Ayn Rand

All philosophers cum novelists of some renown are seldom plagued with self-doubt. The Russian emigre came across supremely confident of her views which were built on her premise that self-interest was the best philosophy for mankind.

We all do philosophy, just as we all do politics, consciously or not---that's where the difference lies. A philosopher is merely a person who does philosophy consciously. Truths are often circumstancial and conditional. Very few truths are unitary and absolute although there's much validity in the saying that everything that rises will converge. Rand's views were a reaction of spending her formative years in Russia under communist totalitarianism where all values were subject to Marxist determinism and statism. She failed to see virtues in some form of governmental intervention to curb the excesses of unrestrained free enterprises. In spite of talking about free will, she failed to see that her thinking itself was a product of her environment. Very few humans are not affected by the enviroment where they grew up.

Because I was turned off by her philosophy of self-interest, I purposely avoided her writings. In these waning moments of my life on this planet, I am getting more open-minded. I recently checked out a book about the interviews she gave out during her life. I was struck by the incredible vigor of her thought process. The following is an excerpt with clear implications for theism and political activism. Sharing this excerpt is my indirect answer to those who challenged me intellectually and politically. It explained my earlier decision to post a clumsy poem written in French although I only had three years of French in high school. If I may add, I do philosophy consciously.

"Even though we all perceive the same reality, men still approach reality in antithetical ways---altruistically versus egoistically, as one example. This indicates that all men do not proceed from that initial perception of reality to the same conclusions. Yet you say that men must grasp the first principles of reality, proceed through an objective system of logic and arrive at the same conclusions.

AR: ...Men do not know everything, and the content of their consciousness is not always correct. All we can learn from the fact that human beings differ is what we can learn about ourselves introspectively---namely, that men do not know things automatically and they do not know them infallibly. Every human being has to acquire his knowledge by a volitional process of observing, thinking, reasoning, learning.

Very few men conscientiously go through that process. Most men act mainly according to their emotions, or they simply accept by osmosis whatever ideas are floating around in their culture. So there will be differences among men. Man has to pursue knowledge throughout his life if he wants to survive. The purpose of knowledge is to define, on a wider and wider scale, what is true about the world in which we live and how we should act in relation to it. You look at the facts and you ask yourself: "What is true?" Once you have discovered the truth, you may then be concerned with communicating it to others But to arrive at the truth you have to use a process of reason. That is all that should concern you---not the fact many of them may disagree."