4) As a cult, it also sucks
Oh, but more ironies abound! Here you have a polemic about individualism, that portrays one accomplished CEO after another “gone missing”… dropping out of sight after each one listens to a solitary pitchman from a utopian community, who croons “Come. Follow me and joiiiin usssss.”
Um, let’s see. When have we heard that before? Drop everything. All your past loyalties and the companies you’ve built. Stop fighting for your family or country. Listen to this incantation and follow our charismatic leader to the special society he has built, just for the exclusive elect, like you!
Good lord, does she have to make the hypnotism-cult thing quite so explicit? So very much like Jim Jones and David Koresh? Did you know that Rand-followers who recite her catechisms light up exactly the same parts of the brain as other true-believers pronouncing passages from the Bible or Koran or Hindu Sutras? And these are not the corners of cortex used by scientists while performing analytical or “objective” reasoning.
But you don’t need any of that to conclude we’re dealing with a cult. Just follow the recruitment process used by John Galt. Who surreptitiously sabotages successful companies in order to drive their owners into his arms! Who then deliberately vandalizes and cripples the nation’s ability to feed itself or engage in commerce that he doesn’t control, in order to wreck any possible competition with his elite enclave. Oh, criminy.
The magic is gone
Yes, I’ll admit that Ayn Rand at least portrays technology as good. That gives her points over the dismal Tea Partiers, or Fox, or the equally dismal (though less-numerous) science haters of a ditzy-fringe far left. Alas though, she treats technology like something magical. Lone inventors weave a spell and suddenly there’s a new metal or new motor. The vast intricacy of collaboration, development, supplier networks, and infrastructure is both a topic to Rand and an excuse for incantatory over-simplification.
But it is science that truly gets short shrift. Ayn Rand’s lack of any reference to scientific research that might support or falsify her assertions about human nature should send alarm bells clanging. Her ignorance of Darwin or human biology, for example, is almost identical to Marx, but much less excusable, given when she lived.
Nowhere, either in Atlas Shrugged or subsequent libertarian cant, is there acknowledgment of the immense stimulative role of U.S. government financed R&D, especially in fields of pure science that would never have attracted investments from anyone looking to a “return horizon.”
Indeed, I have long yearned for a second national debt clock to be set up, this one showing what the public debt would be now, if only the taxpayer had received normal levels of royalties from rockets, satellites, communications, fiber optics, computers, pharmaceuticals, and the internet. Well? Wouldn’t that be fair and businesslike? Tellingly, while many scientists have a fiercely competitive libertarian streak, almost none who are in the top ranks ever hold any truck with Ayn Rand.
The analog to Rand is not the scientist Darwin, but the rhetorician Plato. Sure, she claims to prefer Aristotle. But in both verbal process and incantatory reasoning style, she is Plato’s truest heir.
Slumping toward Babylon
All right, veering briefly aside from Atlas Shrugged, let’s see what Rand says about privacy, a topic I happen to know a lot about:
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
Of course, there is a level at which Rand is simply stating the obvious. That autonomy and long lives arose as our technology and civilized complexity improved. When food surpluses were meager, only a tiny aristocracy could be subsidized and unchained from the land. But a mixture of science and continental peace mixed with our ability to trade goods and services till even science fiction authors can now pretend we are producers of a primary product, worthy of being fed by farmers.
As for the quote itself: as usual, Ayn Rand mixes some core truths of the Enlightenment with mystical teleology. The rise of the individual – never steady or even – has been a core theme of the West, ever since the Renaissance, and especially the Enlightenment. But this progression isn’t fated, ordained or even natural.
Rand looks at a couple of hundred years and one quarter of the planet, and assumes the trend is unstoppable. But Huxley and Orwell – backed up by Malthus and Darwin – showed us what’s “natural.” The diamond-shaped social structure that we take for granted can all-too easily slump back into the oligarch-dominated pyramid.
Only Enlightenment methods ever offered an alternative hope. Rand followers take it for granted. Indeed, they assume that we can dismantle the processes and structures that Adam Smith prescribed, that made the Enlightenment work in the first place.
They bear a burden of proof that we would not just slump back into the condition that prevailed, for thousands of years, before Smith and his colleagues came along. In America, that slump is already well underway.
I am not sure I understand your um perspective. But from the title of this article, and my love of Rand as an author and individual, I think that the Occupy kids should all watch Atlas Shrugged (as they won’t read it-takes too long) I only wish they could have all 3 parts at once. We are John Galt.
I read many of Rand’s works in the past, and I find Brin’s analysis to be largely correct. I would add, in response to his comments regarding points he’d not otherwise heard or read about, that similar observations have, in fact, been made, and rather frequently – it’s merely that such observations are routinely swept under the proverbial carpet by those who insist that Rand is a “writer of monumental status”.
Personally, I always found her division of society to be at best elitist; her ignorance of psychology, anthropology, and other sciences to be abysmal and most definitely *not* objective, nor rational; her characters to be as simplistic as paper-cutouts; her portrayals of human behavior and motivations to be at best juvenile. I also found her portrayal of sexuality to be quite disturbed, and disturbing, in that her “heroines” seem to submit to rape, having no capability for, or interest in, establishing an intimate relationship.
Politically, David Brin’s assessment that Rand parallels Marxism up to the point of monopolism is also a point which seems so obvious, yet is either missed, or simply ignored, by her acolytes – as is the fact that she *does not* deal with the inevitable issue of inherited oligarchy. In the case of her acolytes, however, this isn’t relevant, because they evidently seem to see themselves as deserving to be among the ruling elite, and hold to the same views as have all aristocrats, plutocrats, and dictators, namely: they they have “better blood”, “better genes” than those who reject a life of -emotionally-numb manipulation or outright piracy.
As for her “philosophy”, I found it to be psychopathic long before I learned the word “psychopathy” – not because I personally have any great love, or high opinion, of the bulk of humanity, but rather, because of her utter incapability to give *anyone* the “benefit of the doubt”, or to have any comprehension of the fact that human advancement has arisen because of cooperation between people, not merely out of competition. But her view of cooperation is incredibly immature – she seems to assume that others will automatically cooperate with her (and those similar to her) because they recognize their supposed “superiority”.
Of course, the thing which I find most telling is the fact that, after all her years of making a living by descrying government and social welfare, she herself, when she got old and became relatively obscure, did not seek a “heroic ending” to her life, but instead, lived off of Social Security and relied on others. In the end, her own old age writes the final chapter, and illustrates that the true core of her so-called “philosophy” was nothing more than a life-long attempt to justify her complete lack of regard for, or interest in, anyone other than herself.