Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand. A philosopher and writer who developed the Objectivist school of thought

Ayn Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982), born in St. Petersburg, Russia, was a libertarian author. She was a fiscal conservative advocating free unregulated capitalism, who opposed collectivism, socialism, communism and fascism. However, on social issues, she was liberal. Ayn Rand was a big supporter of unlimited abortion-on-demand, and an atheist. She began her career in Hollywood, and has been described as a promoter of a philosophy known as Objectivism. Her best-known novels are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand asserted that selfishness was a virtue and altruism was wrongheaded (see also: Atheism and uncharitableness). She wrote a book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness.

Ayn Rand's novels often had political messages, such as laissez-faire capitalism with minimum government intervention (known by the name Minarchism) in business. Ayn Rand strongly objected to socialism and nationalism. Combined, more than twelve million copies of her two best-known novels have been sold in the U.S. alone. Despite her anti-Christian and liberal views on social issues, her opposition to state economic intervention has made her works and philosophy popular with the TEA Party movement. She was a heavy cigarette smoker until she was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 70, which cut her life short.

Early life

Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg Russia. Her first name "Ayn" rhymes with "mine", and she was born as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum. She was the first of three daughters to her parents Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna.

During the Bolshevik revolution, her family saw everything it had confiscated and they fled the country. They returned home after the revolution, the city having been renamed to Petrograd. As a young adult, she enrolled in Petrograd University, where she studied the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Nietzsche. Her first published work was an essay about Pola Negri, a Polish actress.

This early experience is reflected in Rand's first novel, "We The Living" whose protagonist is also a Russian girl whose family fled the revolution and returned to the renamed Petrograd and who then goes to university there. Rand herself said that "We The Living" was the closest she would ever come to writing an autobiography- though many of the book's details are fictional. Particularly, the book's protagonist is depicted as having an intensive love affair with a Communist who took an active part in the Revolution and who - surprisingly for a Rand book - is depicted as a positive and honorable character. Rand is not known to have had such a relationship in real life.

Philosophy

For a more detailed treatment, see Objectivism.

Ayn Rand attracted a following based on her opposition to collectivism, as articulated in her novels, particularly Atlas Shrugged. Her followers today tend to be libertarians and predominantly unmarried men, many of whom are drawn to a self-indulgent lifestyle consistent with Rand's philosophy. Rand often called herself a "radical for capitalism," by which she meant the pure, laissez-faire variety. Rand had very little in common with conservatives except for a mutual opposition to communism and socialism. Rand has also been accused of being a rape apologist for her rape scene in The Fountainhead.

Conservative Whittaker Chambers was a harsh critic of the caricatures in Ayn Rand's work, and how she implied that evil systems would collapse on their own without the need for good men to do anything. Edmund Burke famously stated, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," but one might conclude from Rand's work that being selfish and doing nothing is what good people should do, and then evil will fail all by itself. Whittaker Chambers observed in a book review he wrote for National Review in 1957, "Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the children of Darkness are utterly incompetent" (emphasis added).

Rand's most famous and powerful follower was Alan Greenspan (b. 1926), long-time head of the Federal Reserve System (1987–2006), though it is difficult to see manifestations of Rand's ideas in Greenspan's work.

Rand was a moral absolutist with the virtues of rationality and hard-work as central themes to her writing. However, conservatives reject Rand's elevation of reason over faith, sentiment, and tradition. Social conservatives in particular reject Rand's view that sexual fulfillment is an important part of life and not merely limited to procreation. Her views are seen as hedonistic, selfish, and sinful—she accepts the usage of birth control and abortion as proper means to an active sexual life without the consequences of child-rearing. In general Rand's view of the perfection of human character is at odds with the Christian view of man's essential sinfulness.

Rand's philosophy was anti-Christian to the point of even declaring that "faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason." While Rand advocates absolutes in the realm of ethics, her ethical principles are at odds with traditional Christianity. Her followers support an "absolute right" to abortion at any time during pregnancy, including partial-birth abortion. Ayn Rand's philosophy and followers also support a "right" to have same-sex marriage, and opposed California's Proposition 8 defining marriage as between one man and woman.

