Excerpts from Ayn Rand’s Final Hum Paper

By John Veillette

Oct. 31, 2015

In Genesis, the God character, who is of course just a character because a divine being is a fiction for those too weak to face the realities of this earth, [frees] man from the [burdens innate in collectivism]. Subsequently, individual men, like the enterprising Joseph, are able to use their shrewdness and talents to acquire power and wealth, as is their inalienable right as individuals.

In the beginning man was cursed with “one language, one set of words,” hindering his capacity for individualism (Gen 11:1). The narrative despicably refers to the collection of individuals as “they,” as if all men were neatly encompassed in one unit, the enemy of individual freedom. The God character, seeing this grave offense, said coolly, as if a mountain were to say, “‘As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do [pursue collective goals], nothing they plot [suppressing the rights of the individual] will elude them’” (Gen 11:6). And so the God character baffled their language and “scattered them from there all over the earth,” freeing them from the ills of collectivism (Gen 11:8).

Without the burden of caring for the idle, enterprising individuals, with the strength and freedom of [true men?], could accumulate vast sums of wealth and power as a fair market reward for the valuable services they provide to society. Take the example of the young entrepreneur Joseph, who, after prudently stocking up seven years of food before a famine, capitalized upon this opportunity and traded his food to fairly take “possession of all the farmland of Egypt . . . for each Egyptian sold his field” and himself into slavery (Gen 11:20). A weak man would say this arrangement is not fair, that Joseph took the property and the freedom of everyone in Egypt, but anything that is possible is fair, as freedom, in a political context, means only the absence of physical coercion and nothing more.