Audiobooks and Objectivism

For the last few weeks I have been spending much of my time listening to audiobooks. I had forgotten how much I love them! They are perfect for listening to on the way to work and back, and you can even listen to them at work. If you can multi-task, then an audiobook allows you to maximize your time and stay entertained even while doing mundane tasks.

Lately I have been listening to The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. It is a series of fantasy novels that explore the philosophy of Objectivism. I read Atlas Shrugged ten years ago so the political philosophy wasn't new to me. While Goodkind manages to plagiarize the ideas of many of his contemporaries in the fantasy genre, the political angle of the series gave me many opportunities to examine the dangers of good intentions, and I found myself consuming the books one after another.

The series is so popular that Sam Raimi (Spiderman, The Evil Dead, Hercules etc) is bringing it to television this fall.

My favorite book was Faith of the Fallen, which is probably the most obviously objectivist book of the series. It was also the most original. I didn't notice a single idea that was "borrowed" from Robert Jordan (from whom he borrowed the most in previous books). In the book, Richard (the hero of the series) is captured and forced to live as a commoner in a socialist (in the Stalinist sense) state. He learns first hand about the state of slavery that exists when men are forced to live for the benefit of those "in need", and how bureaucracy stifles the human spirit and elevates the worst characteristics in humanity. The government creates sociopathy in the name of fighting it. This probably appealed to me because of my anti-statist leanings.

While the objectivist hero is self-reliant and abhors bureaucracy cloaked in good-intentions, they are also noble and extremely loyal, willing to sacrifice for those they love. The stories praise the willing sacrifice made by free men, as they trample the notion that we are best served by sacrificing our independence in the name of vague ideas about the common good.