by Tom Pratt
Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six, she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction-writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering authors such as Walter Scott and (in 1918) Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired. During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and (in 1917) the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. This is the fateful hour of the arrival in reality of the Marxist slogan “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” an idea whose trail of blood and sorrow seems to be never ending. More on this later.
In order to escape the fighting, which she experienced firsthand when her family’s pharmacy was invaded and confiscated by soldiers of the revolution, her family fled to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory and the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy brought on periods of near-starvation. During this period she confirmed with a entry in her journal that she was an atheist.[9] When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be. When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. During this period her father was allowed to rebuild his business, but it was promptly confiscated again. His response was to declare himself “on strike” in refusal to work. His wife Anna seems to have been able to work odd jobs without interference and confiscations and the family managed to survive.
Graduating in 1924, Alissa experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the take-over of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her one great pleasure was Western films and plays. Long a movie fan, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screen-writing. In late 1925, she obtained permission to leave the USSR for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. Arriving in New York City in February 1926, she spent six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained extensions to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.[10] It was at this time she changed her name to Ayn Rand. Her Hollywood connections would prove invaluable over the years as the source of income and eventually real wealth.
Her first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936 following a long period of rejection by the publishing establishment in the US and Great Britain. This was the time period known as “the Red Decade” for intellectuals and various cultural elites of the period.[11] The book is her most autobiographical and details the dreary death-in-life of the Soviet system. This opinion was not welcomed in the age of the New Deal, whose leadership was enamored of the planned economy upheld in the myths of Soviet propaganda and much of the media in the West at the time. A shorter work, Anthem, an anti-collectivist yarn appeared in 1937. She followed this with The Fountainhead in 1943, after having been rejected by twelve publishers. The book became a bestseller by word of mouth, a positive review in the New York Times and positive comments about Rand herself from the respected Isabel Paterson, and succeeded in making Rand the champion of individualism among the cognocenti of the day and thousands of ordinary readers in years to follow. Atlas Shrugged was begun in 1946 and published in 1957 as a response to requests for a full rendering of her philosophy. It is generally accepted by reviewers and students of her work that this is her crowning achievement and contains the idealized essence of Objectivism concretized rather than discussed in the abstract. As such, it uses as a vehicle what has been labeled “an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex.”[12] This is an apt summary statement that defines the moral parameters of Rand’s intent in writing the novel. Consequently one should not be surprised to find epic-style speeches and idealized conversations that do not occur normally in every day interchanges. Strangely, many critics have seen fit to denigrate the writing style and storytelling for this use of the vehicle. It seems to us that once the purpose is understood, it is best to just jump on for the 1200 page ride.
In her own words Rand frankly states her straightforward philosophy: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”[13] She allowed that she owed nothing in her own theories to anyone but Aristotle, with whom she had many disagreements, but whose “definition of the laws of logic and of the means of human knowledge is so great an achievement that his errors are irrelevant by comparison.” In tribute to that sentiment each major section uses one of his assertions as a title—“Non-contradiction,” “Either-Or” and “A is A.” She was an atheist, though she was deeply influenced by Isabel Paterson (who did believe in God) a writer and critic who was flatly opposed to governmental usurpation of power in any area other than the prevention of force and fraud. Paterson opposed not only Rooseveltian New Deal power grabs but those of Hoover Republicans as well. Rand acknowledged the influence of Paterson in her life, though she later broke with her mentor.[14]
Rand confessed to a lifelong search for the “ideal man,” first projected heroically and stoically in The Fountainhead (Howard Roark) and elaborated on at length in the character of John Galt. Roark was a portrait of the man in himself, and Galt was an expansion of the mission of such a man who refused any longer to be used by the “looters” of business and government. She claimed to have met and married (1929) such a man in Frank O’Connor, to whom she was married for 50 years. That relationship was influenced by her relationship with another man, Nathaniel Branden,[15] with whom she had on ongoing relationship (after consent from the spouses of both parties) until 1968. She and O’Connor appeared to have mended their marriage after much conflict and O’Connor’s bouts with alcoholism subsided. He died in 1979. Rand followed him in death in 1982. She and O’Connor had no children. More on the subject of sexuality and the absence of children in Rand’s work later.
