Ayn Rand: The Key to Rush Limbaugh
Today I realized that the key to Rush Limbaugh's Crazytown is Ayn Rand. Particularly Atlas Shrugged, which he references frequently.
Rand's philosophy can be summed up with a single word: selfishness. Or, in more Rand-ian terms, "enlightened self-interest."
Atlas Shrugged depicts a world where government interference has run amok in the business world. To quote Limbaugh (an outspoken fan), "It is basically about the achievers of life quitting, because they're tired of being 1% of the population pulling the other 99% in the cart."
Now first of all, I am blown away by someone who on the one hand is vehemently anti-intellectual. And who on the other hand espouses the rarefied philosophy of one of the world's most intellectual authors, and is such a fan that he can neatly and accurately sum up her 1,100-page treatise in one tidy sentence.
But if you can set aside that cognitive dissonance (I know it's hard, but try) everything Rush has ever done or said suddenly makes sense. Take school lunch programs, which Rush Limbaugh is against. Rand would say that providing free lunches to poor children isn't doing them a favor in the long term. "Teach a man to fish," and all that.
If the kids go hungry, it will motivate them to work harder and earn their own lunch. Hunger is a great motivator, and I bet it would really motivate that hungry inner-city eight year-old to buckle down and go for straight As in math! (Well, those of us in the real world know that it will only motivate him to drop out early and join a gang because where else is a hungry uneducated inner-city eight year-old going to make a living?)
The same goes for every single social program you can think of. According to Rand, any attempt to level the playing field is just another way to embrace mediocrity. It pushes the inferior farther than they have any right to go, and hampers the achievements of the superior.
The problem is that, just like every other white guy in this country, Rush Limbaugh is unaware of the benefits that his double privilege (white privilege and male privilege) has accorded him. He wouldn't have gotten where he is without the benefits of our corrupt and evil society.
John Galt is the key figure in Atlas Shrugged, and Rush references him often. Galt is the man who convinces society's leaders to quit. He galvanizes the heads of industry and the arts - the 1% Rush references in his summary - to put down the cart, thus bringing about the downfall of that society. Hooray!
Rush obviously sees himself as a real-world John Galt. Except that he isn't willing to go that extra step and quit his job and stop paying taxes and convince others to do the same. Pity that Rush isn't willing to stand up for his ideals.
Instead, he is content to live off the society he sees as corrupt (damn that meddling government, maintaining the Interstate system and funding 911!) while standing in the corner flinging poo and pretending he's better than us.
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The Atlas Rush Shrugged
There are two parts to the John Galt speech that Rush has seemed to shrug-off.
The first part seems to be addressed to Rush's followers -- his ditto-heads:
“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it-that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life-that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence."
The second part seems to be addressed at Rush himself:
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud-that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee-that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling-that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others."
Does anyone else see the relevance of these to passages to Rush and his followers?
BR
PS Emphasis mine