Why Ayn Rand was Wrong

 

It is a pet theory of mine that the "greatness" or "importance" of a philosopher is mostly determined by that philosopher's subsequent degree of influence on a government leader.  Would we still talk about Socrates, if his student Critias had not taken over Athens as the leader of the Dictatorship of the Thirty?  Would we talk about Aristotle, had he not tutored Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great and took over a vast part of the ancient world?  Would we remember Rousseau, had not Robespierre declared him "divine"?  Or Locke and Montesquieu, had not the founders of the United States revered them?  The esteem given to the philosophy by professional professors within the academy matters less, and its internal coherence, or insight, or truth matters less still.  By this measure, Ayn Rand is, unfortunately, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.  

Even though she is barely noticed by philosophy departments, Ayn Rand is massively more influential than, say, Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Russell or Sartre or Foucault or whoever your personal fave may be.  Much as we may not like to, we have to confront this fact.  Not only did she write the number 1 bestselling philosophy of book of all time - and many of her other books are also top-sellers for philosophy within the publishing industry - but also her influence is everywhere in the governments of the world, particularly after the triumph of neoliberalism.  As is well-known, the United States had a Federal Reserve Chairman - Alan Greenspan - who was not only an avid reader and philosophical adherent of her ideology, but was a close personal friend and member of Ayn Rand's inner circle.  During Greenspan's tenure, he was often described as the second most powerful man the world - if not the first!  (At the 2000 Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner, Jay Leno looked straight at Hilary Clinton and said, "I want to say a special hello to the wife of the most powerful man in the world - Andrea Mitchell!"  Everyone got the joke.)  And although he is not as regarded as such a "maestro" as he used to be, after the 2007-2008 recession, many of the policies that Greenspan enacted have continued to have a lasting influence on Fed policy - and indeed on central banks throughout the world.  Not only that, but former President Ronald Reagan called himself an "admirer of Ayn Rand" in a letter.  Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan described Ayn Rand as "the reason I got involved in public service."  (Ironically, one can imagine that Ayn Rand would have bristled at being associated with "public service.")  The list of Ayn Rand followers among politicians is enormously long: Rand Paul, Clarence Thomas, Mike Pompeo, and too many others to name.  Donald Trump has claimed to be a fan of Ayn Rand's books, but in such a vague and rambling way that I'm not sure whether I can believe him.  Even Hillary Clinton is rumored to have gone through an Ayn Rand phase.  Perhaps more importantly, Ayn Rand is even more popular among business leaders - to name a few: Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Steve Wozniak, and Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, who for a time used the cover of "The Fountainhead" as his Twitter pic.

Can anyone name any "Heideggerian" congressmen or senators?  How about a Wittgensteinian town councilperson?  A Foucauldian dog catcher? 

Moreover, Ayn Rand's ideas have spread far and wide, beyond her actual followers, not only in America, but around the world, to people who may never have heard of Ayn Rand.  In some ways, her ideas were not completely original - one can easily find precedents for much of what she said - but she and her movement played an extremely outsized role in publicizing these ideas and forming them into a totalizing ideology.  Her pronouncements formed the moral backbone of a loosely related group of intellectual movements such as American so-called "libertarianism" (really propertarianism), neoliberalism, and many economists of the Austrian and Neo-Classical school, as well as those who call themselves "classical liberals".  Although there was a major split, you can still see the influence of Ayn Rand on the anarcho-capitalists, and again, although there was a split between her and people like William F. Buckley, it's easy to see her influence on mainstream Republicanism.  Even when Americans of every political stripe, from Oprah's book club to LGBTQ activists to Black Lives Matter authors, to your high school guidance councilor, go on and on - as they often do - about the importance of "self esteem," this owes something, I think, to Ayn Rand and her movement.  Once you have eyes to see them, you realize that Ayn Rand's ideas are ubiquitous.  The neoliberal ideology that emerged out of them is especially influential among the multinational multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and so on.  For decades, even if Ayn Rand as an individual has been mocked, scorned, and uncredited, her ideas have run the world.

So, yes, sadly, Ayn Rand was important.  But wrong.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not here to tell you that Ayn Rand was immoral, or evil, that selfishness is bad, etc., etc..  Instead, I simply want to point out her philosophical inconsistencies and confusions.

O Ayn!  If only you'd had the courage of your convictions!  If only you'd had the moral strength to take your principles to their logical conclusions!

One might think, since I philosophically subscribe to the "egoist" perspective - or, as I prefer to say, "egoish" - that I would be inclined to agree with Ayn Rand, author of "The Virtue of Selfishness."  I do agree that there is a kind of virtue to selfishness, although I would describe it somewhat differently than Ayn Rand does.  As I have written before, in my opinion, the ego is not selfish enough. 

I like egos.  I like selfishness.  I like rational self-interest.  I like materialism.  I even like greed.  That's where Ayn Rand and I agree, sort of.  (Though I interpret all these terms somewhat differently than she does.)  But we part company when she starts defending capitalism.  I don't see how egoism necessarily implies slavish devotion to capitalism.  On the contrary: my egoism leads me to see the problems with capitalism, and to see that it will eventually destroy itself.  And furthermore, I don't really believe that Ayn Rand's egoism led her to defend capitalism, either - I think it's more likely that the reverse is true: her fundamental, adamant anti-communism led her to rationalize this fervent political zealotry by way of a quickly cobbled-together, ad-hoc pseudo-individualism.  

Capitalism is not the inevitable result of ordinary human selfishness, nor is it the best system for accommodating selfishness, as Ayn Rand implies - though, in fact, she never attempts to prove this, or even states it clearly.  On the contrary, human selfishness has existed for a long, long time, while capitalism is a recent invention of the last few centuries.  And capitalism, far from being the system that is most attuned to individualism, in reality must repress the individual at every turn.  Like Moloch, it demands perpetual sacrifice.  There's nothing selfish about allowing capitalism to continue exploiting you.  It's not selfish for the workers, whose labor is exploited - they create wealth, and if they are lucky, they receive a living wage in return, while the bulk of the profits go to shareholders who do no work.  And it's not even selfish for the capitalists, the owners of capital, who are even more controlled by capital than the workers are, and who must work as a class to suppress the workers at all times.  If capitalists deviate from capital's demands, they too will be reduced to the station of workers, or worse.  Moreover, this myth we have of capitalism gradually and naturally emerging out of primitive exchange is completely ahistorical and ignores how government, imperialism, war, and slavery all contributed to the rise of capitalism.  Capitalism was imposed upon us by force.

The problem with Ayn Rand was not that she was selfish.  The problem was that she wasn't selfish enough.  A person who was truly dedicated to satisfying her own rational self interests would never support those who exploit her.

What's more, I think that my egoism - which forces me to realize that my interests inevitably come into conflict with the prerogatives of capital - is more logically consistent than Ayn Rand's.  Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, both former followers of Ayn Rand (they were married to each other; Nathaniel was also Ayn's lover, and Barbara her biographer.  It's complicated) have each addressed, with some hemming and hawing, the possibility that they were members of a cult.  Now, I kinda like cults - I'm fascinated by them.  But I'm going to treat this essay as an attempt at something like cult deprogramming.  My imagined audience is people who currently revere Ayn Rand.  (First step in your deprogramming, by the way: read Barbara Branden's "The Passion of Ayn Rand" - or at least watch the movie.  It will give you a very different idea of what Ayn Rand was like, from within her closest circle.)  If I were writing to people who already disagreed with her, I would write it entirely differently.  I'm going to try to show how Ayn Rand failed to live up to her own principles, and how her philosophy fails its own criterion.  Therefore, I'm not going to waste everyone's time by talking about how she was a "mean girl" or that she was "greedy," as a recent book did.  I'm like Gordon Gecko: I think greed is good.  (Even Ayn Rand didn't go that far.)  Instead, my focus will be on two points - first and foremost, that she was illogical: that will be the main substance of this essay; and second, and a rather minor point, that she was a tool of state power.

