Philip Rubenstein
Ayn Rand: High Priestess of the American Right
Philip Rubenstein - Ayn Rand: High Priestess of the American Right
- Could there possibly be a better time of year than Pesach, the Festival of Freedom to look at the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, champion of individual freedom as she was? Just a quick overview for those of you who aren’t familiar with her. She’s born Alisa Rosenbaum in Czarist Russia. She lives through the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution. Then she moves to the US and ends up having, I’d say, a profound effect on a sizable minority of the population of America through her two most famous books, which are the “Fountain Head”, and “Atlas Shrugged”. Now, you’ll notice that we’re slightly out of sequence here because the American series of lectures actually finished a few weeks ago. So please just consider this a late entry into that series. And my justification is that quite frankly, I don’t think we can get enough of hearing about the contribution of remarkable Jewish women because there haven’t been that many in this series. And whether you like Ayn Rand, or will learn to like Ayn Rand, or learn to loath her as a result of the next hour, remarkable, she certainly was. But the place I want to start is in the 1980s, particularly the late 1980s, and this is the tail end of a decade that was known for money, excess, shoulder pads, and it was fueled by the rising power of Wall Street. In 1987, Oliver Stone, the slightly left wing director, made a movie which defined that era, which has got the same name, “Wall Street”, and the movie pits an honest Joe by the name of Carl Fox, who’s played by Martin Sheen, who’s worked in the same factory all of his life, against an unscrupulous corporate raider by the name of Gordon Gecko, who of course is played by Michael Douglas.
It’s a story that’s as old as the hills, the hero’s journey from good to evil, and then back to Good. Bud Fox, who’s the son, he’s led into dark ways by Gordon Gecko, and Gecko is really the devil incarnate. Gecko temps him with pots of money, beautiful women, and a fantasy lifestyle. Bud Fox initially falls headlong for the lifestyle, but eventually he sees the error of his ways. He disowns Gecko, and he returns to the light. “Wall Street” is by and large a fierce critique of Gordon Gecko and everything he stands for, except, that is, for one scene. And that’s really where I just want to start. So let’s just get this up. This is one of the great movie speeches, and in it, Gordon Gecko addresses a meeting of shareholders to justify what he does. He’s trying to buy, if you remember, he’s trying to buy a company called Healthstar, and he needs the shareholders to vote in his favour. And this is what he says. Let’s go from the front. Here we go.
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do it right, or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of $12 billion. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much. ♪ Fly me to the moon ♪ ♪ Let me play among the stars ♪
What’s interesting, I think about that speech is how Gecko explains greed or the word he uses. And what he says is, we human beings, we actually need greed and we need it because it’s the impulse, he says, behind all human achievement. Greed for life, love, knowledge, as well as money. Without greed, he’s saying, there’s no life. Now, I think that this speech is so memorable and it’s stood out so much in the movie because it’s unsettling, it makes us think, but there’s nothing original about it because 30 years earlier in 1957, Ayn Rand published a novel that was called “Atlas Shrugged”. And if you look on the Library of Congress website for example, you’ll see that it’s listed as one of the 10 most influential American books of the 20th century. And the novel contains the so-called Money Speech. And in this speech, one of Rand’s heroes says that the pursuit of money is the most fundamental source of energy that makes all human life and achievement possible. I am going to spare you the entire speech because it’s over 2,500 words long. But here’s just a little flavour of it. “So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked, what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.
Until, and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you will ask for your own destruction.” So it’s fundamentally the same speech as Gordon Gecko’s, but it’s written 30 years earlier, and it’s written by Ayn Rand. Here she is. This is a publicity shot that was taken of her in 1943 when she’s 38 years old. And the first thing you notice about her, the first thing that almost everyone noticed about her is those eyes, dark, widely set, and intense. One of her acolytes, and as we’ll learn later, there were a fair number, said this, “When she looked into my eyes, she looked into my soul, and I felt she saw me.” A journalist on Newsweek magazine puts it in a more blunt fashion. “Her glare could wilt a cactus.” So she’s formidable. Once while making a speech on the subject of patriotism, a member of the crowd jeered her for being a foreigner. She glared at him with those eyes, “I chose to come to America. What did you do?” The best way I think, to get a real sense of her is to watch her on screen. So we’re going to see Ayn Rand being interviewed by Mike Wallace, and this is the year 1959. So Wallace was still quite young at this stage, and it’s two years after publication of her great opus. So she’s now at the height of her prowess. And let’s just hear from her.
