Cato Policy Report, November/December 1997
Atlas and the World
On October 4 the Cato Institute and the Institute for Objectivist Studies cosponsored a conference at the Renaissance Washington Hotel to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Among the speakers were Frank Bond, founder of the Holiday Health Spas, a Cato Board member, and chairman of the IOS Board; Nathaniel Branden, author of many books including Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand and, most recently, The Art of Living Consciously; David Kelley, executive director of IOS; John Fund, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal; and Ed Snider, a member of the IOS Board and owner of Comcast Spectacor and the Philadelphia Flyers.
Frank Bond: Atlas Shrugged, the masterwork of the late novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, has been a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of literature and philosophy. At once a love story, a mystery thriller, a mythic morality tale about the collapse of civilization, and a revolutionary philosophical manifesto, Atlas Shrugged has affected our world like no other work since Marx's Das Capital. Although dismissed and condemned by much of the political and cultural establishment, it has been passionately embraced by two generations and millions of enthusiastic readers. Year after year, Atlas Shrugged continues to sell at near bestseller levels. A survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club ranked this classic second only to the Bible as the book that readers say has made a difference in their lives.
Legions of people--from students, to truck drivers, to members of Congress, to businesspeople--have been captivated and inspired by the vision of life Ayn Rand presented in Atlas Shrugged. Its moral defense of reason, individualism, and capitalism helped launch the modern libertarian movement. And no one can deny that the ideas presented in the book are helping to shape the social debates of our time. As Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recently stated, "Atlas, which I read in galley proofs as it was being written, had a profound impact on my understanding of the roots of morality and free societies. I have no doubt Ayn Rand will similarly influence future generations." This gala event held in the heart of our nation's capital not only provides further evidence of the impact of Rand's masterpiece; it also helps to rectify an injustice. We gather to pay a long-overdue tribute to a great book and to the great visionary who crafted it. Her spirit is here with us today.
As one whose life has been profoundly affected by Atlas Shrugged, I am honored and thrilled to welcome you here both to celebrate and to take the measure of the extraordinary impact of this extraordinary novel.
Nathaniel Branden: Between
roughly 1953 and 1957, a group of us would meet at Ayn's
house every Saturday night to read and reread different
chapters of Atlas. So, by the time it was actually
published, I don't think there was anybody in the
original group who hadn't read the entire book at least
10 times. We lived in that world. It was like a private
intellectual universe--not fully the universe of the
novel, but also not the universe of what people would
call real life. We lived in some very special place where
John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, and Dagny
Taggart were personal friends.
The book had such an impact on us that we all believed it would change the world. We didn't think Atlas would convert the Pope or die-hard Marxists, but we thought that any remotely reasonable person would see the light. None of us--including Ayn--could have imagined quite how long and how complex the battle was going to be.
When the book came out, it sold enormously well and was on the bestseller list for a very long time. But it didn't affect the intellectual class as we had hoped. It took me a long time to understand that Atlas Shrugged--brilliant though it was as a philosophical work--was still a novel, a work of art, and that to produce the kind of cultural change that we all hoped for, many other kinds of activities were going to be needed. The one that I chose as my personal mission was, of course, the creation of what became known as Nathaniel Branden Institute. I thought it would be useful to present a series of lectures that would explain objectivism in a more systematic way. We began at the beginning and worked our way from metaphysics to epistemology to aesthetics. I'm very proud of the number of people who took our courses and went on to do important things.
In the past several years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what's needed to increase the impact of Rand's ideas, and I am convinced that it's scholarship. Objectivists need to make their voices heard in the academy. I don't mean merely new expositions of the ideas. I mean taking core ideas, amplifying them, and showing how they can be used to solve a wide variety of philosophical, moral, and social problems. Let me give an example. A lot of libertarians have told me that while they are very sympathetic to the idea of individual rights, they don't feel completely satisfied that there has ever been an adequate philosophical justification. I think that Ayn provided all the elements for a coherent theory of rights, but I'm not sure she wove them together very clearly. A monograph that took the core ideas and presented a formal, carefully reasoned, and highly structured defense of rights would be very valuable.
