United Liberty
Love and Hate for Ayn Rand
Mon, 12/28/2009 - 5:03pm | posted by Michael Orion Powell
(This article is an amended version of an earlier essay on Ayn Rand.)
I first heard about Ayn Rand earlier this year while reading a copy of the brilliant magazine Liberty. Curious about why libertarians were so ga-ga over this novelist, I picked up a copy of We the Living. From the plot of that book, I expected her to be a libertarian George Orwell, illustrating the horrors of dictatorship and tyranny by way of dramatization.
We the Living is a great book. I think it should be assigned reading for any course on communism. Rand did a brilliant job of illustrating how weak in authority the Soviets initially were and how their power eventually became omnipotent. There was even quite a bit of nostalgia for her mother country in many parts of the book, which clashes with the harsh criticisms of Russian society that Rand made in interviews.
Thinking I had found another great author, I plowed through Anthem, which detailed a collectivist dystopia in which all aspects of individualism had been wiped from existence. Another great book and far more compact than her others. I went through a little bit of The Early Ayn Rand, which publishes some of her earlier fiction work for magazines.
I picked up her most well known work, Atlas Shrugged, and was fairly capitivated for the first hundred or so pages. However, around the 700 mark, when John Galt is revealed, Ayn Rand took a turn for the insane and irrational. Through her characters, Rand preaches her irrational philosophy of Objectivism, calling all people who cloud their perceptions with optimism, denial and other fictions “evil.” For a woman who claimed to be an advocate of reason, her liberal use of “evil” throughout Atlas Shrugged to throw aside that which she didn’t approve of seemed quite irrational.
The flaws of Atlas Shrugged are outweighed by the profound sentiments of The Fountainhead. The dialogue befitted to the protagonist Howard Rourke has been in my mind on a recurring basis but has found its way into my advice for other people. When Howard Rourke to his unoriginal competitor Peter Keating points out that “before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the people,” Ayn Rand is explaining that one must put themselves above those who may or may not even care about them if they expect to succeed. Others will attract when they have become successful, but they will run away from those that are unsuccessful.
SELF INTEREST OR SELF-CENTERED
This is directed at those who admire and criticize Ayn Rand’s beliefs about people who stand on their own feet. Most who criticize Rand say she promoted selfishness, thereby greed, which is self-centered and anti-individual creativity, therefore, anti-Rand. Rand admired the creative individual, such as James Jerome Hill, on whom she was reputed to have based her character Dabney Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. If we look at Howard Roark’s summation to the jury, from Fountainhead, we do not see a self-centered individual destroying his work. Were he greedy, he would have simply accepted his payment. We see a self-interested, other- and outer-centered individual in love with his own dreams and creations, as one would love a spouse, child or family and refuse to allow them to be assaulted. Though love for anything spiritual may be missing, a great idea or vision also measures up to that which is spiritual, and that view is not inconsistent with Christianity. Claysamerica.com.
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