The Age of Rand: Imagining
An Objectivist Future World

By Frederick Cookinham

"Do I think that Objectivism will be the philosophy of the future? I would say yes, but "-Ayn Rand to Playboy Magazine, 1964.

"My views will probably be the norm in the future, but not right now."-Ayn Rand to Johnny Carson, 1967.

Will they? The Age of Rand describes what Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, will mean in practice-for good and ill. Rand expressed her controversial ideas in her best-selling novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Every year, more commentators debate those ideas, often heatedly.

Frederick Cookinham asks questions no author has asked before:

Would Objectivists destroy the environment in favor of rampant development?
Why will Objectivist civilization be built on the oceans and in space?
Is Objectivism a "Nietzschean Superman" philosophy?

Ayn Rand often said, "Check your premises, and watch your implications!" Explore, in The Age of Rand, the astounding implications of this fast-growing and provocative new system of ideas. Some philosophy will dominate this new century-be prepared if it turns out to be Ayn Rand's.

"Frederick Cookinham has written something of great worth to thousands who have been affected by Rand's work."-Andrea Millen Rich, Laissez Faire Books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 2, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595798544

Frederick Cookinham

Frederick Cookinham, 62, is the author of THE AGE OF RAND: IMAGINING AN OBJECTIVIST FUTURE WORLD, 2005. His New York walking tours can be found at www.indepthwalkingtours.com. He lives with his wife Belén in Woodside, Queens.

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Copyright © 2005 by Frederick Cookinham

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

THE BOY ON THE BICYCLE

2

WHO WAS THIS RAND PERSON, ANYWAY?

3

THE SELFISHNESS OF VIRTUE

4

ADVERSARIALISM

5

ALTRUISM

6

NORMALCY

7

RULES FOR SUPERMEN

8

DUSTING OFF THE GOD

9

RAND RAGE

10

THE ART DECO PHILOSOPHER

11

WHAT’S LEFT?

12

MAP OF THE WORLD

13

REALITY IS FICTION IS REALITY

14

SCALE

15

THEAYNRAND MUSEUM

16

WHATIFIT’SNOT THEAGE OF RAND?

17

THE WORLD IS FLAT AGAIN

18

FROM CULT TO CULTURE

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Endnotes:

INTRODUCTION

This is not a biography of Ayn Rand. Nor is it a learned treatise on her philosophic system, Objectivism. It is a speculation on what the world might be like if Objectivism catches on worldwide.

If a majority of mankind, or the most influential minority, the intellectual trendsetters, come to profess Rand’s ideas in the 21st century, as so many did Marx’s in the 19th and 20th, how will that affect your everyday life? The values you teach your kids? The art you enjoy? The kind of work you do and in what kind of city and nation?

The voice I chose for this book is humorous and conversational, not scholarly. Rand said that you should be serious when discussing ideas, and you should be, but even she could inject an occasional wry aside into a serious article or talk and expect the audience to discern when she was being serious and when she was kidding. Besides, I have been on a mission for thirty-seven years to dispel the stereotype of Objectivists as humorless, blue-suited atheist versions ofMormon missionaries. And even Mormons don’t deserve that humorless rap, either.

My interest is history, not philosophy. What has always fascinated me is the process by which ideas percolate through a culture and cause concrete changes.

I had the idea for this book in early 2000, after reading a book called TheAge ofAttila. It occurred to me that there are a lot ofbooks with Age in the title. Arthur Schlesingerwrote The Age of Roosevelt and TheAge of Jackson, and another historian wrote Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. There was Tom Paine’s famous Age of Reason. A medievalist wrote The Age of Arthur.

I will not go so far as to claim that the 21st century will be the Age of Rand, but I do not think it too reckless to say that it could be.

I am predicting the future in this book, not with the expectation of being right, but only with the expectation of setting up milestones. You don’t expect every notable event of a journey to take place exactly at one of the milestones, but measuring the distance of an event from the nearest milestone is how you measure the whole experience. At the end of my period of discussion, in the year 2100, a reader can look back and say here Cookinham was right, and there he was wrong. Here something happened as he predicted and when he predicted it, and

There the thing happened, but not when he said it would. And sometimes the event won’t happen at all.

It is tough to write about the future Age of Rand because there is simply no model for the triumph of a new moral system. It has never happened before. Every religion, philosophy and political system so far has included a re-hash of the moral system of Altruism. Without a model to guide us, we are flying blind into the future. There may be unaccountable waves of popularity and unpopularity for Ayn Rand. That is possible, but that is just another way of saying that if you don’t exert leadership, someone else will. It may be YOU who sets the next trend, if you speak up and make a pest of yourself, as Rand always did, saying, I am not brave enough to be a coward. I see the consequences too clearly.

Among the possible alternative universes, as science fiction writers say, are those in which

•   Objectivism simply disappears

•   Objectivism degenerates into a religion

•   Objectivists remain always a minority, but an influential one

•   Objectivists become the victims of a witch hunt, then disappear, then re-appear, then gain sympathy because of their former persecution, then gain influence, perhaps under some other name, and finally become a majority.

You will know that Objectivism has won when you hear people say, not Rand says... but Here’s why....

The cultures of the world are merging into a single culture, due to the Internet, on top of radio and television and jet travel. Where Europe and America have been dominated by Christianity and the Middle East by Islam up to now, it is likely that some idea system, either a religion, a philosophy, or something, will soon come to dominate, not just a regional culture, but the emerging culture of Earth. To whatever extent Man moves into space, that move too will reflect some dominant view. Why not Objectivism?

There are a few reasons why this could happen.

First, there is simply Rand’s choice of subjects. Since philosophy deals with eternal questions, we are still reading books written thousands of years ago on those questions. The things Rand wrote about will never go out of style.

Rand combined philosophy with popular fiction. Family members who read popular novels will keep buying Rand’s books for the fiction, and then leave those books lying around the house for their nerdy, or let us say intellectually curious, younger siblings to find and read for the philosophy and science fiction aspects of the books.

