Petition to Stop Atlas Shrugging: Part 8
Step 3: Strengthening the four pillars of our society’s success
Ayn Rand’s famous novel (which this substack is named after) ends with Atlas shrugging – an iconic metaphor for what happens when those who carry the world on their shoulders are pushed to their limit and forced to say, “No more!”. It is my belief that we are getting very close to experiencing this Earth-shaking shrug. How do we stop it from happening?
In this series of posts, I draw on a variety of sources by those who are much smarter than me and pondering the same issues. My goal is to organize the thought process. I hope that you, the reader, see this series as an invitation to an honest, meaningful discussion that will bring us together to work out a constructive and positive way forward.
In the first five posts, I tried to get to the root of our problem, because defining the problem is the first step towards solving it. The rest of this series is devoted to considering possible solutions.
Every now and then, I will follow with a HANDOUT – a succinct one- or two-page summary you will be able to download, print and distribute.
In Part 7 of this series, I talked about the need to simplify and “happify” our world. What better way to achieve that than through increasing our local strengths?
“If you want to fix the world, start with cleaning your own kitchen,” I tell my Gen-Z son when he gets especially frustrated with the brokenness of our society. If we all prioritize the small things we can control, all kitchens will be clean and the world will be a nicer, healthier, friendlier place, won’t it?
I believe there are four fundamental pillars to humanity’s success:
Family
Entrepreneurship and small business
Private property ownership
Faith, empathy and morality
The best news is that all of these society-building blocks are within the reach and control of an individual. Just think about the power of being thus empowered!
Let’s look at each one more closely. Today, I will discuss Family and Entrepreneurship. Private property ownership and Faith will be addressed in detail in my next post.
1. Family
A family unit’s strength is in its members’ love, support and care for each other. Those who are backed by a strong family need not rely on the beneficence of the state – their family will take care of them in time of need. No wonder our modern “nanny state” is attacking the foundations of family any chance it gets: if no one needed the state’s “help”, how would it justify its “need” for expansion?
Luring underage children into the ideology of “transgenderism” not only makes them vulnerable to sexual predation while creating a rift between the child and his or her loving parents, but will likely result in the child thus brainwashed (and often also irreversibly physically altered and sterilized by hormones and/or surgical interventions) never having a family of their own.
More broadly, convincing people that they can be “any gender they want, or no gender”, and promoting LGBTQ2S+ “plurality” is designed to deny and erase the biological reality of the basic building block of our society: a union of a man and a woman that is at the start of any family unit – and of any future generation.
Pitting family members against each other in the “covid vaccination” debacle was another example of governments’ attack on the institution of family.
The source of these “ideas” is communism. Throughout history, communist ideology has always included erosion of family values. One of its main stated aims is to remove what it sees as a “capitalist” institution of the traditional family. This is sold to people as a way to eliminate social and economic inequalities; the same claims are being made today by the “DIE” (diversity, inclusion and equity) enthusiasts. In the Soviet Union, for example, divorce was made easier (that was one of the first degrees of the new state, issued on 18 December 1917 – a mere couple of months after the October Revolution!), women were encouraged and incentivized to work outside the home, and the state undertook to take over the care and education of children.
“…the workers’ state will come to replace the family, society will gradually take upon itself all the tasks that before the revolution fell to the individual parents,” wrote a female Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai in her essay titled Communism and the Family (1920).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm
What’s more, the communist state actively invited children to denounce and betray their parents and praised those who placed the interests of the state above those of their own kin. The story of Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old Young Pioneer who in 1932 denounced his father to the political police for aiding “enemies of the Soviet State”, was widely publicized by the state’s propaganda apparatus. As a result of his son’s betrayal, the father was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, where he was subsequently executed.
After Pavlik was allegedly murdered by his family in retaliation, the propaganda machine turned him into a martyr. The communist mouthpiece Maxim Gorky spoke in 1933 of "the heroic deed of Pioneer Pavlik Morozov, the boy who understood that a person who is a relative by blood may well be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared".
Well, if members of that family were indeed murdering each other, communist propaganda machine sure achieved its goal!
We must ensure they never succeed in turning us against each other in such a horrendous way.
Jesse Friedman, known popularly as Hi-Rez, is a Bronx born, Florida raised hip-hop artist who said recently that “recipes for stopping such a one-world, global government range from electing the correct leaders, to curbing the destructive influence of drugs and porn, to homeschooling your kids, to purchasing guns, to eating healthy, and to buying our own land.
But there is a reply that is more graceful and fundamental. It is a prescription as old as time.
Family.
Getting married and having kids. This is the best and most basic way to become independent from the government. …
distance cannot replace the local. Community and familial bonds withstand any circumstance created by government.”
Well said, Mr. Friedman!
2. Entrepreneurship and small business
I am a libertarian and as such firmly believe that free enterprise has been the source of all progress and innovation in our society. People’s ability to earn a livelihood independently of the state dramatically reduces significance and power of the state in their lives.
