President Obama's Relativism and Ayn Rand's Answer

The more I think about President Obama’s attack on the Republican Party over tax issues and whether the GOP is out of step with America, the more I reconsider a quote that I occasionally re-read to keep myself from falling into the relativism that has swept over our world.

Relativism : nobody is guilty, they are abused or mentally challenged - nobody should be held fully responsible for his acts because the acts can be explained by the current status of the world and his position in it - nobody can do anything to dig the world out of its present fiscal catastrophe because the spending that got us into it was and is necessary to prevent suffering even though continuing to spend will finally make everyone suffer.

Relativism started in American education after World War II, when children were taught that all ideas have equal weight and therefore that no one should be held accountable for their acts if their behavior could be explained by their education or religion, or social, mental or emotional state.

This led to nobody being held responsible and the result has been the near collapse of commonly shared moral and ethical precepts that make society, America’s or any other, hold together when trying times arrive, whether from criminal activity or anti-social behavior or war on terror or escalating fiscal crises.  

Relativism reminds me of Barak Obama because he is its prime example in America today. He bends facts to suit his goal (being for a balanced budget one day and disregarding it the next); he changes his opinion about important ethical precepts as new political exigencies emerge (should Guantanamo be shut down or left open…I don’t think we have any idea what President Obama really considers to be the right constitutional decision); and he strays off his avowed course when it is expedient for maintaining his domestic or international position (being against war as a candidate but going to war in Libya to appease Europe while withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan to appease the left of the Democratic Party - and both times saying that it was the right thing to do - as if war were a relativistic diplomatic tool rather than a question of the fundamental defense of America and its vital interests?).

The quote? It’s from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. We all know that Ayn Rand is hailed as the founder of American libertarianism, that she was such a free-market capitalist that she thought that individuals should be left to fend for themselves entirely. But Rand considered the advocacy of reason to be the single most significant aspect of her philosophy, stating, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows." In 1991, a survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked club members what the most influential book in the respondent's life was. Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible. Rand's books continue to be widely sold and read, with 25 million copies sold as of 2007 and another 800,000 sold in 2008.

Rand was a Republican, despite stance as a pro-choice atheist, and the political figures who cite Rand as an influence are most often conservative or libertarian members of the Republican Party. A 1987 article in The New York Times referred to her as the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate."

Rand's political philosophy emphasized individual rights (including property rights), and she considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of those rights. She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and dictatorship.

Rand believed that rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government. She denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism. She rejected anarchism as a naïve theory based in subjectivism that could only lead to collectivism in practice.

But, what she has to say about right and wrong, good and evil, is something to consider because the world is not relativistic. It is definite. And some political decisions are not subject to the whims of the moment. They are absolutes needed to save the nation.

President Obama could learn a lot from the Tea Partiers about the idea of moral decision-making. And, he could consider Ayn Rand’s comments on the subject:

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

With thanks to Wikipedia for many of the facts about Ayn Rand used above.