Can't Say I Ever Wanted To Read Ayn Rand

 When I first heard Ayn Rand's philosophy, I was left with the impression of a Nietzsche rip-off. And a rip-off of exceeding stupidity.

Atlas Schlepped by Gary Saul Morson in The Jewish Review of Books gives me more reasons to dislike and distrust the most dangerous political writer of modern times.

Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

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Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged. “We have no laws in this valley,” Galt explains, “no rules, no formal organization of any kind. . . . But we have certain customs, which we all observe.” The Soviet Union regarded Communism, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, as the ultimate social system. Galt’s Gulch features a dollar sign three feet high, and when Rand died, her body lay in a funeral home beside one twice that size.

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John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, deduces the objective morality of selfishness from another tautology, “existence exists.” “My morality, the morality of reason,” Galt argues, “is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.” No one could explain to Rand that tautologies can’t be used to prove anything about the real world. 

 Even more surprising, Rand, the defender of capitalism, seemed to lack even an elementary grasp of market economics. “When a man trades with others,” she declared in The Virtue of Selfishness, “he is counting—explicitly or implicitly—on their rationality, that is, on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.)” But it is in Marxist economics that goods have “objective” value (the amount of labor it took to produce them). In market economics, value depends on preferences, including tastes, which have no objective basis, and on how much of the good one already has.

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Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “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.”

With ambiguity and compromise characterized as moral treason, Rand’s novels feature principled heroes and dastardly villains, just like socialist realist fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Rand argued for what Soviet theorists called “the positive hero,” the perfectly virtuous person who speaks the indubitable truth. Rand’s novels all contain such spokesmen, typically male, who display the physique of a Greek god, the nobility of a hero, and the charisma accompanying absolute self-confidence.

 And then I found what has bothered me most since the days of George W. Bush (it seems to me Ayn Rand produces wet dreams in Republicans) - that realism is bad for you. 

Rand distinguished this “romanticism” from its evil opposite, which she called “naturalism.” Naturalists (including those usually referred to as “realists”) describe the blemishes of the existing world. They focus on ordinary, fallible people. Instead of showing that reason and will can accomplish anything, they depict social forces and psychological dispositions limiting us. Such works are as bad as tragedy, which both Rand and the Soviets rejected as a genre based on falsehood.

Yeah, reason and will have a funny way of stubbing their toes on the real world - that is what exists outside the dynasties playing in the own minds of Rand's followers

sch 10/13.