Feeling Ayn Randy?
Atlas wasn't the only one shrugging as I invoke history, literary criticism, game theory and morality to review Ayn Rand and Objectivism. TLDR: 1 star on TripAdvisor.
“Ayn Rand, the unpleasant Russian/American fruitcake”
Are they John Galt?
We live in an age of great heroes. The bold Jeff Bezos, the mighty Elon Musk and that old fave, the glorious Bill Gates. These captains of industry, titans of trade, don’t they just make our lives so much better? Without Jeff and his phallic rocket (complete with balls), how else would I get my cod liver oil delivered within 24 hours of clicking it in his shonky app? And maybe systematic labour violations, drivers peeing in bottles, strike-breaking, a slave labour force, platform capitalism and extreme tax evasion are just the costs of doing business? Maybe even throw in child endangerment, too? Don’t just take my word for it:
The other great, noble heroes on that small list, too, are no less guilty of such jolly japes. Musk likes pretending to be an engineer, snaffling up government handouts and getting his employees pregnant when he isn’t making them work insane schedules. Or possibly whilst he is.
Allegedly.
And wee Billy G? Well, he isn’t quite cracking the digital bullwhip or acting like a modern-day plantation owner, but then, he hardly has a lily-white record, either. These three men seem somewhat divorced from the Randian ideal, John Galt.
Atlas Plugged
So what’s this got to do with the patron saint of the unimaginative and emotionally stunted, Ayn Rand? In 1957, her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, slithered onto shelves to great criticism and derision. Which did little to stunt its success despite one critic calling it “the worst piece of large fiction written”, adding that “It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum”. Other critics said that some of her ideas are “derived from Hitler” and that “Its dogmatism is without appeal”. But what prompted these critiques? One thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight pages of dull, puerile prose is what.
The novel tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive fighting to keep her business afloat amid meddling, pointless government regulations. That makes no sense in objective reality or Rand’s tenuous reality. Through some very rapey sex scenes, illogical drivel about a perpetual motion machine and various anti-socialist harangues, often delivered as monologues poured into the ears of spineless dumb dumbs, whose stupidity allows Rand to avoid engaging in serious political debate, this epic ode to capitalism reaches its moronic crescendo with a 60-page diatribe from another character, John Galt extolling the virtues of selfishness and outlining turgid tautologies about the mind, existence existing, reason and many rationales about being selfish. It is, essentially, the outline of Objectivism.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
The story, such as it is, creates a two-dimensional world full of wooden characters. In this pantomime backdrop world, inhabitants can be categorised as “prime movers”, “looters”, “moochers”, and “parasites”. Rand prizes reality, reason, egoism, individualism, laissez-faire capitalism and freedom, stating that it is only the prime movers, the Bezos/Gates/Musk types, that create value, and not the moochers, parasites and looters who have the misfortune to sell their labour to the prime movers.
Atlas Shrugged demonstrates the author’s sheer lack of knowledge of how the economy functions, a government’s role in it, an ignorance of how value is created and a total obliviousness to how things get built or made. Creation of goods and materials is, for Rand, simply a matter of direction, akin to the word of God, for he commanded it; therefore, it shall be done. And no time is spent examining the doing—nothing of import there for our heroic author. The novel lacks any real consideration for the workers, whose collective skill, effort and sweat built the fortunes of those at the top of the self-appointed totem. This is ironic, given Rand’s quote, “There’s nothing of any importance in life except how well you do your work”.
It seems that not all work is important in the Objectivist conception. This strikes at a major contradiction within Objectivism: the inherent acceptance that hierarchies of exploitation must exist. Within this acknowledgement, coercion is implicit, the soft violence of such a stance, rendering the Galt oath (“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”) to be a lie as it is spoken. One does not need to ask because the requirement that “another man” shall live to service other people is taken for granted. Somebody always has to get screwed, no matter how high-minded the view of one’s immorality may be. And this theme of intellectual dishonesty abounds in Objectivism.
The story is essentially about the protracted shrug of these titans of industry, shedding the weight of the world they are pains to tell you that they created all by themselves. The aforementioned perpetual motion machine invented by one of these capitalist-cry babies is abandoned because, you know, fuck helping other people; they’re all “looters”, “parasites”, and don’t deserve the sweat from the brows of such gods that used to deign to walk amongst us but have all buggered off to Galt’s Gulch. One has to wonder just how Apple continued to go on after Steve Jobs used an acute case of death to withdraw his labour from his business.