Whenever I come across people who are devoted to Ayn Rand - they are usually young, and usually men - I like to recommend to them that they try reading Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who wrote under the pen-name Max Stirner, and who was an egoist a century before Ayn Rand.  I have my differences with Stirner as well, but at least once a Randian has read Stirner they will come to realize that there's more than one way to be an individualist - that being an egoist doesn't mean being a dogmatic, brain-dead zombie follower of Ayn Rand.  For that matter, there's a long history of egoists between Stirner and Rand - people like Benjamin Tucker, John Henry Mackaye, Adolf Brand, Emile Armand, Renzo Novatore, and even, in a sense, Emma Goldman.  Friedrich Nietzsche might be considered an influence on some of the people in this current, though he was neither an individualist nor an egoist but something more complex.  We could even go back further than Stirner, and look at someone like the strange case of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (whose novel "Allwill" is in a way the great-granddaddy of Rand's own works), not to mention people like Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner.

Returning to Ayn Rand, although I disagree with her deeply on many, many topics, I think it's shameful the way that the academic world has brushed her aside, apparently feeling it unnecessary even to refute her claims, and instead mostly simply ignoring them - even as Ayn Rand clubs pop up here and there on college campuses, not unlike Cru (formerly known as the Campus Crusade for Christ).  This unwillingness to engage critically with her work only allows her philosophically unsound ideas to spread.  I also can't help getting a least a slight whiff of sexism in their snobbish silence.  In any case, the academy's refusal to debate Ayn Rand's concepts makes them seem afraid - as though they fear that they would be unable to defeat Rand's reasoning.  I hope to help reverse that trend here.  I say that personally, although I was never a follower of Rand, when I encountered Ayn Rand's thought, at first I couldn't figure out a way around her ideas; then, after a couple weeks of thinking, I started to see holes in her arguments; gradually these holes got wider and wider, and soon I was adamantly rejecting her whole cloth, and so she for a while seemed a worthy opponent; and then eventually, once I had gotten her out of my system, she just seemed adorable to me. Once you see through her nonsense, there's something that seems naive and almost sweet about her.  It's the kind of thought that a young person might go through, as a phase - and indeed, that's exactly what it is for many people.  Relatively few people remain her followers for their entire lives.  Still, I know that not everyone has gotten to the point of transcending her ideas, so I think it's worthwhile to argue against her work - to, as Ben Burgis says, "Give them an argument."

All of that having been said, I have to admit that it is somewhat understandable that the academic world largely ignores her as a philosopher.  After all, she didn't really write much philosophy.  Looking through her work, one finds some scattered articles, a couple plays and screenplays, some interviews, short stories, and a few assorted essays and other writings... and of course, most importantly of all, her novels.  To me, Ayn Rand is not primarily a philosopher, but a novelist.  And there is no shame in that.  But one will not find, among her corpus of published material, an extended work of careful, rigorous, deliberate, plodding, point-by-point argumentation or analysis, of the order of, say, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons or W.V.O. Quine's Word and Object. (This is not to say that I am endorsing either Parfit or Quine - I'm just using them as examples.)  The closest she came to writing such a book was her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" - a hodge-podge, consisting of an essay written by Leonard Peikoff, almost 200 pages of transcriptions of her workshops, and a single, 80-some page essay, or group of essays, on a variety of subjects, loosely centered on the problem of universals.  This is easily her worst book, so much so that it seems like a cheap shot to focus too hard on it.  So I'll mostly ignore it here, except to say that that it is a book full of obvious truisms, sprinkled randomly with ridiculous non sequiturs and completely unsupported declarations.  Perhaps I will return to that topic in more depth some other time, but it seems like a waste of time, space, and effort to concentrate on it here.  (There is also The Romantic Manifesto, in which she wrote down her thoughts on literature.  It's a shame this book is so little-read even by many of Rand's most vociferous supporters, because not only is it her longest non-fiction work, but also, at least for me, it has the most lasting value.  Unlike her unfortunate forays into politics, economics, and metaphysics, which make abundantly clear the slenderness of her background reading in these subjects, Ayn Rand knows a thing or two about the art of writing novels, and has quite interesting things to say about it.)

I repeat: Ayn Rand was a novelist.  She was even, I would say, a pretty good novelist - not great, but entertaining and enjoyable.  It's no small feat to have written a gigantic tome like Atlas Shrugged - weighing in at 1,168 pages - and to make it not only the engaging page-turner that it is, but a book that grapples with ideas, which it certainly does - and its provocative ideas are indeed a major part of its entertainment value.  In my personal estimation, I would say that Ayn Rand is a better novelist than Stephen King, say, or James Patterson or Edith Wharton, but not nearly as good as, say, Milan Kundera (another expatriate from the Soviet bloc, also influenced by Nietzsche) or Joan Didion or Don DeLillo or Haruki Murakami.

Now I suppose that someone might counter that fiction can be just as philosophical as non-fiction, and in a way I agree.  After all, even Plato wrote in dialogues, as did other philosophers.  More to the point would be Dostoevsky.  Was Dostoevsky a philosopher?  Well, sort of.   (What, exactly, was Dostoevsky's philosophy?  In a nutshell, turn to Jesus.  That just about covers it, doesn't it?)  There are also numerous superficial parallels between Ayn Rand and those other philosopher-novelists, the French Existentialists, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.  Beauvoir once claimed that Man's greatest value is "Man himself!  We think, and this is one of the greatest points of existentialism, that Man is ultimately the reason for his own being, his own future, the very aim of all his activities.  Thus, we consider good all that serves the interests, the happiness, the development of man.  And evil is all that goes against it."  One could easily imagine Ayn Rand saying something like this.  Of course, politically, Rand and Beauvoir were opposites.  One might say that Ayn Rand combined something like a quasi-existentialist ethics with a political ideology of extreme Americanism.  Even in this, Rand was not totally alone - in some of Hannah Arendt's later writings, she approached something similar.

I think it's fair to say that Ayn Rand was the inheritor of that great tradition of philosophical(-ish) Russian novels: Turganev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Chernyshevsky, Bulgakov, Gorky, Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, etc., etc. - all these vast, sweeping epics, with deep psychological insight into their many characters and political ideologies and epistemological theories floating around here and there.  Ayn Rand is in that tradition, but with one, crucial difference: she is the Russian novelist who fell in love with Hollywood.  

Ayn Rand loved movies - specifically, the golden age of silent movies.  She loved swashbuckling adventure stories from the era of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks.  She loved the Hollywood movies of the teens and twenties, and also German films from that era.  Her favorite, apparently, was "The Indian Tomb" (1921), something of a pulp, B-movie, directed by Joe May, based on a story written by Thea von Harbau, wife and collaborator of Fritz Lang, who also wrote "Metropolis" and "M" - and later wrote religious and nationalistic movies while under the Nazi regime.  "The Indian Tomb" was a moody, suspenseful adventure story - almost a horror movie - featuring an evil Indian Maharaja capable of sorcery (Conrad Veidt in brownface).  (Interestingly, the hero was an architect, who comes to regret his greatest architectural project.)  Ayn Rand wrote novels with something approaching the depth of classic Russian novels, yet with the action and adventure of Hollywood serials - and most importantly, with a very early Hollywood sense of heroism.  

Ayn Rand's novels are, in essence, romance novels - long love letters to their protagonists, who are dashing, brooding, intense males, clearly the objects of Ayn Rand's fantasy.  Think of the description of the hero of The Fountainhead (her best book), Howard Roark, through the eyes of the female lead, Dominique Francon: "It was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible."  There is relatively little sex in these novels, yet there is an undeniable underlying eroticism throughout.  In Atlas Shrugged, it's no small accomplishment that Ayn Rand managed to make what another author would have made a dull-sounding character - Hank Rearden, the CEO of a metal refinery - into a sex symbol.  (Though of course there is Fifty Shades of Grey, which is about the CEO of a holding company with interests in "eco-manufacturing" and "next-generation agriculture" as well as communications and media.  Indeed, there are many such books about CEOs nowadays - my favorite being "Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay" by Hunter Fox, about a CEO, Oliver Anderson, who happens to be a T-Rex.  Maybe Ayn Rand started a trend.) But what makes Rand's heroes so romantic is not their sex acts or even their jobs, exactly, but the things they say, and the audacious ways they say them.

