Ayn Rand and Jesus, symbionts

 

Ayn Rand was and is widely hated for her egoistic, love-lust capitalistic and atheistic doc­trines and her narcissistic attitudes which she reified as doctrine. Mention of her name is likely to trigger the kind of knee-jerk revulsion the “N-word” evokes. But there is a quiet secret – and for her detractors (I am knowing their minds) an ugly embedded secret – that has rarely been given voice. It is a feeling of exalta­tion, of arrival – pure, yet real, but tran­scen­dental – of beauty and strength and supreme health that we first feel when we read the lives and loves, dangers and convictions of her astounding heroes. Rand had an ultra-worldly, Olym­pian god-like view of happi­ness, actually ecstasy, that could only exist in the individual, the individ­ual person’s joy and diamond-hard assertion of his right to be, to live his life as he desires.

There is something primordial, possibly indescribable, in the brilliant poignancy of emotion one feels when the inventor Equality 7-2521, Anthem, discovers the word “I” in ancient, forsaken books. Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart’s waking, after her plane crash, to see the face of the incandescent polymath Galt, and their moment on the mountain when he says “The road is cleared. We are going back to the world.” Roark, at the top of the Wynand Building skyscraper, symbol of his struggle to victory at the end of The Fountainhead. We know this intoxication, possibly from our first bedtime adventure stories, possibly from some gift given us at the universe’s Big Bang that is immanent in our proto-genes. It’s an emotion that is better than, righter than life.

The fatal problem with this feeling is that it cannot live in oxygen, in our real world, where capitalists may be driven by sociopathy not philosophy; where individualism may be xenophobia; where the human core is the ambiguous not the noble. And yet it may be the most real archetype in the “collective uncon­scious” that I can imag­ine, Jung to the contrary notwith­standing. It is a feeling that can only exist in a parallel world created by a different, more robust God, where all human beings have the nature of joy and love of the world, and can manifest it in effort or in reality. In that world, help­ing another person would be to help her be her heroic potential. Providing food for her family would be considered a crisis of no meaning, one that a Randian personage would answer in a hale but perfunctory spirit. Behind the act there would be no philosophy of giving, no imperative of brotherhood.

In this world, we see, with some brownish shame, that the transcendental feeling can’t exist in the other-centered person, the person whose most noble thought is “do for others.” There would seem something unnat­ural about that, something sick.

I was wondering today, Christmas, if for honest believers Jesus is like this pinnacle emo­tion, or a divergent or even opposite one. If that, could there be two antipodal sub­lime feelings dwell­ing in good people’s hearts? The love of Jesus Christ and human­ity, the bowed humble head; the love of freedom and the individual’s heroic nature, head raised high? Could there be two transcendencies?

Rand, Russian Jew, found her emotional philosophy of “human perfection”* and individualism in childhood stories, and tinted it darker in the climate of anti-Semitism and the Bolshe­vik Revo­lution. Its primary color, though, the radiation that strikes the reader before darkness intrudes, remains the feeling of sun brightness, of ecstasy. Christmas, too, is a feeling. Jesus is the hero, whose name is human­ity. But could He live in the oxygen of our world? Where people’s hearts expand only so far, where we can’t love billions of people, day after day? Where, counterpart to Rand’s defect, we are not all the same spirit, as each person wants, first-most, to live his own life in his own space, not join a universal bond, to relish his indulgences, to prefer himself and his family. It seems to me these complementary failures of purity show a fundamental bond between the most egoistic of all teachers and the most selfless: They are avatars of the dichotomy of consciousness, which must be itself, yet can’t remain alone. Either facet, either ideal is no ideal, and can only be reached in stories.

Praise the creator.

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* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/. Introduction, subsection 1.1.

 

I feel like writing a simple statement: Smart teens

 

I see several teenage clients. Four of them are different as I’ve known them for a longer time and we keep up a text-mes­sage chat outside of sessions. That is, they’re basic­ally friend clients. They are 16, 17, 17 and 18. All are depressed but have “special­ties.” There’s the stifled super-bright one who falls into long silences fre­quently, trapped in her head. There’s the girl whose parents are both solip­sists – entirely self-seeing – and who, cut off, has come to think much too much about her inferi­ority and friend­less­ness. (She is very pretty and sweet and by that account would have lots of friends.) There’s the young man whose rare happy or humor­ous moments strike me as almost inap­prop­riate, fleeing instantly from his life­long stolid base. And there’s the hyper-gabby junior with a non-injur­ious Border­line Person­ality who speaks the most dire self-verdicts in a bright and breath­less voice.

One of my main and continual therapeutic thoughts about them is hope, hope that with my help they will move through the teen phase without crum­bling, with­out giving up.

Do teens like these become happy after oppres­sive or aban­doned child­hoods and a year or more of therapy?  Their parents never changed, despite my meet­ings with them and letters to them. I did not replace these parents, of course, so the pri­­mary healing agent was never there. Alice Miller talked about an “enlight­ened wit­ness,” one person who really looks in an alone child’s eyes, believes her story and under­stands her. Is that heavy­weight enough, though, to really sit along­side and meld with the significantly miss­ing parent? “Sometimes” or “rarely” is the best answer I can give.

I still, after twenty-two years, believe that most adoles­cents don’t grow up, and that most adults didn’t. If we were to become aware of the inside of our think­ing and feel­ing, we would recog­­nize the child always there. This points to the pri­mary flaw in the human species. With unhealed pain, we become mis­directed: acting out, hold­ing in, fall­ing out of time. Animals in the wild don’t have this problem because they don’t have a powerful neo­cortex that blocks pain from flowing out. Pic­ture all the smart vermin who’ve infested the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion to see, in the extreme to be sure, the flower of homo sapiens: thought and poison symbi­otically fused.

I enjoy being an enlightened witness, the companion that (I hope) will make a difference.