"Wisdom of Ayn Rand" - - - The Consequences of Avoiding Reality!

[ Note: The below article was taken verbatim from the "American Thinker.”  - - - an especially apt and interesting article shared with me by my dear friend Mike H. ]

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 July 18, 2023 

"Ayn Rand has some prescient thoughts about Democrats' avoidance of reality"

By R.W. Trewyn 

The consequences of avoiding reality are killing us … literally!

American leaders and policy makers in the 21st century should have paid attention to the profound wisdom put forth by Ayn Rand in the last Millennium: 

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” 

It pinpoints the basis for countless problems in America run by Democrats in recent years, clarifying why they occurred. Consider the following illustrations: 

1. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of funding coronavirus gain-of-function research in a communist country whose long-term goal is to destroy you, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”  There’s nothing like a global pandemic to help validate an argument.  Only someone truly brain dead — or totally devoid of ethics and integrity — would argue otherwise today.  Even purveyors of the wet market diversion ought to concede.  Shouldn’t the U.S. government worry about communists anywhere doing gain-of-function research on pathogens? Obviously! 

Think what an out-to-conquer-the-world regime could do — intentionally or inadvertently — with bioengineered viruses. Cause a pandemic? We’ll return to the communist aspect of this stupidity below while plugging in another variant into Rand's same observation that’s especially concerning for America’s future.

2. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of defunding the police, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”  Anyone with even limited brainwave function back when this idea arose could have told you what the outcome was going to be.  Crime would explode in every city where this mindless experiment was launched.  Bingo!  Moronic has been proven multiple times, coast to coast. There is also this: 

3. “You can avoid [the brain-dead] reality” of destroying America’s energy independence, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding [that] reality.”  Clearly, increases in gas prices were going to accompany this executive duncemanship.  However, once that domino fell, a whole cascade of additional ones tumbled immediately thereafter.  Higher gas costs led to supply chain problems which created product shortages that drove up consumer prices thereby providing a vessel for … what?  Inflation!  A third grader could have figured that out.  Well, a third grader pre-COVID.  Maybe a sixth grader now. 

Then, the domino scenario recycled again … and again … and again.  Obviously, the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco could have been used as another exemplar or the open border insanity.  Whenever and wherever reality is ignored, stupid, needless outcomes are the result.  The fallout from all these examples should have been apparent to anyone, but as Ayn Rand also said: “The hardest thing to see is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”  Yes, that’s more reality wisdom she conveyed. 

Unfortunately, significant numbers of Americans have now opted to close their eyes to reality.  Glaringly evident is no more.  Unmistakable has transformed into mistakable writ large.  Welcome to the U.S.A., 2023. 

Ayn Rand passed away in 1982, so America has done without her foresight for quite some time.  An author and philosopher, she always had something to say and an amazingly quotable way of saying it.  Ayn Rand was her chosen name.  She was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum when she was born in the Russian Empire in 1905.  Alissa was the eldest child of a prosperous St. Petersburg pharmacist; prosperous until the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Communists took control and seized her father’s business.  Then came the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin and Alissa’s formal introduction to Marxism-Leninism.  Her intimate knowledge and hatred of totalitarianism grew from there.  Nonetheless, Alissa Rosenbaum graduated from Leningrad State University in 1924 and two years later, fortuitous family circumstances allowed her to travel to the U.S. 

Arriving here, she took the name Ayn Rand, and in 1931, she became an American citizen.  Experiencing the communist conquest in Russia early in her life led to another unique insight that is of particular relevance today. “There is no difference between socialism and communism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by vote.  It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”  

Why is this pertinent? Because the understanding and fear of socialism have been lost by far too many Americans.  A decade or two ago, essentially no politicians would have run on a platform advocating socialism.  Now, candidates for public office call themselves “democratic socialists” unashamedly.  And what does the qualifier add?  Nothing!  Attaching democratic merely validates what Ayn Rand said a half century ago: “to enslave men … by vote” (democratically) is voting to commit suicide. 

Somehow, though, few Americans appear to understand that. Socialism doesn’t scare them like it should.  They don’t see the “glaringly evident” reality. At least communism still seems to make most people in America squeamish.  As a result, there hasn’t been a “democratic communists” political movement so far.  Democratic murder is a harder sell than democratic suicide.  

Regardless, America is heading down a slippery slope that may not be reversible. U.S. voters need to wake up to these issues and start purging local, state and federal government of socialist wannabes, communist collaborators, and all those evading the reality of their actions.  The results are obliterating liberty and freedom.  “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”  America … stop avoiding reality!  The consequences of avoiding reality are killing the U.S. … literally!  

It’s time to confront those destroying our country. Vote the brain dead out of office!

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R.W. Trewyn earned a Ph.D. after surviving Vietnam combat, and more treacherously, endured 53 years postwar slogging academe’s once hallowed halls. 

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Source Link:   Ayn Rand has some prescient thoughts about Democrats' avoidance of reality - American Thinker