Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Ayn Rand did not believe that concern for the wellbeing of others should limit personal liberty. With her striking short black hair, cold piercing gaze and ever-present cigarettes, she quickly attracted a dedicated following. Her individualist philosophy, which she named Objectivism, promoted what she called ‘the virtue of selfishness’. Like Crowley, she viewed her mission as the establishment of a new, post-Christian morality. She made this clear in a 1959 CBS television interview with Mike Wallace, who put it to her that ‘You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?’ Rand’s response was ‘Yes. I am the creator of a new code of morality.’

  Crowley, who was by then retired and living in a boarding house in Hastings, Sussex, was a fan. As he wrote in a 1947 letter, a few months before his death, ‘[Rand’s novel] The Fountainhead is one of the finest books I have ever read, and my friends in America insist on recognising me in the main character.’ In turn, Rand’s philosophy would inspire Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. LaVey was the author of The Satanic Bible, the most influential text in contemporary Satanism, which has sold over a million copies. LaVey’s Satanism was more goat-based than Objectivism, but he readily admitted that his religion was just ‘Ayn Rand, with trappings’.

  As well as Satanists, Rand also has admirers in the right-wing American Christian and business communities. Ronald Reagan was an admirer. Alan Greenspan, who would spend nineteen years as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member of her inner circle. The Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said in 2005 that ‘I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with [her longest and last novel] Atlas Shrugged.’

  This overlap between Rand’s admirers and Christian America can be hard to understand, but its roots may lie in the difference between American and European Christianity. During the twentieth century, church attendance declined dramatically across Europe, both in the Protestant north and the Catholic south. Going to church went from being the regular practice of the majority of the population to an unusual, niche interest for a small and ageing minority. European Christianity had always been the spiritual mirror of the restricting, hierarchical imperial system, so its twentieth-century decline at the epicentre of imperialism’s collapse isn’t surprising.

  American Christianity was different. It had evolved in a culture of largely European immigrants who possessed both the proactive spirit which caused them to journey to the other side of the world in search of a better life, and also a dislike of the constricting, controlling power structures of post-industrial revolution Europe. American Christianity had, by necessity, evolved into a faith that was more understanding about the desire for individual freedom. While the idea that a Christian could approve of Ayn Rand appears baffling in Europe, and remains suspicious to the majority of American Christians, there nevertheless exists a section of the American Christian community which can move from the Bible to Atlas Shrugged without a problem. Yet ‘the virtue of selfishness’ is clearly a different philosophy to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

  Towards the end of Crowley’s life he boiled down the philosophy of his religion Thelema into a clear, simple one-page document, known as Liber OZ. It consists of five short paragraphs, and begins: ‘Man has the right to live by his own law – to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will.’ All this sounds highly appealing. Crowley’s philosophy remains attractive as he runs through the next three paragraphs, which detail man’s right to eat, drink, dwell, move, think, speak, write, draw, dress and love as he will.

  Then we reach the fifth section, which bluntly states that ‘Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.’ Here you may pause and decide that Thelema isn’t quite as attractive as it first appears.

  This is an extreme example of the big problem with individualism, that of reconciling the contrasting desires of different people. One individual might wish to express their personal liberty in a way that prevents someone else from doing what they want to do. It’s all very well a Thelemite claiming the right to kill, but what if their victim doesn’t want to be killed?

  Crowley and Rand believed that the solution to a clash of competing liberties was the use of force. When someone was stopping you from doing what you wanted, then the strongest will must prevail. This was also the approach favoured by the Italian politician Benito Mussolini, a key architect of fascism.

  Mussolini was very open about his intent to force others to accept his will. ‘Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition,’ he said. ‘From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.’

  Three years after being elected to the position of prime minister, Mussolini called a halt to Italy’s burgeoning democracy and began his rule as a dictator. He presented his dictatorship as an alternative to liberal democracy and the communism of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party in Russia. He viewed democracy as weak and ineffective, an opinion shared by many after the repercussions of the 1929 Wall Street Crash sent economies around the world into deep depression, most notably Germany’s.

  Mussolini coined the word ‘fascism’ to describe his politics. The name came from the word fasces, which were a symbol of power in Imperial Rome. Fasces were a collection of thin sticks bound together into a rod that was considerably stronger than the sum of its parts. The nation would be stronger if its citizens were bound together in accord with the dictator’s will.

