Category Archives: Ayn Rand

Editors note: This is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at TOS-Con 2022, which was adapted from Timothy Sandefurs forthcoming book, Freedoms Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (Cato Institute, November). The article contains spoilers of Ayn Rands novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Those of you who have read Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged may remember that the first time the word Atlantis is mentioned is in chapter six. Dagny Taggart is at a cocktail party and overhears someone utter the books catchphrase, Who is John Galt? She turns to walk away but is stopped by one of the guests, an unnamed woman who says in a conspiratorial tone, I know who is John Galt.

Who? Dagny asks.

I knew a man who knew John Galt in person, the woman answers. This man is an old friend of a great-aunt of mine. . . . Do you know the legend of Atlantis, Miss Taggart?

Vaguely, Dagny replies.

The Isles of the Blessed, the woman says. That is what the Greeks called it. . . . They said Atlantis was a place . . . only the spirits of heroes could enter . . . because they carried the secret of life within them. . . . A radiant island in the Western Ocean. Perhaps what they were thinking of was America.

The woman explains that John Galt actually found Atlantisand Dagny loses interest, thinking the woman must be crazywhereupon the woman becomes belligerent. My friend saw it with his own eyes, she says. You dont have to believe it. When Francisco dAnconia interrupts them, the woman brusquely walks away.1

The incident is so brief that its easy to miss the fact that this brusque and belligerent woman who knew about Atlantis was actually a real person. Just as Ayn Rand famously included herself in a cameo in the novelas the character of the fishwifeso the woman at the cocktail party is a cameo of a real persona woman who helped inspire Atlas ShruggedRands onetime friend and mentor, Isabel Paterson.

In 1943, Rand, Paterson, and a third writerRose Wilder Lanepublished books that would jump-start the libertarian or free-market conservative movement. These were Rands The Fountainhead, Lanes The Discovery of Freedom, and Patersons The God of the Machine. At the time, both Rand and Lane acknowledged Paterson as their teacher and intellectual mentor. Although shes largely forgotten today, Paterson was then one of the countrys most important literary intellectuals, a pioneering journalist, novelist, and scholarand the woman who gave Ayn Rand the image of America as Atlantis.

Paterson was born on an island on the Canadian side of Lake Huron in 1886.2 She was named Mary Isabel Bowler. Her family was poor, and she had only a year or two of formal schooling, which ended when she was eleven. Little is known about her early life, except that her family moved to Michigan, then Utah, then the Northwest Territories of Canada. In other words, she was a product of the American West, and she grew up witnessing Indian ceremonies, living in log houses, seeing covered wagons on the plains, and watching as railroads stretched across the frontier. She saw her first lightbulb at the age of sixteenshe was too afraid to tinker with it, so she left it on all night. A year later, the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk.

In 1910, she married a man named Kenneth Paterson, but the marriage lasted only a few weeks before they separated. Despite their breakup, they never officially divorced, and Paterson kept his name. Months after the marriage failed, she moved to Spokane, Washington, where she got a job writing editorials and short stories for a newspaper. She signed her column I.M.P. for Isabel Mary Paterson. She would make these initials famous, but her closest friends called her Pat.

In 1912, she moved to New York, where she worked as a journalist and novelist. On one occasion, she rode along with pioneer aviator Harry Bingham Brown to set what was then a world altitude record of five thousand feet. Aviation was a lot more fun in the early days, she wrote years later: You sat on a six-inch strip of matchboard and held onto a wire strut, and looked down past your toes at nothing but the earth.3 That was why Paterson came to speak of herself as a member of the Airplane Generation.

By 1920, she had moved to Connecticut and was working for the opinionated, iconoclastic, bold, and vehemently American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, best known today for carving Mount Rushmore. Borglum had been recruited five years earlier to create a monument to the Confederate Army generals near Atlanta. A decade of tedious and bitter infighting with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association ensued.

Sketches and models leaned up against one wall, Paterson remembered, and every while or two he would drop whatever else he was doing and dash down to Washington to get a bill passed in favor of the Memorial, or to Atlanta to rally the home guard.4 At last, Borglum became so fed up with the political bickering and meddling with his work that he dramatically shattered his plaster miniatures, and threw the pieces from the top of the mountain. (The work was completed by another sculptor.)5

Paterson admired Borglums defiance and his commitment to his artistic vision. Long afterward, she would fondly recount stories of her time with him and lament the disappearance of that kind of bold masculinity. After her death, an acquaintance recalled that she often said she grew up . . . in an age when men were men.6

Why she left Borglums studio is not known, but in 1922, she embarked on a career at the New York Herald Tribune, which, two years later, gave her a weekly column called Turns with a Bookworm. She would write it every week for the next quarter century. It was not a book review column, although she did write hundreds of book reviews and other items. Instead, it was a news, gossip, and opinion column about the publishing industry, and it contained everything from her thoughts on new best sellers to reports about upcoming events and answers to letters from readers. She had a wry sense of humor, often quoting poetry or comparing different authors techniques, and wrote in a clipped, editorial style that gave the sense of reading a news bulletin. Heres a sample, from her July 7, 1934, column (the ellipses are hers):

The best new book on the Virgin Queen is Milton Waldmans Englands Elizabeth; but here is still another, J.E. Neales Queen Elizabeth, which has solid merit. . . . Yes, there is too such a place as Humptulips. . . . Weve been there. . . . You might prefer Snoqualmie, Kitsumcallum, or Supzzum.7

That column went on to discuss a new play by Edward Hope, a novel called You Cant Be Served, a box of chocolates a writer had sent her, and her views on the gold standard.

Patersons extraordinary breadth of reading and friendship with leading intellectuals made her a brilliant raconteur, and her column became a must-read for the literary world. One writer said in 1937 that she probably has more to say than any other critic in New York today as to which book shall be popular and which shall be passed by.8 She could be brilliantly wittybut also unapproachable, even misanthropic. She was the Goddess of Common Sense, wrote one colleague, who thought she contemplate[d] the world with a mild impatience that people can make such a stupid mess of things.9 But others did not find her impatience mild. One writer said she had a wit so searing that no rubber plant ever grows again in a room through which she has trod.10 Regularly described with words such as acidulous, caustic, and waspish, she was sometimes ferociously stubborn, even when she was obviously wronga habit that worsened as she grew older.11

In 1929, the America shed grown up with began to transform. First, the Depression wiped out much of her savings. There had been depressions before, notably in 1893, but in those cases, the government had let buyers and sellers, investors and producers, resolve economic downturns through private negotiationsthus enabling markets to right themselves and grow stronger. But this time, the Progressive president Herbert Hoover took a different route.

Convinced that the cure for the Depression lay in keeping wages high, he implemented policies designed to reduce productivity and increase government spending. His administration paid farmers to keep produce off the market and urged cotton and wool producers to destroy their crops to prevent prices (and corresponding wages) from falling. He approved severe restrictions on immigration and the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which raised the cost of imports and encouraged other countries to retaliate by imposing their own tariffs, destroying foreign markets for American farmers. He browbeat industries into keeping wages upwhich meant companies spent much-needed capital, thus hastening their bankruptcy. And he vastly expanded government building projects to keep people workingbut because these were government jobs funded by taxes extracted from the market, that was the economic equivalent of scooping water out of one end of a pool and pouring it in at the other.

Hoovers belief that expert bureaucrats could manage the economy was shared by many intellectuals worldwide. The revolutions of Lenin and Mussolini were greeted by many as the dawn of a new era, in which expert planners could organize production and trade to serve everybodys needs and eliminate inequality. Many thought that individualism had been superseded by a new, modern age of collectivism. In fact, as the 1930s began, the idea that America should become a dictatorship became frighteningly popular.

On inauguration day 1933, the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, told Americans that he had two priorities: to put people to work through direct recruiting by the Government and to redistribute land to those best fitted to own it. And although he planned to recommend these proposals to Congress, he was also prepared, in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, to demand broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. The American people were looking for discipline and direction under leadership, he said, and he would make sure they got it.12

To anyone familiar with communism or fascism, these words were alarming. It seemed there was much more to fear than just fear itself. But, as Ive said, intellectuals of the time largely embraced authoritarian politics. Only weeks before Roosevelts speech, Barrons magazine published an editorial advocating a mild species of dictatorship, and Walter Lippmann advised Roosevelt in his column, You have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.13 In May, a New York Times journalist proclaimed that Americans had given Roosevelt the authority of a dictator as a free gift, a sort of unanimous power of attorney. . . . America today literally asks for orders.14

Paterson did not think Americans wanted orders, or a planned economy, or any of the transformations proposed by Roosevelts Brain Trust. What everyone yearns for, she wrote, a day after the inauguration, is to return to private property, to get out from under the heavy load of taxes and too much government.15 But Roosevelt had little respect for the Constitution or individual liberty. Among his first acts was to end the gold standard and declare that the government would no longer honor contracts that required it to pay people in gold. These so-called gold clauses were a protection against inflation, because they stipulated that if the government engaged in inflationary policies, people could demand payment in gold instead. By refusing to honor these promises, Roosevelt sought to make the dollar worth whatever he said it was worth.

