We're all born with a blank slate -- zip, zilch, nada on the mental blackboard. Infants and young children then seem to have an insatiable curiosity and a joy for life. The blackboard morphs into a blossoming spring tree. As children's rationality kicks in, each aspect of existence (a flower petal, a creeping caterpillar, a facial expression, a speeding car, a word) is a learning experience and a part of their benevolent existence. They love life. The play with it. They kid with it. They touch it. They sound it out. They talk about it. They move on with even greater anticipation amid the panoply of life.
It usually takes a horrible upbringing, years of adult oppression and, eventually, a mental cowardice for an adult to change from those early years and become an Ahab. (Remember Melville's immortal ship captain and his fatalistically haunting desire for destruction, for killing the spectre in the shape of a giant white whale?)
There's little argument among readers of Moby Dick that the whale represents the personification of Ahab's own subconscious turmoil, his gargantuan malevolent fury, his uncontrolled, emotionalistic worldview. He is fighting himself. His life has become a Twilight Zone of bizarre occurrences and unexplained events. He sets upon everyone around him with his rage. He believes that others are simply tools for his own agonized purposes.
And so we have the modern Lefty -- the modern Ahab who inhabits politics, journalism, Follywood, and virtually every office and household in America. (To be fair to Lefties (argh!), the Righties are the same, but they are mostly just unctuous, religionizing toads who want basically the same thing.) They have all made of themselves both murderers of the American spirit and vultures who feed upon the carcasses. They vote with their subconscious. They deride the beauty of work and wealth; they praise poverty and the poverty of the spirit prevalent in their "publicly educated" America. It is no irony that these malevolent monsters (forgetful of their halcyon early youth) prey upon our children first to make of them Ahabs who will become blind to their Ahab tormentors' puerile ways.
What the modern Ahab needs is Roto-Rooter for the rational mind. He/she needs rehab -- Objectivism Rehab. Rational Rehab. Reality Rehab.
Rehab to take back early childhood and to take that wonderful, effervescent jolly and understanding forward into the green pastures of solace, serenity, security and resolve. What a great place it is when you know what you think, why you think it and what you will do with it. What a tremendous relief it is to know that each of life's occurrences can be explained and fit into your own princely worldview. Nightmares vanish, monsters are vanquished, and there is no longer the alleged need for the veneer of confidence. You are simply just confident.
Life is not complex. It is simple. Everything is connected and categorized, so that you may go about your daily activities knowing that Moby Dick is fictional, not lying beneath, not ready to rear its frightful head and eat away at your mind and those around you.
Such is Objectivism, that lovely synthesis of mind and body.
It's time for Ahab's rehab.
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