  Mussolini’s fascism partly inspired the rise of Adolf Hitler. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he attempted to transform the German economy through a totalitarian regime that exercised control over every aspect of the lives of its citizens. Totalitarian states may appear to be the antithesis of individualism, but that very much depends on whether or not you happen to be running them. In the eyes of Crowley or Rand, a leader such as Hitler was admirably exercising his individual will. This is another example of how what is observed is dependent on the position of the observer.

  Unfortunately for Hitler, he was not the only psychopath intent on absolute power. Joseph Stalin, who ruthlessly consolidated power in the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin, was also intent on Doing What He Wilt. Stalin and Hitler’s politics are considered to be opposing ideologies, but their two totalitarian states could be remarkably similar in practice. As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.

  The most important similarity between the two dictators was their willingness to kill thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of people. Both executed their own citizens not because of what they had done, but because of who they were. It was explained that some were killed for being Jewish or Slavic and some were killed for being bourgeoisie, but the ultimate reason for their deaths was that Russia and Germany had been rebuilt as monolithic states that obeyed the absolute will of Stalin or Hitler.

  When the day came for Stalin and Hitler to attempt to impose their will on each other, the result was as dark as any event in history. The clash of these two dictators was symbolically represented by the Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest single battle in the history of war. Russian determination to halt the German advance at Stalingrad ultimately turned the tide of the war on the eastern front and prevented the Nazis from reaching the Crimean oilfields, but about a million and a half people were killed in the process.

  Th
e clash between Hitler and Stalin takes the use of force to impose individual will to its logical conclusion, and shows it to be doomed and unconscionable. Thankfully, few people took individualism to such extreme lengths. People are generally practical. Even dedicated libertarians don’t argue for their right to drive on whichever side of the road they feel like, for example. Demanding the freedom to drive on both sides of the road would not be worth the trouble, especially for those with any emotional attachment to their lives, their car, or to any friends and family who might be travelling with them. Individualism is not usually the pursuit of total freedom, but a debate about how much personal liberty needs to be surrendered.

  Individualism can inspire people to remove themselves from tyranny, rather than inflict tyranny on others. When Rosa Parks decided she was not going to give up her seat, as others dictated that she should, on a racially segregated bus in Alabama in 1955, we see that individualism can be bound by an innate sense of morality, and that an individual act can crystallise a larger communal struggle.

  Nevertheless, Rand and her followers promoted complete fundamental selfishness as both rational and moral. The followers of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan recognised that selfishness was morally problematic and evil, but openly admitted that this was what they liked about it. Rand’s followers, in contrast, took the moral high ground and argued that it was only through dedicated self-interest that mankind could reach its full potential.

  A common analogy used to justify selfishness was the ‘invisible hand’ which, according to the great Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith, guided stock markets. This was a metaphor for the way in which the accumulation of all the individual, selfish actions in the market produced stability and benefited society. Another analogy was how the blind action of natural selection stabilised the larger ecosystem, especially using the gene-centred view of evolution developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the English biologist W.D. Hamilton and others. This view was popularised by the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. Dawkins’s title was another metaphor, for he did not believe that genes were consciously acting in a selfish way. Rather, blind acts of genetic replication inadvertently led to a stable and thriving ecosystem.

  In the early 1950s the American mathematician John Nash studied competitive, non-cooperative systems, a branch of mathematics called game theory. It modelled the decisions made by self-interested individuals who operated in an arena devoid of trust. Game theory demonstrated mathematically that the pursuit of self-interest was flawed. The invisible hand may guide and protect, but it could also damage. For example, if a fire broke out in a theatre, self-interest would compel individuals to rush for the exit and push aside people in their way. But if the whole audience did this, more people would be hurt than if everyone left calmly. Another example might be a stock-market panic, or a run on a bank.

  The manner in which individuals pursuing their own self-interest harm themselves is known, in economics, as the tragedy of the commons. This analogy dates back to pre-industrial England, when shepherds grazed their flock on shared or ‘common’ ground. Rationally, a shepherd would benefit most by allowing his sheep to eat as much of the grass on the common land as possible, before it was exhausted by the flocks of other shepherds. But the ultimate result of this logic would harm all shepherds, because the common land would be quickly grazed bare. The best long-term result would be to control the exploitation of the common ground in a sustainable way, as this would offer each shepherd benefits that were smaller in the short term but considerably larger over time. Without such a system in place, rational self-interest dictates that the shepherd must act in a way that ultimately hurts him. A more contemporary analogy would be a corporation that desires to reduce its tax liability and employee wage bill, even though such actions would damage the thriving middle class it needs to purchase its products.

