There’s a tendency in the world of ideas to divide thinkers into saints and witches. Some are singled out for a hagiographic treatment. When others discover issues with their thoughts or lives, the switch is flipped, and they become worthy of being burned. They’re either valorized or demonized. This has happened to countless intellectuals: Voltaire, Jefferson, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and thousands more.
It’s all quite infantile. The better approach is one born of maturity. Read everything and everyone, learn what you can, and toss out what’s wrong. Of course, this requires work and thought. In fact, the saint/witch dichotomy is merely a mask for laziness. It’s a way of finding a fast track to truth that dispenses with the arduous task of actual research.
Few have been victimized by this habit as much as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. People might encounter her work in high school and decide to adopt it as a personal credo, only to find out later in life that the world is more complicated than she describes, and they turn against her.
This is all unfortunate. She was a singularly insightful intellectual from whom there’s a vast amount to learn. And yes, she’s guilty, too, of ridiculous excesses, as brilliant minds are.
That said, there are precise contributions that she has made that make her writings an indispensable guide to understanding modern life, both the problems and many of the answers.
In one of my favorite sections, a leading industrial bureaucrat, Wesley Mouch, frustrated that production and inflation aren’t under control, issues an edict (Directive 10-289) to force everyone and everything this year to be exactly the same as last year. This included enough exceptions to win the loyalties of select industrialists who could later be blackmailed. Yep, it’s all a pretty good approximation.
In her book, Rand imagines that there’s a strike by the owners of capital who gather in a sanctuary that they’ve created to be safe from the crumbling that ensues throughout society. There, they share wisdom about freedom and rights and make plans to rebuild society after the final collapse.
The book contains passages of brilliance that take your breath away. It also has many pages that will have you rolling your eyes in frustration. Yes, it’s a mix of tremendous insight plus painful pedanticism. Because it includes both, it has uncritical champions on one side and vicious critics on the other. This is all rather silly. It’s a brilliant and flawed book in equal measure. Why can’t we live with that tension?
Actually, as you age and experience a wide enough range of professional life, you encounter envy everywhere. It isn’t rare. It’s lurking around every corner. With every good fortune, you'll recruit killers around you, people who smile to your face while waiting with a knife for you to turn your back.
I’m unaware of any author who has such a profound understanding of the personal and social evil of envy in the world. It’s odd because it’s hardly written about at all. This is a major reason that Rand is so valuable. Her works put a bead on the entire subject and help you prepare for something that you'll deal with throughout your entire life. I would say, in fact, that this feature of her work is the most profound and impactful.
No doubt that if she heard me say that, she would violently disagree. However, when we look at the behavior of her heroes in the book, each of them makes profound personal sacrifices to stand up for moral principles. Indeed, the ethical obligation to exercise painful degrees of moral courage is a major theme in her writings. Similarly, many of her most grotesque villains do only what’s in their short-term self-interest, regardless of the impact on others. It’s a bit of an odd feature of her writing that we can get a better picture of her true ethical opinions by the actions of her characters than her own attempt to codify an ethical system in her nonfiction work.
She was born in Russia and slated to live under the Bolsheviks. Instead, she plotted her way out with a clever scheme to visit the United States to study film. She defected, penniless. She lived for a time with relatives in Chicago but felt stifled, so she took a bus to Hollywood, where, not knowing anyone, she climbed her way up to become an important script writer. Then she started writing wonderful novels and eventually became a best-selling author and one of the biggest intellectual influencers of the century. That strikes me as a heroic life. People who want to deny her credit for her own achievements are mostly to be ranked among the envious.
These are good times to read and understand Rand. No need to valorize every aspect of her work, much less denounce her for inaccuracies, exaggerations, and excesses. Her aggressive atheism in particular strikes me as a pointless diversion—and she would certainly disagree with me in that judgment.
Even given all that, she has so much to offer. Contrary to the usual line that her writings are only compelling for kids in their late teens and early 20s, her contribution is best understood by mature thinkers who can take the good and the brilliant with the mistakes and missteps along the way. She deserves a high place in the canon of mighty literary contributions toward realistically understanding the world around us.
