On The Mass Denial of Mass Shootings: The Sandy Hook Question

Two days after the Sandy Hook Shooting, the very large, conservative and politically influential gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), had this to say about the latest and particularly gruesome school shooting in Newton, Connecticut: “No Comment.”

I thought this response was sort of refreshing at first. Maybe like most of Americans today they, too, are so dumbstruck by this mass shooting that a call for profoundly new strategies for dealing with violence in America seems beyond urgent, a subject that should now be front and center in the national debate. Isn’t this time for meaningful reflection and re-assessment of some of our most basic beliefs? Isn’t this a natural reaction when another angry, young, suburban white male lays carnage to an unsuspecting school with the aid of any legal pistol, rifle or machine gun laying around the house? Has the NRA paused to rethink their position that America needs more guns?

Not in this universe. Under the auspice that it would be disrespectful to “politicize” the incident so soon after the tragedy, the NRA took a few days off and then simply re-branded their same old tired argument, which goes something like this:

1.      
   The problem isn’t guns, the problem is violence (“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”).

Yes…but they use guns! When the NRA frames the national debate toward the problem of overall violence in America, the question that gets framed out of that discussion is the most central: How are guns helping? Ironically, the same group of conservative-thinking people who argue for a larger government role in controlling terrorists and women’s bodies – all for the sake of protecting innocent life – suddenly feel their own personal liberty (the right to shoot a gun) is worth more than the lives of now hundreds of innocent schoolchildren, and the lives of those children yet to be gunned down. To talk about gun control legislation is quite simply off the table for these people, and of course for the NRA, whose mission is to put more guns in the hands of more Americans. These people believe that this is the most important thing we should be doing right now, in the name of “freedom”.

2.      
   The problem isn’t guns, the problem is crazy people (and an emerging culture of entitled, liberal, irresponsible and godless strangers who now live among us regular folk).

Yes…but they use guns! Once again, by framing the national debate toward mental illness and a sick and non-traditional America, the more obviously urgent discussion is lost: How are guns helping? If all you can think about when you think about the uniquely violent United States of America is how to find the crazies before they kill, then you’ve missed the point. Of course, there will always be crazy people. But there are lots of ways to be crazy, right? Why do crazy people in this country use guns and go on killing sprees in our schools and movie theatres? Where do these ideas enter the twisted mind? Is it possible that some kind of artificial distinction between our genes and our culture make us believe that these crazy people have not been shaped by the social environment in which they were raised – in a culture that glorifies violence and fame – and one in which guns and bullets are freely available at the nearest Dick’s Sporting Goods?  Instead of reflecting on this more central issue, we get Bill O’Reilly from Fox News telling us that “some kids are just born evil”, and, of course, that a rising tide of liberal, morally dead, atheist, un-American hippies and foreigners are responsible for the imminent destruction of his beloved “traditional America,” an America that never existed.

3.      
   Obama-loving socialists are just using the tragedy to advance their socialist agenda, which includes taking away our God-given right to own assault weapons.

bull·shit (definition)

Noun.  Vulgar. Stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense

Verb.  Talk nonsense to (someone), typically to be misleading or deceptive.

Again, by deflecting from the more central question related to actually reducing this most uniquely American form of violence (mowing down people in public spaces with automatic and semi-automatic military-grade weaponry), we find ourselves debating whether or not we are heading into an era of communism which, don’t forget, is THE key problem facing this country. Another narrative brought into your home by Fox News, and sponsored by the NRA.

Meanwhile, another angry suburban male is stockpiling Glocks he bought down at the gun show, planning the next national massacre.

By the way, am I the only one who has noticed that these mass shooters are always young, white, suburban males? If these mass killers were black, you can be sure we’d be talking about the “black problem!” True, there is the equivalent of a Columbine every day in this country, committed disproportionately by young black males in our cities, but we seem unwilling to accept the fact that the profile of the mass shooter is the profile of a typical teen boy in suburbia. Is this not relevant? The media tells us we have a problem with violence, mental illness, video games, religiosity, Marilyn Manson, etc, etc.. In doing so, we are left with the impression that there is no profile to be found, that just anyone can do these things. But, in reality, it isn’t women or girls, atheists, gamers, crazy people (incidence of violence among the mentally ill is less than in the general population), or even most gun owners who engage in mass shootings – it is typically a young, white, suburban male with easy access to guns. Of course, most young men don’t go on killing sprees, and mental illness is, of course, also part of this profile, but like I said before, there’s a lot of ways to be crazy. Why a mass shooting with massive amounts of firearms? Here, again, the most important question arises:

How are guns helping?

