~~My Story~~
How I got interested in Rand is in fact an amusing story to some degree. I will give you the short of it. I was born on the east side of Buffalo, NY. Both of my parents are apolitical but for some odd reason around the time I turned ten I caught an interest in politics. Newspapers, the news, audio books from the library by Rush Limbaugh, and conversations with older people about politics soon became something that took up a good amount of my young mind. These things do not make you popular as a child in school but for some reason it made me feel important to understand what was going on in the world outside of my neighborhood.
Life progressed as normal until the turn of years brought me to ninth grade and then of course for all adolescents life takes on new obstacles. But the largest change in my life beyond physiology (in that year I grew six inches) was a new English teacher in our school. A liberal by definition; he had shown up to free the minds of oppressed high school children of which I was one apparently. This is where things become ironic in many ways. I had this teacher for one class or another for all four years in high school. He taught alternative literature, diversity issues, and finally media literacy. Throughout all these course he made it plainly clear to us that we should at all times question the status quo. Question authority where it stands and work towards what we believe in. Be prepared to discard that which is irrelevant and seek the facts.
Leaving high school my mind overflowed with liberal ideologies, I would be an English teacher too I thought to myself, perhaps a union leader? In time I landed amongst the socialist crowds in college in the western end of Massachusetts. (This is where they put all the hippy artists after the sixties). While amongst these collectivists I protested here and there, all against everything that collectivists protest against. I debated regularly, organized people, and believed that some day I too would have a chance to save the world, I knew I was right...or did I? Those words that my liberal teacher from high school said still rung hard in my ears and being as I was surrounded by and lived with the collectivists, Maoists, socialists, liberals I applied those words to the things I had been saying and believing. As the christians would say of god judging sinners, I found myself wanting.
At this time there was a realization that English particularly writing was something that I could undertake in my free time. I realized also that in the area of English and perhaps in other areas there are two types of people. Those who write books and those who write books about people that write books. There are authors and then there are biographers. This idea brooded within me until I realized that what I really wanted in this life was to first reach what I believed in and second work diligently to bring this world into existence. So that year I changed my major to Business Finance. It occurred to me that revolutions cost money, and that I never wanted to be poor again, I had done that at the start of my life on the east side of Buffalo.
Over the next year I quickly followed every hole I saw in the collectivists ideology, looking always for other contradictions. Always in search of the truth as I was sure I would come upon eventually. I explored everything Marx to Zoroaster to Daniel Quinn. Looking for the answers. All the while drawing ever further from my socialist friends, each day our arguments got even more heated, each day I won more arguments by pointing out obvious contradictions in their statements. Until one day a neo-socialist joined to our group of informal debates. In our first argument he became livid in a fury of anger at my heretical statement that not all companies were bad. “You should read Atlas Shrugged you Capitalist pig!” he screamed. I was of course insulted at the time, crazy as it seems now, I still didn’t believe fully my own arguments. To me, I was playing devils advocate.
It wasn’t until last June that I decided to myself that I was a capitalist and went to find out what that really meant. I had the fine opportunity to meet a man, who was a vice-president of International Molding Steel Inc. He was also born in Buffalo and had worked in the steel mills when he was my age. Worked his way out of Buffalo out and straight up to where he currently resides. I was very impressed by him; he spoke with such hope for his future and with such passion against the ideologies of the left. As I found out later: he was pleased with my ability to keep up with him intellectually so after spending a weekend at his families cottage he told me I should read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Again I logged the title of the book in my book and went on with life.
It wasn’t until I was in another heated debate that I finally got the third recommendation to read the book, the one that set me over the edge. One of my friends was talking about how he hated Atlas Shrugged. He commented on how it made him sick so he stopped reading it half way through. How he hated that it made the rich people out to be heroes, and how they were actually just lucky people and that all people who make it in the world do so because of luck. This sent me off the edge, I nearly screamed at him. I worked hard to get where I was in college and I would hear nothing of it. He told me that if I didn’t believe him, that I should read Atlas Shrugged and see for myself if I thought otherwise.
So I did, I set out to investigate this pro-capitalist book and come back with evidence enough to verbally plow my friend back into the ground. I can be rather like a zealot when I put my mind to finding something out. Starting with Atlas Shrugged, I read every single book by Rand I could place my hand on. The only fiction I read was Atlas but every small book on her philosophy I picked up and read cover to cover. Then I returned to my friend to duel it out. I won.
So it is, Joe, that the majority of the people who recommended I read the works of Ayn Rand did so in an attempt to belittle me. Perhaps they found a gold mine as you say but I think in this case, their attempt to close the gold mine down, resulted in the discovery of more gold.
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