As the pandemic drags on and one public official after another promises to “follow the science,” I find myself recalling this passage from Galt’s speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
As church after church makes itself the locus of regional outbreaks — and one idiot, howling, bellowing preacher after another dies of the disease — it appears clear to me that Rand knew what she was talking about.
Some related thoughts, in no particular order.
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Good for the governors. It is science, not thoughts and prayers, that is going to find a route back to something resembling normalcy.
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It galls me something fierce when I think of scarce resources being consumed to save nitwits who deliberately exposed themselves to an often-fatal sickness — as smart, hard-working nurses, EMT’s, doctors, police, et cetera, do without.
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When this is all over, don’t forget the needless suffering caused by Godly fools. The anti-mind really is the anti-life, and I’m not kidding when I talk about death-wish theology.