Many speakers have focused on the philosophy presented in Atlas Shrugged, so I would like to talk about the book from a slightly different angle--its impact as a novel, its impact as a work of art. Naturally, many of us here are interested in how many people Atlas Shrugged oriented in a libertarian direction, and we all know the answer is plenty. We also know that many people took from it a renewed appreciation and understanding of business activity. But one of the functions of great art is to inspire, to give courage, to light a fire in human souls, and I think that Atlas Shrugged, like The Fountainhead, did that for thousands of people. As a psychotherapist, I have met a number of people who have been inspired by Atlas Shrugged. The book helped them to take chances, to start their own businesses, to pursue careers that were filled with challenges, to enter marriages their parents might have opposed or to leave marriages they knew were destructive, and to strike out in some direction that might have scared them. You don't hear about those people very often; you don't know their stories. Yet I'm convinced that Atlas has shown people that human beings are capable of achieving truly heroic things.
A lot of people who fell in love with Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are shy about it. They feel a little funny about shouting from the rooftops how much they care about those works. And I think that's because the books touch something so deep inside our own souls that talking about it can make people feel naked. And they certainly don't know what kind of reception they're going to get from the listener. But if we're interested in advancing the ideas contained in the books, we need to be willing to be very vocal and very loud. That leads me back to something I said earlier. Nowhere will the battle be tougher than in academia; nowhere is the whole style of thinking--the whole psycho-epistemology, if you wish--more hostile to objectivism than in the universities. But we're only going to be able to push the ideas so far without doing serious scholarly work.
Tonight marks the end of the beginning. It represents a turning point for objectivism and Atlas Shrugged, a turning point for the ideas that IOS and Cato have done so much to promote. None of us is going to live long enough to see the end of this story, but isn't it exciting to have been there at the beginning?
David Kelley: Atlas Shrugged is a timeless work because it's a philosophical work. Much in the book is dated, to be sure, but not its philosophical core. Atlas is a ringing defense of capitalism as the only social system consistent with human nature and human values. It lays out in dramatic form the worldview on which a capitalist society depends: that human life is the standard of value; that reason is man's means of survival and the glory of his nature; that production, not sacrifice, is the most exalted form of human activity; that the producers are the Atlasses who carry our world on their shoulders; that individuals must be left free to act on their own judgment and to follow their own vision; and that the individual has the moral right to live for himself, to pursue his own happiness, and does not need to justify his existence by service to God or country.
If we want to reduce that philosophy to its absolute essence, I would say that it consists of two fundamental points: reason and individualism. Ayn Rand herself described Atlas Shrugged as a novel about the role of reason in human life: reason as an absolute; reason as a source of knowledge and truth as against any appeals of faith or authority; reason as a guide to action, as a standard of value, as the basis for an objective moral code; and, above all, reason as a creative power, the source of all human achievements, from philosophy, to the sciences, to the arts, to industry and invention.
One of Rand's own great achievements was to dramatize the role of the mind in production. George Gilder has written eloquently about the dynamism of a capitalist economy, showing how wealth is not a static thing but a process driven by human intelligence and imagination. Julian Simon has written about why the mind--not iron ore, crude petroleum, or arable land--is the ultimate resource. Those truths are easy to understand today, in an information age when intelligence is stamped on a computer chip for even the slowest person to see. But Rand understood them 40 years ago.
The second great theme of Atlas Shrugged is individualism. Ayn Rand understood that thought, choice, and purpose are actions of the individual, not the group. Her heroes think for themselves rather than follow convention. Growing up, for example, Dagny always intended to run Taggart Transcontinental some day. "She was 15 when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. 'To hell with that,' she thought, and never worried about it again."
As individualists, Rand's heroes reject any demand for self-sacrifice. The novel is the story of a strike by "the men of the mind," the producers and achievers, to protest the idea that they have to serve others and that the greater their ability, the greater the debt they owe. Those who join the strike swear an oath, on their life and their love of it, that they will not live for the sake of others nor ask others to live for them. No other philosopher has expressed so powerfully the individual's moral right to pursue his happiness.
The message of Atlas Shrugged is that capitalism is not just an efficient economic engine. It is a social system that allows and rewards and celebrates the best in human nature. And socialism, or any form of collectivism, is not just inefficient, it is immoral. It is a degrading expression of envy, of malice, of the lust for power in the few who rule and the fear of freedom in the many who submit.
