Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Although purportedly secular, the public educational system exhibits this same antirational bias. Rand suggested that modern education has internalized the “ideology of socialization (in a neo-fascist form)” which was “floating, by default, through the vacuum of our intellectual and cultural atmosphere.”78 Rand characterized modern educators as “the comprachicos” of the mind. Adopting this phrase from Hugo’s Man Who Laughs, Rand explains that the comprachicos bought and sold children. They made the children into physical monstrosities, degrading and deforming them to complete “the task of political suppression.”

  The comprachicos of the mind degrade and deform the child’s cognitive faculty toward the same end. From the very earliest moments of his education, the child is stunted by “militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual” pedagogical methods, through rote memorization, repetition, and concrete-bound association, rather than understanding, isolation of essentials, or conceptual integration. A premium is placed on social adaptation and adjustment, inculcating “the supremacy of the pack.” In Rand’s view, the Progressive nursery schools do not foster independent thinking. They attempt to socialize the child into conformity. And yet they defeat the very possibility of genuine social integration, since it is only “the thinking child” who is “fit for social relationships.” In elevating “the rule of mediocrity,” the system undermines the child’s intelligence and autonomy. Such pedagogical methods fuel fear and self-doubt and reproduce within education an “Establishment of Envy.” The child’s self-doubt pertains to a fundamental uncertainty over the efficacy of his mind and the rightness of his actions. The adults, teachers, and class “goons” in a child’s life contribute to his “moral emasculation.”79

  It must be remembered that Rand was intimately aware of Progressive “activity methods of teaching.” In her youth, at the university, she witnessed the disastrous results as the Petrograders of Narkompros introduced Deweyite pedagogy into class instruction. While much of the disarray was to be blamed on how poorly many instructors were oriented to the Progressive credo, Rand believed that these methods were fundamentally anti-conceptual. But she also credited herself with being able to rise above the chaos.

  Rand recognized, however, that not all children are as fortunate, especially those who are victimized by Progressive pedagogy from an early age. The child’s “early programming may become indelible at a certain point,” such that it becomes nearly impossible for the child to master the complex skills that his existence requires.80 As such, the child attempts to quell his own self-doubt by following the rituals and beliefs of the group as a guide to action. His loyalty is primarily to the group and to its members, not to ideas or to principles. The group binds all of its members “by the same concretes.”81 It is such anti-conceptual tribalism that serves as the psycho-epistemological root of pressure-group warfare, especially in its racist incarnations.

  Rand argued that the educational “system is self-perpetuating: it leads to many vicious circles.”82 As the student moves into the higher grades, his concrete-bound methods of functioning are matched by an equally concrete-bound, compartmentalized curriculum. The curriculum militates against system-building and the integration of knowledge.83 But the teachers are not much better off than the students, since they too, are “products of the same educational system in its earlier stages.”84 As Branden (1994) emphasizes, many of these teachers “lack either the self-esteem or the training or both to do their jobs properly. These are teachers who do not inspire but humiliate. They do not speak the language of courtesy and respect but of ridicule and sarcasm” (202).

  In the universities, the anti-cognitive, anti-conceptual methods are perpetuated.85 The major difference is that on this level of education, the students are spoon-fed theories of modern philosophy that provide an intellectual sanction for their own stunted cognitive skills. Rand saw the universities as the source and center of contemporary “philosophical corruption.”86 She explained: “Whether the theories of modern philosophy serve merely as a screen, a defense-mechanism, a rationalization of neurosis or are, in part, its cause—the fact remains that modern philosophy has destroyed the best in these students and fostered the worst.”87

  The universities continue the policy of educational fragmentation and intellectual disintegration, as each course requires the students to master a different language and method of thinking. With each subject tom from the larger context, the material that is taught in one class frequently contradicts the lessons of another (251).

  The educational and economic systems reinforce each others’ “moral nihilism … range-of-the-moment pragmatism … [and] anti-ideological ideology” (254).88 The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality serves a useful function in the maintenance of power relations on the structural level (Level 3). Those who function by means of disconnected concretes do not question the principle of government control, but only “the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character of government officials.”89 They accept as self-evident the premise that the government will solve social and economic problems, “somehow.” Rand writes: “As Nathaniel Branden pointed out in a lecture, ‘somehow’ always means ‘somebody.’”90

  The epistemological method of the modern statist focuses on “single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues,” militating against any consideration of basic principles or long-term consequences. The purpose of this anti-integrative, “verbal fog” is to obscure the predatory nature of state power.91 The ultimate product of American education was the “archetypical citizen of a mixed economy: the docile, pliable, moderate Milquetoast who never gets excited, never makes trouble, never cares too much, adjusts to anything and upholds nothing.”92

  Given this scathing attack on the staleness of contemporary American education and its relationship to the statist Establishment, it seemed odd that Rand would express an equally venomous hostility toward those who did get excited and did make trouble—the student rebels of the 1960s. Rand did not condemn the activists for their excitement; she believed that their goals were fundamentally misguided. Her analysis of the student movement is distinctive, both methodologically and historically.

