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I understand it too, and I'm not going to pretend the flyswatter work isn't tiring. But consider how fortunate you are.
You were born in the one century where a man can read Aristotle, Rand, and Peikoff on a device in his pocket, debate a million strangers from his kitchen table, and check any claim in seconds. Every thinker before you had to argue by candlelight to a few hundred people and hope a copy survived.
You were born in the United States, the only country founded on the idea that your life is yours. Everywhere else and every time before, a man with your convictions kept them to himself or died for them.
And you had her. Most men go their whole lives without ever hearing the principles explained in a way that makes the world make sense. You got them laid out in full, by the woman who discovered them, while she was still alive to write the footnotes. That is a stroke of luck almost nobody in history has had.
The odds are long. They were long for her. She wrote Atlas in a culture that had already decided she was wrong, and the book is still outselling its critics seventy years later. There are more of us than it looks like from inside the swarm, and some of us aren't putting the swatter down yet.
You were born in the one century where a man can read Aristotle, Rand, and Peikoff on a device in his pocket, debate a million strangers from his kitchen table, and check any claim in seconds. Every thinker before you had to argue by candlelight to a few hundred people and hope a copy survived.
You were born in the United States, the only country founded on the idea that your life is yours. Everywhere else and every time before, a man with your convictions kept them to himself or died for them.
And you had her. Most men go their whole lives without ever hearing the principles explained in a way that makes the world make sense. You got them laid out in full, by the woman who discovered them, while she was still alive to write the footnotes. That is a stroke of luck almost nobody in history has had.
The odds are long. They were long for her. She wrote Atlas in a culture that had already decided she was wrong, and the book is still outselling its critics seventy years later. There are more of us than it looks like from inside the swarm, and some of us aren't putting the swatter down yet.
Very well said.View quoted post on X
In the last issue of The Ayn Rand Letter, Rand said she was stopping publication as she was finding herself repeating things she had said concerning current events. She likened he work to being a flyswatter, constantly killing one annoying pest while another identical one immediately flew by.
I'm old enough and tired enough to completely understand what she meant.
