United Liberty

I read a passage from Jennifer Burns’ recent biography of Ayn Rand that really got my brain going. In the passage, Burns elaborates on the friendship between Rand and her conservative mentor Isabel Paterson:

Like the other libertarians Rand met during this time, Paterson drew from an older tradition to make her case for limited government and individualism. Spencer was one of her favorites, and her column brimmed with references to his ideas. She was also taken by the concept of the status society versus the contract society, an idea first set forth by the British jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine but given legs by Spencer and later Sumner. According to this theory, Western society had evolved from a feudal system, in which relationships between individuals were determined by their status, to societies in which relationships were determined by contract.

Perhaps this has been a concept in widespread use for a long time and I have simply caught up with it long after the fact, but I found it to be nevertheless very profound. The Soviet Union and other hard-line socialist states (such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela) have identified people by status. They are perpetually identified by their class, and thus the poor are serfs of the state, not by choice but because that is seemingly their fate.

In the West, however, people are not born with a fixed status. Society is governed by a contractual expectation that if you do x, you will receive y. This explains why those who are always seeking more in life achieve much, while those who resign themselves to status achieve very little.

(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.

Ralph Nader has apparently gone off and written a novel. The effort, called Only The Rich Can Save Us!, is an antithetical retort to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (which I’m sure more have read than ever voted for Nader in his myriad presidential efforts) depicting a group of rich celebrities who save the word by embracing altruism.

One of the best elements of a political satire is the creative effort of the author to mask who they are satirizing. Christopher Buckley, William F. Buckley’s son and the author of Thank You For Smoking!, was a master of this, as was Michael Crichton. The overtly political storyline of Revenge of the Sith led interviewers to ask if the character of Palpatine represents George W. Bush, as he had never overtly spelled it out. There is apparently no such subtlety in Nader’s work:

Even the character names Nader invents are mostly sophomoric wheezes on other notables. There is a bloated right-wing blabbermouth named Bush Bimbaugh, identified as the king of shout radio; another broadcaster is called Pawn Vanity. When there is nobody in particular to lampoon, the names are often tritely alliterative: Lancelot Lobo, Michelle Mirables, Roland Revelie, Wardman Wise. The chairman of the House Transportation Committee is Harry Horizon. There is a CEO named Cumbersome and a senator named Crabgrass, bringing to mind a postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress.

The names he came up to resemble the real political world sound like I’m tuning into Michael Savage’s radio show. Apparently writing is not what Nader was intended to do. It would be wise to suggest he stick to - well - whatever is he has been doing up to now.

It’s not often that I allow my personal life to seep into what I contribute to publications such as United Liberty, but I found what was occurring in my life has been relevant enough to mention here.

I have had a friend for many years who has lived quite an altruistic life. His choice of schools and jobs was never really motivated by what would help him succeed but instead by his desire to meet “awesome people.” He turned down opportunities if he didn’t think “awesome people” would be present. During one of the last times I spoke with him, he said he wasn’t going to move from his rather deplorable housing situation because he had to take care of people that mattered to him. It was strongly disputable whether the people he referenced would do the same for him.

The last time I spoke with him, he told me he had been fired from his job. He spoke of me “making my way in the world” as if I had somehow struck with some sort of luck that he hadn’t, when all I had done is try to advance myself instead of jumping around looking for nothing but cool people to meet.

Watching the Gary Cooper adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which, in my opinion, dwarfs Rand’s more well-known work Atlas Shrugged) clarified what the problem here was. My friend had been living for others completely, while I had been putting myself first. I was the selfish one yet I was the successful one.

This is not to say that a dose of altruism isn’t a bad thing, by any means. To have a successful relationship, for example, one must trust, be thoughtful and listen to their lover. However, that relationship is reciprocal. Without reciprocity, altruism can be self-destructive.

For the last week, Ayn Rand has been a hot topic at United Liberty as well as throughout the mainstream and underground media, as two biographies of the philosopher have been released. The twenty year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has also been a hot topic.

In a combination of the two areas of discussion, here is an invaluable nugget of intellectual discovery: Ayn Rand responding to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, in an audio commentary distributed by Pacifica Radio (which today distributes shows such as Democracy Now!).