The New Individualist, December 2006

“The average high-school graduate is a jerky, anxious, incoherent youth with a mind like a scarecrow made of sundry patches that cannot be integrated into any shape. . . . It is the educational establishment that has created this national disaster.”

                         — Ayn Rand, "The Comprachicos"

                            The Objectivist (August-December 1970)

OUR COVER:

Do today’s high schools help adolescents become mature, thinking adults? Ha! They are i nstead generating—and graduating—millions of emotion-driven, infantile brats. Art editor David Sims presents a typical product of the kind of secondary “education” described in C.A. Baylor’s cover feature, “Schools for Subjectivists.”

Editor’s Desk   By Robert James Bidinotto

OUT OF STEP:

Schools for Subjectivists

by C.A. Baylor

         Far from teaching students self-responsibility and self-esteem, today’s high schools reinforce infantile habits of self-absorption and self-indulgence.

SENTINEL:

Blinkmanship: Path to a Nuclear Showdown

by Scott Wheeler

         A veteran investigative reporter reveals how the North Korean nuclear menace arose from a dangerous policy of appeasement that U.S. officials have yet to abandon.

SELF EXPRESSIONS: 

         The holiday season inspires our author to reflect on the nature and meaning of “spirituality”—and whether it must be rooted in religious faith and mysticism.

MAVERICKS: 

Hawley’s Heroes and the Romance of Business 

by Marsha Familaro Enright

          Businessman heroes. Romantic plots. Individualistic themes. You think we mean Ayn Rand, don’t you? Nope—try novelist Cameron Hawley, literary champion of capitalism.
 

American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips
Reviewed by Lance Lamberton

         When neocons and the religious right captured the Republican Party, their influence led the Bush administration to disastrous policies at home and abroad. 

REEL INDIVIDUALISM:

It Was a Wonderful Life

Reviewed by Robert L. Jones

         Are you among those humbugs who think the holiday film classic It’s a Wonderful Life preaches altruistic duty and sacrifice for the sake of others? Think again
 

Superman Returns
Reviewed by Robert L. Jones and Marimer Navarrete

          Previous movies about the Man of Steel gradually reduced him to rust. But the latest film in the Superman franchise restores him to untarnished glory.

SOLILOQUY:  

An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling 

by Robert James Bidinotto

         Why, oh, why should the author who gave the world Harry Potter—and so much magic and joy—feel guilty about her financial success?

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