Must I... [gulp]... re-read Atlas Shrugged? Can't I just hit my head with a hammer a few times?

 Every pompous, self-involved high school student with a science fiction fascination reads Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Maybe not every high school student.  Maybe just boys.  It's a little like Rush.  In fact, given the band's objectivist leanings, it's a lot like Rush.  Self-indulgent, overwhelmingly male, and mostly if you get into it in adolescence, you get out of it by early adulthood because wow is it overwrought.  Actually, I still like Rush, and you can stick your judgment up your 4/4 because I do not care what anyone thinks of my taste, so take that 7 and shove it up your 8.

Ayn Rand was not a skilled writer, in the sense of artistic prose, and as a philosopher, I found her to be a long-winded writer.  Philosophically, I subscribe to no particular school of thought, finding value in many thinkers, from Socrates to the Stoics to Kant, and objectivists detest Kant, Stoicism (the actual philosophy, not the colloquial term) and all such philosophies for the sin of "altruism."  The caricature of objectivism is a rationalization of sociopathy, then, which is a hair's width from reality, that hair being non-zero distance, true, but that distance being uncomfortably narrow.

But if you are a self-involved 16-year-old reading science fiction, it is a step along the way, particularly for those fond of Emerson, which is roughly the age at which I first read Emerson (thank you, Ms. Avery!).  With science fiction and Emerson, there are paths branching off in different directions, but Atlas Shrugged is a fork in the road.  Objectivism always seemed too devoid of positive action for principled goals.  No, thank you.  Yet I have it in me to do something.  I think I might go back and read Atlas Shrugged for the first time in decades.

Why would I do this to myself?  Aristotle wrote about the question of whether or not one can do an injustice to one's self (I promise, I'll stop it with Aristotle soon, but he's stuck in my head, like a bad pop song), and you are welcome to consider his musings on the topic in Nicomachean Ethics.  The problem, as Aristotle saw it, was of equitability, and the division of whatever needed dividing.  Can there be an inequitable division between you and yourself?  Go, have fun with Nicomachean sophistry.

I believe that you can do injustice to yourself, convinced as I am not by Aristotle, but by the Roman Stoics, particularly Musonius Rufus and Epictetus.  Do I do an injustice to myself by telling myself to read that book again?  It is quite long, and unlike other tomes, it is not the most artistically magnificent, as Aristotle would demand.  Rand was not Dostoevsky, who was a more interesting literary figure, and in my opinion, moralist.  While I admire the concept of seeking rationality rather than Dostoevsky's very Christian ethics, the principles Dostoevsky found were more useful as moral guidance, in my opinion.

Even though Dostoevsky was an anti-Semitic product of his time and place, which is where I'm going here.

Why am I doing this?  The short answer is that the world is short on those capable of seeing the difference between good and evil.  There are wars in the world, and two in particular have the public eye.  Why does the world ignore Darfur?  Yemen?  I have addressed the question.  Most people need an easily vilified antagonist for some Manichean interpretation, and when it is Muslim-on-Muslim violence, the right doesn't care, indifferent at best, and disgustingly happy to see them wipe each other out at worst, and the left can't bring itself to call a Muslim a villain because leftists view everything through the lens of identity characteristics and the oppressor-oppressed dyad.  So no one cares, including the Hamas apologists and other useful idiots in the West.  Only a few iconoclasts, like those of us who take moral philosophy seriously, and pay an institutional price for calling genocide on the true genocides, and calling lie when the word is used as blood libel by jihadists and their useful idiots.

There are two wars with public attention.  The Russia-Ukraine War, and the Israeli-Palestinian War.  Each war has a clear good guy, and a clear bad guy.  The Russians are the bad guys, unambiguously.  The Palestinians are the bad guys, unambiguously.  Yes, I said it, and I'll say it again.

I do not even bother with the "Hamas, not the Palestinians" dodge, because a) the Palestinian people overwhelmingly supported October 7, b) even those who opposed it did not do so for moral reasons, but because they understood the practical consequences, and c) Hamas is their elected government.  The Palestinians are as much the bad guys as the Germans in WWII, and arguably more so because there is more uniform support for a "final solution" among Palestinians than among Germans, from whom the Holocaust was hidden, and there were active resistance movements within Germany.

