The Greek word for “civil war” is stasis. While that might seem strange to them modern ear, it actually makes sense. Stasis is achieved when two or more great forces bring a thing/process to a halt. Much of our public discourse today is the language of stasis or public polemic.

I have posted a few things about Paul Ryan & about Ayn Rand over the last week. Some of it over the top. Ryan, however, is the perfect example of the kind of American I reference in an overview piece about Rand: Someone who has tried to combine the mostly mutually exclusive ideas of obvjectivism and Christianity (in Congressman’s case, Catholicism).

I think that Ryan’s work in House of Representatives and his public addresses show him to be a man on a collision course. I also think him a cipher for the kind of shipwreck most Americans are headed toward. These inner polemical forces boiling out into the commons are symptomatic of a febrile culture wherein older generations are on the verge of being overwhelmed by the constantly modulating networks of the Society of Control and younger generations will pay the consequence.

Ultimately, Ryan is right: he’s not a Randian, but nor is he a Catholic; he’s ideologically confused. It’s a cognitive dissonance emblematic of a party that can’t decide whether it will follow its aging social conservative base at odds with abortion and gay marriage or chart a new, more libertarian course for a younger generation of Americans who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

via Ayn Rand vs. the Pope – Salon.com.