Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (6 page)

Let’s be honest here—90 percent of the crap you learn in school is useless out in the real world. Will you ever need to know who Archduke Franz Ferdinand was in any rational social setting? No, you won’t (he was the ostensible trigger for World War I, if you’re curious). Will you ever be asked to find the cosine of an isosceles triangle at a dinner party?
Nyet
(unless you hang out with some really weird people, or mathematicians). The presumptive
eating habits of the northern European aurochs? Seriously. Just no.

All the little facts, all the trivia, all the dates and places and names are not the reason you’re graduating. Everything you need to know to function in your job, you’ll learn at your job. Sure, there’s some general knowledge you’ve hopefully picked up—how to add and subtract so you don’t get shortchanged at the grocery store; the cardinal directions of a compass in case you get lost; that you shouldn’t piss upstream of where you get your drinking water—but, really, that’s applicable no matter what you choose to do.

No, the reason you’re graduating is that (hopefully) you’ve learned how to interact with other people, how to navigate social situations, and how to master new information, no matter what it might be. The world is made up of all sorts of different people, and it doesn’t matter what grades any of you got, what classes you took, if you didn’t learn the most important lesson of all.

People are complex. People are incredibly kind and amazingly selfish. People are altruistic angels and conniving sociopaths. People are smart, stupid, wise, foolish, funny, boring, and so many other things it would take me all day to list them. People were at the parties you went to, throwing up on the balcony, dancing on the tables, making questionable decisions, having a good time, and creepily eyeing the pretty girls (or pretty boys, whatever makes them happy).

Every conversation you had over a beer, or in your dorm room, or during class; every interaction with anyone you ever met was a lesson about the real world and what you’ll find in it. That asshole professor who said your work wasn’t good enough and who gave you lower grades than you deserved? Yeah, you’ll
meet him again in life. He’ll probably be your boss, and he’ll be just as much of a dick.

Side note: If any of you professors out there realize that this applies to you, stop being such a dick. Seriously. I know you have to deal with a lot of students, but remember that your behavior influences them just as much as your subject matter does. You’re role models for children who will one day be role models for other children, and the lessons you pass down will continue long after you’re gone.

Back to the students. The classes you took—not important. What’s important is that you learned
how
to learn during those classes, how to distill information from a variety of sources to get at the small nuggets of truth hidden within. Don’t just blindly follow whatever a book says; examine who wrote it and what her agenda might have been, what biases she may have brought with her. Logic and reason are your friends, and if you can’t logically connect the dots in an argument, ANY argument, then your opinion is not worth listening to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with people who base their arguments on “Because I think that’s the way it is” or “Because that’s the way it’s always been done,” or how many times I’ve heard people cite statistics without knowing what they actually mean or how they were acquired. These people never learned how to
learn
—they learned how to parrot. Please, don’t be a parrot.

Question everything, but don’t do it just for the sake of being contrary (though that can be fun at times). Question when the stats don’t line up with the conclusion being drawn, question when the ethical implications are clearly wrong, question whenever you think someone is trying to hide something or pass a lie off as the truth, because
that’s
what you should have been learning.
How to think for yourself. How not to be a slave to someone else’s unthinking dogma. How to live your own life.

So go forth and live your own life. Whatever you choose to do, do it to the best of your ability, but never forget the people around you, the people you interact with. Our world is only as good as we’re willing to make it, and that means treating others how we want to be treated, letting others live in freedom so they’ll let us do the same. No matter how much or how little money you make, how successful (or not) your career is, all we have is each other.

All we have are the people we spend our lives with.

Good luck.

T
he core of a stable society is a tripod, the legs of which are the following:

Empathy—Without its people possessing a fully developed sense of empathy, a society has no freedom. It is only through accepting the differences of others that a stable polity can develop, and any attempt to marginalize or discriminate against minority groups will lead to conflict farther down the road as they agitate for equality wrongfully denied them.

Logic—The ability to reason and make decisions free of fear and ignorance is the only way to create beneficial long-term growth in a society. Coupled with empathy, logic allows individuals to make altruistic choices that benefit the many over the few by promoting an atmosphere of
equality—as life gets better for everyone, opportunities for conflict diminish.

Enlightened Self-Interest—The drive to constantly improve, but not at the cost of long-term harm to the society, is the core of enlightened self-interest. Combined with logic, this leads to the understanding that short-term gains are never prioritized over long-term consequences; the citizens understand that the society will endure after an individual passes on. Coupled with empathy, enlightened self-interest will never cost another individual his rights, as that leads inevitably to conflict.

The rights of individuals in a stable society are:

The Right to Free Will—Whatever actions consenting adults take that do not deprive other individuals of the opportunity to exercise their own free will are nobody’s goddamned business but the people’s involved. Live your own life and let other people live theirs.

The Right to Knowledge—All individuals must have access to the fundamental basics of education and all information available in the society. The only way for a person to make rational choices is to have all the information in hand so he can weigh the potential benefits and consequences. Ignorance can be only a personal choice, not the enforcement of others. All requests for information will themselves be a matter of public record; a truly free society has no need for privacy laws because everyone knows who is watching at any given time.

The Right to Humanity—Any individual, regardless of race, gender, species, or origin (biological or nonbiological), who can demonstrate empathy, logic, and enlightened self-interest shall be regarded as human and benefit from all rights and protections afforded thereof. Appearances don’t mean a thing. Actions do.

