"Ayn Rand delivered this lecture at the Ford Hall Forum in 1966."
Our Cultural Value-Deprivation
Apart from the dated references, Rand's complaints about our culture make sense to me. I can imagine what Rand would have said about Jersey Shore.
What would Rand have made of the white-trash reality series on cable TV? You know, Dirty Jobs, Pawn Stars, Ax Men, Swamp People, etc. On the one hand they show small entrepreneurs or blue collar guys who engage in trade or productive work instead of living as "parasites." But on the other hand, their work doesn't require much in the way of intelligence or book learning, though it does show skill in the use of tools; a lot of what they portray falls into the neighborhood of John Galt's work as a day laborer on a railroad. Educated, cognitively challenging work in science and engineering doesn't necessarily translate into interesting reality TV unless the engineers have to build something which flies, blows things up or launches into space.
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