An interesting Ayn Rand piece

Here is a very interesting piece by Johann Hari on Ayn Rand. Hari is reviewing two new biographies out on her which I plan not to read, Goddess of the Market ,by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.

I have no intention of delving into Rand’s abhorrent philosophy. It’s enough to say, as Hari does, that it is more psychopathy than philosophy. Rand had some personal characteristics that sprang from a childhood where she was traumatized by Bolsheviks (her father, in frustration, went “on strike”). She viewed the world through the lens of that trauma. But nothing she put forth actually works. We don’t depend on supermen, free markets lead to disaster, no one is self-made, and people need and care for one another. She was wrong about everything.

Hari takes a stab at why she has such appeal in the United States.

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.

“All of us” is far more than the United States, where her philosophy enjoys a large following. Why the US?

The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

I think he’s getting close to it. Most of the Randites I have met have a strut about them, as in “I made it on my own. I am self-made”. It’s self-delusion – these are white guys in a society dominated by white guys, educated in public schools, probably attending land-grant colleges, using public utilities and the commons to their advantage. They don’t know what toughness is. Any minority member could tell them that making it means overcoming difficulties they never really faced.

My favorite line: Hari calls Rand a fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls.

Her disciple, Alan Greenspan, had her aboard at his swearing-in ceremony as he joined the Ford Administration. That was as close as Rand would ever come to the sort of reverence among the elite that she craved. She died alone, abandoned by all who knew her. While it is sad, it is appropriate for the promoter of a philosophy that says we need no one. She lived her dream.