American political thinking is being infected by a mind-eating form of philosophic sadism sold as something called a rational virtue, the virtue of selfishness. It arises from the writings of a cult author of the 1940s and 1950s with the pen name of Ayn Rand whose ideas were conveyed into popular culture via her two major novels, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. These fictions deal with heroic individualists and their gigantic egos who fight being pinned down like Gulliver by the rules and regulations of Lilliputians more concerned with the trifles of the common good than they are in the liberty of Great Men from whom all wealth and progress trickles down to the benighted masses who just aren’t nasty enough to get filthy rich.
The spirit of this fictional philosophy is what drives the legislative agenda of Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan who is reported to recommend reading Rand at every opportunity. And Atlas Shrugged, the current President has said, is his favorite book and Rand his favorite author. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush gave Rand a kind of non-literary respectability as the godmother of their cruel stinginess.
The virtue of selfishness comes from Rand’s view of rationality expressed in her philosophy of objectivism, in which she claims that it is objectively self evident that the moral underpinning of a good society is as a structure that allows each person to seek his own happiness, keep all his earnings, and the devil take the hindmost. It is a bestial view of human life in which smart big thugs, and the banal and brutal rich get to beat up anyone standing in their way. Atlas Shrugged is often depicted as a novel that portrays the virtue of capitalism and the demonic forces of communism, or collectivism. But that’s too facile a reading. I call Rand’s fictional philosophy sadistic because it sees the infliction of pain as mere collateral damage in the holy pursuit of materialistic self-fulfillment.
The pain it inflicts comes in all forms – taking food stamps from hungry children and impoverished families; attacking welfare as a form of mooching; characterizing the old, infirm, and very young receiving public aid as leaches, chiselers and parasites; valuing property rights over human rights; fighting tooth and claw against livable wages for those who work themselves into an early grave for what amounts to pennies to their bosses who get richer and richer on their broken backs; raucously supporting laws that keep women as second-class citizens, a beta class to alpha males, and endanger their health as well as that of their children; equating wealth with virtue while demeaning the vast majority of hard working people who struggle financially with the added burden of being accused of shuffling laziness and congenital stupidity; literally risking the lives of billions of people altering the global climate for the sake of meaningless profits for those who already have more money than 90% of the world’s people.
Randism, and the objectivist philosophy of selfishness, is eating away the entire conservative end of the American political spectrum. Randism is a gateway philosophy to the personal and social horrors inflicted by Social Darwinism which glorifies the view that in the “rational” and selfish ethics of the “survival of the fittest,”might makes right. It pits humans against humans, cultures against cultures. It consigns the physically and monetarily “unendowed” to an untouchable caste. It is the philosophical rationale for colonialism and its self-righteous hierarchy of superiority. Social Darwinism is the basis of Jim Crow, homophobia, anti-Semitism, scapegoating of all kinds, misogyny, prejudice against “abnormality,” including mental illness, and all forms of blaming the victim.
Social Darwinism erroneously applies the biological reality of natural selection, grounded in solid science, to the human condition. By stressing competition it overlooks and even denies the human capacity to cooperate and commiserate which has given us an evolutionary advantage over other species, perhaps to the detriment of the planet. But to deny this advantage and condemn cooperation, generosity and kindness as forms of subversion and weakness, which Randism and its worship of the hero does, is to literally dehumanize a society, valuing nonhuman voraciousness and cruelty over the human strengths embodied in the Golden Rule, the worldwide set of formulas for cooperative virtue and survival of the species. While predators often prevail in nonhuman situations, there is no room for predators in a free, collaborative and moral society, no room for financial and political Tyrannosaurs. They aren’t heroes. They’re threats. Those who see constitutional government as fundamentally the enemy of freedom and the virtue of selfishness, as Randites do, and not as a defender against predators and a promoter of cooperation, leave the cage doors of the Tyrannosaurs wide open. And most often all hell breaks loose.
We can see the impact of Randian selfishness in impoverished New Mexico over the last six and a half years of the reign of Governor Martinez and legislative allies. Survival of the fittest conservatism, and the Party of Selfishness, has run roughshod over public life and the general good: defunding education; financially and politically undermining colleges and universities; doing relatively nothing about the plague of childhood malnutrition; falsely accusing non-profit New Mexico behavioral health organizations of fiscal improprieties, defunding them, destroying them, and giving them over to for-profit crony corporations from Arizona, most of which profited and then left our state; privileging fracking and its air and water pollution over the health of rural communities; underfunding the court system so jurors are underpaid and public defenders are left with unconscionably large caseloads that inflict the tortures of injustice upon those who Randian conservatives consider the mere rabble.
The Randian “objectivist” worldview is based on a logical flaw, a misreading of reality that shows us clearly the awesome power of a bad idea. Her view of scientific rationalism is that it leads directly to a rational selfishness, to the opposite of altruism, to the “ethical’” right to pursue ones own happiness at the expense of any who get in the way. But human beings are not little crocodiles who hatch fully formed and ready to compete for life against other predators. We know, rationally and objectively, that humans are not hatched whole, but are born in such a vulnerable and undeveloped state that they require the love, good will, attention and care of their parents and communities for two decades before they are ready to face the challenges of life. Altruism is the context of their survival as children, and their survival against the vicissitudes of fortune all the rest of their lives.
