Donald Luskin Page 2
It’s ironic to see the political right overlooking these realities in order to embrace Rand. Until now conservatives have despised her. So if my enemy’s enemy is my friend, then Rand is a friend to liberals.
Rand was a militant atheist, and that has always been an irreconcilable difference with the conservative movement, given its coalition with the Christian church. Rand never even tried to be conciliatory on the subject. When she first met William F. Buckley Jr., the founding father of modern conservatism and a devout Catholic, she reportedly proclaimed in her heavy Russian accent, “Mr. Buckley, you arrrr too intelligent to believe in Gott!”6
Buckley himself used to repeat that story, and denied any animosity about Rand’s atheism. But when it came time in 1957 for Buckley’s highly influential conservative magazine National Review to review the newly published Atlas Shrugged, it was worse than a pan—it was a smear. The review was by conservative icon Whittaker Chambers, the ardent anticommunist—who also happens to have been an ardent Christian.
Chambers portrayed Atlas Shrugged as a call for totalitarianism by big business, with “the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross.”7 To anyone who had read the book, such an idea was preposterous to the point of slander. But reviews are intended for people who haven’t read the book. This review was intended so that no conservative ever would. It didn’t quite work that well, but it set the tone for half a century for how conservatives would regard the ideas of Ayn Rand.
But while conservatives have despised Rand, she often despised them right back. She loathed Dwight Eisenhower. And in 1975 she wrote, “I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan.”8
Issues always made the difference. Rand endorsed Richard Nixon in 1968 because he supported abolition of the military draft—and Rand was especially proud of her protégé Alan Greenspan serving on Nixon’s Gates Commission, whose findings led to today’s all-volunteer army. Rand opposed Reagan on his antiabortion stance. She was ardently prochoice, saying five years before Roe v. Wade, “Abortion is a moral right—which should be left solely to the woman involved. An embryo has no rights.”9
These weren’t the only times Rand took positions that didn’t exactly ingratiate her to the right. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, once saying, “It is as irrational and immoral as any public act in our history.”10 As an individualist who insisted on seeing people as individuals, she declared, “I am an enemy of racism,”11 and she advised opponents of school busing, “If you object to sending your children to school with black children, you’ll lose for sure because right is on the other side.”12
Rand’s own life story ought to ingratiate her to the left. As a woman alone, an immigrant arriving penniless in the United States, not speaking English—if she were to show up today rather than in 1925, modern liberals would give her a driver’s license and register her to vote.
Rand ridiculed feminism as a “phony movement” and once described herself as “a male chauvinist.”13 Yet she lived as a poster child for feminism, utterly defying gender stereotypes. She rose from poverty to become an enormously powerful intellectual influence upon the culture, a very rare achievement for a woman in the 1940s and the 1950s. She is believed to have had an abortion in the early 1930s.14 She was the family breadwinner throughout her life. In late middle age, she became enamored of a much younger man and made up her mind to have an affair with him—having in advance duly informed her husband and his wife. Conservatives don’t do things like that (or at least they say they don’t).
In some sense Rand’s novels are feminist fantasies, as Camille Paglia, a postmodern critic embraced by liberal academics, has pointed out. We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged are all told primarily from the viewpoint of female characters. Atlas Shrugged, in particular, is built around the extraordinarily capable railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her struggles with her corrupt and incompetent brother James, the railroad president. She’s the female who deserves the man’s job, but doesn’t have it because she’s a woman; he’s the man who has the job because he’s a man, but doesn’t deserve it.
So don’t let politics get in your way of learning from the heroes who embody Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Political labels are products of the collective; you are an individual, as Rand was, and don’t have to be bound by them.
Objectivism 101
The standard of value for Rand’s Objectivist ethics is human life, or correspondingly, those things required for human survival. She correctly observes that, unlike other members of the animal kingdom, humans are not endowed with innate physical traits or complex behavioral instincts to ensure their continuation on the earth. We must clothe ourselves, arrange shelter, and obtain food for our sustenance through choice and action.
The basic survival tool and competitive advantage we have at our command is the human mind and our ability to reason. Since everything we need to live must be discovered by our own minds and produced by our own efforts, the essential means of life are thinking and productive work. That which supports the life of a rational, thinking, working human being is good; that which opposes or negates it is evil.
It follows that the individual mind is the root of all value that is produced or ever existed. No amount of brutish, mindless labor could perform a set of physical motions and create a nuclear reactor, or even a wheel and axle. No amount of randomly placed machinery could assemble itself into a productive assembly line, and no sack of rice could exist if someone didn’t first think, reason, and figure out the fundamentals of agriculture by using their own brainpower. There is no such thing as a collective mind. All value distills down to the individual.
But no man is an island. Humans come together into societies for mutual benefit, including group protection and division of labor, which allows members to develop specialized skills that can exceed the productive value of an individual generalist. Yet any time people come together in a civilization, there are those who seek to profit by taking the production of others rather than by freely and voluntarily trading the products of their own efforts with others in fair exchange.
