The Oddities of Ayn Rand

I mean, aside from her atrocious understanding of human relationships, of course...

No, the odd thing about Ayn Rand is that she truly failed to understand or articulate what she was arguing for. It's there, in Atlas Shrugged, just not in the clearest, most philosophical passages. She's perhaps the best--at least, the most ferocious--enemy of charity broken away from truth.

The promise of Communism lies in man's natural rage against injustice and the suffering of his fellow man. When the workers were treated like animals, and worst than animals, the resulting back lash was inevitable from any conscience with a bit of life and spark left in it. You must feed a horse enough to keep it alive and plowing your fields. You must tend to your machinery and equipment at a bare minimum in order to keep it at work. When the horrors of the dawn of the industrial age, of Dickensian poverty and working conditions are defended and embraced by the titans of industry and those supposed to preserve the virtue of society, then one risks revolution.

But at the same time, such rage against ill treatment based in man's benevolence towards his fellow man overshot. In the name of the revolution, in the name of compassion, in the name of charity and concern for the oppressed laborers of the world, the revolutionaries believed they had to throw out all concern and charity for the oppressors of the world. Into that category they lumped the preservers of virtue in a society--the religions, the governments, the organizations and framework of the world from before the time of the Revolution, before the Year Zero of the Revolutionary Calendar--and decided it all had to go. Not only were they committed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but they wanted to chuck the tub with it. As well as the soap. And indeed anything and everything that reminded them they were ever involved in a bath to begin with.

Rand comes forth into the field with a clarion call for the nobility and necessity of truth, the importance of justice, the vital place of the producers--of the virtuous--who become the people of wealth and power in a society, and indeed, a call for the repudiation of anything, anything at all, that smacks of communism! And so, she pulls the baby and the tub back into the house, through the house, and right back out the other side of the house. She throws out charity.

Funnily enough, she tries to keep good will between people. She wants to retain a willingness to sacrifice everything for the welfare of people you love. She'd like to retain compassion. Even while she scorns it. It's an odd dynamic to watch at work. Her statement of her philosophy is so forceful, so compelling, so inviting in its heroic cadence and the strength of conviction behind it--and let's not forget the fact that an appeal to the existence of reason contra much of modernity is always refreshing--that many people get swept up in it and overlook the problems. She did, herself, I suspect, though it is unfair to judge her system merely from the novels and not from the explicitly philosophical work.

But her whole system depends upon the Communist vision of the world having some real attachment to what ordinary people mean when they speak of care for the little guy, and compassion for the oppressed, and the need to resolve problems of systemic injustice, and love, and altruism. Rather, she didn't understand Christianity. She who loved Aristotle, who ripped off some of his best lines for her chapter titles and section names, didn't seem to get the full force and effect of his description of the Prime Mover. Her adaptation to fit the main players of a capitalist worldview celebrating producers and men and women of achievement is an ingenious one, but it does not show that she got what he was saying. There must be a God. There must be some being at the back of all things, whether as the First Pusher who Itself is not Pushed or as the Ground of All Being or what have you, but there must be a God. There must be some first cause, or else we live in a universe of infinite cause, which is a universe of irrationality and unpredictability, without purpose or meaning. And this she abhorred.

Once that is understood, a great many other things are thrown into a different light. In an atheist's world, then history could truly have been a sequence of moochers and looters oppressing the men of production eternally, because in an atheist world, all religion would have been a sham and a lie, useful only for crowd control and the deception of the masses. But if religion is true, or the reflection of a higher reality expressed in better or worse ways by different systems, then there exists a being who may truly have a claim upon all men by right of creation, of production--a right over the creature that she would have understood and appreciated if she could only have seen. The creator's rights over the created are not like those sham rights of the master over the slave, or (in her novels) the sham rights of the looters and moochers over the producers and men of genius and achievement.

And then, of course, there's the complicating factor of the relationship God desires with his creations, which would elevate us far beyond anything Rand dreamed of in her neo-pagan fantasies. So Rand: both prophet of the diseases of modernity (specifically, of charity without the bindings of truth and justice, i.e., Communism) and a purveyor of false teaching herself (of justice without mercy, of Darwinian capitalism), while at the heart of it pulling out a key insight into money as the means of man's peaceful interaction, of trading value for value, of labor rewarded with pleasure rather than the slave's mere relief from pain, of the best of capitalism rewarding people of virtue with wealth according to their production and achievement aiding all of humanity.

I think frequently she is mistaken as a proponent of deregulated business, when she was rather arguing for the proper rewards for achievement and virtue. It is true, she wanted government cut to a minimum, enforcing contracts, handing down justice, and keeping the peace so that the producers could do what they did best. But she was not simply friendly to business--she was friendly to the achievers. She was not friendly to deregulation--she demanded just laws and good government, government based on truth and justice. She desired to see virtue rewarded and vice punished, according to her own scheme. And that was the problem, in the end. According to her own scheme--except her scheme was wrong.