My morality is based on man’s life as a standard of value. And since men’s mind is his basic means of survival, I hold that if man wants to live on earth and to live as a human being, he has to hold reason as an absolute, by which I mean that he has to hold the reason as his only guide to action, and that he must live by the independent judgement of his own mind, that his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness, and that he must not force other people nor accept their right to force him, that each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
So she’s saying, our highest moral purpose, okay, highest moral purpose, higher than anything else, is the pursuit of our own happiness, and our own self-interest. Now, that’s quite a statement, but before we dig any deeper, let’s find out a little bit more about her, who she is, and where she came from. So this is a very, very cute photo of her and her sisters. And she’s the oldest, as you can see, of three sisters. She’s born Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905, and she’s born into a bourgeois Jewish family living in St. Petersburg. Here are her two younger sisters and their father, Zinovy, is a successful pharmacist. Now this is, of course, still the time of the Russian Empire. So in the main, Jews are still forced to live in the Pale of Settlement. But you can get out of the Pale, if you are either rich or if you develop specialist skills, in which case you are able to live in Russia proper. And Zinovy Rosenbaum was one of those who developed skills. He’s a hard worker and he wants to make something of himself. So he studies pharmacology at Warsaw University, which is liberal enough to admit Jews. And this is his passport out of the Pale. He marries Alisa’s mother, Anna, and they move together to St. Petersburg. And they bring up the family in a kind of traditional Jewish way. They celebrate the high holy days, they hold Seder, but otherwise, they’re a kind of a secular Haskalah family. Zinovy starts to build the business. I mean, so he, you know, first of all, it’s a kind of a small local pharmacy. Then he buys grander premises with a partner on the city’s main shopping avenue. And by 1914, he’s now the sole owner.
He’s bought the building, and the family is living upstairs, and they’ve got a couple of servants. So they’re what you’d call, well to do. He’s a reserve character is Zinovy, but he’s very proud of his success. He’s proud that he can afford to help his extended family, and he’s especially proud that he can maintain his wife, and his three daughters in a level of comfort. Young Alisa is aware that she lives in a nation that is deeply hostile to Jews, but even so, she feels inured to this, because she’s protected by her father’s prosperity and by his business ties. But in the winter of 1918, a year after the revolution, all that’s going to change. Alisa had been excited by the February revolution, the year before 1917, and what she saw as the hope it brought for freedom. But of course by now, all of those liberal Democrats have been swept from power and they’ve been replaced by Bolsheviks. And Alisa’s friends and their parents are all leaving town in fear. As they did, with thousands of other factories, banks, and shops, the Red Guard turn up one day, and they seize Zinovi’s shop. This is all part of Lenin’s campaign of class warfare against the middle classes, a practise that he calls, looting the looters. Alisa is actually there in the shop that day. She’s witness to everything that happens. She watches as the Bolsheviks drive her father out of the shop, as they humiliate him in the street, and as they nail the doors with a red seal signifying that the property is now confiscated, and now belongs to the people. This event is, I mean this is going to be pivotal in her life, and she talks about it, she never forgets it. She’s only 12 years old, and she’s just witnessed what effectively is the end of her family life as she’s always known it.