So are intellectuals singing the praises of reason? Are they celebrating individualism? Are teachers promoting rationality, independence, and the individual's right to exist for himself? Well, not exactly. The dominant voices in the cultural arena today are those of conservatives such as William Bennett on one side and of radical multiculturalists on the other. Those two contenders are engaged in a noisy culture war with each other. But underneath their differences, both sides share an antipathy to reason and individualism.
Conservative intellectuals tend to elevate tradition, faith, and authority over reason as guides to human action. Conservatives have lately been arguing that the decline in traditional standards of conduct and character is responsible for social pathologies like crime, drug abuse, and dependence on welfare. They blame the counterculture of the 1960s and more generally the spirit of individualism for eroding traditional standards. Individualism, they complain, elevates the pursuit of happiness over the cultivation of virtue. To quote William Bennett: "Unbridled capitalism is a problem. It may not be a problem for production, but it's a problem for human beings. It's a problem for the whole dimension of things we call the realm of values and human relationships."
The multiculturalists who dominate the universities and the arts are vehemently hostile to reason. They embrace the Marxist idea that cultures and beliefs are expressions of class interest. Not only is Western culture no better than others. It's worse because it's the culture of an oppressor class. Reason, objectivity, and standards are tools by which elite Eurocentric males oppress everybody else.
That whole mindset obviously is hostile not just to reason but to individualism. At the University of Pennsylvania several years ago a student was censured for turning in a paper in which she talked about her "deep regard for the individual and my desire to protect the freedom of all members of society." An administrator sent the paper back to her with the word "individual" underlined and with a note in the margin: "This is a red-flag phrase today. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privilege the individuals belonging to the largest or dominant group."
A free society allows, encourages, and even depends on people who can define for themselves the values that give their lives meaning and then pursue those values autonomously. It relies on people who are entrepreneurs in their own lives, who have a sense of self-ownership and the drive to make the most of themselves. The ideas of today's cultural warriors on both sides of the conflict are completely out of touch with that reality.
John Fund: I have some good
news and some bad news to report to you. The good news is
that I think the influence of Atlas Shrugged is
everywhere around us. I think that even people who have
not fully accepted or fully believed what Ayn Rand wrote
have been influenced by her. After all, hers are
extremely popular works, and their ideas have literally
seeped into the popular culture. And I have noticed that
there are many people who have been able to find niches
in this world in which they can cooperate with others and
still remain true to the principles they learned from
reading Ayn Rand.
Now the bad news. The bad news is that our public educational system is sending out the following message to people: "We will take care of you as long as you don't do anything to improve yourself." That is the bargain that I think paternalistic government is giving people now--don't bother to think about what you can accomplish in life because ultimately we are there to take care of you, as long as you don't push the envelope of our system, as long as you don't try to break out of the box.
I'll give you an anecdote that I think illustrates my point. A friend and I bumped into a group of school children on a trip to East Berlin in 1984. We shared stories. I showed them my passport; they showed me their identity papers. And they told us about what life was like growing up under a collectivist system and to what extent Western television was a window on the outside world and why they were insatiably curious about it.
When dusk came my friend and I had to go back across the wall into West Berlin. The students had never seen the wall, but they knew instinctively that it was coming. Finally we were about 50 yards away, and they stopped and turned to us and said, "It's probably best we not go any further. If we get too close to the wall they'll ask us questions." I will never forget that moment. I could go literally anywhere in the world from that point even though I was not a person of wealth, but they could not go another 50 yards. Their world stopped at that wall. So just to keep the moment going I asked them idly, "What do you all want to be when you grow up?" One said a beautician and one said a nurse and one said a teacher. But the oldest and the wisest, whose name was Monika, said, "It doesn't make any difference what we become under this system because we will always be treated like children." People were not allowed, in the words of Ayn Rand, to be that which was the best within them.
I was just crushed by that, but Monika and I exchanged addresses, and over the next few years I would occasionally send her a postcard or a letter to try to keep her spirits up. And then the day came: the wall came down and I wondered what became of Monika. Later that night I got a phone call. I picked up the phone and she said, "Hello, this is Monika. I'm over the wall." At the end of the conversation I reminded her of our conversation on that street corner in East Berlin and I said to her, "Well, are you now no longer going to be treated like a child?" And she said, without skipping a beat, "I think my entire country has graduated from kindergarten to high school overnight."
