Ayn Rand and Libertarian Utopia

As part of “Put Ayn Rand on a Spit and Roast Slowly Week,” we have strenuously avoided the term, “libertarianism.” Rand herself referred to libertarians as a “monstrous, disgusting bunch of people” who plagiarized her ideas. But, thanks to “Atlas Shrugged” and her other works, the term has become identified with her. But what is it?

Broadly speaking, libertarianism implies a soft form of anarchy, which views all forms of government as an infringement of individual liberty. The sentiment embraces the entire political spectrum, from communists who perceive the “withering away of the state” as the ultimate prize to their sworn enemies on the right who bristle at the thought of state interference in their activities.

Anarchy matured into a political philosophy under the 19th century French socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. “Property is theft!” he famously declared. Right-wing libertarians would strenuously disagree, and here is where Ayn Rand enters the picture.

In the final section of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” we are introduced to a right-wing libertarian utopia - Galt’s Gulch - sequestered in the mountains, where hero capitalists and related vocations live to their heart’s content mining ore and practicing medicine and producing music and lending money with no regulation and no taxes.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perceive the absurdity of this arrangement. What happens, for instance, when the hero mining magnate decides to dump his tailings into the river the hero banker likes to fish for trout in? The situation reaches its ultimate level of absurdity when our heroes prepare to emerge from their seclusion with new terms to impose on the rest of the US. Get ready: they rewrite the US Constitution to expressly forbid the regulation of business.

So much for “We the people.”

Hmm - baby clothes that catch on fire, tainted products in supermarkets, cars that blow up, nuclear reactors built on fault lines ...

Hmm - workers on starvation wages, nine-year old chimney sweeps, Triangle Factory fires ..

Oh yeh, no public education, no public roads, no public health or sanitation, no social services or amenities ...

I’ll stop right there.

The movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” only covered part one of her book, so we have no visual version of Rand’s libertarian utopia. But I imagine the JR Ewing character (pictured on top) from the 80s TV hit, "Dallas," would be right at home in it.

But it pays to recall that there is also a Communist strain to libertarianism, and the Stalinist government in 1949 was thoughtful enough to provide us with this filmed utopia featuring singing peasant farmers:



Back in our real and very imperfect world, the reasoned among us acknowledge that an individual’s rights happen to extend to the right to band with other individuals “in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

There is a term for this type of imperfect but ultimately serviceable arrangement. The last thing anyone would call it is libertarianism.

Black Box Warning: Something Good About Ayn Rand

As part of “Put Ayn Rand on a Spit and Roast Slowly Week,” we compared the movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” to “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” unmasked her as “666” in the 2008 financial-economic apocalypse, and exposed her silly objectivist philosophizing as a fraud.

Okay, I know you’re not going to believe this, but Rand’s strongest critics back in her day weren’t communist sympathizers or left-wing intellectuals (or for that matter anyone with half a brain). No, it was the far right. This from a 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged by Whitaker Chambers in William Buckley’s National Review:

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

“To a gas chamber - go!” the review concluded.

In 1964, Buckley condemned "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral," comparing her unyielding dogmatism to the likes of Savonarola (the fanatical Florentine monk who burned books and works of art during the Renaissance).

Forgive me, but any enemy of the far right is a friend of mine.

Buckley’s major contribution to the conservative movement was in cloaking an essentially Visigoth creed in a veneer of civility. The far right, back in those days, had image problems. A country which had prospered and achieved world leadership under FDR and Truman (and let’s give Ike credit, too) was not about to display its gratitude by voting back into office the same people who had inflicted upon them the Great Depression, unemployment, bread lines, social injustice, isolationism, and union-busting.

By branding himself as a conservative that liberals could stomach, Buckley is credited for setting the scene for the Reagan Presidency and the unrelenting sorry mess that followed. But first, he had to purge those who might blow his cover. Segregationists and McCarthyites who essentially knew how to hold a knife and fork correctly were allowed to remain members in good standing. (Buckley was both a white supremacist and an ardent defender of the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts.)  Anti-Semites (even those with good table manners) were not. Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, was too much of a loose cannon.

Then there was Ayn Rand. As well as being an atheist (she once told Buckley, an observant Catholic, that he was too smart to believe in God), she preached a gospel of naked (she called it rational) self-interest.

Every right-winger worth his salt, Buckley included, believed in exactly the same thing. Free enterprise is based on the principle, and you can make a very good case that it serves the public interest far better than any system that claims to act in the greater good. I have greatly benefited from living in a society based on naked self-interest - I’m not stupid.

Ayn Rand sneered at the idea of altruism, but she wasn’t exactly against it, and it would be unfair to pin this rap on her. What she was against was forced altruism. According to Rand, that’s where the trouble starts, and she witnessed it first-hand in her native Russia after Lenin’s Bolsheviks took over. Once the greater good comes into play, it is time to get the hell out of Dodge. No longer does the state serve the individual. Rather, the individual serves the state. Always with catastrophic results.

Yes, we all long to be part of something greater than ourselves, but there exist no shortage of evil people most happy to exploit this noble side of our nature.