The unsmiling tale ends with the government of Stupidland torturing big Daddy Galt and begging him to fix the economy they wrecked because they suck. Cos, you know, all governments are just bad…because, you know, government. Nuance and imagination need not apply here. My pithiness here is equal to what such a traumatising tome deserves. The critics of yesteryear were not wide of the mark. So how did such abject drivel sprout a “philosophical system”?
Ayn Who?
To answer the question of how Objectivism came to be, it is perhaps worthwhile examining who Ayn Rand was. Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born in St. Petersburg in the twilight of Tsarist Russia in 1905. She adopted her pen name in 1926 upon moving to the United States, a move that cost her parents the last of their remaining valuables after the forced seizure of their business by the Bolsheviks. She slept rent-free in the Chicago apartment of her relatives and, from there, spent several years mooching and looting her way to Hollywood to fulfil her dreams of being a screenwriter. Millicent Patton was the first victim of Rand’s nebulous charisma, acting like a walking ATM for the young émigré. The prophet of self-reliance didn’t feel the need to pay her benefactor back, nor credit her, or indeed her parents or relatives at any point in her rise, less she shit on her philosophy post hoc. One has to wonder how much mooching, looting, and parasitism one must practice to become a prime mover.
Rand began to earn handsomely in the 1930s thanks to government money received for the sale of her courtroom play Night of January 16th. Her first novel was published in 1936, and she went on to write many books, fiction and non-fiction. Her fiction was always a thin veneer for her political musings, dressed up as philosophy. When not banging the drum of selfishness, she set about defining what art is, determining what she didn’t like as “not art”, and, perhaps purposefully (due to an apparent messiah complex), sought to define what is and what isn’t in all spheres of life and beyond. She and Hitler both despised modern art and for much the same reasons.
She also demonstrated a breathtaking lack of knowledge about philosophy and philosophers. Struggling to understand dialectics, he labelled Hegel as a “witch doctor”. She discarded Plato’s theory of Forms as it ruined her unargued assertions about reality. She frequently misquoted Aristotle and labelled Kant “the most evil man in mankind's history”. Not too bad for someone who lived through the Second World War and witnessed the Bolshevik revolution. Perhaps if she had fully understood dialectics, she might have been able to stop mercilessly sorting reality into unhelpful binaries.
Objectively Wrong
In sum, the key principles of Objectivism are: Reality is an absolute, reason is man’s only means of knowledge, man has free will (the choice to think or not), self-interest is moral, individual rights are absolute, capitalism is moral, and good art is crucial to good living.
Craig Biddle, The Objective Standard
If we consider Craig Biddle’s summation of Objectivism a good approximation, we have several headings by which to pick Rand’s philosophy apart.
Reality is an absolute
What is reality? The state of things as they actually exist? What can be experienced? How about the thoughts in your head? Rand said, “You can ignore reality, but not the consequences of ignoring reality”. Ironic, given that many of her followers deny climate change and she died from lung cancer due to dismissing the risks related to smoking.
But of the nature of reality itself?
Cogito ergo sum doesn’t quite seem to be enough. Do other things exist when I am not there sensing and experiencing them? Does that tree in the forest make a sound when no one hears it? Can we be absolute about this? And if reality is just what you sense, how do we know we all sense the same things? Rand has remarkably little say beyond a dogmatic what is is just what is. Perhaps she should have studied Plato more carefully or taken the time to understand how measurement works.
If one wishes to measure the flow of a stream, then we could use a paddle wheel. This rotates, hitting a switch with each complete rotation. Number of rotations = flow rate. So, in this setup, does the device counting the rotations know anything about flow? Our senses are conversions of measurements, too; the eye converts photons hitting it into electrical impulses, which are, in turn, translated into thoughts. These thoughts are approximations of reality. So, is that all that exists? What about if our perception is altered? Is reality then altered, too? Rand has nothing to say about this beyond dogmatic axioms that are only provable with reference to themselves and nothing beyond, rendering them analytically useless and unprovable.
Reason is man’s only means of knowledge
Unlike other animals, we aren’t born with much knowledge. Fresh from the womb, we know how to orient ourselves in a 3D environment, to hold our breath underwater, to use our senses and from there, to intuit things about the world. We acquire language via learning, allowing us to reason and access other higher brain functions. But it is not the only means of knowledge acquisition, merely one method. We can, after all, learn from mistakes and learn simply by experiencing and not reasoning. We have, according to Kahneman and Tversky, two modes of thought, with complex reason only existing in one system.
