The Obligatory We

Compulsory labor conscription is now practiced or advocated in every country on Earth..............Ayn Rand

And, I would add, in every civilization that ever existed. I, at any rate, can't think of any obvious exceptions. There were pretty dramatic differences in scale and scope, to be sure. A couple of fundamental circumstances constrain the nature and character of human interactions: the struggle for existence, and the need for cooperation. Every mammal is dependent for some period of infancy, but many live almost totally independently for much of their lives. Humans aren't like that. We are obligatory social animals, and lone individuals can't compete against a band or tribe.

Once men adopted agriculture, higher forms of society developed and with them came obligatory cooperation, with societies unwilling to adopt such being killed out by those that did. Such enforced cooperation doesn't sit well with human nature, so it was almost always limited in scope. The dystopian fantasy of Rand's Anthem has occasionally been approached but never achieved.

Enforced cooperation was the great bugaboo of Ayn Rand's thought and literature, but she ran her own circle of sycophants like an oriental despot. Her vision had no room for dissent or independent thought and consequently, no room for reality. Her fantasy is thus condemned to remain a fantasy, but it exerts a powerful pull that I don't fully comprehend.

Somehow this intensely elitist philosophy seems to have a lot of its appeal to those who look a lot like losers in the game of life.

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