The value of Ayn Rand's novels is precisely their capacity to provoke.  It's hard to think of another novelist of the past century who is quite as provocative and controversial as she.  I would even go so far as to say that Ayn Rand's ability to annoy and irritate her readers is a credit to her power as a novelist.  I may not agree with her, but I still enjoy her work, in something like the same way that I enjoy the rap of Ras Kass (though I don't agree with his conspiracy theories or homophobia), or the playwriting and acting of Valerie Solanis (though of course I deplore the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol, and her transphobia) or the punk rock of FEAR (though I don't agree with... a lot of the stuff that Lee Ving says).  In fact, these performers are entertaining, not despite, but because of their snotty, offensive attitude - and their courage in carrying out this attitude and articulating it into a fully developed piece of work.

This brings me to another aspect of Ayn Rand - though she was primarily a novelist, she was also something else: a rhetorician, and a fairly impressive one.  Indeed, in some ways her novels are merely set-pieces for displaying her rhetoric.  As an orator, she had a pugnacious, gloriously vituperative style.  She was capable of bringing an audience to rapturous applause, but seemed more to enjoy being booed.  In many ways, not least her endless contrarianism, her style of argumentation reminds me most of Christopher Hitchens - arrogant, elegant, compelling, passionate, seductive, rousing, dazzling, intransigent, unwilling to cede the slightest ground to opponents, unwilling even to consider other points of view, extremely difficult to counter, and above all, absolutely cock-sure of being right, with a self-righteous certainty that blazes with the intensity of the sun.  Yet also, again like Hitchens, if you examine her work carefully, she was not entirely internally consistent.  There is, after all, a difference between rhetoric and philosophy.  

Although her rhetoric was admittedly quite compelling on its own, it's worthwhile to point out that she rarely engaged in debates.  Indeed, as I already mentioned, most of her rhetoric takes place within her novels, where she gets to set the setting and terms of the discussion.  And an awful lot of these conversations are fairly one-sided.  We hear rant after rant from her protagonists, but rarely do these characters engage with interlocutors who are more than cardboard cut-outs, foils who immediately crumble when confronted with Rand's own prose - or villains who reveal their utter wickedness as soon as they are unmasked.  All too often, in her novels, her heroes are tilting against strawmen. 

It's further worth pointing out that when Rand's followers, like Nathaniel Branden, attempted to formalize Ayn Rand's work into a more systematic philosophical or psychological theory, the result could be generally regarded as a disaster - not least by Ayn Rand herself.

Ayn Rand named her movement "Objectivism".  I've written elsewhere about how funny I find it when movements give themselves names like "Accuratism" or "Sciencism" or "Truthism" or "Goodism" (examples would be Scientology, Pragmatism, Realism, the Rationalist community, and so on).  I always wonder: do people really fall for that crap?

Should Ayn Rand's thought be called "Objectivism"?  Was it even "objective," with a small "o"?  As far as I can tell, it seems to be the very opposite - at many crucial points, her writings exhibit the purest subjectivism.  If I had never heard of Ayn Rand, and you told me that you believed in objectiv(ist) philosophy, I would be curious, and I would want to know more, but on the face of it, I would assume that you meant that your philosophy was based on verifiable, objective facts - that you could back up all of your claims with reliable evidence from scientific sources that had undergone the most rigorous kind of statistical analysis and peer review.  But one will find none of this in Ayn Rand's writings.  Not only is it the case that her ethical and political conclusions don't follow logically from the facts she provides.  The truth is, she simply provides no facts at all.  You will scarcely find a number in all of her writings, let alone any reliable statistics.  This is a philosophy based on fiction.

A single, egregiously embarrassing example will suffice: in the collection "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal," there's an article named "Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise."  I was excited by the title - "Wow, what would the history of capitalism look like from Ayn Rand's point of view?"  Imagine my disappointment.  The article is pathetic.  Rand does not display the slightest familiarity with any of the most basic facts in the history of capitalism.  In preparation for that piece of writing, she seems to have read four books, none of them scholarly, all of them written for a popular audience, all of them about trains.  Choo choo!  She makes assertion after assertion, without backing them up with facts or citations.

So what are her arguments based on?  Not facts, but feelings.  And it's true that, as a novelist, she is quite gifted at portraying the inner world of her characters rather convincingly - some more so than others.  (I find that the character of Peter Keating was especially well-drawn - somewhat derivative of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, but to my mind even more psychologically penetrating - one can at once identify with him in certain ways, while also feeling an intense revulsion towards him.  Dominique Francon, too, is a vividly evoked, complex character.  Howard Roark is less convincing, being more of a cartoon.  Ellsworth Toohey, also, is a bit too villainous to be believed, though everyone loves a villain, and he certainly delivers.  Other minor characters are much more stock caricatures, with far less convincing personalities, and I consider them failures on Ayn Rand's part as a novelist.)  Rand also has the rather uncharming habit of quoting from her own writings, with the unstated implication: I said it, therefore it must be true.  (And often, her non-fiction political essays refer back to her works of fiction.)  The argument from authority, with an egoist twist.

But the problem is deeper than that.  Her arguments not only lack objectivity; they are explicitly grounded in subjectivity.  Her work is not just accidentally insufficiently scientific - at times, it is downright deliberately anti-scientific, or at least highly critical of science as it existed in her day.  She seems to have been convinced that the state of science in her time was bad and quickly getting worse.  In "What is Capitalism?" (1965) she writes: "[...] in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. [...] The collapse of science is all but complete." (p.1)  Just why she thought that is unclear - what recent developments in science had led her to believe it was in such a sorry state?  Did she look awry at relativity, or quantum physics?  I can't find a direct citation from her works that proves that she did, but where she feared to tread, her followers such as Leonard Peikoff and David Harriman rushed in.  Here's Peikoff, in his book Ominous Parallels:

Decades ago, the exponents of purposefully guided, objective cognition - which is what scientists had once been - began yielding to two newer breeds: the narrow technicians and the punch-drunk theoreticians. The former are intent on amassing disconnected bits of experimental data, with no clear idea of context, wider meaning, or overall cognitive goal. The latter - trained in a Kantian skepticism by Dewey, Carnap, Heisenberg, Gödel and many others - turn out increasingly arbitrary speculations while stressing the power of physical theory; not its power to advance man's confidence or make reality intelligible, but to achieve the opposite results. Quantum mechanics, the theoreticians started to say, refutes causality, light waves refute logic, relativity refutes common sense, thermodynamics refutes hope, scientific law is old-fashioned, explanation is impossible, electrons are a myth, mathematics is a game, the difference between physics and religion is only a matter of taste.

But if anything separates Rand and Peikoff, it's that Peikoff merely attacks modern physics, like quantum dynamics and relativity, whereas Rand looked askance at all science.  And her problem with science was not that it was insufficiently objective - on the contrary, her criticism of science is precisely that it lacks, or fails to account for, or covers up, the subjective element, which she alternatively calls "man," or "the mind".  She writes:

The clearest evidence [against science] may be seen in such comparatively young sciences as psychology and political economy. In psychology, one may observe the attempt to study human behavior without reference to the fact that man is conscious. In political economy, one may observe the attempt to study and to devise social systems without reference to man. [...] Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man." ("What is Capitalism," p.1-5, emphasis hers.)

Not only does she attack science for its failure to capture subjective, conscious, rational inner experience, but she raged against science for dethroning humanity as something special within the universe.  (Incidentally, she insists on the masculine term "Man" - often capitalized, rather than the gender-neutral "humanity".)  She seems to have found especially offensive the concept that human beings are animals.  As she writes in John Galt's famous 60-page-long speech towards the end of Atlas Shrugged:

"There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.

"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that destroys it is the evil.

"[...] Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others [...].  They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence that they have granted to the lowest of insects." (p.1014-1015, emphasis hers.)

