I’m glad that one of us is having a philosophically serious go at that bizarre Randian diatribe of some days ago
My problem is that I so utterly despise Randian philosophy that I cannot make myself take it seriously. I am also put off by the vicious religiosity of so many Randian responses to any criticisms of their sacred texts.
But if Randians boom forth with their nonsense while the rest of us just suffer in silence, observers of the libertarian scene are liable to get the idea that Randian philosophy is a far more important part of the libertarian movement in general than it really is.
My take on the Randians is that, like the Marxists (“exploitation”, “labour”), they are definition hoppers. By “altruism” they don’t mean what the rest of us mean. If you explain to a Randian that you are an altruistic sort of a person from time to time, that you don’t always behave selfishly, etc. etc., he’ll tie himself into knots explaining that you are really being totally anti-altruistic and completely selfish, all the time, even if you have just rescued a complete stranger from drowning in a freezing cold lake at definite risk to your own life. Something to do with selfishly choosing to live by your own values, blah blah blah.
Meanwhile back in normal-land, altruism means what Adriana says it means, and capitalism is relentlessly altruistic. Tradesmen spend their entire working lives obsessing not just about what they would like to be doing all day long, but also about what their customers would most appreciate them doing, the trick for happy capitalist life being to find things to do that satisfy on both counts.
Which leads to the other great folly that I see embedded in Randianism, namely fixed sum economics. The world is now, as it always has been, full of the foolishness that you can only get rich and happy if other people are made to sacrifice their riches and happiness for your benefit. It’s not that Randians believe explicitly and self-consciously in fixed-sum economics, any more than most other people do. It’s merely that everything else they say is said as if they believed in fixed sum economics.
The proper way to deal with this falsehood is to deal with it. (See my Libertarian Alliance piece called The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy: How To Make Yourself Miserable About the Past, The Present and The Future of Mankind.)
Fail to deal with it and there are two characteristic ways in which the fixed quantity of happiness/wealth fallacy will deal with you.
People who are nice, and who don’t like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.
But then there is the screw-you-Jack response, which consists of saying that I want to be happy and goddammit I’ve a right to be happy! And that if that means others have be unhappy, then to hell with them!! And we see that all around us also, in the form of exuberantly busy capitalists who just want to get rich, and if that means they have to think of themselves as quasi-criminals, then so be it. They can live with it. With friends like these, capitalism doesn’t need enemies. (Screw-you-Jack capitalism is especially rampant in the financial world, where it takes a little bit of imagination to realise just how much good you are doing for the world by, e.g., placing a bet on the price of next year’s corn crop. It’s obvious that you do a bit of good for other people if you sell them newspapers and sweeties, but perhaps not quite so clear that you and your confreres are actually making modern agriculture possible if you trade in agricultural futures.)
These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other’s existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.
Randians don’t fit exactly into either of these boxes, because they actually come in both forms! Randians are anything but straightforward advocates of selfishness, even though they insist hysterically that they are. Atlas, the ultimate miserably self-sacrificial altruist who eventually can take it no longer and who shrugs, is one of their biggest heroes! And when Atlas does shrug, that also turns out to be partly a selfish act of self-liberation, but also partly a contribution to an altruistic movement of general social redemption.
But back in normal-land again (where “selfishness” is assumed to mean selfishness), the Randians, with their bellowings forth about the virtues of capitalism and of selfishness, are heard to be supporting screw-you-Jack capitalism, that is, they reinforce rather than challenge the idea that capitalism is rooted in an active hostility to – in an active determination to destroy – the happiness of the non-capitalist masses.
Which is just one of the reasons why the Randians must be regularly denounced by the rest of us.
