Speak for Yourself: Letters to the Editor
“BETTER AND BETTER”
I want to congratulate you on the past three issues of The New Individualist. From the look of the magazine to the content, each issue is getting better and better. In the March 2006 issue, I particularly enjoyed Walter Donway’s book review dealing with creativity and the brain and Sara Pentz’s interview with Walter Williams.
TNI’s approach of examining all aspects of life from an Objectivist viewpoint is vitally needed in today’s culture. I hope to see much broader distribution of the magazine soon.
Jordan Zimmerman
Principal Software Architect
SHOP.COM
The March issue is very good. They keep getting better and better. Keep up the good work.
Chris Grieb
I read all the March articles. All of them, all the way through. I hardly ever do that with any magazine. And I liked them. Color me impressed.
I admit I sped-read the letters.
John Enright
I like the new TNI: It's bright and breezy, no longer hiding its light under a bushel. It shouts, "I want your attention," and is getting it - yet it is not without substance. TNI doesn't cheapen the message it renders accessible. While other editors trembled under their desks, you’ve published the Islamic cartoons [Winter 2006]. While fainter hearts might have hesitated to take chances, you’ve redesigned your covers in a bold attempt to capture mass-market attention.
Anyone familiar with the Ayn Rand Letter and The Objectivist Newsletter knows that
TNI is no longer an Objectivist face without a smile. Thank you, Robert.
Robert Davison (Wolf)
Thank you, one and all. I hope the magazine continues to meet your highest expectations. -RJB
ERSATZ INDIVIDUALISM
Dr. Bruce Thornton’s “Huck Finn and the Nuremberg Rally” (March 2006) made a wonderful case for the creative power of the sort of iconoclastic, frontier American individualism that Huck Finn personifies. Many other cultures seem to have been knocking on the same door with such personas as the ronin or the Cossack, but they never broke through to realm of freedom.
But beware of imitators! All that seems ruggedly, nobly individualistic to unwary eyes is hardly so. Consider:
Misfits and deviants. They naturally go against the grain, but hardly to any productive or noble end. If surly contrariness were the only measure of virtue, the criminal psychopath would rank up there in the pantheon of the gods. And goodness knows there are the idiots who fall for the mistake of placing them there. That leads to...
The budding thug and despot. Hitlers and Pol Pots have to start small, and their quest to seize power intrinsically puts them at odds with the status quo. Their sack-and-pillage climb to the top sure has the trappings of rebellion, but naturally it’s all just a tumultuous switch of overseers. The dull, ditzy, and naïve will be seduced by this spectacle, however, and of course see the Second Coming coming. Just look at the fools who like to sport the mug of that unwashed homicidal nutter Che Guevara on their T-shirts. Which brings up the issue of...
The ersatz rebel. There are so many sheep blindly following a fad purporting to be liberation, without an independent thought in their heads. Remember that pivotal scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when the beleaguered Brian tries to shoo away his horde of sycophantic followers with the admonition that they should go and sort out matters on their own. And they respond robotically, “Yes-that’s-right. We-have-to-work-it-out-for-ourselves!” To that lot, “freedom” is just another word for “give me the brain-dead life.”
So be warned. Accept no substitutes.
J. Wroblewski