According to Ayn Rand, there are two potential violators of a human’s rights: criminals and the government. Outright thievery is condemned across all cultures. Tribal raids for the purpose of sacking and looting the resources of a neighboring clan are generally absent from developed societies. Yet governmental looting is alive and well; the looters have just gotten more sophisticated. Through the promotion of various philosophies of altruism that teach that individual advancement is ignoble and that self-sacrifice is noble, siphoning of individual production by government is not only rationalized, but portrayed as a moral good.
After all, who wouldn’t deem it desirable to lift the poor out of poverty, to grant health care to all people, and to help the helpless? It’s not for our benefit; it’s for the public good (the “public” in this case being some sort of mythical entity with a superior claim over any individual member of it).
For the altruist, the beneficiary of an action is the only measure of moral value. As long as that beneficiary is someone other than you, it must be good. Selfishness, they say, is an evil. We must not live for ourselves, but for our fellow man.
Objectivists would agree that eliminating hunger and poverty would be a good thing. The difference is that Randians ask the next logical question that the collectivists conveniently ignore: “At what cost in terms of human freedom?” Shall we forcibly confiscate property from some to dole it out to others? Should we enslave some workers to support the nonworking? What about imprisoning those who resist in order to force compliance with the social good as determined by a supposedly benevolent dictator? All have been tried throughout modern history in the name of greater social progress. Some exist today to various extents—even in the United States.
These are all forms of collectivism, and they are made possible by mystical philosophies such as altruism. Their opposite is individualism, which is made
possible by reason-based philosophies such as Objectivism.
Rand, rather controversially, uses the word selfishness to capture the virtues that lead to individualism and freedom. She means “selfish” in the sense of one’s personal rights, defended and exercised in one’s rational self-interest over the course of an entire life. This is not the same as the collectivist’s derisive depiction of the “selfish” man as a hedonistic brute who seeks only the whims and pleasures of the moment and who, in the end, is no better than a marauder, seizing from others whatever he wishes. For Rand, that describes the collectivist, who has no respect for the rights of others—even though he calls himself an altruist. Selfishness in the Randian sense implies deriving your survival and your happiness from achieving command over nature, not over other people.
It means gaining the skills needed to engage in productive work while honing one’s rational mind to inform well-reasoned decisions. It means providing for ourselves through our own efforts and not expecting others to live in support of us. It also means living with the consequences of our actions—reaping the gain from favorable outcomes while shouldering the loss from downside risks.
Collectivists believe the world is like a zero-sum poker game with a fixed amount of chips on the table. Wealth exists in the economy as a fixed-size pool to divvy up. If someone gains a larger share, it must be at the expense of another. The collectivist’s goal—at least the stated goal—is to ensure “fairness” by forcibly penalizing the productive “rich” and giving the proceeds to the unproductive “poor.” Since they see wealth as fixed, then it follows—they claim—that the rich must have done something wrong to someone else in order to have seized a disproportionate share.
For Objectivists, wealth is not a fixed pool but a dynamic inventory achieved by producers in proportion to the creative value they deliver into the economy. The producers who contribute value should have a right to the value of their own production. How can that be unfair when, after all, any value is assigned in a free market only by the voluntary choice of customers who deal—or not—with a producer?
For the collectivist, there is no thought given to the source of economic value or the means of its creation. In the collectivists’ stated view, the world consists of two groups, the victims and the oppressors. Their belief system cannot accommodate an alternative relationship between humans—that of self-reliant equals.
In Rand’s ideal world, no one is a slave and no one is a master. All transactions between parties are based on voluntary exchange and open dealings under a limited government that enforces simple rules to protect basic rights, but doesn’t interfere in the voluntary affairs of individuals. Risks are borne by those who take them; players don’t gamble with other people’s chips and expect someone else to pay for their losses, nor do they take someone else’s winnings. Benefits accrue to those who practice clean dealings and meet true market needs with value-added products or services.
Who Is Ayn Rand?
Ayn Rand had firsthand experience with the perils of collectivism early in life, which carried through her unwavering body of work.
She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. Young Alisa had a front-row view of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. When the communists confiscated her father’s thriving business, the once prominent, solidly middle-class, and well-educated family was consigned to a hardscrabble existence living off minimal state wages. During her college years at the University of Leningrad, free inquiry was replaced by communist doctrine. One by one, her favorite professors were shipped into exile and any of her classmates who dared to protest were sent to Siberia.15
Shortly after Alisa immigrated to the United States in the late 1920s, the country fell into the grips of the Great Depression. Communist rhetoric and party membership were on a steady rise, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was putting in place the New Deal, vastly expanding the role of government in the economy and in individuals’ lives.