Rand was an atheist and opponent of traditional family values, who personally adhered more to Hollywood Values than conservative ones. She was a strident opponent of altruism. As far back as 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of Atlas Shrugged in National Review, and Dr. Gabe Vertin derided her "senseless self-aggrandizement."

Rand's selfish philosophy can pull young men away from the Bible and a coherent conservative viewpoint. While she deferred to the Austrian School of Economics, it was an example of being right for the wrong reason of selfishness. She did praise honest productive work, earning one's keep, engaging in honorable trade, stern moral dealings, self-reliance, and, in general, being a productive member of society, but she disagreed with what Alexander Hamilton and George Washington observed is an indispensable basis of political prosperity: religion.

In metaphysics and epistemology, Rand argued for a reality-based outlook as opposed to the subjectivism of progressive post-modern academia.

Rand can appeal to those conservatives who emphasize the Greco-Roman tradition of Western Civilization, especially Aristotle, while she disappoints those who give greater emphasis to the Judeo-Christian influence. She continues to attract converts, especially the young, to right-leaning Republican politics—including notable figures with more traditional outlooks.

Similarities to George Orwell

Similar to George Orwell, Rand had first-hand knowledge of living under a communist/socialist dictatorship. They both used their knowledge to paint vivid pictures of the specific ways in which these political philosophies break down. Orwell's focus was on control of the mind through the use of secret police forces and through the reworking of the language itself, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was about the horror of a functioning dictatorship; Rand focused on the corruption and vice that inevitably follows from a political philosophy that rewards failure, Rand also pinpointed the specific maneuverings that liberals use to avoid justice and justify their might makes right attitudes.

In Atlas Shrugged Rand put a great deal of emphasis on the use of informal procedures as a way to rob victims of any tools they might be able to use in their defense, production tribunals in the book met and had an informal discussion, so that the producers that they were strangling could not call any kind of precedent or procedure to rescue them from the abuse of power. In the crumbling socialist world of Atlas Shrugged the only defense was to agree with those in power. Orwell envisioned (and had seen) the same problem, a world in which the marketplace of ideas was as strangled as the marketplace of goods and services, only done in private and hellish jail cells.

Both of these authors had some very liberal characteristics, Orwell being a socialist himself and Ayn being an atheist and egoist but in spite of their liberal traits they couldn't help but look at the world that liberals created and decry how wicked it was. Author Christopher Hitchens, writing about Orwell, called this a "power of facing", where in Orwell was able to face the issues on his own side, a very important characteristic shared by many great academics and philosophers in the Christian tradition.

Quotes

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: The stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission – which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

"The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law. The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history."

"Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism."

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.” Atlas Shrugged, Francisco's "Money Speech."

Works

• We the Living
• Anthem
• The Fountainhead
• Atlas Shrugged
• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
• The Romantic Manifesto
• The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
• The Virtue of Selfishness

See also

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Big government Welfare state leads to Nanny state, leads to Police state
• Liberal totalitarianism
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell
• Mystery:Did George Orwell Become a Conservative?
• Animal Farm - anti-Stalinist "fairy story" by George Orwell
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Atheism and women

References

• Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), standard scholarly history, by a conservative historian. excerpt and text search
• Doherthy, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement. (2007), popular history.
• Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Ayn Rand Companion (1984) 130 pp. good starting point
• Heller, Ann C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made (2009)
• Kirsch, Adam. "Ayn Rand’s Revenge" New York Times Sunday Book review Nov. 1, 2009
• Uyl, Douglas J. Den, and Douglas B. Rasmussen, eds. The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) 235 pp.; dense essays by professional philosophers

External links

• Ayn Rand Institute
• ARI Watch — argues that the above misrepresents Ayn Rand.
• The Atlas Society — home of The Objectivist Center
• Objectivism Wiki