Rush’s 2112 Album Paved the Way to Liberty

Thanks Matt!!! Love this bit of History! Never paid much attention to Rush but will now. Fortunately I still discovered Ayn Rand in High School and immediately fell in love with her books and philosophy.

If Ms. Rand and Mr. Peart, et al only knew how many hearts and minds were awakened by their work! Great work on freethepeople, your account of this discovery mirrors my own as a high school student of the 70’s. Thank you, sir!

My story? I thought the world had ended when Tommy Thompson signed Wisconsin’s first sunset slave-belt law, then vetoed a measure that would have ended it early, and signed a bill to renew it, and signed a bill to make it a permanent law. Thought that was enough to make me a Democrat, but then Doyle signed that booster-seat bill (causing me to swear I’ll never have kids, even if I have to resort to a coathanger abortion to stop it). I’ve waited over 30 years for the country to wake up–but there’s always something “more important” than having “freedom” by its most basic definition–even for card-carrying Libertarians. Slavebelts have become a nemesis I’m not even allowed to carry a defense to. My career and life have been all downhill since, and I’m now a nihilist, praying for an asteroid to slam into the planet.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin

There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them. I’m prepared to defend freedom.
– Robert “Lavoy” Finicum
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. -Theodore Roosevelt

If you are going to live a risk free life, you are going to die without having lived.
–Shuping Mokgothu

If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.
–Malcolm X

No one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a general workable law — i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.
–Immanual Kant

Power always thinks… that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.
John Adams

“I have never thought, for my part, that man’s freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.”
― Plato

Nuts. I had those on 8-Track and never saw the liner notes. Wasted youth I suppose. I discovered Rand as well, and enjoy her in the spectrum of ideas. Her personal character was wanting, and parallels her contemporary, Simone De Beauvoir. Both owe much to Nietzsche, who’s conception of the self-creating man is their hero and the model of Existentialism and rugged individualism. But in Henry James’ conceptualization of the two forces in philosophy, the tough-minded and the tender-minded, this branch of philosophy’s tree is all tough, all very Lockean about personal production and identity. In a state of nature, they are perfectly right. This represents perfect justice (getting what one deserves), but neglects the tenderness that we feel towards our own, and perhaps even towards others. This is where Cicero fills the gap in a letter to his son, “De Officiis,” where he explains in noble Roman fashion, our duties to our fellow man. This calls for wisdom, as the one who we give to also bears an obligation to us. Rand neglects the other side of the coin, so embittered she was by the Communist appropriation of her Jewish father’s pharmacy, leaving them desperately poor. Nietzsche was angry at the weak-willed. De Beauvoir was angry at those who gave in to society’s enslavement, and Rand was angry at a society who takes from the those who produce and give it to those who do not. We must be careful about engaging an angry philosophy that is correct but primarily self-interested.