Coming to Grips with My Ayn Rand Phase

As for so many alienated sixteen-year-olds, the works of Ayn Rand granted me solace. She heralded the primacy of ideas in a culture that seemed impervious to them; she dared to tell me that my accomplishments were valuable when the world seemed to be telling me that everything I did should be in the name of self-sacrifice; she promised me that truth and rationality were achievable. And, best of all: she told me that I didn’t need an omnipotent government or a god to do this.

Throughout my teenage years, I delved deeply into her writings. Most people who encounter Rand read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, find their concepts intriguing, and move on. For a small minority of Rand’s readers, including me, her works penetrated at a much deeper level. I came to devour every syllable the woman ever uttered: the books Ayn Rand Answers and The Ayn Rand Lexicon sit on my bookshelf, for instance.

Rand’s points are easily misunderstood, which was often her own fault. She wrote in a harsh style that was accessible usually only to those already predisposed to agree with her. She was also, at her core, a radical, and often fiercely anti-prudential. She condemned Ronald Reagan for being pro-life and preposterously said that she hoped to die before he became president (alas, she did not live to see him carry us to victory in the Cold War). She said that Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were ultimately useless since they refused to mount a truly philosophical argument for capitalism. (She contended, in essence, that if socialism were discovered to be more efficient, the Friedmans of the world would jump ship and join the socialists.)

Still, Rand had a way of getting to the bottom of things. She wielded her pen like a razor and stripped away the layers of public-relations nonsense to get to the philosophical premises of her opponents. She cared deeply about language and demanded specificity in semantics. Because of this, she was able to tear apart the agents of class warfare like few others. Her denunciations of the left’s cultural pretensions are breathtaking. Opining on those who suggest raising taxes on millionaires at every turn, she wrote: “They don’t want to be rich, they want you to be poor. They don’t want to succeed, they want you to fail… our culture tells you to be successful — but God help you if you are! Be happy — but don’t show it!” Of the 1960s’ Democrats’ proposal for a so-called second Bill of Rights, including the right to healthcare, recreation, and a job, Rand demolished the whole thing by noting one simple aspect: They list everything desirable under the sun without ever bothering to answer — who exactly is to provide all of these things, and what is to happen to them if they prefer not to spend their lives laboring for strangers?

Rand’s followers are more at home on the right than most libertarians because of her uncompromising moral absolutism. Rand and her disciples were strongly anti-Communist, deeply pro-Israel, and, today, usually find themselves allied with neoconservatives on the foreign policy front. Rand’s contemporary followers mostly supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they all want America to use its platform to stick up for Israel and speak against Islam (not terrorism — Islam). If any one politician on Earth is using his platform to crusade for Randian ideals, it’s not Ron Paul — it’s probably Geert Wilders. Many media commentators used Rand Paul’s name to make jokes about how Ayn Rand would have loved to see him triumph, but Ayn Rand would have absolutely despised Rand Paul, mostly for his belief that America has little business taking the fight to America’s Islamist enemies.

Yes, then, she was a cogent writer. Her arguments are arresting and her style is hypnotic: the arid prose of Friedrich Hayek is nothing like Rand’s philosophical essays, which are infused with the novelist’s flair. Her broader philosophy appealed to me, as to so many other alienated teenagers. But as I felt liberated to have encountered her, I felt equally liberated to have thrown her restrictions off.

The real danger in embracing Rand’s works too tightly is that hers is a system without room for skepticism or doubt. She would be aghast at the comparison, but there’s something of a religious component to Objectivism (itself, like ‘psychoanalysis,’ an inappropriate name; no system devised by a single person should be named after anything other than its founder). Rand proudly claimed to have become privy to the Absolute Truth. Deviations from her philosophy thus become not disagreements over substantive points in the great conversation of Western civilization, but objective errors in understanding. Disagreement with Rand’s opinions becomes a character flaw, rather than a philosophical dispute. It is simply impossible to embrace her works for any period of time and not internalize this fact. Thus when, at nineteen, I became intrigued by the arguments of thinkers like Hobbes, Burke, and Wittgenstein, I quite frankly felt a bit dirty for it. Rand was the woman who gave me confidence at a time when I felt isolated, alienated, and generally miserable. And now I dare betray her?

Rand’s inability to engage other systems of thought on a serious level is the fatal conceit of Objectivism. She did not see herself as part of a great Western tradition of inquiry, but as a revolutionary renegade who was shaking the West’s assumptions to its core. Indeed, she claimed to owe no philosophical debts to any thinker except Aristotle (even though her own bookshelf reveals that the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and Herbert Spencer influenced her). The fact that she was never taken seriously by professional philosophers cannot simply be dismissed as a postmodern/analytic joint conspiracy against system-builders and capitalists. Robert Nozick was taken entirely seriously in his libertarian years. The problem with Rand was her hit-and-run style of argument; her total lack of respect for people she disagreed with. She abhorred the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, for instance, but was more keen on calling him a “monster” out to “destroy man’s mind” than to address his arguments substantively. Rand is the type of person who would literally cast people out from her inner circle if they dared to suggest that, for instance, David Hume might have had a point about the nature of knowledge.

She was no less contemptuous of people who should have been her intellectual allies. She bizarrely dismissed Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill’s arguments for the free market and minimalist state out of hand for not defending her conclusions from the same angle as her. Smith, for instance, defended capitalism on what are admittedly collectivist grounds: it strengthens society and helps others by channeling man’s naturally self-serving instincts into something mutually beneficial. Rand despised this line of argument, preferring instead to point out how capitalism allows men to act as free agents, rather than as masters and servants, as a command economy insists upon. Now, I unequivocally agree with Rand that it is not a duty to devote one’s life to helping the poor — but there’s something wrong with a system of thought that makes its adherents feel guilty about using that argument in favor of capitalism. The ability of the free market to lift up the poor from their misery is one of its most beautiful aspects. It really ought to go without saying that one doesn’t need to be a bleeding-heart leftist to think that this is a highly compelling argument for capitalism. And yet, in the thousands of pages of Rand’s writings that I digested, I don’t think that I ever came across more than a couple of paragraphs celebrating it.

I know many people, young and old, who claim to have entered and exited “Ayn Rand phases” in their youth. It is interesting that one rarely encounters a person who says that he went through a “Burke phase” or a “Plato phase.” If one becomes less enamored of Plato’s arguments, he simply says that there is much merit in Plato but that he has been persuaded that his arguments are ultimately incomplete.

This is, I think, a mature way of transitioning out of a ‘Rand phase.’ To cast off Rand forever and spit on her insights — which really were often quite brilliant and which she often stood nearly alone on the right in making — is to engage in the same kind of all-or-nothing mentality that one erred in by embracing her unquestioningly. Her condemnations of left-wing cultural pretensions, her glorification of productive work and achievement, and her love of this Earth are breathtakingly inspiring. There is no other figure embraced by the right who arouses the same emotions in defense of liberty that Rand does. Ultimately, she is too radical, too anti-pragmatic, and does not understand well enough the limitations of human action to be embraced wholesale — but what thinker can be embraced wholesale? On balance, I am comfortable saying that there can be little doubt about the fact that Rand is an asset — flaws and all.