I celebrate Atlas Shrugged Day (September 2) each year by opening to a random page of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, and reading a passage. Here is what I found today, on page 790 of the hardcover book (New York: Random House, 1957), Part III, Chapter II (“The Utopia of Greed”):

Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which is now destroying the world—his was the heaviest guilt. He had the mind to know better. His was the only name of honor and achievement, used to sanction the rule of the looters. He was the man who delivered science into the power of the looters’ guns.

Because I exert no political influence, at least in the short term, my thoughts on Afghanistan can wait for another day. In the meantime, here are non-fiction words from Ayn Rand to ponder.

Observe also that moral neutrality necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue. A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil is evil, finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good. To him, a person of virtue is a threat that can topple all of his evasions—particularly when an issue of justice is involved, which demands that he take sides. It is then that such formulas as “Nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong” and “Who am I to judge?” take their lethal effect. The man who begins by saying: “There is some good in the worst of us,” goes on to say: “There is some bad in the best of us”—then: “There’s got to be some bad in the best of us”—and then: “It’s the best of us who make life difficult—why don’t they keep silent?—who are they to judge?”

—Ayn Rand. 1962, 15–16. Intellectual Ammunition Department: How does one lead a rational life in an irrational society, such as we have today? The Objectivist Newsletter, 1 (4): 15–16. Reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness.

Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil, which means—not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing blinding panic—that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.

To an appeaser, the self-assertive confidence of the good is a reproach, a threat to his precarious pseudo-self-esteem, a disturbing phenomenon from a universe whose existence he cannot permit himself to acknowledge—and his emotional response is a nameless resentment. The self-assertive confidence of the evil is a metaphysical confirmation, the sign of a universe in which he feels at home—and his emotional response is bitterness, but obedience. Some dictators—who boastfully stress their reign of terror, such as Hitler and Stalin—count on this kind of psychology. There are people on whom it works.

Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil. The next step leads to opposing the good in order to appease the evil, and rushing out to seek the evil’s favor. But since no mind can fully hide this policy from itself, and no form of pseudo-self-esteem can disguise it for long, the next step is to pounce upon every possible or impossible chance to blacken the nature of the good and to whitewash the nature of the evil.

—Ayn Rand. 1966, 4–5. Altruism as Appeasement. The Objectivist, 5 (1): 1–6. Reprinted in The Voice of Reason.

On second thought, I don’t really have to write about Afghanistan (and Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.), because I have already done so many times. For example, see this post from 2015 (which refers to an article from 2003): Republicans Accept Goal-Line Defense Against the JV.