During this time, Alisa learned English and resolved to be a writer. She changed her name to Ayn Rand, and began to evolve the philosophical framework and literary talents that would make her newly taken name immortal. She published her first novel, We the Living, in 1936 as a semiautobiographical story of the individual’s struggles against the state in communist Russia. Two years later, she released Anthem, a novella set in a dystopian future and again focused on the triumph of an individual mind over a collectivist state, where even the word I had been lost and replaced with we.
The Fountainhead was Rand’s first major commercial and literary success, published in 1943. Its central character is an innovative and iconoclastic architect named Howard Roark. He is a nearly unique creation in literature—the hero of a story presented from the beginning as a fully realized ideal man. He encounters and overcomes challenges, but goes through no personal growth or transformation in the process, because he is already perfect; indeed, the whole point of the story is to demonstrate how a perfect person handles challenges in a highly imperfect world. Rand’s definition of the perfect that Roark embodies is utter individualism, leading to a life of uncompromising creative work and unshakable personal integrity.
Roark is surrounded by four other main characters, every one of them a “second-hander,” to use Rand’s expression. Roark, the individualist, lives his life firsthand. To live life secondhand is to be less than an individual—it is to put the purpose of your life outside yourself. Two of the second-handers are villains. One is a thief who steals Roark’s ideas; the other is an egalitarian collectivist who tries to thwart Roark’s career. The other two second-handers are heroes—one a great businessman who mistakenly uses his wealth to achieve power over others, the other a beautiful woman in love with Roark but unable to bear the thought that the world might hurt him. Of the four, three are destroyed by their failure to live life firsthand. The fourth, the woman, overcomes her fear and joins Roark as a first-hander.
After The Fountainhead was published, the Cold War began in earnest and it seemed the tide of socialist collectivism could turn into a tsunami that would inexorably soak the West and drown out individual liberty once and for all. Presidential candidate Henry Wallace called for “public ownership of a large segment of American industry, business dependency on government funds, government ownership of banks, and federal control through rationing.”16 By the early 1950s, United Nations forces had been fought to a stalemate by Chinese-backed Communists on the Korean peninsula.
Rand wrote her masterwork Atlas Shrugged in reaction to these developments. On its publication date, October 10, 1957, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite was on its fifth day of earth orbit. Atlas Shrugged became a best seller, and grew in popularity even as Cuba fell to the Communists at America’s back door.
Atlas Shrugged is set in an America that Rand extrapolated from the creeping threat of collectivism all around her. Its plot tracks the growth of a counterrevolutionary movement designed to restore individualism and freedom. The unique twist is that the counterrevolutionaries—a growing cabal of industrialists, artists, and professionals disgusted by the devolving world around them—do nothing at all to turn the tide of events. They literally do nothing, which is to say that they go on strike and withdraw their minds from the corrupt world, refusing to contribute to it in any way. Rand’s key insight here is that evil is powerless in the same way that any parasite is—collectivists require productive individuals whose work they can expropriate, just as a flea requires a dog.
John Galt is the ideal man of Atlas Shrugged, the “perfect” one around whom a cast of imperfect heroes and villains orbit. The heroes are industrialists who love their work so much they can’t bring themselves to go on strike, and so continue to inadvertently serve the collectivist villains. Those villains are corrupt businessmen and bureaucrats who seek collectivism for a variety of reasons, all having to do with their personal impotence.
Over the course of the novel, Galt recruits more and more able men to his strike, and as the
ir talents are withdrawn from the world, the economy falls into severe decline. The collectivists get increasingly desperate, and expropriate the remaining productive individuals all the more—until finally they, too, join Galt in his strike. Ultimately the economy utterly collapses, and Galt leads his strikers back to the world to rebuild it from the ruins.
Surely part of the twenty-first-century readership revival in Rand’s work is a Newtonian reaction to the chain of events that began with the terrorist attacks and global economic collapse of the past decade. That collapse was triggered by decades of an unholy alliance between corrupt businesspeople and corrupt bureaucrats. In the wake of these events there has been a resurgence of government intervention in our personal lives and in the economy, reaching in the United States all the way to government takeovers of major private banks, financial firms, and manufacturing companies—many of which had corruptly intertwined themselves with government to begin with—and most recently the health care industry. Collectivism is most assuredly not a dated relic of the Cold War era. It’s here and now. It’s not just the world of Atlas Shrugged. It’s the world we live in.
Living the Life of an Ayn Rand Hero
Ayn Rand’s heroes are larger-than-life projections of her ideals. They lead lives of virtue based on consistent personal convictions with a coherent philosophical system to guide them. Today’s real-life heroes universally did the hard work, tedious at times, to achieve their success based on their own effort and mental acuity. Steve Jobs created the revolutionary Apple II through what one observer called “moxie and energy,” and then engrossed himself in mind-numbing details for every nuance of the Macintosh user interface to deliver a tangible product that was often called “insanely great.” T. J. Rodgers studied the molecular structure of silicon to make subatomic improvements and create ultrafast memory chips. Bill Gates spent tens of thousands of hours immersed in the inner workings of computers, writing millions of lines of code.