Vasil Levski

Ayn Rand – The Girl Who Saw It First She was twelve when the Bolsheviks came into her father’s pharmacy in St. Petersburg and put a red seal on the door. In a single afternoon, a man who had worked all his life owned nothing. She never forgot his face. Her name then was Alisa Rosenbaum. She watched what followed: the hunger, the informers, the university purged of anyone with the wrong parents. In 1926, she obtained a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She was twenty-one, and she never went back. She never saw her parents again. She left the old name behind with the old country. Nobody knows for certain where "Ayn Rand" came from, and she never settled the question. What the name conveys is plain: two strong, hard and clear syllables, with no country, no family and no past in them. It was the first thing she built in America, and she built it herself. On her second day in Hollywood, a car stopped beside her at a studio gate. The driver was Cecil B. DeMille. He gave her a ride and a job as an extra. On that set, she noticed a tall actor with the face of one of her heroes and deliberately stuck out her foot so that he would trip over it. She married Frank O’Connor, who stood by her for fifty years. She had one conviction: the West could not defend itself because it was ashamed of its own best men. So she wrote its defence. Her philosophy starts with three words: A is A. A thing is what it is. Reality does not bend to wishes, votes or slogans. She took this principle from Aristotle, the only philosopher to whom she acknowledged a debt, and saw herself as continuing his work. The three parts of Atlas Shrugged are named after his classical laws of logic. From A is A, everything follows: reason is man’s only means of acquiring knowledge, contradictions do not exist, and whoever asks you to accept one wants something from you and is asking you to abandon reality for something else. Check your premises. Her characters are that philosophy made flesh. Howard Roark, the architect of The Fountainhead, would rather break stone in a quarry than change a single line of a building to please a committee. He is integrity: a man whose work and whose soul are one and the same. Ellsworth Toohey is his enemy, and her most prophetic creation. He builds nothing. He rules by praising the mediocre, mocking the great and teaching people that they are small. Kill a man’s capacity to admire, and he is yours. Dagny Taggart runs a railroad better than any man around her. She is competence, and the joy of it. Hank Rearden invents a new metal and is made to feel guilty for it. Through him, she showed the sanction of the victim: evil is impotent and lives only on what the good produce and agree to hand over. And John Galt. "Who is John Galt?" is asked on the first page, as a shrug of despair. He is the engineer who invents a motor that could power the world, sees that it will be seized in the name of need, and walks away. Then he persuades the builders, one by one, to do the same. He stops the motor of the world to prove who had been running it. His oath is her ethics in one sentence: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers before going on to sell millions of copies. When her publisher begged her to cut Galt’s sixty-page speech, she asked whether he would cut the Bible. He did not cut it. In 1991, a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked readers which book had most influenced their lives. Atlas Shrugged came second – after the Bible. Mises reportedly called her the most courageous man in America. She was delighted and asked only whether he had really said "man." The life was harder than the books. To finish The Fountainhead on deadline, a doctor prescribed her amphetamines; according to her biographers, she took them for some thirty years. She smoked two packs a day and dismissed the evidence linking smoking to cancer, until a surgeon removed part of her lung. Around her gathered a circle of young admirers who met in her apartment on Saturday nights. They called themselves, jokingly, the Collective. One of them was Alan Greenspan. The joke turned sour. The philosopher of independence came to demand agreement on everything: the right novels, the right music, the right friends. Doubters were put on trial in her living room and expelled. Then came Nathaniel Branden, her chosen heir, twenty-five years younger. She insisted that both spouses be told and give their consent, because she would not live a lie. They consented. Nobody was the better for it. When she discovered that he had concealed another woman from her, she slapped him, denounced him in print and ordered her followers never to speak to him again. Most obeyed. She could reason her way to almost anything, including the idea that feelings should obey logic. Hers never did. In 1973, her youngest sister came from the Soviet Union to visit. Rand showed her New York and offered her freedom. Her sister found America vulgar and went home to Leningrad. The Bolsheviks had taken her father’s shop. Fifty years of the Lie had taken something worse from her sister: the ability to recognise freedom when she saw it. Nothing taught Rand more about what the Lie does to a mind. She died in New York in 1982. By her coffin stood a six-foot dollar sign made of flowers. For her, it was the symbol of Liberty: free trade between free minds. Her enemies laughed. They had never seen a red seal on their father’s door – she had seen it at twelve, and she knew what the symbol of Liberty costs. What should we do with her? Take the builder’s virtues, all seven: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride – the kind that is earned. Nobody has stated them better, and no civilization grows without them. Put them where she refused to: on the foundation she rejected. Charity and hope hold the ground; her virtues build upon it. Galt swore by his life and his love of it. A civilization must swear by more than one life: by the lives that come after it. That is hope – the affirmation of life that plants trees, raises children and builds what it will never see finished. Together, they make Western Civilization: reason that understands the world, the builder’s pride that shapes it, and an affirmation of life that hands it on. Each alone fails. Reason without a goal turns cold. Pride without hope ends with its owner. Hope without builders remains a wish. Together, they form the widest frame ever found that actually works. And keep her warning with her teaching. A school of free minds becomes a sect the day agreement matters more than truth. We need her courage, and we need to avoid her living room. The novel opens with a shrug: Who is John Galt? It was meant as an expression of despair. It is really a question to each of us – and the answer is whoever still builds, and refuses to apologize for it.

Thomas Sowell – The Man Who Asked for the Evidence 📚 He was born in 1930 in North Carolina, in a house without running water. His father died before he was born. He grew up in Harlem, left school at sixteen, delivered telegrams, worked in a machine shop and served in the Marines. Then he went to Harvard, Columbia and Chicago. He started as a Marxist. Books did not cure him. A summer job did. In 1960, at the U.S. Department of Labor, he studied the minimum wage in Puerto Rico's sugar industry. Each time the wage was raised, employment fell. He proposed a simple test to find out why. Nobody in the building wanted it run. The department's budget depended on the law being good; whether the law was good was not its business. That summer, he understood that an institution has interests of its own, and that the truth is rarely among them. Everything else followed from there. For sixty years, he has asked the three questions that no ideology survives: compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence do you have? He put the whole of economics in one line, observing that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And he put the whole of politics in another, noting that it is hard to imagine a more dangerous way of making decisions than putting them in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. He gave the planners their true name: the anointed. People who judge themselves by their intentions and everyone else by results, and for whom every failure of their policy is proof that it was not tried hard enough. He was a black man from Harlem who said that culture matters more than grievance, and that the policies made to help the poor had hurt them most. For that, the people who claim to speak for the poor never forgave him. He kept writing anyway – more than forty books, without a single slogan in them. He is ninety-six. He has never held power, never led a movement, never raised his voice. He only asked for the evidence. In the age of the Lie, that turned out to be the most radical thing a man could do. — America has one honor that fits: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, its highest civilian award. 🏅🇺🇸 He should receive it now, while he can still walk up and collect it. 🗽