Epistemica

Ayn Rand infused her fiction with her objectivist philosophy. Much like her nonfiction, though, her novels are rife with misrepresentation and misunderstanding. Rand’s black-and-white fictional moral universes are populated by idealized heroes and grotesquely evil villains. Rand conceptualized socialism, liberalism, and altruism as extreme forms to glorify her philosophy of radical individualism. Whittaker Chamber’s 1957 review of Rand’s fiction noted “everything and everybody is either all good or all bad.” Each story is like a “War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” told in modern form, where “both sides are caricatures.” Like in her nonfiction, Rand’s novels never engage with actual socialist or liberal ideas on their own terms; instead, she invents rather absurd, villainous versions of those ideas and then dramatically defeats them. It’s a world of strawmen.

In The Fountainhead, Rand pits her idealized hero, architect Howard Roark, against the forces of collectivism and self-sacrifice personified by villain Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is a socialist-minded intellectual who manipulates public opinion and preaches altruism to gain power. Rand portrays Toohey as a conniving mastermind who openly admits that calls for “selfless” service are just a means to control and enslave others. Toohey monologues about his true motives as he describes step by step how encouraging self-sacrifice and mediocrity can break people’s spirit and make them obedient. He advises, “Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity – and the shrines are razed,” urging that making mediocrity into the standard will destroy greatness. He explicitly links altruism to power-lust, saying: “It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.” Toohey says, “I want power. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy… Universal slavery without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. The world of the future.” Such a laughable confession is intended to reveal the true beliefs of those who call for public service and the common good as nothing but a mask for tyranny and stagnation. No intellectual probing; no connecting the dots; just a flat revelation that reaffirms Rand’s selfish objectivism philosophy. No real-world advocates of charity or social welfare sound like Rand’s Ellsworth Toohey, who literally equates altruism with a plot to “kill man’s soul” and create “a world of obedience and unity” under a few manipulative elites. The character is an unsubtle caricature, attributing cartoonishly evil intentions to philosophies of selflessness or community.

Rand makes her “collectivist” characters straw men who literally revel in oppressing the individual to the point of utter absurdity when Toohey smugly explains that all moral ideals through history—religion, self-denial, world peace, what she calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat”—have simply been tricks to make people give up happiness and freedom so that “the few” like him can rule. Such extreme statements prompt readers to hate the very notion of altruism or egalitarianism, since in Rand’s universe, such ideals lead straight to totalitarian control.

Atlas Shrugged is no different. Here, Rand portrays an entire dystopian U.S. that collapses under the weight of socialist/collectivist policies, which are shown as both morally bankrupt and practically idiotic. The book’s antagonists include the bureaucrats, politicians, and social moochers whom Rand calls “looters.” They are painted as two-dimensional caricatures of liberals and communitarians. They spout platitudes about “the public good” and “need” while enacting corrupt regulations that strangle the productive geniuses in society.  There are no well-intentioned, reasonable reformers in Rand’s version of government. They are all power-hungry incompetents whose policies become apocalyptic. In the novel, the Twentieth Century Motor Company attempts to implement the ideal Marxist slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The result is a hellish scenario that reads like a cautionary fable against any form of welfare or income redistribution. The workers who are most able and productive are forced to work harder and longer for no extra reward, while everyone’s wages are doled out based on others’ needs. Rand describes how such a noble-sounding policy immediately bred corruption, misery and evil: “We had become beggars – rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning…his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’…so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm.” In Rand’s telling, the factory’s egalitarian experiment turns into a grotesque contest of pandering and self-destruction where workers deliberately underperform and hide their talents because showing ability only gets you punished with more work, and everyone vies to prove they are the most pitifully needy in order to get a bigger handout. Productivity plummets, innovation ceases, honest people give up, and the only winners are the most shameless moochers and liars. The factory and the town around it collapse under this system of enforced altruism, intended as a demonstration that socialism leads to societal death.

Just like in The Fountainhead, the causal relationship from socialism/altruism to societal ruin is not explained; it is only assumed. The looter class in Atlas Shrugged is completely ignorant and cartoonishly evil. They spout laughable slogans like “Nobody is ever really free,” or “Human ability is a dangerous thing,” and enact directives such as the infamous “Directive 10-289,” which freezes all employment and production (an absurdly oppressive law meant to satirize government regulation). Nowhere do we see a balanced argument for, say, modest taxation or social safety nets. In Rand’s universe, any government intervention is slippery sloped into totalitarian collectivism.

Rand’s strawmen approach to fiction is a reflection of her nonfiction. Here, Rand similarly misinterprets and exaggerates the ideas of altruism, socialism, and liberalism in order to refute them. A key target of Rand’s polemics is “altruist” ethics, which she consistently defines in absurdly extreme terms. According to Rand, altruism tells us “any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil”, so that “the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value”. In her view, altruism necessarily means total self-renunciation: “man’s life – self – is to be sacrificed whenever anyone else claims to need something,” an obviously grotesque distortion of what most people and philosophies mean by altruism. She sets up a false dichotomy where every form of caring for others becomes self-destructive folly. Altruism is generally understood as generosity or concern for others alongside one’s own interests rather than absolute abnegation. Yet Rand writes as if the world were uniformly preaching “sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial” (her words) and as if “everything enjoyable is considered depraved or sinful” by the code of altruism.

Strawman arguments are obviously fallacious and fail to support the conclusions they draw. But a major issue with Rand’s portrayals of altruism in her fiction and nonfiction is that there was already a massive amount of scholarly research and discussion on altruism in various contexts including morality, biology, and anthropology. In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, “communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” He also wrote, “The first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy,” and “Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience.” Rand had more than half a century of scholarship to engage with, including work from Pyotr Kropotkin and Edward Westermarck. Instead, she created a fictional world of strawmen; it is a world that many insecure, immortal, anti-intellectual individuals are drawing from even today to justify their own selfish posturing from a position of power.