Ayn Rand's ethical ideas seem to be based on some kind of conception of human nature, but not one that is derived from scientific inquiry, and indeed not one that is fully or clearly articulated in her philosophical work.  She seems to think that there is something that makes humans fundamentally different from all other animals, but she does not explain how or why.  Frequently, she is simply factually wrong about humanity.  For instance, she claims that "Man comes on Earth unarmed.  His brain is his only weapon."  She compares humanity's survivability with other animals, claiming that humans have no physical advantages, "no great strength of muscle" and thus humans' only advantage is their capacity for reason.  But this is an overstatement.  Those who study human anatomy and physiology and human's evolutionary development know that humans in fact have several physical advantages.  Most obviously, we are some of the most impressive bipeds on Earth.  Although other animals, like cheetahs, can run faster for short burst of a few seconds, humans are capable of running marathons.  Some humans have been known to run hundreds or even thousands of miles.  This superpower largely owes its existence to humans' unusual skin and our capacity for heat regulation through our impressive sweat glands.  Even horses rarely run more than a mile and a half.  Kangaroos are impressive bipeds, to be sure, but it's debatable whether they count as pure bipeds since they balance a lot of weight on their tails.  Only ostriches have us beat for bipedal motion.  In addition, of course, humans have opposable thumbs and are capable of climbing and picking up and swinging sticks.  Humans are also fairly large, compared with our near relatives - most chimps are less than 3 feet tall, while bonobos, our closest relatives, are usually a little less than 4 feet tall.  Most impressively of all, humans are, by far, the best animals at catching and throwing, both in terms of distance and accuracy of aim.  Throwing rocks was undoubtedly very useful skill for survival in the Pleistocene savannah.  And then there is that other super-power of human beings that has contributed more than anything else to our survivability - our capacity for language, for empathy, for culture and the passing down of knowledge, for cooperation and social organization and division of labor.  From the hunting parties that coordinate complex strategies of driving their prey in a direction where it will be easier for a striker to attack (or off of a cliff, for that matter), to warriors with detailed strategy in war, to sports teams to capitalist corporations to scientific collaboration and peer review, cooperation and coordination has been a key element of our species' success.  Of course our capacity for reason is important as well, but this does not give us the right to be dishonest or to ignore scientific facts.  Like all romantics, she appeals to nature - that is, to the misrepresentation of nature.

In passing, I'll point out a glaring contradiction in Ayn Rand's thought in the course of Galt's speech.  On the one hand, the central theme of the speech is that man's only means of survival is reason.  On the other hand, she also claims that reason is voluntary, that people can choose not to think, and that, "Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."  If humanity can only survive through reason, and through most of the history of humanity, humanity has not used reason, then how has humanity survived?  She seems aware of this contradiction.  She goes on to write: "A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive.  A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted.  But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind." (p.1013)  But she makes no effort to resolve this contradiction.  If Galt is right, then humanity should not have survived - yet here we are.  Can it be that, despite actively trying to destroy its only hope for survival for countless millennia, humanity has survived through sheer dumb luck?  Or could it be that people who disagree with Ayn Rand's philosophy are not as irrational and mindless as she makes them out to be?

In a way, Ayn Rand's attitude towards science, especially as exemplified by John Galt's speech, is reminiscent of Guido Mazzoni's more recent work, "Theory of the Novel," - though I'm not sure either of them would welcome the comparison.  In that work, Mazzoni asserts that the novel (or romanzo, in his native Italian, related to Roman, the word for novel in German and French, or romance in Portuguese) is the great artform of the western world, great precisely because it and only it can express the subjective experience of a singular person, as opposed to the human sciences, which, with, their demand for replicable results, necessarily tend to render people into dismal statistics, to lump people together into categories, to reduce people to an indifferent mass.

In my opinion, rather than calling Ayn Rand an "Objectivist" it would make much more sense to classify her as a romantic idealist.  And this is no slander.  It seems that she was fully willing to embrace those labels when it suited her.  I have already mentioned The Romantic Manifesto.  In addition, there is Ideal, which she originally conceived as a novel and attempted to adapt into both a screenplay and a play for the stage.  This rather obscure work, unpublished in her lifetime, was the clearest expression of both the kind of lofty aspirations that Hollywood movies evoked in her, and the the sordid reality that Hollywood confronted her with, when she tried to work there.  It's a strange story, in which Rand seems to be saying that the fans of a beautiful, rich, glamorous actress don't idolize her purely enough.  And of course, there's the essay collection, "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal."

A romantic idealist, then.  Ayn Rand herself defined Objectivism as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."  None of that sounds the least bit objective, to me.  As Wolfgang Pauli would say, it's "not even wrong"- that is, it does not rise to the level of a hypothesis that could be tested as either factually correct or incorrect.  "The concept of man as a heroic being" - what does that even mean?  There's nothing objective about heroism- there's no litmus paper one can use to administer a chemical test and determine that a person is 3.4 heroic (what would be the units of heroism? Microhercules, maybe?).  No - once the focus of your philosophy is heroism, we have departed from rational analysis, and entered the realm of myth.  

(A friend of mine told me that she was briefly - again, as a teenager - an intensely devoted fan of Ayn Rand.  But then she grew out of it, concluding that, as she put it, "Ayn Rand wants us all to be gods.  But we can't be gods."  That brief pair of sentences has rattled around in my head ever since.  I think it's very insightful, on several levels.)

And that's fine.  They are entertaining enough stories.  But what is most odd about Ayn Rand's thought is her adamant insistence on the fundamental importance of establishing an explicit, articulated, systematic, rigorously logical philosophy that can be derived consistently from first principles, combined with her own total failure to produce one.  She starts with the most purely tautological statement, "A=A," or as she paraphrases it, "existence exists," and claims to derive all sorts of detailed positions on everything from the psychology of love to micro-economics to foreign policy not from empirical facts but from this tautology.  However, she never actually works out these supposed derivations in any formal or consistent way; she merely waves her hand vaguely in the direction of such supposed proofs, and responds with rage if you question her. 

I can understand the attitude of those who say that establishing such a fully realized systematic philosophy is impossible, and that the most we can hope for are fragmentary insights - such is the stance of, for instance, Romantic philosophers like Schlegel and Novalis, Existentialists like Kierkegaard and (very debatably) Nietzsche, and postmodernists like Lyotard or Rorty.  Or I could understand a good-faith, decades-long attempt to produce such a fully consistent philosophical system, even if it ended in failure - one thinks of the many late 18th and early 19th century attempts to "complete the system of German Idealism," most of which are nowadays regarded as failures, or, in a very different way, the late 19th and early 20th century attempts to consolidate all of the discoveries of theorems in mathematics and to ground them in fundamental logic, with the minimum number of axioms and inference rules, one of the most famous and ambitious examples of which was Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.  (This project, too, was largely abandoned, especially after the publication of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.)  But what I cannot understand is Rand's insistence on systematicity, combined with her refusal to even try to create a fully worked out system.  To be honest, at the risk of being uncharitable, this makes me think that what we are dealing with here is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect - the tendency of people with comparatively less knowledge and experience in a given field to overestimate their own competence.  Rand thought that building a fully coherent philosophical system was easy, or even self-evident, largely because she never actually tried it.  Once one actually tries to build a system from first principles, one discovers that it's not so easy - there are some real, difficult problems.  Those who know the most learn how little they know.  

So, in lieu of an actual, rigorously logical system, what one encounters in Rand's writing is emotional, often angry denunciations.  For those with a sentimental nature, who enjoy getting swept up in lofty rhetoric, Ayn Rand's prose can be very moving - and a part of me feels that we should let such people have their fun.  But for those whose minds are questioning, Rand's pretty words are not particularly persuasive.  As a reader, I don't want someone to just declare to me what I should think - in whatever tones of high operatic drama.  If I'm reading a persuasive essay, I want careful, rigorous, logical arguments.  I want facts.  And I want the sources of those facts, so that I can check them myself.

People with critical reading skills are especially suspicious of those who frame their arguments, and indeed their worldview, in the terms of a struggle between good guys and bad guys.  Critical readers much prefer - and find much more convincing - the style of argumentation in which a writer considers several possible competing theses or interpretations, considers in turn the strengths and weaknesses of each, without demonizing or strawmanning any of them, but genuinely and in good faith trying to understand all of the perspectives, weighs the evidence, and finally comes down firmly on the side of one of the options, explaining why.  This is, after all, the style of a scientific paper, in which scientists demonstrate their familiarity with the existing literature on an ongoing problem in science, and then add their contribution.  For instance, recently physicists were working on the problem of the movement of the outer spiral arms of galaxies, which move must faster and much differently than traditional models predicted.  The usual explanation for this is "dark matter" - about which there are many competing theories.  Another, completely different way to explain the evidence is "modified gravity" - also known as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics).  A recent paper tested some of the predictions of the MOND model by carefully working through data on gravitational lensing.  The result was not great news for the fans of MOND, so it's looking like we should probably turn back to the "dark matter" model - or come up with a completely new hypothesis.  But the scientists did not argue this by claiming that the "modified gravity" thesis is evil, or that the scientists who came up with it are bad people, and shouldn't be trusted.  On the contrary - they took the modified gravity theory seriously, as a framework worth investigating, and then it turned out that the gravitational lensing data didn't lend much support to the MOND model, and so the team of researchers accurately reported that new evidence.  Even then, the MOND model is not completely ruled out - it may still be possible for theoretical physicists who are working on MOND to adjust the MOND theory to fit the experimental data.  But so far, it seems that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of dark matter.  So it looks like the scientific consensus is leaning in that direction.  But more research is necessary.  That's how science works.

