Dr Michael Galak and his family came to Australia as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1978
The global Left rants, raves, riots and wears pink hats in its ongoing refusal to accept that Hillary Clinton isn’t president. No doubt they revel in the perverse pleasure of putting their anger and impotence on display, but they would learn more of their enemy by reading Ayn Rand.
Donald Trump’s first actions as POTUS continue to trigger unprecedented worldwide hysterics, vapours and hissy fits in progressivistas who did not get the president they had banked on seeing installed in the White House. These often grotesque convulsions bring to mind — to my mind, at any rate — the body movements of laboratory mice with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centres of their brains. The mice son learn that the simple act of pressing a lever produces the dopamine that results in uninterrupted sexual pleasure, so they press those levers to the exclusion of anything else. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t drink. They do nothing but pleasure themselves.
There is a difference, though, between these two groups of dopamine lovers. Where pleasure-fixated mice endlessly push their laboratory levers, progressives are embracing their Trumpian pain to attain the consolation of a self-righteous and politically correct collective orgasm. Masochism? Quite probably, but drawing a perverse pleasure from displays of public agony is the only way they have left to re-assert a feeling of control over a world turned upside down, a world they can grasp but simply cannot accept. On November 7 their universe was as they thought it should be. They dominated the public pulpit, the media and universities, set and policed the topics that might be discussed and dictated how they must be discussed. Then came Trump and their comfortable intellectual environment evaporated. The satisfaction drawn from the fury of their protests is the palliative of the uncomprehending.
Angry accusations of racism, misogyny, political bullying, plus all the other deadly sins thrown at the new president, have two main sources. These people do not know how, or do not wish, to think for themselves; they depend for their opinions on the ‘authority’ of well-placed and influential intellectual gurus. This explains the cognitive dissonance sen o often on the Left; without it, how can you protest Trump’s sexism while making common cause with Islamic groups, whose sexism is wovn into their very fabric. The impending loss of this pre-programmed pattern of approved and endorsed intellectual functioning frightens and angers them. What we see, operating at a physiological or gut level, is a Pavlovian mass reflex.
And there is another source, a philosophical one, which represents the profound, fundamental and irreconcilable difference in the weltanshauunung between the progressivistas — ‘dependents’, as I call them — and creative people like Donald Trump. This source has a name, a well-formulated philosophy, a body of literature and, what’s more, a substantial following. This particular philosophy and its followers were derided, denigrated and, as often as not, prohibited by the totalitarian regimes of both the Soviets and the Nazis. Needless to say, it was hated by progressives all over the world, who accused its followers of lack of empathy, of egotism and of a refusal to follow the directives of the Politburo.
I am talking about the ‘objectivist’ philosophy founded and formulated by Ayn Rand. It appears that that author’s ideas have a staunch adherent, a man who now happens to be the President of the United Sates of America.
I strongly suspect this consideration will need to be taken into account when Australia’s relationship with the new US administration has to be re-formulated. And make no mistake, reformulated it will have to be, as the near-disastrous Turnbull phone call to Trump demonstrated with all too obvious clarity. This is not such a profound thought. However, it is a key to predicting and understanding Trump’s thinking. I speak, of course, of Ayn Rand and her philosophy, which Trump is said to regard as one of his main vectors in life.
