Ayn Rand on Johnny Carson: Watch the full Tonight Show interview. (VIDEO):
Ayn Rand is a one trick pony and
an effective marketer of snake oil. The key is that her alleged philosophy has
only one premise that things would be so much better had humanity not strayed
from the Path it was intended to be on. Whether it lies in the cruder readings
of Marx and Engels and the vulgar literalism that overtakes the Religious Right,
these are variations on the Fall from Grace trope. It is a simple paradigm,
simply presented, that presents a powerful and seductive reason for why things
are not perfect. It is a fantastically reductionist movement that, although
Rand protests that no one, not even the State, may initiate force against
another to compel him or her to act against their own judgment, Rand's dogma
isn't workable, even in the most botched and disastrous application, unless the
absolutist policies favorable to her ends find implementation in a manner that
brutishly and none so subtly exclude an opposing view.
The inevitable result of her
views and the views of her followers is to establish an authoritarian regime,
with rights and privileges restricted to those with money, land, industry at
their full disposal. Rand as much argued this in her writings. Now is the time
for all of us to imagine the sheer hell an America governed by Randroids would
be like. Bear in mind that I am talking about Rand's ideas and her followers
and not about the Libertarian Movement in general. Rand has spent a good amount
of her writings arguing who should have power and who should not, and
regardless of the finer points of her grating prose, it comes down to that
those with the business genius, which is to say downright ruthlessness, are the
only ones who have the natural right to shape the world in which they live.
Others are no consequence; it is implicit that others in the culture, the
majority of us, must be subservient to those who build corporate edifices to
their self-defined greatness. This comes across as authoritarian and calling it
something else or claiming that it isn’t so does not change the matter that
life for the rest of us, under Rand regime, would be Hobbesian nightmare, nasty
, brutish and short.
It's fitting. Rand was nasty, brutish and short.
Ayn Rand continues to infuriate the left, because she clearly identified the
basic and crucial political issue of our age: capitalism versus socialism, or
freedom versus statism. “
Ayn Rand famously presented herself as an atheist in her desire to be branded
an intellectual, and yet the diagnosis she presents as to what the defining and
most crucial issue facing America as a country and culture,, "free vs.
statism", is a trope she borrowed from the Bible and it's fables of end
times, of the war between Heaven and Hell being fought here on earth through
the human agents for God and Satan. This Manichean view demonstrates the
laziness of her thinking. Not that this habit of borrowing particulars from the
narrative template Christian orthodox places upon us is limited to rigidly Hard
Right demagogues; erstwhile atheist philosopher Karl Marx foresaw the end of
history as process where, after achieving through violent revolution the
"dictatorship of the proletariat", the State would wither away and the
world and the people within in would be restored to a pre-Capitalist state of
naturalness. Among both their sets of codified ideas are a great many notions
taken from other sources, and the presentation of their ideas into
comprehensible arguments entails rummaging through the same stock of rhetorical
devices and sleights of hand. The upshot of all this, of course, is that it
feeds beautifully to a population that desires an answer to the over arching
question that consists of When Did Things Go Wrong?
You can find an answer for ever
No one is arguing against property rights; rather one is arguing against a
belief system that insists to the exclusion of all other evidence that it is
morally wrong for property owners to be held accountable for what they do with
their property, or that there should be enforceable standards and limits on
what can be done with that property lest it seriously and dangerously conflict
with --gasp!--the greater good. When the hack architect Keating in The
Fountainhead breaks his promise to Roark and allows government bureaucrats to
alter the design he (Roark) ghost-designed for him, Roark feels betrayed and
personally violated by the forces he abhors and takes it upon himself, by
reason of him being a self-motivated and self-contained creator, to ignore the
Law and all shared sense of decency and avenge his hurt feelings by destroying
the finished destruction of the public housing project.
The shelter and
elevated standard of living it would have provided the poor and needful was of
no consequence--the solipsistic principles Roark lived by needed to be enforced
over all else. Roark's long and one-note speech at the end of The Fountainhead
is a fairly good outline of the Objectivist point of view, and with it Roark
defends his action. There was a disturbance in the balance of things, much as
it goes in classical tragedy, and only an act of severe violence, unmindful of
what death might occur as a result, could put the balance right again. Roark
here is conspicuously Rand's mouthpiece, a sock puppet peddling her peculiar
brand of inverted morality; the implication is clear, conspicuous, very plain
indeed: should the work of genius creators like Roark be interfered or changed,
the creator reserves the right to become to rise above the petty, slave morality
laws of common society and commit an act of TERRORISM to keep his point clear.
This is not merely a fictional spiel intended to tie up loose plot threads, it
is a serious if deluded argument meant to be taken seriously by the reader.
Roark is very much a fictional creation whose example we are meant to be
inspired by. ...more
