Literary Discussions

I think that if one's main goal is economic success or military victory and world hegemony/security then one must throw ethics and morality out the window and be utterly ruthless; ruthless to the extent that one is willing to allow Darwinian natural selection to take its course while the weak to fall by the wayside, and the ruthless development and use of weapons of mass destruction in a preemptive fashion to reshape demographics and eliminate ideological threats. In a very odd way this would make Jesus words "the meek shall inherit the earth" come true for after the designer demographics the remaining surviving cultures would be the meek and orderly. The casual reader will confuse these statements with MY GOALS. My goal is to die as quickly as possible for I find life in this world inconvenient, of little value to me or others. But your question is, I assume, what we think of Republicans and conservatives embracing or praising Ayn (draw the line) Rand.  I think victory will be to the more ruthless and proactive. I am no Ayn Rand scholar so I do not know what she thought of weapons of mass destruction or the notion of reshaping the world to make it more stable. Now if there is a God who created this world then that God created the law of the jungle which is : frogs eat butterflies, snakes eat frogs, hogs eat snakes and men eat hogs (the title of a Wallace Stevens poem) .. I think there are any number of ideologies/cultures who would do what I describe above in a heartbeat if they had the means and the window of opportunity. I rather like the personality of Jesus as I understand it. I see Jesus as a socialist who would be pleased to practice pure communism, and I actually lived in a pure communist society called a Greek Orthodox monastery. I suspect that the monasteries of Mt. Athos and Sinai are the only successful communities to have survived for centuries as purely communist societies with no personal property and each producing according to their abilities and consuming according to their needs. I would prefer to live in a world of Gandhis and Mother Teresas, but if you want shear survival then take some of your strategy from Rand and some from Stalin and Hitler. Whatever you want to say about Stalin, always remember that he died in his bed from old age; he did not die by the sword. After watching a documentary on Oppenheimer and how they saw his objections to the development of the H-Bomb as unpatriotic, I sincerely believe that America of the 1950s thought it would be a good idea to bomb their way across Russia and China and achieve detente by eliminating 300 million people.