We have been enduring an era of anti-art and anti-literature since at least the 1960s. Sooner or later, that trend will give way to a new Golden Age of serious literature, like the novels ofVictor Hugo and others of the 19th century. Then, experimentation with lack-of plot, lack-of-grammar, etc. will end, and writers will use the tried and true devices of classic literature because they want to inspire readers and provoke action on the issues of the day, as Zola did. Some Objectivist author may catch this new wave ofserious issue fiction. He will tell his fans that he learned his art from Rand. His fame will then amplify hers. A lot ofhistory is caused by someone simply being in the right place at the right time. An Objectiv-ist may write the next The Grapes ofWrath. And this time, Tom Joad will campaign for a new Homesteading Act, and empower the poor with micro-loans, instead of running off at the end to organize Communist cells.

Rand’s ideas will prevail because she staked out the territory between memorizing a religious dogma on the one hand and spending your life mastering all the minutiae of technical philosophy on the other. Most people live in the middle, and that is where they will find Rand. Not every man will want to be a professional philosopher, but every man needs to learn how to think for himself. To that extent, then, Everyman can and should be his own philosopher.

And what is philosophy but a guide to making decisions?—decisions being what make us human. The human is the chosen. Mankind is discovering, right now, in my lifetime, the concept of human, but through the back door. In our era, racism has become odious. The Internet and other influences are making children unconscious of race. Look at TV shows and commercials. Race and other divisions of mankind, once so strict, are becoming non-issues. Junior is now taking an African-American girl to the prom, and maybe even an African-American boy, and no one bats an eye anymore (well, except out in George Bush Land). What is left when you remove all the old distinctions of race, gender, nationality, sexual preference, language, religion, and the rest? Man is left—the decision-making animal. Out goes Tribalism and exclusion, and just so fast in comes a new interest in philosophy. And there, waiting to cast her net, on the Net, is Rand.

The current wave of religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, not only in Islam, but in Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, may provoke its own backlash. The pendulum of intellectual fashion may swing from atheistic Marxism, in the 19th century, to jihad in our time, to atheistic Objectivism in a few decades. Objectivism may be poised to catch the next wave of Reason over Faith at its crest.

Socialism is another wave that has crested and is receding, leaving a vacuum. By 2050, the 20th century will be remembered for two things: socialism and big wars. The connection will not be lost on your grandchildren.

Finally, an era of daily transformations of all our lives by technology will certainly favor a philosophy that celebrates science and invention.

The message of this volume, then, is The Age of Rand may be coming. Join me in preparingfor it.

In these pages, you will find not only paeans to Rand’s thought, but cautionary notes as well. If there were no dangers, no traps and pitfalls in a prospective Age ofRand, there would be no need to prepare for it. We could just sit back and let it wash over us. I hope to anger and disappoint both those who will see me as being too soft on Rand and those who will say I am too hard on her.

I have struggled with vocabulary in writing this book. The difference between a philosophy and a cult is that a cult deliberately creates jargon, so the initiate must get all the way in before he can understand all the secrets of the temple, and so he can feel superior to the outsider who does not know the jargon, while a philosophy avoids jargon for the sake of clarity...and ends up with a certain amount of jargon anyway. New ideas simply cannot be discussed without creating some new terms. Ayn Rand started a moral revolution. All the terms of ethics have heretofore been coined by one side—the Altruist side. Now that there is a second moral system in play, that new system has to either make up new words, or continue playing with the loaded dice left us by centuries of Altruism. This is why Rand had to subtitle The Virtue ofSelfishness ANew Concept ofEgoism. In the first draft of this book I used unwieldy terms of my own, such as Ratsel: Rational Selfishness, and the acronym S.I.E.S.B.R.: Selfish In Everyone’s Sense But Rand’s. I later replaced these with Egoism and Self-Absorbed or Needy.

I have capitalized the word Objectivism because it is the name Rand chose for her total philosophic system. In dictionaries, you will find it uncapitalized. Without the capital O it means the objective theory of reality, that is, the theory that when I close my eyes, the universe does not cease to exist, it goes on without me. That is the basis of Rand’s system, so she named the whole system after its most basic premise. An awful lot of magazine writers do not know this distinction, and call Rand’s system objectivism.

I have not capitalized the word libertarian, though, unless I am referring to the Libertarian Party.

I explain in the text why I use the terms the state and government differently.

Stolen Concept is one of the few examples of Objectivist jargon. It means a concept you use in an argument that contradicts that concept. Nathaniel Branden introduced the term in 1963 in The Objectivist Newsletter. His prime example of a Stolen Concept was Proudhon’s famous line All property is theft. How can there be such a concept as theft if there is not first such a concept as property?

I could not resist one acronymic neo-logism of my own, though: GAHTL: Government, Academic, Hollywood Trendy-Leftie. If you go to a party and meet Robert Reich and Tim Robbins, it is a GAHTL party.

Rand explains the difference between Egoism and Egotism in her forward to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead. If you aspire to a full, rich life, you are an Egoist. If your self-esteem is so pathetically low that you feel a need to tell everyone every five minutes how great you are, you are an Ego-tist—and your friends will quickly catch on to the fact that the one you are really trying to convince of your greatness is yourself. Not even greatness, though, just adequacy. There is nothing as pathetic as delusions of adequacy.

The NAP—the Non-Aggression Principle—was best expressed My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

My favorite of all the principles I have gotten from Rand or Branden or from myself is what I call the Alexander Principle. I derive this from a remarkable passage in W. W. Tarn’s 1948 book, Alexander the Great: Alexander proclaimed for the first time the unity and brotherhood of mankind. Above all, Alexander inspired Zeno’s vision of a world in which all men should be members of one another, citizens of one state without distinction of race or institutions, subject only to and in harmony with the Common Law immanent in the universe, and united in one social life not by compulsion but only by their own willing consent, or (as he puts it) by Love.

In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark tells Peter Keating that love of the doing must precede doing anything—whether for yourself or for others.

Love the doing.

