Posted by
Howard Roark on Thursday, March 13, 2008 8:51:48 PM
I'm finally starting a blog, which must mean that they are so 15 minutes ago, really probably so 5 years ago, but hey I've been busy. I'm a big fan of 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand and loved the dialog that she wrote. Unfortunately, I'm not as a good a writer as Ayn, but I'm tired of all the things that are going on in America and the world and I needed some place to vent; my wife can take only so much.
I do think that the personal self-reliance and even selfishness of Howard Roark in 'The Fountain Head' forms an ideal that would help many people in their own lives. Instead of worrying about others actions and their own inability for action, people should focus on their own lives and how to better themselves, without relying on the state for help or blaming society for their problems. This leads to the reason for the creation of my Blog and why I named is after 'The Fountainhead' main character. I think that now, unlike any time since the 1930s, we face a new drive towards increased collectivism and decreased individual freedoms. Whether on the left or the right there is a drive towards reducing individual rights in the name of curing society’s problems or ensuring security. We no longer face a linear system of freedom on one end and communism on the other. We now face a '^' shaped model with individual freedom perched precariously in the middle, with the drop to collectivism on either side. Not since the nationalism of the Nazi's and the communism of the Soviets' have we faced such an assault on the freedom on individualism.
Now the right and left are not the Nazis and Communists of the past, but at the same time the innate interrelatedness of our society and the technological advances that allow everything to be observed and noted make these extremes all the more potentially suffocating.
Against the background of the assault on individual freedoms, I see a distinct change in the kind of conflicts and interactions of people, business, and countries. Human struggles seem to have been a battle of peers. Sure there were Davids against Goliaths, but on the whole there was a symmetry and desire for parity in conflicts. If someone had dreadnoughts their opponents wanted more and better, but they still wanted dreadnoughts. Even guerilla wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan were more proxy surrogate wars, then real mano-e-minnow conflicts. It seems to be that force-on-force conflict is being replaced by conflicts based on ideologue and asymmetry. As we learned on 9/11, and Israel learned recently Lebanon, we now face enemies that are not just rouges without the usual command and control structures, but rather a network type enemy more akin the leaderless structure of the internet. Based on that peer-to-peer model and enabled by the interconnectedness of the internet, these new enemies assault the current order. These new attacks stress and test the democratic democracies ability deal with them without overreacting or under reacting.
So here we are, facing new enemies and who knows what history will make of our efforts. All I know is that I want to hand down a better world to my two children, and I don't have my father around anymore to engage in Jesuit trained mental jujutsu, and my wife tires my dissertations. Plus thoughts are never as well thought out until they exposed to the stark truth of a blank page.
Howard