"I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need - and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling."This is the first significant statement of belief that we hear from John Galt ("Who is John Galt?) shortly after we meet him in the Atlantis-like utopia inhabited by industrialists who have abandoned the real world to live lives that accord with their principles (though it's difficult to imagine today's gazillionaires being content with the lives of modest simplicity these folks have accepted). It is a theme that appears throughout the novel, leading up to Galt's consecration of it as the fundamental tenet of Objectivism. It is repeated countless times, as if repetition will make truth of the accusation that liberalism is fundamentally motivated by the belief that the greatest of men exist only for the sake of the least. She successfully tears that notion to shreds over and over again throughout Atlas Shrugged, but to what end?
d'Anconia makes this case early on after intentionally driving a large project into the ground to make a point:
Francisco shook his head regretfully. "I don't know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn't everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn't it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn't it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit - I took a loss. Doesn't everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of it's employees? The San Sebastian Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they achieved, in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day's work, which they could not do. Isn't it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned."Again, the sophomoric distortion of the other side's ideas make for great lampooning, but not for worthy opposition to any serious statement of philosophy. Francisco would be indisputably correct...in a universe inhabited by people who believe "that it is evil to work for profit," or that owners are, by definition, "parasites and exploiters." The problem is we don't live in that universe. Sure, we live in a universe in which some owners have been known to be parasites and exploiters, but that does not translate into a belief that it is evil to be an owner. It translates into a belief that owners should not be parasites and exploiters.
Rand pulls a similar stunt on two well-known phrases, both of which she nonchalantly presumes to conflate with liberalism. First, she introduces us to Ivy Starnes, one of the two remaining siblings who ran the Twentieth Centry Motor Company into ruins through their implementation of a communistic business structure. In helping her find the Starnes brothers, the local police chief tells Dagny "There's all sorts of human beings to see in the world, there's murderers and criminal maniacs - but, somehow, I think these Starnes persons are what decent people shouldn't have to see." Now that we have a totally unbiased view of the character we're about to meet, Ivy explains: "We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Their plan was "defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men." "Things became very ugly indeed and went fouler every year," Ivy says. "It has cost me my faith in human nature. In four years, a plan conceived, not by the cold calculations of the mind, but by the pure love of the heart, was brought to an end in the sordid mess of policemen, lawyers and bankruptcy proceedings."
Rand has accomplished two things here. She has indiscriminately labeled all liberals as Marxists. With that out of the way, she claims to show that enterprises run by liberals according to liberal principles are doomed to failure - by merely recounting the failure of a fictional one. Worse yet, similarly fictional attempts to institute such principles all across the country have brought civilization to the precipice of complete meltdown. (Rand would undoubtedly be surprised to hear of the success of the worker-owned Wisconsin robotics firm and California bakery - to cite just two examples from Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story - that are run according to democratic and collectivist principles.)
And so, her beloved industrialists, so righteous that they could not go on in such a world, leave everything behind and set up a spartan commune in a hidden valley where they build their own humble abodes, barter for services, and basically start a new, ideal civilization from scratch. As hard as I try, it's difficult to imagine Jack Welch or the Koch brothers doing anything as high-minded as walking away from their vast fortune and the luxuries they affords them.
Rand also serves up "Money is the root of all evil," as uttered by the detestable Bertram Scudder (couldn't you tell by his name?), for d'Anconia to slash and burn for five long pages. In this case, not only does she deliberately pervert the spirit of the phrase, she inadvertently argues for its correctness (as properly understood) on both sides of the debate. "You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood - money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor." Both the producers and the looters are after the same thing - money. It is the pursuit of money that is regarded by the expression as the root of all evil, in which case the "moochers" and "looters" can just as easily be called "evil" for their determination to take it from the producers. Her attack of this aphorism has a self-defeating element which she ignores for the purposes of tying it around liberalism's neck.
If some of this is starting to sound redundant, you're getting an idea of what it's like to read this book. In Part III I will tie this all together in an attempt to show how current events are being shaped not only by Rand's shoddy attempt at philosophy, but by conservatives' misunderstanding of the Atlas Shrugged.
Read Part III HERE.
And now, for your entertainment, a little Francis Albert with Count Basie:
No comments:
Post a Comment