They Say
A Commencement Address
Excerpted from an article by Edwin A. Locke, a retired professor of management and a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine:
Dear John and Sue:
We want to congratulate you on receiving your degrees. We know that you both worked very hard over the past four years.
There are some dangers we want to warn you against. Ironically, these dangers lie in the very ideas you have been taught in your college classes. We know, from having worked in the universities ourselves, that two broad themes dominated most of your courses: that human reason is unreliable and dispensable and that the individual should be subordinate to the collective.
There is one last academic danger you must face: the commencement address. This bromide-filled talk invariably reinforces the same falsehoods you have heard in your classrooms. The speaker will tell you that your highest moral obligation is to choose a career in which you pursue not your own interests, but those of society. You will hear the statement that self-sacrifice is the noblest ideal for which any American could strive.
The truth is exactly the opposite. America was founded on the principle of individualism, the principle that the individual is sovereign and has an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In America, virtue was meant to consist not of self-negation, but of self-assertion,not of collective servitude, but of individual achievement. Defying centuries of statist political thought, the Founding Fathers declared for the first time that the individual does not exist to serve the government, but that the government exists solely to protect the rights of the individual.
The principles of America are the polar opposite of those that governed Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The philosophies of those and of all dictatorships were based explicitly on the premise that each citizen has a duty to sacrifice his own interests to those of the collective.
So as you start out on your careers and your adult lives, we urge you to hold two ideas as absolutes, never to be breached or compromised: that reason is your means of knowing reality and that your life belongs only to you. These are the principles that made America great and that will enable you, if you embrace them consistently, to live productive and happy lives.
Love,
Mom and Dad
