In 2008, the vested interests of banking and corporate America were so afraid of what Barack Obama might do to regulate the markets - after the subprime scandal and the crash that came in its wake - that John Galt and Atlas Shrugged seemed like a clarion call. Far from the crash shaming the bankers and their apologists, the rise of the Occupy movement and other anti-capitalist and anti-globalist coalitions in its aftermath, caused the capitalist true believers to double down on the virtues of free markets, small government, and great individuals.
Hence the resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand and her works. As Amy Benfer, in a fine Mother Jones article entitled “And the Rand Played On” observed at the time:
Donald Trump cites The Fountainhead as one of the few works of fiction he admires. Other noted adherents include Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul - short for Randall, not in fact, as widely believed, named after Ayn Rand. Ted Cruz, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Judge Clarence Thomas, Sajid Javid, former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser, Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel, Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Apple’s Steve Jobs, John Mackey of the Whole Foods Market, and dozens of other Silicon Valley “Big cheeses” have all identified as Randians or Randites.Her [Rand's] particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies, and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed.
In fields as disparate as comic books and tennis, her name is revered by many, including Spiderman's Frank Miller and Steve Ditko, Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry - not to mention assembled media figures like Hunter S Thompson, Neil Peart of the band Rush, Magician Penn Jilette, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn, Amber Herd, Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, Jim Carey, Rob Lowe, Martina Navratilova, Billy Jean King, Chris Evert - it's really quite a list.
And the many Rand societies and foundations that flourish around the world are proof of the staying power of her ideas - love them or loathe them. For of course there are those who do loathe everything to do with her. Such a point of view often showing the kind of disdain that causes her adherence to cry “Snobbery!” and “Metropolitan elitism.” Though how a true follower of Rand can use elitism as an insult is hard to explain. Or “metropolitan” come to that. Rand adored big cities and claimed to have burst into tears when she first beheld the Manhattan Skyline.
Urban Dictionary has this definition of “Randite”
In general, academia would go along with that, relegating her to the status of little more than a freakish footnote in mainstream courses in philosophy, politics, and economics - which isn't to say that there aren't accredited, tenured and respected philosophers and others who do offer courses in Objectivism.Someone who thinks that Ayn Rand is not only a philosopher but has logical consistency. See also “Asshat”
Rand didn't call herself a libertarian - allying that in her mind with anarchy, which she despised - but she shared the essential libertarian instincts of distrusting any kind of legislation to control morality. While she claimed to be revolted by homosexuality, for example, she absolutely opposed the legislation that outlawed it. Most of her Republican fans - at the tea party end especially - have to square their admiration for Rand, not only with her laissez faire attitude to the bedroom, but more problematically for them, her absolutely committed atheism and hatred of religion and her resolute and oft-stated belief in the rights of women to terminate their pregnancies.
Her definition of freedom was this:
Rather pathetically, Ayn Rand - the lifelong enemy of big government subsidies and state handouts - spent her last years in entirely depending on welfare and Medicare. A six-foot dollar sign was placed by her coffin, evoking the final image of Atlas Shrugged, where Galt carves a giant dollar into the hillside.Freedom: noun. To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Well now, this podcast is supposed to be examining Greed and Avarice, not the complex, maddening and peculiar life and works of Ayn Rand! But she stands as a deeply influential flag bearer for classical liberalism taken to the edge, dragging the rational self-interest that figures like Adam Smith held to be the benevolent force that made markets work for the good of all, into something crueller and more brutal - an uncompromising belief in individualism, a contempt for altruism and a belief in Greed.
And what is the opposite of Greed? Generosity? Apathy? Maybe it's thrift, the great Victorian virtue, or sustainability, the great virtue of our time. What would the “Greed is good”-ers as say? They might say at the simplest and most obvious level, if we all patched and mended our clothes, recycled, reduced our upgrades on technology, cars, and every other damn thing - we'd imagine that we were helping save the world. But they would say we'd also be sending millions into unemployment around the world. Our participation in the greedy game of consumption keeps our fellow humans in work and prosperous, or at least on the path to prosperity.
