Selfishness and happiness

If all this seems happening a little too fast, i can remind you again, that donald t-rump did not invent fascism nor did he begin the long draught of nation state toxic swigging thats been going on WORLDWIDE forever. Kings, queens, popes and preachers have been fostering the kill the messenger message for as long as they've written the history of the world.
I was watching an old, old like meaning before most americans today were neither born nor escaped and migrated from foreign lands, by the way, carrying a false american dream around their heads like halos, a tape of a young mike wallace interviewing ayn rand. Ayn rand wrote, maybe, two significant books in her lifetime, the fountainhead and atlas shrugged and far be it for me to divulge the meaning to any young, wistful for the past, person or wanna be dreamer of the american dream (without socialism).
Basically, her outlook on life was called selfishness (self interest) by her detractors and "objectivism" by her intellectual cohorts.
Her beliefs took in everything from loving to politics but the books conveyed wealth and success as the main function of Man. In other words, happiness comes from self-satisfaction and freedom from making as much money as one can, money being the main mover of all freedom. In her world, freedom shouldn't be bought but neither should it be sold.
I can agree with that part, but the basis of her argument is that freedom does not buy bread so freedom actually becomes the value upon which we must live, giving up our freedom in order to secure our own self-interest which for most people, normally, is survival.
Where ms rand is right is that the principles of revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were based on that value of trading freedom for survival. The idea that so called free will is meant to be every person's coin.
Free will is the creation of church and state to justify the decisions of any person giving up their freedom in order to survive. Free will is not a pure conceptual type of freedom because as we all know one cannot act one way when there are natural or social obstacles making it impossible to be free. In other words, slaves can be freed but can they, once freed, act contrary to the restrictions imposed by the social standards and laws already established? To her, freedom and free will are attributes of those who have wealth, ownership, and chutzpah to go out and get what they want because they can.
To believe that everyone has free will and the freedom to act even under the most adversarial conditions is absurd.
Yes, we are free and are by free will able to resist but resistance has its price, and we have to decide what price we will pay.
Looking at those who rule today we dont see ayn rands "happiness" among billionaires, as she suggests what happiness is. They are not satisfied with doing what they want but, instead, are determined to make sure everyone else is unhappy, a condition she insists shouldn't happen. They, according to her, should really be uninterested in the happiness or unhappiness of others. Self-interest is supposed to lead to a sort of happiness and its only when we start wanting good things for others, do we get unhappy because we are no longer thinking of just ourselves. Topsy turvy philosophy.
Where individualism beaches itself is the denial that we are social animals. No one person, whether inventor, billionaire, king nor anyone else is an island unto itself, an appropriate phrase.


Sent from my iPad