This is the human background to Atlas Shrugged. It is important for our subject because she contended that her philosophy was about how to live on earth. She was clear that this was all there was or is; so much the more therefore do we need to LIVE now. Her heroic characters continually affirm life and its best value (to them), happiness in productivity and the corollary of rejoicing in the productivity of others through fair trade-offs of one productive effort for the other. They pay a heavy price for their credo, however, for they suffer at the hands of those who would coerce them into a productivity that is put in the service of coercive societal demands. Consequently, the conflict seen in the mythological experiences of Atlas and Prometheus and others becomes the foil for stating and developing the morality to which her heroes aspire—for theirs is not an amoral world at all. To seek to coerce from another anything involuntary is an act of death-dealing. The first one to use force is the ultimate criminal, no matter what he uses as his justification or what the object of his coercive effort is. One might defend oneself or other innocents from this use, but one may never initiate the use of force. Fraud, of course, is a form of force through subterfuge and must be defended against. This is the legitimate exercise of governmental power—the prevention of fraud and force from damaging or taking the life of individuals and/or overwhelming societal structures. The underlying premise and conflict in Atlas Shrugged is that government has usurped the life and happiness of the individual by becoming itself the purveyor of fraud and force in the marketplace where man must be able to use the results of his own productivity to survive, to live. Moreover, that usurpation and reversal
of morality has been dressed in the garb of altruism (we will deal at some length with this concept later) with a view to enlisting the victims of its immorality in the overall fraudulent exercise. The conflict at the heart of the novel concerns the decision of one man to stop the process by cutting off its motive power, seen as the mind of man made free to invent and produce and enjoy the fruits of his labors. How he goes about this task is the plot line and the philosophical construct of Rand’s work.
The “happiness” to which she refers in our summary quotation above can only be achieved by the virtuous person. It cannot be found through living a dissolute life or living at the expense or for the happiness of others. It is most clearly derived from creative effort of the mind applied to the material world of living and working. One cannot expect another person to bring happiness to himself, and it is immoral to regard it as another’s duty to do so. The happiness experienced in community or fellowship of human beings is that of equals who derive pleasure from experiencing the excellence of others in their pursuit of happiness or in the exchange of one material good or service for another through voluntary association. One might also, even must, experience happiness through aspiration toward the seemingly unattainable, either in oneself or in others—that is, rather than envy and/or resentment of the success and achievement of others as against one’s own limitations, happiness is celebration of the exceptional creativity of the master at his or her craft and inspiration to one’s own efforts. “Ayn Rand’s heroes are larger-than-life projections of her ideals. They lead lives of virtue based on consistent personal convictions with a coherent philosophical system to guide them.”[16] This is what makes them truly happy.
At the most simple level happiness is due appreciation and celebration of the ability to cook a wonderful meal (even a roadside diner hamburger, as the philosopher Hugh Akston does in the novel) or show complete competence at some craft or other learned and productive activity or service. At the highest level it is the ability to enjoy the creative genius of the inventor or the philosopher or the musician or the railroad builder or the scientist or any other of the pursuits that raise the level of happiness of all those around them. The ones who create in this fashion are, of course, the heroes of Rand’s philosophy, and they comprise a small percentage of the general population. They should be admired and honored and imitated in their pure devotion to the productivity of the mind. Beyond that, as we shall further explore, all those who admire such heroes and emulate them in their own lives will also find happiness.
By contrast the immorality of the lazy and dissolute and misguided (who are both envious and unhappy) can be seen in the inability to discern the difference between creativity and its fruits and money. Money has meaning to Rand and her heroes only as it expresses what it takes to produce wealth. Otherwise it is merely paper with fraudulent printing on it. Not surprisingly her characters have no use for currency that is not backed by the actual value of gold, and wealth consists in the accumulation of the benefits of productive labor, not in the looting of others’ goods. One cannot truly enjoy the nature of money as a means of exchange unless productivity and creativity have invested it with meaning outside its intrinsic nature. One’s happiness is already achieved in the process of creating it, so dissipating it in slovenly activities such as casual sex and drunkenness or indulgent feasting and public spectacle actually defeat the goal of happiness that was achieved in the creation of wealth in the first place. Those who merely acquire money through various means of theft or fraudulent business or as a payoff for political favors and business cooperation in the destruction of competitors or as recipients of “benefits” not earned through labor and the application of the mind are the true “materialists,” for their acquired money has no connection to productivity.