To be clear, we do have a larger problem in this country with violence, a problem that cannot be solved simply by trying to get rid of all the guns lying around. We have to accept the fact that this is not possible, even if we wanted to do it. The government cannot control the quantity of guns in this country, no more than we can build a fence to stop people from jumping our borders. Where there is a will, there’s a way, right? There is merit to the argument that by taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding people, we put ourselves at greater risk to those who will find those same guns and point them directly at us. Exactly how we go about controlling guns in this country is a debate we should be having, but outside the politically misdirected context of creeping socialism or our God-given Constitutional rights. In much the same way that we almost instantaneously enacted the Patriot Act after 9-11, which gave the government sweeping powers to infiltrate our privacy, surveil our digital lives, and feel us up at the airport, or when we stopped kidding ourselves about second-hand smoke and banned smoking in public spaces, or when we banned fully automatic weapons from public sale because we didn’t think you really needed a machine gun to kill deer, or when we imposed limits on toxic and climate-changing emissions from our industries (oh, wait, we haven’t done that yet…), we should be talking about direct and practical ways to control the use of guns in this country. As someone raised in the rural Midwest, in a farming and hunting community, it is easy to see this as a slippery slope. I get it. Anyone who enjoys hunting as a total nature experience gets it. But isn’t this a right we should be willing to negotiate, for the sake of society as a whole?

Historically, Americans are also hyper-sensitive to a future where only outlaws have guns, where a citizen does not have the protected right to protect herself from the real dangers that lurk in our modern world, up to and including a threat from our own government. But does this right trump the life of a 1^st grader in Connecticut who is about to get her face shot off by another disaffected teenage boy who was just grabbed the Glock from his mom’s bedroom? We should be willing to give up some of our ill-defined “freedoms” in this scenario.

On this particular subject – of banning military-grade assault weapons - the peculiar NRA-driven logic employed is based in the more general assertion that you can’t control violence by controlling guns, distinguishing method from motive. Would you outlaw cars to stop car accidents, they ask? This logic seems almost sound until you realize that cars are not guns. Cars have an important and useful purpose in society. The purpose of an assault rifle is to kill another person, preferably many. And just like we accept speeding laws to control people driving those cars, we should readily accept a national ban on assault weapons and a stronger strategy to control the crazies who can, if they wish, buy one legally at the nearest gun shop or mega gun show. If an alienated American male is intent on killing, why should we make it easier for them? I’m sure every kid at Columbine would agree that they would have rather been assaulted with a knife, taser gun, or deer rifle than a pile of semi-automatic and automatic weapons (and hundreds of rounds of ammo) purchased legally from the nearby WalMart.

How are these guns helping?  

Mindless gun advocates then morph these unfounded assumptions into a more dubious claim that we need more guns to protect ourselves from scary people who want to kill us. The narrative goes something like this:

The walls of our fortress communities have been breached by Godless, amoral and un-American forces that seek to destroy us. They are jealous of our success and they want to take our stuff, and our lives, out of spite. They are evil and you should be prepared to kill them if they dare set foot in your community (e.g. Treyvon Martin incident).

With a worldview like this guiding you, you might fail to see the obvious tautological reasoning that follows, which ultimately is this: MORE GUNS = LESS VIOLENCE. Because more people could protect themselves in these situations, the evil villains wouldn’t be able to kill as often, or as many. So, for instance, if teachers at Sandy Hook had been required to carry a concealed weapon, one of them may have been able to shoot the shooter.  Or so the logic goes.

The MORE GUNS = LESS VIOLENCE argument fails the test of logic and falls way short of the empirical evidence. If you examine the facts of gun violence in America, you learn that, overall, areas with the highest levels of gun ownership have the highest levels of gun homicide (contrary to false reports by conservative news media), and that accidents in the home of a gun owner and assaults by a family member living in these homes are the leading cause of homicides in these homes. In other words, if you are shot by someone in the U.S., it will most likely be someone you know – and they will use a gun they obtained from you, your neighbor, or your local gun dealer. Statistically speaking, and despite the disinformation campaign of “facts” sponsored by the NRA, the oft-cited home invasion by a stranger who is shot dead by a gun owner in self-defense, or the mass school shooter for that matter, is a relatively rare event compared to the more common ways people die from guns in this country.

