Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for October 22, 2009
October 21, 2009
October 23, 2009
Transcript:
Adam: Here we are, honey. 'Teering our hearts out. Laura: "Teering"? Adam: Yeah...short for "volunteering". This is soul-nourishing! And shoot, if I don't feel better about myself. I haven't had an ego boost like this since I fit in those size 38 pants. Laura: You did some "tearing" that day, too.
Susan001: I’ve seen a certain ecstatic look in the eyes of people who feel like you seem to. There is no denying that it feels like happiness to them. But how kind and caring a person can you be if you call a complete stranger a “selfish pig” in the open Internet? Hardly charitable of you.
Doctor Toon: Your experience with Ayn Rand is too common. Adolescence is a time when the child’s mind has reached a level of maturity when it is ready for an adult level of understanding of reality and principles for living. Young people cry out for guidance. They want ideals! It is part of what makes adolescence so thrilling. The lucky ones can keep that feeling their whole lives (even at the risk of being insulted by you).
BUT… for too many reasons (which I won’t go into here because I want to get on with today’s cartoons), they give up, and they give up early. They decide ideals are unattainable, they sink into cynicism which they then equate with maturity, and they end up sounding like what you’ve written here.
If you are like the many people I’ve encountered who say the kinds of things you said, they never expended the effort needed to resolve in their minds the serious contradictions between what they’d been taught all their lives versus a completely new ethical philosophy in history. Selfish? Absolutely! But not the superficial misunderstanding of selfishness that most people cling to.
For anyone sincerely interested in understanding what Ayn Rand thought about ethics, you should read the essay collection “The Virtue of Selfishness” which should be available in any large bookstore. Then you have a chance of seeing that happiness should come from ambition, achievement, purposefulness, and success and not from ladling soup to the less fortunate. (Does anyone really think Mother Teresa was happy after they read her letters to the Pope?)