Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism

[Mister Agenda]

"The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value."

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964

Look at what she practised. For Rand free love was a-ok, as long as she was snagging other women's partners. Once the men deserted her for other women then unfaithfulness became a bad thing again.

For years she railed against the idea of having the safety net of social security, not saying that people abusing it were wrong but that the whole system was stealing food out of the "makers'" mouths, yet when she fell on hard times, then social security suddenly became a-ok.

Even her fiction is impregnated with this immoral self regard. She talks about the "makers" in Atlas Shrugged as if those at the top running companies are the only ones doing any work or making anything of value (protip 1; in real life if you've made it to boardroom level, nine times out of ten your time working long hours is long past, if you ever had to. Protip 2; most of the "makers" she talks about would, in real life, have inherited their wealth never having to do anything to become rich) forgetting completely the fact that in an industrialised society most of the work done (and most of the value added to an economy) is done by blue collar industrial workers not top level management or owners. Her fiction implies that the top level people would do fine without anybody else around, forgetting about the farmers, the miners, loggers, the factory floor workers, servants and all the myriad other jobs that make the products and provide the services they use. To her mind anybody below very upper middle class was, at best, an automaton to be exploited until they gave out. Her philosophy pretty much demanded that the majority of people be kept in a stage of slavery or serfdom.

In some ways, she was an awful woman. However, her heroes largely didn't inherit their wealth, they created it. I'm not sure what many people having inherited their wealth has to do with Ayn Rand, she was not an admirer of inherited wealth. In her novel, blue collar workers are held in high regard, they are part of the revolution in Atlas Shrugged. Honest labor was a virtue in her book (literally).

I find it awkward to have to continually correct criticisms of her. Why is it so  hard to criticize her for what she actually said instead of a strawman notion about it? I realize not everyone has read her work, but I would think those who haven't would be a little more shy in expounding on it. I've read pretty much everything she's written and wound up not agreeing with her on fundamental issues. She was bitter and extreme and ironically formed a cult of personality around herself; she had a very unseemly at least half admiration for a killer, and didn't comprehend that the kind of people she was portraying as heroes had elements of sociopathy.

But she didn't regard 'the people at the top' as the only makers, didn't hold ordinary hard-working people as lowly or unnecessary or objects of exploitation. She saw productive work itself as a virtuous endeavor. She was for good wages and working conditions...but she thought that those arise naturally from increased productivity and voluntary negotiations between workers and owners. She wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957, when the economy was humming and wages were rising. Almost sixty years later we can see that it doesn't always play out that way. She was wrong, but she wasn't for exploiting the working class. Mao was wrong for encouraging a high birth rate that contributed to famine that led to millions of people starving to death; but if you said Mao encouraged people to have children so they could starve to death later, I would have to disagree. That's what this conversation is like to me. I'm not a big fan of Mao, but he did not set out to starve his own people to death. I'm not a big fan of Rand, but she did not regard workers as robots to be exploited, she thought they had a dignity that surpassed bureaucrats and those who lived off the wealth of their predecessors. But following her misguided suggested policies (to the very limited extend that they were followed) was not good for labor in the long run.