Time to Win

I found the following blog post today, which contains an excerpt from Ayn Rand.

Link: The Tea Partier’s Ayn Rand (blog post contains links I chose not to transfer).

Begin quote, with bolding by me:

Young people are constantly asking what they can do to fight today’s disastrous trends; they are seeking some form of action, and wrecking their hopes in blind alleys, particularly every four years, at election time. Those who do not realize that the battle is ideological, had better give up, because they have no chance. Those who do realize it, should grasp that the student rebellion [at Berkeley] offers them a chance to train themselves for the kind of battle they will have to fight in the world, when they leave the university; a chance, not only to train themselves, but to win the first rounds of that wider battle.

If they seek an important cause, they have the opportunity to fight the rebels, to fight ideologically, on moral-intellectual grounds – by identifying and exposing the meaning of the rebels’ demands, by naming and answering the basic principles which the rebels dare not admit. The battle consists, above all, of providing the country (or all within hearing) with ideological answers – a field of action from which the older generation has deserted under fire.

Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denunciation, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative.

This does not mean that rational students should enter debates with the rebels or attempt to convert them; one cannot argue with self-confessed irrationalists. The goal of an ideological battle is to enlighten the vast, helpless, bewildered majority in the universities – and in the country at large – or, rather. the minds of those among the majority who are struggling to find answers or those who, having heard nothing but collectivist sophistries for years, have withdrawn in revulsion and given up.

The first goal of such a battle is to wrest from a handful of beatniks the title of “spokesmen for American youth,” which the press is so anxious to grant them. The first step is to make oneself heard, on the campus and outside. There are many civilized ways to do it: protest-meetings, public petitions, speeches, pamphlets, letters-to-editors. It is a much more important issue than picketing the United Nations or parading in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And while such futile groups as Young Americans for Freedom are engaged in such undertakings, they are letting the collectivist vanguard speak in their name – in the name of American college students – without any audible sound of protest.

But in order to be heard, one must have something to say. To have that, one must know one’s case. One must know it fully, logically, consistently, all the way down to philosophical fundamentals. One cannot hope to fight nuclear experts with Republican pea-shooters. And the leaders behind the student rebellion are experts at their particular game.

But they are dangerous only to those who stare at the issues out of focus and hope to fight ideas by means of faith, feelings, and fund-raising. You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not touch: appeal to human intelligence.

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have.”

Ayn Rand, July-September 1965

I will add, guns are the teeth of liberty, reason, and the right to exist. This is a topic I will be expanding upon later. In the mean time, my opinion simply stated is that every young man should* own a firearm (or firearms), know how to use it, have the ability to use it many times over (ammunition), have the will to use it (an absolute understanding of your right to life), and if possible, carry it at all times.

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“Should” because every man has a duty to himself — and no one else — to always be able to defend his life and liberty.