Guru
Of Greed: The Cult Of Selfishness
By Leonard Doyle
15 October, 2007
The
Independent
Why is it that millions of ordinary
Americans vote for conservative policies that seem inimical to their
lives? Why are the politicians who support healthcare reforms to give
access to a doctor for the 47 million Americans without insurance branded
as closet socialists or worse?
Why, in this upside-down
world do so many blue-collar Americans vote Republican, and family farmers
support a President whose Wall Street friends would gladly push them
off the land?
Why do people shrug and say
"tough", when they read that hundreds of thousands of Americans
have lost their homes, after falling victims to crooked mortgage salesmen?
The most common response is that millions of people who otherwise could
never have afforded a home are now enjoying the American Dream.
Perhaps the greatest political
riddle of the US is why so many Americans vote against their economic
and social interests?
If it were otherwise, then
surely John Edwards, the telegenic Democratic candidate for President
would lead the polls since he has dedicated his campaign to lifting
tens of millions out of poverty. Instead it is Hillary Clinton, whose
economic policies might as well have been drafted by the editorial board
of the Wall Street Journal, who looks a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination.
So what's the matter with
America?
The answer may be contained
in the writings of the Russian emigrée and radical libertarian
philosopher Ayn Rand. Two decades after her death, she remains the darling
of right-thinking Americans and sales of her novels, paens of praise
to unbridled capitalism, are even outselling The Da Vinci Code.
More copies of her book Atlas
Shrugged are sold now than when she was the literary pied piper of Wall
Street. In his early thirties, no less a figure than Alan Greenspan,
who married one of her closest friends and went on to become the chairman
of the Federal Reserve fawned over her. On Saturday nights he made his
way to Rand's deliberately darkened apartment in Manhattan to sit in
rapt admiration as passages of her novels were read aloud to her conservative
salon.
"Ayn," Mr Greenspan
would say according to those who were also present, "upon reading
this, one tends to feel exhilarated!"
Mr Greenspan was already
making lots of money as an economics consultant, advising the Wall Street
moguls and other captains of industry whom Ms Rand idealised in her
books.
At the time Mr Greenspan
embraced the Rand dogma, he favoured removing all safety nets from the
US economy and bringing back the Gold Standard. When Atlas Shrugged
was negatively reviewed as an apology for totalitarianism in the New
York Times, Mr Greenspan wrote a letter to the paper, which in retrospect
looks like an application for the job that would eventually make him
one of the most powerful figures in the world.
To the editor:
Atlas Shrugged is a celebration
of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals
and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment.
Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as
they should,
Alan Greenspan
New York
Over the years as Mr Greenspan
became the World's pre-eminent central banker he slipped from Rand's
circle of influence. And while never quite dumping her theory of Objectivism
– in fact he has fond memories of her salon in his new book –
he turned his back on her cold-hearted worldview for the rest of his
powerful career.
Some argue that it was Rand
herself rather than her philosophical ideas that held the public gaze.
Biographies penned by spurned lovers and collections of her letters
reveal a difficult personality, alternatively passionate and cold. A
woman who kept lists of sworn enemies. She enjoyed kinky sex with swinging
couples and enforced a cult of loyalty among her followers.
Rand was born in 1905 in
Russia and her comfortable life was turned upside down when the Bolsheviks
attacked her father's pharmacy, declaring his business to be state property.
She had fled the Soviet Union by1926 and soon arrived in Hollywood.
There she looked though the studio gates to see the director Cecil B.
DeMille on the set filming a silent movie, King of Kings.
She talked her way onto the
set, and got a job as an extra, later becoming a junior screenwriter.
There she also met and married the writer Frank O' Connor.
For a few years she wrote
screenplays as well as novels that failed to sell. It was only in 1943
that her career took off when word-of-mouth campaign got The Fountainhead
noticed and put her on the road to success.
Rand's most influential book,
Atlas Shrugged begins in a recession. To save the economy her hero,
John Galt, calls for a strike by intellectuals against government interference.
Factories, farms and shops close. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.
Rand herself said she "set out to show how desperately the world
needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray
"what happens to a world without them".
The book was published into
a welter of criticism. The New York Times critic denounced it as "written
out of hate" and called it "a triumph of English as a second
language". Both conservatives and liberal critics disparaged it,
with the right condemning its promotion of a godless ethic and the left
condemning its message of "greed is good". Rand cried every
day as bad reviews poured in.
But now she is back in fashion
of a sort. Her theories have made inroads into academia. Objectivism
is taught at more than 30 universities, with fellowships at several
leading philosophy departments. The Ayn Rand Institute has a war chest
of over $7m to promote her ideas and more than a million high school
pupils are being given free copies of her novels to read.
Now a movie, starring Angelina
Jolie in the lead role, is being released next year.
As Forbe's magazine –
aka The Capitalist's Tool – breathlessly reported: "Sales
on Amazon in the first nine months of this year are already almost double
the total for 2006." With the 50th anniversary of its publication
today, Atlas Shrugged was ranked 124th on Amazon's sales charts while
The Da Vinci Code languished at 2,587.
The book made Rand the toast
of every Rotary Club in the land.
Legions of readers, including
Hillary Clinton, members of the Supreme Court and of course Mr Greenspan
count Rand among their formative influences. And the 140,000 copies
of Atlas Shrugged, which are sold every year, are a small fraction of
the 6 million books sold since the book was first published.
Rand's credo is summed up
by the title of a collection of her essays, The Virtue of Selfishness,
which have circulated in an almost samizdat fashion among enthusiasts
of capitalism red in tooth and claw.
It attracted the devotion
of America's top corporate executives, who would only speak of its impact
behind closed doors. A staple read of undergraduate business schools,
the book provided comfort to each generation of entrepreneurs by telling
them that there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.
One of the characters in
Atlas Shrugged, summarises her philosophy of Objectivism with the following
oath: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never
live for the sake of another human being, or ask another human being
to live for mine."
Her novels continue to inspire
visceral feelings of worship and disgust among readers. Reviewing the
newly published memoir of her acolyte Greenspan, the conservative writer
Andrew Ferguson complains in The Weekly Standard that "her creepy
philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the centre of the moral
universe, still is embraced by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys
in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious
bouts of masturbation."
One way or another Rand's
ode to American individualism has made her one of the towering figures
of US political thought in the late 20th century.
By rejecting altruism and
embracing selfishness she rejected the Judaeo-Christian underpinning
of the religious right. The only moral obligation a person had was to
his or her own happiness. That meant capitalism should be given a free
rein with an unregulated market economy.
She pushed America's cult
of individualism into uncharted waters where ruthless self-interest
and disdain for poorer members of society were the guiding principles.
Her admirers partly credit
her revived appeal to an absence of ideas coming from the US left: "Today's
left doesn't have anything positive to offer to young people,"
says Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "When they
were socialists, there was at least something they were fighting for,
and they believed in a right and a wrong. Today's leftist agenda is
negative and nihilistic – focused on stopping industrialisation,
capitalism and even Western civilisation. But young people want positive
values. That's why religion is so strong today, because many view it
as the only thing that promises a brighter future.
"Ayn Rand is the only
voice that offers a secular absolutist morality with a positive vision
and agenda, for individuals and for society as a whole."
The coming presidential election
will reveal the extent to which ordinary poor Americans will proudly
vote themselves out of jobs, off the land and ensure that their children
can never afford to go to university or afford health care. It happened
in the last two presidential elections, and the Ayn Rand Institute is
banking that it will happen again.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
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