I do not see any of this as difficult or complicated.  The politics of academia mean that I am supposed to at least gesture towards the supposed plight of the Palestinians, but that is because they are in the weaker position, and academia is committed to an anti-moral framework of power analysis, where you can literally rape women to death, as long as you are structurally weaker.

Let's ask my man, Manny Kant about that, 'kay?  Hell, let's ask the leftist hero, Michel Foucault about throwing gay people off the roofs of buildings.  They've building their pseudo-moral framework on him.

Anyway, because of the bizarre structure of our politics, most people are blinkered on precisely one of these two wars.  The right/Republicans have decided that Vladimir Putin is awesome, and Russia is the good guy, but for the most part, they recognize that Israel is the good guy.

The left/Democrats mostly get that Putin and Russia are the bad guys, but they think that a group of Islamofascist terrorists whose charter says that their goal is to kill the Jews-- they're the good guys, and a small-d democratic country that respects individual rights, has gay pride parades, plenty of Arab Muslim citizens, a bunch of them in the Knesset, and even their Supreme Court, they're the bad guys under some bizarro redefinition of "apartheid" because words have no meaning anymore.

To add another layer, while each side gets one war right, it isn't even for the right reason.  Why does the right get Israel right?  There are a few reasons, but let us consider several, briefly.  First, they hate Islam.  We can admit that, right?  Part of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was a ban on Muslims entering the country, and since that would never pass constitutional muster, he gave his advisors the task of coming up with something that would, and they came up with something that I call redlining for Muslims.  That's one example, but if we are blunt, as I often must be, a lot of people on the right just do not like Muslims.  Anti-Semitism on the right exists, but it is overstated, and animosity towards Muslims is stronger.  So, they side with Israel because of who the villains are.  (See earlier comments.)

There are a few doomsday-ers, their commonality overstated, who tell prophecies of Judgment Day, believing that the Jews need to be in Israel, and that's why a small number side with Israel.  There are a few others, but generally speaking, these are not what I consider good reasons to side with Israel.

Do the Democrats who side with Ukraine have good reasons?  Mostly, they hate Putin because Putin and Trump are sympatico, and Putin tried to interfere with the 2016 election to stick Trump in power.  Cut through the shit, and that's why.  Remember when Mitt Romney said that Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, and Democrats poo-pooed the claim?

What happened?

Well, Mitt was right, Democrats were spineless, little wusses, and Putin decided that he and Trump would get on like gangbusters.  Poor choice of words, apologies.

I give Republicans a lot of shit for flip-flopping on Russia because Trump told them that Russia was awesome, but we don't give Democrats enough shit for their flip-flip, which has some similar timing.

Mitt was right.

Russia is our forever-enemy.  Russia will never be the good guys.

Look, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, and turned them into civilized nations, but since we are never going to blow the shit out of Russia and then rebuild them, Russia will never be civilized.  It will always be evil.  It was evil before 1917, the USSR was among the most evil regimes in human history, and it just turned into another form of evil.  Russia will always be evil.  Why?  This is a puzzle of sorts, but consider the evil of the czars, the Soviet Union, Putin's autocracy and oligarchy, there is something about the place and the culture.  We can get into Samuel Huntington, but Russia is a place of eternal wrongness.

(Imagine if the Russian people weren't considered "white," and the left didn't currently oppose Russia.  Imagine how you'd react to what I just wrote.)

Russia is our forever-enemy.  Mitt was right, and the Democrats flip-flopped too.  For the sake of siding against Trump.

Or are the Dems now the party of Team America: World Police?

What's the real reason to side with Ukraine?  The same reason that the right sided against the USSR, all through the Cold War, fighting like hell against mealy-mouthed, leftist apologists for the Soviet Union to keep the pressure on.

Russia is an expansionist, illiberal country seeking true empire.  Economic and social prosperity developed on the our side of the Iron Curtain because Western liberal democracy works, and the peace that came about in the post Cold War era, the very peace being challenged by Putin's expansionism, created the greatest economic prosperity in the world.

And suddenly the leftists who were always making excuses for and overtures towards the Soviet Union are now the ones standing against Putin?  The very election before Trump, this same group of people was weak on Russia.

