I Wish Ayn Rand Had Been a Parent

I Wish Ayn Rand Had Been a Parent

by

Eric Paul Nolte

We just saw the Oscar award-winning film, “Still Alice.”

The story involves the tragically unusually early mental decline of a brilliant professor of linguistics at Columbia, due to Alzheimer’s disease.

A truly horrible premise!  I can’t think of a much worse fate, unless it is losing a child at a tender age.

Now Ayn Rand was insistent that man was a being of entirely self-made soul.  I think she must have held this belief because she herself lacked a certain worldliness, a certain experience of life that is available to a large population of others who had the opportunity to be parents.  

I wish Ayn Rand had had children… imagine her getting up at 03:00 every night for months or years in the service of her babies!  Ah, yes, we are entirely beings of self-made soul!  Right.

Imagine if she had had a husband or parent with… Zeus forgive the thought… Alzheimers… or… if she herself had come down with dementia, and had enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the horror of this condition while still in command of her intellect.  Is dementia the result of a being who is truly of self-made soul?

What revision to her view of man as a being of self-made soul might she have made  if she had had the opportunity to reflect on the situation of some poor sub-Saharan African girl, born into a Muslim family, born with AIDS, born into a family where, if she survives these miserable circumstances long enough to reach puberty, she will enjoy the opportunity to experience an adolescent rite of passage in which her loving elders will slice off her clitoris in some horrible, unhygienic ceremony in which she stands a good chance of contracting an infection that will kill her?  To what degree does this poor, blighted soul, who, if typical of much of her demographic, does not have an IQ much above 70, stand of creating a life of meaning, purpose, and joy?  

If you say this poor girl is a being of self-made soul, I pronounce you an idiot, an ideologue, in mindless orbit to the, yes, otherwise brilliance of Ayn Rand.

Now, I credit Ayn Rand with offering me a set of values that essentially saved my life from a fate at least as bad as death.  But let us acknowledge that she did not have all the answers.  So far, nobody comes even close to Rand’s best answers, but let us affirm that we are still keeping our minds open and searching for ever better answers as we move forward in this on-going search for wisdom and happiness.

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