I waste far too much time commenting on issues of secondary importance and engaging with people whose views, as irritating as they are, are of no great consequence. In commenting, I can make such issues and people seem far more important than they actually are. I am learning which fights to take on and which to just pass by, to let them fizzle out in their inconsequence.
Over the years I have written next to nothing on Ayn Rand. She's not worth it. There's nothing to gain from saying how bad she is. Those who admire her will accuse you of lacking a rational argument, forcing you into taking the time and trouble set out such an argument. To no avail, for the very reason they won't be persuaded. Rand's work is so manifestly bad that I can’t even dredge up contempt, let alone anger. Not only do I find her views superficial and infantile, I find her writing hackneyed and her pretensions at being philosophical comical. Since it serves me nothing to say these things, I have in the main said nothing on her. There’s nothing to engage with. Any views she has that possess a degree of plausibility are much better stated by others. Indeed, the very fact I would criticize her comes with the danger that I am admitting deep down that I think her worthy of criticism. I really don’t. I can't say how awful her writing is.
I think Rand and the Rand phenomenon is worthy of brief dismissive comment, though, lest my silence be misconstrued as ignorance on my part, rather than the indifference it is. I don’t even have contempt for Rand. There is nothing by way of intellectual seriousness and philosophical depth to her writing. Her novels are entirely lacking in literary quality. Rand is philosophy for people who don’t understand philosophy, but like to flatter themselves that they do; it is writing for people who don’t read. Her style is turgid, her ideas unimaginative. Her dense books are full of hack writing. Her thinking is crude in the extreme. I dislike the work of Hayek and Mises and such like, but I recognize the fact they have a conceptual apparatus and can construct an argument. Rand reads like an ill-digested libertarian fantasy written by and for adolescents of stunted moral and intellectual growth. For all of her talk of ‘objectivism,’ her arguments are loaded. Her work is sociologically illiterate, caricaturing each, any, and every supra-individual institution and form as repressive of the liberty of the discrete individual. Her views express an infantile understanding of society and economics, denouncing all social institutions and solidaristic forms and structures as ‘collectivist.’ Any entity greater than the self-possessing, self-choosing individual is denounced as ‘collectivist.’ This is not merely narcissism writ large, it ultimately reduces to the madness of solipsism. It is an adolescent fantasy that appeals to selfish and greedy adults who are deficient in social understanding. We could call them sociopathic.
The appeal is easy to understand. It isn't philosophical. Rand’s view espouses a rugged individualism that fits the contours of a ‘free market’ economics which isn’t free and unregulated at all. Her view expresses individualism as an organized collective hypocrisy, the collective in this sense being that of the rich and powerful happy to atomize society into discrete individuals, rendering each one powerless in the face of the collective forces and forms of power. For all of the emphasis on the freedom of business and the individual from government and regulation, this view is all about government intervention and reregulation . The end is to re-rig markets and re-order society via government to facilitate the upward redistribution of resources from labour to capital. This vision is not about deregulation and individual freedom at all, but re-regulation in the cause of redistributing wealth to enable the richer to get richer. The end is the further concentration of wealth.
Let's not overrate Rand's importance, though. Rand is not an intellectual titan driving the whole scam. She is merely PR and rationalization, schoolgirl cheerleader flattering and being flattered by the lusty wealth-creators and conquerors of the world. There are no pretensions to philosophical depth and engagement in her writing. For all of the dense texts, people who read Rand already know what they believe: government = socialism = collectivism = bad, markets = freedom = good. It's that simple, or, rather, that crude. This kind of reasoning has the same relation to philosophy as pornography does to sexuality in the flesh - whatever truth it reflects it's a truth that exhibits human beings in their worst aspects. It’s soft porn, hence the thrill and excitement Rand and her ‘arguments’ generate among those not normally known to read anything of any weight and depth.
But to dismiss it as soft porn is actually to make it sound more interesting than it is, minimizing its truly wretched quality. There is a meanness, greed, and callousness to the followers of Rand that is as hard in its relation to others as it is perverted. Such people cultivate a cruelty and indifference to the people they consider losers in society. In fact, they flaunt it to signal their virtues and reinforce their status as achievers and go-getters. For such people, the losers are not to be pitied, still less helped; they are to be scorned as the architects of their own miserable fate. There is a sadistic quality to such characters, shown partly in the way they derive pleasure from the misfortune of others, partly in the way they express horror at weakness and vulnerability to such an extent as denying it. Rather than empathize with those in need, there is scorn and denial. The weak, the poor, and the needy contradict the heroic images conjured up in the heat of adolescent fantasy. Hence my reference to pornography. The evident contempt for the poor, the weak, and the needy is the counterpart of a libido-driven worship of heroic individual achievement. The scorn and ridicule poured on ‘the underclass’ is the other side of this fetishism.
