Ayn Rand's schtick
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - march 09 ]
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
Sales of Ayn Rand's 1957 classic individualist novel Atlas Shrugged have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.
Victimized Americans are thinking if they can't beat them they had better join them. Or maybe they are merely trying to find out what went wrong: first the Communists go belly up, and then the free-market Capitalists sink like the Titanic with all the swells aboard.
Something is up. Could it be yin and yang? The world is a web of cause and effect. A butterfly can cause a tsunami. We know how it ends. How does it all begin?
As Alisa Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand (1905-82) the novelist grew up in Bolshevik Soviet Russia. She studied philosophy and screenwriting at the University of Petrograd, and then biting the hand that fed her, she fled to the United States where she found a home and a husband. She believed that absolute economic freedom was the key to Utopia, arguing that unrestrained license, the absolute freedom to do, make, and develop ideas and things had been the essential agent responsible for the major achievements of American inventors and businessmen during the 19th and 20th centuries. She was a crackpot. She is to literature as Elvis Presley is to music, or Mickey Mouse to the movies. However, she was right half the time.
When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism - with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
Sounds like Don Vito Corleone, the Godfather, or Microsoft.
Her philosophy she named Objectivism, as if this ism were essentially different from anarchy, lawlessness and chaos. For her, seduction is for sissies; a he-man wants his rape. She had more balls than Joe Dimaggio.
With jolting clarity she saw the truth that every government was a criminal enterprise, especially the Soviets and Nazis. For her, every political or economic system based on control of the individual by the group leads to stagnation and ultimate chaos. The problem is, of course, that we cannot control individuals enough to make them all work together towards a common goal. So, going to the other extreme, she supposed that license, anarchy, extreme libertarianism, dog-eat-dog, cowboy John Wayne heroics and domination are the answer. But whoa, Pardner, it don't work that way.
Think about where Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps would be in the world's estimation without the drowned. They would be unknown if it were not for all the other swimmers of all time. They are perfect apples on a giant apple tree. They stand out, but they did not create what they stand out from. They are effects, not causes. All heroes, who are merely contingent, are accidental, and incidentally the work of many hands.
As a Philosophy, Objectivism is so 19th century reactionary, romantic, and wrong - a version of the romances based on the idea of the Noble Savage, the uncorrupted, uncivilized, naturally pure, sinless Candide. It's the world that's wrong, not me. I am the Great Man.
The Great Man Theory of culture and history is blamed somewhat unfairly on the 19th-century Scottish satirical historian Thomas Carlyle, who declared, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." Carlyle argued that heroes shape history through their leadership, intellect, and their art, but most importantly, through "divine" inspiration. Heroes take over competing ideologies, forces, trends, and isms, and turn them into winners, into prevailing correctness. He was half wrong too.
The 19th century was an age that saw the bright people stranded without the lifeboat of the Saviour. Without religion what were they to do? One way to stay afloat was to rationalize and write words, words, and more words about ideas. Fichte, Goethe, Emerson, and Carlyle tried to tailor a new wetsuit (Sartor Resartus) for the drowning swimmer, urging passion, revolution, and individualism. That's about as far as Ayn Rand got in her intellectual and spiritual development. That's all they knew to teach down at St Petersburg U.
Nietzsche called Carlyle "an insipid muddlehead."
William F Buckley said that Ayn Rand's philosophy was "stillborn."
Of course, laws are for society and against individuals. That's what it means to say that individual persons are equal under the law. But some are more "equal" than others, as George Orwell observed in Animal Farm. Those who are rich enough are above the law. Individuals are selfish, willful, flawed, always looking out for numero uno, sinful without exception. Property is legal theft, even when stolen by socialists. Even the pope has a confessor. But, hey, so what?
Ayn Rand is a great writer the way Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is a great writer. She knew that fact and fiction are different only in the minds of the sane. Her critics, the few who took her seriously, have politely called her route of many roads leading to nowhere "Romantic realism." She was a creative, imaginative writer inventing a comprehensive worldview that seems to reflect reality. She made up a believable world just like Joseph Smith, author of The Book of Mormon, like the committee that wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, like Mary Baker Eddy and her Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, like all science fiction, all the Utopias, Scientologies, and Raptures, like the movies that convince you they are real, virtual realities. L Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, anyone?
The Great Man Theory seems to fit Bill Gates because he built a better mousetrap and patented it. Lincoln is a great man because he had good luck. He incidentally freed the slaves as a tactic of war, and so he is now The Great Emancipator. He did not create our world any more than did Achilles, Hector, Gandhi, Babe Ruth, Churchill, Napoleon, Howard Hughes, or Chief Sitting Bull.
Henry Ford, for an example who was as nutty as Ayn Rand, used the manufacturing process called "the assembly line" for standardized parts. He did not invent it. Nineteenth century rifle makers in Germany, France, England, and New England developed and improved the notion of interchangeable parts in order to facilitate the killing and wounding during the many nationalist revolutions of that day and age like the American War Between the States, and the Franco-Prussian War.
Objectivism is existentialism with a muddier name. It is only one half a philosophy, a diamond in the rough without the rough, pure speculation.
What Schopenhauer had to say about Fichte fits Ayn Rand perfectly:
For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. (Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena)