In 1994 Monika came to California to visit me and she had an unusual request. She wanted to speak to an American civics class at my old high school. I had gone back to speak at that high school, and every time I did so I was appalled by the decline in standards, discipline, and rigorous thinking. In fact, the last time I'd spoken at that high school, I said to myself as I came out, "John, thank goodness you're not any younger because you could be like them." But I swallowed my doubts and I let Monika speak to the high school class. It was a disaster. Perhaps it was the wrong day, but there was gum chewing and people were talking and interrupting her. At the end of her speech she took questions. The first question was from someone in the front row, who asked why in the world someone would want to build a wall down the middle of a city? Obviously, he had not listened to anything she had said, not comprehended any of it. So I left with Monika, shaking my head, feeling ashamed, and trying to explain that not all American students were like that. She looked at me with that same pained, sad expression that I remembered from that street corner in East Berlin and said, "John, the problem with America is you have had freedom for so long, you have never lost it, and therefore you are willing to give it away by inches. Those children in that room, no matter what they do when they grow up, many of them will always act like children."
And that's our challenge. I think the ideas of Ayn Rand, of Atlas Shrugged, of individualism, of the free market are becoming more and more embedded in our society. But there are fewer and fewer people who can understand them, fewer and fewer people who can think for themselves because of the bargain that the government has sold us.
Ed Snider: When I was active in the National Hockey League, I was extremely puzzled because I thought many of the other owners consistently voted against their own self-interest. At a board meeting in the 1970s I expressed that sentiment to a colleague, and he said that if I really wanted to understand what was going on I should read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I really wasn't much of a reader, but I had a great deal of respect for the man who gave me that advice and so I read the book. It changed everything in my life from that day forward. For me, it was a revelation that explained things that I had heard all my life but did not understand.
Shortly after reading the book, I wrote an introduction to a pamphlet by Rand called "The Meaning of Money," and I sent it to many businessmen that I knew. In that introduction I argued that not only had I never realized the importance of ideas and philosophy to my daily business decisions, but I had implicitly accepted ideas that were making me unhappy, much like Hank Rearden had. Although I enjoyed working and producing, I didn't know why, and, in fact, I often felt guilty. Atlas changed that. It explained that money is the reward but not the reason we work, and it showed me why personal happiness is the proper goal in life.
After finishing Atlas, I wrote to Ayn Rand and told her that I would like to discuss the book with her and bring my sons up to meet her. To my amazement, she wrote back and said she would like to meet me, too. At that meeting, I asked her, "How do you understand what goes on in business and what goes on in the board rooms? Where did you get all that knowledge?" And she said, "I don't understand anything about what goes on in the board rooms; I understand the nature of man."
I told her that I would really like to see objectivism taught in every philosophy department in the United States and that I would like to work toward that goal. She started laughing and said, "Well, you can work on it, but I don't think that you are going to be very successful. You are going to find that people are going to call me a fascist and a lot of other things." Well, lo and behold, I went to the University of Pennsylvania and met with the president and the people in the philosophy department and encountered the type of resistance that Rand had warned me about.
But, finally, it was decided that we would have a test and that the philosophy department would sponsor a lecture by Ayn Rand or someone of her choosing, and if that the lecture was a huge success, we would take the next step. So we sponsored a lecture titled "The Virtue of Selfishness." The lecture hall was overcrowded and the event was a resounding success. I went to the cocktail party after the lecture and one of the professors in the philosophy department walked up to me and said, "Do you believe this garbage? Do you realize that she believes that if someone invents a cure for cancer that he could just destroy it and not give it to the world?" I said, "No, that is not really what she believes. She believes that if someone invents a cure for cancer it belongs to them and no one has the right to take it away. And that any rational man who would come up with such a remarkable invention would want to profit from his efforts--not to waste them." To which he said, "Well, if you really think that way, why don't you just give a million dollars and have a chair?" I said I have a better idea: "Why don't we just replace you?"
This article originally appeared in the November/December 1997 edition of Cato Policy Report.