For Rand and her heroes the source of wealth creation and happiness through productivity is the human mind. It is not merely labor at any level. It is the mind of man applied to that which becomes a resource in their hands as he or she mold and shape the formless into that which is useful and gratifying and beautiful to themselves and others. They do not do it “for others” but for the personal satisfaction it brings, and they are gratified when others appreciate and applaud and most of all understand what it took to create their masterpieces, small and great. This is the realm of the “spiritual,” and it cannot be divorced from the physical, for it cannot be experienced or expressed without the physical. To Randians the separation of soul from body, as the Enlightenment philosophers and theologians and scientists did, resulted in an immoral dichotomy. Man is not a “struggle between a corpse and a ghost,” for man without a soul or spirit or mind is nothing but a corpse, and the mind or soul without a body is simply a ghost. Such a condition is actually death, not life, and one cannot be moral and not affirm life itself. So one must seek out those who affirm life in order to have a community that is moral in its ethos and relationships.
The nature of this community is expressed in the confession at the heart of Rand’s philosophy: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” This is the Golden Rule of Rand’s philosophy; the code of Galt’s Gulch. The emphasis in her ideal is on the word “live.” It is irrational to believe that men and women will actually live “for the sake of” others without reciprocal arrangements or subterfuges that provide, in effect, hide-outs from their inconsistencies. If they are honestly satisfied and happy in some reciprocal relationship, it is because the thing in itself makes them happiest, and they have gladly consented to provide reciprocity in that which reinforces the happiness of the other. This cannot be said to be “living for the sake of” another. It is living out one’s own happiness in the joyful discovery of another’s happiness, which is itself not derived from using another person’s emotional capital.[17] If, on the other hand, one claims that the relationship is self-fulfilling while one is putting obligation upon the other for reciprocity, one is simply self-deceived and irrational. Worse, if one engages in relationships that supposedly flow from altruistic (more on this terminology later) motives and claims to be purely unselfish and even “sacrificial,” one destroys and denigrates the true humanity of the other person for one’s own gratification and happiness, thus irrationally annulling the very concept of sacrifice and altruism itself. Enslavement and degradation follow, especially as other parties size up the situation and play the game to their own advantage by sowing guilt and fear in the minds of the inattentive and unsuspecting. In Rand’s works this is the pathway of the “looters” and “moochers,” who people the halls of government and whose main henchmen are business men and women looking to capitalize on relationships at the expense of the merely creative and productive. Consequently, rational selfishness is the mark of moral people who examine life and its varied relationships with proper lenses in place and enter into relationships and transactions accordingly—that is, freely and with mutual benefit.
It should be clear from the foregoing that Rand struck a nerve when she advanced such radical thoughts without apology. The reason she was so straightforward, besides the sheer rational clarity with which she sought to think herself through to conclusions, is the discovery that is peculiar to her thought and most innovative of all. She believed, and her characters find themselves gradually being persuaded, that the world as we know it runs on the fuel of the guilty sufferings of the most creative and productive among us, whether they are the creator heroes or more ordinarily heroic and competent people, including mothers and cooks and managers and office assistants and track layers and station managers and clerks and anyone else who affirms the primacy of life. That is, because the game has been rigged by the looters and moochers and manipulators (those that some have called “political entrepreneurs”). They require a kind of consent to their activities that will give cover to their nefarious schemes—the masses of the public unthinkingly going along in mob-like subservience and obsequious abetting. That is why the phil
osophies that depend upon altruistic rationales are immoral and evil. They discovered that the cloak of supposed unselfishness and sacrifice “for the common good” could be made to fit all but the most relentlessly rational among us. Moreover, one must be virtually stony-hearted to resist the pleas of the “needy” (here we/she speak of an inner state that may or may not be matched by an outward economic condition) for compassion (a willingness to suspend rationality in the face of deserved consequences) or love (a thing being required by guilty persons in order to relieve the other of supposed guilt) or benevolence (an acquiescence in the act of charity that is actually succumbing to the use of force, in effect using pity to control others) or any of the many, many other uses of language that pervert the meaning of reality or seek to fake it in some way. So the fit and the able and the creative and productive and successful, in other words the competent, are made to feel unremitting guilt and are given the means of assuaging it by cooperating with their persecutors. Rand calls this the “sanction of the victims.”
John Galt vowed to put an end to this once and for all. And he does so for the moral reason that he is responsible for the products of his mind and the use to which they are put and will not have his creativity put to the service of evil. The mystery unfolds over nearly 700 pages as we follow the plot and become engrossed in the characterizations until John Galt vows, “I will stop the motor of the world.”