Paterson was indignant. She began devoting her columns to bitter and brilliant lectures on the meaning of money. Currency, she explained, is not a mere social construct but a tangible representation of production. For government to manufacture money by fiatto, essentially, engage in counterfeitis a form of theft, because it diminishes the value of dollars held by people who earned them. And that cheating was the prime object of inflation, she wrote. Roosevelts policies were intended to operate as a hidden tax, which would wipe out the savings of the smallish people who have the deplorable habit of paying their debts, in order to transfer their wealth to the government.16

When Walter Lippmann wrote that debates about inflation and the gold standard gave him a headache, Paterson shot back that if he found monetary policy hard to understand, he should go home and take an aspirin.17 Ridiculing the idea that the administrations gold measures were a form of theft, Lippmann argued that gold, like an umbrella, is the property of the man who holds it. No, Paterson replied, all gold in the U.S. Treasury belonged to whoever had gold certificates, and by nullifying those certificates, Roosevelt was forcing people to accept a risk of inflation that they had tried to avoid. Gold was indeed like an umbrella in that the owners were keeping it for a rainy day and it was stolen, seized by main force.18

In the years that followed, Roosevelt imposed federal control on virtually every aspect of the nations economy, and Paterson became one of the most eloquent and insightful of the few media figures who opposed these New Deal policies. Government economic planning was foolish arrogance, she thought, because planners would have to know absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made. Lacking such omniscience, their efforts to organize society would only put it in a straitjacketand encourage cronyism by using government power to serve private interests. Government and business can be entwined only in the same way as Laocon and the python, she wrote. It doesnt do either of them any good and its very hard to untangle them again.19

Paterson thought Roosevelts advisers were a bunch of young men who went to college on an allowance, and then came out in nice white collars to jobs on politely radical magazines supported by kind wealthy ladies, and whose political ideal was a mothers boy economic program with a kind maternal government taking care of everybody out of an inexhaustible income drawn from mysterious sources.20 And she thought the New Deals basic fallacy lay in ignoring the role that individual personality traits play in generating productivity. Roosevelts Brain Trust never ask themselves how wealth comes to exist in the first place, she wrote. They just take it as a fact of nature and go about redistributing it.21

But Paterson thought wealth creatorswhom she called self-starterspractice a specific set of virtues: thrift, industry, diligence, foresight, and independence. Self-starters were the people who manage to plow and sow and reap, to build and make . . . against the tempest, though all bureaucrats stand massed against them.22 Critiquing a book by a socialist in December 1933, Paterson objected that the author

assumes as his set-up a self-existent economy of plenty. There is no such thing. That potential plenty depends entirely upon a minority being allowed to function. We do not mean a class, but a certain type of mind. It exists in various degrees and formsbusiness men and farmers and foremen and housewives, the people who will always somehow get things done. . . . They are self-starters . . . and their particular function is to hold everything together. One cant always see how they do it. A business may be so admirably organized that it looks as if it would run itself, but if you take out one or two men who keep it running and put in some bureaucrat who knows all the graphs and charts the business will go to pieces . . . And in an effort to regulate everything those people may easily be eliminated. They have been very nearly exterminated in Russia.23

While she was writing these columns, Paterson was also working on her novels. Never Ask the End was published in 1933, The Golden Vanity a year later. Never Ask the End, which became a best seller, was an introspective, naturalistic novel with almost no plot centered around the life and thoughts of a character named Martaobviously a stand-in for Paterson herselfwho feels her youth vanishing under the onslaught of modernity and bureaucracy. Marta frequently contrasts the present day with the America she knew when she was young. Weve come so far, she thinks. Starting in a prairie schooner and covering the last lap by aeroplane. There and back. . . . To experience all the stages of civilization in one lifetime, from the nomad to the machine age, demands the utmost.24

Yet, in the Roosevelt Age, that vibrant sense of opportunity seemed to have vanished under the mandates of bureaucracy and government compulsion. And that theme of lost innocence was a frequent subject of Patersons writing. In The Golden Vanityher novel about the Great Depressionone character, named Mysieagain, a stand-in for Patersonvisits Washington State, to see the place where she grew up, and is mortified to see her neighborhood has been demolished.

She was gazing at an open square of naked and infertile sand, with not a stick nor a stone nor a blade of herbage on its arid surface. A new concrete pavement bounded it rectangularly, one city block in an extensive grid of dismal blocks, of which the others were meagerly built over with new bleak small buildings. . . . Whoever was responsible, I hope theyre dead broke, [she thought]. Thats what the planners are going to do for us everywhere.25

In one of her columns, Paterson wrote that the Wright Brothers were lucky to have lived before the New Deal, because otherwise they would never have invented the airplanethey would have been forced instead to join a cooperative social group to study leadership and fill out reams of paperwork.26 The airplane was invented in the United States precisely because this was the only country on earth, the only country that ever existed in which people had a right to be let alone and to mind their own business, she said. New Dealers should ask themselves what would happen if innovators and inventorswhom Paterson called the Intelligence Section of societywere put out of action by a system of economic controls, rationing, political restriction, and a devouring plague of bureaucrats throughout the world.27

That was not an idle question. In 1937, the American economy fell into a second collapse, in some ways worse than the 1929 crash. It was caused by Roosevelts massive new taxes on businesses, such as Social Security, as well as his new pro-union legislation, such as the National Labor Relations Act. Wages fell by 35 percent, and four million people (the equivalent of ten million people today) lost their jobs.

Refusing to admit that his programs had failed, Roosevelt instead blamed this depression-within-a-depression on what he called the strike of capital. He claimed that it was the result of a concentrated effort by big business and concentrated wealth to drive the market down just to create a situation unfavorable to me, and he ordered the FBI to begin investigating bankers and business leaders.28 Attorney General Robert Jackson told an audience that business owners were trying to liquidate the New Deal and establish a new manifestation of aristocratic anarchy by refusing to invest or hire. Four days later, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes gave a radio address claiming that the nations sixty richest families were engaged in a general sit-down strikenot of labor . . . [but] of capital.29

In truth, there was no such conspiracy; business owners and investors were simply reacting to the administrations policies, which punished economic growth and seized earnings. But Roosevelts scapegoating sounded all too familiar. After all, leaders in Russia and Germany were also blaming their own economic catastrophes on saboteurs and secretive counter-revolutionary forces.30

The following May, Paterson pointed out why the whole idea of a capital strike was fallacious. If there are sound opportunities which the banks pettishly refuse to take advantage of, she wrote, will the capital strike theorists name even onesome person or firm who has without reason been refused a loan, for proper and profitable use? The recession was no conspiracyit was caused by the fact that any form of investment may be clubbed over the head by arbitrary rate fixing, or by property seizures . . . or by punitive investigations . . . or by taxes piled on taxes.31

A month later, former New Dealer Hugh Johnsonwho had left the White House and become a Roosevelt criticrevealed that after the Supreme Court struck down some major parts of the New Deal in 1936, Roosevelt had told him, Business has bucked me, and when business wants to play with me again, it will be on its hands and knees.32 Paterson was astounded that nobody seemed outraged by this grave and repulsive language. Industry on its hands and knees is not a pretty idea, she wrote. What can be the state of mind which could anticipate that condition as something to play with? But instead of speaking up in their own defense, acquiescent businessmen chose to remain silent. If they dont resent [such treatment], she said, they may come near deserving it.33

It was in this environment that Roosevelt decided to run for a third term. His decision did not surprise Patersonshe had predicted four years before that he would be the permanent nominee of the Democratic Party.34 There was little hope that Republicans could unseat him, because so much employment now depended on his funding and favoritism that he was essentially buying votes with taxpayer money. But Republicans made a surprise decision in 1940 by nominating a virtual unknowna businessman named Wendell Willkieto run against him.

Willkie happened to be known personally to Paterson, because he was carrying on an extramarital affair with her boss at the Herald Tribune, editor Irene Van Doren. Willkie even attended some of Patersons private get-togethers at the Herald Tribune offices.

One of the many Americans who volunteered for Willkies campaign was a Russian immigrant and author named Ayn Rand. After escaping the Soviet Union, she had published a novel and written a successful Broadway play. Now she was at work on a new book, centering on a brilliant young architect. But convinced that Roosevelts campaign for a third term meant it was now or never for capitalism, she laid aside her manuscript to work for Willkies campaign.35

She was quickly disappointed by his lack of intellectual coherence. He had seemed like a principled defender of individualism and freedom, but on the campaign trail, he descended into a weak, me too style that left voters unenthusiastic. We received letters by the thousands, begging us for information, she later said.36 But the campaign had no intellectual ammunition to offer, and Willkie was easily defeated.

