This is a video I made for YouTube where I responded to Knowing Better’s video called “Redefining American Capitalism, Libertarianism and Ayn Rand”, from July 2021. I really like the videos Knowing Better produces, and I’ve made a couple of video responses. Here are the notes for this one (not precisely a transcript, but close):
I wanted to respond to this one because Ayn Rand and Libertarianism was a huge influence on me when I was an undergrad in the early 1980s. I studied economics, read the Austrians, got a fellowship to attend a summer program at the Foundation for Economic Education when it was in Irvington NY and Leonard Read was still alive. It sometimes surprises my students today, who often expect me to be a Marxist of some sort, that I have some background in the ideology that stands behind some of their political positions.
:50 The thing that really stands out to me is the seemingly random bundle of ideas and beliefs that seem to make up each "side" of this political choice we're faced with. We're sort-of expected not to look to closely at the bundle and question whether these things really go together? Support for choice with cracking down on "welfare moms" for example. Or support for "Life" with capital punishment. These are just a couple of obvious and maybe provocative examples; there are plenty of others. I think it's a product of a winner-take-all 2 party democratic system, where there's no real option of compromise or consensus.
It wasn't always this way -- but in the 70s we had a Republican administration that had inherited the bills for two expensive programs (the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty) and then was completely discredited by Watergate, replaced by a Democratic technocracy that failed to control stagflation, which finally led to Reagan. Ayn Rand was a symptom of this.
3:45 Alisa Rosenbaum becoming Ayn Rand and the early influences on her outlook are interesting. Anthem is actually a pretty good book, IMO. It's short and works as a sort-of romantic parable about a person breaking free of mental chains, which happened to be the chains of collectivism -- Ursula K. Le Guin returned to this theme in her longer novel, The Dispossessed.
I isn't really relevant to me whether or not Rand took uppers for her depression, chain-smoked, or drank too much coffee. Although it's funny that the cigarette later becomes a symbol for the fire of Prometheus in Atlas Shrugged. The romanticism already takes an anti-social and somewhat sociopathic turn in The Fountainhead, though. Howard Roark is an architect who apparently has no concern for his CUSTOMERS. How does this square with free market capitalism? The ARTIST's vision is so much purer that he can ignore the requests of the people who are PAYING him? What is the basis for this pure vision, in a materialist world?
It IS important to note that no real country acts like this -- nor do businesses. So this isn't really a story about government collectivism vs. capitalist individualism. When Roark says "nothing else matters", he's saying "I have to have my way 100% or I'll blow it up". Which he DOES. And don't even get me started on the weird love triangle and the sexual...oddness...that will continue into Atlas.
6:20 The fact that Rand testified before HUAC sort-of runs against her story that state power is bad, doesn't it? Use the power of the state to destroy the careers of people who think the wrong thing? Also, KB missed her debut novel, We the Living, which is a 1936 romance about post-revolutionary Russia that she said was the closest thing to an autobiography. It also has some sexual oddness.
7:14 The conflation of Democracy with Capitalism sort-of happens at this time though. At least for Americans. Other people elsewhere insist that their socialist or communist systems (to whatever degree they actually live up to those names) are better democracies or republics than the US. The point may be that, in spite of Rand and more serious authors like Friedrich Hayek or the Austrian Economists, any incorporation of social welfare programs is NOT a step along the Road to Serfdom.
11:30 The dystopian setup is necessary for the economic plot to make sense. YES! This is a feature of novels that we often miss: the setting is arbitrary but SEEMS INEVITABLE and can even seem like it is our world when it is not. We make a lot of assumptions when we're reading -- it's part of that "willing suspension of disbelief". KB is right that from Mexico's perspective, Taggart criminally mismanages the railroad. But the railroad BELONGS to Dagny, right? It doesn't travel over Mexican land? It doesn't offer services to Mexican people? Well, the Mexican land is worthless until the Taggart Line makes it valuable. And if the Mexicans are too stupid to build their own railroad, then they need to just shut up and be grateful. Racist much?
Rearden Metal is apparently so much better because why? It's a classic MacGuffin, and the plot moves to fast to allow us time to wonder HOW it was that only Hank Rearden was able to invent it. Because -- oh right. Men of the Mind.
