The Man Who Speaks to You of Sacrifice

Jonathan Rick
  Issue XX - March 9, 2004
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Earlier this year Saturday Night Live ran a skit on Islamic terrorists, who Osama bin Laden has just dispatched to martyr themselves for Allah--and for the seventy-two dark-haired virgins that await them in paradise.[1] When somebody asks the bin Laden character why he isn't sacrificing for the cause, he fumbles over his words, screams out something about Allah, and proceeds to dispatch another group of martyrs to die—in his stead.

Indeed, since the start of the Second Gulf War, whenever we heard from Saddam, he invariably exhorted friends, Romans and countrymen to fight the infidel--to sacrifice in the cause of a greater good. And yet, when we found him last night, the ex-dictator was in disguise and hiding, crouched in a six-by-eight-foot spider hole. Sure, he had a pistol, but even at this point of no return, he refused to martyr himself.

Ayn Rand explains, through Elsworth Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead. "Don't bother to examine a folly "ask yourself only what it accomplishes. . . . It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. . . . The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."

Social theorist Chris Sciabarra draws the political implications. "Hussein, bin Laden, and other leaders of Islamic terrorism are fully capable of sacrificing their own people; they most assuredly do not wish to die themselves." It is therefore reasonable "that pointing a nuke at Baghdad"--the U.S. Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction--"can still have the required effect of keeping Hussein in check . . . Why would he have so many tunnels and escape routes under his various castles if living were not a priority?"

[1] In Live on Broadway-- the funniest stand-up I've ever seen-- Robin Williams tells how after bin Laden ascends to heaven, seventy-two members of the Continental Congress greet him. "How dare you defile that which we created," George Washington declares, before they start kicking the [life] out of him. "What's this?" asks bin Laden; "Where are my virgins?" "Seventy-two Virginians, you [imbecile!]" Washington replies.

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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.