It usually begins with Ayn Rand

Reason magazine have gone a bit Randy this month. In fact, if you look at the Reason blog, I bet you any money there’s a mention of Ayn Rand within the first 5 posts. Go on, check. They’ve also released a cubic butt-load of interviews, anecdotes, and other what-have-yous about the woman, and gone as far as to dedicated the December issue’s cover and lead articles to her. So, in light of this, here’s my experience with Rand and her odd little cult philosophy.

I’m not a huge fan of the woman personally, but there’s no denying that she’s a major player in 20th century libertarian politics- ask any person who calls themselves a libertarian, and I bet you near on half will tell you “Well, it started when I read Atlas Shrugged…”. I know that’s how it started for me, even if now if I was presented with the choice of being labelled an outright Objectivist or a socialist, then it’s time to go smash the chains of the proletariat, comrade. She did do a lot for the cause of promoting pro-liberty politics in general, even if at times her own system was flawed.

I first got into the works of Rand back when I was in Peter Symonds college, and whilst researching classical liberalism for my Government and Politics course. It wasn’t long after that I ordered a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged through the local WH Smiths. It was the Signet edition, and was pretty badly made. The ink would smudge at the lightest touch, and the binding was so weak that the whole book would tear in two before I finished it. It took me a long time to slug through, even giving up once around the wedding of James Taggart (which is odd because Francisco’s money speech, which he gives at that wedding, now sticks out as one of the better parts of the book). I began reading near the end of my A2 year at Peter Symonds; I finished it at 2am one weekday morning whilst in the first year of University. Yes, including the John Galt speech. Every last word.

It was defiantly pretty powerful on my little brain at the time, as I kept running key parts of the story through my head for about a week or so afterwards, thinking “Hmm, what would John Galt/Dagney Taggart do”? or, upon seeing a Socialist Workers Party stand on campus (run by kids who have never done a days work in their lives) I would think “More moochers wanting to live at other’s expense”.

But, I never, ever actually thought to myself “Yep, this is my bible- I’m an Objectivist”, though, for a handful of reasons. There was the ethical system, which although started out on sound enough grounds, ends up taking the “self above all” thing a bit too far, her strictly pro-intellectual property stance, her “self interest” foreign policy ideas, , and, above all, her cult like status that I just find so repelling.

First, I can’t accept Rand’s ethical system. Under Objectivism, one’s self interest should be one’s sole purpose for living. She writes a whole load of the usual “The welfare state is wrong” stuff, and about how it’s wrong for people to be forced to provide for others at the barrel of a gun. To the libertarian, none of this is controversial. The problem is, Rand takes it to radical extremes, advocating not just non-aggression against individuals (especially not for the sake of “welfarism” or what have you), but advocating a state of mind in which each individual places one self as his highest priority. To be an Objectivist, or so we are told, every action in your life must be aimed at your own interest, and the desire to help others by means of voluntary charity is seen as neutral, or worse:

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue. (Playboy interview with Rand)

I’m all for voluntaryism and private charity in supporting the less well off, but what Rand puts above simply takes the concept of self-interest too far. I don’t see it “a marginal issue”, and I do see voluntary altruism as a virtue. But, I will concede- it shouldn’t be a “duty” (i.e. involuntary, and run by government). More to the point, I honestly don’t see how any one could live their lives placing themselves as number one, at all times. I can imagine such a mindset being a huge burden on a person’s life. I honestly believe that helping people out, especially those close to us, but sometimes even people we don’t know, as being part of what makes us human. Hell, helping people out often is in your own self interest- what better way to get the community to see you as a good person? Rand was stuck in a world view of the elite industrialists and businessmen- then, I can see how an Objectivist outlook on life can be of use- follow the money, no matter what. But as for personal relations outside the business realm? It doesn’t work. Ok, next…

I may be a Propertarian, in the sense that I am pro-property rights, but Intellectual Property is an area I have a lot of problems with; I don’t see how a certain type of monopoly over what should be an infinite resource (an idea), especially seeing as it can only be enforced via the state, can truly ever be on par with property rights over say, raw materials like wood or steel. Rand, on the other hand, thinks these state enforced “rights” over other people’s minds are entirely justified (whatever happened to self ownership?). Reading The Fountainhead, I always felt uneasy at how Roark justified his destruction of the housing project by means of what is effectively a 6 minute defence of patents (also, in Atlas Shrugged, one key scene sees Hank Rearden having the formula for Rearden steel extorted out of him. This is different; it involved actually forcing the formula out of him, thus actually gaining sympathy from my libertarian side). Apart from her fiction, she also claims that:

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property. (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)

I don’t accept Rand’s theory that being the creator of an “idea” alone gives you a right to state sanctioned monopoly control over it; all it does is create artificial scarcity. Real property means control and ownership of actual, real things. If I design an engine, and then you make an identical one of your own resources, I sure don’t hold right to claim I have control over your property merely because I thought up what it was used for.  State-granted intellectual property rights are the antithesis of property rights, not part and parcel of them.

