The John Galt’s of the 20th Century

Collectivism Doesn’t Create – Individual Liberty Does

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph — a device later improved by Thomas Edison, who went on to invent the phonograph, the electric light, and the motion picture projector.

Charles Goodyear discovered the vulcanization process that made rubber useful, and George Eastman revolutionized photography with the invention of a new type of camera — the Kodak.

George Washington Carver, among myriad agricultural accomplishments, developed peanuts and sweet potatoes into leading crops.

Architects like Louis Sullivan and William LeBaron Jenney created the skyscraper, and George Westinghouse, the inventor of train airbrakes, developed a power system able to transmit electricity over great distances.

The penniless Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie built a vast company manufacturing steel, and John D. Rockefeller did the same in the oil industry.

John Roebling perfected the suspension bridge

Thinking About Hobbits

You do not understand a passage well enough to preach it unless you can make it a metaphor. If you can’t put the idea of a passage into a metaphor, you don’t really understand it. And you are certainly not ready to preach it” (Edwards, Deep Preaching, p. 126).

Intellectual Abdication (a.k.a. “appeasers”)

When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.” — Ayn Rand Disclaimer: While we do not support the wordview of Ayn Rand (Objectivism) — to the extent that she uses lumber from a Christian worldview to build her house – we would find agreement. We believe that what Schaeffer called “true truth,” and what Augustine referred to as “plundering the Egyptians,” belongs to God and to us as Christians. Therefore we do not shun truth whether it comes from Rand or pagans such as the philosophers.

One Man Prevented the Destruction of Christendom in 732 AD

It was a macrohistorical event. That one man in 732 AD at the Battle of Tours was Charles “the Hammer” Martel. Without such a man we would all be reading the Koran.  It was under one of their ablest and most renowned commanders, with a veteran army, and with every apparent advantage of time, place, and circumstance, that the Arabs made their great effort at the conquest of Europe north of the Pyrenees.

—Edward Shepherd Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World

Creasy said “the great victory won by Charles Martel … gave a decisive check to the career of Arab conquest in Western Europe, rescued Christendom from Islam, [and] preserved the relics of ancient and the germs of modern civilization.” Gibbon’s belief that the fate of Christianity hinged on this battle is echoed by other historians including John B. Bury, and was very popular for most of modern historiography.

Most of the 18th and 19th century historians, like Gibbon, saw Poitiers (Tours), as a landmark battle that marked the high tide of the Muslim advance into Europe.– Victor Davis Hanson

Poitiers was the turning point of one of the most important epochs in the history of the world. — Leopold von Ranke

Outnumbered by at least 2 to 1 –

Chesterton on Revolutionists

Chesterton Understood Unbelieving Sociologist (read: Marx, Weber, Gramsci, Sanger)

“…But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything.

He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist.

And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.

Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself.