Guest Book Review: Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Reviewed by Ron Beasley
The picture on the left may represent the beginning of the deregulation frenzy that resulted in the current world wide economic disaster. It was taken in 1974 by David Hume Kennerly and pictured are President Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Rand’s husband Frank Conner and Greenspan’s mother Rose Goldsmith. The occasion was Alan Greenspan being sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The significance of the picture is that Ayn Rand is there next to her disciple Alan Greenspan but to understand the significance you must understand Rand herself and her philosophy. Anne C. Heller helps us do that with her excellent biography of Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
I recommend this book not because I agree with anything Ayn Rand stands for but because it’s a really good read and it’s necessary to understand Rand and undererstand how we arrived where we are today. Heller makes it clear that Rand and her life are much more interesting than any of the creations in her fiction and there are times you forget that you are not reading fiction. I am going to concentrate on Rand’s early life in this review – it’s important because narcissists and sociopaths like Rand are either created early if not born that way.
Alyssa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1905 of Jewish parents. While it’s often said that it was the Bolshevik revolution that was responsible for Rand’s philosophy and world view according to Heller the foundation for Rand’s philosophy predates the revolution.
When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children’s playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn’t have relinquished them in the first place. This may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call “altruism.” Her understanding of how power can be acquired by a pretense of loving kindness would grow only more acute with time.
Perhaps it’s little wonder, then, that from the age of four or five onward, Rand developed a keen sense that anything she liked had to be hers, not her mothers, the family’s, or society’s, an attitude that readers of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead will recognize in the perverse and complicated character of Dominique Francon. As a corollary, she claimed not to care about being approved of or accepted by her family and peers. Since she generally wasn’t accepted, the proud, intelligent child appears to have learned early to make a virtue of necessity. In her twenties and thirties, she would construct a universe of moral principles built largely on the scaffolding of some of these defensive childhood virtues.
The second influence in Rand’s life came when she read a serial in a French Boys magazine, The Mysterious Valley. It was there that Rand met Cyrus Vance, a handsome and heroic figure and in Rand’s eyes a hero in every way. Rand would spend the rest of her life looking for a Cyrus Vance and creating him in her fiction.
Rand herself was an elitist who lived on cigarettes, amphetamines and chocolate. Elitism was also what she was marketing in her novels. Her characters like Galt and Roark were unbelievable because they were little more than abstract principles personified. Her vision of capitalism was simple and had a grade school like quality to it.
But Rand has impacted us all and still does. The principal architect of our current economic crisis, Alan Greenspan was a disciple for most of his life but after looking at the havoc he had created had to recant. (Via Digby)
“I have found a flaw” in free market theory, Greenspan said under intense questioning by Representative Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the Government Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives. “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is,” Greenspan added. “But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
Pressed by Waxman, Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Greenspan said.
Waxman pushed the former Fed chief, who left office in 2006, to clarify his explanation.
“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
But she still has her followers in important places today like the Republican’s wonder boy, Congressman Paul Ryan.
It’s important to know what motivates the enemy and the Rand cultists are still with us. As Digby notes Rand’s followers are passing out free books. For that reason this is an important read for anyone concerned about how Ayn Rand is still an influence.
Ron Beasley is a veteran blogger who writes on Newshoggers. This review is cross posted from that site.
12 Responses to “Guest Book Review: Ayn Rand and the World She Made”
Interesting–perhaps she was just not a freak of nature, but a victim. Hmm.
Back in the 60s, my office mate at the university was stalked by a follower of AR. Her husband had to intervene. The stocky blonde young man always dressed in a brown suit and even had an overcoat, no doubt to distinguish him from the commoners. He had written a novel!
Personally, while usually willing to entertain debate with students on almost any subject, I refused to discuss AR. I pointed out that the proper pronunciation of her name was Hind End and that was it.
I may be way out of my league on this one, but is it possible that the fault is not so much in the faith of the system, but in the faith of men to correctly implement it. In the same way that socialism is great in theory, but never works in the real world.
Maybe Greenspan failed to realize that because men are fallible, even in their own greed, we need government regulations to keep those mistakes from causing catastrophic systematic failures.
Any system by which you expect people to live must take into account whether it can be implemented in the real world, by real people. Therefore, yes, it is the fault of the system and those who have faith in it.
Ayn Rand was powerful medicine to me when I was a teenager in school. Getting out into the real world worked to dispel much of that mythology though, and her continuing popularity in certain circles makes me wonder how connected those fans are to real life experience. As for Greenspan, my god… what can you say about a charlatan that was embraced by both parties and was so instrumental in taking our country to the cleaners? Btw Ron, you are absolutely right in referring to it as a cult.
