| | Motivated by Steve Wolfer and Jules Troy, I wrote a summary of my work history and put it on Necessary Facts. This is here under Objectivism because the opening and closing of that are nods to Atlas Shrugged. The post was about me qua me, so did not go into "How Ayn Rand Changed My Life" but I could have.
I was in Young Americans for Freedom and one of my YAF comrades from the school newspaper handed me Anthem as we passed into and out of algebra classes. I read The Fountainhead next. I read The Fountainhead again before taking on Atlas. Somewhere between them, I found the non-fiction at a bookstore. I think that VOS in paperback was on the front display rack inside the largest bookstore on Cleveland Public Square. I found a card for The Objectivist Newsletter in one of the books.
Philosophy is about big issues - the universe, universal morality, Art with a Capital A - but really, the deepest message from Ayn Rand (one that is misunderstood by her detractors, and misapplied by many followers) is that each person has a philosophy of some kind and it shows up in how they live their life generally; and specifically in how they work and earn a living.
Howard Roark tells Peter Keating that to be successful, you must be the kind of person who gets things done, but do get things done, you must love the doing. At some point, I think it was Kent Lansing or more likeky Roger Enright who laughed, "So, you do need people." Roark is taken aback, "Of course, I do. I am not building mausoleums." He has clients in order to build. He does not build in order to have clients. An economist would point out that both sides of the ledger must balance, but the point was taken. In the Valley, readers of Atlas Shrugged met a young sculptor who made machine tools. All work is an act of philosophy.
I can be unmotivated. And I move on pretty quickly when that happens. I might be intellectually open to the idea of tax evasion, but anyone who cheats on their taxes - and I do not mean merely using the law to your advantage - anyone who cheats on their taxes would cheat me out of my wages. Although I have worked off the books for libertarians, and bought and sold for silver, I never met a tax cheater who was a libertarian. Mostly, they are just crooks. In fact, I once had an employer say, "I don't care who I cheat, there's $15,000 at stake." I wondered what her upper and lower bounds were...
I was on another project when the company was sold and we were told to just wait. My manager suggested that I "surf the web." I had to ask him what that meant. By the end of the week, I found another project with a different firm and client.
In the book version and the movie version of The Fountainhead, Roark's meeting with the Manhattan Bank board is portrayed differently. In the film, rolling up the blueprints, Roark says, "I'd rather work as a day laborer" and the next scene opens with him drilling in the quarry. Of course, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes easily become blue collar workers because they started out that way. Last week one of my GOP comrades called being the cook at the restaurant we were at, "a deadend pink collar job." I thought of Hugh Akston.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/28, 10:34am)
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