And if the opposite of Greed is generosity, here Ayn Rand waxed charming on that subject:
There's a hardness there that reminds me of some of my Marxist friends at university who tried to persuade me that charity was repressive; that charity did the work of capitalism. So long as the poor and disenfranchised were lulled and patted by charity, the less likely they would be to rise up to free themselves, they argued. Charity and philanthropy are oppressive, therefore, and a hindrance to the necessary revolution.It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence. Such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
“That’s all very well” I used to wail, “but passing by on the other side when a fellow human is in pain or need!”
Both full on Randians and Marxists - such complete and incompatible opposites as they would believe themselves to be - share a similar sternly rational and deeply materialistic outlook. They are like denied that there is any morality other than the needs of the self - on one side - or of the state on the other. For Rand, self-Greed is good; for Marx, state-Greed is good. Above all, they share an absolute contempt for the woolly, soft, bleeding heart, hand ringing liberal, the progressive, the social Democrat, the compromiser, the pragmatist, the free thinker - and for that matter, the pious, charitable person of faith. I confess to belonging to that weedy, uncertain, and hapless breed of liberals, so despised by – well, by everyone at the moment.
Liberal intellectuals, liberal lovers, liberals of any kind are “elite loser hypocrites, driven by either guilt or some kind of virtue signalling urge to occupy a high moral ground.” Of course, we don't feel that, and we don't think that love, kindness charity - as Rand puts it - are such feeble human attributes as she and Marxists would have us believe. But there's no denying that our viewpoint is increasingly out of favour, derided and shut out.
But suppose Rand and her adherents are right. Suppose such wishy-washy progressive ideas as - diluting capitalism into a mixed economy, taxing the billionaires at higher rates and intervening to regulate the markets - suppose such policies really do shrink the economy and therefore functionally impoverish the majority: all for the price of hacking down the super-rich. Easy for us to dismiss their Greed and self-interest as bad, but suppose Rand was right and it's actually good?
Well, influential figures on the Left, like Thomas Piketty and Rutger Bregman don't believe that. But for every social Democrat economist, you can find an equally vocal free marketeer to disagree.
Which leaves us amateurs with a serious question to ask: are the compassion, empathy, sorrow, fellow-feeling, desire to sucker, heal and help others less fortunate than ourselves, either useless sticking plasters that cover the real systemic problems - as a communist would have us believe - or are they self-indulgent barriers to the success, achievement and wealth creation that will benefit all - as a Randian would believe?
Hmm, maybe it's just DNA. It seems that some research suggests there may indeed be a genetic basis for Greed. It is possible that people who have a shorter version of the so-called “ruthlessness” gene – AVPR1A - may behave more selfishly, At the Hebrew University in Israel. Professor Richard Epstein and his colleagues - according to a 2008 article in Nature Magazine - decided to look at AVPR1A because it is known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin – a hormone involved in altruism and pro-social behaviour. So, Greed could be a congenital suppression of altruism. Altruism itself is no more than a genetically evolved attribute, found, not just in homo sapiens, but in many species of socialising and colonising animals - from termites to vampire bats, dolphins, and buffalo. If you weren't born with that version of the ruthlessness gene, you can read Ayn Rand all day long and it won't convince you that Greed is good. If you do have it, you can read as much progressive literature or indeed as much New Testament as you like, and you'll never be altruistic.
I, and maybe you, sincerely don't believe that such reductionism tells the whole truth, which is not to say it won't play a part. As social animals, we tamp down the wilder fires of our lusts, drives and impulses all the time. There truly would be no such thing as society if we couldn't. But here's the thing: many thinking people would argue that all of these political and economic philosophies are utterly and fatally irrelevant. They are outdated, dangerous, and catastrophic. For neither Randianism nor Marxism nor bleeding heart, progressive liberalism in the middle, do anything to address the only Greed that counts: the Avarice that is destroying our planet day by day, and ensuring that children born roundabout now have a very reduced chance of being able to live at all in the future, let alone live with prosperity and individual autonomy.
This reading tells us we're all greedy and that our Greed is not good. Unless you're a cockroach, bacterium or hardy acacia, capable of weathering the coming apocalypse of desertification and doom, that is, in which case you are laughing!
We're screwed, so we might as well screw! It's lust next time. See you then. Wear a cap or condom!
