Karl and Ayn Speak Up

Dear Ideologue,
I recently moved away to university and am having difficulty adjusting to my new environment. So far, I am having trouble meeting people and getting used to the university lifestyle. It seems like everyone I meet just wants to drink! I thought university was supposed to be about learning. How can I make friends who are interested in more than just getting wasted?
Lonesome Teetotaller

Dear Lonesome,
By it’s very nature, the capitalist mode of production is alienating. It alienates workers from their labour by witholding a portion of it’s value from them, and alienates workers from from their humanity by forcing them to sell their labour to the capitalists instead of working accordingto their natural talents and desires.

Dehumanized in the factories, workers also behave as animals in their leisure time. Hedonistic drinking, womanizing, gambling and other wild behaviour thus are manifest, further alienating man from his fellows.

University only functions to maintain bourgeois rule so that the proletariat, few of whom can afford to attend university, are excluded. To make true friends, try engaging in a revolution where by the proletariat overthorows the bourgeoisie. Nothing brings people together like the blood of their class-enemies flowing through the streets.
Karl

Dear Lonesome,
Your disappointment at university life is to be expected, especially at such a disgustingly liberal campus as WLU, within the wishy-washy, feelings-based Ontario education system in the slimy, socialist nation that is Canada.

Objective minds are a rarity; rarer still are those who want to get to the bottom of things when they face an apparent contradiction; the rest go drinking to evade such a responsibility. If you have an independent will to learn, you do not need friends, but they will find you anyway. A reasoning, productive mind will stand on its own while the unreasoning and weak will give way to whatever currently passes as thought. Such a mind cannot be hidden from others like it.

Alternatively, you can speed up the process by starting an Objectivism club on campus, and have them meet in the library during happy hour. Failing that, try moving to Silicon Valley.
Ayn

Dear Ideologue,
I recently became pregnant. This is a problem since I did not want to become pregnant. In fact, I was taking birth control pills at the time, so I’m not really sure how it happened. I am unsure about whether I want the child; I don’t have a job, and I’m pretty sure my parents will be very upset if I chose to keepthe child. What should I do?
Pregnant and Worried

Dear Pregnant and Worried,
You should not feel guilty, for despite engaging in free love, you had the foresight to take reasonable precautions and so were not behaving irresponsibly. By using birth control you rebelled; you rose up, casting off the chains of reproductive tyranny, and thus seized control of the means of reproduction.

Yet you are with child! How can this be? The capitalists claim that their pharmaceutical factories have ushered in an age of self-mastery. Alas, as with many such claims, it is not always so. Whether by sabotage or incompetence, their products (the high price of which no doubt force you to toil for long hours under brutal conditions) failed you. Though you do not mention him, I sense that your lover exploited you. It is typical of the bourgeois to treat you as mere human capital, extracting his pleasure from you and moving on to the next hapless young lady.

I, too, have known the anguish of raising children in poverty. I was so poor, in fact, that my youngest daughter Jenny died for want of basic necessities. Such is often the lot of the proletariat. At the same time, to give up the child for adoption would mean alienating yourself from the product of your labour. That’s odd–it seems my line of reasoning has proven fruitful in terms of analyzing the current state of affairs, yet offers little in the way of practical advice. Sorry, frauline Pregnant.
Karl

Dear Pregnant and Worried,
It could be a rational desire not to be pregnant while one is jobless and attending university, and modern biological science has reliable ways to end pregnancies. To ignore these facts and question your will is to deny the very essence of your existence as a reasoning human being.

Furthermore, the fact that you even consider your parents— and THEIR feelings at that!—implies that I am wasting precious minutes of mine in sharing my knowledge with you, since it is unclear—insofar as you are “unsure” about something so obvious—that you are an individual with whom it is worth reasoning. Otherwise, you would not have let any vile, self-refuting ‘pro-life’ campaigns deceive you into denying your own self, if such a thing actually exists in your case.

But I am paid to write responses, and you did have enough sense to ask advise from me, so I will conclude: I have said elsewhere that a child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. Do not let that happen. Get rid of it now, or you will pay for it for years.
Ayn