This is why I mention my grandfather deciding, at eighty, to arrange his life so that everything he did was because he wanted to and not because he had to. It is also why I define force by contrast to trade: A trade is a situation where you say to another "If you do as I wish, I will give you a value that you do not now rightfully enjoy. Force is a situation where you say, If you do not do as I wish, I will take away a value that you do now rightfully enjoy."

One reader of the first draft thought I should call the book Connections. I want to lead the reader through a vast maze of connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. (Some say that is the very definition of creativity.) I want to make you see the connections between Rand and the American Revolution, and between the ancient Greek world-view of Man-worship and the Art Deco style of architecture in the 1920s. I hope I don’t lose you completely when I describe the cover art on a Frank Sinatra record album and relate it to Man’s view of himself as Atlas Shrugged went to press in 1957.

Because there are so many connections, though, I found that I had, in some cases, told the same story in two or three different chapters. I think I have caught any totally unnecessary repetitions of this kind, but I have also left in some of those repetitions, in cases where the same story serves to make two different points. So if you see a story that looks like deja vu all over again, I hope you will see it as a story that bore repeating, and not as one that repeatedly bored.

I use a few movie references in this book. That is because I have decided that D. W. Griffith was absolutely right when he said that movies were predicted in the Bible, in a passage about men learning, in the future, a new language. Movies are a new language—a universal vocabulary of shared images. Those classic movie scenes and lines have lessons to teach. Besides, Rand wrote for the screen before she wrote novels. Hollywood was her world.

I have also mentioned my walking tours in these pages. I give a series of walking tours called Ayn Rand’s New York. This book and the tours are adjuncts to each other. In several chapters I discuss the ancient concept of city as sacred enclosure. New York will be a vast historic site some day, especially ifRand is the central figure of the space-born tourist’s view ofhistory. So I am not just touting my tours. There are connections there too, relevant to this book’s point.

One subject that I barely touched on, but becomes more intriguing the more I think about it, is equality. There is the chimera of equality that socialists speak of, but in Objectivist economics, and even in its ethics, there are several more subtle kinds of equality in prospect. The angle I discuss in the text is the promise that, in a world unimaginably richer than ours, it just won’t matter whether you are a billionaire or a mere millionaire. But there may be other angles here, and they may be a subject for an article, and maybe even a whole book, in the future.

I expect that the reader will be hooked by the many interesting ideas I bring up, only to see my drift of thought skip on to other subjects without developing the first one. But that is okay; it just means that either I, or perhaps you, will write a book or article expanding on the brief glimpse I provide here. Equality is one such subject, ecstasy is another. Branden’s brief odes on that word have intrigued me and may result in an article. More development is also needed on my theme of making up new words and expressions untainted by Altruism, Stat-ism, and other doctrines of the past, my pet peeve being the widespread description of the president’s job as running the country. If this book’s greatest achievement is to provoke other writers to surpass it with writings on themes first suggested herein, it will have done its Zarathustrian duty, and no one will be better pleased than I. The creation always rises up to destroy the creator.

I am not going to fall into the trap that Christians and Marxists have fallen into—predicting Man reaching some idyllic state that will never end. There will be no end to history. What will make Utopia will be its ability to change as needed, not any end of a need to change. I do not propose the Age ofRand as the last Age we will ever need. The Age of Rand will come and go, leaving behind some lesson for the next Age to learn. Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Rand was a giant, but neither the first nor the last.

In The Fountainhead, Henry Cameron, dying, asks Howard Roark to burn all his drawings, contracts and other papers. He dies a bitter man who does not want to leave anything to the philistines who frustrated his creative career. You will note that Rand left no such instructions to her heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff. On the contrary, she left tons of stuff for historians to pick over. She was preparing her place in history. She knew that she would spend far more years as a memory, as a story, than she did as a living being—see Chapter Thirteen on reality becoming fiction. For all her famous moaning about the world going to hell in a handbas-ket, she did actually hope for a better day. Relating, integrating, finding the con-nections—between Rand’s past, present and future, her place in the long perspective of history—that is the purpose of this book.

You will read plenty, in the pages ahead, about the relationship between Rand the person and Objectivism the idea system. Here I will add that, as much as we all should avoid idolatry, to be indifferent to Rand’s personal history is to be indifferent to the causality behind Objectivism—and it was John Galt’s use of that word that first sent me to the dictionary to find out its meaning. If we want more philosophical advances in the future, we need to learn whence they came in the past.

Thanks are due to my wife, Belen; to my nitpicking editor, Marc Glasser; to Andrea Rich; to Michael Emyrs and Donna Camp, who read the manuscript; to my computer guru, the late Elliott Werner; and to other anonymous persons, all of whom gave me help and encouragement during the writing of this book. No blame attaches to them for any mistakes I have made, and I hope that their help will not be self-sacrificial, but will bring them as much pleasure as the publication of this book will bring me.

Ayn Rand was initially opposed to the practice of dedicating books, believing that any book is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it. I will say that the present volume is addressed, and dedicated, to any reader who enjoys and profits by it.

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,—

The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers.

—William Cullen Bryant

(The best description of the concept of objectivity I know.)

1

THE BOY ON THE BICYCLE

I heard the Dalai Lama on the radio recently. He began his talk by saying, If you get something out of my talk, good, but if you don’t find anything of value in it, then just forget it.

Now, I liked that. It was disarming—the crowd laughed—and I thought, how unpretentious!—especially for a Living God. Maybe the twenty-first century will not be the Age ofRand, and this book will be meaningless by 2100. If so, just forget it.

Ayn Rand, of course, would not let students ofher philosophic system, Objectivism, off the hook so easily. If you did not find value in what she said, you were wrong, and not just wrong but probably evil. There are innocent errors ofknowl-edge, she said, and there are uninnocent errors ofwillful blinding of oneself to the facts of reality.

This was part of Rand’s appeal, especially her appeal to youth: in an age of moral relativism, and even relativism over whether the senses are reliable and whether reality is real, Rand wrote that the noble soul demands ofhimself that he be able to explain rationally his every thought, feeling and action. He makes sure of his facts before he opens his mouth, but after that, if someone disagrees with him, that person is mistaken.

