The Moral Basis of Individualism
Susan Shelley has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Daily News, the Republican Liberty Caucus of California and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
In January of 1944, with the D-Day invasion still six months away and the whole world hanging in the balance between freedom and totalitarianism, the Reader's Digest published an excerpt from "a forthcoming book to be published by the Bobbs-Merrill Co."* It was titled The Moral Basis of Individualism, and it was written by Ayn Rand.
“Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), Russia, and graduated from the university there,” the editors wrote. “She took up writing and in 1931 came to the United States ‘in order to write as I please.’ She is the author of the Broadway hit The Night of January 16th, which ran for three years in the '30s. Among her books are We the Living, Anthem, and the recent best-seller The Fountainhead, which is soon to be made into a movie.”
In this excerpt, titled “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” Ayn Rand writes:
“The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
“Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’”
The future author of Atlas Shrugged called on Americans to understand that the American system was founded on individualism.
“We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation,” she wrote. “The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual.”
Also noteworthy in this 1944 article is the sidebar by Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president.
“In the process of winning this war the American people have accepted centralization of government, regimentation of activities and restriction of liberty to a greater extent than ever before in their history,” he wrote. “Totalitarianism has an insidious, a sinister appeal. It appeals to those who prefer leadership to initiative, blueprints to enterprise. It appeals to those who find it difficult to bend democracy to serve their economic or political self-interest. At the end of the war the freedoms we have lost must be rewon and restored, not part, but all of them; not sooner or later, but sooner. If we fail to do that, then history will write it down that in this war — as in many others — the victors were the vanquished.”
The title page of the January 1944 issue of Reader's Digest promises “An article a day of enduring significance.”
That's for sure.
Click here to read “The Only Path To Tomorrow” by Ayn Rand.
*The book was never published.