator Abraham Lincoln -- abolished serfdom by decree in 1861. The sudden shift of moral environment caused by Alexander's decree provided supplementary credence for nihilist ideas floating at that time in democratic, liberal and populist and circles in St. Petersburg.

In 1906 in that vast capital city was born Alice Rosenbaum (she kept her initials, assuming the names Ayn and Rand.) About nihilism itself anyone would hear then in high school. In university where she took history, Rand could drink her fill of the ultimate ideology. Her father Franz ran a druggists' shop in the city where mystic Rasputin had reached elevated orbit.

Now, a superficial scan of Rand's writings shows an expression of self-interest that seems to coincide with the private interest in Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees" and Adam Smith's "Unseen Hand."

Such a coincidence was to bring script-writing Rand to City of London-geared financial economists who - disciplinary philosophy weak - then searched for stage-props for perception control of onlookers while they buried the body of work of the American national school of Henry Carey's. That school had once helped Lincoln and his immediate successors to advance young U.S. industry to the level of Britain in fifty years.

Rand had left Russia by steamship via Odessa in the south. Though Russian-speaking on arrival, she emerged in 1926 Hollywood as a script writer of Americanism. As by-product of her encounter, many of Rand's books are set as motion-picture dialogue.

Now this dialogue is not enlivened by drama such as Wells-Fargo wagon hold-up with sheriff plus volunteer posse charging off in hot pursuit. As such, patriots such as Mark Twain would go pink with pride to discover that market revenue from the astute Mr. & Mrs. John Smith of the mid-1930s United States supported books reflecting esoteric Russian nihilist philosophy. For at hand was not the land of philosophers, not the land of Hegel and Kant.

Another surprise awaits us. At that very time in Germany, philosophers like the ones above were being shelved. Winston Churchill had grumbled a preference for a more specific notion for Herr & Frau Johannes Schmidt -- ethnic scapegoating to billiard Germany against Russia.

Churchill incepted this in London in his article in the popular 'Illustrated Sunday Herald' on February 8, 1920:

One and a half decades later, Germany was still employed in the technicalities of scapegoating that stemmed from the Churchill-group affected, social criterion and stigma, "international and for the most part atheistical Jews." That happened so as to exclude in Berlin the likes of money-man Max Warburg who was watching over the Reichsbank and financial Germany (his own brother Paul watched over the U.S. Federal Reserve and financial U.S.A.)

So Bulow-Schwante sent out Wilhelmstraße circular No: 83 of February 28, 1934 to diplomatic missions. His language goes back and forth to define that the Reich was closer in particular to Zionists whom Churchill eliminated from scapegoating:

Out in Mr. & Mrs. John Smith's U.S.A., neighbours were not distancing each other. They had got together. To consolidate, they had long drawn on European constitutionality. They had been building that way since 1620, the year of the Compact, the Plymouth Brethren's agreement signed when ship "Mayflower" stood at anchor.

The tradition for consolidating communities through constitutionality had served Rand in several ways. She records in her book 'For the New Intellectual' that "man survives by adjusting his background to himself."

However, when Rand's total blend of ideas fell out of the blue to become required text in U.S. schools, Rand began to lead communities backward from constitutionality.

More, she led backward from the first and second Judeo-Christian Commandments of 1900 BC to a pre-Mosaic mix. Rand led to a historic no-man's-land.

Rand's real theme was revealed in a book of 1937 she entitled "Anthem" (if her mind's eye was translating from Russian "Gimn", then she provided you not just with her own anthem but the substance for an anthem for countries of the world):

"And now I see the face of god, and I raise this
god over the earth, this god whom men have
sought since men came into being, this
god who will grant them joy and peace
and pride. This god, this
one word:
I."

More than the "Open Society" theory, which Karl Popper transplanted from Germany to the London School of Economics (later supported by financier George Soros' many "Open Society" institutes,) Rand plunges a knife into the bare, open human chest of everyday norms of behaviour, social values and accountability. This is a knife that cuts the hand that feeds it.

As events unfolded, by the late 1960s teen use of street drugs cropped up (once this was achieved, George Soros could come out in the open in Wall Street with his cheque book for drug legalisation.) Also, the "Me Only" generation arrived. When Ayn Rand's associate Milton Friedman was placed on the tribune of advisor on economics to the U.S. Presidency, corporate nihilism became familiar.

Now as 'globalism' could come the 'international' that Winston Churchill had in 1920 professed to dislike.

Rand's long-term friend Milton Friedman had access to U.S. control of voting shares in the IMF and the World Bank. In both institutions, nihilism became required seasoning for work. Though salaries and comfortable pensions come from community, nihilism was now amplified so that an executive became a servile office lackey of his superior, come what may. "The country's currency has fallen through our advice? Let them pay IMF dues by privatising water. Sell to Abraham, Isaac or Joseph - who cares ... "

The Constitution and accountability become suspended in Rand's logic. She shadow boxes 'We':

To Rand, the general interest becomes as 'gray' limestone. Regarding facts in black and white, for Rand only particular interests exist (Abraham's, Isaac's, and Joseph's.)

Let's now take up the record in black and white on "We the people".

Using your own PC you can count in the book of Deuteronomy ("the second reading of the Law") upwards of 50 references to "We." The term persists throughout the Pentateuch (the five books treated as the cornerstone of three religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam.) So you quite wonder then what forces had supported Rand's atrocious wrangling with logic and semantics to printing presses in the U.S. to have you copy her scapegoating of community.

There is no hand, only fingers! Margaret Thatcher had installed one of Karl Popper's social philosopher disciples at No: 10 Downing Street. As these new notions filtered into her mind, Britain's own PM exalted:

What would British society have built without the recognition conferred by its learned societies such as RIBA, MRCP, FRCS and FRS, without recognition conferred on architects, physicians, surgeons and scientists respectively? How would a Bar association certify lawyers?

Contempt for society and externalising blame to demonise one's neighbours is achieved by obtaining the worship of oneself as superman. The Nazi Overman (Übermenschen) was erected to scapegoat people of a particular faith. An ultimate imperviousness to criticism can be summoned up for ordinary mortals only through bigotry, conceit and self-idolatry.

Ayn Rand has been busy drafting the world for history's no-man's-land.

Ending quote from Edgar Alan Poe: "I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence."

___________________________

_1/ Square brackets incorporating 'but' were added by this researcher to help English audiences derive the contrast that is implied in the Russian.

_2/ We observe that Rand's cake-mix is also anti-Zionist. Rand cannot both preside over her cake and eat it. Would a label such as "international and for the most part atheistical Jews" fit her? Definer Sir Winston himself finally presided over the loss of the whole British Empire after his German-Russian billiard was spent in the snow of February 1943 in Stalingrad

His father Sir Randolph's syphilitic death at age 46 disclosed ample debt to Rothschild group bankers and Sir Winston's decision for strategic anti-Semitism was partly an act of elite desperation towards the 1917 - 1918 wave of discontent and uprisings in Europe that threatened to flow over into the magnate tea holdings which *made* the British Empire and the Pound sterling.

Today in the same way, the lame declensions, arbitrariness and shame bequeathed to the highly visible U.S. presidency represent a desperation of the magnate elite. They were seriously dented by the U.S. War of Independence which several British generals fought to letter and not in spirit because their sympathies were with community (Charles Corwallis openly resigned over suppression of Ireland's Catholics later.) So Thomas Jefferson assured John Adams, that "the Flames kindled on the fourth of July" had spread over too much of the globe ever to be extinguished by the forces of despotism and reaction."

© 2001 by Wendell Solomons
All rights reserved.

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