Near the end of Atlas Shrugged is an episode that explains the far-right’s extreme aversion to environmental regulations otherwise known as protections of the public health. A character proposes a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would read, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.” That means to Randians don’t mess with my freedom to produce whatever I want, regardless of the pollution it causes and the harm it brings to the common environment on which we all depend. Randian heroes don’t give a hoot about anyone else. That’s what they mean by the virtue of selfishness.
If you pit the vice of selfishness against the wisdom of the good, you see that when valuing hard work, creativity, personal freedom and choice, you must leaven them with kindness and responsibility or the virtue of effort might morph into the sadistic curse of tyrannical politics and monomaniacal Me-First economics that thinks nothing of ruining the world just to serve itself.
Spot on. Thank you V. B. Price.
As always, V.B. Price writes both brilliantly and beautifully and provides a potent humanistic message for our times….!
First, I’m going to guess that V.B. Price has read neither “Fountainhead” nor “Atlas Shrugged”; both are available as movies. Price’s diatribe is misinformation trying to refute the misinformation about Rand that seeps out of the Republican propaganda machine.
Lots of folks get Ayn Rand wrong: Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, even radio host Thom Hartmann. The Objectivist philosophy is a very good match for the Golden Rule, so any claim otherwise misses the mark. Ayn Rand kicked the Republicans out of her ‘circle’ in New York in 1968, and she kicked out the Libertarians the next year. The Republicans especially stand on the word ‘selfish’ and say they love Objectivism but give themselves permission to lie and cheat and steal to win elections. Any claims to Objectivism by Republicans and Libertarians are untrue.
The ecomonies of the United States and Europe are not and never have been capitalism. Robber barons are not capitalists, but they get away with a lot by flying that false flag. Capitalism is the creation of jobs and products and services.
Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy is correct in the existential sense: it matches objective reality. Theough the philosophy is correct, Ayn Rand made one very large mistake, one which has caused a lot of mischief. Ayn Rand was born in Petrograd, Russia in 1905; she experienced both of the revolutions of 1917; the Bolsheviks took away her father’s pharmacy and her family suffered reduced circumstances thereafter. She hated communism for the rest of her life.
You can see videos of Ayn Rand from the late 1970s, mostly from televison appearances, and they are a lot of fun. What is remarkable there is that even at age seventy her Russian accent was pronounced. (She moved to America in 1926, died in New York City in 1982.) It looks on these videos like she thinks in Russian and then speaks in English. That is the source of her major mistake. The term ‘selfishness’ as used in her novels and her newspaper columns and her collected works is not really what the philosophy intends. The proper word would be ‘selfhood’, which leaves the Republicans out in the cold. A lot has been lost in that mis-translation.
One must become a (capital-S) Self in order to practice Objectivism. A Self is responsible for his/her actions. A Self has no interest in pressure to conform or to surrender to altruism — altruism is putting the interest of real or abstract strangers before the interest of one’s Self or loved ones. A Self chooses and lives from his/her values without agreement being necessary.
So-called Social Darwinism is also a false concept. Darwin used the term ‘survival of the fittest’ only once in his books, and that was a quote of someone else. What Darwin said was “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Mankind’s failure to adapt to the reality of climate change has our species destined for extinction in about thirty years. Conservatives use Darwin to justify raping and pillaging the planet — just as they use Objectivism to oppress regulation.
One of the items on my Lottery List (what I’ll do when I win the Big One) is to obtain the rights for “Atlas Shrugged” and edit a version with the word ‘selfishness’ replaced by the word ‘selfhood’. While the Ayn Rand estate sells 3 million books each year, in large part to college students, those readers give up the tough road to selfhood partly because the vocabulary in Ayn Rand’s books is inaccurate. There is also the 24/7 pressure of the Culture Structure to believe all the crap that recently put a fascist in the White House.
Being a Self provides major advantages in dealing with a sometimes-hostile and often-irrational culture. You and your readers should try it.
Mr. Nordell, I appreciate your thoughts. I agree with your statement, “One must become a (capital-S) Self in order to practice Objectivism. A Self is responsible for his/her actions. A Self has no interest in pressure to conform or to surrender to altruism — altruism is putting the interest of real or abstract strangers before the interest of one’s Self or loved ones. A Self chooses and lives from his/her values without agreement being necessary.”
And, may I add that there seems to be an eternal tension between the Self and the society in which that Self is located. I might further add that the Self, on its way to full maturity, must find the balance point within that tension. The American experiment has been an exercise in reconciling the individual’s right to pursue happiness and the good of the general welfare. Trumpeting one over the other is folly.
We’re engage in a balancing act. The balance point is never static. It never stops. If you have not already done so, may I suggest that Nathaniel Branden’s memoir of his time within Ayn Rand’s most intimate circle, “My Years with Ayn Rand,” might serve you.
Having read Rand as a young architecture student many years ago, “Sabotaging the Golden Rule” rang many bells. Price’s description of a coherent philosophical basis behind the way these folks think makes sense. Some may argue that Trump’s and Ryan’s approach to politics is not what Rand meant, but it is easy to see how her “philosophy” nonetheless had the very result which Price describes. Social Darwinism rears its ugly head again as it once did for Fascism.
N. Crowe
As clear and rarional explanation of what the US is experiencing as any I have read. Kudos Mr. Price!