  Rand criticized the student movement for its acceptance of Hegelian and Marxian theoretical constructs;93 however, Rand recognized that many students ran to the Marxist camp because it was more intellectual and systematized than its social science counterparts (N. Branden 1989, 47). She claimed that if the students had been offered the Wall Street Journal and Southern racism as examples of capitalist politics, they were correct to sense hypocrisy and to move further to the left.94 But the New Left did not embrace the more reputable Marxist synthesis, which had retained some respect for reason, science, and technology. The New Leftists rejected ideological labels, and proclaimed the supremacy of emotionalism and immediate action. Nourished on a poisonous diet of Kantianism, pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and existentialism, the New Left mounted an anti-ideological assault on a system that was fundamentally anti-ideological as well.95

  Methodologically, Rand’s critique of the New Left was profoundly dialectical. Rand refused to detach even a seemingly radical rebellion from the social totality in which it emerged. The New Left was as much an outgrowth of the antirational as the culture it had rejected. While the “hippies” were to be commended for their repudiation of the Establishment, they failed to recognize their own place in it. The students were the “most consistently docile” archetypes of the System they condemned. They had internalized every major premise of the liberal Establishment and every major tenet of the altruist morality. Their rebellion was a symptom of “cultural disintegration … bred not in the slums, but in the universities.” They were, by and large, “middle-class savages.”96

  For Rand, the counterculture, like the culture-at-large, had celebrated the superiority of faith, emotion, and instinct. In their indiscriminate, promiscuous, group sexual activity, and in their efforts to merge the self with the communal herd, there was but an
other manifestation of the cultural collectivism that had seeped into the pores of the social totality. Their use of drugs was an attempt to escape from their own unbearable inner lives, a “quest for a deliberately induced insanity” that invalidated their rational faculties.97 Rand proclaimed: “They are the distilled essence of the Establishment’s culture, they are the embodiment of its soul, they are the personified ideal of generations of crypto-Dionysians now leaping into the open.”98

  This characterization of the New Left counterculture as “crypto-Dionysian” gives us a further clue into Rand’s historical savvy. As I suggested in Chapter 1, Rand had witnessed the same emotionalist, orgiastic, Dionysian elements in the Russian Symbolist movement of the Silver Age. In their exaltation of the cultic loss of self, the Symbolists had internalized the flagrant mysticism and collectivism of the Russian cultural milieu. Despite a revolutionary aesthetic, the Symbolists reflected their Russian roots. In Rand’s view, the New Left was no different. It was a pure by-product of its cultural context.

  On Level 1 and Level 2 of her analysis of power relations, Rand had traced the broad effects of psychological, ethical, linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical practices on the autonomy and efficacy of the individual. Rand saw these factors in terms of their organic conjunction; each was both a precondition and a consequence of the other. Her dialectical sensibility helped her to project an all-encompassing, multilevel, non-Marxist, radical resolution. But Rand’s task was not complete. In challenging the implicit, antirational premises at work in modern culture, Rand mounted a simultaneous assault on the explicit antirational economic, social, and political structures and policies of the modern predatory state.

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  THE PREDATORY STATE

  On Level 3 of her analysis, Rand focused on the relations of power as mediated through statist structures and processes. She emphasized the role of the predatory state in perpetuating social dualism and fragmentation. She recognized that power relations at this level simultaneously incorporate and depend on the interpersonal and cultural conditions she explored on Levels 1 and 2.

  THE MIXED ECONOMY

  It must be remembered that Rand’s political theory was an attempt to enunciate and defend the underlying social principles of capitalism. The capitalist system, ideally understood, was based on the volitional exchange of values. Within such a system, “economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value” for their labors.1 In a pure capitalist system, Rand saw no inherent dualism between the state and the market. She rejected the anarchist resolution because it reified a dualism between state and market that was historically specific to statism. Individualist anarchists typically sought resolution by proposing the market’s absorption of all political functions.

  The anarchists were responding, no doubt, to the brutality of statism. Statism had created a violent antagonism between state and market. It sought to reconcile their opposition by the complete political absorption of the economic sphere. The organizing social principle of statism was “political power,” which “is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.” The trader deals in a market of values, but the statist deals in fear, authority, and obedience (48). In Rand’s view, statism concentrates extensive economic, political, and social controls in the state at the expense of individual rights. It is the negation of every rational and moral principle of social organization. It is a structural formation of legalized looting, “a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war, that leaves men no choice but to fight to seize power over one another.”2

  As a twentieth-century social critic, Rand witnessed some of the most flagrant state brutality in human history. In keeping with her revolt against formal dualism, Rand opposed both fascism and communism as “two variants of the same political system.” Despite their apparent ideological and sociological differences, both systems were fundamentally statist. They enslaved the poor and expropriated the rich “in favor of a ruling clique.” The struggle between fascists and communists and each of their political derivatives obscured the central issue of contemporary politics, the clash not between rich and poor, but between the individual and the state, between capitalism and statism.