I can attest to the fact that this strategy works. It gets you respect. It opens doors for you, because people come to trust both your honesty and your judgment. In a hostile college classroom, a fellow student told thirty people that although he did not agree with my views, he respected me for having views and being able to articulate and defend them; for having views that were well thought out. I appreciated that.

That expression by Rand of a noble ideal—that was the Homeric deed that started all the reading and thinking and learning and teaching and growing in wisdom, and that also started all the trouble. Wherever people claim certainty, whether through reason or faith, theywill often become suspicious of the motives of anyone who disagrees. Much ink has been spilled over this aspect of Ayn Rand’s story.

Face the facts! Set a goal and strive for it! The world makes sense, even if many of the people in it don’t. Your world makes sense if you do. Don’t panic! Cultivate your own garden! Make of your life a work of art! These are the messages of Ayn Rand. Her fiction and her non-fiction are both exercises in shoulder-squaring.

Rand called her moral system Rational Self-interest, or just Self-esteem. But there are two selves in language: the I and the Me. The whole world, raised in the moral system of Altruism, accuses Rand of Me-ism. In fact, though, it’s about the I: what am I going to do with my life? Rand also called her moral system Egoism. Ego is the Latin for I, not Me. The subtitle of her book The Virtue ofSelfishness is A New Concept ofEgoism. Self-cultivation has to come first. The rewards—the Me—come only later, as a well-earned consequence of what I did to deserve them. Rand emphasizes not Duty—an I with no Me—nor a Citizen Kane-like mindless acquisition of junk—a Me with no I—but the integration of the two (remember that word; you will see it again in this book): the process ofEffort, Reward, Greater Effort, Greater Reward, followed by the satisfying feeling ofIt works! But of course. Q.E.D. A is A. Egoism, not just Me-goism.

Integration is a theme in Rand’s life to which I will return thirty or forty times in this book. It is an example of Nietzsche’s influence on Rand. In the passage from Beyond GoodandEvil that Rand mentions in her Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead, Nietzsche refers to the concept of the order of rank and then adds, —to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning

In 1979, Rand appeared on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show. Snyder asked Rand whether she, as a refugee from the Soviet Union, would thank God for this country. Even though she opposed all religion, Rand surprised Snyder with an enthusiastic Yes, and added, "I might not literally mean a god, but I like what that expression means: ‘God bless you,’ or ‘Thank God,’ because it means the ‘highest possible’ to me, and I would certainly thank God for this country."

As I heard Rand say this, the light bulb snapped on. So this is what Rand is up to, and Nietzsche, too: Taking old, familiar but flawed ideas and either rejecting them or finding the abstract idea behind the literal idea. Before you can have a concept of God as the highest being—Jupiter Optimus Maximus—you must have, implied, hidden but findable if you know how to look for it, an abstraction:

Optimus Maximus—The Best and Greatest—that does not necessarily have to refer to Jupiter.

Behind religion hides philosophy. Philosophy means abstract ideas: just the thing that makes Man human. Rand was pulling aside curtains and revealing the new and deeper meanings that had always lain there, waiting to be found.

Seeing Rand’s New and Deeper Meanings excites the young reader and gets him in the door. The experience hooks him, and then Rand’s convincing arguments land him. Rand has used a technique that I call the Patton Principle.

General George Smith Patton Junior explained his formula for battlefield success thus: Grab ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the ass. By that he meant: first pin down the enemy with an artillery barrage, so he can’t maneuver, and then use the mobility afforded by Patton’s favorite new invention, the tank, to swing rapidly around the enemy’s flank and attack him from the rear. The General was one of the great apostles of mobile warfare.

So was Rand. For her, the mobility of the tank was her virtuosity at persuasiveness—persuasiveness of an outrageous proposition.

First she would stun, immobilize and fascinate her audience with ad copy about a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world. Or she would give a book a title like The Virtue ofSelfishness, addressed to an Altruist world, or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, addressed to a more or less socialist intelligentsia. Or she would give a lecture a title like The Fascist New Frontier. (The New Frontier meant the Kennedy administration.)

But then she would astonish her audience by actually making a convincing case for these intriguing, not to say shocking, claims. She got away with it by sticking to philosophy and not journalism. She was not well-informed. She got many facts wrong about the world outside her Murray Hill apartment. But she forged an iron chain connecting Aristotle’s laws oflogic, Egoism, and free market economics. She drew a sketch of an enormous building, and many eager draftsmen are happy to spend their lives figuring out where to put the closets.

ANTI-TRIBALTHINK TRIBALTHINK

In the 1960s, Nathaniel Branden was a young psychotherapist and Rand’s foremost protege, and, for a while, her lover. After his break with Rand in 1968 (hereinafter, The Break, as significant a historical incident as The Casting Out would be to a student of Milton), Branden wisely said that students of Objectivism should not worry about the mileage that will be gotten out of The

Break by the opponents of Objectivism. The Break had been over a personal matter, not a philosophical one. In the long run, he said, you cannot stop ideas. And, he added, The Break might even lead to good consequences, if it gets students to separate ideas from personalities. And if it gives them a feeling of being more on their own, so much the better.

The Rand camp and the Branden camp have been completely on their own since Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982. On one side were Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, no longer married, but equally banished from Rand’s circle, and now, free of her spell, getting some distance and perspective on the whole experience. On the other side were Dr. Leonard Peikoff, heir to Rand’s money and copyrights, and his fellow philosopher Dr. David Kelley: The keepers of the flame. Kelley would have his own Break from Peikoff in 1989, and this time it was over a philosophical difference. Peikoff founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985, and Kelley the rival Institute for Objectivist Studies (now called The Objectivist Center) in 1990.

