[ SECRET POST #3153 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3153 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 060 secrets from Secret Submission Post #451.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

(I'm kind of over-sharing here. Definitely feel free to not read/reply if over-sharing bugs you.)

On the other hand, I read this at a time when I personally needed the bootstraps message.

Yeah, that whole bootstrap thing is...complicated. On the one hand, I really love a lot of what she has to say about autonomy and self-knowledge and taking as much personal responsibility for one's life and one's choices and one's feelings as possible. She writes her characters according to those principles and it's at the core of why I like them so much. It's also at the core of how I try to live myself.

That said, I'm also in my late twenties and struggling with an non-visible disability (extreme anxiety and some depression, mostly) meaning that I receive money from the government in order to get by. I am very aware that Rand would have considered me a moocher. Even by modern standards, knowing what we now know about mental disabilities, she probably still would have been among those who think I'm being lazy and sucking up the tax dollars being unfairly given to me by my "lousy socialist government." (Canada, eh.)

Even so, I think that IF Rand had been of the mind to believe in my disability, she probably would have said something like: you must exert your efforts towards becoming as able and as active as you can, for your own sake as a human being. And I believe that. Which is why I do work, as much as I am currently able, even though it's very hard and I don't have to do it. Because personal effort is ultimately the only way for us, as individuals, to make our lives non-empty.

Not that our lives cannot be shape by circumstances beyond our control, mind you. There are so many people in the world whose lives would be difficult and painful no matter how hard they tried, and I think Rand's philosophy kind of disregards that. Her books are full of characters with first-world privileges, and she tends to frame "effort" in first world terms. I wonder what her response would have been to sweat-shop workers, for example, who work fifteen hour days merely to survive. Would she have blamed them for their circumstances because they "accept" their drudge work? Or would she have seen them as the tragic victims of a lazy, crooked, mooching capitalism that's nothing like what she had in mind all those years ago?