by Ayn Rand
There is a 50/50 chance that Mitt Romney will be elected
president this November which is a reflection of how divided our nation remains at
this point in time. In an attempt to
increase his appeal with the so-called Conservative Base of the Republican
Party and tip the scales away from President Obama, he selected Congressman
Paul Ryan, a young, dynamic, Tea Party favorite to be his running mate. Mitt Romney’s biggest problem with his fellow
Republicans is that he governed the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the way a
“Blue Dog” Democrat might, after all, Obamacare is Romneycare’s disowned child. In order to prove that he now thinks his own
highly successful program was a terrible mistake, Governor Romney invited a
bona fide conservative to go on the Great American Road Trip with him. Vice presidents, historically, have been akin
to window display mannequins at urban department stores: they are designed to entice voters who might
otherwise sit an election out. (A
notable exception was Dick Cheney, but that’s a topic for another day.) As a pre-emptive strike, Governor Romney
stated that he, and not Congressman Ryan, will be setting the agenda; and that, if elected, Vice President Ryan
will do as he is told. In other words,
no worries about him “going rogue”.
By now, we pretty much know who Joe Biden is, so no
surprises there, although he does sometimes surprise his boss. Paul Ryan, on the other hand, while not the
wild card that Sarah Palin was four years ago, is still somewhat unknown and
therefore requires a closer look. One of
the best ways to gain insight into a person is to ask him or her what his or her favorite
book is. Required reading in Congressman
Ryan’s office is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, an immensely popular novel (published
in 1957) about a dystopian America where the big, mean, government has crushed
the entrepreneurial spirit of the pioneering free market capitalists who made this country great. Out of despair, these free market capitalists
have gone into self-imposed exile in their own private state where they wait
for the big, mean, government to beg them to come back and Save the Country. Meanwhile, the earnest corporate executives
who depended on these excellent entrepreneurs in order to keep their corporations
running felt as if they were whipping dead horses (bureaucrats) and being
forced to feed the lazy, unwashed masses.
Dagny Taggart, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, is
woman way ahead of her time: an unmarried,
but extremely beautiful (in a no-nonsense way), executive whose sole goal is
the economic success of her family’s railroad.
Unfortunately, her boss (who is also her brother) is an incompetent twit
who makes bad economic decisions at every possible opportunity, leaving Dagny
to swim upstream in her quest for profitability. Even worse than her worthless brother is the
blood-sucking and coercive government which takes the hard-earned profits of her
hard work to support people who are too lazy to get jobs and feed themselves. And then, suddenly, the men who do and make
the things which create the profits that the government steals disappear,
mysteriously. No entrepreneurs, no
profits, no internal revenue.
With the economy in cardiac arrest, Dagny and a very
attractive steel executive named Hank Reardon take to the roads to solve the
mystery of the disappearing rain-makers.
During their travels, they fall in love and this allows Ayn Rand to
discourse on her feelings about sex.
Reardon’s wife is a controlling shrew who prevents him from realizing
his potential (in every way). Before he
and Dagny move beyond a platonic relationship, they both must come to recognize
that their superior qualities as people will justify their physical union (which
will be as amazing as they are). Ms.
Rand was no prude and neither was she religious, so the fact that Hank Reardon
was married was not an issue because he went through an elaborate searching of
his conscience which enabled him to see that being with Dagny was in his own
self-interest and was therefore The Right Decision.
Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum) was born in St.
Petersburg, Russia, and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution which destroyed
her father’s business and caused the family to flee to Crimea. One benefit of the Revolution was that women
were allowed to attend university. After
returning from exile, Ms. Rand studied literature, philosophy, and cinema at
Petrograd State University. In 1925, she
obtained a visa to travel to the United States and immediately fell in love
with the Manhattan skyline. In order to
remain in the US, Ms. Rand traveled to Chicago to stay with relatives, who happened to own
a movie theater. Ms Rand passed many hours
watching movies and, apparently, was bitten by the movie bug because she next
traveled to Hollywood, California, to become a screenwriter.
Ayn Rand enjoyed some success as a screenwriter but it was
her novel The Fountainhead which catapulted her into the limelight. It is in this book that her notion of
“individualism” versus “collectivism” begins to take form. Ayn Rand believed that the individual was
much more important than the community, but that a community of fully realized
individuals, operating out of the purest of motives, would make an ideal society. If everyone feeds and takes care of himself,
without taking from his neighbor, the role of government is simply to make sure
that everyone is minding his own business while not being invaded by tyrants.
With Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s evolving political
philosophy emerged with more clarity. In
1962, she wrote:
Objectivism holds that:
- Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
- Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
- Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
- The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. (Copyright 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.)
Taking
this at face value, I can only conclude that Ayn Rand believed that humans, if
they put their minds to it, could be the excellent and moral individuals that
Objectivism requires. She wasn’t clear
about how we would get there or what we would do with those who would not or
could not evolve (which leaves me with an uneasy feeling). As a political philosophy, it makes good
fiction. As the basis for a running a
country, it is a house of cards which, when scattered by the prevailing winds,
could easily serve the needs of those with the will to power and the means to
seize it. (Perhaps Congressman Ryan
should read War and Peace or Generations of Winter?)
In Atlas
Shrugged, a popular phrase, “Who is John Galt?” is another way of saying
“who cares?” John Galt, it turns out, is
the brilliant engineer who discovered a way to create a motor using static
electricity in the air to produce electric current. His employer, representing the Communist or
collectivist mentality, decided that everyone in the company should benefit from
Galt’s innovation, so Galt quit in disgust, leaving his prototype behind
him, with no instructions. John Galt, recognizing that the country’s
ills stemmed from a government that espoused Karl Marx’s famous slogan: “ From
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” organized a
strike on the part of the makers and doers in society, leaving the mooching
masses and bureaucrats to fend for themselves.
Feds with Big Guns wanted to put a stop to this and they almost
succeeded in making a martyr of John Galt, but Dagny Taggart saved the day. Apparently, Ayn Rand viewed the government of
her adopted country as two steps away from Bolshevik-style communism, but given
her personal history, this is completely understandable.
So here
we are, 55 years after Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged, with a
troubled nation still leading an even more troubled world. Sea levels are rising, deserts are expanding,
populations are exploding, and rogue nations are working overtime to develop
their own arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, our own fragile government is
crippled by partisan warfare which serves only the needs of the political power
brokers (i.e., the political party organizations, corporate lobbyists, and the
richest one percent of the population who will be damned if they will pay
another dollar in taxes). Nobody in
Washington wants to say the dreaded “T-word” lest he or she be branded a
“Tax-and-Spend Liberal”; instead, a frightening number of our esteemed
representatives in Congress and the Senate are busy planning the funeral of the
United States of America which they believe will be killed by malignant budget
deficits (not to mention our huge debt to China for funding the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq). It all sounds
pretty hopeless. Except it isn’t. Unless we allow political forces to divide
and conquer us by discouraging us.
Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved
