Ayn Rand’s heartless version of objectivism
March 23rd, 2008 by Erich ViethAt Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse puts Rand’s theory of objectivism under a bright analytical light and finds it wanting:
Since Objectivists reject all notions of a social safety net, it’s natural to ask what would happen to the poor and needy in an Objectivist society. This is Ayn Rand’s answer: “If you want to help them, you will not be stopped” (p.80).
This chilling response, which carries with it the unmistakable implication that she will not be participating in any such effort, illustrates Objectivist philosophy’s cruel, heartless ethic of social Darwinism. Its guiding principle is not “we’re all in this together”, but rather “every man for himself” - and whatever misery strikes the worthless and the inferior as a result ought not to trouble the brave, heroic, superior souls whom Rand imagines are mankind’s salvation. The parallels between this doctrine and the beliefs of tyrants throughout history should be too obvious to need pointing out.
Rand based many of her conclusions on her unwarranted belief in the allegedly perfect wisdom of the “free market,” an (unfortunately) common belief that I have repeatedly criticized at this site.
As a teenager, I was briefly enchanted with Rand’s writings. I pulled away, though, for many of the reasons Ebonmuse eloquently raises in his detailed post.
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
If you take the long view of human history, you’ll notice that social progress occurs in fits and starts. Civilization goes through cycles between “every man for himself” and “let’s spend all our resources supporting the weak”. Neither of these extremes lasts for long. Civilizations rise toward supporting and then fall from supporting. Then comes a period of adjustment (starvation, plague, invasions, etc) and it eventually rises again.
That’s how biological populations progress, as well. Evolution.
Rand’s quoted answer may have been intended in the colloquial mode, using the vernacular “you” for the global “one”. But the few of her novels that I’ve read certainly support the idea that she believed in survival of the fittest, and not creating social restraints to hobble the fittest.
See Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” or Kornbluths “The Marching Morons” for other Rand-contemporary views on superiority and the response of society.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Dan: one thing I found telling (and cited in my post) was a quote from Ayn Rand to the effect that, because the Native Americans didn’t hold to a capitalist conception of property rights, they therefore deserved no rights at all, and the Europeans were fully justified in doing anything they wanted to them. Yes, she really said that.
Some of her followers showed up and claimed I was misinterpreting the quote, though given the bluntness of her wording, I don’t think they had any basis to claim that. But what I found more amazing is that quite a few of them defended this stance and claimed that, yes, the conquistadors were acting rightly. One commenter said that the Native Americans, who had been living on that land for hundreds of generations and had built cities, empires and elaborate civilizations, were “squatters”.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:38 am
It might do us all good to realize—to remember, I should say—that what the Europeans did to the native Americans was possible because there was no constraint. Meaning no law to prevent it, nor enforcement of any such law that might have been. We forget that Law is an artifice. It may reflect our inclinations, moral or otherwise, but ultimately it is what we say it is and its force is only what we give it. There is no “natural” Law in that sense.
Rand was at the extreme end of a long line of people who thought there is a natural law (which for an atheist like Rand was kind of interesting) and that anything humans concocted as Law was necessarily arbitrary and usually error-filled. Yet she applied the similes and metaphors of human concoctions (like capitalism) to her own conception of that natural vision of Law all the time. She was a smart woman, but trapped in her own biases like so many others. She loathed and despised the soviet systems (from firsthand experience) and saw capitalism as the natural enemy of communism. Her allegiance blinded her to the fact that both are human constructs.
But we criticize Rand tend to suspect that there is a “natural” Law and that it is apposite to Rand’s. There is not. And what we conceive of today as good and proper in a hundred years may appear either barbaric or naive. We have to stop freewheeling conceptually and figure out what kind of Law we actually want and remind ourselves constantly that it is only an artifice.
In that respect Rand is instructive.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:25 am
“The parallels between this doctrine and the beliefs of tyrants throughout history should be too obvious to need pointing out.”
World across at present and also in history, it was communist government which were creating miseries for their people.
A free market will always find way to help those deserving needy !
March 25th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Greenstaya: Here is a source that says that 25,000 people starve to death every day. Most of these deaths are occurring in African and southern Asian countries, whose governments no longer have the power or interest to reach out an affect the lives of those people. The poor subsist in hopelessness until they die. It can be argued that these places of greatest tragedy are environments where the market is as “free” as it can get.
Yet you say that “a free market will always find a way to help those deserving needy.” I suppose that none of those people are “deserving?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation
March 26th, 2008 at 5:52 am
The ugly canard that needs to be dealt with is the notion that there is such a thing as a “free market”—there is not. Someone always controls the market, whether it be a government, an aristocracy, a consortium of business people, or a mafia boss. The sooner we get over this absurd idea, the sooner we can start coming to grips with what needs to be done to make the market work well enough to do what we want it to.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:04 am
You all don’t have the first clue what you are talking about when it comes to what Ayn Rand said. I mean, you are so far off, I don’t even know where to begin. You are stuck thinking about ideas in strict Marxist terms, and if an idea doesn’t match up with some Marxist construct in your database, you spit some Marxist tenet back out that has some of the same words, like a match on a Google search. Then you proceed to evaluate it by Marxist standards. How about a little original thinking?
Example: American Indians. They themselves claimed that they did not own the land because no one can own land. So how could Europeans “steal” it? Ownership a precondition of theft. And if the Europeans’ conception of property rights is “arbitrary” and “error-filled” because all systems of law are so, then on what basis do you give a free pass to the American Indians’? Your whole argument is self-contradictory.
And for the author here to compare Ayn Rand, a radical for individual rights, to tyrants throughout history, who have killed millions of people in the most “heartless” ways imaginable, is just beyond the pale. Name me a single dictator that is using Rand’s philosophy of individualism. None - because they all grab power and implement their schemes using the “we are all in this together” line, not “every man for himself.” They convince their subjects that they are fighting for the good of their society, and individual rights be damned.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:11 am
–Example: American Indians. They themselves claimed that they did not own the land because no one can own land. So how could Europeans “steal” it? Ownership a precondition of theft.–
Legally, you may be correct. Morally? Grow up. Two problems with this old canard. The first, not all Indians said this—in fact, most of the Eastern seaboard tribes vehemently claimed the land as theirs. While it is true they did not practice property rights the way Europeans did, they did nevertheless “sell” a lot of land to the settlers. The second thing is, they owned their Home—which happened to be the land they lived on. They did not have a concept of deeding in perpetuity the way Europeans did, but when you study the way the land was appropriated, it is obvious that the Indians had very concrete notions of possession and use.
Secondly, Marxism was wrong in many ways, but Marx’s critique of capitalism was dead on. Rand’s problem was that she decided that an artificial system of finance and commerce was somehow “natural” — she claimed that capitalism was the only natural and moral system. Considering the history of abuses to which capitalism can be credited, I question her concept of morality. However, I look only to her fiction as demonstration that her “individuals” practiced a species of self-vindication that borders on the criminal. The dictator gets voted into power, well, it’s not Henry Reardon’s fault, and if that’s what they want then he’ll just pick up his marbles on leave.
Rand’s basic problem was that she thought the ability to Play The Game was the dividing line between those who have a right to exist and those who just get left behind. That if one couldn’t “get with the program” then one’s destruction was only to be expected and not the fault of her true heroes.
One last thing—you need not be a Marxist to be critical of Rand. The system she championed was in place in the early 19th century and any perusal of Dickens will suffice to see what harm it caused, and there were people then who recognized it—and not a Marxist to be found.