In the case of mass shootings, the guns used are almost always purchased legally in a local store or taken from a home in which guns are stashed for the very purpose of defending against those evil “super predators”, who it turns out are some of their own children (just ask Adam Lanza’s gun-loving mother). In this way, the false logic creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The guns that kill our children are the same guns we bought to protect them! After the Sandy Hook incident, how many well-intentioned parents ran out and bought a gun? How many of those parents will use that gun in a successful thwarting of some stranger in their homes or communities? How many of those guns will fall into the hands of those who would victimize the innocent, or harm someone they know intentionally or by accident? Unfortunately, we do know the answer to these questions, and it does not support the case for more guns in America.

The vacuous argument that MORE GUNS =LESS VIOLENCE just fails the smell test of empirical facts and defies overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Like trying to snuff out a fire by pouring gasoline on it, it’s just doesn’t work.

At the end of the day, if guns equaled less violence, then the U.S., with an estimated 300 million guns, would be the safest place on Earth. We are, in fact, the world’s leader in gun homicide when compared to other developed nations by a longshot.

The Sandy Hook tragedy reminds us, once again, that a national debate over gun control in the U.S. is long overdue. As others have said, talking about a national strategy to stop mass shootings in the early aftermath of such an unthinkable act like this one isn’t “too soon”. It is much too late. A national solution to crime and violence in America starts with the understanding that these phenomena are complex. Only a muti-faceted, comprehensive strategy for curbing gun-related crime and violence in America will have any shot at success. But one part of that larger strategy should be stronger regulation in gun ownership (such as prohibiting sales of guns to the mentally ill), banning assault weapons that serve no useful purpose in a civilized society, and better enforcement of gun laws that already exist. But no such strategy can even be conceived until we are brave enough to ask the most obvious question:

How are guns helping?

Kenneth H. Laundra, Ph.D.

Check out my disc golf course review page HERE with a recent review of the new disc golf course in Decatur, IL at Nelson Park.

Orwell's Era: Corporate Governance as Big Brother

     

An essay by Kenneth H. Laundra

The United States is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy. We are ruled by the wealthy in every conceivable way, in every conceivable corner of society. We have reached the point where almost every major policy decision, at every political level, is made in deference to multinational corporate interests. Often, these elite interests quite obviously collide with the common good of the vast majority of average Americans, but are easily obfuscated through a media system ruled by the invisible, but heavy hand of highly organized, global, corporate profit seeking, manifest in the corporate form today. These interests control the rules and they control the collective narrative, allowing a new form of dictatorial rule and exploitation of most Americans, and those interests are increasingly consolidated.

plu·toc·ra·cy /pluˈtɒkrəsi/ [ploo-tok-ruh-see]

1. the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy.

2. a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.

Let’s shine some light on American inequality today, in an Orwellian society where almost all human interaction is mediated through manufactured desires (victory gin, anyone?), in which overwhelming influence over congress comes from multinational corporations instead of real people, and “where money not only talks, it screams.” While it is true that the U.S. has more very rich people than ever before, the percentage of those who are wealthy is far less today, so that now about 1% of Americans own almost half of all the wealth. The middle class is shrinking and the number of working poor is staggeringly high for such a wealthy society. Incomes for the top 1% continued to rise through the most recent economic crisis (brought on by those same interest groups through fraudulent, unregulated corporate banking, mortgage and investment schemes) while middle and working class families experience stagnant or falling wages and dramatic price increases for just about everything, not just gas and food. The evidence for these new economic realities is not hard to find online and doesn’t need to be regurgitated here, including a recent conversation with Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Paul Krugman and an intriguing article recently published in Vanity Fair.

Of course, most middle class Americans don’t need scholarship on the issue to tell them that times are harder than ever before. Daily life is our proof. We are working harder and longer for less, a reality we see firsthand every day. But seeing is not always believing. It is probably more accurate to say that we believe what we think we see, which begs the question, who is telling us what we see? More to the point, how is our worldview shaped in this modern era of ubiquitous telecommunications, where more than ever the “medium is the message”? 

It is utterly baffling that these realities are not readily acknowledged by every single semi-conscious American, regardless of political party affiliation. Baffling, that is, until you consider the modern day propaganda machine and its corporate origins. What might seem like honest public debate over the role of government in America, individualism, or free market principles is, upon closer inspection, actually a heavily contrived narrative produced through a network of “astroturf” (as opposed to truly grassroots) movements funded by just a handful of elite interests. For instance, Americans for Prosperity, one of the largest Republican think tanks, and the foundation of what came to be known as the “Tea Party”, is actually a front for the Koch Brothers (ranking numbers 5^th and 6^th on the richest Billionaire’s List), designed to serve their conglomerate of industries and media operations (see “The Billionaires Tea Party”,worth watching). Coupled with a 24-hour propaganda platform disguised as real news, with Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Beck barking out the playbook, it is easier to understand how nearly 30% of Americans continue to believe that climate change is a liberal myth, that universal health care is a direct path to socialism, and that the President of the United States has not produced a valid birth certificate, is secretly Muslim and openly Marxist.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Corporations are people.

