FoxNews.com: The Radicalness of Atlas Shrugged

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an article published today on FoxNew.com’s opinion page.  Titled “The Radicalness of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” Dr. Ghate writes:

To give a taste of its radicalness, consider that  today it’s taken for granted that the man of virtue is Mother Teresa-like; he  selflessly lives to serve others and demands that you do the same. The man of  vice is selfish; he pursues his own interests and demands that his actions bring  him a profit. Whenever a television show or movie needs a stock villain, one  whose evil motivation will require no setup, you can be sure a businessman  erecting an office building on treed land or a corporation testing an  experimental drug will be written in. Simply to point out that they are pursuing  profit is sufficient to damn them. Judging from my experience, more murders on  television are committed by businessmen than by mobsters.

It is this entire viewpoint, entrenched for  centuries by religious and secular thinkers alike, that Atlas Shrugged challenges. What emerges from its pages is that the moral man is in fact truly  selfish: he chooses to embrace his own life by choosing to purposefully,  systematically, and unwaveringly do the thinking and take the actions necessary  for his own happiness.

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And if you’ve heard of the movie and are interested in exploring Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, you can start here.

Read more at The Ayn Rand Center