We the Living and the “common good” — VOICES for REASON

The election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate has a lot of pundits clamoring about a resurgence of the Republican Party. Let’s hope not. The last thing this country needs is a resurgence of the same Republican Party which, as Don Watkins noted on Monday, has become virtually indistinguishable from the Democratic Party in its fundamental philosophy. Although there’s presently a lot of tension between the two political camps, most of what President Obama is doing was already done by President Bush, and Republican “alternatives” to Obama’s proposals are typically nothing more than watered-down versions of Democrat bills.

What is that philosophy? As Don notes, it’s the idea that “the government has the right to force us to sacrifice our freedom, interests, and desires for the sake of the ‘common good.’”

If you want a sense of what’s wrong with this idea, I recommend Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, which is set in Communist Russia—a society that implemented the idea of sacrifice for the “common good” as its fundamental principle. You’ll get a wrenching depiction of the misery and oppression of a totalitarian society (as well as a moving, plot-driven story filled with the heroic figures typical of an Ayn Rand novel), and a preliminary understanding of why life beneath a government wholly dedicated to the “common good” has to be so horrific.

In that vein, I’d also like to recommend this interview with Dr. Leonard Peikoff in the January Impact, the monthly newsletter of the Ayn Rand Institute. Dr. Peikoff was a friend and student of Ayn Rand for more than thirty years, and wrote the introduction to the new trade edition of We the Living. He’s also the author of Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand and The Ominous Parallels. Here’s an excerpt in which Dr. Peikoff discusses the universal evil of totalitarianism and why We the Living is so relevant today—especially to the United States:

The timeless evil of totalitarianism derives from two fundamental ideas: unreason and self-sacrifice. Which amounts to: give up your mind, and thus lose any means of independent judgment; and give up your values, and thus lose any independent purpose. If this is what people come to accept, they’re ripe for a dictator to tell them: “OK, this is what to think and this is what to value”; in other words, “now I control you in thought and action, soul and body.” That is the definition of totalitarianism—total state control over every aspect of the individual.

These two essentials underlie every totalitarian regime—from the medieval Christians preaching worshipful faith in and service to God (Christianity is the historical originator of totalitarianism) on through their twentieth-century variants. According to Communism, truth is determined not by your mind, but by the dialectic process as interpreted by adepts in proletarian logic, and service is sacrifice to the (correct) economic class. For Hitler, truth is grasped by Aryan instinct or blood, while service is sacrifice to the (correct) race. The result in all three cases was rule by institutionalized brutality—the Inquisition, the GPU, the Gestapo—with all of its anti-life consequences: mass impoverishment, mass terror, and piles of corpses.

The relevance of We the Living lies in the fact that these deadly ideas are spreading in the United States today. They are more than spreading; they are essential to our intellectual Establishment, and have now been adopted across the political spectrum, with an intensity unprecedented in American life. Conservatives uphold faith as against reason; and morality, their faith tells them, is service to God (which includes sacrifice for the sub groups of have-nots picked out by the Bible). The liberals uphold principled ignorance, i.e., skepticism, as against reason; and their ignorance somehow leads them to demand sacrifice for the very same biblical favorite.

In many respects beyond politics, the United States is moving rapidly toward and getting ever closer to totalitarianism. The heritage of our Founding Fathers is still a large obstacle to the statists, but that heritage is now crumbling before our eyes.

Read more here.