Friday Fun: raising your kid Objectivist

Written By: - Date published: 2:36 pm, January 28th, 2011 - 11 comments
Categories: humour - Tags: ,

Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Atlas Shrugged.
BY ERIC HAGUE

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I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place—a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles—and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.

Since the day Johanna was born, we’ve worked to indoctrinate her into the truth of Objectivism. Every night we read to her from the illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged—glossing over all the hardcore sex parts, mind you, but dwelling pretty thoroughly on the stuff about being proud of what you’ve earned and not letting James Taggart-types bring you down. For a long time we were convinced that our efforts to free her mind were for naught, but recently, as we’ve started socializing her a little bit, we’ve been delighted to find that she is completely antipathetic to the concept of sharing. As parents, we couldn’t have asked for a better daughter.

That’s why, when Johanna then began berating your son, accusing him of trying to coerce from her a moral sanction of his theft of the fruit of her labor, in as many words, I kind of egged her on. Even when Aiden started crying.

You see, that Elmo ball was Johanna’s reward for consistently using the potty this past week. She wasn’t given the ball simply because she’d demonstrated an exceptional need for it—she earned it. And from the way Aiden’s pants sagged as he tried in vain to run away from our daughter, it was clear that he wasn’t anywhere close to deserving that kind of remuneration. By so much as allowing Johanna to share her toy with him, we’d be undermining her appreciation of one of life’s most important lessons: You should never feel guilty about your abilities. Including your ability to repeatedly peg a fellow toddler with your Elmo ball as he sobs for mercy.

Look, imagine what would happen if we were to enact some sort of potty training Equalization of Opportunity Act in which we regularized the distribution all of Johanna’s and Aiden’s potty chart stickers. Suddenly it would seem as if Aiden had earned the right to wear big-boy underpants, and within minutes you’d have a Taggart Tunnel-esque catastrophe on your hands, if you follow me.

Johanna shouldn’t be burdened with supplying playthings for every bed-wetting moocher she happens to meet. If you saw Johanna, her knees buckling, her arms trembling but still trying to hold aloft the collective weight of an entire Tot Lot’s worth of Elmo balls with the last of her strength, what would you tell her to do?

To shrug. Just like we’ve instructed her to do if Child Protective Services or some other agent of the People’s State of America ever asks her about what we’re teaching her.

After all, we’ve managed to raise a bright, self-reliant girl who achieves her goals by means of incentive and ratiocination and never—or very rarely—through the corrupt syllogism of force. We know, despite what you and a number of other parents we’ve met have said—as they carried their whimpering little social parasites away—that Johanna’s defiant, quasi-bellicose nature only superficially resembles that of an out-of-control toddler, and in truth posits her as more of a latter-day Dagny Taggart than any kind of enfant terrible.

Yes, she’s blossomed into everything we ever hoped or post hoc rationalized she would. In our house we no longer say, “Who is John Galt?” Instead we say, “Who’s our little princess?”

11 comments on “Friday Fun: raising your kid Objectivist ”

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  1. Colonial Viper 1
    28 January 2011 at 3:28 pm

    Classic. And then Johanna grows up to be a National PM just like Shipley, English or Key.

    How lucky we will all be then.

  2. ianmac 2
    28 January 2011 at 3:47 pm

    Must remember to use Johanna’s name in reply to the frequent posts from those who say that “It is their money and the bludgers on DPB or the Dole are not getting any of my money. Take that!”

  3. Ian 3
    28 January 2011 at 7:24 pm

    Nice post. Idiot libbers objected to the government giving to the Christchurch earthquake relief fund. Such charming people.

  5. mickysavage 5
    28 January 2011 at 8:22 pm

    Ha

    Way too subtle for some …

  6. Pascal's bookie 6
    29 January 2011 at 9:26 pm

    Funny:

    “There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.” – Ayn Rand

    Given:

    An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand’s law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand’s behalf she secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor).

    As Pryor said, “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out” without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently… She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ford/ayn-rand-and-the-vip-dipe_b_792184.html

    Say it aint so!

    ‘But aha, it’s the lieberal ‘huffington post’,
    who is squishy and not consistent,
    and believes in truths not related to A= A’,
    there is no depth of perfidy to deep for the salanderers and befoulers to stoop to,
    shame on them, it is like unto murder and slavery,
    which is the custom of the left
    dontchaknow.’

    However, it was revealed in the recent “Oral History of Ayn Rand” by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that in the end Ayn was a vip-dipper as well. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand’s law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand’s behalf she secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor). …

    ‘Shut up!’

    ‘Also it is only because of the system, just because she disagreed with the system, and felt it evil, and parasitic, and what not, it is the system she was living under, against her will I might add. So it is not hypocritical to sneakily use the things under one name, that you decry as evil under another more famous name. Because you are forced to you see. You are entitled to it because of their thievery.Yeah, that’s the ticket’

    “There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.” – Ayn Rand

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