As for her thoughts on foreign policy, Rand wrote about how an ideal foreign policy is one based on, as always “self-interest”:

…a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defence of America’s rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)

Off the bat, I find it very hard to believe that it’s possible for the same woman to hold that the greatest foreign policy is one of “national self-interest”, but at the same time write the following:

The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men.But the mind is an attribute of the individual…

…There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. (Roark’s court speech from The Fountainhead)

If there’s no such thing as a “collective brain”, how can there possibly a “national self-interest”? And how, after writing so extensively on why collectives have no rights, only individuals (no complaints here), can she suddenly make some up specifically for one area of policy? Rand puts forward the idea that the concept of the “common good” was merely a tool for tyranny (No objections here), yet seems to be perfectly ok with using it as an excuse to attack other countries. Specifically, those that don’t conform to her ideals:

PLAYBOY: What about force in foreign policy? You have said that any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany during World War II . . .

RAND: Certainly.

PLAYBOY: . . . And that any free nation today has the moral right—though not the duty—to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other “slave pen.” Correct?

RAND: Correct. A dictatorship—a country that violates the rights of its own citizens—is an outlaw and can claim no rights.

(Playboy interview with Rand. Mercifully, they didn’t insist on a photo shoot.)

I was always confused as to why Neo-conservatives praise Ayn Rand so much, but never appear to follow her ideals of a free market and strong individual liberty (preferring corporatism and a social policy based on religious dogma) but now I think I’ve cracked it: Her ideas on foreign policy gave them some sort of justification for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rand totally goes against herself on this issue; although claiming to never advocate the use of force to put her views into practice (certainly a big plus for anyone even thinking of calling themselves a libertarian), she totally threw that out of the window when it’s people from other countries who’s lives are on the line.

Ahead of all these, though, I have a problem with the way Rand presented herself and her ideas to the world. She was a God damn cult leader, plain and simple. A bitch with a serious attitude problem. She was to open discussion and tolerance of other ideas what creationism is to science, or what Catholicism is to equality of sexuality. And like creationism and the Catholic church’s gay bashing, Rand’s little clique of followers was a religion in its own right. This clique was notorious for its absolute control over its members, in every way from the philosophy they held to the menial, to the down-right bizarre. Did you smoke? No? Oh, that won’t do:

The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement’s position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: "Well, I can’t quite understand their position on smoking." Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: "They have a position on smoking? What is it?" The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, "How is it that you don’t smoke?" When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: "Oh, that’s OK, then." The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.)

Uh hu. Right. A random passage in a book, which appears to the average person to be nothing more than a metaphor, is turned into the basis for a belief seen as vital to moral wellbeing? Where have I heard that before?

Even worse than the idiotic rules on smoking and aesthetic tastes (you don’t like modern architecture?! How evil!) was how Rand effectively shut her followers off from encountering anti-objectivist arguments by claiming that- and remember, this is supposed to be an intellectual- if you read Marx (just READ, even if you were an Objectivist), you were “giving sanction to the enemy”, and would be BANISHED FROM HER LITTLE CIRCLE.  Let’s go back to Rothbard, who had first hand experience of this “you-must-accept-my-philosophy-entirely-or-reject-it” circle jerk:

Since every cult is grounded on a faith in the infallibility of the guru, it becomes necessary to keep its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold. The Catholic Church maintained an Index of Prohibited Books; more sweeping was the ancient Muslim cry: "Burn all books, for all truth is in the Koran!" But cults, which attempt to mold every member into a rigidly integrated world view, must go further. Just as Communists are often instructed not to read anti-Communist literature, the Rand cult went further to disseminate what was virtually an Index of Permitted Books. Since most neophyte Randians were both young and relatively ignorant, a careful channelling of their reading insured that they would remain ignorant of non- or anti-Randian ideas or arguments permanently (except as they were taken up briefly, brusquely, and in a highly distorted and hectoring fashion in Randian publications).

The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian theory of "not giving your sanction to the Enemy." Reading the Enemy (which, with a few carefully selected exceptions, meant all non- or anti-Randians) meant "giving him your moral sanction," which was strictly forbidden as irrational. In a few selected cases, limited exceptions were made for leading cult members who could prove that they had to read certain Enemy works in order to refute them.

Rand wasn’t an intellectual, she was a narcissist on an epic scale, who demanded blind obedience from her followers. And all in the name of individualism and free though.

This is a shortened version of just four of my problems with Ayn Rand; I havn’t even gone into why I feel the best thing for libertarians to do is put an end to the strong association between her and all non-objectivist libertarian types. But I really, really can’t be bothered right now; instead, here’s Murray Rothbard’s one act play based on Ayn Rand, Mozart Was A Red.