Ah, Ayn Rand. What an interesting character. She was always an author whose stories I enjoyed immensely, although her philosophy was so, so antithetical to everything I believe. To me, her work comes off as young adult sci-fi, which is entirely engaging and can have interesting and insightful things to say about the world, but require an initial buy-in to a pseudo- or non-scientific basis. Makes for great story-telling, not so much for a philosophy around which to base the most complex economical structure in the world.
As for the vast majority of her followers — wow, what a bunch! It's like a bunch of adults who are still pissed off because they had to do more than their share of work in that high school project that one time 20 years ago. That's pretty much the audience she speaks to. The other funny thing about the Randians: how convinced they are that they are so awesome and super-special that John Galt would surely invite them to his city of bootstrap-weilding genius people. Most true geniuses in history wouldn't be caught dead in Galt's Gulch — I mean, can you imagine someone like Einstein or Da Vinci abandoning the rest of the world to go live with a bunch of self-inflated egomaniacs? Not so much.
Interesting comment roro. I think you may be on to something there. If there was a predominant genre represented in my (insatiable) reading habit during my teens, it was probably sci-fi. Maybe (as you suggest) Rand resonated in a similar way
Funny you should mention that – I'm a big Sci Fi fan ans when I was in college in the mid 60s I picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged which was in the Sci Fi section of my local book store. I started it but was unable to finish it.
@JSpencer and Ron Beasley — Yeah, Randian dystopia novels share a lot in common with SciFi novels. In almost all SciFi stuff, there's one premise that the reader must accept so that the rest of the story falls into place — once accepted, the plot development generally evolves from what real humans would do under such circumstances. A different planet, a new technology, etc.
I guess that where Rand falls flat for many of us (and shines for others) is that she starts with the premise that the vast majority of humanity is utterly useless, while a few shining stars are useful. Because her stories naturally set the reader up to identify closely with the “superhuman” who is useful, put in a world of useless dolts, it appeals most to those who distain and deny the humanity of those around them. Heck, I was there as a nerdy teenager myself. Most of us, however, grow out of this at about the same time that we realize that our parents are actually not as stupid as we thought they were when we were teens. Maturing to realize other people matter and are valuable corresponds strongly to realizing that Rand is full of it.
In other words: I find the typical Rand fan to be very analogous to the angsty, immature teen who is of higher-than-average intelligence but is under the mistaken impression that ze knows everything and has all the answers.
“It’s important to know what motivates the enemy and the Rand cultists are still with us.”
“The enemy”?? I am very familiar, and very much disagree, with Ayn Rand and her philosophies… but she is not my enemy. Nor is Alan Greenspan. Both are Americans with sociopolitical views very different than mine (and I assume yours). But, Mr Beasley, for you to call these Americans or those that argue their theories “the enemy” exemplifies much that is wrong… very wrong… with our political and social discourse today. Sounds horribly like a Cheney speech. No rightful place for it.
I read Rand in high school. No one in the outback where I lived knew how to pronounce Ayn. All I remember is a fabulously wealthy man 'warming' at the fire, a dress made of platinum to dress his woman in. I thought that was so cool, the act of warming this metal clothing first. Maybe I imagined that scene. It was sensual and unlike Rand's writings around that which were oddly lacking in even sci fi or mythic imagination, unlike her own horribly tangled personal relationship with a guy-wanna-be…. most of the kids who so said they adored her work, didnt understand it.
We were also reading Baldwin, the Fire Next Time, and also reading The Lonely Crowd and McLuhan. And Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Corso and Pound. These werent assigned in our high school; we found our way to them because they were on the Index or outlawed by someone somewhere. lol. We were marching in homemade civil rights marches and working for parity for naturalized citizens and refugees (our people)
We read like crazy, Ron, and I think it was sort of like pouring lots of words and ideas into a hopper, and only some things remained because they were either completely beautiful, like platinum dress, or else they were truly useful, highminded but deeply pragmatic.
There's a politics of the soul, a politic of the soul of the tribes. Rand was writing for reasons other than those. Remember too, in her time, in the olden days, a woman, a female paid attention to as a novelist, as a semiotic or political writer was a rare thing. Compare Pearl Buck, Muriel Rukheiser (sp), Peg Bracken, Ursula Le Guin (sp), Marianne Moore, von Franz, who all had their own takes on 'culture and politics' but werent taken up by politicos as some kind of scriptural writing.
just my .02
dr.e
I disagree! I have suffered – nearly everyone I know has suffered from the implementation of Rand's philosophy by Greenspan. Individuals that are responsible for my suffering are enemies.
There's a politics of the soul, a politic of the soul of the tribes. Rand was writing for reasons other than those.
Perhaps that is her real sin (as in missing the mark). She was anti-tribal and we are tribal creatures for better or worse. Or perhaps her tribe was just really small and exclusive.