S
o I forced myself to read
Atlas Shrugged
. Apparently I harbor masochistic tendencies; it was a long, hard slog, and by the end I felt as if Ayn Rand had violently beaten me about the head and shoulders with words. I feel I would be doing all of you a disservice (especially those who think Rand is really super-duper awesome) if I didn’t share some thoughts on this weighty tome.

Who is John Galt?

John Galt (as written in said novel) is a deeply flawed, sociopathic ideal of the perfect human. John Galt does not recognize the societal structure surrounding him that allows him to exist. John Galt, to be frank, is a turd.

However, John Galt is also very close to greatness. The only thing he is missing, the only thing Ayn Rand forgot to take into account when writing
Atlas Shrugged,
is empathy.

John Galt talks about intelligence and education without
discussing who will pay for the schools, who will teach the teachers. John Galt has no thought for his children, or their children, or what kind of world they will have to occupy when the mines run out and the streams dry up. John Galt expects an army to protect him but has no concern about how it’s funded or staffed. John Galt spends his time in a valley where no disasters occur, no accidents happen, and no real life takes place.

John Galt lives in a giant fantasy that’s no different from an idealistic communist paradise or an anarchist’s playground or a capitalist utopia. His world is flat and two-dimensional. His world is not real, and that is the huge, glaring flaw with objectivism.

John Galt does not live in reality.

In reality, hurricanes hit coastlines, earthquakes knock down buildings, people crash cars or trip over rocks or get sick and miss work. In reality, humans make good choices and bad choices based on forces even they sometimes don’t understand. To live with other human beings, to live in society, requires that we understand that shit happens and sometimes people need a safety net. Empathy teaches us that contributing to this safety net is beneficial for all, because we never know when it will be our turn.

If an earthquake destroys half the merchandise in my store or levels my house, that’s something I can’t control; it doesn’t matter how prepared I was or how hard I worked. Trying to recover from something like that can cripple a person, both financially and mentally, unless he has some help from those who understand that we’re all in this together, we need each other to function as a society, and the next earthquake might hit one of
our
houses.

If a volcano erupts and takes out vital transportation and infrastructure, should we just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Not my responsibility”? No, because it
is
our responsibility.
It’s our responsibility as members of a societal group to take care of the underlying foundations of peace and security—to ensure that the roads and rails are protected because they provide a collective good.

To be fair to John Galt, though, the safety net cannot be a security blanket. If you hand one person everything in life by taking it away from someone else, then the will to succeed rapidly fades on both sides; why work when it doesn’t matter? Look at any of the idle rich, the spoiled children of privilege, the welfare collectors who churn out babies because it means another weekly check to buy shoes or purses. Ayn Rand got it right up to that point but fails to make the next logical step.

If you want to get rid of the moocher, you don’t do it by excluding everyone you think could be a moocher, by building your own private jail with yourself as both warden and prisoner. No, if you want to rid yourself of the moocher, you do it by focusing on and teaching rational empathy. If you treat other people the way you want to be treated, you’ll never want someone else to live your life for you, because shackling others means you’ve chosen to shackle yourself. We’re all free, or we’re all slaves.

No one wants to take care of someone who does nothing in return, provides no value for society (I’m ignoring babies and children here, because they’re kind of necessary to the long-term survival of humanity), and so the corollary applies—if you feel that everyone should be free to live his or her own life, the safety net can never become a permanent solution, because if you rely overmuch on it, then you’re no longer living your own life.

Just as you don’t want other people to be an unnecessary burden on you, you should desire just as much not to be an unnecessary burden on others. If you take handouts when you no longer
need them, you’ve turned yourself into a slave to someone else. If you think that other people have to take care of you but that you don’t have to take care of them in return, you’re trying to enslave those who would provide for you. If you make people dependent on you by limiting their opportunities for education and work and requiring them to subsist on a dole, you’ve taken away their chance at free will, at making their own lives.

John Galt as written lacks this rational empathy. John Galt is brilliant but doesn’t have the long-term vision to maintain the society that allowed his brilliance to flourish. John Galt is self-motivated but has no concern for the effects of his actions on other people. John Galt is a lone individual living in a world filled with countless teeming masses, and just as John Galt plants his feet on the backs of all those who came before him, he must provide a surface for future generations to plant their feet as well, not through sacrificing everything he owns but by realizing a stable society is ultimately a productive society.

But that’s not John Galt. A world full of Ayn Rand’s John Galts is a world that will eventually consist of only one person, and then none, once his lifespan concludes. John Galt doesn’t care for the disasters that affect his neighbors—they can sink or swim on their own (and they’ll sink). John Galt doesn’t care for the public good, because all he can see is his own good (and he’ll wonder why it gets harder and harder to get the resources he needs). John Galt doesn’t recognize that genius arises under any circumstances (and he’ll never know how many geniuses he excluded from paradise because their parents didn’t fit his ideals, or why the population keeps shrinking).

John Galt is a remorseless shark feeding on those unable to get out of his way, the blood-churned waters boiling around him as he
takes in everything he requires for his own happiness without thought of the cost to others, rending and tearing the stability of social interactions until his once-teeming world is barren and lifeless, collapsed under the gluttonous appetite of self.

Then he starves, and no one is left to mourn his passing.

Are you John Galt?

I
’ve been doing some serious thinking lately, and I’ve decided I’m going to take the plunge. There’s no reason not to—the benefits are quite substantial, and there’s really no downside to doing it. Frankly, the more time I spend in the modern world, the more surprised I am that someone hasn’t figured it out earlier.