But Ayn Rand was not interested in this good faith style of argumentation.  She'd rather frame things, explicitly, as a centuries-long, epic, cosmic struggle between good and evil.  Thus the famous 60-page-long speech that John Galt gives at the end of Atlas Shrugged.  Not that this struggle is given any kind of detailed historical basis.  But it's clear that Ayn Rand, via her mouthpiece, John Galt, divides the world into the bad guys, who are called the "mystics," and the good guys, the "men of mind".  It's never entirely clear who falls into which category, but by and large, it seems that the "mystics" would include just about everyone who has ever disagreed with Ayn Rand in any way, that is to say, almost everyone who has ever lived or will live.  As Rand herself once put it, she saw herself as opposing "two thousand years of received wisdom."  So: she opposed all religious people, but also all communists, and socialists, and fascists, and in the United States also liberals, and most conservatives, and even most libertarians, and most philosophical traditions that came after Kant, not to mention Kant himself, and even Nietzsche, and many, many more.  And the "men of mind" would be... well, in the book, it's John Galt and his companions in Galt's Gulch; in real life, I suppose it would be Ayn Rand and her tiny group of Objectivists - "The Collective" they called, themselves, with intentional irony - that is, until members of her group were exiled for one reason or another.  These are the sides in the great cosmic battle, Ormazd vs. Ahriman.

Note: I want to be clear, here.  I am not saying, "Do we have to be so dualistic?  Is it all or nothing?  Can't we be moderate?  Can't we all just get along?  Isn't there some comfy, reasonable space on the spectrum between the far left and the far right?"  That's not my point at all.  My point is that Ayn Rand's attempt at intellectual blackmail and name-calling, in which everyone who disagrees with her the slightest amount and for whatever reason is painted with the same broad brush of "mystic," is epistemologically invalid and invites all kinds of cognitive biases, which are justified in the name of a tribalistic, us vs. them, post hoc political rationalization.  It erases all distinctions, some of which are absolutely necessary for the rational analysis of the many subjects Rand takes on.  I'm not faulting Ayn Rand for making too sharp a distinction - I'm saying she doesn't make enough distinctions.

One more thing must be said in this regard: the us vs. them dynamic that animates nearly all of Rand's writings is not a recipe for serious, factual, data-driven analysis of contemporary political and economic issues, nor for timeless, abstract metaphysical speculation.  It is, however, a great format for propaganda.  And for all of the railing against "statism" that Objectivists do, it needs to be acknowledged that, more than once in her career, Rand acted in a more or less official capacity as a propagandist.  Loosely within the era of anti-communist witch hunts that has become known as "McCarthyism," or even before it, Ayn Rand was an enthusiastic participant in HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, where she nominated filmmakers Gregory Ratoff and Lázló Benedek for the Black List, perhaps the original example of "cancel culture."  In her own journals during the period, she saw herself as "calling attention to the conspiracy that was going on."  Indeed, it's not hard to interpret Ayn Rand's entire career as a product of the Cold War, and the American government's attempt to roll back workers' gains all over the world at both an economic and cultural level in its global imperialist contest.  She came to America seeking fortune and fame in her idealized world of Hollywood, and when Hollywood rejected her, or at least when success came more slowly than she would have liked - when Hollywood fell short of the "Ideal" she had constructed in her mind and turned out to be full of normal people living ordinary lives, just like in her native Russia, she resentfully concluded that Hollywood must be infected by a conspiracy.  Rather than continuing to try to "make it" there, she therefore dedicated herself to tearing down the successful projects that other people in Hollywood had gotten their grubby little paws on.  (Howard Roark's dynamiting of the Cortlandt housing project could be seen as symbolizing this.)  She was ressentiment personified.  Several times throughout her life, she wrote to the FBI, and specifically to J. Edgar Hoover, trying to get them to investigate and persecute this individual or that group.  The FBI consulted her for a 13,533-page report on communist infiltration of Hollywood, focusing on many movies, apparently including Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life."  Ayn Rand was not only willing to be used by the government in its persecuting role, she was eager, and indeed felt that the government did not go far enough - that they were babes in the woods, unwilling to take the kind of authoritarian steps necessary to stamp out the enemy.  Outside of the official government capacity, she continued to write anti-communist propaganda, such as her "1947 Screen Guide for Americans" which is full of instructions for dealing with the enemy, like this one: "A favorite trick of the Communists is to insert into pictures casual lines of dialogue about some important, highly controversial political issue, to insert them as accidental small talk, without any connection to the scene, the plot, or the story.  Don’t permit such lines."  Ayn Rand may have bravely opposed the government in her fantasies, but she was the government's sycophantic lapdog in reality.

*     *     *

Let's get to the heart of the matter: selfishness.  Ayn Rand asserts the "virtue of selfishness," and in a way I agree that there is a virtue to selfishness, though I would describe it differently than Ayn Rand does.  But back to Ayn Rand - the central issue we must confront is: what does she mean by "selfishness"?  At first, this word seems very straightforward, but if you read her work carefully, you will see that she is using it in a strange and rather dubious way.  The first thing to notice is that Ayn Rand did not think that human beings are naturally selfish.  Again and again, she asserted that the human mind at birth is tabula rasa.  Indeed, she takes the tabula rasa doctrine even further than many of its previous philosophical adherents, asserting that "Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are 'tabula rasa.'" (From "The Objectivist Ethics," 28; italics hers.)  Like so much else in her philosophy, she asserts this without even the slightest smidgen of evidence.  

Still less did she believe that all human behavior is by definition selfish.  That is to say - Objectivists are often confused with those who make something like the following argument: "All human behavior is selfish.  If you want to help people, and you set out to do so, then you are acting on your own desire - you are acting because you want to help people.  Even if you want to destroy yourself, or to stop wanting altogether, even so, you want these things.  Therefore unselfish desires simply don't exist, and any notion of such a thing is simply a logical confusion."  Objectivists were at pains to distance themselves from this kind of argument, and often explicitly rejected it. 

For Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, it is possible for human behavior to be unselfish.  Otherwise, selfishness wouldn't be much of a virtue - it would simply be a state of being.  In her opinion, selfishness was not something given or automatically a part of all human thought, but rather something that had to be achieved, and in a sense earned.  Indeed, for the vast majority of human history, a fog had descended on the human mind - humans had been so befuddled by the "mystics" that they were dissuaded from the selfishness that is their right.  For thousands of years, it was the mystics of spirit who dominated, and more recently, another group, whom she calls "the mystics of muscle," i.e., the materialists, have rivaled the religious mystics for control of the Earth.  Genuinely selfish people are the rare exceptions, and they can only achieve selfishness by using their reason - i.e., through philosophy.  What's more, any old philosophy won't do, since most actual historical philosophers are merely mouthpieces for the worldviews of the "mystics of spirit" and the "mystics of muscle" - the spiritualists and the materialists.  She seems to have held Aristotle in a certain amount of esteem, but doesn't display much evidence of actually having read any of his books, and ultimately brushes him away as having committed several nameless errors.  So what are we left with?  The conclusion seems to be, more or less explicitly, that the only way for a person to be selfish, according to Ayn Rand, is to follow the philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Now can you see how a philosophy supposedly dedicated to individualism could turn into a cult?  (I'll note in passing that Scientology, too, presents a worldview in which each individual is supposed to dedicate himself to his own personal, individualistic flourishing....)