That experience persuaded Rand that America needed a strong, intellectual voice for individualism. She began trying to organize a group of thinkers to take up that work, and among those she invited to join was Isabel Paterson.

Paterson said no. She never joined groups. But she invited Rand to visit her at the Tribune offices, and it was there, probably in the spring of 1941, that the two first met. They hit it off right away. Rand was awed by Patersons historical and literary knowledge, and Paterson was fascinated by Rands intellectualism and personal history. They began meeting weekly at the Tribune offices, and Rand loved the experience. When Pat is in a good mood, she is like quicksand, she told a friendcompletely irresistible.37

Paterson invited Rand to visit her Connecticut home, and soon the young writer was a regular guest, joining Paterson for weekends during which they stayed up late discussing literature, history, and philosophy. Other times, Paterson spent evenings at Rands Manhattan apartment, talking until sunrise about philosophy or joking about books and politics. Rand particularly treasured the memory of one late-night conversation about consciousness, during which the two tried to figure out what goes on inside the mind of a beaver. Rand even worked a reference to this into The Fountainhead. In one passage, newspaper magnate Gail Wynand recalls how, when he was young and poor, he sometimes escaped his unhappy surroundings by thinking about his pet kitten, which was cleanclean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the worlds ugliness. I cant tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free.38

In fact, the friendship between Wynand and Howard Roark owes much to the feelings that developed between Paterson and Rand. Around this time, Patersonwho took to calling Rand her sisterinscribed a copy of her novel, If It Prove Fair Weather, to Rand, with a touching quotation from the French essayist Michel de Montaigne: Because he was himself; because I was myself.39 It was a line Montaigne used to describe his relationship with Etienne de La Botie, which Montaigne called the ideal companionshipone in which souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together. Rand reciprocated with a copy of The Fountainhead in which she wrote, You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeateda line that in the novel Roark speaks to Wynand as an expression of the deepest possible rapport.40

Of all the aspects of Rands philosophy of Objectivism, the element that would prove most controversial was her rejection of the morality of sacrifice. Rand viewed herself as challenging the cultural tradition of two and a half thousand years.41 But she was not alone in this: Paterson, too, thought a morality of rational self-interest is proper for human beings, who are inherently individuals responsible for their own lives. Its also the only sound basis for political freedom. Sacrifice and unselfishness seem to be the motives causing wholesale destruction, devoted to death, Paterson wrote in her column. When men relapse into selfish and unsacrificial motives they create a living human worldgrow food, build houses, invent and construct and produce, strictly for themselves.42

Freedom must mean freedom for each person to pursue his or her own life for its own sakean inherently self-interested proposition. After all, Paterson continued,

wasnt it selfish of the slaves to want to be free? Why werent they satisfied to live for their masters and die for them too . . . [?] The masters said it was for the good of society that they kept slaves, and their argument was quite as sound as any other argument for the good of society.43

Modern intellectuals were drawn to altruism precisely because it call[s] for the antecedent need or misery of its objects and therefore gives politicians grounds to demand power over others.44

Thus, in her 1943 book The God of the Machine, Paterson would condemn what she called the purest altruism of the communal cult, because it stood opposed to the principle that every person is born with a right to a life of his own.45

That books general thesis is that economic exchange is a kind of circuit whereby individuals, acting on their own local knowledge and circumstances, can cooperate to create and exchange wealth while respecting each persons freedom to run his or her own life. This distinguishes it from centralized, command-and-control economies in which people are forced to pursue a single, unified goal and occupy social positions determined by authorities. Patersons book represented an intellectual breakthrough, partly because it offered an explanation of economics in terms of the transfer of energyan innovative way of understanding how markets operate. But it was equally notable for the connection it drew between the morality of self-sacrifice and the politics of collectivism. In a passage that strikingly echoes the theme of The Fountainhead, Paterson distinguished between two different conceptions of power: power directed toward the mastery of nature and power over other men.46 The latter is the essential characteristic of collectivism and is most easily disguised under humanitarian or philanthropic motives.47 Such a focus on power over people leads to a society that is frozen and changeless, as opposed to the fluid, ever-evolving society of freedom created by a culture that focuses on mastering nature. Static societies cannot invent or innovate, because creative processes do not function to order.48 To live, people must think; and to think, they must be free. This explains why collectivist countries such as the Soviet Union stagnate or are forced to borrow or steal technology from freer societies.

Rand called The God of the Machine the greatest defense of capitalism I have ever read.49 It could literally save the world, she told one businessman, if enough people knew of it and read it.50

But she and Paterson did not agree on everything. They differed about religionPaterson thought there must be a supernatural or immaterial essence in the human spirit to explain free will; what some philosophers have called an lan vitaland they differed in their literary views, too. As an advocate of romanticism, Rand did not admire the plotless, stream-of-consciousness quality of Patersons novels. Paterson, by contrast, respected the romantic approach but was committed to naturalism.

In fact, Rands fiction shows little evidence of any debt to Patersonwith three exceptions. First, Rand originally intended for Howard Roark to mention Hitler and Stalin in his climactic courtroom speech, but when Paterson saw the outline, she urged Rand to remove these references, because they would date the novel and reduce its impact in years to come. That was good advice, and Rand followed it.

Second, when Rand was working on Atlas Shrugged, Paterson urged her to omit unnecessary descriptive passages that slowed down her prose. I have been engaged in a wild orgy of weeding, Rand replied, not of devils grass, but of adjectives.51 Rand was probably familiar with this age-old writing advice before encountering Paterson, but the reminder may have been helpful.

And the third influence was the legend of Atlantis.

That legend was destined to play a prominent role in Atlas Shrugged, which Rand started writing shortly after The Fountainhead was published. In October 1943, Paterson wrote her a letter enclosing a quotation from the Medieval Islamic scholar Averros, who had urged his fellow philosophers not to bother debating the mystics who claimed the truth was revealed to them directly by God. Reasonable people, Averros wrote, should stay silent and simply content themselves with a solitary possession of rational truth.52

Didnt that attitude of intellectual retreat, Paterson asked, explain how the Muslim world had lost its position as the worlds intellectual leader in the 12th century? Intellectuals such as Averros had withdrawn from the world, and civilization had collapsed.

Rand enjoyed the quotation. I know that I will now have to write [Atlas Shrugged], she wrote back. Youll push me into it.53 By that time, Rand was living in southern California, having moved there to work on the film version of The Fountainhead. That project took much longer than expected, because World War II rationing slowed film production, so in the interim, Rand got a job as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis, who in 1945 released the film Love Letters, for which Rand wrote the script. She managed to include a sly reference to Paterson in that film: In one scene, a character holds up a toy boat he played with as a child and mentions that its called The Golden Vanitythe title of Patersons 1934 novel.

Rand would occasionally take a break from working on screenplays and Atlas Shrugged to write Paterson about her progress on the novel.54 In February 1948, she traveled to New York and Chicago to research railroads and steel mills, and she wrote Paterson a long, enthusiastic letter describing the trip. She had even been allowed to operate the locomotive. Believe it or not, she beamed, I have now driven the Twentieth Century Limited.55

She was by then far enough into the manuscript that she shared part of it with Paterson, who offered some suggestions on what became part 1, chapter 8.

In this part of the story, Dagny Taggart and steel magnate Hank Rearden ride on a train over a new bridge built of Rearden Metal. Reading Rands description of the characters sensations on the train sparked Patersons joyful memories of watching and riding railroads on the prairie in her youth. A train streaming across the landscape, she told Rand, was not quite like any other visual impression of things in motion. It was

not exactly a feeling of speed in the obvious way, as with a bird flying or a stone thrown or a creature runningnot exactly that it is going fast, but that it cuts space, it gets there so positively that the relative quality of speed becomes unnoticeable; its on another scale. Almost an effect of planetary motion.56

Rand wrote back to say that she loved Patersons way of putting it, and the final version of this passage captured some of what Paterson was trying to describe:

[Dagny] felt no wheels under the floor. The motion was a smooth flight on a sustained impulse, as if the engine hung above the rails, riding a current. She felt no speed. . . . She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake aheadand in the next instant she was beside it, then past. It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment.57

Paterson also passed along other helpful tidbits for the novel. In 1943, she sent Rand an advance copy of Boot Straps, a memoir by Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel. Five years earlier, Girdler had refused to negotiate with the militantly left-wing Steel Workers Organizing Committee, leading to violent protests at Republic Steels Chicago plants, which left ten people dead. Rand admired Girdler for his refusal to cave in to the unions demands, and she based the character of Rearden partly on Girdler.