But even more important, this is going to colour all of her ideas and her worldview between now and the next 70 years while she’s is still alive, and in particular what she’s going to think about the right to the individual versus the rights of the collective, and her views on the role of the state. Overnight, the family is completely impoverished, so they flee the city, and they end up in the Crimea, because it’s still under white army control. Alisa’s mother just about keeps the family afloat by gaining work as a teacher, but her father’s unable to work. And four years later, it’s now 1922, and the family is forced to flee again, because now the Crimea has fallen to the Bolsheviks. So they return to St. Petersburg, which has now, of course, been named Petrograd, and here they face desperate starving conditions and life only improves in tiny increments and over time. For Alisa, however, there is one silver lining of revolution and that is that Russian universities are now for the first time, open to women. So aged 16, she enrols at the local university where she studies history. And while she’s there, she develops two great loves. The first is writing, and the second is the movies. She becomes an obsessive movie goer. And once her university studies are complete, she then gets herself onto a filmmaking course. So here we are, in the mid 1920s and this interest that she’s had in film has grown into a fascination with Hollywood. And Hollywood becomes her main gateway into American life and culture. From everything she sees in the movies, she develops a yearning for America, it’s modernity, it’s skyscrapers, it’s movie industry, and above all, the sense of personal freedom that America seems to offer.
So she’s 21 years old, and she decides that she has to go to the USA. It’s still relatively easy at this stage to leave Russia. So she manages to finagle herself a visa claiming that she’s only going away for six months, and will be returning to be reunited with a non-existent boyfriend in Russia. She arrives, but she can’t speak any English at this point. However, she does some kindly relatives living in Chicago who take pity on her and they take her in while she works out what she’s going to do next. So first job for her is to learn English, and the second job is to reinvent herself. This is when Alisa Rosenbaum becomes Ayn Rand. Now it is pronounced Ayn, I’m told, as in pine, not Ain, A-Y-N as in pain, although I have to say I do keep slipping into Ain. So I’m going to try and stick to Ayn but you may hear me slipping, for which apologies. Why does this, why does she choose this strange name, Ayn Rand? Well, Ayn allegedly is I tribute to a Finnish writer that she admires, and Rand is again, allegedly, she says it’s an abbreviation of the name Rosenbaum. But let’s just look at it another way. What she’s doing is she’s casting off her Russian Jewish identity, and she’s reinventing herself for the new world. After six months in Chicago, she takes a train to Hollywood. She’s got no job to go to, she’s got no place to live, still has very little English, but she’s carried there by sheer ambition. The story goes, that she applies for a job with Cecil B. DeMille, but she’s rejected. So she decides she’s just going to hang around in the parking lot waiting for him.
After a while, DeMille drives up and he sees her all alone, and he shouts, “Hey kid, jump in if you want to see how we make movies here.” So there she is with Cecil B. DeMille in his car, and he takes her to the set of his new movie. This is 1927, and his new movie, which is called “King of Kings”. So here’s a still from that movie, and to be honest, I’m not really going to talk about it. The only reason I put this in is I just think it’s such a striking image and for the movie buffs among you, that’s Jacqueline Logan, a star of silent screen from the ‘20s and early '30s. That’s Jacqueline Logan in the middle playing Mary Magdalene. And the caption there, I dunno if you can read that, it’s fantastic. The caption is, “Beauty at her toilet is distracted by a courtier’s chance remark.” Anyway, sorry for that distraction. Back to the story. It’s on the set of “King of Kings” that she meets tall, handsome extra by the name of Frank O'Connor, Frank O'Connor from Ohio. As you can see, very striking. And she notices him one day when he’s dressed in the full regalia of a Roman centurion. As he walks past her, she sticks her foot out and she deliberately picks him up to get his attention. And so they get chatting, and after a short while they fall for each other. Two years later, they marry.
And this also means for her that she’s now able to become a permanent resident in the US. So she’s secure in the country. She and Frank are married. It’s a lifelong relationship. Frank dies in 1979, and she dies three years later. So they’re married for a long time, but Frank is always going to play second fiddle to Ayn in the relationship. She’s the main breadwinner and he’s generally content to stay in the background as the loyal and complaining supportive husband. So she’s met Frank, and she’s working on set, and this kicks off what effectively is her first career, which is in the movies. She starts off with a series of fairly odd jobs. So she’s an extra, and at one point she has a stint in the wardrobe department. But as I say, it’s writing, that’s her real passion. And before too long, she gains employment as a screenwriter where she works on scripts for Universal, and Paramount, and MGM. Frank likes living in California. He loves the great outdoors, but she yearns for the intellectual cut and thrust of New York. And so as usual, Ayn wins the day, and they sell up in Hollywood and they move East. These are important years for her. This is the '30s now, and it’s through screenwriting that she starts to learn how to tell stories, how to shape characters and dialogue, and how to create dramatic tension. Not only screenwriting, but once she’s in New York, she’s also writing on and off Broadway plays. So she’s contributing to other plays and she’s writing her own. And these are the years where she’s honing her craft. I mean the thing, I’d say the things to remember about Ayn Rand from a very early age is that she has this enormous self-belief, and she’s developing ideas, philosophical ideas about how the world is and how it should be.