Not coincidentally, strangulation of small businesses has been the centerpiece of government policy in recent years or even decades, reaching its apogee during covid lockdowns.
Entrepreneurs are a resilient bunch but resilience has its limits: when pushed beyond these limits, people eventually say “enough is enough”. Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) published a report on August 17, 2022, which showed that 54% of businesses were still reporting below-normal revenues and 62% were still carrying unpaid debt taken on during the pandemic, $158,000 on average, according to the estimates. As a result, CFIB reported, more than one in six small businesses across the country were considering going out of business. BNN Bloomberg said on February 7, 2023 that, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, the number of insolvencies filed by Canadian companies in 2022 was up 37.2 per cent compared with 2021.
Atlas shrugged indeed!
And then came the deadline to repay the pandemic loans. Canada’s federal government refused to extend the repayment deadline beyond January 2024, forcing many of the small businesses that survived the “pandemic” into bankruptcy. Let’s not forget that the same government had created the environment of draconian and scientifically unjustified pandemic lockdowns that forced businesses to resort to those loans in the first place.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-braces-possible-wave-business-bankruptcies-2024-02-01/
It is common nowadays to blame “capitalist greed” for the failures of our society. Take, for example, the following substack post from the brilliant Dr. Toby Rogers, which talks about “avarice”:
Here’s the comment I posted on Dr. Rogers’ substack:
“How do we distinguish between AVARICE and SELF-INTEREST? Self-interest is basic human nature.
Communism failed precisely because it tried to change human nature: communists were going to build a society in which no one would act out of self-interest and ended up with a society that was profoundly corrupt - because EVERYONE was acting out of self-interest in ways that were warped by the system that tried to "cancel" self-interest.
Capitalism (before our govts and their buddies the big corporations started tinkering with it) was economically successful because it HARNESSED SELF-INTEREST, instead of trying to change it, and converted that self-interest into actions that benefited the society as a whole, such as creation of wealth.
We are now burning through that wealth at an an ever-increasing pace. What will happen when we run out of it - collapse of society as we know it?”
In other words, a successful society turns individual opportunism into an opportunity for the entire society. Herein lies the original success of capitalism.
In another post, Dr. Rogers talks about “late stage capitalism” and “the corporate takeover of human bodies”.
I felt compelled to comment on that post as well, which resulted in the following discussion:
ME: I must be a hard-core Libertarian, because I do not agree with esteemed Dr. Rogers' statement that "both the market and the government alternative have failed". It’s the state interventionism that has resulted in failure. In other words, markets did not fail. Adulterated markets, distorted by govt interference, have failed.TR: But the corporations that own the government rig the market in their favor. Pfizer writes the rules that the FDA & CDC implement. The government interference you complain about is directed by corporations.ME: Thank you for your comment Dr. Rogers! You make a valid point, and you certainly got me thinking! Here are my thoughts: the fact that "the corporations own the government" means that the governments are corrupt. Therefore, we need tighter controls over and accountability by the governments, not the corporations. Corporations are inherently self-interested, as they should be in order to succeed. Trying to change that would be trying to change human nature - this has been attempted by various stripes of communists and other ideologues time and again, and has always failed. The only useful measure that comes to mind with regard to corporations is that we need very strong and effective anti-trust laws (or another tool to the same effect) in order to prevent monopolies and oligopolies from forming, as they invariably have multiple negative effects on the society as a whole (including formation of "public-private partnerships", which is just another name for corruption of governments by too-powerful mega-corporations).TR: In the last four years there has been a merger of corporations and the state (and the military). I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins -- it's all one big happy crime family. The federal government should be cut in half at least. And I agree with you about anti-trust.ME: Dr. Rogers, you get no argument from me re "one big happy crime family" or that "the federal government should be cut in half at least"! The same certainly applies to provincial and municipal govts here in Canada, and I am sure the situation is similar in the US and world over. Once again, in my opinion the main fault for the status quo lies with the government: too big, too much overreach, too much power. How do we change that? These governments are obviously not going to legislate themselves out of existence.One thing the esteemed Dr. Roger and I agree is the need for “small “c” capitalism”, rooted in the inherent freedom of spontaneous, grassroots, progress-driving human ingenuity as opposed to the top-down “planned economy” approach, which is a communist concept.
Here are a few additional thoughts on the subject of entrepreneurship and business that merit mention here:
Big corporations follow the government model, featuring complete disregard for the people they are supposed to serve.
Why and how are businesses forced to act as an extension of government? For example, why do we require businesses to act as unpaid government sales tax collectors? What compels platforms like AirB&B to take on responsibility for enforcing government licensing laws?
Productivity of a communist society is usually through the floor – it’s a feature of that system, not a bug. People need to be motivated to go to work and run businesses, and in a well-functioning society that motivator is the prospect of success: at the end of the day, this is what makes the world go round. Those who try to erase merit and make the outcome of hard work somehow “equal” to outcome of idleness destroy that motivation. In Canada, after nine years of socialist Liberal Party’s rule, productivity is in a freefall.
Thank you for reading! Stay tuned!