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Friday
I recently read a Bulwark article on Ayn Rand that has me partially rethinking the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Given how much space I’ve given to bashing the noted libertarian thinker, both on this blog and in my book, for fairness sake I should present another perspective.
The Russian emigré looms large in the imaginations of tech bro billionaires Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen. While they regard themselves as Randian supermen (Übermenschen) like John Galt and Howard Roark, however, Paul Crider contends that they are closer to Rand’s villains.
He acknowledges that it makes sense that the billionaires would lionize Rand. As a “radical for capitalism,” she “glamorized the heroic industrialist who struggled to produce, invent, and achieve against the countervailing resentment of the mediocre masses and big government oppression.” Therefore Silicon Valley venture capitalists “like to think they are building—literally building—the future, something very much in line with Rand’s romantic vision of human triumph.”
In point of fact, however, they are “a grab-bag of Randian vices.”
Criber lays out the villainous resemblances:
–While a central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem, Musk is an attention-seeking bully who feels a constant need for self-validation.
–Musk and Thiel are both “looters”—the worst thing you can be in Rand’s eyes—who sponge off the government. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, with Tesla having remained solvent only thanks government assistance. Both Musk and Theil, furthermore, have major defense contracts (Space X, Palantir). And to make sure they get this government money, both men have poured millions into electing candidates who will do their bidding.
Crider notes that many of Rand’s villains—not her heroes—thrive off of this environment:
There is the steel magnate Orren Boyle who uses his government connections to nationalize Rearden Metal, the fictional material developed by one the novel’s central protagonists, Hank Rearden. James Taggart, the incompetent chief of Taggart Transcontinental, resents his capable sister who really runs the railroad; he spends his time peddling influence in policy circles. Or there is the perfectly named Wesley Mouch, a corporate-lobbyist-turned-bureaucrat who is Rand’s stand-in for the idea that industrial lobbying is inherently corrupt.
Taggart, in fact, sounds uncannily like Musk and his Doge team, who are tearing down institutions on the grounds of “waste, fraud, and abuse” while actually costing the government money in the process. For his part, Taggart contends that “destroying the achievements of others is the greatest work there is.”
“I’ve never felt better in my life!” he snapped, resuming his pacing. “You bet I’ve worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It’s above anything that grubbing mechanics, like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I can come and break it, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like breaking a spine!”
Crider points out that, unlike Musk and his ilk, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged “take no such pleasure in destruction or in the subjugation of others, even when it is necessary.” To dominate others, Crider notes,
is to sacrifice their rational interests and happiness for the sake of your own. To inflict cruelty for your own enjoyment is to obliterate the natural harmony of interests between individuals and engender hierarchies of domination and submission. Rand’s heroes wanted to engage with others as free and equal beings, trading value for value.
This is very different from Musk, Thiel and Andreesen. Musk is a white supremacist who boosts Nazis and others on his media platform while Thiel and Andreesen “have embraced the racist and monarchical ideas of the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.”
Crider acknowledges that the Silicon Valley oligarchs do share some political ideas with Rand, such as abolisihing various agencies like the Department of Education and USAID (which has saved millions of lives). But Rand, he says, “believed in America’s constitutional republican form of representative government, not monarchy or personalist rule à la Trump.”
To be sure, Crider faults Rand for giving her followers the impression that “John Galt-type heroes are plentiful at the commanding heights of the economy.” In doing so, she leaves her disciples
unprepared for a world in which so many of the world’s wealthiest capitalists used the “aristocracy of pull” to amass their wealth, and sought that wealth not as a byproduct of their creative energies but as a means to dominate others.
Crider adds that Rand also “failed to equip her followers to grapple with racism not from the underbelly of society but from its highest echelons.” While she herself decries racism as the “lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism,” many of her wealthy fans buy into the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, distinguishing between good blood and bad blood immigrants.
I love the “ironic twist” with which Crider ends the article. While our tech oligarchs correctly see themselves a characters “straight out of an Ayn Rand novel,” Crider repeats that it is the villains they resemble rather than the heroes. Our society’s best hope, he believes, lies not in our preening billionaires but “in the quiet competence and steely integrity of career civil servants who refuse to budge.” These have more in common with John Galt and Howard Roark than do the Elon Musks of the world.
A further thought: While I appreciate Crider’s defense of Rand, I still feel the author bears some responsibility for the excesses of her followers. In my book I note how a number of Republican lawmakers—most notably former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan–have used her to attack social welfare programs. Just as Hitler appropriated Nietzsche’s “Übermensch,” for his purposes, so have rightwing libertarians pointed to John Galt in support of their class privilege, labeling as looters beneficiaries of social entitlement programs. Rand’s one-dimensional characters make this easy to do.
My favorite quotation about Rand enthusiasts was penned by blogger John Rogers:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
This 14-year-old is invariably a boy longing to be tough enough to handle all the world is throwing at him. If he escapes the Rand orbit, it is by learning that empathy and compassion will get one further than self-interest.
