Ayn Rand and the fallacy of the imagined possible Utopia
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Ayn Rand has become somewhat of a darling to the American political right over the years. Many conservatives – especially those of a libertarian persuasion – have found themselves drawn in by Rand’s explicit and unwavering support for the power of the free market and the righteousness of true individualism. I can see the attraction for them. Freedom is often just a buzzword today, but Rand took the idea of it extraordinarily seriously; so it’s no surprise that many conservatives find her works particularly infectious.
In many ways, a book like Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a very affirming novel for conservatives. The values it highlights – minimal government regulation, abolishing most taxation, the prominence of the individual over the collective – are practically the cornerstones of what they would profess to be their ideal world. However, while it’s true that the basic underpinnings of Rand’s political and economic beliefs can be found in Atlas Shrugged and her other works of fiction, it’s important to remember that they are, after all, only works of fiction.
Ayn Rand also wrote a great many essays and political tracts, and that these writings don’t get nearly as much attention is both curious and telling. In 1961, Rand published an essay titled America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business. It is not a lengthy work; but within it are a number of ideas and themes that I think demonstrate the significant deficiencies in Rand’s own personal political philosophy and also serve to highlight the major mistakes that today’s American conservatives make about the nature of the world we live in.
An obsession with rationality
There has always seemed to me to be an obsession in political philosophy with the “rational.” Most political theories, it seems, are based on the idea that humans have the capacity to use reason, and because of this we must look to what happens when reasonable people make rational choices in order to establish the norm for a political idea. For Rand, the rational person will always act in their own self-interest to attain their highest purpose in life which is happiness. This particular aspect of Rand’s philosophy is labeled as pure selfishness and dismissed out of hand, though that isn’t entirely justified. Rand isn’t necessarily saying, “be selfish at the cost of everyone else.” She arguing that if everyone always acted to achieve their highest purpose through rational action, we would have a fair system in place to decide who would earn the most success in life.
The problem with this is that fairness in the first place is an illusion. A piece of advice I got when I was very young, and which I give to people even now is this: life’s not fair, get used to it. Stop obsessing over fairness when it doesn’t exist in the real world. We see that everyday. Rand argues that laissez-faire capitalism is the best model because it will best reward those who act in the most rational way. It’s the most fair, but that would only be true of all people acted rationally all of the time. And they just don’t. To be fair, if Rand’s world existed – laissez-faire capitalism actualy might be the best system. But it doesn’t. Rand has constructed a fantasy world to match the one she built in Atlas Shrugged and implanted it onto her conception of what the word really is.
Her arguments make sense in the context of her utopia, but that doesn’t matter because that utopia cannot exist. People are not rational beings. They have a poor sense of their own abilities and almost always overestimate them which causes them to make bad decisions. In the storybook fantasy world of Atlas Shrugged, where every decision made by every character is decided upon by Rand herself, this system works perfectly. But all of us live in the real world, not in Rand’s fairy tale. It comes to my attention now that Paul Ryan may not understand this simple fact either, or that he thinks God play Rand’s part as creator but even that makes little sense because Rand was an atheist and and omniscient God strips the world of any conception of fairness anyway.
Deregulation doesn’t work because people won’t allow it too. We can see from experience that some regulation is essential. We need only look to the BP oil spill for evidence of that. But even under Rand’s definition of government power regulation of a company like BP would be necessary, by destroying what was not theirs they would have been acting illegally.
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If she did use the word “fair”, then let know in what what work?
When did Ayn Rand ever use the word “fair”?
Is she really called Ayn or were her parents dyslexic?…;-)
Sorry all but Atlas Shrugged was one of the first books I ever read and I loved it!!
Don’t be sorry. Atlas Shrugged is not a bad book, and Ayn Rand was certainly a brilliant woman. I’ll say this though, The Lord of the Rings is a great book too, but I don’t think there is a ring of power out there waiting to be found. Rand’s fantasies are no less contrived than Tolkien’s.
Excellent analysis! I would also add that another flaw is her vision of the world is that sometimes the absolute extension of the individual interests can be a polar opposite of what’s the best interests for the system.
Your statement “People are not rational beings” was also the fatal flaw when the application of Game Theory was the darling of the Military and think tanks like the Rand Corporation in the 50’s and early 60’s during the Cold War.
Theories were presented as logical rational steps, if we did this.. they would do that because of their self interests, etc..etc.
Again, the problem of “People are not rational beings” was the variable that could not be overlooked.
The idea of “rationality” is the bane of the political philosopher’s existence. We must dismiss it if we are to truly better understand the world.