If you ever wanted to know why I will always regard anti-rights advocates like MikeB302000, Laci the Dog Bitch, Josh Sugarmann, Denis Hennigan, and others of their ilk with the highest disdain, Ayn Rand
says it far better than I could:
Learn to distinguish the difference betwen errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing ot correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that whcih you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers thaose specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel it’ – or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It’s only logic,’ which means: ‘It’s only reality.’ The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.
These people have been shown the facts, figures, statistics, logic, and reality time and time and time again, and still consciously choose to remain willfully ignorant, still desire to control, govern, and limit free men based on their feelings and their feelings alone, and still continue to write it all off as “only logic”, if they can bring themselves to admit it at all. They are, indeed, aiding and abetting criminals by actively, intentionally, and maliciously seeking to leave law-abiding citizens disarmed and defenseless – unwilling victims fabricated by another person’s baseless desires. “Potential killers” indeed – some have even expressed the desire to be killers, while others have “rejoiced” at the senseless murder of an average American mother.
Such people are, by their very nature, intrinsically evil, and should be handled accordingly.
However, today’s Randian quoting does not stop there…:
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of criminals vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.
Remind you of any governments you know?
For those who have read the book in question, you will know that those two above quotes come out of John Galt’s three-hour, 56-page radio address / monologue / speech. Speaking as someone who actually managed to read that thing, in its entirety, and is damned close to finishing its entire host book, let me say this: if you are interested in reading Atlas Shrugged, get the book from a library, flip to page 923 (assuming the Penguin 50th Anniversary Edition printing), read from the middle of it to the end of page 979, and return the book whence it came.
In those 56 pages, Ayn laid out the moral, reason, rationale, and cause celebre of the book in sufficiently plain language and logic that anyone with at least a high school freshman’s reading comprehension ability (accounting for the decline of the American education system, natch) could grasp it, and do so without the superfluous, holier-than-thou, strawman-burning, mysoginy-wrapped-in-kink, repeatedly-bash-your-head-in-with-a-sledgehammer, have-you-gotten-the-message-yet pontification delivered by cardboard characters that fills the other 1002 pages. This is not to say that the speech is a particularly easy or quick read, but at least it is shorter than the book as a whole.
But, hey, if you go in for that kind of thing, knock yourself out – I was just trying to save you some time. If only I had not promised myself I would read this gorramed book cover-to-cover…
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