Rick Santelli made a comment this morning on CNBC about “anti-Ayn Rand” folks. Well, Santelli, “anti-Ayn Rand” is synonymous with ‘anti elitism’ which Ayn Rand would certainly agree with since her whole shtick was the glorious marriage of intellectualism and power. It is unfortunate that a second-rate fiction writer was taken seriously by the post-Nazi, Austrian economics’ libertarians of today. I have news for these folks:
Intellectualism and power have a certain repulsion for each other in reality. Only in fiction can that illusion pass the test of truth.
In case you have not noticed, if intellectuals did what they did for power and its equivocation, money, there would be no intellectuals. Academics and scholars are not generally wealthy, to the contrary. The passion of intellectualism is not driven by power but by knowledge. Knowledge is for its own sake for intellectuals. The pursuit of power for an intellectual is an oxymoron, and no one with any brains would ever think that is what drives them. Certainly, one could equivocate and suggest power is all there is with some kind of metaphysical vigor. This reductio ad absurdum would suggest ‘power’ just takes different forms for different people. However, this then becomes an unfalsifiable dogma much like a religious belief. If ‘power’ means the ability to control others, then only an idiot would suggest intellectuals have become power mongers. Hitler was an intellectual hack like almost all-powerful elitists.
Which brings me to the notion that current white supremacists have which states, “I am a male chauvinist because I do not apologize for creating modernity” which can only be arrived at after much beer. These folks do not belong to modernity so how could they have any notion of it? They belong the Neanderthals. The ability to crawl out of the caves did not come from power but from real intellectuals. They are the Aristotles, Newtons, Einsteins of history not the providence of the elitists. Rand’s elitists are made clearly evident by the modern libertarian ‘elitists in their own minds’. They are a rather pathetic example of a bad fiction gone ‘badder’ (should be a word).
Sorry Santelli, but you are not an elitist or an intellectual either. Neither am I for that matter. However, I have read enough studies over the course of a lifetime to know the difference between power and intellectualism. Libertarian elitists only exist in intellectualism in the vacuum of unchecked ego. Santelli and all the other jokers would be used for cannon fodder by the Hitler’s of history. Even an idiot like Trump would chew them up and spit them out in a nano-second if it helped him. Do not confuscate power and intellectualism in order to boost your own elitist ego-centric inadequacies. You are not that; that does not exist in reality or history only in bad fiction Santelli!