There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth.
—Joseph Brodsky
~
IN ATLAS SHRUGGED, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, the captains of industry, the world’s best and brightest, remove themselves from society, implementing a work stoppage of, it seems, everyone on earth worth his or her salt. Absent the creative energy of the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses and Esther Dysons who populate the novel—original working title: The Strike—the rest of sheeplike humanity founders.
Reading the book, we root for and identify with Rand’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, who is ultimately tapped to join this exclusive club of world-beaters. Here’s the best part: because the most venerated of all the insiders is John Galt, a wunderkind who emerges from a humble upbringing (not unlike Ayn Rand’s), we are reassured that membership to this secret society—unlike membership to, say, Skull & Bones—is not a birthright. Rand’s utopia is a meritocracy, one to which the highly capable Dagny—and, by extension, anyone who reads the book—belongs. Who is John Galt? John Galt is me! Isn’t that awesome?
As YA fiction, Atlas Shrugged succeeds beautifully; we want to be Dagny, to inhabit her world, in the same way we want to travel through tesseracts and play quidditch and go to prom with the sparkliest vampire. The novel’s not-that-novel concept is beyond simple—those who contribute something to society make the grade; those who don’t, don’t—and its black/white, with-us-or-against-us appeal is what makes it so popular with disaffected teenagers and other readers whose intellects are not yet fully formed.
Young adult fiction is more capable of positively informing the worldview of a young mind than so-called literary fiction, as Harper Lee well knows. But Atlas Shrugged is not To Kill a Mockingbird. As the inherent logic of quidditch breaks down upon closer examination, so does Rand’s faulty reasoning: what John Galt advocates is nothing more than social eugenics, a selfish system based less on meritocracy than cruelty, and one fueled by a profound lack of empathy. Some make the cut and others don’t; fine. But who gets to decide? Ayn Rand? Rand Paul? Paul Ryan? Ryan Gosling? And, more importantly, what criteria are these deciders using?
Ayn Rand’s thinking owes more to Leopold and Loeb—her contemporaries, whose murder trial took place two years before she emigrated to the United States—than any compassionate human being should be comfortable with. Atlas Shrugged should not form the basis of a political party, however fringe. Nor should it or its odious creator have inspired the worldview of a man a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Many ways of saying the same thing, namely: "Me me me me me."
In 2005, at the age of 35 (i.e., old enough to know better), Paul Ryan attended a meeting of the Atlas Society (!), at which he proudly announced, “I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.”
I grew up reading the Dungeon Masters Guide and the Monster Manual and the Players’ Handbook; I have not based my value systems on the writings of Gary Gygax (although, to be fair, Gygax’s worldview is superior to the chaotic evil of Atlas Shrugged). Nor do I still play Dungeons & Dragons. I’m savvy enough, as most readers (even young adult ones) are, to separate fact from fiction. Orcs and werewolves, wizards and zombies, Mrs. Whatsit and Aslan, Bella Swan and Dagny Taggart—all belong in the realm of make-believe.
That said, I get the Ayn attraction. The underlying principles of Randian objectivism dovetail nicely with the American don’t-tread-on-me value system. We like our heroes to be rugged individualists who pull themselves up by their bootstraps; Horatio Alger rags-to-riches successes; quiet, manly types raised in log cabins with three walls, who walked ten miles in the snow twice a day to go to school, who rose to the top by virtue of their own God-given talents and sheer determination—and not because their old man was a knight of the realm, or a landed aristocrat, or the governor of Michigan. We admire people like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth and Bill Gates, Jay Gatsby and (yes) John Galt.
We conveniently forget that this is mythology, that no one succeeds by him- or herself, that Horatio Alger stories are just that: stories. Rand’s objectivism is a binary “philosophy” that holds water only in summer movies based on comic books. Like summer movies based on comic books, it has a wide appeal, and like summer movies based on comic books, it fails to grasp the nuances of a real world that is all nuance.
This seems to be beyond the reckoning of Paul Ryan, who regards Ayn Rand in the same way tween girls do Taylor Lautner. (Really, Mitt, if the purpose of this pick was to suck up to the mega-rich, you should have just named a Koch Brother and eliminated the middle man; that’s what the efficiency experts at Bain Capital would have advised).
A closer look at Ryan’s famous budget, beloved document of the Tea Party and other myopic and/or selfish conservatives, reveals just how staunch a disciple of objectivism he is. As a host of professors, many of them Jesuit priests, from my alma mater, Georgetown University—not, it should be noted, a hotbed of liberal politics by any stretch of the imagination—explained in an open letter to the Congressman before his visit to the campus earlier this year: “[W]e would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few…..In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”
What would Jesus do? Not read Atlas Shrugged, for starters.
