Although it’s been many years since I’ve read any of her books, it finally came to me that the short-short story (an excerpt, really) that I will to try to paraphrase, came from one of three novels written by Ian Rand: We the Living, The Fountain Head, and Atlas Shrugged. She also wrote at least one short story that I know about, but don’t remember its title. I first read her books in the early 1950’s--barely a teenager--and read them again 15 years or so later. None of them make for easy reading, to say the least, and the Fountain Head, the only one I still have, (which was also made into a very bad movie) is 750 pages long. So, to find the excerpt exactly as it was written would be quite an undertaking. Besides, I’m fairly confident that I can do justice to the author even though most will be my own words, not hers. I’m hoping, however, that you’ll first allow me to tell you something about Ian Rand because, to understand her, is to give you a greater depth of understanding of what you quite correctly called a parable.
She was born in Russia, suffered the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution and the tyranny of the Leninist/Stalinist regimes then, luckily, escaped to America where she spent the rest of her life exalting the American industrialist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ian Rand was, first and foremost, a philosopher, not a writer of fiction. The three books of fiction that she did write were merely avenues to express her philosophical ideas. She called her philosophy, “Objectivism”. Since she wrote and spoke volumes on her philosophy, it’s not possible to explain it in these few words. One of it’s central points, however, is that every person has not only a right, but a moral duty to pursue one’s own “rational self interest” without hindrance--especially from government. Every one loses in a compromise, she believed. But, when they can pursue their own interest, neither hindering others or being hindered, the best...