Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more significant than others. I couldn’t claim to be a self-chooser, and deploy a whole Nietzschean vocabulary of self-making, just because I choose steak and fries over poutine for lunch. Which issues are significant, I do not determine. If I did, no issue would be significant. But then the very ideal of self-choosing as a moral ideal would be impossible.
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you— you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to these two. Hours and hours seemed to go by in this dead calm, and they hardly noticed that they were getting colder and colder.
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The transition from gold to paper need not be problematic in and of itself. The use of paper currency and checks was, historically, a matter of convenience so as to avoid the costs of physically exchanging gold every time trades occurred. The key was that the paper instruments were still redeemable in gold if the holder so desired. When Rand has Francisco talk about the gold being “seized,” presumably this refers to removing any role for gold in the monetary system. If so, then the claim that what is left is just a “counterfeit pile of paper” is somewhat closer to the truth. However, even in that case, the paper is not literally worthless. As long as people continue to believe that the paper can be used as a medium of exchange, it will retain some value. The issue that is more important than the move from gold to paper is the degree of discretion to change money’s quantity without regard to the demand for its services that any change in the monetary regime gives the producers of money.
Sayfa 389
The following are basic qualities that will help create the illusion of charisma:
Purpose: If people believe you have a plan, that you know where you are going, they will follow you instinctively. The direction does not matter: pick a cause, an ideal, a vision and show that you will not sway from your goal. People will imagine that your
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