One reason was Girdlers philosophical naivete. She and Paterson found his memoir disappointing because he failed to understand that the reason why he was demonized in the press was not economic but moral. Paterson wrote in her column that the books most remarkable feature was the contrast between Girdlers enormous practical ability and his utter absence of general ideas.58 Girdler was bewildered that although everyone agreed that workers had a right to strike, nobody spoke up for the much more venerable and important right to work.59 And he complained that the rotten core in all of the New Deal thinking was the presumption that a man with payroll responsibilities is necessarily less of a humanitarian than people of prominence without such responsibility.60

That is not true, Rand told Girdler in a long and patient letter. The real reason socialism was growing in popularity was because we accepted altruism as an ideal. That allowed self-professed humanitarians to claim a moral high ground they did not deserve. In principle and in fact, Rand wrote, socialists are parasites, because

they are primarily concerned with distribution, not with production, that is, with distributing what they have not produced. Parasites are neither honorable nor kindly. So it shocked me to read you, a great industrialist, saying in self-justification that you are just as good as a social worker. You are not. You are much better.61

She closed by urging him to read The Fountainhead and The God of the Machine.

But the most significant of Patersons contributions to Atlas Shrugged was the Atlantis metaphor. Paterson had been fascinated all her life by this ancient myth, and she invoked it often in her column. In spite of [my]self, [I] have always believed in Lost Atlantis, she wrote in one. She speculated that perhaps the myth had its origins in some prehistoric discovery of North Americathat there had been an Island of Atlantis and that it was the New World. Even if that was not literally true, Atlantis symbolized for Paterson the America she had known before the Depressiona land of possibilities in which bold men were free to accomplish great things. Commenting on a book about the history of the American Westthe land of her childhoodshe called it a strange sunken world, a real lost Atlantis, which is the element in the American mind that Europeans do not understand. And in Never Ask the End, she wrote that [Marta] could remember reading of the Wrights first flight. . . . So she could also remember before that. It left one gasping, to think of belonging to both agesto have seen the world swing out in space, and nothing to steer by but one far-off nameless star.62

As a child, she thought about how the American West was a wild land . . . [that] has never been plowed or fenced. . . . One used to come to the end of a board sidewalk and step off upon virgin sod. But now Marta thinks that the people of her generation belong[ed] to a sunken continent; lost Atlantis, submerged under the westward tide of the peoples of the world. . . . After us, nobody will know what it was like.63

Simply put, Atlantis represented the world the Airplane Generation had grown up ina prewar, pre-Depression, pre-New Deal country full of boundless possibilities and brilliant innovators.

In Atlas Shrugged, the worlds great industrialists have disappeared into a refuge they call Galts Gulchand also call Atlantis. Atlantis, says John Galt,

exists, not in the past of the [human] race, but in the past of every man . . . somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit. . . . The independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise.64

The Atlantis myth that Rand and Paterson had discussed in their late-night conversations became in Rands metaphor a spiritual place of possibility, opportunity, freedom, and devotion to ones highest valuesa place like the American West of legend. It might seem ironic that Rand, who always considered New York City her spiritual home, would invoke the spirit of the West as the salvation of American liberty. But she did, in large part thanks to her Western friend, Isabel Paterson.

Patersons own book, The God of the Machine, did not sell well, and by 1948, Patersons violent temper was getting out of hand. Rand once told a friend that she had never approved of Pats incredibly offensive manner toward people but couldnt figure out how to react when she witnessed it, because she had so much admiration for Patersons fierce intellectual honesty [and] her strict devotion to ideas.65

When the wealthy philanthropist Jasper Cranewho they were both hoping would fund a new magazine devoted to free-market ideastold Paterson that he thought God of the Machine was too hard for average readers, Paterson exploded in a letter that called Crane stupid and cowardly and likened herself to Newton and Euclid. She then proudly forwarded a copy of the letter to Rand, who was startled by its ferocity. Another time, Paterson chewed out a businessman so savagely for failing to support free-market ideas that he replied that he now understood how the Germans must have felt after being firebombed. That is nothing, Paterson told Rand. Ill give him Hiroshima yet.66

Paterson knew how off-putting she could be. Slowly but surely I am fixing it so that I wont speak to anyone but you, she told Rand, and if you then wont speak to me Ill be all set for peace and quiet.67 Rand mused in her journal about Patersons rage, wondering why she alternated between uncontrollable fury and a clingy need for attention. It seemed as though Paterson had been wrecked by a fierce sense of injusticean indignation toward cruelty and irrationalitywhich erupted into exaggerated pride as well as an insane arbitrarinessa tendency to say I am right because Im right. This habit had become so extreme that it turned to hurting those whom she likes.68

Rand wrote to Rose Wilder Lane to ask if she had observed Paterson losing control. Among Rands papers is a fragment of Lanes reply, detailing examples of Patersons angry stubbornness. Yes, Lane said. She told Rand about a time when she got into an argument with Paterson over whether rosebushes could grow in the shade beneath trees. Paterson insisted they could not. But the two were then sitting together on Lanes patio, beside a maple under which a rosebush had flourished for years. When Lane pointed this out, Paterson still angrily maintained that it was impossible. It was an irresistible force meeting the immovable rosebush-under-the-tree, Lane said. An idea once in her head cannot be dislodged.69 Rand decided her mentor was a tragic case, someone who might have become a great rational thinker but was instead succumbing to a bitterness that handicapped her ability to speak in defense of freedom.70

In May 1948, Paterson flew to visit Rand in Los Angeles, in hopes of interesting California investors in her idea of starting a new magazine. But the visit proved disastrous. Paterson treated Rands friends rudely and offended businessmen who might have been able to fund the proposed magazine. Then, toward the end of her visit, Paterson told Rand that she had been offered the chance to review The Fountainhead five years earlier and had declined. As a result, the Herald Tribune had published one of the few negative reviews the book receivedwhich would never have happened if Paterson had chosen to review it.71

Rand felt betrayed. After a tense ride to the airport, Rand bid her good-bye, saying, I hope youll be happier than you are.72 They remained cordial and continued to correspond about a new magazine, but their friendship was essentially over.

Rand was now forty-five, an accomplished writer with a best seller, a major film, and a growing circle of admirers. She felt no further obligation to make excuses for Patersons behavior. Yet she could never betray her appreciation and admiration for her former mentor. Consequently, just as she included herself in a Hitchcock-like cameo in Atlas Shrugged, she included Paterson in the book, as the character who first speaks of Atlantis and stubbornly insists that it existedbefore angrily storming away.

Despite the end of their friendship, Paterson was thrilled by Atlas Shrugged when it was published. It was far more complex than War and Peace, she told a friend, and cram-jammed . . . with action. She was delighted by its defense of capitalism. The great fraternity of eggheads and deadheads, Liberals and Commies and bureaucrats, are carrying on a deliberate campaign to kill the book, if they can, she wrote.73

Indeed, reviewers were almost uniformly hostile, denouncing its unwavering individualism. Left-wing reviewers hated it, and conservatives were equally hostile. The National Review published a review that claimed Rand wanted to murder her ideological opponents. Paterson, who had written for the National Review, was furious. She complained to the editor, William F. Buckley, calling the article libelous, but Buckley dismissed her complaints. That, combined with Buckleys refusal to publish an article of her own in which she denounced businessmen who failed to defend capitalism, led her to sever ties with the National Review. She spent the rest of her life living on a modest pension and seeking a publisher for her last novel. She died in January 1961 and was buried in an unmarked grave in New Jersey. Even Buckley, who found her intolerably impolite and impossibly arrogant, had to admit in the obituary he wrote that she was a great woman.74

Patersons biographer Stephen Cox said that she provided an intellectual link between a frustrated and alienated older generation of anti-collectivist Americans and an aggressive and optimistic younger generation.75 Certainly, as a member of the Airplane Generationof the vanished America of opportunity created by 19th-century capitalism, which she thought of as the island of AtlantisIsabel Paterson considered herself the last survivor of a golden age. But she helped bequeath to us a vision of that free worldand not just a vision, but something more precious: a rational intellectual argument for it. It would be nice to think that she was not the last of Atlantiss inhabitants, but the first of their return.

Timothy Sandefur holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), 15354.

2. The only biography of Isabel Paterson available is Stephen Cox, The Woman and the Dynamo (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004).

3. Isabel Paterson, Turns with a Bookworm, New York Herald Tribune, August 8, 1943.

4. Paterson, Turns with a Bookworm, February 27, 1927.

5. Howard Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff, Six Wars at a Time: The Life and Times of Gutzon Borglum, Sculptor of Mount Rushmore (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 1985), 21415.

6. Whittaker Chambers, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (New York: Putnam, 1970), 94.

7. Paterson, Turns with a Bookworm, July 7, 1934.

8. Irene and Allen Cleaton, Books and Battles: American Literature 19201930 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 130.

9. Basil Davenport, The Apostle of Common Sense, Saturday Review of Literature, October 27, 1934, 237.

10. Cox, Woman and the Dynamo, 84.

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How Isabel Paterson Helped Ayn Rand Find Atlantis - The Objective Standard

One person's nightmare is another's wake-up call.