The Brandens did not, of course, dare to show up at Rand’s calling hours or interment, but I was there, at Kensico Cemetary in Valhalla, Westchester County, New York. There was a light snowfall and no wind as I stood in the crowd at her graveside, listening to Kelley read Rand’s favorite poem—Rudyard Kipling’s If—and to Peikoff as he said: Ayn Rand wanted no stone. Her achievements are her monument. She changed the course of history, and those who knew her, or knew her through her books, loved her, and do

We, the living readers ofRand, loved, and still do love, the inspiration and the moral vision we found in her books. We are all the boy on the bicycle, from the opening ofPart Four of The Fountainhead. This is a passage from the novel that is particularly loved by Rand fans. A boy, just out of college, encounters Roark and one of his buildings, and the sight of the man and his accomplishment gives the boy the inspiration he needs to reach for the creative career he wanted in spite of swinish humanity’s indifference to greatness. Just as Howard Roark gave that boy courage, Rand gave millions the courage to face a lifetime. We will see whether she has changed history, by how we change it. In this book we will try to imagine how that changed future history will look.

What Rand’s circle of the 1960s discovered painfully over many years will be re-discovered by new generations ofRand readers—the need to make that separation between ideas and personalities. Hopefully, all the subsequent books about Rand will make it unnecessary for every generation to go through all the same process of disillusionment that the first did. Those who pick up and read Rand’s books after this point will be more like me: someone who came along a bit late for NBI (Nathaniel Branden Institute, through which Branden taught Objectivism, under Rand’s watchful eye, to thousands in the 1960s) and grew up in Syracuse, not New York City, and so was spared exposure to all the mishigoss; the cultlike aspect of the Ayn Rand circle. They will benefit from the ideas of Rand without getting enmeshed in the personality of Rand. But there is enough, and more than enough, of that personality in her novels that the cult-joining personality—who will make a cult out of anything, even a philosophy of thinking for oneself—will still be attracted, through her novels, to what he will call the philosophy of Objectivism, but which is really a game of aping Rand’s personality, especially its aspect of heretic-hunting.

I have seen that happen. One girl of college age read Atlas Shrugged at my behest, solemnly intoned Galt’s Oath, and then immediately added that it would be hard to be an Objectivist, because it would mean leaving so many people behind. Like many others, she thought that being an Objectivist requires some kind of weekly quota of excommunications of friends who fail to toe the philosophical line. She had briefly been a Jesus freak before this. After this, she soon forgot all about Rand and flitted on to some other interest. Her interest in ideas was superficial. She had been carried away by the drama of the philosophy’s fictional presentation. That drama came across so vividly in Atlas Shrugged that it is no wonder that people who knew Rand personally, on top of reading the novel, got carried away by Rand’s success at dramatizing herself as well as her philosophy.

What will happen if the Age of Rand comes, but it is dominated by Rand fans whose interest in ideas is superficial? Your grandchildren may resemble the mob in Monty Python’s Life ofBrian, following the bewildered Brian around, aping his every move, convinced that he is the Messiah.

Most, though, will get the ideas and miss the personality—saving themselves a lot of grief, but also missing what one friend of Rand’s called a human being who used all ofher brain, not just the 10% most of us use. Knowing her personally was, by all accounts, shall we say, bracing. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s strenuous life, and the activities ofNietzsche’s Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body, being in Rand’s circle would make you stronger, if it didn’t kill you first.

If Rand is Jesus, and Branden both her John the Baptist and her Judas, and Peikoff and Kelley her Peter and Paul, and Atlas and The Fountainhead her parables, then Barbara Branden’s 1986 biography—Rand’s first full-length one—The Passion ofAyn Rand, has the honor to be the first gospel; Rand’s Book of Matthew. Nathaniel told his side of the story in his 1989 autobiography Judgment Day: My Years WithAyn Rand. That then is the Book ofMark. The Peikoff camp will sooner or later produce an official biography ofRand; the Gospel ofLuke. It can be expected to be so sanitized and uncritical that we will read it and head straight for John. But how many Johns will there be? How many Acts of the Apostles? How many more books about Rand, or extending the bare outline of Objectivism that she left, will there be?

The parade of Rand commentaries—the Talmud to Atlas’s Torah (switching metaphors from Jesus to the Old Testament Yahweh)—started a long time ago, with the Brandens’ 1962 study Who Is Ayn Rand? The second entry was a vitriolic attack from psychologist Albert Ellis, in his 1968 book, Is Objectivism a Religion? Then came satire: Jerome Tuccille’s 1971 book, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. (Satire or history? When Tuccille ran for Governor of New York on the Rand-influenced Libertarian Party ticket in 1974, he swore to me that every anecdote in his book had been attested to by at least two witnesses.) A philosopher (a professional, which Rand was proud not to be), William F. O’Neill, gave more professional, but still negative, commentary on Rand in his With Charity Toward None, in the 1970s. An enthusiastic analysis also came at that time from Paul Lepanto, Return to Reason. Later came the two theatrical Branden testimonies, the first of which has already become a movie that you can find at your local video store.

After Rand’s death came the first sympathetic word from the philosophic profession, The Philosophic Thought ofAyn Rand, by Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen. David Kelley wrote The Evidence ofthe Senses, Peikoff wrote the long awaited...long, long awaited...full treatise Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, historian Robert Hessen wrote two books on the much-maligned subject ofbig business from the Objectivist point of view, and the libertarian/free market/classical liberal (call them what you will) economists have kept the Rand-supporting economic theory coming, to the point where the establishment said, in the wake of the USSR’s demise in 1991, In the end, Marx was wrong and von Mises was right. (Ludwig von Mises, author of Human Action, was a great, though underappreciated, economist whom Rand appreciated.) George Walsh, Tibor Machan, and other credentialed philosophers have weighed in on amateur Rand’s behalf. And Dr. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 1992, dared to propose that Rand did not, as reported, spring one day from the head of Zeus, but had an approach to philosophy very like that ofher professors, and their professors, in her native Russia. Dr. Alan Gotthelf, a philosophy professor from the Rand circle of the 1960s, found this preposterous, but all Dr. Sciabarra is saying is that Rand went to college and paid attention in class. That traditional Russian technique in philosophy was, if I may be permitted to boil