So if you read Ayn Rand and you are inspired to believe in yourself, to be true to yourself, to stay true to your own creative vision and never to compromise for the sake of a lesser value such as conformity, agreeableness, or fear, that's all wonderful.  That's what Ayn Rand got right.  There are times when Ayn Rand's philosophy sounds something like self-help therapy - for instance when Ayn Rand claims that "To say 'I love you,' one must first know how to say the 'I'."  That's a fairly reasonable sentiment to consider, though a serious philosophical analysis of the underlying concept requires more than this kind of sloganeering.  But I can see how it's helpful for people, in a therapeutic way.  But when this therapy turns into a demand for a dogmatic obedience to Ayn Rand's half-baked political and economic ideas, including her slavish devotion to capitalism and American imperialism, that's where Ayn Rand was wrong. 

Again and again, throughout Ayn Rand's writings, one of her favorite tropes is the concept of a "bromide" or a "blank-out".  She uses these terms something like George Orwell used "stopthink" in 1984, as a voluntary interruption of rational thought, to prevent "crimethink" - thoughts that went against the official ideology of the ruling regime.  Another of her favorite phrases is "check your premises."  (I actually quite like this phrase - it's much more interesting than the rather stale and obvious "check your privilege.")  Ironically, though, I find a lot of bromides in Ayn Rand's thought, a lot of places where she "blanks out" her own line of reasoning, and fails to check all of her premises.  In other words, although she congratulated herself for challenging "two thousand years of received wisdom," I find many places where she was insufficiently radical - that is, places where she fails to get to the root (which is what "radical" literally means) of philosophical issues, leaving many fundamental assumptions unchallenged.  And here's the thing: failing to question existing structures, whether they be economic, political, or ideological, is seldom neutral.  Usually, it serves to reinforce the status quo.  Often, Rand's work, both fiction and non-fiction, functioned to reify, entrench, and celebrate the power structures of American society as they existed in Rand's time.

An example: in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" Ayn Rand fails utterly to break down the complexity of modern political economy to first principles, or to a historical description of its development.  Instead, again and again, she uses a magic phrase: "I shall remind you."  As in: "I shall remind you that 'rights' are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context, that they are derived from man's nature as a rational being and represent a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.  I shall remind you also that the right to life is the source of all rights, including the right to property."  (p.9)  Remind us?  What?  Where is she getting this?  Where is her argument?  Where is her proof?  There is a footnote to refer to her other essay, "Man's Rights."  So to that text we go.  There we learn that "The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law."  (p.368, emphasis hers)  All previous political and economic systems were expressions of "the altruist-collectivist ethics."  (ibid)  Further, "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.  There is only one fundamental right (the rest are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action - which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment, and the enjoyment of his own life.  (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)" (p.369)   But I still see no evidence for these assertions, or even much of a logical argument for them.  They are simply declarations, which do not really explain where rights come from or how we know that they exist, except by a kind of slant argument from authority, by reference to the Declaration of Independence.  And we should take this text as authoritative because - blank out.  Her failure to radically investigate the work of Locke, Madison, Jefferson, et al, from which her ideas derive, means that her work is full of these half-digested bits of received wisdom.  Take away her patriotic flag-waving, and there's not much left to support her assertions.

Ayn Rand made a career of her relentless invective against Marxism specifically and socialism generally.  Yet she demonstrates very little evidence that she actually ever read Marx.  Again and again, she mischaracterizes Marx's arguments, painting with an extremely broad brush, and steamrolling over the many subtleties and nuances that make Marx's analysis distinctive.  The result is something worse than a strawman argument - she is often simply talking past Marx.  Why was she unwilling to take on Marx's actual theory?  What was the motivation for this unwillingness to think, and to have her premises challenged?  Is it because she was afraid she might learn something?  Or is it because she was afraid Marx's thought was closer to her own than she'd like to admit?  (As it happens, when I first read Ayn Rand, I happened to read Atlas Shrugged at the same time that I was trying to make my first slog through Volume 1 of Marx's Capital.   Of course, Capital was much more difficult, and some parts are pretty technical and boring, whereas Atlas Shrugged is much more fun, light, exciting, and romantic.  So I didn't read Marx very carefully that first time, whizzing past a lot, and missing, and misunderstanding, a lot along the way - because I couldn't wait to get back to reading Rand.  Nonetheless, what I did notice, to my complete surprise, was that Marx and Rand have a lot in common.  I remember taking a walk during that time and seeing a billboard, on which was some ad which was trying to sell something or other with some kind of schmaltzy, saccharine altruistic message, and I remember thinking "Ayn Rand would hate that" and then suddenly "Hold on - Karl Marx would hate that, too".  And from then on I kept a mental list of things that Rand and Marx would agree on - usually things in contemporary culture that they would both despise.  The number was surprisingly high.)

To show how illogical Ayn Rand's thought is, let's start by pointing out some of the simplest, most obvious, superficial contradictions; later, we will get into the deeper, more serious philosophical issues.  We can start here: on the one hand, Ayn Rand again and again extols property rights as fundamental, indeed as the basis of her entire ethical philosophy.  As she puts it in her essay, "What is Capitalism?": "Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced."  Accordingly, she saw rape and murder as violations of property rights, because one owns one's own life and one's own body.  She also made the heroes of her novels the embodiment of her values, and always insisted on strict rationality without contradiction.  Thus it should come as a bit of a surprise that, even by her own definitions, [SPOILER ALERT!] Howard Roark, the hero of her most well-known novel, The Fountainhead, violates property rights in two flagrant and famous ways.  First, he commits a sexual act against a woman, Dominique Francon, which is perhaps admittedly written ambiguously, but which Francon describes later, multiple times, as rape.  Then, at the climax of the novel, he dynamites the Cortlandt Housing Project.  Whoever owned the housing project, according to any law, it certainly wasn't Roark.  He destroyed someone else's property.  I am not picking at nits here - these are the two most dramatically significant events in the entire book, and the plot was constructed around them.  In Rand's most iconic novel, the archetypal hero's most heroic acts, in which he made his deepest values and principles manifest and concrete, were, according to Ayn Rand's own stated ideas, violations of property.

Obviously, Ayn Rand could have written this novel differently.  So why did she choose this plot, which seems to undermine her own political ideology in such a blatant way?  (And I might add that these are far from the only examples - there are more extreme cases, like her fascination with the child murderer William Edward Hickman, which developed into her never-finished novel, The Little Street.  In her journals, she nominates him as a "Superman.")  One answer to this question might be that, ultimately, she was too good a novelist to let her supposed principles get in the way of her writing.  Consciously or unconsciously, she was more deeply committed to writing a dramatically and emotionally powerful novel than she was to constructing a logically consistent political ideology.  And there's little that packs such a dramatic punch as a paradox.  A self-righteous ideologue may prize consistency above all else, but a novelist finds the twist more delicious.  The greatest fiction writers are all masters of irony.  Even greater than the appeal of the old trope from countless romance novels of the brutish farmhand who sexually dominates the rich, bored, socialite (in this slight variation, he's not a farmhand but a worker in a granite quarry) is the transgressive thrill of the violation of a principle.  Dominique Francon (who arguably is a semi-autobiographical character) is a walking contradiction: she loves loves Roark with a singleminded devotion, yet marries Keating, whom she despises.  She loves architecture, and demands that her house be "magnificently ugly."  She is a masochist who enjoys the power she wields over the man she loves; she habitually does what she hates; she lives for pleasure and enjoys denying herself pleasure.  Ayn Rand's principle seems to be "contradiction for me, but not for thee."  Not only does she contradict herself - she enjoys contradicting herself.

Let's focus for a moment on the dramatic climax of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark's act of sabotage, the dynamiting of Cortlandt Homes.  Now some of you might be objecting: Sure, Roark blew them up, but he had the right to do so.  Legally, the Cortlandt Homes may not have been his property, yet metaphysically, they were.  For it was his mental labor that brought them into being in the first place.  Well, the first obvious objection to this is that it wasn't just his labor that brought them into being - it was also, for instance, the physical (and also mental!) labor of the construction workers, and/or all their subcontractors - surveyors, earth moving equipment drivers, plumbers, electricians, etc., etc. (we could go on and on).  But let's put that aside for a moment and go back to this notion that Roark had the moral right to blow up this property, even if he didn't legally own it.  What's fascinating about this argument is how closely it parallels Marxist thought: producers (that is, from the Marxist perspective, workers) may not legally own the products of their labor, and instead these products may be the property of the capitalists, the owners of the means of production, simply because they are owners, even if they contributed no work to making these products, and they are theirs to sell on the open market - but these products would not exist if not for their work, and therefore workers have the right to "blow up" this production, to stop production through a general strike or work stoppage, to shake off the parasitic loafing class of capitalists, and to become free of their influence.  This connection is even more explicit in Atlas Shrugged, where a global general strike of the productive class is the central story of the book.  Rand strangely affirms the very principles she seeks to repudiate.