"My mind got really really clear when I was injured," Jason Henza, who appears in the six-part HBO docuseries The Anarchists, told Newsweek on August 24. "I was able to think far ahead and know the exact steps I wanted to take."

He's talking about being ambushed by gunfire in 2019 at the Acapulco, Mexico, home his friend, John Galton, shared with his girlfriend, Lily Forester. Henza was shot three times and Galton was killed.

"I lost my right arm for about six months," Henza says. "It wasn't fully working. These two fingers are still numb. I still have a bullet up in my nerve cluster in my shoulder. It cut through my pectoral muscle and went upward."

When I ask how he's doing emotionally, he says, "I was pretty angry at myself for allowing myself to let my life fall apart the way it was. I was blowing off police checkpoints, going on police chases, and just kind of just generally reckless behavior, so the shooting overall I would have to say kind of...it was tragic to lose John and that was really hard, but overall as far as emotionally being shot, it doesn't affect me as much as you think it would."

When I push him on thishow could getting shot not be traumatic?he says, "I like violence. I watch football on Sundays. To come through on the other side of that makes me happy. I like action-adventure movies. It's just my personality type; that's why it's so easy for me to get over it."

The centerpiece of The Anarchists is Acapulco, which became a haven for the liberty set thanks to the presence of Anarchapulco, a conference for libertarian anti-state idealists founded by Canadian Jeff Berwick in 2015 that eventually grew into a sort of Coachella for crytobros. John and Lily (real names Shane Cress and Miranda Webb), whose connection to the conference was tangential, were also fugitives, hiding out in Mexico thanks to looming drug charges in the U.S. (Many people featured in the doc go by aliases somehow related to John Galt, of Ayn Rand's objectivist tome Atlas Shrugged, which has come to be something of a sacred libertarian text.)

When the shooting happened, according to the series, the wheels were already coming off Anarchapulco, and getting shot somehow gave Henza clarity.

"I felt like I was the only sane person in the room. Calm, collected, knew what I wanted to do, I was talking to people on the phone, trying to get Lily in a safe spot and then get everybody ready to go up there and get John's body to get it cremated. Obviously we're freedom people. We didn't want to do anything according to law. We just wanted to go about our business and live with the failure that we created....My mind got really clear. I got really evolved in that moment. Most of the time my mind isn't that clear."

Of the documentary itself, Henza says, "I thought Todd and [sound mixer Kym Kylland] did a very fair job. They were really kind and nice to everybody. They showed that they cared about us all, they didn't just move in and use us. They were with us for about six years. Unfortunately what you guys get to see is just a tiny pinhole of our lives, these small moments. There was so much more. It wasn't so awful and tragic as the documentary was showing."

By the end of the series, three people were dead: Galton, veteran Paul Propert and self-proclaimed Anarchapulco "cat herder" Nathan Freeman.

There are just two things that bug Henza about the doc: that the audience didn't get to see more of his beloved dog, Sammie, who died after filming, and the title of the series.

"I would love that everybody out there to know that we didn't choose the name of the documentary. We all identify under the large umbrella of anarchist. We are not the political movement that has struggled over hundreds of years trying to create their ideal of a society and all that kind of stuff, and I feel kind of bad for all the people that have worked for that cause, and I admire them in a way because they're extremely charitable people."

For Henza, though, the lines are a bit more blurry.

"I wish that they didn't have such hard lines when they were communicating with a person like me who just wants to learn. I don't read at all. So normally when somebody throws a book at me, I just laugh them off because I don't read. And they expect me to understand their values and I would prefer to live it in practice. So, overall, I just wish, I think that was the hardest one for me to deal with, all the anger over the name and to have everyone say these aren't real anarchists. Because we definitely want to live voluntarily, we definitely want to avoid coercion, we don't want that in our lives anymore.

"We don't want the corruption that comes with the big system that's currently going. We just kind of want to get out of its way and do our own thing. Some people want to challenge it just because they're crusading, which I think is just foolish. Just start building. There's no reason to crusade. There's a lot of people who depend on the system; you can't just pull it out from under them."

That's where Lily ends up at the end of the documentary, too: that freedom works for her but that she has friends who are "statist" and the two can coexist. Says Henza, "That's how we get along in society, or on the outskirts of society. We don't always participate in their welfare programs and their health care system. When I was shot I went to a private hospital instead. A lot of us don't put anything into that system, so we shouldn't get anything out. I don't think it's fair. It's why I never asked for the COVID checks.

In our community, it's relatively small. It's a freedom community itself. I don't want to go out and keep hammering on the word anarchist. It does mean "without ruler" and it does upset a lot of the anarcho-communists. I care about anarcho-communists a lot. I'm a vonuan voluntarist. I prefer voluntary interactions among people. no coercion. I want to learn what they have to offer. I never want to reject the communist side."

In freedom circles, "vonuan" signifies "one who is impervious to coercion"; "voluntarism" is the idea of relying on voluntary action (in layman's terms, the opposite would be "statist," a more typical form of government that relies on centralized organizations and control over citizens).

Says Henza, "My whole premise is to subvert the state or coercions that may come after me. I just sidestep things I don't want to do....That was one of John's major objections [to Anarchapulco]. There was just like, People aren't doing enough freedom. All they're doing is talking about blockchain and a party and they want to change the world? I agreed with him: Let's decentralize, let's build a fork, let's do something cool and wonderful and do something for the community."

Today, Henza is happily living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, sleeping in a small apartment with a hammock for a bed. He and Lily are, he says, best friends who talk every day, and he's even dating.

Newsweek reached out to Lily Forester for comment.

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Where Is 'The Anarchists' Star Jason Henza Today? - Newsweek

In this episode of New Ideal Live, Ben Bayer, Dan Schwartz and Agustina Vergara Cid address questions on Objectivism submitted by the podcasts audience about the meaning of the term objectivity, the difference between evasion and selective focus, and the strongest objections to Objectivism.

Among the topics covered:

Mentioned in this podcast are Leonard Peikoffs book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on Objectivity, Bayers blog post The History of Objectivity in Light of Rands Epistemology and Ethics, Rands novel Atlas Shrugged, Lecture 2 of Peikoffs course Understanding Objectivism, and Harry Binswangers course Free Will.

The podcast was recorded on July 27, 2022. Listen to the discussion below. Listen and subscribe from your mobile device onApple Podcasts,Google Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. Watch archived podcastshere.

Podcast audio:

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Objectivism Q&A with Ben Bayer and Dan Schwartz - New Ideal

Book banning has always raised my hackles. Ayn Rand is a literary genius so when some hippie mom whose kid went to the same school as mine tried to get her work pulled from the schools reading list, I told the principal she was selling pills. Whatever happened to free speech in this country?

Suffice it to say I was furious when I found out my kids school was cutting some very important reading from the curriculum. I try to be open-minded so I went to a PTA meeting, which is when I learned just how many books my kid was going to have to read. And since Im a very proactive parent, that meant Id be right there in the trenches with him to help analyze these books and study for his tests. Upon further review, they should be banning way more books because Ill be damned if Im gonna spend my limited free time helping out with all this work.

Parenting is hard work and, not to sound selfish, but I need my me time. Sure, Ill help him out to a reasonable degree but does he really need to read a new book every unit? Whatever happened to the classics? Catcher in the Rye. To Kill a Mockingbird. The one with all the racial slurs. All banned! These were books I had already read and its gonna be a hell of a lot harder to help my kid with his homework if I have to learn something new.

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Book Banning Is Wrong Unless It Gets Me Out of Helping My Kid With His Homework - The Hard Times

Its 7 a.m. on the second day of the second week of summer school. As I write this, I can hear the custodian walking past my room. Muffled music escapes his cell phone as he pushes a trash can down the hall to be emptied. I like his choice in music: All the Small Things by Blink 182 echoes down the hall beyond the rattle of the trash cans wheels.

In comparison, we are currently reading the novel Anthem by Ayn Rand. It is a dystopian novel about a futuristic civilization that fears the small things that make people individuals. It is a story about a world that lifts up the collective society above all else. Even saying I is illegal. The book states, All men are one and there is no will save for the will of all men together Thats scary because I do not like the same flavor of ice-cream as Mr. Steely.

While I think being a useful part of society is important, it would seem society exists so there can be individuals; a safe place where singular persons are free to do great things. However, as institutions, big business, and big pharma gain more control of our rules and regulations, monetary goals and progress are sometimes blind to the needs, wants, and even creativity of the individual.

Comparatively, in the novel, the protagonist is quite the rule breaker. He even admonishes himself for his illegal activities -actions that we think are common. He is told thinking, writing, and even being alone is evil. The rules in the story have evolved into a form of complete control for the sake of society.

Ironically, as the class lifts the main character up in his quiet rebellion, we have to acknowledge in all honesty that a real society cannot exist without rules. Actually, a classroom cannot exist without rules.

