Your response is a simple restating of what I said before, that Rand believes that everyone else can go fuck themselves.

However, let me ask you this - How long is one of your “visionaries” meaningful? If you invent something in your twenties, but produce nothing of any value for the next ten years or more, are you then relegated to the trash heap of meaninglessness with everyone else? To simply consume your way through existence? Are you saved from that fate only because your idea or invention may have brought you into wealth? What if that wealth disappears? What if you never made any money off of your idea, or spent all of it? Are you then downgraded back to a “unintelligent” person?

And what of all of the individuals in our society who are wealthy and with means who have done nothing to earn them? Those that have inherited their fortunes because of someone else’s hard work and vision (generations of Rockefeller’s)? What about reality tv stars? People who are rich simply because they are on TV, and their lives, for whatever reason, draw enough people in each week to sell ad time? By Rand’s logic, an Einstein and a Kardashian are on the same level. While Kardashian (and I am speaking of Kim) may be morally reprehensible (at least in my eyes), she is an entrepreneur in a sense. She took a product that she had (her body), and sold it, beginning her career. Then she took even more of herself, and sold it, turning her into a multi-millionaire. Does this make her a visionary? Does this make her worth more than my Dad, who spent 40+ years faithfully working for a company, bringing home a wage that was just enough to put food on our table, clothes on our back, and a roof over our head? A man who will, I can guarantee, have worked infinitely harder over the last forty years than Kim Kardashian will work over the next forty? And yet, she’s a multi-millionaire, and my dad retires with small pension to fund retirement for him and my mother, part of which is based in Social Security and Medicare, a social contract made between the American people to help each other in their old age (when they need it most), that now stands on the chopping block because of the mismanagement of a corrupt government and the taking advantage of by a minority of immoral individuals.

Your childish fantasy is that you believe people’s individual merit means anything. Someone could walk up to another person on the street tomorrow and stab them to death. The victim’s individual merit won’t save them. Steve Jobs’ merit as one of the greatest minds of our time didn’t save him from cancer. Stephen Hawking is considered one of the greatest minds on the planet, and yet, the other week, he confessed that he didn’t understand women. His individual merit was not able to save him from his handicap or his loneliness. 

And what about women? You’re a woman, correct? You are aware that it wasn’t until the last century (not that far off), that women were barely allowed out of the house. Put yourself in that time. Since you obviously fancy yourself one of the “intelligentsia”, think of what it would have been like to be relegated to the fate of women just a little over a hundred years ago. No (real) hope for college. No hope to be recognized for much of anything. The second you would have come out of the womb, you would have already been dismissed as destined for only a handful of jobs. You may scoff at reading this, but it wasn’t so long ago. The twentieth century has completely skewed our reality. Think about it - Commercial airline travel is less than 100 years old. Interstates weren’t built until after World War 2. A computer that didn’t take up a whole room is only about 40 years old. The ability for anyone other than an upper class individual to travel out of the country, and in some situations out of state, is something that didn’t even come about until the last century. A woman’s right to vote? 1919, which makes it not even 100 years old. So, if this were 100 years ago, instead of us having this argument, you would be relegated to being a part of that “unintelligent” group that you say is “vital, but replaceable”, and I would be enjoying pretty much all the freedoms that I have always had.

Rand’s fault, and presumably yours since you seem to partake in her philosophy, is her inability to understand the interconnectedness of every living thing. In the sphere of mankind, every man and woman effects every other man and woman. No one is interchangeable. No one is replaceable. How would you feel if your loved one was deemed as someone who needed to be replaced? I assume, if you have a heart and I assume you do, that you would be devastated. It’s a natural response, because you are connected to that person. The fact of the matter is, everyone is connected to someone, and in being so, everyone is connected to everyone. The fact that this goes unrecognized is one of the biggest travesties in the human race. No one is simply replaceable. Everyone is a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a cousin, etc. Everyone is something to somebody.

Separate us out into classes and make us fight for survival, and you will only create more classes, because, you see, that’s the problem with human beings. We, by our nature, feel that we are better than everyone else. Someone who creates a vaccine is not going to accept the idea that they are on the same level as the person who invented Oxi-Clean, and so the cycle begins again.

What I find so funny about people like you is the fact that you don’t realize how easily you can become the very person you’re saying is worthless. One accident, one aggression, one moment and it can all change, and I am SO thankful that there are so many people who DON’T believe the same way that you do, and will be there to lift you back up and show you love and help you become the most that you can be, no matter what lot in life you are dealt. Compassion and generosity are two things that, often times, separate us from a meaningless existence. I’m glad that there’s a lot of people out their who have those traits, even if you don’t see the necessity in them.

(via grapefruitatlarge)