Orwellian doublespeak like this is more easily choked down through mainstream, round-the-clock opinion news sources like Fox News and CNN where, if you say something enough times people believe it. This media net is vast, pervasive and utterly inescapable, even for the three remaining people on the planet that do not, as yet, have a Facebook account. But the apparent array of diverse choices for news and entertainment, from YouTube to 60 Minutes, is illusory because, in fact, just a handful of corporate entities own and operate virtually everything you see and hear in every media outlet.

Ignoring this basic fact, we tune into the channel we trust (and never that other channel), never questioning the choice of headlines, or lack of stories about the really important stuff we are never told about. If you don’t believe me, just turn on Fox News right now, where they are either analyzing the latest murder trial or debating whether Obama is a bad President or the worst President ever. By ignoring important stories about corporate malfeasance, the current environmental crises, or global inequality and human suffering and, instead, focusing on fear and political divisiveness - and knowing full well that both major parties are in their pockets - corporate media are able to shape the American worldview for their own privilege and profit. It is an intentional distraction.

In America today, the wealthiest country in the world, about 1 in 4 children live below the official poverty line. Did you know that? Who told you?

If you accept this premise, that corporations largely control both Republican and Democratic parties, it is not difficult to imagine what true corporate governance through the media might look and sound like. You would hear “experts” justifying a corporate bailout by middle class taxpayers while simultaneously ignoring the root (corporate) causes of the crisis. You would see devastating images of the country’s worst oil spill - in the form of an oil-soaked Pelican - devoid of any substantive discussion of a country addicted to oil and in desperate need of a modern energy plan. You would hear alarmists demanding that we reduce the federal deficit by .0001% by outlawing teachers unions or by defunding NPR , and that we cut Medicare for seniors as a top national priority, while simultaneously announcing that a closer inspection the military budget and its trillion dollar wars (which constitutes nearly half of the entire federal budget)  is simply “off the table” and not up for debate. You would hear testimony from anti-evolution politicians who are certain the planet is just six thousand years old that the overwhelming evidence (and dire consequences) of man-made climate change presented by literally thousands of reputable climatologist across the globe is an organized hoax. You would not see accurate coverage of the largest, most diverse public protests in American history that took place across the country in every major city in the past few years over health care costs, education and poverty. In defense of the corporate agenda, cleverly disguised as a defense of American individualism, you might even see a re-make of the movie, Atlas Shrugged!

And people will believe, despite any contradictions to reason, because people tend to fear the unknown, which in this case is unfiltered information about the world around us. We will believe because we do not believe there is an alternative story to be told, and because we fear changing our pre-existing worldview. We fear changing our mind because it is easier not to, and the role of corporate media has been to incite fear and to entrench opposing ideologies against each other.

Given that true power in an information age is control over information, doesn’t today’s corporate media conglomerate become the Big Brother that Orwell imagined, in that it is all-encompassing, both producing and pacifiying our fears? In both essence and practice, claims that commodify life, reducing everything in life to economic value, are propagated while ideas that might threaten the dominant, corporate worldview become thoughtcrimes, handled bureaucratically through either selective media newspeak, or what Noam Chomsky calls manufactured consent, which often consists of not talking about it at all.

As imagined by George Orwell, in his apocalyptic future novel, 1984, such a society would also necessitate unprecedented surveillance of its citizens and a fusion of mind and body control. These Big Brother invasions of the private sphere would be justified with large scale fear campaigns designed to convince citizens that their personal safety is in unprecedented peril and that heightened government security and surveillance is a necessary moral imperative for a misguided nation. In true doublespeak, they might also decry government involvement in corporate affairs as the best means for ensuring social stability and economic prosperity.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Corporations are people. And that is why this happened, and also why this is happening, with no serious public opposition whatsoever.

