Ayn Rand: The Good

There is much in Ayn Rand’s works that many find refreshing and it is no surprise that she’s the darling of many Libertarians and Republicans.

• Rand recognized what should be “duh!” to everyone: contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time and in the same way! As she put it: “A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.”¹ Yes! Would anybody mind if I ate that last slice?
• Rand demanded that we can know reality, and that too is refreshing in this age of postmodern poppycock. “‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge….”²
• Since we can know reality, it followed that we must use our minds to the fullest. “Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”³ Of course, this leads logically to a constant theme in her books that people need to stop making excuses for their failures and get to work!⁴
• She argued that lazy thinkers often resent other people’s achievements and so many of them like the idea that we can’t know reality because that excuses their failures. In discussing the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand wrote that, prior to landing, newscaster “Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be made of green cheese, it will be a blow to science; but if it isn’t, it will be a blow to ‘those of us whose life is not so well organized.’ And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality.”⁵ Thus “the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned.”⁶
• Contrary to communism and most socialist philosophies, Rand recognized that humans are selfish and will not work hard (or even work at all) unless they believe their efforts will be rewarded. Although Christians completely disagree with Rand on the nature of selfishness (she thinks it’s a good thing), she’s right that it is the natural human condition that if people aren’t incentivized they will not excel. Communism’s failure to recognize human selfishness is the number one reason for its collapse. It’s no wonder then that while the West German was making the Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche, the East German working for the “collective good” was making trashbin Trabants, “the car that gave communism a bad name.”⁷

So logic works and we can know reality and we should stop making excuses and we should work hard for our labor will be rewarded.

What’s not to like!?

Next we’ll look at Ayn Rand–the bad.

1 Thessalonians 5:21: “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.”

Amen.

1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957; repr., New York: Plume, 1999), 1018. [↩]
2. Ibid., 1040. [↩]
3. Ibid., 418, 420. Of course, this last clause is just hyperbole as Rand thought there were many other evil thoughts. [↩]
4. Contra Rand, this can be taken too far. [↩]
5. Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Meridian, 1999), 104-105. [↩]
6. Ibid., 34. [↩]
7. Dan Neil: “This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany’s answer to the VW Beetle — a ‘people’s car,’ as if the people didn’t have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!” Dan Neil, “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time” Time.com, http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1658533_1658030,00.html#ixzz1IxseJ0Ku, accessed 8 April 2011. [↩]