A bevy of respected academics from a highly-regarded university were sufficiently moved by Ryan’s inability to see the inherent flaws in his thinking that they saw fit to write a public letter walking him through it. And this buffoon is who Mitt Romney has tapped to be his second banana! If this is what passes for smart in the GOP, if this nincompoop is really the conservative fountainhead of Ideas, we are all doomed. Paul Ryan is not an intellectual; he’s a fanboy. But then, Romney the Latter Day Saint probably admires a guy who believes so passionately in the contents of a book that any rational human being can tell is pure fantasy. Next to the tale of Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni (that’s iMoron, if you’re into obvious anagrams), Rand’s bombastic ode to ruthless capitalism seems perfectly reasonable.
Romney should have just picked a Koch Brother and eliminated the middle man.
It’s a kind of perpetual adolescence we’re seeing here. I read Rand as a teenager and I remember thinking, OK, this is kind of interesting — because to a teenager the notion that a single person could make a difference in an entire society was compelling — but then (unlike Ryan and the other morons) I spent a little time thinking about it.
And then I stopped thinking about it, because even as a young person I realized it was utter nonsense. The wet dream of the vulgar solipsist.
Over the past few years I’ve been noticing something. People like Ryan and the Tea Baggers have no understanding of society (not to mention ecology in the largest sense). By this I don’t mean anything theoretical or emotional or even political (except in the largest sense).
They don’t seem to realize that human beings always live in societies, everywhere in the world and at all times in the past for which we have any evidence. This is irrefutable. It’s equally irrefutable (one only has to take Anthro 1) that every human society depends on division of labor, cooperation in a large subset of activities, and always has emergent properties. Competitions, status/power differences and rivalries, sure. It’s not hard to find them but they are not everywhere and they are at dramatically different levels from place to place.
Societies like those Rand imagined not only don’t exist, they cannot exist.
This astonishing disconnect has a lot of do with why these fucking morons say the moronic things they do. (And, by the way, to the extent that they do understand what social science has shown and continues to show, it explains why they hate it.)
So sayeth the professor. Thanks, Don, as always, for the thoughtful response.
“The wet dream of the vulgar solipsist.” Beautifully put.
And then there’s this:
http://exiledonline.com/paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls/
That’s the best title of any post of all time ever.
I wonder if Paul Ryan is a psychopath. Not in a violence-prone manner, but more generally. Many influential power- brokers in politics and industry exhibit the symptoms. Lack of empathy is one of the traits of this type of personality.
I myself do not wonder, because it surely is true.
But seriously, you raise a good point. Thanks for reading and commenting.
He’s trying to keep our Country out of the horrible debt we have gotten in, and has a 10 year plan that will do just that. He’s brilliant and a good Catholic. We all want to help the poor and the needy, but they should obey the law, that is for admittance. They do not have to obey wrong laws, such as abortion clinics. It says so in Galatians.
I hated Atlas Shrugged. I hate this election season.
Nice article.
Amazing to me that we have a President who went under a totally different name, has associations with known subversives and we still have not seen his college transcripts……and there are people questioning above? Wow… see what you want.
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Mainly, she believed in Capitalism, and that’s what Paul Ryan is speaking about. There are other non-Christian attitudes in her book. The Pope wants us to feed everyone and take them in, but Jesus said “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God, that which is God’s.” This means we can have capitalism, and the illegals can get in the damn line.
If you really think that the passage about “render unto Caesar” is an endorsement by Jesus of capitalism, then your grasp of theology is even more tenuous than your grasp of literature and economics.
When Jesus says that, what He means is that the money is temporal and therefore irrelevant; it’s the kindness in your heart that matters.
Also, your capitalist system depends very much on illegal labor, whether in the US or elsewhere. Unless the illegals are getting in the damn line to work, capitalism ceases to exist. (Look up what happened in Alabama when the idiots there actually kept the illegals out for a harvest season).
Paul Ryan has endorsed a racist, misogynist bigot to the highest office in the world. You know, just like Jesus would do.
Stop trying to put your words into mine. I know the saying from Jesus was the answer to if they should pay taxes for the census or not. His answer indicated they should pay their dues to the law. His world (and mine) was/is not of this world, but of a higher Kingdom. Capitalist system depends on free trade, without government interference. It does notinclude the use of illegals, you sound like Hillary making up things. It COULD, because there are corrupt persons in every area of life, but there are also good people. I’ve helped many illegals become legal after they worked for me, but one did not want to become legal because she said she got more out of being illegal, like $8,000 free service to have her baby born here, and free medical care for that daughter. Hillary is corrupt, a liar, and has even caused the deaths of certain people. I know of a secret service man whoworked near her. She was awful to the women Bill had affairs with calling them tramps and other names…she degrades women and doesn’t even pay them the same as men. She is a great actress. Trump marries them, and his wives and children all get along, and are very bright. Please, do not speak ill of Jesus, as He’s the Lord and Master of all, you shall see that one day if you are lucky. I’ve already had the near-death experience. You do not have the correct meaning of what Jesus said. Go read Mark 12.
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