Changes

"To sum up, the radical individualist/subjectivist philosophy which informs the policies and actions of the ALA, sees freedom of speech as radically extendible. Little or no attention is paid to the concept of harm to others. The right to know is always seen as more important than the right to protect, even where children are involved. And a relativist value system finds the use of standards of judgment in acquiring library material to be elitist and old-fashioned. Indeed, good and evil are seen as merely subjective opinions. Under these philosophic views, the ALA no longer encourages libraries to be responsive to the community, but encourages confrontation, viewing the community as a dangerous source of potential "censorship" against which librarians must be eternally vigilant. <br />

"To sum up, the radical individualist/subjectivist philosophy which informs the policies and actions of the ALA, sees freedom of speech as radically extendible. Little or no attention is paid to the concept of harm to others. The right to know is always seen as more important than the right to protect, even where children are involved. And a relativist value system finds the use of standards of judgment in acquiring library material to be elitist and old-fashioned. Indeed, good and evil are seen as merely subjective opinions. Under these philosophic views, the ALA no longer encourages libraries to be responsive to the community, but encourages confrontation, viewing the community as a dangerous source of potential "censorship" against which librarians must be eternally vigilant. <br />

"When did these ideas begin to infiltrate the ALA? And who brought them in? During the social turmoil of the late sixties, the Office of Intellectual Freedom in the ALA headquarters in Chicago became very important in the making of policy. Around this time, Judith Krug began her tenure as director of that office, and in 1970 forged strong links between the ALA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU functioned under a philosophy of nihilism/individualism since its founding by Roger Baldwin after the turn of the century. For a time in the 1970s, Ms. Krug served simultaneously as ALA Intellectual Freedom Director and as a board member of the ACLU, which has given her several awards. The ACLU, according to George Grant's 1989 study, believes that children should have the same rights as adults, that pornography should be protected by the Constitution, that the First Amendment's free speech clause implies a right to receive information, and that the smallest limitation of any speech or expression will automatically lead to totalitarian repression."</ref>

"When did these ideas begin to infiltrate the ALA? And who brought them in? During the social turmoil of the late sixties, the Office of Intellectual Freedom in the ALA headquarters in Chicago became very important in the making of policy. Around this time, Judith Krug began her tenure as director of that office, and in 1970 forged strong links between the ALA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU functioned under a philosophy of nihilism/individualism since its founding by Roger Baldwin after the turn of the century. For a time in the 1970s, Ms. Krug served simultaneously as ALA Intellectual Freedom Director and as a board member of the ACLU, which has given her several awards. The ACLU, according to George Grant's 1989 study, believes that children should have the same rights as adults, that pornography should be protected by the Constitution, that the First Amendment's free speech clause implies a right to receive information, and that the smallest limitation of any speech or expression will automatically lead to totalitarian repression."</ref> On a related note, Sartre, and to a certain extent leftists as a whole, took "individualism" in his existentialist philosophy as that one when embracing their own self, and creating their own values, is obliged to eliminate any other selves, or as Henri-Bernard Levy put it, "[Sartre] cannot imagine any encounter between consciousnesses which does not immediately and definitively turn into a bout of fisticuffs."<ref>https://www.hoover.org/research/absolute-intellectual<br />"It is the writing of this early Sartre that Lévy so esteems — he calls it “a shock, an event, a tremor, torrent, a tidal wave.” The worldview that runs through all of Sartre’s work of this period, soon dubbed “existentialism,” based itself on several key themes. The first was the purported Death of God and the meaninglessness of existence. Sartre’s protagonist in the hallucinatory Nausea, Antoine Roquentin, laments the “total gratuity and absurd contingency of the universe.” “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance,” Roquentin says, struggling against a powerful urge to vomit. Lévy sums up this bleak Sartrean vision of man adrift: “Life has no meaning. . . . No promise dwells in it. No invisible hand is guiding it in secret. It is chaotic. Shapeless. Pure disorder and fog. A tangle of moments in disarray. Chaos. A mess.”<br />"Roquentin overcomes his dread and disgust only by recognizing what he deems to be the liberating possibilities for the individual consciousness of a contingent universe. “All is free,” he resolves: We can create our own meanings, our own right and wrong, our own futures, our own multiplicity of selves. Roquentin meditates on an American jazz song he loves — “Some of These Days” — and imagines a musician in a New York apartment finding his reason for living in composing it. “Why not me?” he then asks himself, and concludes that he, too, will create something to triumph over contingency: He will write a novel.<br />"Man’s freedom of will — another central theme of the early Sartre — is what makes such creative acts possible. Drawing on German and French philosophical sources — Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, among others — Sartre explained that human beings, unlike, say, oak trees and snakes, choose their own future, even when, trapped in “bad faith,” they pretend they do not. Man has no nature that predetermines what he will eventually become; his existence precedes his essence, as the Sartrean formulation puts it.<br />"One problem this choosing self runs up against is how to regard other choosing selves. A third existentialist motif, best summed up in Sartre’s famous phrase “Hell is other people,” shows how Sartre understood that problem. Few writers have ever offered a nastier depiction of human interaction, as Lévy underscores: “[Sartre] cannot imagine any encounter between consciousnesses which does not immediately and definitively turn into a bout of fisticuffs.” Friendship? Just mutual exploitation. Love? Simply what Sartre calls pursuing “the death of the Other.” Sex? Always a kind of violence, at least in part."</ref>

== Rugged individualism ==

== Rugged individualism ==