I see that the New York Times has a glowing review of Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism …

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The 1957 novel was harshly reviewed and widely read.

The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

The roll call of the rich and powerful who became fans of Ayn Rand could be engraved on tablets of gold.  They were her audience.  The ones she would preach to, that theirs was both the power, and the glory.  Amazingly enough, her work was also much beloved by many ordinary Americans who were drawn to her passionate defense of individual liberty, and her vision of a world where your right to live your life as you pleased, was held sacred.  These were decidedly Not her audience.  We were, to employ a phrase whose origins she would understand perfectly well, her useful idiots.

I was one of those college age kids who were bedazzled by Atlas Shrugged back in the mid-70s.  I devoured the paperback, one of the thickest books I’d ever read (in more ways then one…), went out and immediately bought a hardback version, and for years carried in my heart her message that to live for the Self is a virtue.  I was a believer.  But like a many believers, I eventually came to a shame-faced understanding that what I thought the prophet meant, and what the prophet actually did mean, weren’t necessarily the same thing.

In some ways, Rand was my rebellion against my Baptist upbringing, which if it was anything, was more about pounding shame and self-denial into my heart then a love of God.  But Rand also spoke more directly to my love of human beauty and achievement then any other writer I’d known up to then, and which was a thing I felt was being betrayed by the cultural climate of the times.  I’d grown up during the space race, watched raptly as Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another world.  I was appalled afterward, to see so many in my generation, and so many of our intellectual elders, treat the space effort with contempt.  In Rand I found what I thought was a champion of human achievement against both leftist nihilism and right wing fascism, along with the grotesque inhumanity of "original sin" that I’d had drilled into my head every Sunday since I could remember. 

Her exaltation of technology as an extension of the human mind appealed to my budding techno geek side.  Her insistence that sex for its own sake was a righteous thing, that a couple needed no external validation of their desire for each other, that in fact that to take pleasure in each other’s bodies is the right of two people who wholeheartedly desire one another, body and soul, appealed to my emerging gay awareness.  I tended to overlook back then, that her sex scenes consisted mostly of rape fantasies.  Later, I would dismiss her knee jerk homophobia as merely a product of her times.  I should have taken more careful notice of all that.  Fact was, the longer I kept Rand close to my heart, the more I had to forgive her for.  Rand as it turned out, wasn’t so much a product of her times, as a product of her own imagination.  And mine.

She had an afterward attached to her novels, which she said consisted of the words "And I mean it", saying that she’d always lived by the ideas she presented in her novels.  But…she didn’t.  Not always.  Like many prophets, she practiced what she preached only so long as it wasn’t inconvenient.  From her self serving denial of what her affair with Nathaniel Branden did to her own marriage, and to Branden’s, to her stubborn refusal to stop smoking and encourage her fans to quit too, even as she lay dying of it in her hospital bed, Rand never checked any premise that gave her conceits pleasure.  Most tellingly, she said she was neither a supporter nor a detractor of the theory of evolution.  It’s not hard to see why.  Evolution was the monkey wrench in her philosophy, which was entirely driven by a model of human consciousness, that acknowledged only our capacity for rational thinking.  Rand’s human being, was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis.  And that is not what a human being is.

Rand said her morality was based on the primacy of human life.  Actually, its based on the primacy of power, and of its principle expression: the acquisition of property.  In order to sustain our lives Rand argues, we must acquire the necessities of life.  But since, according to Rand, human beings are lacking instincts, have no automatic code of conduct by which we sustain ourselves, our entire means of survival depends on our ability to think, to make judgments, and to act on those judgments to our own benefit.   Since the those things which we work to acquire to sustain our lives are the products of our capacity to think rationally, and are not provided for us in some automatic form such as by instinct or by some other gift of nature, they would not exist at all were it not for us.  Therefore as our lives are our primary value, that which we create to sustain our lives, which would not exist without our intellect, must belong to us as both the creator of those things, and as the means of sustaining our lives.  If we do not own the means of sustaining our own lives, those means, and therefore we, must belong to whoever does own them. 

This is human existence reduced to the act of acquiring and disposing of property, and it’s true as far as it goes.  Without some right of ownership of the fruits of our labors, we are merely slaves.  But the problem with a property centric view of morality is that eventually it turns people into property, and all questions of right and wrong become merely issues of ownership.  And there are some questions of right and wrong, that have nothing whatever to do with property.

