Thatshit Sucked: Or Why I Hate Ayn Rand

I know why Rand is still read-she’s the most ardent gospelizer of free market capitalism. There’s no competition. Adam Smith’s idea was very theoretical, and very much about the collective good, and that’s not what modern capitalists want us to be thinking of. They want us to be thinking of ourselves above all else, not how capitalism can increase equality for everyone. Milton Friedman is too technical and didn’t write any novels, so his ideas are not as digestible. Ron Paul is a good candidate, and indeed, his gospel is more popular now than ever (credit him with that) but he himself has a slightly difficult relationship with Ayn Rand (I THINK—VERIFY THIS). Ayn Rand, however, offers her package in simple terms, and she gives us what we want: simple solutions that achieve anything. The world is reduced to her Manichaean divide and good resides on only one side. What could be easier? Just as many conservatives are lured into libertarianism due to its gross simplification of the world and human motives, and are thereby attracted to how reductionist it is, they are also attracted to Ayn Rand, the fiery sermon on the mint of not only the free market vs. gov’t intervention, but of superlative selfishness altogether. It is moral luxury on two counts: not only is there moral certainty, but the message is entirely self-serving. What really gives Ayn Rand its kick, though, is that she makes an enemy out of everyone that disagrees with her, calling them statists, moochers, looters, and on and on.

My problem with Rand is that it is, of course, too simple. If you want to live in a world where taxation IS looting, where a safety net IS mooching, where the people that don’t believe in utopian, unfettered capitalism hold the opinion that success is bad, where menial laborers enjoy their work for its own sake because it’s honest, then the only way to do it is to immerse yourself in her novels and maybe join the Rand Institute, because you will not find any trace of it in real life.

Let’s start with this: Ayn Rand was a spiteful, fearful woman, the product of collectivism truly gone awry in the Soviet Union. It would be as if a child who left the United States after her father lost his job, fell ill with an expensive disease, and was foreclosed upon, came to VIRULENTLY hate not only capitalism in its entirety, but the concept of money itself. We would understand her perspective, but with a grain of salt. So when she claims that the only defense against the imminent plague of looters doggedly trying to render an “anti dog-eat-dog,” anti success, collectivist hell, is to act purely in our self-interest, it’s hard to take seriously when you look at how supremely self-interested the culture we live in is. It’s about as necessary a call to arms as if she railed against group conversation in favor of finding your true self in a personal electronic device.

Ayn Rand’s world is built around absolutes, and thereby achieves the ultimate absolute by becoming devoid of distinctions. Social services amount to living your life to the benefit of another—slavery—which she sees as immoral. Well, fine. I don’t like slavery any more than the next guy, and would certainly not want society to be built around me having to support other able-bodied people. But there is a huge difference between that and having to pay dues to society for the benefit of net goods that—guess what?—you may not have thought of. Or cared about.

We benefit from living, as humans, in communities. Why, then, should that membership be any different from any other benefit we experience? Why should membership in society; protection from outside threats; comfortably drinking water from the tap; roads to bring goods to market; why should those be free? Indeed, they’re not, because we pay for them in taxes.

She considers money to be the ultimate good, but how is not an even more transcendent good that which acknowledges that there are responsibilities and capabilities that society has that one person cannot? If an old man freezes to death in his apartment because he cannot afford the heating bill, it is not my fault. I do believe, however, that it can be considered society’s fault, if that society—maybe a wealthy society, maybe a society that nearly runs out of ways in which to show off its prosperity—considers itself civilized. That’s where Rand and I differ. She does not see the collective as a legitimate entity. And on this she is plainly wrong. History is the story of humans compulsively organizing into societies built around common goals. In order to whitewash this, Rand has to change history, which she does in the most painfully wretched section of Atlas Shrugged, in which she makes an argument that mankind has been the story of the lazy subjugating the rich in such a ludicrously fabricated fashion that Nietzsche would blush.

She thinks that the opposition to her is that they support the opposite. If she thinks greed is good, then the opposition must think that anti-greed is good. It’s a straw man. Her writing is horrible and painful to read. She also thinks that there is no general good. I think that it does exist, it’s discernible, and I’m not sure she would agree with that.

The biggest fantasy is that money is going to relate people in a way that replaces other human impulses. She loves the concept of money, going so far as to claim that it is the epitome of man’s development. The reason is that it is one man’s word working with another’s. or something. That’s bullshit. Money is a way to exchange the fruits of my labor for the fruits of yours, so it’s certainly an innovation, but why is it any better than choosing to put that money toward a benefit you don’t necessarily see yourself? Why is compassion not a higher good? The classic line that money is the root of all evil is incorrect—it is supposed to be, love of money is the root of all evil. Why? Because money is a stand-in for something that exists in a Hobbesian state of nature: stuff. Everything from life-giving sustenance to mammon, status, power. None of these things are the highest order of a fully evolved human, if for the sheer reason that none of them bring fulfillment or happiness. This is a truth recognized by nearly every major world philosophy except this one.

Maybe it wasn’t awful writing that made her characters lifeless automatons; maybe these are the only type of person imaginable who could be fulfilled purely by money. Eh, I doubt it. In one section, she describes Hank Rearden as, for the first time, feeling “this thing men called rage.” It’s hard to tell where her abysmal skill starts to sap momentum away from her horrible ideas—and the writing is absolutely wretched, to be sure—but she really creates a character that is unfamiliar with rage as an adult man?

The main thing that Rand misunderstands is a fairly important reality about capitalism, money, business, and even culture. Commerce is an interface applied to society to facilitate its mechanics, but it is a poor substitute for the underlying humanity that is the fundamental reason that we animals crowd together and make habitats together and survive and thrive together. Dollars lubricate the gears of society, allowing me to trade my labor for yours fluently, but by no means are they the gears, and money makes for a poor fuel.

There are other nonsense arguments in Ayn Rand’s canon—the argument that major corporations are a persecuted minority because of the caprice of antitrust laws is one of the more compelling arguments, believe it or not; one that says that capitalism is the only system that would do away with slavery on its own is one that is typically mystifying—but they are truly too numerous to count and too stupid to make you spend more time on this blog over.

The best use of Ayn Rand, in my mind, is as starter philosophy, an attractive, simplistic world-view to introduce to children to teach them how to refute arguments (and I challenge any Randian to defend her supposed adherence to logic, as well) and to learn to reject arguments that clearly bear no relation to reality.