The New Left

In these essays from the 1960s and early 1970s, Ayn Rand identifies the underlying nihilism of the Left and the student movement of the time. Already back then, she warned of the toxic influence of the left and pointed out that the intellectual battle does not consist of opposing, denouncing or evading, but of exposing and disproving evil ideas and proclaiming a consistent alternative to the left's bankrupt philosophy. In the essay Apollo and Dionysus, she compares the 1 million people that converged on Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11 with the 300 000 that gathered at Woodstock on August 15 that year. Rand explores these events in the light of Nietzsche's metaphysical principles of reason and emotion as observed in Greek theatre. Whilst denying that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists, she shows how the media virtually ignored the one event while blowing the significance of the other out of all proportion. On the one hand, decent people were sharing an event of great achievement and on the other, self-indulgent hedonists behaving like pigs. As she explains so eloquently, it is irrational emotions that drag people down into the mud, and it is reason that lifts us up to the stars. In the essay The Left: Old And New, Rand predicted that the issue of the environment would be the next big crusade of the Leftists, after Vietnam. In this, as on so many other issues, she was correct and we still have the EnviroNuts with us and they are shriller than ever before with their self-serving tooth fairy tales of global warming. The short essay "Political Crimes" looks at the dangerous notion that there could be a distinction between political and non-political criminals. Crime is a violation of the rights of others by force of fraud, thus there is no such thing as a political crime. The essay The Chicken's Homecoming discusses the results of promulgating doctrines like Pragmatism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, and how these doctrines disarmed the best and unleashed the nihilists. In this regard, see The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. The Age Of Envy is one of the very best in this collection. In it, Rand claims that the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment had been followed by ours, the Age of Envy. She takes envy to mean: The hatred of the good for being the good. Here too, she nails down the left, old and new, with keen insight and prescience. She demonstrates how the appeasement of evil has been an undertow of mankind's cultural stream down the ages. The Comprachicos is the disturbing essay that concludes the collection. It warns against the hijacking of the minds of children and students by the leftist, collectivist educational establishment. This even more true now than it was then: the modern seats of leftism are the universities and the Old Media which Rand exposes throughout the book. To show how right Ayn Rand has been, I highly recommend t

In this book Ayn Rand looks at numerous aspects of our culture from Woodstock and the Apollo moon missions to public education and relates them to various philosophic principles. She shows not only how irrational the current left-wing philosophy is, but also how it is now morally bankrupt, especially compared with "the old left". Despite the colossal failure of socialism time and time again, modern liberals- to this day- continue to idealize it, even the horrors of the former Soviet Union. Just look at the book "In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.Please note that this title has been replaced by Ayn Rand's "Return of the Primitive" which contains all the material from this book, plus additional essays by both Ayn Rand and a contemporary Objectivist.

The star of this book is Rand's essay "Apollo and Dionysus," a comparison of the near-simultaneous events Woodstock and the first lunar landing. I was in high school at the time, and I remember the Woodstock explosion that occurred during the school year following the August concert, the remarkable number of classmates who adopted the hippie lifestyle and pretty much stopped doing any work whatever. One guy who'd been a valedictory prospect dropped right off the academic radar, probably due to drugs. Rand's suggestion that Woodstock represented an abandonment of reason is supported by on-scene reports of concert-goers who simply showed up with the clothes on their backs -- no plans for food, water, lodgings or anything, and the fact that concert organizers also neglected such essential considerations. The Woodstock army completely trashed the place, ending up wallowing in a big muddy mess while standing stupidly outside in the rain.On the other hand, the lunar mission was a sterling example of human achievement driven by rationality, the culmination of the application of brainpower to a problem, and the success which resulted therefrom. Oh certainly, Rand drew (and draws) a lot of fire, but she was absolutely correct in her belief that upgrades of our human condition will only be developed by people who think and act, and not by herds of hippies standing in the rain.

I find it amusing that Rand is called a closet Leftists, an individualist, a Statist, a conservative, etc What is missing from these rants (the reviewers - not Rand) is a discussion of the book and its subtitle - "The Anti-Industrial Revolution"Consider the anarchists and socialists who arrive in jets at WTO meetings. Their main goal (apart from the ubiquitous violence) is an end to free trade and capitalism. (No word on what will replace a market system.) At the just completed conference on development, environmental groups protested such things as outdoor plumbing, electricity to villages in Africa and the idea of using credit instead of traditional ways (bartering goods). This in spite of all evidence that these things have made life easier and longer for 3rd world folks.On another level, the Left is mounting a relentless, ideological assault at universities against any discussion of ideas it does not approve of and on those same campuse and in Europe, one witnesses a rising tide of virulent anti-semitism. Jews have always been connected with the financial side of capitalism which may explain some of the hatred. The problem with the "New Left" is that they view industrialism as predominantly a matter of workers engaging in manual tasks. The idea that physical abd not intellectual labor drives economies would be applicable in a pre-industrial society. And that, I guess, was the point of these essays - that what the New Left is asking for is anti-industrial in nature.Yes, some of these essays stretch the point - but the idea of comparing unlike events to arrive at a stated conclusion is quite common. What this book does do is remind us that ideas have consequences in the real world. Prophetically, the article on public schools sounds as if it could have been written yesterday.

The things the left has always hated are individual success and individual freedom. Both of these hatreds are exposed for what they really are in this book. While some may try to confuse the issue, saying that she must be leftist due to her cry for freedom and individualism, they can only make that erronious claim due to the errors of the right. The modern Luddites hide in the environmental movement, but the're still there, still hating that we have better living conditions than a medevial pesant, and that we are more free than that medevial pesant as well.