I am amazed to find so many intellectual kindred here. It was Ayn Rand’s writings that inspired me from 13 years old on that there was an alternate worldview to the mealy-mouthed, craven patently evil Leftism that permeated the environment of my childhood and youth in the 60′s and 70′s. (I still have original copies of the <I<Objectivist and subscribed to Reason when it came out ( I was 14.) Her understanding of the nobility of man and of reason kept me from sliding into that cesspool of madness that enveloped so many of my generation. Inspired by von Mises, Hayek and Friedman, I went on to study economics.
Yet there was an inherent flaw in Objectivism that is part of the problem today. Radical materialism and individualism have led us into the degraded state of infantile narcissism, hedonism, and statism we see ominously engulfing us. Another ex-atheist who woke up when he was assigned to be the correspondent for the Leftist Guardian in Moscow during the 30′s, put it succicntly this way: “If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.” The understanding of the true nobility of man that emerged from the Reformation-Enlightenment period originated from a simple Biblical concept – that man was made in the likeness of God and was made to be in perfect union with Him. All the heroic struggles for freedom and dignity came from that wellspring.
As for me, like Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Christ is my John Galt. He is the true liberator of mankind. When I realized that the system is far more corrupt than even Ayn Rand could imagine in Atlas SAhrugged, I shrugged many years ago and went to my refuge in the mountains -it’s called the Church.
The independent, honest, hardworking producers of the earth, like the Joe Wurzelbachers are still my heroes too, and I see an inexorable link between the two, the producers and the mystics, that libertarians will hopefully come to see also. The Sarah Palins, like myself, are your friends. The enemy wants to divide us.
One might start with reading GK Chesterton, especially The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy.