*     *     *

I won't spend any time combating Ayn Rand's economic theories, because she didn't have any.  As I've already pointed out, you won't find any mathematical formulae in Ayn Rand's writings, or any numbers at all.  Her defense of capitalism was not based on economics, or on any scientific facts, but on aesthetics.  (I will put aside the rather thorny issue of Ayn Rand's relation to Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics.  It appears that there may have been a mutual admiration between the two at some point, but that the relationship was not always entirely sanguine - though people on each side of the debate have widely differing accounts as to why that is.  I won't get into it, as I have no dog in the fight.  Let it suffice to say that I have my own separate reasons for disagreeing with Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school, but that is a subject for another essay.)  

Let me be more precise here: Ayn Rand's aesthetic argument for capitalism was based on her romantic conception of the artist and of the process of artistic creation.  In short, as she saw it, anything created by committee could not be aesthetically satisfying; true artistic creation could only be accomplished by an individual with a singular artistic vision.  This is the central conflict that animates The Fountainhead, and it shows up, in one form or another, in many of her works.

First of all: is this even true?  I'll be honest: I'm not sure.  At a gut level, an emotional, irrational, intuitive level, I think I feel the same way she did - these are where my immediate sympathies lie.  This is the story I tend to tell myself about artistic creation as well, and it makes sense as fiction.  But once again, our feelings are overruled by reality.

Think, first of all, of her beloved artform: movies.  There is a longstanding theory of film known as auteur theory, which argues that the best movies are the product of a completely original vision of an individual, usually both the writer and director of the film, and that any interference on the part of the producers, the studio, any committees or focus groups and so on, will ultimately dilute the artistic power of the cinema.  American film critic coined the term auteur theory in 1962, drawing from the work of earlier French film theorists such as André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc as early as the 1940s.  What matters about film, according to this theory, is the singularity of the auteur's perspective.

But does auteur theory hold up?  Consider "Casablanca," produced by Hal Wallis, for whom Ayn Rand worked for a few years.  Think of how it was made: Murray Burnett and his wife Frances traveled to Austria to help their Jewish relatives escape the Holocaust.  On their way back to America, they stopped in a bar in the south of France where many refugees from Nazi Germany were coming through, and Burnett thought it would make a great story for a play.  Once in the U.S.A., he sought the help of his writing partner Joan Allison (real name, Alice Joan Leviton) and together they wrote the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's," which they were unable to produce.  Story editor Irene Diamond discovered it and convinced Hal Wallis to buy it for Warner Bros..  Story analyst Stephen Karnot liked certain aspects of the play, but producer Casey Robinson gutted the original script and incorporated elements, um, "borrowed" from other movies such as Jean Renoir's "The Grand Illusion" and "Algiers" which was an American remake of the French film "Pépé le Moko".  Wallis would take a personal interest in it and had some creative input, but assigned it to twin writers Julius and Philip Epstein, who started working on it, but had a conflict, and while they were gone Howard Koch took over.  Then the twins returned and rejected most of what Koch had written.  But once production had started, Koch was back on the project, and was writing scenes on the fly as it was being filmed.  At first, Wallis wanted William Wyler to direct, and it was developed with Wyler attached as director, but at the last minute before filming, Wyler became unavailable and so it fell to Michael Curtiz to direct.  Director Curtiz and writer Koch did not get along at all, constantly arguing about many aspects of the film, and the studio pressured more scenes to get added along the way - mostly musical numbers, which were being written during production, until suddenly Curtiz too suddenly became unavailable and abandoned the film partway through shooting, so that the final few scenes were shot directed by Don Siegel.

If ever there was a case of "too many cooks in the kitchen," "Casablanca" was it.  According to the auteur theory of film, and Ayn Rand's aesthetic theories generally, "Casablanca" should have been a sprawling mess, without focus or meaning, without anything daring, defiant, or powerful, a mere perfunctory product, designed by committee, milktoast, conformist, mediocre, boring, bland, ugly, and pointless.  Yet it is widely regarded as one of the greatest films, if not the greatest film, ever made (and I, for one, consider it one of my favorites).  

Now think about Star Wars.  The first "Star Wars" movie was written and directed by George Lucas, himself a deep believer in auteur theory, but he first conceived of the project as a fledgling director, and in the cut-throat world of Hollywood, making this movie was a struggle for him.  He had initially intended to make a movie version of the Flash Gordon serial, but was unable to acquire the rights, so he decided to write his own story.  There were many drafts and rewrites, over several years, incorporating a story that paralleled Akira Kirasawa's "The Hidden Fortress" as well as some westerns.  He brought a treatment to Universal Artists, who turned him down.  He was mentored by Francis Ford Coppola on some of the dialogue and character development, who also brought it to Paramount, where Peter Bogdanovich gave him some notes before rejecting the film.  But meanwhile, Lucas had made "American Graffiti," which turned out to be a surprise hit, making him a desired director.  Despite that, Disney, too, said no to Star Wars, and Lucas finally turned to 20th Century Fox, where Alan Ladd finally gave him the green light.  Even so, he butted heads with the studio constantly, and the production was beset with technical problems, frequent conflicts with the "old school" cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, and constant revisions and rewrites, and Lucas was deeply unsatisfied with every aspect of the film except the soundtrack, feeling that the result had been very far from his original vision.  He therefore continued to tweak the film, re-editing it and adding to it even after it proved, to his surprise, to be a hit.  Indeed, it is one of the movies that, together with "Jaws," helped define the very concept of a blockbuster - but he continued editing it, even years later, most substantially with the digital rerelease in 1997.  He had been so frustrated and stressed out by the process that he decided not to write or direct the sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back".  At first, he'd hoped his friend Leigh Brackett would write the screenplay, and indeed, she wrote much of the script but sadly passed away while they were still working, and so the script was completed by Lawrence Kasdan and the film was directed by Irving Kirshner, with massive input by the studio system, since the franchise had by now turned into an enormous industry unto itself.  Brackett, Kasdan, and Kirshner helped deepen the characters of the first movie - particularly through the witty repartee of Han and Leia - and this studio-system-produced, focus-group-tested movie is now widely regarded as the best in the series, if not one of the best movies of all time.  

Now, by contrast, consider the prequel trilogy, "The Phantom Menace," "Attack of the Clones," and "Revenge of the Sith."  Those were real auteur pictures.  By the time George Lucas got around to making these movies, he was one of the richest and most powerful directors and producers in Hollywood, and so he really had absolute creative control of these productions - even more so, because advances in digital technology gave him a level of aesthetic control of every inch of the screen for every frame of the film that would simply have been impossible in the 70s.  He was capable of choosing the placement of every single eyelash in that movie.  And I won't bother describing the result.  I'll just say: if you want to know what Ayn Rand's aesthetic values get you, watch the prequel trilogy.

We could go on and on here.  I'm sad to admit it, but all-too-often, auteur films tend to be bloated, self-indulgent and boring, whereas more collaborative movies can be surprisingly compelling and powerful.  At the very least, we can see that the simplistic equation "auteur = deep; system = shallow" is unproven and there are many movies that challenge and complicate this stereotype.  In some ways, the very nature of movie-making is inherently collaborative - or at least it used to be, before contemporary technology made it more possible for a single person to create a movie.

Nor is this unique to the world of movies.  In the world of music, we're all familiar with bands that are great until one of the members decides to "go solo" and ends up producing unlistenable dreck.  The example that immediately leaps to mind for me is The Police, whose greatness has been all but retroactively destroyed by the utter worthlessness of Sting's solo career.  Ozzy Osbourne's work under his own name pales in comparison with his work with Black Sabbath.  Personally, I prefer Them to any of Van Morrison's solo works.  Maybe the most dramatic example is much of Paul McCartney's solo career, compared to the output of the Beatles.  If Ayn Rand's aesthetic theory were reliable, the best and most interesting music would be put out by electronic musicians who can produce an entire album without anyone's help, whereas all bands would be worthless, or only valuable if they were dominated by a singular creative voice.  But, surprisingly, many of these solo electronic artists are conformist, a dime-a-dozen, whereas musical collaborations can often bring out the most creative ideas of their members.

