Originally written on Saturday, July 22, 2023
The American Myth, or Why Ayn Rand and her Philosophy are Baloney.Historically speaking, America doesn't have a really great birth story. It's all muddled and intertwined with British history. It's not really until you get to the deplorable acts in the 1750s, that the American colonists started to ask questions about their "Englishness". This is when we start talking about being an American. If you look at just the revolutionary war, you could say in the parlance of a bookie, that we beat the spread. You may ask why do I say that? Look at it this way, if we really kicked British ass, they would not have come back 30 years later to invade our shores. But we beat them back and with all the bravado of 20-somethings, we talked up our victories to Manifest Destiny. It was God's will! And then, with the urging of our fledgling government, "we loaded up our trucks and moved to Beverly".
With our movement West, we took the attitude and ethos, that wherever we staked our tent, it was by our divine right. Our attitude really started to become atrocious after the Civil War, when the true industrial revolution hit. When the resource extractors, and titans of industry started to rule and created the rugged individualist narrative, he who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and created his enterprise, all on his own took hold.
Thus the Gilded Age formed, with only a slight pause at the turn of the 20th century caused by some progressive reformers, until the stock market crashed in 1929. The division of wealth had stratified to the point that was more or less on par with what it is today. With the people at the top pulling in more and more wealth and the people at the bottom getting less and less.
Let me take a break for a second because I don't wanna sound like an America basher. The United States, with all her flaws, is by far the best constituted government in the world. But I must reiterate the emphasis on the word "constituted"! This is where I put that first crack to the glass lie that is the American myth of rugged individualism. The constitution explicitly says it right and it's preamble: "We the People."
The great depression was a bad time for America. And for all the flaws in some of the economic policies of the Roosevelt administration, he did get a lot of things done that both conservatives and liberals take for granted today, most of which were large infrastructure projects, that carried on even after World War II, into the Eisenhower administration, with the Interstate Highway Act.
All right, I hear you asking, "what the hell does this have to do with Ayn Rand"? At the risk of sounding a bit antisemitic, it was in 1935, that a little Russian Jew moved from Saint Petersburg to the US. She brought with her the scars of the Russian revolution and the tyranny of Stalin; a university education (in philosophy) and some convoluted thoughts on free thinking, free markets and free love.
Now, maybe you know who Ayn Rand is and maybe you don't. Her major fame comes from two of four novels she wrote, you may or may not have heard of. The first one was called: "The Fountainhead". Turned into a movie in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. In the book, you get the first hint of what her philosophy would become. If you've ever read that book, and you were any kind of a bibliophile and were to give a critique on it, the most you could probably say is it's a terribly written love story with a marginally likable hero named Rourk, who is just trying to stay true to his dreams (however unconventional and arrogant they may be), and the woman who falls in love with this stoic (as condescending as he is to her), to the point of stupidity, only to watch him die when to her vain attempts to help her love, fails.
Her fourth novel is the one that most people know: "Atlas Shrugged". A ball busting 1100 paged tome. This is, in the words of one critic, her "Magnus Opus". Here is where she really tries to flesh out what her ideal human should be. The book was published in 1957, and instantly became a hit with the buttoned down, angst ridden, 20 something year old Ivy League types that were tired of mommy and daddy telling them what to do all the time. They would take on the ethos of John Galt. "Who the fuck is John Galt?", you ask. Well if I remember correctly, you don't actually get to meet the asshole until something like page 700. Maybe. But first, you will it become intimately involved with Dagny Taggart.
We follow Dagny and her travails against government interference, her brother's bad business decisions, her varied love interests, and the constant battering on our heads that the only true way to happiness and freedom is when we, as individuals, think only of ourselves and our happiness, damned be all who get in our way!
A little aside, reiterating that I'm not a book critic, but it fails as a romance novel, suspense novel, science-fiction novel, dystopian novel, or any other genre you may try to pigeonhole it in. If you have read this novel you will understand this next sentence. If you remove the authors use of the word "whatever", the size of the volume would probably be reduced by 200 pages. That may be a slight exaggeration but she does use that word an awful lot in the dialogue.
Her characters are too simplified. They are one dimensional. They are bricks of ideas to beat you over with, and over with again, until you are completely worn down and finally meet John Galt. He is the cop-out artist of the whole story. The entrepreneur that created the better mousetrap, only to be ridiculed. And like a bratty little kid, he's gonna take his toys and go home. In his worldview, everything is black and white! There is no subtlety.
This he does! He moves himself West and establishes his little gated community called Galt Gulch. This is also where the Titans of industry have vanished to. John Galt has set up the perfect capitalist's dream, where all relationships are transactional in nature. You need something from me, I get something from you! You see, that way, we are both happy! There are no shades of gray, and all the relationships are superficial.
And you ultimately only find this out somewhere around page 1000, when John Galt gives his 60 page diatribe on why the US is going to hell in a hand–basket, placing the blame squarely on the government. He rants, on and on, about him and his friends being the producers, and everyone else the takers and leeches, sucking the innovative spirit out of the Men of the Mind.
It is in those 60 pages, that Ms. Rand finally defines her philosophy: Egoism and Objectivism. She could've just as easily called it something else: Materialistic Sophistry! The problem is that this philosophy and these ideas have come to define a major political party. And while it may feel nice when you are young and idealistic, it can become hazardous when trying to live in the real world and working together towards a common goal. In many ways her ideals are the flip-side of the coin to the ideals of Karl Marx. Both of those philosophies suffer from the common philosophic conundrum, that is to say they fall down because of the "Ought-Is" gap. The philosopher always has an ideal solution, but forgets that he's dealing with human beings with all their flaws. No matter how good the ideal is, it can never be attained. Not only can it not be attained, someone will always come up with another ideal, which too will never be attained, ad infinitum.
While I despise the people on the far left, the Freedom Caucus on the far right, would just as quickly burn the Capitol to the ground while clutching "Atlas Shrugged" to their breast and watching Washington burn! The sad thing is that that book has influenced regular people longer and deeper than a book like "The Turner Diaries" concerning separatist movement sympathizers. It's one thing to create a few nut jobs that want to blow up a couple buildings. It's another thing to create a whole political party capable of tearing up the Constitution, rather than work with people that disagree with them.
Of course, all of this is just me opining. I'm sure there's a great number of you that will totally disagree with me. That is OK with me. As I said in my manifesto (*) "I'm here to be a thorn in people's arses."
Anyway, I love y'all, and thank you for taking time to read this.I look forward to the comments. Patrick Graham for [insert office] in 20XX. Sponsored by: Plato and the Platypus.