Obviously, the greater good was by no means a communist monopoly. Propagandists such as William Buckley needed to use it to make their case for a kinder and gentler brand of “screw-you-I’m-rich” conservatism. It also helped if they could use religion as a club to beat dissenters over the head.

But here was Ayn Rand, telling it like it was, undermining Buckley. Give Ayn Rand full marks for her honesty and courage. I came of age during the sixties. I read Buckley’s columns. I watched him on “Firing Line.” For all his collegial bantering with the likes of liberals such as John Kenneth Galbraith, this man was an enemy of democracy.

Make no mistake, it is the far right who originated politically correct. If you don't believe me, cast your mind back to the flag-burning amendment controversy and the people who supported it. Also, check the credentials of those who lead book burnings.

Heaven help back in the day if you believed in racial equality or social justice - that made you a communist. Heaven help if you objected to poor young boys being drafted to fight an ill-conceived war - that made you an some kind of traitor.

“Love it or leave it,” appeared on the bumper stickers of the day, and leading the chorus was the glib and smooth-talking Bill Buckley.

So whenever “the greater good” comes up in the name of country or religion of some other ideal, we need to pay attention to Ayn Rand. I’m proud to consider myself altruistic. I freely give my time to individuals and worthy causes. But when it comes to forced altruism - of someone else telling me how to think and behave and what stupid war I'm supposed to die in - put me foursquare in Rand’s corner.

Of all things, Ayn Rand has now become a right-wing folk hero, but probably only because Fox News has neglected to inform its viewers that their new role model was rabidly atheist, pro-abortion, slept around quite a bit, was ethnically Jewish, and insisted on marching to her own drum.

The world is a funny place ...

Is Ayn Rand Too Smart to Believe Her Own Crap?

On March 9, in anticipation of the release of the movie version of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” Fox News’ Sean Hannity addressed his fellow traveler, John Stossel:

There were certain writers that just had this vision of the future. It seems like this out-of-control, know-no-bounds government ... they got it, they understood what could happen.

Stossel’s response:

Oh my God, how could she see 50 years ago what would happen now in America?

The answer is simple, really. As I mentioned in my most recent piece, Ayn Rand could easily foresee the situation because she in fact helped cause it. The architect of the 2008 financial-economic meltdown was Rand’s protege and one-time acolyte, Alan Greenspan. As long-serving Chairman of the Fed and de facto economic Czar answerable to virtually no one, Greenspan personally oversaw the dismantling of regulatory control of the finance industry and the American economy.

But instead of a golden age of the type of hero capitalism that Rand extolled, we witnessed rat bag opportunists running amok. We are still paying in full measure for their legalized sociopathy. As a result, we are in for years of the type of dragged-out economic stagnation that hit Japan in the nineties. The possibility of the apocalypse envisioned by Rand is not out of the question, either, particularly if the likes of Fox News is successful in promoting her timeless appeal.

Okay, let’s examine this timeless appeal:

Ayn Rand grew up in St Petersburg, Russia. She was 12 when the Czar was deposed in 1917. Soon after, Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power and confiscated her father’s pharmacy. Ayn’s family sought refuge in Crimea - then beyond the reach of the Soviets - where she completed high-school. Back in St Petersburg the Soviets had opened up universities to women and Jews. Her family was destitute, but - of all things, thanks to Communism - she was among the first generation of women in Russia to obtain a higher education.

In 1925, Rand emigrated to the US and broke into movies as a budding screen-writer. During the thirties, as the depression deepened, various movers and shakers in the US looked to Europe for alternative political/economic models. Facism was a strong favorite of the reactionary wing of the Republican party. Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer. Various liberals, with equal naivete, advanced an idealized view of Soviet Communism.

It was against this backdrop of misguided communist sympathizers that Rand was reacting to. She had witnessed first-hand the brutal reality in turning over the reins of government to collectivist thugs. This experience formed the basis of her 1936 novel, “We the Living,” set in Soviet Russia, which she describes as “near to an autobiography as I will ever write.”

But of course, this is where Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy is unmasked as a fraud. Rather than pointing to an “absolute reality” revealed by the powers of reason, Rand’s world view is highly colored by emotion and personal experience. Had she and her family been victimized by Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, instead, she would have been singing a highly different tune.

As it was, even those mildly sympathetic to FDR’s New Deal were seen by her as the enemy.

This decidedly anti-objectivist view of reality was the basis of her 1943 “The Fountainhead” and her 1957 “Atlas Shrugged,” both which idealized hero capitalists and visionaries ruggedly acting in their own rational self-interest, and which vilified liberals as effeminate schemers and back-stabbers.

But as morality tales, both novels work and work exceptionally well, on a similar level to Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.” These were novels for their time, hardly novels for all time. Ironically, “Atlas Shrugged” was published during the second term of Eisenhower’s successful Presidency, what is regarded by many as a golden decade. The rich paid high taxes, the nation was gainfully employed, opportunities were expanding, the economy grew beyond expectations with regulations in place, and very few seemed to be complaining.

Nevertheless, there is universal appeal in Rand’s warning about being highly skeptical regarding those who claim to act in the greater good. Inevitably, we the gullible find our pockets picked and our freedoms taken away. But in this day and age, the enemy turns out to be Rand’s own legacy.

