Thoughts on Ayn Rand?

I read Rand when I was a young and impressionable 15 year old and I was struck by the sense that, for the very first time in my life, I was reading something with which I was wholeheartedly in agreement. I’ve since moved beyond libertarianism but I believe Rand manages to capture something essential about people – and the people that hate her work hate it because they see themselves in the whiners, grifters, and parasites against she so vehemently rails.

Ayn Rand’s books are much like Karl Marx in that it all sounds good in theory but are just navel gazing rubbish.

She never worked in government but rails against government waste and inefficiency.
She never ran a business but sees unfettered capitalism as a utopia.
She despised socialism but died receiving sickness benefits from the government.

There were some good ideas in both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead but for me it was a case of taking a concept that should be part of a mix and ratcheting it up to 11 and the pure concept is the only way forward.
Yes, too much charity can be damaging. Socialism can be taken too far. It is good for some individuals to uncompromisingly follow their dream at the expense of short term convenience.
This doesn’t mean all charity is evil, social Darwinism should rule at the expense of societal compassion, or that that anyone who holds down a lifelong career job is an unimaginative dolt. There is a spectrum in all things.

And really! Atlas Shrugged is about a society that unexplainably keeps electing a continuously incompetent and corrupt government to its own obvious detriment. This results in all the business entrepreneurs taking off to set up a colony hidden by a reality perception shield, built with magic steel, powered by a perpetual motion machine and it was all set up by a pirate. Seriously. And this is supposed to demonstrate how things would be in reality if we all just adopted a more self centred outlook on the world and let the weak and less fortunate just die on the vine. Grow up.

To give her a bit of a break. I understand her outlook was formed by being a refugee from the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. Maybe her ideas would apply to that era, but they certainly have no place in the modern political spectrum and particularly when used to criticise Scandinavian style socialism.

I desperately, passionately love The Fountainhead. I found it when I was 15 and it’s been my favourite book ever since. For me, it’s a very powerful message about what it means to live authentically and create true value in the world, and the Roark/Keating dichotomy it describes is one I’ve seen play out among real people around me repeatedly. I don’t think I’ll ever forget what it said about ‘second-handers’ and I honestly think there’s no worse fate in the world than to be a Keating, with no self-identity except the empty reflections of other people’s opinions.

I have slightly more mixed feelings about Atlas Shrugged. It’s a powerful and inspiring story, but it has a sort of element of rigidity or insanity to it: the heroes are unbelievably perfect, the villains are utterly contemptible, and literally everything is a value judgement: it’s often hard to tell if Rand is just describing a character or taking a moral stand on whatever the character is doing, even something seemingly innocuous like wearing a yellow dress.

From what I’ve read about Rand, she was an undeniable visionary who became increasingly rigid and closed-minded in her later years. Her friends describe her as being a person who sometimes judged people’s moral worth based on if they reacted to a given piece of music the same way as her, which fits with what I said above. But all that said, I greatly admire her as a person and I do my best to live by the philosophy in The Fountainhead.

Admittedly, I only read Anthem, but I was so disgusted by it I’m scared to pick up any of her books. The main character runs off and discovers science text books and forgotten technology, wants to bring it to his dystopian society, and they refuse him, so he runs off with the woman that he loves, finds an abandoned house, and celebrates how much of a self made man he is and how he’ll defend this land he earned for himself. First off, he’s only doing well off the past success of others. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems to really contradict his quest for individualism, doesn’t it? Where would he be if he hadn’t discovered the science text books or the already built house? He learned so much from libraries but is now going to deny those libraries to others? This is the exact behaviour that lets children of business moguls deny their privilege and see themselves as a bootstrap story. Also, the main character seems to assume that everyone around him is stupid. This is probably my biggest issue with Ayn Rand. The prevailing interpretation that I’ve seen is that society doesn’t let the gifted people be special enough, so let the stupid people be stupid and give me free reign to live out whatever really smart fantasy I have. It’s the exact “normy” culture that I think denies certain people humanity and understanding. Lastly, I don’t really see Anthem’s point. Who’s advocating for a system where we shun science, give people no choice in their lives, and only advocate conformity. I’m not a Bolshevik sympathizer, but this seems to be echoed more directly in our American school systems where parent’s have their kids live’s planned out for them and evolution is something parents can opt their children out of, than in science endorsing Russia. Rand paints this unrealistic society no one would ever advocate for as a straw man for her argument that selfishness is beautiful. I could go on for days but I don’t think I really have to.

I am a big fan of Rand’s philosophy, and I am very curious to learn what the counter-arguments may possibly be. I searched for articles that criticize her theories, and found this: https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Virtue-of-Stupidity-A-Critique-of-Ayn-Rand-and-Objectivism I love how every single one of the author’s attempts at an argument is utterly destroyed in the comments section there!

The only semi-convincing criticism I’ve come across so far is the issue with the entitled rich kids who never had to work for their money, and how in many cases their selfishness could be destructive to the society. Rand addresses this in “Atlas Shrugged” as well though, saying that the rich who haven’t earned their money and have no skills to do so will lose it quickly (which would actually help support the economy). I would say that if the world were able to gradually adjust to Rand’s way of thinking, mainly in regards to holding competence and ability to create value as the highest moral achievements, then this issue would gradually disappear as well: no decent parents (i.e. those who understand the value of money, personal growth, and achievement) would simply hand over their earnings to their kids w/o making sure they’ve been properly educated and found a good path for themselves (as in no allowance till you hit 30 or something like that), and no decent person would use their wealth to hurt others (again, given that the society gradually conditions people to become decent). Obviously this would take time, since in today’s world people’s values are pretty screwed up.

Thoughts?