  Like Rand’s ‘enlightened self-interest’ and Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, Crowley also had a moral justification for his philosophy. Do What Thou Wilt, he stressed, was very different to Do What Thou Like. This was due to the nature of what he called True Will. True Will was distinct from normal desires, and defined as action that was in harmony with the universe at large. It was action that occurred naturally and which was not undertaken for ‘lust of result’. As he saw it, by being ‘in harmony with the Movement of Things, thy will be part of, and therefore equal to, the Will of God … If every man and every woman did his and her will – the true will – there would be no clashing. “Every man and every woman is a star”, and each star moves in an appointed path without interference. There is plenty of room for all; it is only disorder that creates confusion.’

  This idea is essentially Daoist. Crowley took the ideas of the sixth-century BC Chinese writer Laozi and flavoured them with a Nietzschean, proto-fascist outlook that chimed with the early twentieth century. It also reflected Crowley’s own dark worldview, for there were reasons why the press dubbed him the ‘wickedest man in the world’. It was one thing for Crowley to call himself ‘The Beast’, but it’s something else when, as in his case, the person who originally gave him that nickname was his mother.

  Crowley’s shocking absence of compassion can be seen in his doomed 1905 attempt to scale the treacherous Himalayan peak Kangchenjunga, which is the third-highest mountain in the world. Crowley was a significant figure in the history of climbing, although his occult reputation overshadows his achievements in this field. After a troubled ascent with basic clothing and equipment and a good deal of discord between Crowley and the rest of his expedition, and after reaching a height of 6,500 metres above sea level in terrible conditions, a number of climbers and porters decided to turn back. As they descended the mountain one of the porters slipped and caused an avalanche. Four people were killed, despite the efforts of two survivors to dig them free.

  During all this drama Crowley remained in his tent at the camp above. He heard their cries, but chose not to respond. Going to assist his fellow climbers was, apparently, not an action that was in accordance with his True Will. Mountaineers need to be able to rely on their fellow climbers, so the idea that a colleague could ignore calls for help was considered especially unforgivable.

  Crowley’s opinion of compassion is abundantly clear in The Book of the Law. ‘We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not,’ he wrote. ‘Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.’ Crowley understood that pure individualism was incompatible with empathy. He was aristocratic in his politics and he would have identified more with the Long Island elite from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby than with the determined and wilful Gatsby himself. His view, as he so clearly wrote, was that ‘The slaves shall serve.’

  Those who study Crowley’s work argue that there is a great deal of value in his writings, as a scientific system for generating changes in an individual consciousness, provided you can get past the theatrical and proto-fascist trappings. Yet it was Crowley’s declaration of the predominance of the individual, rather than his insights into consciousness, that has been his real legacy. This was the reason why the BBC included him in their 2002 list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. This was why John Lennon included him on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and why he influenced bands including Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones.

  Crowley wanted to be remembered as the prophet of the great religion of his age. In the UK’s 2011 census, 184 people listed their religion as ‘Thelemite’. This should be seen in the context of a country where 176,632 people listed their religion as ‘Jedi’. The vast majority of the population, Crowley would have been crushed to learn, did not feel that becoming Thelemites was an action that was in accordance with their True Will.

  Despite how Crowley and Rand are now viewed, their promotion of fundamentalis
t individualism had a major impact on the twentieth century. The disappearance of emperors and the omphalos they offered had left us with a mass of competing perspectives. Cubists such as Picasso and physicists like Einstein may have been able to navigate such a world, but most people found it difficult. It was easier to make your individual self the focus of your worldview, especially as this could have short-term advantages. In such circumstances, the problems with individualism could be overlooked. So could questions about what an ‘individual’ actually was.

  Crowley and Rand assumed that an individual was a self-contained, rational agent with free will. The true definition turned out to be considerably messier.

  Untitled photomontage by an unknown German artist, c.1910 (adoc-photos/Corbis)

  FIVE: ID

  Under the paving stones, the beach

  Something remarkable happened during the May 1913 Parisian premiere of The Rite of Spring, a modernist ballet scored by the then relatively unknown Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.