If Ayn Rand were alive today, would she fall for her own crap? Interesting question ... 

More to come ...

Ayn Rand: Author of the Catastophe She Envisioned

“Atlas Shrugged” the movie is set in 2016. The US is in economic ruins caused by big government and do-gooder liberalism. The only thing standing between civilization as we know it and a new dark ages is a small band of hero capitalists, who are mysteriously disappearing.

According to the likes of Sean Hannity, Ayn Rand was monumentally visionary in forecasting this scenario fifty years ago. Was she ever. After all, she helped caused it.

The year 2016 may well be the new 1984, but if it eventuates it will be for entirely different reasons than imagined by either Ayn Rand or Fox News. To refresh your memories, the economic-financial meltdown of 2008 was caused by rat bag capitalists operating unfettered in an unregulated economy. Civilization was saved by big government and hero do-gooders. Hero capitalists were in short supply. We are still not out of the woods. Economic recovery is still bogged down and things may yet disintegrate to the bleak and harsh 1984 of 2016.

I have a depressive temperament and an active imagination. The collapse of western civilization - sudden or gradual - is not an alien thought to me.

Now rewind back more than a half a century, when Ayn Rand was working on “Atlas Shrugged.” During the time, she ran a salon frequented by her acolytes spouting her creed. Get ready for this: Prominent among her acolytes was a young Alan Greenspan.

That’s right, Alan Greenspan, legendary Chairman of the Fed, the economic czar virtually answerable to no one, who had only recently stepped down from his position when the shit hit the fan. As he later testified to a Congressional committee:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Translation: Ayn Rand’s fantasy view of hero capitalists acting in their own rational self-interest for the common good is totally unsustainable.

So was Ayn Rand partly responsible for 2008 and by extension the new 1984 she envisioned? Hate the sorry mess we’re in, love the irony.

Atlas Snored

After a nearly a whole lifetime of deliberately avoiding Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” five or six years ago I finally unavoided it. I could cite more reasons to not like this book than Martin Luther had theses to nail to the Wittenberg door, but one simple fact trumps all of my objections - namely that I couldn’t put the damned thing down. Say what you want, the book is a page-turner.

Compare that to the movie version, released as “Atlas Shrugged - Part 1.” Inside 30 seconds I was looking at my watch. Let’s put it this way. The movie invites comparisons to such classics as “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” and Ed Wood’s immortal “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” Really, we’re talking “Mystery Science Theater 3000” quality here.

Ayn Rand’s dystopic novel asks us to identify with a band of hero capitalists getting squashed by big government, who in their frustration stage their own version of going on a strike led by the mysterious John Galt. Everything ends happily when the US of the future is plunged into the Dark Ages as a result, setting the stage for a return to reason.

Crazy as it seems, Rand pulls it off. The story centers on a hard-as-nails railroad heiress, Dagny Taggart and a much-maligned self-made steel magnate, Hank Rearden, who team up to save the country from its own stupidity (but only in pursuit of their own rational self-interest, which is Rand creed), and fall in a higher kind of love in the process, only to bow to the inevitable and join John Galt.

Rand’s oddball over-philosophizing is about as subtle as a headache (and just as painful) and the various plots and sub-plots and sub-sub-sub plots unfold like George Orwell on acid, only not nearly so coherent, but she does stick to literary convention in serving up virtuous and heroic (and ultimately doomed) Arthurian archetypes with whom we can easily identify.

This is far from the case in the movie version, which effectively turns our heroes into JR Ewing and Marie Antoinette.

No, it’s worse than that. At least JR Ewing was fun to watch. Whatever induced the producers to think that a main course of thudding right-wing speechifying would make compelling cinema? “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” by contrast, is a cliff-hanger. Unfortunately, my cinema seat did not come equipped with a fast-forward button.

It was no coincidence that the Dagny Taggart character seemed to have come straight from a Fox News desk. It was as if the producers felt that we would instantly identify with a limo-riding blond in short skirts, gorging herself on fine delicacies while the rest of the country couldn’t afford to feed their families. Any second, I expected this bloodless wonder to spout on about the evils of Obama Care.

What idiot could possibly identify with a character like this? I could only think. Oops, that’s right, Sean Hannity. He loved the movie. Then again, he probably wrote the screen play.

I’m sure the military right now is playing this movie to suspect terrorists at Gitmo to get them to confess. Where water-boarding failed, this horrible excuse for a movie may well succeed. In the name of humanity, we need to find a more humane form of torture.

Poor Ayn Rand. This is the last thing she would have wished for. “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” Alas, she is doomed to a similar fate as her Nietzschian supermen.

Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959 part 1

I'm headed out the door to see the movie "Atlas Shrugged - Part I." I am no subscriber to Ayn Rand or libertarianism or objectivism, but I do applaud her for her intellectual honesty and moral integrity. You can see both qualities on ample display in this 1959 interview with Mike Wallace. You can search out Parts II and III of the interview for yourself

I look forward to at least two or three blogs on the Ayn Ran and her legacy, and to lively discussions. Enjoy ...