Earlier this month, in “A Powerful Passage from Ayn Rand,” I discussed our good fortune in having lived lives of relative freedom and what we must do to maintain such freedom for ourselves, our loved ones, and future generations.
Today, I want to indicate the effectiveness of TOS toward that end and to ask for your support of our work. (To contribute now, click here.)
I’ll let two of our readers have the first word.
Here’s a letter I received from two UK philosophy students who attended AynRandCon Europe (a student conference), where they picked up copies of The Objective Standard, which we supplied for free:
Dear Craig Biddle,
This is Aravind Deepak and Shruti Menon. We are students of the Objectivist Academic Centre, and we are currently doing our Masters in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.
We are writing this email to express our profound gratitude to you for sending copies of The Objective Standard to the Ayn Rand Conference in Prague. We had been following various articles of the journal for a long time, but had not yet procured a full issue. We got one copy each at the conference, and we absolutely love it!
The middle-of-the-range articles are invaluable in the knowledge they provide, and nourish a deep spiritual need of ours. It sets an objectively great standard for researching, analysing and writing, and demonstrates the necessity of a rational philosophy in decoding issues in several fields. We want to add that we love the advertisements too, and find them delightfully valuable.
We will henceforth attempt to procure the digital versions of the other volumes of the journal, from 2006 to 2018, through Kindle or The Objective Standard website, as it is a product that gives us immense pleasure and value. Owning the physical copies of The Objective Standard that we have feels much like owning artefacts from Galt’s Gulch. We love it.
Thank you very much for your work, and we look forward to reading more of The Objective Standard.
We are attaching a photo of the two of us with our copies of The Objective Standard in this email.
Thank you,
Aravind Deepak
Shruti Menon
Here’s how I replied:
Dear Aravind and Shruti,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartwarming email and the photo of you two with lovely smiles and TOS in hand. You made my day.
I’m glad you received copies of the journal, and I’m delighted that you’ve found them so enjoyable and useful.
Because you are students, I suspect money is tight. Please send me Shruti’s email address (Aravind’s was included here), and I will give you complimentary Digital subscriptions to TOS while you are in school.
I hope to see you when I come to speak in the UK in April. I’ll have details about my schedule by the end of the week.
Cheers,
Craig Biddle
Our correspondence continued, and I did meet them in London, where they attended one of my lectures and we dined together.
Over dinner, we discussed, among other things, a wonderful project that they have devised and are working on to advance Objectivism. They also asked me to advise them on the project, which I’m now doing.
Shruti and Aravind are active-minded, highly intelligent, and profoundly benevolent young adults. They are exactly the kind of people TOS seeks to reach—and does reach—people who demand that ideas make rational sense, who uphold and live only by ideas that do, and who, when they discover and come to understand Objectivism, embrace and advance it accordingly.
We regularly receive email, snail mail, and phone calls from people who are moved by the articles in TOS. (I’ll share more such correspondence in future emails.) And we regularly engage with and advise those who want to advance the ideas themselves. But most of our readers simply enjoy the clarity, beauty, good will, and solid arguments that TOS brings to them week after week, year after year. Some of our readers are completely new to the ideas, some are long-time Objectivists, many are in-between. What all of them have in common is that TOS helps them to think more clearly, to live better lives, and to defend individual rights and political freedom on solid ground.
This is what TOS does. We do it well. And to continue doing it, we need your help.
So far, in our summer fund-drive, 102 people have contributed a total of $45,270. I’ve personally thanked all of them, and I extend another heartfelt thank-you to all of them now.
Special thanks go to Chris & Lydia Ash for their $10,000 in matching funds, to Jim & Kathryn Smith for their $5,000 in matching funds, and to Jim Hanrahan for his $5,000 in matching funds—all of which are included in the $45,270 we’ve raised to date.
Thank you all for your generous support and extra incentives!
These contributors have helped us to pass the half-way mark toward our goal of $85,000.
Contributions of any amount, large or small, make a difference. And monthly donations are especially helpful.
I appreciate your consideration.
Sincerely,
PS. If you would like to join the Ashes, the Smiths, and Mr. Hanrahan in providing a round of matching funds, please let me know. That would be enormously helpful. Please email me to do so.
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