Reflectively, on the first day of summer school I asked a student to take off his hat. Hats are not allowed to be worn in the building, let alone in the classroom. But hey, its summer, and although it is a black and white rule, my favorite color is gray. After I politely asked the student to take off his hat, I declared that our Thursdays would be Hat Day, and anyone could wear a hat during our three-hour class. Consequently, I wore my Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Im actually not a baseball follower, rather a fan of Magnum P.I. He proudly wore this hat in the 80s TV series.

We went on to have a contest for the best hat. A girl who sported a Bob Ross hat, with a painting under the bill, won. Then the class became a little crazy and we talked about pronouns and antecedents. Beyond head attire, English class must carry on!

Regarding the novel, the question arose, how is breaking the rules justifiable in our heros world? Again, a society needs rules and laws to function. By definition, laws regulate actions of a societys members for the overall good of the society. These regulations can incur penalties and punishments. What if the rules ask too much or take away too much (kind of like health insurance)? Or what if a black and white law does not fit a gray situation.

Most anyone reading Anthem will conclude that the protagonist is being illegal by breaking his societys laws, but he is not wrong in doing so. While a government that would issue such laws is wrong, the society that the main character lives in is conditioned to believe the rules dictated by his leadership are what is best for his society, and as such, he should sacrifice certain freedoms and accept control.

As the class conversed, we came to conclude that in order to justify our hero breaking the rules in his society, there has to be morality and common sense that exists, if not with, then beyond a governments prescribed laws and rules. In that same context, a society that accuses individuality as selfishness is dangerous. Ultimately, when the rules are crazy, sometimes you gotta break the rules.

An individual would hope that societies consider this truth, but as George Orwell put it, The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. Sadly, but fortunately, our history is made up of martyrs who spoke the truth and changed the world. Hats off to them.

Comparatively, every Thursday, in our English Class during summer school, is Hat Day. Yes, we are breaking rules and changing the world (for a few hours). I do not think Rand or Orwell would be too impressed, but there is no doubt that Magnum P.I. would think it was cool.

Brian Theodore is a language arts teacher at Corbin High School and lives in Corbin with his wife, who is also a teacher at CHS. He can be contacted at Theteachersdesk.theodore@gmail.com.

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THE TEACHER'S DESK: Breaking the Rules | Opinion | thetimestribune.com - Times Tribune of Corbin

It wasnt that long ago that I fabricated a summer column like this one just as an outlandish hypothetical, a wouldnt it be fun if " sort of throwaway that you knew going in would never happen.

It was about what college conferences would be like if there was relegation and promotion in the vein of European soccer. Worst three teams by record are dumped down a division every year and replaced by the three best from the next-lower division. I used the Big Ten and Mid-American Conference simply for examples.

Now? In this Ayn Rand world into which college athletics is seeing itself devolve? Suddenly, nothings off-the-board, nothing discarded out of hand.

You know its the Wild West out there when the Big Ten can suddenly invite a couple of schools from Los Angeles, then has all its broadcast lapdogs nod in approval.

Look, I generally like Colin Cowherd. I watch him and Joy Taylor for an hour once or twice a week on FOX Sports The Herd, and I think both are thoughtful commentators who try to see sports events from unique angles. Its the only such talk show I ever watch.

Cowherd often sets sports issues in thematic terms related to other businesses. And its all a business, I think even the most idealistic of us have been beaten over the head with that truth lately so that we cant drive it from our escapist fans minds.

But its so obvious that Cowherd is dealing in promotion for his Big Ten-partnered network bosses in this case. This USC/UCLA>B1G move is great, he exclaims. Hell, he even got off a plane on vaca when it happened and tweeted a minute-long reaction video from an airport terminal. Win-win-win for everybody Big Ten, LA schools and football fans he proclaimed in assuring tones. It was slightly more convincing than when he was forced to shill for FOXs USFL reboot all spring.

By this point, you know how I feel. I believe Ive made it clear the past two weeks I think its a shameless money grab that appears to make fiscal sense now and will handsomely profit a few in the short term but will diminish the sport in the long run. That its just another step in the inexorable shameless monetization of college athletics at the steep cost of all that fans love about it. That Im totally for unlimited NIL and freedom of movement for athletes, that I dont see that as a threat. But that the suits who now run the sport are motivated by pure greed.

Through that lens, I can now imagine a development I never wouldve believed possible before a contraction of schools from the power conferences.

In other words, if the object is to relentlessly add schools with greater value with total disregard to culture and geography, whats stopping the networks and university presidents from also cutting some fat? I mean, thats how its done in business underperforming units are dissolved. No matter how long and what assets theyve brought to the firm prior, enough substandard quarterly earnings and they can be jettisoned after one executive meeting and nobody bats an eye.

Think it cant happen? Several fans Ive quoted in this space during recent correspondence have floated the idea. And while I never rejected it out of hand, neither did I consider it particularly likely. Then again, that mightve been partly due to my nave traditional mindset, having grown up within a stable Big Ten through young adulthood.

And on Wednesday, something happened that made me think, Uh-oh, this really could happen: Cowherd raised the proposal out of thin air.

Look, I dont necessarily believe hes in cahoots with his FOX management on every strategic move it makes. But neither would I be surprised if he was clued in about the USC/UCLA>B1G bombshell hours or days in advance. He was a cheerleader for the concept straight out of the gate.

So, when he floated the concept of ill-fitting newbies Nebraska, Rutgers, Maryland and maybe even longtime but underperforming member Purdue being carved out of the Big Ten in the future, I didnt take it as coincidence. Could FOX chieftains have intimated the notion at some point and leaked it to Cowherd just as a way to normalize it, get it out there in the mainstream?

Anyway, even if Cowherd conceptualized it all on his own, I dont discount the possibility in the slightest. Hes a bright guy with vision. If we really are in a Machiavellian business now where its eat or be eaten without regard to decades of neighborhood and tradition, then why cant the lesser legacies whove been either born into or recently invited to this gated community be cast out on their own?

More to the point, if the arbiters distilled their decision purely based on gross football revenue, irrespective of annual conference broadcast/streaming payouts, who would get the boot?

We know those figures because theyre made public every spring. Each school must submit a report to the U.S. Department of Education related to its gender equity requirement. Ive been posting them for years.

The latest figures released this past spring were outliers because they related to the heavily COVID-impacted 2020-21 fiscal year. So, I dont believe theyre valid for this purpose.

But if we retreat to fiscal 2019-20, released in Spring 2021, all you need to do is examine the lowest rungs of the B1G ladder. Here are the bottom four programs in gross football revenue:

14. Rutgers: $32.9 million.

13. Maryland: $44.7 million.

12. Purdue: $51.9 million.

11. Indiana: $56.5 million.

You can see the entire fiscal 2019-20 list here for the Big Ten football programs and here for all the 65 Power Five.

Now, imagine a reformed Big Ten with Washington ($91.7 million), Oregon ($77.6 million) and Utah ($62.6 million) all top-25 national football revenue producers in 2019-20 replacing Rutgers, Maryland and Purdue.

Further, try to envision a Big Ten totally incentivized by revenue in which each school knows its contract with the conference is based on some metric combining gross revenue, viewership eyeballs and whatever else FOX and the BTN deem critically marketable. And membership is fluid, predicated on performance with each new broadcast media deal.

The laggards are dropped and promising prospects from the second division (Cincinnati? Louisville? Pittsburgh? West Virginia?) are considered as their replacements.

Now, that would be some true relegation and promotion. Id label this myself as outlandish speculation. Except, these days, I dont know what qualifies for those terms anymore.

More PennLive sports coverage:

Off Topic: What was it like to fly an F-16 with a USAF Thunderbird? Heres video, 30 years ago.

Does Gavin Newsoms disdain for UCLAs stealthy move to Big Ten indicate broader California dissent?

Dolts like Realmuto get paid so much they neednt perform or even play; Im done paying them attention.

Hey, Jones!: Notre Dames decision, USC-PSU, and a Big Ten expansion idea nobodys mentioning.

Freddie Mitchell on first hearing of UCLAs move to the Big Ten: I was sick to my stomach.

Heres hoping this USC/UCLA-Big Ten merger careens off the track, crashes and burns.

Reasons for and residue of USC/UCLA bolt to Big Ten have me conflicted at best, depressed at worst.

Read more here:

If Big Ten didnt just add lucrative programs like USC but trimmed stragglers, whod get the boot? | Jones - PennLive

One of the many highlights of our time here in southern Alberta has been our opportunity to participate in a session at the Cardston Alberta Temple on Saturday. Another temple patron whom I did not know approached me and requested that I take one of his family names through, so I represented one Mills Robinson, who passed away on 2 April 1900.

