In an effort to describe and explain the madness forcing various versions of a “green agenda” upon us, our guest Salim Mansur recently found himself drawn to a series of essays originally compiled in Ayn Rand’s 1971 book “The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.” (re-released in 1999 as “Return of the Primitive” with additional essays by Peter Schwartz on the enduring legacy of the Left.)
“There is something fundamentally primitive in this malady, this profound sickness that has overtaken Western man,” laments Salim. “It was astounding. Everything that Rand wrote about is what we’re living through. This is not a new debate.”
Drawing upon Rand’s symbolic comparison of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus with the Right and Left respectively, Salim is led unavoidably to the conclusion that the making of civilizations is an individual undertaking, not a collective one.
In the light of that reality, the collectivist wave now enveloping the West can itself be understood to be both the cause and symptom of civilization’s collapse. Continue reading »