Sciabarra’s book down to a sentence, look for dichotomies, and heal them. Exactly what Peikoff got from Rand, as in, for example, his article The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. Dichotomy was one of Rand and Peikoff s favorite words. It means basically the same as contradiction. And that approach was exactly what attracted me to Rand’s philosophy, and attracted a lot of other people, too: the desire to leave no dichotomy, no contradiction, uncured. The desire to work everything out and make it all make sense, including our relationships to each other. The desire to heal conflict. That is why integration is another ofRand’s favorite words. Here is a dichotomy in Rand’s own field, popular fiction: Heroism, we are told, may be morally desirable but it is corny in fiction. Fiction needs un-heroes and even anti-heroes to be sophisticated. How can characters be made soaring and not boring? Rand’s solution was to have a main hero with few or no inner conflicts, but also another character, like Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, who has conflicts but is also heroic in his way.

Just off the top of my head, I count two books written about Rand and her ideas in the 1960s (not counting her own), four in the 1970s, at least ten in the 1980s, and at least eighteen since 1990, and I may be leaving some out. We have been treated to books on her Ideas, her Letters, her Journals, her Facets, her Column, her Marginalia, and her Cult. We now have taped lectures ofRand’s Fiction Writing Course, Non-fiction Writing Course, her Life and her Humor. One inspired gourmet had the idea of collecting recipes from various libertarian authors in a book, Liberated Cooking, and got, from Barbara Branden, Rand’s own recipe for authentic Russian Beef Stroganoff. Twenty-odd years after It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, Tuccille reminds us that It Still Begins With Ayn Rand. Twenty years from now, no doubt he will write It Will Always Begin With Ayn Rand. Articles about Rand in recent years include The New Yorker’s Twilight of the Goddess. The Peikoff camp plans to reveal her Personal Journals someday. I suspect it will be right after Nathaniel Branden dies, so he won’t have the satisfaction of saying that his story of their affair is now confirmed by Rand’s own words. But the Peikovians are not above editing out any words like that.

In 2002, I saw an off-off-Broadway play called The Allegory of Golf, by Wade Gasque, about a worried housewife who has been studying Rand until the philosopher appears to her in her dreams and gives her advice. The dream-Rand is a golfer, and wears a tam and carries a putter. After the play, I met the woman who played Rand. She asked whether Rand had actually been a golf enthusiast. I said, Uh, no.

In Mary Gaitskell’s novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, the heroine is a typist for philosophical novelist Anna Granite, who has a young lover...you get the picture. (Did I mention that Branden was 25 years younger than Rand?)

The influence of Ayn Rand is gathering momentum, both in quantity and (sometimes) in quality. In fifty or a hundred years...the mind boggles.

Karl Marx published The CommunistManifesto in 1848, and Das Kapital in 1854. He died in 1883. Ludwig von Mises published HumanAction in 1948, and Rand published AtlasShrugged in 1957. She died in 1982. I kept telling myself this, in the 1980s, as I faced rejection after rejection, asking people on the street to sign petitions allowing Libertarian Party candidates on the ballot. They have almost exactly a century’s head start on us, I thought. Marx had steamships, railroads and the telegraph to spread his ideas. In the 16th century, Luther had the new printing press with which to spread his ideas. Since the 1960s, we have had television and satellites. Now, in the Twenty Aughts, we also have the Internet, which is not to be compared with the advances of Marx’s time or even Luther’s, but with the invention of writing itself. Our day will come.

A WAY WITH WORDS

What moves the world...in the Objectivist direction? What is the motor of Rand’s growing influence? It is inspiration, and I will have more to say about what that word means, in later chapters. What made me pick up Anthem at eleven was simply curiosity. It was there, among other books, many of them science fiction, on my older brother’s bookcase. I read it and liked it, as science fiction, immediately. I also found Atlas Shrugged there, but it took me another two years to decide to tackle such a tome. When I did, it was again because of the science-fiction aspect of the book. I am typical of the teen science-fiction fan and first-time Rand reader. On the cover and on the teaser page, and in the table of contents, I saw terms like the motor of the world, Atlantis, The Generator, Miracle Metal and The Utopia of Greed. But once I was hooked by the neato-keano stuff that will hook any teenager, what kept me reading for the next thirty-five years was the moral vision. This was the Patton Principle at work. Of course, any moral vision at all was attractive in 1968, with all its troubles in the world, but Ayn Rand was different. At the point in the story where the bad guy offers the hero a deal, the hero always scornfully says No deals! I don’t make deals with criminals! (Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode Mudd’s Women, for example). But not Ayn Rand’s hero. Galt avoids that old fiction cliche, by saying sure, he’s open to a deal, it’s just that evil has nothing to offer him, since the evil, in his view, is the anti-reality and therefore impotent. That is what did it. Rand took set-ups for old tired formulas, and gave them a new twist, a new and deeper meaning.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of dozens of memorable, and even thrilling, moments in Rand’s fiction—lines and scenes that taught me moral lessons and made me fear the shame of not living up to the standard Rand raised.

•   The last words in We the Living, in which Kira, though dying, focuses on what life had made possible.

•   Kira preferring the artificial to the real, as a source of beauty.

•   The scene with the Dean in The Fountainhead.

•   In Anthem, the paragraph in which Rand summarizes Man’s whole history as a progressive breaking of chains. This was her first public statement against racism, and against class-conflict theory, identifying the two as shades of the same lumping ofhumans into collectives.

•   Toohey’s line about who will be first in line to help you if you attack the rich.

•   The John Erik Snyte-Austen Heller scene.

•   Dominique’s attempt to tempt Roark.

•   Wynand’s attempt to enslave him.

•   Dominique taking off her robe at the sight of Roark, and capturing the look Steven Mallory has been trying for all day for his sculpture.

•   Mallory’s chilling image of the mindless beast—that one really got to me in a very personal way, seeming to describe my view of the grown-ups around me.