17:15 Who is John Galt was a great pre-internet meme. Sort-of meaningless but with the appearance of deep significance. I like the description of this world as "Great Man Economics". It does sort-of reflect the ways history has traditionally been told. Funny that being a day-laborer is the lowest job these people can imagine SOME OF THE TIME, but at other moments, Rand praises the pride people take in a job well done, even if it's a humble job like cooking a meal. But pay no attention to this inconsistency! It certainly says nothing about Rand's mental state!
The "rapey" nature of the sex in all Rand's novels and the way Dagny repeatedly "levels-up" to a new alpha male (and is seen as improving HERSELF by doing so) is another HUGE inconsistency in Rand's story-world. But, as I said, the plot moves pretty fast so the reader doesn't have a lot of time to ponder on all this.
19:20 It's no joke that many people seem to understand contemporary issues through the lens of this fictional world Rand produced. I'm not 100% convinced of KB's argument that fiction "normalizes" bad behavior, but understanding big, remote issues like the 2008 financial crisis isn't that different from understanding the plots of a novel, if you were not a person who was directly involved by, say, losing your home. He's also spot on about the 60-page "John Galt Speech". Even when I was a Rand convert and in love with the book and the philosophy, I was NEVER able to read that through to the end.
20:48 Alan Greenspan, ironically, became Chairman of the FED! He wrote articles for Rand's Objectivist newsletter, several of which were republished in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ("Antitrust", "Gold and Economic Freedom", and "The Assault on Integrity"). So a guy who argued for a return to the gold standard was put in charge of the Fed. What could go wrong?
KB also makes a really strong point about the way Rand controls the parameters of her philosophy's vocabulary -- I think she gets away with this because her audience is to a great extent educated people to whom actual academic philosophy had ceased engaging with. This has partly to do with postmodernism and partly with the arrogance of academics.
Also, finally, I LOVE the little tag there, showing that when push came to shove, Rand embraced New Deal socialism!
25:58 Funny that KB thinks people being curious about her atheism in 1980 was unusual. Atheism is still a problem for most Americans today. Imagine how much more traction she would have got with conservatives, if she had toned down the criticism of religion?
But yeah, her philosophy is incredibly romantic and if you can assume that people have good intentions, then setting them free might not seem like a bad idea. But isn't there also a sort-of assumption of the invisible hand here? The idea that if everybody acts in their personal best interest, this will somehow add up to the best possible society?
28:14 Yeah, Smedley Butler's book, War is a Racket exposed that in the 1930s. Funny that Rand disliked the Libertarians, though. A bunch of hippies in California with a different set of priorities learned from her, though, how to claim that their perspectives and opinions were objective reality and if you disagreed with them you were irrational or a collectivist or both.
Also interesting that voting gets shifted to 18 so that the boomers can participate and then their participation results in NIXON's Republican administration establishing the EPA. This WAS seen by corporations as an inordinate amount of government interference, which played into Rand's hand a bit.
I'm going to skip past a bunch of the history in the middle,
Rand vs. Reagan. Yeah, this was when I was a fan. She was hanging onto that romanticism for dear life, but calling it Objectivism. It sort-of took an effort of will to ignore the inconsistencies. It was easier to do this, of course, if you were a privileged kid going to a university where you were often the smartest student in the room. I remember arguing with socialists in economics classes at UMass, but I always won. It wasn't until I got out into the world that I began to see that a lot of the time, people didn't have good intentions and all the people in charge of corporations I worked at were NOT heroic Men of the Mind. Not to mention that not everyone had all the access I had taken for granted. It almost seems like this Randian philosophy really can't stand the light of day. I guess it remains to be seen how it will do in the world of filter bubbles and alternate facts. In his book, Griftopia, Matt Taibi mentioned Rand while brutally taking down the "bloviating, arbitrary, self-important pseudo-intellectual, Greenspan". He said, “It is important to spend some time on the seriously demented early history of objectivism, because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in its sleep decades ago would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan, to provide virtually the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early twenty-first century.” (Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. 38)
If you liked this, you may also like this other response video I did to Knowing Better’s video called “Neoslavery”:
Response to "Redefining American Capitalism"