LET’S leave alone sacred cows—or let’s bash them. The aftermath of the recent financial meltdowns and social struggles in the US have caused seemingly undetectable changes in the ideological landscape. But one almost obvious direction is the nearly imperceptible latter-day campaign by the masters-that-be to discredit the once-booming subculture surrounding the cult of Ayn Rand.
In a recent Alternet.org article, titled How Ayn Rand Helped Turn the US Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation, Bruce Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite, explores and sums up how the author of Atlas Shrugged made “selfishness heroic and caring about others a weakness,” ultimately reviewing how Rand became a leading voice in America’s turn to the so-called Me Generation, an intellectual icon lionized and incapable of fault. And, so greed became a virtue, and vice was unselfishness, all this thanks to Rand. You’re free from responsibility for your actions because you’re just a cog in the wheel, or a stupid reader. What ever happened to personal agency?
But talking about fault, let’s talk about sex. What was quite titillating and apparently scandalous was Levine’s expose on Rand’s sexual life. To whip up interest for a subject matter best left for matters of the head, the Alternet.org story amazingly hits below the belt. It accuses Rand of being an alleged philanderer who fearlessly conjured a trysting schedule with an unhappily married follower almost half her age, and flouted the rendezvous openly among her group of devotees, the self-styled and ironically named Collective, which included among its members future US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, now removed from office due to the blues of Wall Street and perhaps his identification with Randian greed.
But using sex and the social construction of the “lofty moral standard” to discredit the dead and defenseless is old hat and boring. You can whip up any number of red herrings to get your foe out of the way without mentioning how many times she’s been lucky. It’s better to stick to arguments, and through mere intellectualization, remain elegant and above the fray.
Granted that, look into history and see why Rand reached apotheosis during the war with communism.
Aside from pinkie witch hunts and Sen. Joe McCarthy, the US needed new buzz words and a new celebrity who could be popular among the masses while holding court in the lofty marketplace of ideas. And they needed someone who could fight for the maintenance of the status quo. These they found in Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum (later changed to Ayn Rand), a pretty young thing who not only made smoking a cigarette look chic and harmless but who could outwit almost anyone in an argument. What was priceless was that she was a Jew born in Russia, that she suffered under Lenin’s persecution, and that she was exiled to the US. It helped, too, that she was a voluminous writer, although not a very talented one.
I don’t like Ayn Rand because she was not particularly original and was boring and too lengthy, in fact. All her books made the same tired point: To be greedy and to revel in it.
I don’t need anyone to convince me otherwise. I’m already there and I’m revelling in it, but my greed is different, almost enlightened.
All Rand’s ideas were rehashed from elsewhere. Like Apple founder Steve Jobs, she merely picked what was good for her and repackaged these in new cultural products and new labels that sold to common denominators. For example, in The Fountainhead, the protagonist is a visionary artist whose work is done out of love and commitment to an inspired vision and who refuses to change his art in order to make it more marketable to the community’s needs. The book can convince anyone, especially artists and the powerless, that here’s an author who understands your convictions. If you are young and impressionable, the book can seduce you by explaining how the world is and why. It can lure young minds by identifying with feelings of alienation from a conformist society. It tells you that being unique and idealistic is good and special. These alone aren’t such downers, but she doesn’t stop there.
She proceeds to definitively answer the readers’ every question regarding the struggle to be genuine in society. In the aftermath, everyone else is reduced to the dimensionality of the flat character or the zombie. Using drama and philosophical exhortation, she convinces the reader that these characters represent the real forces at play in the world and that they must be fought if real liberty is to prevail. Many fall under the spell of this paradigm of heroes and the demonzed, convinced that Rand’s world view truly represents all social reality. Her followers then feel empowered and self-appointed with their own set of pontifications.
Seeing the world this way doesn’t lend itself to making real connections, so her adherents have a nasty time getting out of their stupor and continue to return to their original source of inspiration.
But there’s a better path. Why can’t you use greed within the context of community preservation? It takes a village to preserve a way of life.
In order for there to be those who are rich, you need those who are poor. If altruism is the unselfish devotion to the needs of others, another form of greed can be selfish, too, about the needs of others because you need them in order to survive.
The financial meltdowns in the US wouldn’t have happened if greed was tempered with the knowledge that excessive profit can destroy the whole system, including the lives of the profiteers. In other words, it’s still good to be greedy but not to the point where you threaten the whole rat race.