jbgotmar

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! 43
critique, writing that Christianity “is the best kindergarten of communism
possible.” 10 Christianity taught believers to put others before self,
an ethical mandate that matched the collectivist emphasis on the group
over the individual. Thus a new system of individualist, non-Christian
ethics was needed to prevent the triumph of Communism.
Although her ethical theory was fi rm, Rand was less certain of the
other messages her book would impart. In her fi rst notes she thought she
“may not include” Communism in the novel. By early 1938 she described
it to an interested publisher as “not political, this time.” “I do not want to
be considered a ‘one-theme’ author,” she added. 11 Not a single Russian or
Communist would appear, she assured him. At the same time Rand had
always sensed a connection between politics and her conception of the
second-hander. Indeed, her neighbor’s statement had rocked her precisely
because it seemed to illuminate a puzzling question: What made
some people collectivists and others individualists? Before, Rand had
never understood the difference, but now she believed that the basic collectivist
principle was “motivation by the value of others versus your own
independence.” 12 Even as she professed a purely philosophical intent, the
book’s very origins suggested its possibilities as political morality play.
Still, Rand was ambivalent about writing that kind of book.
Part of the problem was that outside of the Russian setting, Rand
wasn’t sure where she stood politically. By the early 1930s she was
expanding her range of nonfi ction reading beyond Nietzsche, and she
gravitated fi rst to writers who were deeply skeptical of democracy, such
as H. L. Mencken, Oswald Spengler, Albert Jay Nock, and José Ortega
y Gasset. 13 These thinkers did little to shake Rand out of her Nietzschean
fi xation on the superior individual. Indeed, they may even have shaped
her understanding of Nietzsche, for the writers she selected had themselves
been deeply infl uenced by the German philosopher. Mencken was
one of Nietzsche’s foremost American interpreters, and Nietzsche’s ideas
strongly infl uenced Spengler’s Decline of the West and Ortega y Gasset’s
Revolt of the Masses, which in turn exerted its powers on Nock’s Memoirs
of a Superfl uous Man. Rand’s reading was a Nietzschean hall of mirrors
with a common theme: forthright elitism.
Accordingly, her refl ections on American society were both tentative
and deeply pessimistic. Rand doubted that America was hospitable to
her values, an impression furthered by the popularity of Communism
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com