Being a socially responsible American means being an informed and engaged citizen. It means participating in both local and global communities, making life fairer and helping those who suffer. And more now than ever, it requires us to look behind the media veil, to pull back the curtain and see the true face of Big Brother whom, if he had a face today, would necessarily be that of a corporate lawyer. We have to seek out alternative stories being told in the corners of cyberspace, in the margins of mainstream news, and in our treasured tradition of intellectual freedom on our campuses to balance the misshapen images cast by the dominant corporate agenda that functions solely for global profits and which, consequently, has a vested interest in what you think is happening out there in the world.

                                                                              

We should be more like Winston Smith, the hero in Orwell’s timeless novel, who refused to lie when asked how many fingers his malevolent torturer was holding up, despite knowing he would be tortured again and again until he conceded. Admirably, he resisted easy answers and spoke truth to power because of his commitment to an ideal higher than any other – freedom of thought. Although Winston was ultimately rendered powerless, we are not, at least not yet. And like Winston, we should resist. We should resist a false narrative driven by a single-minded corporate worldview because it is falsely singular and one-dimensional, seeking profit over all else, and at the expense of all those nonmaterial things that make life worth living, such as relationships with other human beings not mediated by economics. More than that, it is a repressive force that hinders human evolution, intellectual growth and enlightenment.

As humans, we are dependent upon the diversity of life on this planet for our very survival. Thus, as co-evolvers with other species we have an innate awareness in the benefits of coexistence with diverse others because we know that without these vibrant interactions we would be diminished in every way. So we value diversity in all its forms, but especially diversity of thought, because it buys us something corporate interests are unable to sell. It provides us with an opportunity for intellectual growth and moral development that is not constrained by any single claim or worldview (like capitalism or religious dogma). It provides us with a sociological imagination that allows us to understand our society from various vantage points that cut across class, culture, gender and race. Diversity of thought provides us with a strong community of free thinkers - and all the other things money can’t buy.

These are the reasons for resisting the mainstream mandate pushed forward by multinational corporate interests, for questioning their authority, and for speaking truth to power. In truth, our willingness to question authority is the reason for the resistance. Like Winston, we are compelled to seek the truth in the face of coercive powers bent on obscuring it. This is what makes us fully human, and not merely corporate objects valued solely for our ability to consume and produce.

How many fingers am I holding up? Just one. My middle finger.  

*For a more thorough expose’ on corporate media control, see the Link TV special: 

http://www.linktv.org/programs/special_orwellrolls

                                      

Published online in Sosh Chat, 6/28/2011                                             

Kenneth H. Laundra, Ph.D. | Department of Behavioral Sciences | Millikin University

klaundra@millikin.edu

The Dump: A Visual Exploration of Illegal Dumping on Public Lands in Rural America

Academic paper about rural dumping, forthcoming in Visual Sociology:
https://sites.google.com/site/kenlaundrasoc/Home/additional-scholarship/the-dump

Atlas Shrugged - double-checkin those premises

A Critique of Atlas Shrugged
By Ken Laundra

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.        -Paul Krugman

“Who is John Galt?” The phrase is, according to author Ayn Rand, used by the characters in her book to say something equivalent to, “well, that’s just the way it is and nothing can be done”. Used in this sense, the novel’s message of the value of reason, free thought and rational self interest as a means to happiness and prosperity (known more formally afterwards as objectivism) is advanced by comparing this ideal to the presumably more lackluster ideology behind the Galt phrase which represents a belief in irrational ideas such as altruistic intentions and valuing policies aimed at the common good over profit-seeking.

Ok fine, sounds good to me so far, although I must confess to a nagging voice in my head while reading this book that something was logically askew or, more to the point, missing from the fundamental thesis of the book. I was also often bored while listening to business details of a hypothetical (and historically inaccurate) train industry, a subject (like business principles in general) that does not crank my gears at all. The writing was frigid and devoid of human compassion (including the sex scenes), probably because compassion for humanity as a whole is apparently an abhorrently unprofitable excursion from the more noble pursuit of malevolent and egotistical industrialism. Let’s break it down:

The thesis of the book need not be regurgitated by me, the ideological center of her belief is commonly asserted in any cliff note summary, such as this one:

Great creative minds such as Galt's, by definition, think new thoughts and discover new knowledge. They neither conform to social belief nor obey a tyrant's command. They follow their own vision and pursue their own truth. In making intellectual breakthroughs, people like John Galt lead mankind's progress. The creative mind looks only at the facts, whether of metallurgy, energy conversion, or another field. It does not bow to the whims of a dictator. If people like Floyd Ferris or Wesley Mouch can, by decree, stifle or redirect the research being done by a Galt or a Rearden, they've placed a gun between the great mind and the facts that it studies. This explains why the freest countries are the most advanced, and why the brutal dictatorships that proliferate across the globe wallow in backwardness and abysmal poverty. Galt's strike recognizes that the first right of human beings is the freedom to think and act independently. The result of this freedom is the unshackling of the human mind and a dramatic rise in living standards.
(source: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/Atlas-Shrugged-Critical-Essays-The-Role-of-the-Mind-in-Human-Life-in-Atlas-Shrugged.id-7,pageNum-90.html)