  While Rand did not live to see the death of communism, she was convinced that the danger to the West lay within. For Rand, Soviet communism was morally, culturally, and economically bankrupt. The West’s social, economic, and political crises were not an outgrowth of external clashes with the Eastern bloc, but of its own internal contradictions, its attempt to combine elements of freedom and slavery under the rubric of the so-called, “mixed” economy. Rand argued: “A mixed economy is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements, which cannot remain stable, but must ultimately go one way or the other.”3

  Rand recognized that throughout history, all societies were “a kind of mixture,” since neither the principles of freedom nor those of slavery were “observed consistently.”4 Twentieth-century social formations differed only in their relative mixtures. Western economies were typically skewed toward capitalist principles of organization, while Eastern-bloc economies were predominantly statist in their orientation.

  In merging the fundamental principles of two opposing systems, the mixed economy leads to a complex interpenetration of social practices, making it extremely difficult to distinguish the “real producers of wealth” from the “pseudo-producers.” Rand argues that the genuine producers are “money-makers,” in the exalted sense her political theory champions. The money-makers constitute a very small minority of businessmen. They are innovative entrepreneurs and creators who translate their discoveries into material goods. By contrast, government officials and the vast majority of businessmen are pseudo-producers or “money-appropriators.” The money-appropriator is a looter. He is a parasite on the wealth created by others. He becomes rich not through a process of symmetrical trade, but “by means of legalized force,” through government favors, privileges, subsidies, and franchises.5 While the authentic producer earns money as a means to his distinctive ends, the pseudo-producer seeks social-metaphysical prestige by flaunting “his money in vulgar displays of ostentation.” For the money-appropriator, the accumulation of money is an end in itself, a gauge of his pseudo-self-esteem (7–8).

  Rand’s distinction between producers and pseudo-producers, moneymakers and money-appropriators, is consistent with the classical liberal and modern libertarian traditions. Such thinkers as Nock, Paterson, and Mises had proposed similar distinctions.6 Like her contemporaries, Rand attempted to trace historically those economic developments rooted in free production and exchange, and those rooted in government interventionism.7 She argued, however, that as each business became entangled in a network of government regulations and controls, the objective distinction between the earned and the unearned, between the money-makers and the money-appropriators was blurred. The “mixed economy” was “a society in the process of committing suicide.”8 Genuine producers were compelled to seek government assistance, participating in a political process that was destructive of their ultimate aims, while some pseudo-producers entered the realm of production to bolster their “public image” (New Intellectual, 48). As the economy muddled through one crisis after another, statist ideologists continued to ascribe to “capitalism” the abuses that were a direct outgrowth of government intervention.9

  ECONOMIC DISLOCATION

  Rand’s analysis of the political roots of economic crisis and dislocation is derived from the teachings of Austrian school theory, specifically the contributions of Ludwig von Mises. The modern Austrian school offered sophisticated theories of monopoly and the business cycle that focused on the interrelationships between state and market. While a full presentation of Austrian theory is beyond the scope of the current study, it is important to explore several key Austrian themes that Rand reiterated in her structural critique of statism.

  For Ran
d, capitalism was a historically emergent system that was hampered from its earliest moments by a variety of cultural forces. Attacked by both the feudal right and the socialist left, capitalism inherited mass poverty but laid the basis for a revolutionary and progressive transformation (N. Branden 1967T, lecture 14). It slowly eradicated the economic necessity for child labor and enabled women to earn their own living and to move away from the social drudgery and stagnation of family life.10

  And yet capitalism has been blamed for vast inequalities of wealth, the emergence of monopolies, and wild swings of inflation and unemployment. In Rand’s view, such chaotic social and economic tendencies were not an inexorable product of the free and unimpeded market. Following the Austrian theorists, Rand argued that these structural aberrations were an outgrowth of state intervention in the market process.

  The Objectivist view of the genesis of monopoly is a case in point. Alan Greenspan, drawing from Austrian theory, and writing for Objectivist periodicals, argues that the essential precondition for the establishment of any monopoly is a legal obstacle to market entry.11 The Austrians enumerate the various institutional mechanisms that cause monopolistic price and wage rigidities, structural unemployment, and the restriction of the free flow of labor and capital. These include governmental grants of franchise, license, and subsidy; compulsory cartellization; price controls; output quotas; certificates of convenience and necessity; compulsory unionization; product control through standards of quality and safety; tariffs; immigration restrictions; minimum wage laws; maximum hour laws; conscription; conservation laws; and the use of eminent domain. Even government prohibitions on narcotics, prostitution, and gambling engender monopolistic control of black markets.12