Why Should We Care?

”Who is John Galt?”, begins Ayn Rand’s fulfillment of the novel genre that can never be surpassed in its epic vision and proportions of the timeless human narrative of society's basic impulses -- fleshed out in individual thought and action.

Newspapers try to convince us we should find what they think is so important, important too, and when nobody responds in that predictable manner, the realization doesn’t happen and take hold. It takes another to validate what one wishes any other to “see.”

In times past, those who controlled the printing presses, controlled the agenda of what could popularly be thought -- and they would suppress every other “alternative” thought they did not want exposed, let alone given equal time. In the age of the Internet, such absolute control and suppression is no longer possible -- as readers search the world for the best and the brightest, not limited to the political and geographical favorites. Few can be convinced anymore, that what a self-chosen few want us to see, is all there is to see -- just because they will grade us highly for knowing only what they want us to know.

That has always been the limited world of knowledge -- and now it is possible to understand both the known and the unknown. Thus, there is no longer the fear of the unknown -- as though that was the worst of all possible fates. One simply finds out about an area of life and experience they did not suspect before. But it is reality that thrusts that focus on us, and not the endless speculations and anxieties that unchecked, became the source of one’s mental and emotional imbalance.

We should care about what is really happening -- but not all those things people merely want us thinking about -- distracting and diverting from what is really going on. Then, the wrong problems are solved, while the right ones are ignored -- and even denied being a problem. Ultimately, real problems are solved not in the urgency of the present moment, but in some far away time in the future -- which means that they never will be solved but only pushed further into the future with each subsequent generation.

Therefore, each generation must sacrifice themselves for that glorious future and future generations -- who in their time, must sacrifice themselves for the future generations once again. Each generation’s happiness is sacrificed for this future that will never arrive.

In this manner, politics and political solutions make a clean break from any reality and becomes wholly a myth about some theoretical and abstract “community” -- in the future. Transportation systems are built where the people don’t live -- but government wishes they will. Garbage is loaded on barges and taken out where nobody can see, and dumped into the ocean. Discussions and forums can be canceled if there is the slightest threat that its organizers and officers might lose control. And the newspapers will suppress, censor and alter, to ensure that they alone will be “the smartest guys on the island.”

“Who is John Galt?”