The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow
Man has free will
I would like to think we do, but I’m open (and undogmatic) to the question. Hence, I wouldn’t be certain about it. Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's work on the quantum effects in consciousness may offer some intriguing answers. Orch-OR is cutting edge and may show that free will is not even applicable.
Even if we’re free, we’re still predictable, which itself begs questions about what free really means. And I shan’t even deal with the stupidity of the qualifier “to think or not”.
Individual rights are absolute
As defined by the dictionary, absolute means true, right, and the same in all situations and beyond comparison. It is free from imperfection, pure and not requiring a qualification. Rand falls foul of Hume’s Is-Ought Problem with this one, especially since she hailed from a country that most definitely did not treat such rights as an “absolute” and moved to a country in which the individual rights of one often trump the rights of another. You may have the right to bear arms, but this means that your neighbour does not have the right to live free of threat and the implicit intimidation of knowing all those around you are armed. And being armed yourself does not assuage this. If individual rights are absolute, then which individual’s rights matter more? It seems the Galtian extremism and barbaric language employed in Atlas shrugged give us a clue.
Self interest is moral
“If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.”
Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It
This is often the central plank of any Rand criticism. And it is so essentially because it doesn’t square with our lived experience, what we know about history or how we act as parents, carers, friends or just well-meaning people. Indeed, a rejection of altruism is often a sign that you are dealing with a sociopath. Altruism is how any social species survives and thrives. It can be witnessed in ants, bees, dolphins and many of our primate cousins. Altruism is to the benefit of the individual, not the detriment. And any wishy-washy need to point at biological altruism or a view that Rand was only taking umbrage to Auguste Comte is special pleading from the terminally Rand-obsessed. As we have seen, Rand’s dogmatism never let logic get its way.
The Prisoner’s dilemma also demonstrates mathematically that selfishness is not the optimum strategy in all cases. Indeed, in Atlas Shrugged, Rand ignores game theory and lived experience to show that the Prime Movers withdrawing their labour is good when, in fact, the gift of the perpetual motion machine to the masses would allow the enlightened egotists to live without being bothered in Galt’s Gulch. As John Nash stated regarding his Equilibrium, “The Best for the Group comes when everyone in the group does what's best for himself AND the group”. So, altruism it is.
Capitalism is moral
We could spend all day on this one, but let’s just get to the main meat of it: how can a system that doesn’t account for externalities, i.e. environmental damage, poverty, etc, be considered moral? Is it moral for Wal-Mart to pay its employees with food stamps to ensure the Prime Movers of the Walton family have more wealth than the bottom third of American citizens? Where is the morality in Jeff Bezos having a $161.3bn fortune built on the backs of people forced to piss in bottles? Is micturating into a plastic bottle an “act of philosophy” to quote our intrepid author? One has to wonder how anyone can praise capitalism as moral whilst stating that no one has the right to coerce another.
Good art is crucial to good living.
Given what Rand defines as art, I think we can dismiss this. What I will say is that art can enhance life, even if it is by Jackson Pollock or Samuel Beckett.
One more thing…
Rand is an atheist—no arguments from me on that front. Twelve years of a catholic education convinced me of the veracity of atheism. But it seems that her work and her messianic self-belief means she isn’t opposed to religion but rather thinks she should be the Muhammad of choice for the masses. One only has to read Leonard Peikoff (I've done it, so you don’t have to - you’re welcome) to see the extreme obfuscation apposite with religious texts that Rand encourages. Take this passage:
To form a concept, one mentally isolates a group of concretes (of distinct perceptual units), on the basis of observed similarities which distinguish them from all other known concretes (similarity is 'the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree'); then, by a process of omitting the particular measurements of these concretes, one integrates them into a single new mental unit: the concept, which subsumes all concretes of this kind (a potentially unlimited number). The integration is completed and retained by the selection of a perceptual symbol (a word) to designate it. "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.
Leonard Peikhoff, The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
As Einstein supposedly said, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Regardless of who said it, the point remains extant: all the best teachers can distil their wisdom. Sophistry hides in verbosity and obfuscation.
Rationed Rationality
A charge frequently levelled at Rand dismissers is that they mischaracterise what she means and that, as Rand-botherer Yaron Brook says, “they don’t get it.” Selfishness seems pre-loaded into humans, demonstrated mere seconds out of the womb. It is commonplace in her work that rationality is invoked every time something questionable raises its head, which is every second sentence.