We have a bizarre political system, in which most players are right on precisely one war, and when they are right, they aren't even right with the right motivation.

Who can tell good from evil consistently?

Not many.  There are a few remaining of what was once called the IDW (intellectual dark web) who can see that both Ukraine and Israel are the good guys.

But you know who else?  [Gulp.]  The objectivists.

Rand, of course, was a Soviet refugee, and she was an actual refugee.  The word, refugee, has a strange redefinition these days.  My family fled Russia a few generations back, but I am not called a "refugee" because I, personally, did not flee Russia.  (According to the Seder, I was personally freed from slavery in Egypt, but that's another matter.  Where's my reparations check?)  For every single group except one, you are only a refugee if you, personally, flee a country for violence/persecution.

From now until the extinction of humanity, whether that's when the sun goes nova, or when humanity escapes into another universe through wormholes or whenever, everyone of Palestinian descent will forever be a "refugee."  But only those of Palestinian descent.  You could be living a wealthy, prosperous life in the United States, generations removed from your family having been moved in 1948, or your family could have been in Gaza, or the West Bank anyway, and hence not moved, but you are a refugee.  Does that work for anyone else whose family got, let's say, "moved," in the 1940's?  No, just Palestinians.  Cute, right?  None of the descendants of Jews kicked out of wherever they were are refugees.  None of the descendants of anyone else kicked out of wherever they were are refugees.

But from now until literally the end of time, all descendants of Palestinians are "refugees."  Even the rich, prosperous ones, like the children of Edward Said.  Cute.

Anyway, Rand was an actual Soviet refugee.  Her opinions on Russia were well known.  She would not have approved of Putin, and the objectivists do not approve of Putin, nor his invasion of Ukraine.  They're on Ukraine's side.

They're also on Israel's side.  Why?  Right of self-defense.

It's the same thing.  A self-governing democracy gets attacked, and it has the right of self-defense, end of story, end of debate.  This really isn't complicated, and while one might legitimately say that objectivists have a simplistic view of things, the plus side is that they don't overcomplicate simple matters, like whether or not an attacked country has a right of self defense.

Which means that right now, among the few people capable of getting it right on both wars are the objectivists.  Which I find a little distressing, because mostly, these people tend towards near-sociopathy and simplicity.

There is another element, though, which is the Galt's Gulch concept of Israel.

Look, it is legitimate to say that we, Jews, can be a little arrogant.  It is also a matter of objective fact that over 20% of Nobel laureates are Jews.  We're about 0.2% of the global population.  If you accept the logic of critical race theory, that means the Nobels are fixed, and run by and for the benefit of the Jews, and it's all a Jewish conspiracy.

Remember, there's a reason leftists are anti-Semitic.  All of their models reduce to anti-Semitism once you ask how it applies to Jews, which most of them do in their heads anyway.

Point being, there is a reading of Israel as a kind of Jewish Galt's Gulch.

Well, except that it's a "social democracy," and pretty far left in its welfare structure, and hence not the libertarian paradise envisioned by John Galt/Ayn Rand, so the metaphor kind of falls apart, but there is an element of the oppressed/exploited overachievers saying, as Eric Cartman does, "screw you guys, I'm going home."  (Key word:  home.)

Cartman might not appreciate the analogy, which makes it all the funnier.

I have a hankering to go back to this one.  I expect to grumble a lot.  Rand was a little nutty.  More than a little nutty.  She was obsessed with the gold standard, she thought altruism was the worst vice imaginable, and also, she was not a good writer.  Then, there's the whole train thing, which if you haven't read the book, oy.

Am I actually going to torture myself by doing this?

Yet why is it that the only goyim capable of getting it right on both wars are Randians?  Oy.  Realistically, it probably says more about the dysfunction of modern politics than a bad novel with a cult following in which the worst sin is altruism.

I'll need a palate cleanser of Seneca.

I have a few more books ahead in the queue, but I expect a forthcoming series on this.  There will be grumbling.  Oh yes, there will be grumbling.  I promise not to use Rush for each music post.

I cannot hold myself to that promise.

Rush, "Freewill," from Permanent Waves.