“Oh big deal.  She inspired a bunch of people.  Great.  She didn’t suffer or anything.”

I was shocked to hear that statement as we discussed the documentary, “Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life.”  Knowing my companion hadn’t read any of Rand’s books, perhaps I should have simply accepted what she had said, but that statement flagrantly disregards the essence of Ayn Rand’s work.  This sentiment is exactly what Rand fought her entire life.

First of all, she did suffer.  Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905, she saw the rise of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and watched helplessly as the soviets took away her father’s pharmacy.

This is a world where private property means nothing.  Private earnings may be confiscated at any time by the government’s whim.  Who can say that this constant perturbation of property is not suffering?

Even as she attended the University of Petrograd, she lived with constant concern.  Rand was very vocal about her opinions against the regime.  The Soviets publicly threatened not only the university students who spoke out, but promised to punish their families as well.  By banning any verbal expression against the government, the Soviets did not let its citizens own their speech.  The government filtered the “good” from the “bad.”  Fortunately, Rand was never punished.

Perhaps the reason my companion breezed over these and many other violations of self-ownership, however, was because the documentary rightly spent most of its time on Rand’s development as an artist.  In spite of her suffering in Russia, Ayn Rand did not seek to create bleak landscapes and desolate futures.  Her art did not mimic her past experience but instead expressed the vibrant and productive life she saw possible in America.

The Fountainhead, the novel that launched Rand into fame, tells of Howard Roark, an architect who only engages in work where he has absolute creative control.  Even when he has not had a job for months, Roark turns down offers that asked him to compromise his artistic integrity.

In the introduction written 25 years after the first publication, Ayn Rand explained The Fountainhead’s main motivation: “the projection of an ideal man.  The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”  And Rand said of her life, “My personal life is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.’”

She did suffer when she grew up, but it wasn’t a big deal in her life.  Her suffering did not hinder her and was not, for one moment, a virtue.  Rand did not ask what people needed, but instead what people could attain.  She did not look at what was wrong with people, but what was right with people.  Not everyone is a Howard Roark, but that does not mean they are helpless.

Whether considering policy decisions, personal decisions, or any decision, there is one vitally important question that everyone must consider:  What sense of life are we creating today?

Reid Ginoza is a graduate of the Pearl City High School Class of 2005; attending at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont; and an Adjunct Intern with the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.