Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 26/08/1999
Music - Die Fledermaus
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Thursday August 26, proudly sponsored by Tuariki Tobacco Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
Music up, music down!
Recently I received a heart-wrenching e-mail from a young man in Australia, who had stumbled across my Free Radical web site. From his own account his background is tragically typical of that of so many of his generation. Unlike his peers, however, he has decided to do something about it - with mixed results so far:
"I have been struggling to reverse years of terrible thinking and living habits, and although Objectivism initially provided a powerful jump start in this process, recent experiences have left me feeling beaten, demoralised and empty. I have effectively no friends, having lost or abandoned most of them as a result of my shift in views, and anyway find most personal contact with people to be irritating and difficult. I have strong convictions about reason and freedom but I have a great deal to overcome in my personal life. Sometimes hours and days are wasted in almost a state of panic; having taken so many wrong turns in my life and lived so evasively and subjectivistically, I often seem to be just what Rand described in 'The Comprachicos.' Although my thinking is sometimes razor sharp, I regularly and habitually fall back into the muck of vaporous, uncontextualised fear. At this point I think the only problem is bad thinking and living habits that need to be modified or replaced. Emotions tend to follow from thoughts, and you can imagine what sort of thought habits one has when one has grown up on the malevolent universe premise, taken drugs, looked up to junkie 'artists' as role models and battered oneself senseless with nihilistic punk rock music for years."
I can imagine it, of course - in fact, no feat of imagination is required; one need only look around. The retreat from the mind is everywhere, in countless forms. The "senseless nihilistic punk rock music" is really an affirmation of that retreat's final destination: oblivion. Death. This young man's dilemma is that, though he has embraced life again, so much of the baggage of the journey of death still clings to him.
I doubt that there's a single Objectivist or libertarian alive who doesn't face the same plight in some measure or other, especially among the young. Conformity has seldom been more prevalent. You know that when a drooling, incoherent female goes on the Holmes Show with her father & has to have her father explain that the rings in her nose & tongue are an expression of her "individuality" - a word that the drooling female, her brain obviously battered senseless with nihilistic punk rock music, would not begin to comprehend. For someone raised in such a culture to grasp the link between individuality & reason, as this young man has, & then actively to champion these values, becoming friendless in the process - bespeaks a courage & an intelligence & a burgeoning independence that tell me he will win his battle to shed his baggage. Not all of it, by any means, & it's important that he not feel guilty over that. But enough of it to make his life radically better.
And of course, he will find friends again, people who share his values & his sense of life. He's already found one!
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