The Russian terrorist Vera Figner, a leader of the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, recalled how she lost respect for her father when he replied to a serious question: “I do not know.” This answer filled the child with “burning shame.” All important questions, Figner knew, have clear answers, and all reasonable people accept them.
Figner didn’t weigh pros and cons. No sooner did she hear some indubitably correct answer than she adopted it. Regardless of counterevidence, she never questioned a belief, just as one never doubts a mathematical proof. Figner was by no means unusual. This way of thinking—this certainty about being absolutely certain—characterized both the prerevolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia and, after the Bolshevik coup, official Soviet thought.
Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”
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When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. One can divide prerevolutionary Russian thought into two strongly opposed traditions: that of the radicals and that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and other great writers. The radical tradition featured ideologues and revolutionaries, including devoted terrorists like Figner and Sergey Nechaev; anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; populists Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; Marxists like Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin; and a host of tendentious literary critics.
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Rand’s reasoning was, in fact, remarkably sloppy. She regarded Aristotle as the greatest philosopher because he formulated the law of identity “A is A,” from which she claimed to derive a proof of radical individualism and the morality of selfishness. If A is A, then Man is Man and I am I, which (for Ran d) means that I owe nothing to anyone else. If Man is Man, then man must choose to survive, which means that it is irrational to let oneself be “looted” by unproductive people. If one is to survive, she reasoned, one’s ultimate value must be one’s own life. “The fact that a living entity is determines what it ought to do. So much for Hume’s question of how to derive ‘is’ from ‘ought.’” It is hard to say which is worse, Rand’s failure to understand the positions she dismissed or the shoddy logic she deployed in the name of infallible “reason.”
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Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”
Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”
Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
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I could not help recalling this famous phrase, which Rand must have known, when encountering her defense of essentially the same position. “Why must fiction represent things ‘as they might be and ought to be’?” she asked. Quoting from Atlas Shrugged—Rand had an annoying habit of quoting herself or her fictional heroes as authorities—she answered: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” In other words, she concluded, “Art is the technology of the soul.”
Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.
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Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.
Rand wrote as if poverty always resulted from failure of willpower, as if no one is born into it. She was right to reject the deterministic view that people are wholly the product of heredity and environment; choices that cannot be wholly explained by such factors help make us who we are. But it is no less mistaken to treat people as entirely self-made and utterly responsible for their condition.
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I was one of those "teenage boys"; although I was like 22 or so when I read Rand for the first time and hooked.
Then as time passed, I grew up and I understood how deluded I was. There are some very good self-reliance messages in her book a.k.a “pep” talk - I took those few hundred words and flushed out everything else from my life.
Ayn Rand gives a "certain" view of the world which is completely against reality. Reality is uncertain and to top it off - our biology doesn't even allow us to see much of reality in the world.
The answer is to be humble, keep learning and change your mind as our understanding of reality changes.
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