As a matter of fact, some things necessary for human existence Are provided to us by nature.  Which is really unsurprising considering the fact that human beings Evolved in the natural world we live on.  We may have to think about how to go about getting the food and water we need, but nobody invented water, or meat, or apples. And we don’t even have to think about how to go about getting and using the air we breath.  It comes to us as naturally as…well…breathing.  How do you determine ownership of air?  Well…we know how Rand felt about all those dirty hippies who were bellyaching about air pollution back in her day.  In her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Rand cites a series of statistics that show life expectancy in the U.S. was increasing, even as the environment was becoming more and more polluted, and said,

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest, smokestacks you can find

Of course Rand was citing the life expectancy of the nation as a whole, not that subset of folks who, as a matter of fact, actually could take a short walk from their houses and lay hands on some grimiest sootiest smokestacks, not to mention living with ground water that was tainted with more dangerous chemicals then a nerve gas factory.  She might have discovered that as it turned out, Their life expectancy wasn’t quite so much.  But in Rand’s morality, since they choose to live in an ecological disaster zone, they deserved what they got.

Rand also had this to say about the nascent environmental movement of the 60s…

The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship.  This goal does not have to be inferred – many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.

There are two significant aspects in this New Left switch of the collectivist’s line.  One is the open break with the intellect, the dropping of the mask of intellectuality worn by the old left, the substitution of birds, bees and beauty – nature’s beauty – for the pseudoscientific, super-technological paraphernalia of Marx’s economic determinism.  A more ludicrous shrinking of a movement’s stature or a more obvious confession of intellectual bankruptcy could not be invented in fiction.

The other significant aspect is the reason behind the switch: the switch represents an open admission – by Soviet Russia and its facsimiles around the world and its sympathizers of every political sort and shade – that collectivism is an industrial and technological failure; that collectivism cannot produce.

In other words…it’s all a communist plot, to seize our private property.  Like they did her father’s pharmacy. 

It was after seeing in the Reagan years what kind of government we were likely to end up with when money became synonymous with morality, and more to the point, the kind of people we were likely to be ruled by in that world, that I finally walked away from Rand, and from the bastard child she always hated, Libertarianism.  It was years before I went back and read some of the books of hers that I once sat raptly with.  It was…embarrassing.  Her writing really is just awful.  Horrible.  Worse even, then LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind books.  And it’s interesting to note that Rand shares with LaHaye and Jenkens, more then merely an apocalyptic fervor.  More fundamentally, she shares their utter obliviousness to actual human nature.  Her characters aren’t even two-dimensional, particularly her villains.  They’re not people, they don’t act like people, they don’t talk like people, they are merely scarecrows flap, flap, flapping in her long winded wind.  And interestingly enough, just as in LaHaye and Jenkin’s book, there are no children.   More specifically, just as in the world of Left Behind, in the world of Ayn Rand not only are the children not there, nobody seems to notice that the children aren’t there.  There is a striking obliviousness to the vast landscape that is the human experience, which in novels of the size and scope of hers should be all around her characters, and it just isn’t there.  And there’s a reason for that.

Until just recently, I put Rand’s babbling about things like environmentalism being a communist plot, along with her vitriolic hatred of the 60s counter culture, down to a bred to the bone hatred in someone who had every legitimate reason to detest communism.  When it came to anything that even vaguely resembled communism, I figured she just had to be against it.  That was why, in the face of any evidence that laissez faire capitalism might only end up destroying democracy, and any vestige of freedom for all but the very few, and very rich, she just had to stick with it, because to give an inch would mean the communists would win.  She was, I figured in other words, a zealot.  But that wasn’t it at all.  The fact is, her celebration of the individual over the mob was rhetorical.  She never really believed in it.  As long as the mob was made up of John Galts, she was fine with whatever it wanted to do.

Ayn Rand died, ironically enough, on the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision.  You may think Dred Scott was about slavery…but as far as some folks were concerned, it was about property rights…

Scott was an enslaved man from Missouri who had lived for several years in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In denying Scott the opportunity to sue for freedom, the Court also ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In the notorious majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that blacks had never been intended to receive any federal rights “the white man was bound to respect,” and that it was inconceivable that blacks should ever have been intended by the Founders to enjoy equal citizenship.

Scott you see…wasn’t a man, he was property.  You might suppose that the Randian position on that is that Scott’s primary ownership of himself, of his life and the means to sustain it, had been stolen from him, and that no one can rightfully receive stolen property.  You would be wrong.