Her style is lifted from the romance and hard-boiled detective genres, one reason for her huge influence, that and the level of indulgent fantasy. She appeals to the narcissism of the typical 14-year-old, and conveys the message that such is the way to be always, that stupid self-indulgence and contempt for others is the way to heaven on earth. And here we all are living in just the world she envisioned. How do you think that's working out, then?
This is not a true heroism, of the kind we can find in the work of Tolkien, for instance; it is a cruel heroism. And it breeds an attitude that comes to infect the entire social and psychic fabric. Society comes to be fractured and the body politic fragmented and atomized. Each and all become prey to abstract collective forces, forced into a struggle for survival without job security and benefits. Such a society is cruel, but is still ‘heroic,’ in however bastardized a sense, in that individuals battling a precarious existence still make the attempt to lead a good life and plan for a future that they know not to be in their own hands. I should know. I’ve been living life this way on the margins for years. It is hard, tough, and uncertain, nothing to romanticize at all. I find notions of rugged individualism and wilderness indolent, decadent, even, in an urban environment.
This ideology celebrates and rationalizes a society that is divided between winners and losers, and the fundamental con is that both parties are drawn into the struggle for survival. It’s all about the great ‘I.’ Rand didn’t believe in God and considered religion an 'affront to reason.' Her God was the ‘I.’ Act for yourself, pursue your own interests, make your own choices, back yourself, take your own chances – society is you, you as in ‘I.’ And if you fail, then that’s just tough, you are not good enough, and life is tough. The attitude is failsafe, containing an in-built apologetics. It sets up society for failure, celebrates those who predate on the weak as the winners, and casts the losers as responsible for their own misfortune. The heroes succeed and the weak, the villains of the show, go to the wall. This sociologically illiterate drivel is fed to us culturally and has come to prevail to such an extent that the victims of the system themselves to believe that their precarious existence is as a result of personal failure on their own part rather than as a result of faulty rigging and regulation. Individuals thus persist in their attempts to survive throughout social pressures and arrangements that are patently not working for them. Rather than join together in political common cause, such individuals learn to live with and reconcile themselves to the fact that life isn’t panning out for them and accept that in all probability it never will. But they carry on with this cruel existence, out of some inverted heroism. Freedom, they say, when it is mere survival, and barely even that. It’s a bastardized heroism in that the triumph is mere survival. The paradox is that those surviving still identify with the aspirational and entrepreneurial success stories at the top. They imbibe the belief in the future as centred on the all important ‘I,’ and to Hell with every one else – even though they themselves are damned to this social Hell.
As for the intellectual qualities of Rand, I won’t waste any time. Rand was utterly clueless about capitalism and economics. She may as well have drawn pictures with big chunky crayons. At best, her view is cartoonish. I still don’t know whether to laugh or cry at her pretensions to be a philosopher. She wrote “The Individualist Manifesto” as a response to Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,’ demanding that ‘individuals of the world unite.’ This would be comical were it not for the fact that grown adults actually read Rand, or read her in slogans that conform to and confirm what they already believe to be true. But, yes, Rand tells us that socialism doesn't work and could never work, and so is incredibly intelligent to those who fear and loathing of socialism far outweighs their intellectual curiosity.
It’s drivel. In fact it’s worse than drivel. Rand's works are full of imperialism, racism, and white supremacy. And hypocritical. Whilst Rand put herself forward as a property supremacist, she had no respect whatsoever for native Americans. In fact, she argued that they deserved to be expropriated and slaughtered since they had done nothing with the land they had. She claims that when you own property, no government can tell you what to do with it. Then she justifies outright theft of native American land and murder of native American people, because, in her ignorant view, native Americans weren’t doing anything productive with the land.
And that’s about as much time I am prepared to waste on Rand and her followers. The Rand phenomenon is really a snare. It isn’t worthy of intellectual engagement, precisely because it isn’t an intellectual phenomenon at all. That leaves you only able to hurl out contempt and abuse, which cannot reflect well on a person. It doesn't make you feel any better, either. Better to ignore. And I do have better things to be doing with my time than even thinking of Rand and her cruel stupidities. Right now, I am due at The Abbey for a little birthday celebration. Rand has no place at such celebrations. She’s best left alone to her sad and deranged fantasies. The same for those who take her seriously.
Gore Vidal summarizes concisely:
‘Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society… To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.’
The effects are evil, and so too may be the intent. But it's like arguing with an orc. I'm sticking with Tolkien.