Ayn Rand has some prescient thoughts about Democrats' avoidance of reality

American Thinker ^ | 18 Jul, 2023 | R.W. Trewyn

[MtnClimber]

The consequences of avoiding reality are killing us … literally!

American leaders and policy makers in the 21st century should have paid attention to the profound wisdom put forth by Ayn Rand in the last Millennium:

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

It pinpoints the basis for countless problems in America run by Democrats in recent years, clarifying why they occurred.

Consider the following illustrations:

1. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of funding coronavirus gain-of-function research in a communist country whose long-term goal is to destroy you, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to help validate an argument. Only someone truly brain dead — or totally devoid of ethics and integrity — would argue otherwise today. Even purveyors of the wet market diversion ought to concede. Shouldn’t the U.S. government worry about communists anywhere doing gain-of-function research on pathogens? Obviously! Think what an out-to-conquer-the-world regime could do — intentionally or inadvertently — with bioengineered viruses.

Cause a pandemic? We’ll return to the communist aspect of this stupidity below while plugging in another variant into Rand's same observation that’s especially concerning for America’s future.

2. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of defunding the police, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”

Anyone with even limited brainwave function back when this idea arose could have told you what the outcome was going to be. Crime would explode in every city where this mindless experiment was launched.

Bingo! Moronic has been proven multiple times, coast to coast.

There is also this:

3. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of destroying America’s energy independence, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”

[MtnClimber]

This article should be sent to all politicians.

[marktwain]

The Left deny the reality of the article.

They claim it is just "Right Wing Propaganda".

[Noumenon]

Atlas Shrugged was supposed to be a novel and a cautionary tale, not a documentary.

[Red Badger]

Ping!....................

[Night Hides Not]

Read the chapter Miracle Metal. It speaks of the mindset of our “leaders”. Then you’ll understand tersely worded letters mean nothing to them. My money is going to purchasing more lead.

[Lurker]

So was 1984.

L

[xenia]

I’ll add #4

Removing the southern border and allowing an invasion of foreigners.

It’s not just the Democrats. Why can’t so many conservatives see that? the silence from “our party” is deafening.

[newfreep]

Leftwing policies....

It’s not incompetence.
It’s intentional.

[alloysteel]

Ayn Rand had a peculiar way of looking at things. She fled the Soviet Union in its earlier days, when its mind-numbing conformity and brutal suppression of independent thought were at their heights, and in the heady atmosphere of the West, she argued for the resistance to all forms of suppression and conformity. She could get very wordy, and when we finally determined who John Galt was, we found ourselves on the other side of a very long lecture. “Atlas Shrugged”, and the equilibrium of the whole world, tenuous as it was, just went spinning off its orbit into chaos and despair, the unthinking ones left to drift aimlessly in their own spoil.

Was Ayn Rand “right wing”? She was one of the greatest exponents ever of libertarian thought, though many libertarians never progressed so deeply into that logical application of the principles.

[mjp]

Ayn Rand believed there was rational metaphysics, objective truth, objective knowledge, objective concepts, objective values, objective virtues, objective politics, and objective economics

[lilypad]

Soon: Clockwork Orange

[Lurker]

“Ayn Rand believed there was rational metaphysics, objective truth, objective knowledge, objective concepts, objective values, objective virtues, objective politics, and objective economics.”

That’s because there are.

L

[Night Hides Not]

A = A.

[Taxman]

Ping

[cgbg]

For those who don’t want to slog through Atlas Shrugged there is a great collection of some of her non-fiction (outstanding) essays:

https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Selfishness-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0451163931

One very important life lesson I learned from her is that when someone tells you that you are “selfish” what they are really saying is they want to be your master and they want you to be their slave.

[Publius]

Rand ping.

[Billthedrill]

Thanks for the ping! The core of this essay is Rand’s occasionally grim recognition of objective reality, born out of personally seeing her own society having its pretensions and fantasies torn from it by force and replaced with someone else’s equally fallacious and much more malignant ones. We are witnessing something similar at the moment: men can be women, weather can be commanded, anything we want at the price of ceding complete control to the State. You can avoid the realization that it leads to disaster, but you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding it.

[gitmo]

Shouldn’t the U.S. government worry about communists anywhere doing gain-of-function research on pathogens? Obviously!

Shouldn’t we be concerned about the US conducting gain-of-function research on disease organisms?

[Still Thinking]

1. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of funding coronavirus gain-of-function research in a communist country whose long-term goal is to destroy you, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”

Meh, I'm not at all convinced that funding bioweapon research in a communist country was an unintended consequence for the statist creeps that did it. I think that was actually the plan, or at least a welcome advantage of the plan.