I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand

My father, Sloan Wilson, wrote novels that would help define 1950s America. I loved and admired him, but the prospect of following in the footsteps of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place was like being expected to climb Mount Everest. My love of nature provided an alternative path. I would become an ecologist, spending my days researching plants and animals, which fascinated me since the summers I spent as a boy at Lake George and a magical boarding school in the Adirondack mountains.

Little did I know that by heading away from the madding crowd of humanity and my father’s vocation, I would end up writing a sequel to another famous novel of the 1950s—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But don’t get me wrong. I’m no Rand acolyte. I’m not here to praise her ideas but to bury them.

Even if you never read Atlas Shrugged or anything else by Rand, you probably know the names and what they stand for: The sanctity of the individual and the pursuit of self-interest as the highest moral ideal. Rand constructed an entire philosophy around this called Objectivism, which she claimed could be fully justified by rationality and science. But it was through fiction that she reached her largest audience, with Atlas Shrugged selling over 7 million copies and still widely read. She wisely noted that “Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.”

The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world, like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.

Whether conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits for its shareholders. In Ayn Rand’s fictional rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches. In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!

How did someone running away from his famous father into the woods end up in a position to critique Ayn Rand and neoliberal economics? By becoming an ecologist, I did not escape the kind of Individualism that pervaded Rand’s thinking. Instead, I encountered it in a different form: The dogma that organisms never evolve to behave “for the good of the group,” but only for the good of themselves and their selfish genes. This conclusion had been reached with such certainty when I entered graduate school in 1971 that only a fool would challenge it. “For the good of the group” thinking belonged on the same dust heap of history as a flat earth, Lamarckism, and Phlogiston theory.

Later, when I began to study topics such as religion from an evolutionary perspective, I discovered that Individualism pervaded all of the social sciences, not just economics. It was called Methodological Individualism, as the most practical way to study all aspects of human society, regardless of its philosophical underpinnings. In short, Individualism is a far bigger beast than Ayn Rand. She gave voice to it, but it would be just as strong if she never existed.

by David Sloan Wilson, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Nick Gaetano

[ed. See also: Ayn Rand Meets Her Match: David Sloan Wilson Fights Fiction with Fiction (Evonomics) - with excerpt.]