Part Seventeen

Here on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort.  And it will become as the heart of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day.  And word of it will reach every corner of the earth.  And the roads of the world will become as veins which will carry the best of the world's blood to my threshold.  And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me.  And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the Cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends.  For the freedom of Man.  For his rights.  For his life.  For his honor.

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner.  The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle.  The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:  EGO

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This concludes our introduction to the writer/philosopher Ayn Rand.  After this, I will return to my usual schedule of posting on weekends.

Ayn Rand was a proponent of objectivist philosophy, of rationality and reasoned thought, as well as a fierce advocate of individual rights and responsibilities.  For those who may have had their interest piqued by these postings, I commend the novels The Fountainhead and, of course, Atlas Shrugged.

This Ayn Rand novella was a view of the inevitable result of the doctrine of altruism and extreme egalitarianism.  Some may argue that such an extreme society could never exist outside of a science fiction novel.  To those people I would point to the examples of Communist Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, & North Korea.  There is never any end to the demands made by those who either believe they have the inherent right to do so because of the purity of their intentions; or have the desire to control others.  The average life span of a democracy throughout human history has been around 200-250 years.  They have always followed the cycle of struggle, freedom, prosperity, complacency, corruption, and finally oppression and eventual slavery of the productive to the parasites, where it stays until some future generation is born with the spark of freedom and the courage to take up the struggle once again.  As the founders warned, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and liberty.  Should we lose that vigilance, we will lose all.

This novella was transcribed here in the United States of America due to the kindness of the copyright holder, who has allowed the copyright to lapse in this country, in order to facilitate it's distribution.  The copyright laws are still enforced in other countries around the world.  Please do not download or store these posts on a computer outside the U.S.