One finds creative collaboration among comedians - the work of Monty Python and The Kids in the Hall is often better than the individual efforts of any of the members.  Indeed, even in the world of painting, admittedly a medium that is the purview of individual artists, some of the best work comes from an art "scene" - a community that fosters innovation - or a movement, such as Impressionism, or Expressionism - or simply a friendship, such as that between Pissaro and Cezanne, or Picasso and Matisse.  Even poets and novelists historically have existed in communities and have spurred each other on to greater innovation and experimentation - think of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, and on and on and on.

Even in the world of architecture, the subject of The Fountainhead, collaboration can help bring about some of the most creative work.  Frank Lloyd Wright, upon whose life The Fountainhead was (very, very) loosely based, was in reality quite unlike Howard Roark.  Wright was a natural collaborator, working closely with other architects such as William Eugene Drummond, John Van Bergen, Isabel Roberts, and many more - not to mention his many influences in Japan from which he derived a great deal of cultural inspiration and where he managed to find a lot of work.  Far from rebelling against his benefactors, he always acknowledged his debt to his mentor, Louis Sullivan, whom he called his Lieber Meister (beloved master).  The two of them did have a falling out, but it was not out of artistic differences - not because Wright's architectural vision was, say, too bold and uncompromising for Sullivan - but merely because Sullivan felt that Wright had violated the terms of his employment by secretly accepting commissions outside of work while still under contract to Sullivan.  The two men made up, later in life.

I've noticed that when many young people finish The Fountainhead, they are filled with motivation and determination to be just like Howard Roark, and to dedicate themselves to fulfilling their own deep inner desires, and to achieve their own dreams - if only they could figure out exactly what those dreams were.  They feel intensely that they want to be dedicated to something, only they don't know what.  Howard Roark seems to have come pre-packaged with his own destiny.  That was handy, for him.  But what about the rest of us?  As soon as you start thinking about what might motivate you to want to start a career in some kind of field, suddenly all these confusing factors pop up.  If the kind of career you're pursuing is one in which you can express yourself creatively, as an artist, well, that's fine and good, and it sort of makes sense that you could be the Howard Roark of that.  But what would it mean to be the Howard Roard of insurance salesmen, the Howard Roark of sewer workers, the Howard Roark of cashiers in department stores?  What would it mean to be a Howard Roark of a factory floor?  What would it mean to be the Howard Roark of nursing?

And even if you're lucky enough to be in an artistic career, even then, how can you be Howard Roark?  Howard Roark seems, again, to be conveniently pre-packaged with all these wildly original ideas.  Yes, he works very hard on his designs, and at one point claims that the majority of his work winds up in the garbage can - like Edison, his work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.  But what makes his architectural style so new is that in his work, form follows function.  Unnecessary ornament is discarded, simplicity is embraced, and the focus is on the creation of spaces that will make their inhabitants happy, rather than obeying traditional rules.  But what if you are an artist working within a medium in which this stylistic revolution has already been fought?  We can put it this way: what if you are trying to be the next Howard Roark, after Howard Roark?

If one seeks a career in nursing, it is likely that one is motivated by the desire to help people.  The very definition of nursing implies that people will benefit from your labor.  For millions of jobs, it's not entirely clear how adherence to Ayn Rand's value system of uncompromising individualism would even apply.  Then again, even Howard Roark was motivated in his designs by a desire to make the people who lived and worked in his buildings happy.  Surely, however committed one is to one's own aesthetic values, this would not motivate one to design a building that makes its occupants' lives horribly inconvenient - or even actively harms the occupants.  (Then again, there is a school of architecture known as Brutalism, some of whose designs do seem to verge on sadism.  Would such architects, with their extreme aesthetic commitment and blithe disregard of the contentment, wellbeing, and safety of their occupants, be even more Howard Roarkish than Howard Roark himself?  ...Ironically, Brutalism "flourished" in communist countries, such as Serbia and Vietnam....)  Now, Ayn Rand would likely reply that Howard Roark is motivated not by sadism, but by rationality - an unsentimental, unwavering rationality that others were unwilling or unable to accept.  But if so, then we have simplified and clarified the issue - it is no longer a romantic tale about the individual asserting his artistic originality against the conformity of the public, but simply a matter of pragmatic utilitarianism vs. those who are too closed-minded to understand it.

But all of the above is a little bit beside the point, when one considers a deeper point, that calls Ayn Rand's ideology into question and demonstrates its illogic.  Ayn Rand's arguments are usually presented as arguments against the state - or at least against statism.  To understand why this doesn't make sense, let's go back to the purely artistic jobs, where Ayn Rand's arguments seem to apply the best - where uncompromising dedication to the integrity of one's own artistic vision seems to be of paramount importance.  The auteur film director, who strives for independence and individual artistic integrity against the Hollywood studio system, is not battling against the state.  The government has little to do with it.  The individual writer-director, trying to stay true to his unique vision against meddling bureaucrats who want everything screen-tested and focus-grouped, is in a power-struggle against a corporation.  (And indeed, remember, if anything, Ayn Rand was in favor of the state interfering with the studio system and coercing them into making films of anti-communist propaganda.)  Likewise, if a writer struggles against a publishing world that either refuses to print their books or edits them in such a way that cuts out aesthetically crucial parts for the sake of length or waters them down or removes anything potentially offensive, this is, again, a struggle against a corporation.  Undoubtedly artists struggle against galleries, museums, and artistic communities.  Even the nurse may rebel against his employer, which, in a capitalist system, is often a private corporation.  And yes, architects may well get caught up in conflicts with those who refuse to abide by their individual aesthetic choices.  But it is purely a contrivance in The Fountainhead that the people Howard Roark butts heads with are in the government.  One can easily imagine a similar situation in which Roark designed homes for a private developer who refused to abide by Roark's aesthetic choices.  Would he then be just as willing to blow these homes up?  Once again, Ayn Rand avoids the rational philosophical principle at question by conveniently framing the narrative in such away that neatly circumvents it.  

If we stop and think about the struggle between the creative, productive individual and the social system that imposes conformity and stifles creativity and innovation, it becomes obvious that this social system is often some form of corporate capitalism - not, typically, the government.  The Peter Keatings of the world are willing to compromise their artistry for the sake of being accepted by the community, and for success in their careers - which means they are willing to trade in their ideals for money.  They'll fall short of what they know to be more daring and innovative artistic design in order to cater to popular taste - and thus mass-market their work.  In other words, from the auteur film director to the nurse, the interests of a creative producer do not generally or automatically conflict with those of the state, but instead is constantly in conflict with the prerogatives of capital.  

The artiste of a chef who boldly invents the most original and yet subtle and delicious sandwich will have difficulty getting McDonald's to sell it.  How many times have we heard the familiar story of artists who do not own the rights to (for instance) their own music, and are being screwed over by their record label, their art being used in all kinds of ways that are contrary to their own intentions?  Sometimes this happens in truly comical ways, such as the time that John Fogerty, former frontman of Creedence Clearwater Revival, was sued for plagiarizing... himself.  He no longer owned the rights to the songs he had written for CCR, and the entity that did, "Fantasy, Inc.," a purely parasitic rights-holding company syndicate like a monster accidentally created by the sorceror's apprentice, sued him for writing songs that were too similar to himself.  

Nor is this limited to the art world.  Think of science.  Personally, I know someone who discovered a gene.  Now to my mind, no one should own a gene - or, if anyone does, it should be the person whose cells contain that gene.  But no, it is possible, upon discovering a gene, to patent that gene.  But does my friend, the discoverer, own that patent?  No, he doesn't.  Instead, the institute for which he worked owns it.  The scientist, just like the artist, has no rights to the product of their own intellectual work.  Why?  Because the scientist, like the artist, is a worker - who, under capitalism, is perpetually exploited for their labor.

So yes.  Take Ayn Rand's principle, and take it seriously.  Take it all the way to the end.  Be selfish.  Be an individual.  And you will soon find that this brings you directly into conflict with capitalism.  Don't stop at merely fighting the state, but also fight the entire capitalist system that the state supports.