This is the second time that my wife and I have attended the temple in Cardston, but the first time in many years. Doing so had special personal meaning for both of us. For me, there were two particular reasons: First of all, I love the design of it. As I mentioned at the opening of my Cardston fireside yesterday evening, when I was quite young, I dreamed of being an architect. Im still exceptionally taken by beautiful buildings. As I said last night, the only thing that really prevented me from pursuing a career in architecture was my utter and absolute lack of even the slightest trace of visual talent. I cant draw. Not at all. And every time that I sat down, inspired by a striking building that I had just seen to sketch my own, my creation emerged looking like a box. Or, if I were really on a roll, it looked like a box on a box. Ive since realized, of course, that absence of talent hasnt prevented quite a few architects from having lucrative careers. But it was enough to dissuade me.

Still, though, I love beautiful buildings. And one of my architect heroes is the great Frank Lloyd Wright. (Many years before I realized that Ayn Rands fictional character Howard Roark is, in some regards, a thinly veiled Frank Lloyd Wright, I read and loved her novel The Fountainhead. Ive since come to a much lower opinion of Ayn Rand than I held as a teenager, and I feel that I need someday to re-read the novel. Im curious to see whether Ill still like it.) Anyway, as Ive said here before, the Cardston Alberta Temple which was designed by the, to me, absolutely great Latter-day Saint architectural firm of Pope & Burton (see the Wikipedia articles on Harold W. Burton and Hyrum Pope) is a magnificent exemplar of Frank Lloyd Wrights Prairie Style. Of course, its dedicated to a form of service that would not only have been pure nonsense to Ayn Rand but complete anathema to her.

Another part of my fascination for the Cardston Alberta Temple is its longtime association with Edward James Wood. When I was a teenager, I believe, I read about a number of remarkable spiritual experiences that he had received, and Ive always wanted to learn more about him. In fact, I went into the Cardston Bookstore on Saturday to see whether they had anything about Brother Wood. I bought a history of the temple in Cardston (written by a son of President Wood), but, although they looked for it, it appears that they had just sold their one used copy of E. J. Woods autobiography. I was disappointed.

My wife has a personal connection to the Cardston Alberta Temple. Her German-born maternal grandfather, who went on to have a lengthy career as a skilled cabinet maker and woodworker and whom I was privileged to come to know for a number of years at the end of his long life, apprenticed as a nineteen-year-old on the temple, which is justly famous for its beautiful interior woodwork. We dont know exactly where he served in the project; given his young age, he probably didnt take a leading role on any of the prominent features. But sitting in the unique and elegant dark-wood celestial room after our temple session was complete was an emotional experience for my wife as she thought of her grandfather.

After we were done, I brazenly asked a counselor in the temple presidency whether we might look in on the baptistry. I was prepared for a No, since, as I told him, I realize perfectly well that temples arent built to be tourist attractions. But he answered with an easy Yes, and deputized one of the other temple workers to take us down. One we were down in the baptistry which, in perfect symbolism, is precisely at the center of the temple and exactly below the celestial room the baptistry coordinators, who were in a bit of a temporary lull for a few minutes, took time to tell us about the history and particular features of that beautiful space. (They even knew about the rancher whose oxen had served as the models for the sculpted oxen supporting the baptismal font; I think that he was a relative of one of them.)

And then, when we exited the temple (past the sculpted relief of the New Testament woman at the well by Torlief Knaphus that was once exterior to the temple but is now enclosed within its annex), we stopped off at the visitors center, where a kindly local senior missionary couple spoke with us about the history of Cardston and its stunning temple, and showed us historical photographs of both. The photographs made it even more remarkable to me that so small a town far smaller still in the early 1900s is blessed with such a sacred structure and so striking an architectural monument.

In our conversation with the senior missionaries in the visitors center, the thought came up that, surely, among the reasons for the construction of the temple in Cardston was the fact that the Latter-day Saints who settled southern Alberta had come here because they had been sent by the Church. They didnt come for land or wealth, but because they were faithful and obedient. And now they were hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest temple, unable to do work on behalf of their kindred dead, unable to receive the ordinances of the temple without a lengthy and arduous journey. I know that the similar sacrifices of the Saints in Colonia Juarez, Mexico, were on the mind of President Gordon B. Hinckley when the revelation came to him that launched the construction of very small temples including one in Colonia Juarez itself immediately after his visit there.

I have loved being here among the Latter-day Saints in Alberta. My wife and I are already talking about coming back next year, if we can, for the centennial of the Cardston Alberta Temple. I expect that there will be a celebration.

Posted from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

Link:

A high point of our time in southern Alberta, Canada - Patheos

No death toll can truly capture the devastation that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and their ilk inflicted upon the world. Think of the engineered Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor), the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Though today we recognize these leaders as monsters, we mustnt forget that in their time Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others had Western apologists and admirers. By now we should have learned to evaluate dictators properly.

But, depressingly, many politicians and intellectuals persist in misreading dictators. For example, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was rising to power, he found admirers among Western intellectuals. In 1979 Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, dismissed concerns about Khomeinis political vision of Islamic totalitarianism. Falk suggested that Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country. Thats not been the experience of Iranian women who are brutalized and jailed for failing to wear hijab; nor of gays executed by public hanging; nor of any Iranians who value their freedom; nor of any of the victims of Iranian-backed Islamist terrorism.

Remember when Bashar al-Assad of Syria was seen as a savvy reformer, invested in the welfare of his people? Except that he became notorious for inflicting chemical weapons on his subjects. Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was breathlessly hailed as a forward thinking, capable leader: yes, the selfsame MBS who ordered the hit on and literal butchering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist affiliated with the Washington Post.

But surely the most consequential examples today are Xi Jinping and especially Vladimir Putin.

In the words of one American commentator, Vladimir Putin is like a grandmaster of chess when it comes to strategy, whereas Barack Obama stumbles with checkers. On the eve of Putins invasion of Ukraine, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the Russian dictator as very shrewd, very capable, adding I have enormous respect for him.... [Putin] is an elegantly sophisticated counterpart and one who is not reckless but has always done the math.

While Donald Trump was in office, he was one of Putins superfans and apologists. Trump has described the Ukraine invasion as genius, later praising Putin for having taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions.

This is a severe misreading, and the most obvious evidence can be seen in the battlefields of Ukraine. The reputedly formidable Russian military has struggled against courageous Ukrainians fighting in self-defense. It can also be seen in the extraordinary scale and extent of international sanctions imposed on Russia. But this misreading goes deeper than a strategy that backfired.

The notion of dictators as charismatic, capable strategists is an illusion. The illusion endures partly because they can appear successful, at least for a while. But the truth is that Putin and Xi, like their twentieth-century predecessors, are fundamentally impotent.

For individuals to live, think, produce, and thrive, the role of a proper government is to protect their freedom. It is freedom that fuels human progress and prosperity. No one who values human flourishing can look at Putin, Xi or any other dictator as anything but a lethal aberration.

READ ALSO: Israel, Individualism, Tribalism: What Justice Demands

Putin and Xi are not simply politicians who get a few details wrong. Theyre wrong all the way down. They dominate, brutalize, and exploit those who think, teach, invent, produce, run businesses, create value at whatever scale. By violating the rights of their citizens, Putin, Xi, and other dictatorial leaders defy the objective conditions necessary for individuals to live and prosper. They are destroyers. To deal with men by force, observed philosopher Ayn Rand, is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

What Putin, Xi, and their cronies have achieved are regimes geared toward exploitation. Putin-aligned oligarchs have ransacked the country. Chinas caste of party-aligned operatives have raked in billions, amid the countrys impressive economic rise. That rise, now seemingly slowing, occurred despite not because of Chinas dictatorial leadership. It was a consequence of the slight degree of economic freedom the Party condescended to permit and which it is now undoing.

Theres nothing shrewd nor sophisticated here. Such dictators and their hangers-on are thugs, gangsters, and murderers who operate under the states (ostensible) moral authority. Human parasitism is an expression not of efficacy, but of impotence.

Why do some view Putin and Xi as impressively capable, strategic leaders? Here are two factors.

First, to put it bluntly, many Western intellectuals and policy makers have an irrational prejudice against freedom, especially as manifested in markets. You can see it in the bias against markets, deemed messily inefficient, and in favor of central planning. While we both reject this common perspective, our point here is not to persuade you that were right about markets. Rather, its that many in the West are afflicted by what you might call Central Planner Envy, and this leads them into warped thinking. It picks out supposed accomplishments Behold the high-speed trains in Xis China! while evading the full reality of the uncountable individuals whose rights are trashed in the course of maintaining the regimes system of pervasive repression.

A second, more significant explanatory factor is Western appeasement of Russia and China. Instead of frankly recognizing the evil character of these regimes, the West affords Russia and China the undeserved moral status of civilized countries. By agreeing to sit down with them at summits and multilateral meetings, our heads of state perpetuate the fiction of Putin and Xi as efficacious and benevolent leaders that belong in the company of rights-respecting nations.