“There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
So why give this truculent Russian writer such a poor review? Extreme narcissism and fascistic tendencies aside, the reach that her work has attained is something that cannot be ignored and should be confronted.
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a Rand disciple and merciless promoter of the Austrian school of economics. In 1992, at his first meeting with then President-Elect Bill Clinton, Greenspan persuaded Clinton to ditch his campaign promises around healthcare and other reforms in favour of a “financial markets strategy”. This led to Clinton dismantling the Glass-Steagall, the levy which, until then, had held back the tsunami of destructive financialisation, the cause of The Great Depression in the 1930s, for over sixty years. This gave us the dot-com bubble and the unresolved meltdown of 2008. Something Greenspan later regretted. Sort of.
While presidential promises are often as weak as a dying man’s handshake, it could also be argued that Greenspan’s market-knows-best approach gutted healthcare reforms that have led to the number one cause of bankruptcy in America: healthcare costs. And the same vultures that pick at America’s healthcare carcass are circling the NHS as I write this. The USA sneezes, and Britain catches a cold.
And the cult of Rand has poisoned more than one well. Sajid Javid, former Health Secretary of the UK, has often professed his love of Rand. Javid stated that the British public was “cowering before Covid-19”, which echoes Rand’s words about “cowering before nature”.
Outside of government, too, Rand has had an impact. Amongst the John Galt wannabes stalk luminaries such as Eddie Lampert (the guy who ruined Sears), Travis Kalanick (the guy responsible for the free-market-fuckup that is Uber), Peter Theil (Palantir founder, tax avoider & Gulch envier), and the list goes on, through all spheres of shit-headed-ness. The John Galt action figure may have fully articulated limbs, but the head can’t look back to see the damage left in its wake.
The Coddling of the Conservative Mind
“There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women”
Margaret Thatcher, Women’s Own Magazine, 1987
Why is Rand so popular amongst conservatives? It helps to decouple psychological tendencies from politics, even if the latter is a handy heuristic. Avi Tuschmann’s book, Our Political Nature outlines some key differences in human psychology that lead to political predilections. According to research, tendencies related to conservatism are a heightened fear response, risk aversion, disgust, dogmatism and a greater requirement for order and certainty, leading to change aversion. This perhaps should explain why Rand has more luck punting her ideas on the right. Yaron Brook calls Rand “revolutionary”, but on the one occasion I find myself agreeing with Slavoj Zizek, she is anything but:
Capitalism was and still is the official doctrinal system we live under. Selfishness and sociopathy are the default states for all of the powerful people on Earth, communist poster boy China included. Rand isn’t telling us anything new or revolutionary but simply reaffirming what some in society want to hear. Indeed, Objectivism can be seen as furthering Thomas Hobbes’ “bellum omnium contra omnes” (war of all against all), with the conclusion of Atlas Shrugged offering precisely that. Perhaps then, it should be no surprise that the same psychological profile would claim there is “no such thing as society” and fail to recognise the importance of any philosopher that stresses the inherent complexity of the universe, such as Hegel or Kant.
One Star on TripAdvisor
But far from an attack on people, this wordy rant review should be a clarion call to us all about our psychological blindspots and a timely reminder that the tomes and texts we find sacrosanct might be just as fault-ridden. Our inherent biases can make us blind, and dogmatism never helps.
Ever.
We should also take the time to avoid the religious certainty we tend to find in seminal works; Marx got a lot right but also much wrong, including not involving energy cost in his theory of value and discounting all the modes by which automation could be used. Reading the opening chapter of Wealth of Nations does not give you all you need to know about capitalism; Adam Smith wrote the book before there were factories.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Rand outlined a fundamentally immoral philosophy in which no one can truly be an Objectivist, lest civilisation fall apart. Her work has inspired some truly tragic outcomes and serves as an apology for the worst excesses of the terminally greedy. Whilst humans have been acting like selfish, myopic shitheads for millennia before Rand ever clacked a typewriter, we should nevertheless treat her work as fundamentally wrong.
But not her adherents.
Rand's Disciples often respond to the surface, peaceful intent of her work: don’t use violence to achieve your goals; think about your actions; look after yourself. None of these things are bad. It is just a pity that such tautologies are packaged in with some truly disgusting thoughts and obstinant blindness to the true, complex wonder of the universe.
One thing I am sure we can all agree about, though: don’t be an arsehole. And that starts by taking stock of what is around you, who helped you get there and who, coerced or otherwise, shall help you get on in life.