In an ideal world where the law really is an impartial referee, and justice is blind, a property centric rule of law might grant even the poorest of us rights that the rich and powerful would have to respect.  I may only have the clothes on my back, and whatever skills I’ve learned to survive on, but those belong to me and I can freely barter my skills with others for goods I need.  I may only be able to afford a run-down shack where nobody but the poor would want to live, but your multi-billion dollar factory right next door can’t pollute my ground water, and the food I grow, and the air I breath.  But in a world where the rule of money is bigger then the rule of law, and morality is measured by a balance sheet, rights will reliably gravitate to the few and away from the many.  What you have to understand, is that this is exactly the world Ayn Rand worked tirelessly for.  Not the one where everyone is free, but the one where only money talks.  A world where the marketplace bestows moral value, and might inevitably becomes right.  If The Man wants your meager little portion of the American Dream, then it’s his right to take it…because he can. 

And if you think this is Not what Rand meant, you are sadly mistaken:

On the 125th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, Ayn Rand — who surely would have approved of its fearless pronouncements on inequality — died at the age of 77. The right-wing cult philosopher and high priestess of tedium somehow managed to sell millions of copies of her nearly unreadable novels from the 1950s onward, including paperweights such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. On 6 March 1974, following a speech to the Army cadets at West Point, Rand was asked about the dispossession of American Indian land. In short, she approved of the idea.

They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

I’d have to say that if working your land well enough that you are making an independent  living off of it, which they were regardless of the degree of civilization the native peoples of America had, and they had a good goddamn more of it then Rand is giving them credit for there, if that gives you a moral claim to the land, then the Native Americans certainly had more then enough at the time of the European invasion…even on Rand’s stated terms.  They were in fact, making productive use of their lands.  Maybe not the productive use Rand would have cared for, but nonetheless they were earning a living off it, and had been for thousands of years.  The native Americans of the time didn’t live in caves, and in fact knew enough about their environment to live well in it, that they had to teach the first settlers how too, otherwise a lot of those oh-so-civilized white folks would have starved to death.  And if anyone was behaving like animals I’d suggest it was more the various civilized Americans during the 17 and 1800s, who decided that the natives needed to be eradicated, instead of traded with, which many of them were more then willing to do before being pushed off their lands.

See…Rand always claimed that the icon of civilized society is the trader, and that no value was ever gained with the force of guns.  It seems grotesque then, to see her justifying the seizing of property in a way not at all dissimilar in kind, if not in the particular, from what had happened to her father back in communist Russia, so long as it was being done to people she was pleased to call savages.  And…unwhite.  Many of those savages starved to death after their means to earn a living was taken from them, like Rand’s family almost did.  It all seems so staggeringly obscene…but that’s only if you take her postscript to her novels at its word.  And I mean it…  That’s the problem.  She didn’t.

Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.  Or for that matter, take over a dark person.  To…you know…civilize them.  And perhaps "stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice…"  Now you know how Rand could be utterly indifferent, contemptuous even, to the idea that capitalism could be just as dangerous to individual liberty as Marxist collectivism.  She was never really against the use of force to steal value from others…only against it to the degree that the values came from the white landed gentry.  What they did with the rest of us was merely the prerogative of the rich and powerful.  And the white.  That was her personal philosophy.  The public one was merely the instrument by which the personal one could be achieved.

And as America has been learning ever since George Bush was elevated to the presidency by an ersatz states rights supreme court, this is the way it is with the right wing.  Their values are mere window dressing.  A facade meant to fool the rubes.  The real value, the only value, is might makes right, and that was all that Rand’s philosophy was ever intended to do: give the powerful a moral sanction to rape the weak.  Ayn Rand styled herself as a champion of the mind.  She styled herself as a champion of freedom.  She styled herself as a champion of the individual over the mob.  It was all a fraud.  She was none of that.  She was a champion of the rich and powerful and never anything more.

Eight years to the day she gave her West Point speech, one-hundred and thirty-three years after Roger B. Taney declared from the bench of the United States Supreme Court that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect, Ayn Rand died.  The author Mary Renault once said that a person’s politics, like their sex life, is merely a reflection of the person within.  If you are mean and selfish and cruel it comes out in your sex life, and it comes out in your politics, when what really matters is that you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.  Consider Rand’s politics then, as being merely a reflection of the sex scenes in her novels, which are almost without exception fantasies of rape.  There’s the woman.  There’s her philosophy.

Postscript:  In re-reading that essay of hers in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution for this post, I had to laugh when I came across this:

But – the ecologists claim – men would not have to work or think, the computers would do everything.  Try to project a row of computers programmed by a bunch of hippies.

Ahem.  Yes.  Just try Ayn…

[Edited a tad…]