•   Finding, in Atlas, for the first time in my life, the concept of being able to be both a nerd and a jock at the same time—both brain and brawn, both a wiz and a socially-skilled and charming man whom women found attractive. Never even occurred to me before. An intellectual and a man of action—the ideal for her heroes that Rand found in real life in the Founding Fathers. A dichotomy cured.

•   Dagny trading a diamond bracelet for Lillian Rearden’s bracelet of Rearden Metal.

•   Dagny’s contemptuous dismissal of the objection that women do not run railroads.

•   Francisco’s line about the coming and going of those who stand for reason, in a time when philosophers did not know whether they were coming or going.

•   Hank and Dagny’s discovery of a motor that would add ten years to the life of every person in the world.

•   Dagny opening her eyes to see Galt kneeling over her, and learning from him not to avoid eye contact—more on that passage in Chapter Seventeen.

•   Hank and Francisco saving the furnace.

•   Galt defiantly telling the technician how to repair the generator that is torturing him.

•   What would you say to the great men of history if you met them in Heaven? More importantly, what would you want them to say to you?

•   One of the last lines in Galt’s speech, in which he draws a picture of the City ofMan, in counterpoint (as I interpret Rand) to St. Augustine’s City of God.

•   Galt urging his hearers to form their own communities. (More thoughts on alternative communities in Chapters Four, Fourteen and Seventeen.)

•   And of course the triumphant first ride on the John Galt Line.

•   Above all other moments in Atlas, for me, the moment when I grasped the fact that the philosophy, not Galt or Dagny, was the hero of the novel. The story was not about Gee, how is the hero going to get out of this dangerous predicament?—but rather, Gee, how is Rand’s philosophy going to get out of this dangerous predicament; how is it going to answer this possible objection?

•   Equality 7-2521’s heartrending horror at the rejection ofhis electric light by the Council of Scholars, and his equally heart mending discovery of the word I.

•   But in a way my favorite passage in all Randland is Equality 7-2521’s first look at his own face, in a stream. He is about twenty years old, and lives in a world without mirrors, and without the word I or the concept of self, except as an odious evil. If you were seeing yourself for the very first time at that age, would this person look like someone you could trust? Or fear?

Do you know how much that means—to a nerdy teenager who buries his nose in a book all day because outside of that book lies nothing but fear for him?—fear and self-loathing, because he does not believe he can trust this being who looks at him from a mirror.

As long as there are young people, there will be grateful readers of Rand.

How many writers do you know who project ecstasy?

Ecstasy?—you ask, puzzled. This side of drugs or the freaked-out fringe of religion, who said anything about ecstasy? Well, if you never even think about it, then apparently no one has told you that you are entitled to a certain amount of ecstasy, once a week or so. Rand projects this in the John Galt Line scene. When Rand’s publisher, Bennett Cerf, ofRandom House, read that scene, he ran out of his office and down the hall, waving the manuscript and exclaiming It’s magnificent! Branden mentions ecstasy several times in My Years With Ayn Rand. But not only do Rand and Branden promise ecstasy, they make clear that ecstasy is your reward for hard, rational work and self-cultivation. Who else presents the concept of ecstasy in the same sentence as rational?

The course of Christianity’s influence, and Islam’s, are measured in centuries. The origins of Judaism are more obscure than theirs, and those of Hinduism are hopelessly obscure. In fact, there is so little cohesion in Hinduism that it is almost more accurate to call it a collection of religions than one. But Christianity and Islam were started at definite times by one or a small number of persons with a more or less single purpose. One study, by Marshall G. S. Hodgson, is called The Venture of Islam. A philosophy is even more a venture—a single thinker’s venture—since it can admit being such and does not have to claim to be God’s work. A philosophic system proves its mettle by surviving peer review, not by massing crowds of kneeling reciters of formulas. (You can read, for instance, Peikoff’s and Kelley’s analyses of their philosophical disagreement yourself and see what you think.) Now that Rand has started this venture, whither will it go? Quo Vadis, Domine?

2

WHO WAS THIS RAND PERSON, ANYWAY?

Ayn Rand was born Alice, or in Russian, Alisa, Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905. She came to the United States in 1926, took the pen name Ayn (rhymes with swine, she used to say) Rand, and started writing screenplays. She sold one to Cecil B. DeMille, but it was never produced. She wrote a play, Night ofJanuary 16th, which was produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway, in 1935. Moving to New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (not the Irish short story writer by that name, but an actor she had met in Hollywood), she oversaw a successful run for her play and then published her first novel, We the Living, in 1936. It was indifferently reviewed and did not make a following for her.

Her success came with her novel The Fountainhead, 1943, which became a Warner Brothers movie in 1949 starring Gary Cooper. She wrote a dystopian future fantasy novelette called Anthem, published in 1938, as a vacation from writing The Fountainhead.

She labored for twelve years, 1945 to 1957, on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. This novel has been described as a philosophical mystery story, and as such it inaugurated, you might say, a new genre, philoso-fiction, which is to phi-losophywhat science fiction is to science. The hero of the story is DagnyTaggart, who must come to some philosophical insights in order to solve the mystery, which is; what is making the world’s economy grind to a halt?

The answer is: a strike of the key industrialists and other creative people, called by John Galt. Galt is always called the story’s hero, including by Rand, but I call Dagny the hero, because we see the story mainly through her eyes, we never go inside Galt’s mind, and his key decision was taken before the story opened; the decision to call the strike. The calling of the strike is not what the story is about—the story is about how Dagny uncovers the strike and faces the decision whether to join it or not. Also, we are shown almost nothing of Galt’s quest for a soulmate, and we are shown quite a bit of Dagny’s, so I would say that Dagny, the hero, gets the guy in the end, rather than saying that Galt gets the girl in the end. This shows Rand’s version of feminism, although Rand had no use for Feminism, since it, like almost all 20th Century intellectual trends, was infected with socialism. (Infected is exactly how Rand would have put it.) Don’t think Dagny is a hero to women? She runs a transcontinental railroad. No glass ceiling stops Dagny.