The United Nations is a major culprit in whitewashing these regimes. Both have permanent seats on the UNs powerful Security Council (!), despite violating the organizations stated principles flagrantly, repeatedly, and on a vast scale. What about the massacring of pro-democracy student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989? Dousing the last embers of intellectual freedom? Interning thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps? Wiping out the last vestiges of freedom in Hong Kong? Ongoing piracy of foreign-owned intellectual property? The dishonest handling of the COVID pandemic? No, China has learned that it is effectively untouchable.

This official whitewashing encourages, and is reinforced by, the willingness of American and European companies to invest in China and Russia as if they were basically free, civilized, moral regimes. The consequences are pernicious. Putins regime, for example, has benefited handsomely from the inflow of foreign capital and joint ventures with BP, Shell, and Exxon. But since the war in Ukraine, all three of these companies are frantically departing the Russian market, suffering losses in the tens of billions of dollars.

READ ALSO: Sept. 11 and the Failure to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism

When you reflect on how the U.S. and European nations dealt with Putins past aggression, his initiation of war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is exposed as foreseeable, rather than strategically shrewd let alone genius. Passive appeasement by the U.S. and Europe emboldened Putin. Consider the incisive observation of Evgeny Kissin, an expatriate Russian pianist and composer, who on this issue exhibits greater clarity of vision than political leaders in Washington, London, and the capitals of Europe:

If the West had applied the same sanctions against Putins regime as it is applying now 8 years ago, after the annexation of the Crimea, there would have been no war in the Ukraine now. Ill tell you even more: had the West applied such sanctions in 2008, in response to Putins invasion of Georgia and the de facto annexation of South Ossetia, Putin would not have annexed the Crimea five and a half years later and maybe, by that time he would even no longer be in power. And more: if the West had applied such sanctions back in 19992000, in response to the genocide in Chechnya, there would definitely have been no invasions of Georgia and the Ukraine

Theres still the notion that Putin, Xi, and their ilk are charismatic, inspiring loyalty. The reality is that they are at war against their own subjugated people. Putin and Xi are usurpers, and on some level they know it, but shut their eyes to that truth. The epic scale of censorship and repression under their reign is telling. Why intimidate, muzzle, and seek to control the thoughts of the population, if it truly found you inspiring, magnetic?

Orwells fearsome Big Brother pales in comparison to Chinas vast surveillance of its population, social credit scores, and legions of censors. The regime crushes dissent, and it imposes thought control. When Dr. Li Wenliang spoke out about the novel Corona virus at the pandemics outbreak, he was silenced, punished, humiliated. After his death from Covid 19, tragically vindicating his warning, censors scrubbed Chinese social media to erase public demands for freedom of speech. Or recall what happened to Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis champion who accused a Party official of sexual assault: she was disappeared. (Only after an international furor about her vanishing, did she reappear for a stage-managed interview.)

Putins railroading and disappearing of critics, the poisoning of opponents, the eradication of every last vestige of an independent media, the marinating of the population in endless propaganda: these are a confession of weakness, a fear of facing the facts. Thought control puts the regimes wishes above facts, on the premise that wishing makes it so. Theres no war in Ukraine, only a special military operation and any Russian who denies this or objects to it can face up to 15 years in prison.

Dictators are at war not only with their own people, but, ultimately, with reality.

The notion that Putin and Xi (and their ilk) are charismatic, efficacious leaders is false. They have pitted themselves against the facts and against human life. To the extent such dictators advance toward their stated goals, they wreak havoc. Zoom out from Ukraine, where Putins forces are floundering, and recall that Stalins reign brought nothing but death to his own people. Hitler lost a world war, laid waste a continent, and put to death tens of millions.

READ ALSO: Free: Read the Introduction of "What Justice Demands"

Reflecting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the final solution, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil. Its an idea that remains controversial. If you take it to mean that evil is in fact small, unglamorous, commonplace, theres some truth in the observation. And it certainly applies to Putin, Xi, and other dictators; picture Saddam Hussein upon being dragged out of hiding from an underground rathole.

But this idea is at best incomplete. Theres a deeper truth about the character of evil, which Ayn Rand discussed in her writings. Rand observed that evil was impotent that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

A version of this article was published on June 17, 2022, in IAI News, the publication of the Institute of Art and Ideas.

Image credit: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping by Kremlin.ru is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (tinted, cropped).

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The Banality of Putin and Xi - New Ideal

How did we ever get to this point? What pillars did we build? The churches tried everything the looked successful only to never succeed. We built an illusion. All we needed was the right formula. The church would succeed if we did it right. The pandemic pierced the illusion. Now people are searching for it. Like chasing mirages in the desert, we know the relief is just ahead. And then we find only dry sand. This gloom and doom piece seeks to go beyond piercing the illusion. I want to destroy the four pillars of it.

Rick WarrensPurpose Driven Churchwas bad enough. He decided a purpose driven book for life was necessary too. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. It is interesting to note that Warren never made a promise that his method for church development would actually work. In fact, he told people not to try to replicate the method of Saddle Back. When I criticized all things Purpose Driven, I was reminded of this by his supporters. But they still attempted it.

I remember the appalling moment a church leader stood before the congregation for an announcement. It was merely a commercial forPurpose Driven Life. This conservative lay member placed this book on par with the Bible. My heart sank. Because I remembered the idiocy that surroundedThe Prayer of Jabez. That nonsense fizzled out. But it left a mark of dishonesty on the people who adhered to it. I had to stop praying it, I heard more than one or two people say, because I was getting too many blessings. When I considered that greed was the driving factor for the popularity of the book, I doubted the reason was true. The shine wore off of the lure.

The used bookstore I frequented at the time began a pile of copies ofThe Purpose Driven Life a couple of years later. Seeking ones own desires, it appears, never ends. One of the pillars is self-focus.

The new church down the road is doing church in a whole new way! Or so they say. Evangelical churches more than any other theological type avoid being seen for what they are. I always found this interesting. Church leaders and consultants are always in the process of remaking church. An Orthodox Priest once asked, Is any Protestant Church the same as it was 100 years ago? I am not sure if any are the same as they were 10 years ago on the outside.

Jesus called his opponents white-washed tombs. In modern parlance, we would say repackaged corpses. The present trend in repackaging is to place a # in front of the name.

Reinventing the wheel is the attempt to look busy and do nothing. It is merely the attempt to avoid doing what one must. Churches use this pillar instead of confronting the social problems we help create.

Church growth programs are key to growing churches. At least, that is the message we get. I have said a lot about the overreliance on plans and programs. One church lay member could not understand why the congregation paid someone to tell them what they already knew. It was just common sense stuff we know we should do. Yes. And the real question is, why have they not been doing that common sense stuff?

One reason is that after a while people tire of doing those little actions of welcoming and engaging visitors. They have friends they have not seen in one (or more likely) three weeks. They want to catch up with them. Who is then left to engage visitors? No one. Yet, it is the same no ones who were engaging the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the hurting. These people do not increase offerings if they increase the attendance.

Doing the growth program is another substitute for engaging in ministry with the marginalized.

The harshest of the 4 pillars is this one. The filmA Hidden Life has the protagonist observe with another resident in his village in Austria that their neighbors, Do not recognize evil anymore. It is a biblical problem. An oft quoted text used by fundamentalists against their enemies is, Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Ah, you who are wise in your own eyes, and shrewd in your own sight! Ah you who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights! (Isaiah 5:20-23)

What is the result of the prophets criticism? The innocent suffer. The innocent continue to suffer by the actions of people in churches. And it is not by a direct action. It is by allowing evil to prevail and calling it good or necessary. Evangelical women holding Ayn Rand as a hero of their gender is a good example of that insanity.

These four pillars provided the illusion the pandemic pierced. It is time to take them down and turn to a theology of sense and compassion.

Go here to see the original:

4 Pillars of The Illusion | C. Don Jones - Patheos

Ayn Rand Institute resources offer a consistent intellectual case for a womans right to abortion.

For many years, the Ayn Rand Institute has led the world in offering rational philosophic support for a womans right to abortion. Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, the Objectivist perspective on that crucial issue is needed more than ever. This article gathers the available resources in one place, to help defenders of individual rights understand the philosophic errors that led to Roes demise. Thats the first step toward reaching a day when the Supreme Court can uphold the right to abortion on proper grounds for the first time.

Abortion (entry in The Ayn Rand Lexicon)

Ayn Rands Radical Views on Abortion (article by Ben Bayer in New Ideal)

Abortion Rights Are Pro-Life (article by Leonard Peikoff in New Ideal)

Why the Right to Abortion Is Sacrosanct (book available on Amazon)

Abortion Allows Women to Protect Whats Sacred about Life

Science without Philosophy Cant Resolve the Abortion Debate

Abortion Should Be Legal until Birth

The Dark Roots of the Texas Abortion Bans Vigilantism

Abortion Defenders Are Losing the Moral High Ground

The Pursuit of Happiness Includes the Right to Abortion

Roe v. Wade: Forty Years Later (podcast featuring Onkar Ghate and Tom Bowden)

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The Philosophic Case for the Absolute Right to Abortion - New Ideal