Ayn Rand: Unrealistic and Naive?
Yeah, right. Because "reality" and self-delusion were the epitome of what characterized Ayn Rand…
In a recent newsletter, investor Doug Casey proclaimed that “This is the problem with Ayn Rand’s writings. She saw businessmen as heroes for creating wealth. But in the real [emphasis added] world, businessmen don’t know anything about either economics or philosophy. Sad to say, they’re not heroes. Few care about anything but becoming personally wealthy.”
And: “Unlike Rand’s ideal heroes, business never [emphasis added] defends itself on a moral basis. In sordid reality [emphasis added], they’re archetypal whipped dogs who comply with everything the government dictates as long as they’re tossed fat bones.”
Hmm.
Wow.
To take these quotes in reverse order, Casey is a businessman. He sells investment advisement and makes investments for himself. So…is he a “whipped dog”? Does he “never” defend what he does on moral grounds? Does he sit around waiting for the State to toss him “fat bones”? What about his friends who are business people?
I doubt Casey would accept such a personal characterization.
And, of course, there is John Allison who worked at BB&T (Branch Banking and Trust) who required his senior people to read Atlas Shrugged and wrote The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope.
Sure. The number of business people who “know anything about either economics or philosophy” and who “defend” themselves “on a moral basis” is sadly small.
But this merely reflects the general abysmal ignorance of people in this country. And the more statist and collectivist societies in the rest of the world are even worse in this regard.
Regardless, methinks Casey has committed the same intellectual error as the statists and collectivists he opposes: overgeneralization designed to smear an entire class of people.
Good job…!
I have seen any number of investors rail against the immoral and unconstitutional actions of our government, especially in the realm of monetary policy.
Maybe I hallucinated those interviews…
And—do I really have to say this…?— Ayn Rand never claimed that all businessmen are flawless heroes or experts on morality and philosophy. “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” are rife with examples of “peddlers of pull” who get rich from cozying up to government bureaucrats. Indeed, the stark contrasts between these parasites and actually productive businessmen are central elements of her novels.
What Rand did say was that those in business improve the lives of countless individuals as they go about creating and producing and selling goods and services that did not and would not exist without their tireless efforts. The actions of successful businessmen—whether or not they are consciously aware of the moral and philosophical underpinnings of their endeavors—make them heroes (in any meaningful definition of that concept).
As the decades have ground on from one century to another, the disdain in which businessmen have been held has continued to ramp up (despite the sorry spectacle these days of even leftists touting the glories of “Big Pharma”). Schools, governments, arts, intellectuals, and on and on have attacked and demeaned them and all the good they have done for us…even while those identical critics use the very products produced by these “evil businessmen.”
“Persecution” of big business is—with the current whacked exception of Big Pharma—an understatement. As Rand said, business is “penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty…” (“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”)
As for the absence of businessmen from the arena of moral arguments, as Rand said:
As a group, businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield, disarmed by the deadly combination of altruism and Pragmatism. Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence. Abandoning the field of ideas to their enemies, they have been relying on lobbying, i.e., on private manipulations, on pull, on seeking momentary favors from government officials. Today, the last group one can expect to fight for capitalism is the capitalists. (“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”)
But Rand treated all businessmen as equivalent to John Galt?!?
In this particular area, Doug Casey is full of shit.
As Rand said, “Businessmen are the symbol of a free society—the symbol of America.” (“The Moratorium on Brains”) [emphasis added]
“I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win.” (John Galt, Atlas Shrugged)
I am SO sick of people—especially those titularly on the side of freedom; self-proclaimed “intellectuals” who will be long forgotten while Rand’s words live on—who present Straw Man arguments of what Ayn Rand said and believed while prattling on about “reality” as though they aren’t distorting the truth with their very words…
I get angrier the more I think about his. I am sick of it all. “Libertarians” who pretend that Rand never existed. “Freedom lovers” who act as though they were they first to point out X or Y or Z. “Intellectuals” who disparage Rand to puff up their own delusional sense of worth.
Fuck all these people. And the horses they wrote in on. The only naive and unrealistic people here are those who choose to disparage Rand’s ideas when they have no clue as to what she actually said, wrote, and believed.
Twitter
https://twitter.com/maddrus/with_replies
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Russell-Madden/e/B00C7XTUEK
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/1maxruss
Thank you for this, a refreshing article that accurately lays out key Objectivist principles intellectuals are hellbent on evading. I applaud the passion in your writing as well. Never lose it :)