James Clavell’s novel Shogun might be compared with Atlas Shrugged, in that it is a very long novel that gives you an idea of what a whole philosophy or way of life is about; namely, the Japanese way of life, especially Bushido, the code of honor of the Samurai, or warrior/ruler caste. The difference, though, is that Clavell was writing about a historical philosophy while Rand was making up a new one as she was writing the book. Also, there was nothing in Shogun like Galt’s Speech, in which Galt lays out the whole idea-system in textbook order.

Rand put that new philosophical system very succinctly when one of the Random House salesmen asked her, at a pre-publication sales conference, Can you explain your philosophy while standing on one foot? She replied by naming the four main branches of philosophy and giving a one-or two-word summary ofher position in each: Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: Capitalism. (We won’t go any deeper into technical philosophy in this book than to simply mention Rand’s one-foot definition in passing.) Go to www.nathanielbranden.net and he will explain the problem with Rand’s use of the word capitalism to describe her politics. In Jefferson’s time, the word for Rand’s politics and Jefferson’s was liberal. Today the word libertarian is gaining currency for the politics of severely limited government, and of free enterprise.

Many who hate, and I mean hate, everything they think Rand stands for will criticize Atlas for anything they can think to accuse it of, but they are partly right when they say that it is all long speeches and no story. It does have a lot of speeches, including the famous 60-page speech ofJohn Galt, and even those who agree with Rand complain that she repeats herselfin the book; nevertheless, many readers with no philosophical axe to grind either way read and enjoy the story and either endure the speeches stoically or just skip them. On the subway once, I spoke to a woman I found reading Atlas. She said, a little impatiently, Look, I don’t care about the philosophy. I read this as just another junk novel to read on the subway, okay?

If millions of readers do read Rand that way, fine; they will enjoy the books, and will keep them in print, and leave them lying around for the philosophically-minded to pick up and read for the ideas. I gave The Fountainhead to a woman at work. She complained about the length, but she finished it and said it was nice. But aren’t you interested in the deeper philosophical implications of the book? I asked, wondering how any human being could be so uncurious.

Yeah, okay, it means we’re all different, right?

This reader, who sees the story but not the philosophy, is as blind as the critic who sees the speeches but not the story. In reality the books, especially Atlas, are meant both to entertain you and to make you think about the Great Questions of Life, the Universe, and Everything. That’s why the New York Times critic Lorine Pruette—in just about the only good review Rand ever got—called The Fountainhead ...the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.

The secret of Atlas Shrugged is that it is really the philosophy of Objectivism itself, and not Galt or Dagny, that is the hero, the Prime Mover, of the story. And that is the way I read it, when I read it for the first time. At some point in the story, I said, Okay, I get it. The story is about the ‘Perils ofDagny’ on only one level. On the deeper level it is about the perils of a new system of philosophy. Rand is putting her system through its paces. I found myself saying, "How is her philosophy going to get out of this scrape?" And I enjoyed reading it that way.

One such moment was when Hank Rearden, of Rearden Steel, and Dagny are discussing her order for rails of Hank’s newly-invented alloy, Rearden Metal. She is in a crisis and needs rails sooner than would be possible for any steelmaker but Hank Rearden. He assures Dagny that she will get her rails on time, but he will charge her an arm and a leg for them. He reminds her that Taggart Transcontinental is over a barrel and he could charge her twice as much and she’d have to pay it.

But she reminds him that he could, but he won’t. She knows that the government and the public have doubts about Rearden Metal, and he needs a showcase for it. So he needs her as much as she needs him. This was my introduction to the principle ofbalance, or countervailing forces if you will, that I discuss in Chapter Four, Adversarialism. It was a revelation for me. This ethical system of Rand’s is not about sacrifice of one person to another, or cheating, or the pious hypocrisy of telling the other guy you are doing him a favor when you aren’t. It is about two people who respect each other, and who both reject the ethics of Altruism and self-sacrifice. Hank laughs, when Dagny mentions the showcase consideration, and congratulates her for having no illusions of getting favors.

Respect. No illusions. No cheating or favors or lies, but more than that: no perceived need for cheating or favors or lies. That is the result of two people respecting each other’s right to live for his own sake—and of knowing that rational people are of value to each other. This was the alternative to Altruism and force that Rand presented to a disbelieving world. In this passage, Rand’s ethics were about to be trapped between the equally undesirable alternatives of sacrifice of self to others and sacrifice of others to self. Would her ethics steer safely between Scylla and Charybdis? Would her moral theory fail this practical test? Tune in next week!

Rand’s philoso-fiction is already spawning minor imitators. If these bloom into a whole new genre, then by 2050 we may see the first World Philoso-fiction Convention. Perhaps, paralleling Science Fiction’s Hugo Award, this convention will bestow the Ayn Award for the Best PF Novel of the Year.

That’s the way to enjoy Atlas. It doesn’t work for some people, especially people past college age, because they are already well-trained to root for Scylla and Charybdis: They have been taught that fiction with a clear-cut hero must be juvenile, and that an adult novel’s protagonist must be flawed, like a Shakespeare protagonist, to be sufficiently sophisticated for adults. Existentialists would hold that view even if the protagonist is a philosophy and not a man.

After Atlas, Rand co-operated with her protege, psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, in his Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI, 1958-1968), which offered lecture courses in her philosophical system, merely outlined in Atlas. Branden (originally Nathan Blumenthal) had written Rand a fan letter in 1949, when he was nineteen. She invited him to write, then to call, then to visit, then, with his girlfriend Barbara Weidman, to read as much of the Atlas manuscript as she had written. Nathan and Barbara transferred from UCLA to NYU to finish their schooling, and Ayn and Frank followed them to New York. The Brandens were married in 1953, both taking, as their nom de plume for their expected future writing, the name Branden. (They still swear it was not meant as an anagram for Ben Rand: Son ofRand.) In New York, Nathaniel and Barbara introduced a series of friends and relatives to Rand, and they all met at Ayn’s (thirty-six East Thirty-sixth Street)