Flattened Ears

The first essay included in The Return of the Primitive centers on the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" protests of the 1960s, and it also forces me to commit a typographical crime in the form of a double end-quote due to how I format my post titles. The reason for this is because Ayn Rand is the Sargon of Akkad of the 1970s. More on that later. The more specific reason for this is because Rand wants to make it clear that she doesn't consider these students to really be rebels, she considers them to be conformists who merely appropriate the image of rebellion for the sake of branding and to feel cool, and for the first couple paragraphs and the title of the essay she'll persist in putting scare-quotes around the words "rebel" and "rebellion" to drive this point home. This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or...

If it wasn't clear from the views I've already espoused on this blog in regard to politics and culture, at this point in my life I consider myself a great many things which can broadly be categorized as "leftist." Specifically, I'm currently a big fan of Pyotr Kropotkin's anarchist communism. But this wasn't always the case, in fact it's a pretty recent development. Prior to this I had a period where I considered myself a "left-leaning centrist" and avoided politics most of the time, and before that (back in and immediately after high school) I was outright conservative. Not just conservative, in fact, but a Randian Objectivist. I know, I know, a goth phase would've been preferable, but that would've required me to go out and buy clothes, whereas all I had to do to get into objectivism was grab a couple books off my (mostly politically-illiterate) mom's shelf. (I was also pretty well primed to accept objectivism due to a lifetime...