In the Next Life, Canto III, stanzas 54-59

“No ‘we’ is anything, you simple snip,
for only individuals exist.
You can’t be part of some relationship
that’s merely an abstraction in the mist.”

He had a good idea of what she meant.
He’d read about what’s real and what’s pretend.
He knew of those whose thoughts were heaven-sent
and those who cracked their eggs the other end.

He knew that some maintained that gods
installed a sense of duty in the human soul,
but Darna (for that was what she was called)
apparently believed the self was whole.

His ancestors thought something like that, too:
’Twas wrong to use initiated force;
all government was evil, through and through;
and knowledge had a pure objective source.

Unable to persuade Society
that laws were slavery and taxes theft,
unwilling to be something less than free,
they resolutely packed their bags and left.

With what they’d managed to accumulate,
they bought a valley way out West somewhere,
pretended it became a sovereign state,
and traded, being careful not to share.

Eggs: This reference to Gulliver’s Travels implies that Merrimac saw no real difference between the faithful and the rational. Obviously he believed there is a tremendous difference in the final result; he has the belief system of Darna’s people (later named as Rejectionists) failing to perpetuate itself. Indeed, as we just discussed, it dies off more rapidly than the nearly nonexistent mores of Ciral’s folk. I think the similarity is in their tenacious dogmatism, so lacking in the compound, and in the ultimate source of their values.  Randian Objectivists like to think their entire ethos is based on Aristotelian postulates, but the very imperative to have such a thing in the first place is essentially irrational, no less than if they claimed a supernatural source for it. Put differently, they would not, and could not, have begun to dream up such a thing if one that they consider completely nonsensical had not already existed. Try to imagine a group of people with no values, one of them saying “I’ll bet we could get along better if we had some ethics,” and the others concurring. If someone has a less ridiculous scenario for the spontaneous generation of that kind of thinking, I’ll be happy to include it in the next edition.Objective source: This seems inconsistent with the distinction otherwise drawn between the two groups. See the following note.
Theft: A mantra of the Libertarian Party. That Merrimac is so familiar with and so dismissive of Objectivism is an indication that he is or has been involved in the libertarian movement, which seems to be largely composed of refugees from Objectivism. See Jerome Tucille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Note that I’m following the practice of libertarians themselves by using a capital L only when referring to the political party. I’m using a capital O throughout, however, to emphasize the orthodoxy of the Objectivist movement.
Pretended: A lot of libertarians dream of seceding or otherwise creating their own relatively lawless nation. Some have actually attempted it, but of course under normal circumstances such an endeavor wouldn’t be allowed by whatever armed group claims authority over their territory.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac