Monthly Archives: April 2023

Ayn Rand is my hero, yet another student tells me during office hours. Her writings freed me. They taught me to rely on no one but myself.

As I look at the freshly scrubbed and very young face across my desk, I find myself wondering why Rands popularity among the young continues to grow. Thirty years after her death, her book sales still number in the hundreds of thousands annually having tripled since the 2008 economic meltdown. Among her devotees are highly influential celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Eva Mendes, and politicos, such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

The core of Rands philosophy which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature, the guiding principle by which one ought to live ones life. In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand put it this way:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rands book The Fountainhead is a rape in which she fought like an animal.)

WATCH: Why do the rich get richer? French economist Piketty takes on inequality in Capital

The fly in the ointment of Rands philosophical objectivism is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These prosocial tendencies were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against natural self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are diseases imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality. For example, in her journal entry dated May 9, 1934, Rand mused:

For instance, when discussing the social instinct does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question) does it mean that they have to remain so? If man started as a social animal isnt all progress and civilization directed toward making him an individual? Isnt that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isnt man the next step?

The hero of her most popular novel, Atlas Shrugged, personifies this highest of animals: John Galt is a ruthless captain of industry who struggles against stifling government regulations that stand in the way of commerce and profit. In a revolt, he and other captains of industry each close down production of their factories, bringing the world economy to its knees. You need us more than we need you is their message.

To many of Rands readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. After all, others are simply pursuing their own self-interest as well.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

Modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. In a recent Planet Money episode, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor of economics and former member of the Central Bank of England, laughed out loud when one of the hosts asked, Is that fair?

Economics is not about fairness, he said. Im not going there.

Economists alternately find alarming and amusing a large body of results from experimental studies showing that people dont behave according to the tenets of rational choice theory. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust than is predicted by the theory, and we retaliate vehemently when others behave selfishly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions.

So what if people behaved according to Rands philosophy of objectivism? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rands principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the companys leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business thats ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013:

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand.One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears circularsUnits were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival.

We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramores words:

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2009, Honduras experienced a coup dtat when the Honduran Army ousted President Manuel Zelaya on orders from the Honduran Supreme Court. What followed was succinctly summarized by Honduran attorney Oscar Cruz:

The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws the ZEDE comes in this context and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich.

As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras.The government wont fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

He described the living conditions this way:

On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel.In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top. As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. A resident pointed out a place for a new airport that could be the biggest in Central America, if only it could get built, but there is no private sector upside.

A trip to a local pizzeria was described this way:

We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist. Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard.

This is the inevitable outcome of unbridled self-interest set loose in unregulated markets.

Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

READ: Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless and more competitive than those who went extinct. But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive then and today.

Editors note: This post has been updated to correct a previous statement that Sears went bankrupt. It has been updated to reflect that the retailer appears to be heading towards bankruptcy, as the companys earnings and share prices plummet.

See original here:

Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

Ayn Rand on the set of The Today Show, 1961. Photo by Getty Images

By Dan FriedmanApril 4, 2023

Living upstate and away from her people at the onset of the pandemic, Alissa Quartfound community in a Passover zoom Seder. In the face of a contemporary plague, finding thoughtful company to discuss ancient and modern hardships was a natural move for a Jewish social justice crusader. After all, no one wants to face unforeseeable calamities alone.

In her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Quart lays bare the laughable linguistic roots of the term bootstrapped and its dangerous contemporary sociological ramifications. It may originally have been coined to show that, just like blowing your own sails, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps is actually impossible. But today the myth of the self-made man is twisted through modern society, feeding off the American Dream and scorning everything thats not self-reliance.

Part of the reason that Jews, more than any other ethnic group, continue to vote for Democrats, is that one of our decisive annual ceremonies is the Passover Seder. During the recounting of that story of the Exodus, Jews of all stripes are reminded that they began as slaves, became immigrants alongside a crowd of non-Jews (the Erev Rav), and narrowly escaped death in the wilderness only to be feared as foreigners in the Promised Land which their leader cannot enter because of his own hubris.

In terms of both theme and diet, Passover sets a tone for a community. It is no season to be puffed up about ones own singular achievement. Even the feast itself is a celebration of the group coming together to achieve a communal gathering. Traditionally, though presented as a group undertaking, the preparations are overshadowed by the noisy Seder itself. The feast, the cleaning of the home and the exorcism of any leavened products has been a task taken for granted and performed laboriously, by women.

These types of domestic labor along with other forms of privilege are exactly the things that Quart accuses Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson of erasing from their accounts of their own ideas of self reliance. She skewers their pomposity in ignoring the role of wealth, gender, race, inherited property and a whole cache of related opportunities. Indeed, she connects some compelling dots between the storytelling of the transcendentalists that she had so admired as an English major and the pernicious parable of the deserving rich.

These admired writers from history lying or providing cover for a broken society feels like a particular betrayal for Quart a poet, journalist and author of such books as Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Squeezed: Why Our Families Cant Afford America. As the executive director of the not-for-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, she is in particular touch with the types of erased, obscured and ignored stories of Americans living in precarity. And, in Bootstrapped, she explains the history of the American myth of self-reliance and how it endangers tens of millions of Americans today.

Her implication is that whatever the good intentions of people in the C-suite may be, they are fighting against a myth bent on rewarding the personally lucky and the historically privileged. Noting that over $625 million had been raised for health care through GoFundMe, Quart quotes its former CEO Rob Solomon saying that We werent ever set up to be a health-care company and we still are not.

However, in 2016, while he was still CEO, Solomon wrote about the mission of GoFundMe as a type of tikkun olam that each person should work towards making the lives of others and those of future generations better through acts of loving kindness. His motive seems genuine and aligned with GoFundMes mission, but Quarts point is that even the millions of dollar bills it raises are little more than Band-Aids. To her mind, and mine, it is an admission of gross social failure when tens of thousands of people in the richest society the world has ever known need to turn to a private fundraising company to raise cash for emergency medical procedures.

Fascinatingly, after Emerson and Thoreau, Quart presents Alisa Rosenbaum as the key proponent of American solipsism. Better known as Ayn Rand, Rosenbaums novels are the most widespread modern source of the brutal social myth that I am not my brothers keeper. It is fascinating to speculate on how a Russian-Jewish immigrant like her, whose success was so dependent on family, education and Hollywood networking was able to focus and amplify such a gospel of privilege.

It may be that it was precisely the elements of dependency that Rosenbaum wanted to escape. Perhaps for Rosenbaum and other self-proclaimed self-made Americans, shame and disgust come from the feeling of owing your success to the others who have built the roads, the lines of communication and the freedom for Jewish women to publish fiction.

In her bestselling novel The Fountainhead, Rosenbaum hides her name, heritage and gender as author. And, tellingly, her protagonist and stand-in Howard Roark is a healthy, young, white, male atheist with no minority affiliations. She even chooses a nom-de-plume that means nothing in Hebrew to demonstrate her absolute lack of connection to what comes before. Quart notes that, as Rosenbaums luck faded and she needed the help she had not while riding her wave of health and fortune, so in absolute contradiction to the values she spent her life peddling, Rand turned to Social Security there are freedom of information act documents that confirm she received the assistance.

Rands story is a particular case of disavowal, but Quart is thinking about the general psychological attraction of the bootstrapping myth to a broader audience and quotes theorist Jacqueline Rose saying that motherhood is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world. The myth of self-making is not only systemically misguided and injurious but also one that cuts at the heart of the family. Perhaps too, the strength of the myth of the Yiddishe Mama in the Ashkenazi community has inoculated American Jewry somewhat from the inherent social disavowal of the mother as part of the American Dream.

A significant part of the book, though, is not spent in critique. Quart is committed, both literarily and professionally, to describing how things can be made better. She goes deeply into the myth and the system it has helped to build, but she makes real concrete policy suggestions which lie beyond the scope of this essay, though readers should feel free to discuss their merits over the Seder Table. In Bootstrapped, Quart does not just ridicule the idea of raising a society up by its bootstraps but presents ways like cooperatives, collectives and mutual aid societies by which we might indeed raise our standard of living. After all, theres no point in critiquing Pharaoh if you dont actually have a plan of how to reach the promised land.

See the article here:

How Ayn Rand, Emerson and Thoreau perverted the American Dream