Ever since President Obama was elected, sales of Ayn Rand's decades-old prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged have shifted into warp drive, untold millions of copies sold. Everywhere people are asking, "Where is Obama taking the United States? Will America end up a depressed and disheartened nation ruled by thugs?" Ayn Rand, writing over 50 years ago, showed us a clear picture of the future which is now unfolding. Dr. Yaron Brook says, “People are discovering the prescience of Ayn Rand’s writing. They’re seeing the policies of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ villains Wesley Mouch and Cuffy Meigs acted out by our government officials today."
Atlas Shrugged tells the story of an American future in which redistribution of wealth (government-forced sacrifice of some for the good of all) has become the moral ideal. Men and women of talent, skill, common sense and heroic spirit are increasingly punished (taxed, regulated, burdened) because they have produced more than others. Tricksters and morally corrupt individuals are rewarded by the system. America is deteriorating into dark and miserable cultural and economic chaos.
Ayn Rand showed clearly the cause of all this destruction: the morality of self-sacrifice.
Those who have read Atlas Shrugged are under no illusions as to where Obama and his philosophy are leading us. They can already see deterioration of society setting in everywhere they look ... and they know it will get much worse.
Rand's desperate attempt to offer an answer resulted in her modern philosophy which renounces sacrifice. But the rejection of a man-made moral code which teaches living for others at the expense of oneself is not new to Ayn Rand. The refusal of such an ethic is logical, psychologically healthy, natural, and (despite centuries of misinterpretation) the true teaching of Jesus Christ.
Not long after the publication of Atlas Shrugged another New York woman of Jewish lineage, who became known not so much as a prophetess but as a scribe for 21st Century Christianity, began jotting down words dictated to her from Jesus Christ. After substantial gentle and loving prodding from Jesus, Helen Schucman eventually surrendered to writing the lessons she was hearing, which Jesus described as his true and corrected teaching, much different in some important ways from popularly understood "Christian dogma."
Especially important to any discussion of the cultural and economic deterioration of modern America, Jesus Christ, in his modern-day revelation which has become known as A Course in Miracles, joins with Ayn Rand. Whereas Ayn attempts to teach us that sacrifice is immoral, Jesus goes much farther, showing us that sacrifice is meaningless, an ego-mechanism which we use to blind ourselves, a device for denial of truth.
What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain, and no one asks for pain if he recognizes it. It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. (ACIM Manual For Teachers)
In A Course in Miracles, Jesus devotes entire chapters to correcting the corrupted worship of sacrifice found in Christianity and elsewhere. In one particular chapter entitled, The End of Sacrifice, he states:
Fear not to recognize as SOLELY OF YOUR MAKING the whole idea of sacrifice.
You who believe that sacrifice IS love, must learn that sacrifice is separation FROM love. For sacrifice brings guilt, as surely as love brings peace. Guilt is the CONDITION of sacrifice, as peace is the condition for the awareness of your relationship with God.
Jesus makes it very clear that he never sacrificed himself for others, nor would he ever. His actions and circumstances have for centuries been misinterpreted by minds which never understood. In his chapter entitled, Atonement without Sacrifice, Jesus states:
There is one more point which must be perfectly clear before any residual fear which may still be associated with miracles becomes entirely groundless. The Crucifixion did NOT establish the Atonement. The Resurrection did. This is a point which many very sincere Christians have misunderstood.
If the Crucifixion is seen from an upside down point of view, it certainly does appear AS IF God permitted, and even encouraged, one of his Sons to suffer BECAUSE he was good. Many very devoted ministers preach this every day. This particularly unfortunate interpretation, which actually arose out of the combined misprojection of a large number of my own would-be followers, has led many people to be bitterly afraid of God.
Sacrifice is a notion totally unknown to God. Sacrificing others in any way is a clear-cut violation of God's own injunction that man should be merciful even as His Father in heaven is merciful.
For the salvation of mankind, the thought that sacrifice is somehow a moral ideal has to disappear. This idea was incorrect when it first started to spread among mankind, but its destructive effects became painfully obvious when it was picked up and championed as a societal ideal by Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. It has been an idea responsible for never-ending suffering and death, and can only bring about the ruin of America and Western freedoms ... unless we refuse it.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's fictional hero John Galt makes this declaration on an ethical level: “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Jesus Christ in A Course in Miracles drives home the point on an even more fundamental metaphysical level: "The lesson I was born to teach, and still would teach to all my brothers, is that sacrifice is nowhere and love is everywhere."
Often a prophet or prophetess is a forerunner, signaling disaster about to come ... and offering at least a hint as to the solution. Ayn Rand was a great 20th Century prophetess. Freedoms known in the Western world will be saved if everyone you know reads her novels. And yet her inner hearing was not in every instance 100% clear. The clearest inner hearing had to wait for the humility of Helen Schucman and the voice of Jesus Christ:
The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take. And sacrifice is an idea so mad that sanity dismisses it at once. Never believe that you can sacrifice. There is no place for sacrifice in what has any value. If the thought occurs, its very presence proves that error has arisen, and correction must be made.
America's salvation from Obama's insanity: Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ! Who would have guessed?
Also available free of charge online:
Course in Relationship Miracles