I had high hopes for this novel, particularly since it was written by a scholar of obvious high intelligence, and an advocate for reason, rationality and atheism. On its face, the logic seems sound and, moreover, it is an attractive idea. Don’t block a bright mind from innovation through the pursuit of self interest and profit, for this is the means by which societies prosper, both intellectually and economically. Conversely, since government intervention and regulatory policies block such progress, such acts are necessarily evil, characterized as “looting” by Rand throughout the novel.

But these ideas are only comprehensible when you assume that societies always prosper with unrestricted, free market principles and that societies always fail when policies aimed at the common good are advanced instead. She characterizes these conflicting ideologies as incompatible, reminding us to “check our premises”, but provides a shallow and unconvincing argument that these causal effects actually occur in the real world, outside a fantastically fictional world where a mere handful of heroically brave, wealthy industrial elites are held back by a mass of uneducated slackers that, evidently, comprise the majority of mankind. In what universe does such a society with such one dimensional people exist?

Furthermore, Rand’s indignation and contempt for the working class ruins her attempt at shallow reason. What a pompous ass! To assume that such an elite group of self-interested, rational individuals exist, and that by simply unshackling them from the burdens of social and moral responsibility we would all enter into a utopian era of prosperity is laughable to me. But an even greater leap of reason might be her assertion that a keen understanding of free market principles, void of irrational concern for the welfare of others, is the ultimate key to human enlightenment and happiness. For reals?

If the social consequences of a de-regulated, private banking industry (the 2008 trillion dollar bank bailout due to fraudulent lending and accounting practices), or the consequences of unregulated gulf oil rigs (BP Oil Spill 2010), or the consequences of profit-driven war for increasingly scarce oil (the decade long, 3 trillion dollar wars with Iraq and Afghanistan), or the consequences of not adopting Kyoto climate change protocols in time to save the planet’s ecosystems because it is deemed “too expensive” are not sufficient examples of rational self-interest run amuck, then you have obviously crash landed your brain into John Galt canyon.

Time and time again, throughout history, deregulated industries have broken all moral covenants with the overall welfare of society by exploiting workers, lowering wages, defrauding consumers, trimming worker benefits, outsourcing jobs, and polluting the environment – all in the name of short term profit-seeking for the company’s stockholders. It cannot be reasonably argued that the invisible hand of the free market does not regularly slap society across the face when given a chance, that it always benefits the common good, particularly when you consider the important difference between a high quality of life and a merely high standard of living, a distinction Rand does not appear to grasp the significance of.

Wealth does not guarantee happiness (although it certainly helps), but in conflating these two distinct human goals, Rand makes the erroneous assertion that they are synonymous achievements (e.g. John Galt, the ideological hero of Atlas Shrugged, argues that "a free mind and a free market are corollaries"), and that, hence, in accumulating wealth you will attain self-fulfillment. This claim is only evidenced in a fairy tale of industrialist dreams that is Atlas Shrugged. In the real world of actual people, we strive for satisfying relationships with other people, wealthy or poor as they may be, and we are cognizant of our social responsibilities and common plight as one species on a fragile, interactive planet. We value diversity of ideas and diverse cultural experiences from people of all walks of life, capitalist or communist in orientation, and most of these cherished relationships are not grounded in economic exchange or mediated through economic principles at all. There is simply much more to life and more to value about our fellow human beings than Rand is willing to acknowledge. In fact, by asserting that economic structures dictate our social experiences so fully and completely, Rand reveals herself as more Marxist in orientation than many socialists living today! There’s a contradiction for ya, Ayn!

At its best, Rand’s free market worldview is overly idealistic, not well grounded in the actual, complex patterns of human interaction. At its worst, it is an ironically totalitarian manifesto, founded in a clear bias toward the peculiar economic morality of production and greed. Given the spectrum of contrary and negative outcomes that the capitalist agenda has levied on us throughout human history, one can only conclude that Atlas Shrugged falls on its face, in the face of facts and reason. It seems reasonable, then, to wonder if Rand should reconsider this contradiction and - check her premises.

Ken L.