The importance of re-reading Ayn Rand: freedoms that have long been taken for granted are never compromised like today
The conquest of freedom is never comfortable. It is a constant struggle against the wave of conformity and Ayn Rand knew this very well.
In her extraordinary “The Fountainhead” , the American author describes the young architect Howard Roark who fights against everything and everyone, against the world of politically correct and against collectivism. It is the symbol of selfishness understood not as a vice, but as a primary virtue of the human being.
He is a totally lonely hero, abandoned to himself, who decides to give up fame in order not to subordinate his ideals. Those ideals that focus on freedom, independence and the refusal of the simple quiet life.
Never before has Ayn Rand been as relevant today. In a world ruled by socialists and proponents of the "state is good" formula, "The Fountainhead" teaches us how relationships between individuals must be free, direct and non-coercive. Only what is decided autonomously by the individual can be considered right and actually wanted.
For a year now we have been immersed in a society of the spectacle which, as Debord recalled, certainly not a liberal, is nothing other than the overturning of reality to make understanding impossible. A real incapacitating narrative that managed to convince us of the wisdom of restrictive measures of our fundamental freedoms. It has now become a daily routine not to go out with friends, not to go to school, to go home before 10pm. And all this was imposed by the government with simple administrative acts.
The lack of a liberal and libertarian area turned out to be crucial for the undisputed development of all those socialist recipes that Ayn Rand herself tried to obstruct both on a political and moral level: skepticism about the role of the enterprise, the welfare state , the prejudice against wealth and its redistribution through the "sword of Damocles" of taxes.
There is no doubt that the pantheon of liberalism is crowded with great thinkers, but when it comes to politics, at least in Italy, liberals have always been marginal. For this reason it is necessary to read and reread Ayn Rand: precisely because freedom triumphs over everything, precisely to counter the politically correct wave, to move the political camera on the central role of freedoms, long considered to be taken for granted but never as compromised as today. .
The post The importance of re-reading Ayn Rand: freedoms that have long been taken for granted have never been compromised like today appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/limportanza-di-rileggere-ayn-rand-liberta-da-tempo-date-per-scontate-mai-come-oggi-sono-compromesse/ on Sat, 06 Feb 2021 04:54:00 +0000.