And she becomes convinced that her mission in life is to convey her ideas to the world. Over the course of a long career, she’s going to write somewhere in the region of 30 books, and most of these are going to be philosophy books. It’s the novels that she’s most famous for. She realises that most of us aren’t that interested in reading dry and dusty philosophy. But if you can explain your ideas and you can express your ideas through the medium of a novel where there’s a plot, where there’s drama, where there’s characters, where you can use more poetic language to inspire, if you can do that well, you stand a chance of attracting many, many, many more people to your ideas. And so this is what she does. She writes her first novel, she does moderately well. And then in the late 1930s, she has an idea for a new novel, where the main character is an architect who has a vision for a new kind of skyscraping. So, let’s pause for a moment just to understand more broadly what her ideas actually are. I’m not going to spend too long on this, but I think it’s just important just to get a sense of what she fundamentally believes. She calls her philosophy, Objectivism by which she means a philosophy based on objective reality. And there are three essential components to it. The first is reason. Aristotle, she says, taught us that the only thing that we human beings have that we can truly rely on to navigate this world is our reason. So we must trust only our reason and nothing else.
We can’t trust our emotions, and we can’t trust in faith. So to her, the idea of faith in God is a complete anathema. She’s a lifelong atheist. And she cannot believe in God because as she says, it’s not based on rationality. Second, individuality, sorry, individualism. In her early years, she was hugely influenced by the gentleman here with a large moustache who’s Nietzsche of course, and she says, “Look, the only thing that’s real in this world is the individual human being. It’s only individuals that are capable of heroic acts. You can’t have a society that’s heroic, it’s an individual who’s heroic. It’s only individuals who are capable of creative achievement. So let’s just be honest about this, and let’s also be honest about the fact that individuals will and should only ever act in their own self-interest.” This is what she says, “Selfishness is a virtue, and altruism is evil.” Yes, she uses those words. “Selfishness is a virtue, and altruism is evil.” Okay? This is how she explains it in that interview with my Mark Wallace.
[Mike] Because you bring, you, you put this philosophy to work in your novel, “Atlas Shrugged”.
That’s right.
[Mike] You demonstrate it in human terms in your novel, “Atlas Shrugged”. And let me start by quoting from a review of this novel, “Atlas Shrugged” that appeared in Newsweek. It said that you are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our ruled by the majority will. Other reviews have said that you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?
Yes, I agree with the facts, but not the estimate of this criticism. Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I’m challenging the moral code of altruism, the precept that men’s moral duty is to live for others, that man must sacrifice himself to others, which is the present day morality.
[Mike] What do you mean by sacrifice himself for others. Now we’re getting to the point,
One moment since I’m challenging the base, I necessarily would challenge the institutions you name, which are a result of that morality.
[Mike] All right.
And now what is self-sacrifice?
[Mike] Yes, what is self-sacrifice? You say that you do not like the altruism by which we live. You like a certain kind of Ayn Rand’s selfishness.
I will say that I don’t like is too weak word, I consider evil. And self-sacrifice is the precept that men needs to serve others in order to justify his existence, that his moral duty is to serve others, that is what most people believe today.
[Mike] Well, yes, we’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man, to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other. Now why do you rebel? What’s wrong with this philosophy?
But that is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal that men must work for others, concern himself with others, or be responsible for them. That is the role of a sacrificial object. I say that man is entitled to his own happiness, and that he must achieve it himself, but that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.
[Mike] I agree.
And nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others. I hold that man should have self-esteem.
Wow. Well, there you saw the eyes again and she was going to say what she was going to say, and Mike Wallace wasn’t going to get much of a look in, while he was interrupting. I have to say I love lockdown, but every now and again it’s a little bit frustrating not being able to actually be in front of a live audience and be with everyone, and just hear and watch people’s reactions. I mean, I would just love to know what everyone who just saw that is thinking right now, whether some of you are just thinking, “Well, you know, she’s got a point, and maybe she’s right” or, maybe alternatively you’re kind of spluttering with indignation into your kosher for Pesach Manischewitz white wine, appalled by what she’s just said. We are not finished because we’ve done reason and we’ve done selfish individualism. And now there’s the third component, which is that she advocates laissez faire, pure capitalism. The image that you see there is Adam Smith, who’s often thought of as the father of laissez-faire capitalism. So she believes in pure capitalism, no fetters, no guardrails, no regulation. She believes that any attempt by the state to limit or regulate capitalism is doomed to fail. So maybe you are thinking, “Well, you know, in that case, what’s the point of government?” Well, in her estimation, the role of government should be highly, highly limited. It’s there to fight crime, provide a national defence against external attack, and enforce contracts, and that’s it, nothing else. And with such a limited role, she says, “Well, there’s no need to tax income,” because she regards income tax as the state thieving money by force from those who rightfully earned it. Interesting. Okay. So Mike Wallace is listening to all of this. And in that interview he challenges her and he says, “Look,” he says, “Surely we need a state for some essential services.” So let’s just listen.
Take another, how do we build roads, sanitation facilities, hospitals, schools? If you are not, if the government is not permitted to force, if you will by vote taxation, I’m using your word, we have to depend upon the trickle down theory, upon the noblesse oblige, the largesse.
I will answer you by asking you a question. Who pays for all those things?
[Mike] All of us pay for these things.
When you admit that you want to take money by force from someone and ask me, how are we going to build hospitals or roads, you admit that someone is producing the money, the wealth that will make those roads possible. Now, you have no right to tell the man who produced the wealth in what way you want him to spend it. If you need his money, you can obtain it only by his voluntary consent.
[Mike] And you believe in the eventual goodwill of all human beings, or at least that top echelon of human beings whom you believe will give willingly.
No goodwill is necessary, only self interest.
[Mike] Only self interest.
I believe in private roads, private post offices, private schools.
[Mike] When industry breaks down momentarily and there is unemployment, mass unemployment, we should not be permitted to get unemployment insurance. Social security we do not need. We’ll depend upon the self-interest of these enlightened industrialists whom you so admire to take care of things, when the economy needs a little lubrication and there are millions of people out of work.
Study economics, a free economy will not break down. All depressions are caused by government interference. And the cure is always offered. So far to take more of the poisons that cause the disaster. Depressions are not a result of a free economy.
[Mike] Ayn one line…
So, you know, there you have it. I mean, it all seems incredibly harsh. She doesn’t believe in any unchosen obligation. So if you are poor or you are hungry or you are chronically ill, I don’t have any social or moral obligation to you. That’s what she’s saying. At one point in this interview, Mike Wallace says, “Well, where do all these ideas come from?” And she says, “Well, they’re all from my own mind. I invented them all.” And I find that very interesting because you know, it’s so obvious how everything that she thinks is also a direct reaction to her experiences growing up. Remember, you know, she’s come from a repressive, antisemitic Russian empire, which was then replaced by a repressive, antisemitic, anti bourgeois Bolshevik state, which took everything from the self-made father who she so admired, and destroyed her family. So as a result, she has no faith in any ideology. She trusts only reason. She despises communism in any form of collectivism. And she has no trust in the authority of any state, any state, because she sees that the only purpose of the state is to hamper individual freedom. And I mean, this is one of the things that I find really interesting about her, how her universal ideas have been formed to such an extent out of the crucible of her very personal experiences of growing up in Russia. And I mean, you’d never think to compare her to Emma Goldman, would you? Emma Goldman, whose politics are a polar opposite. Emma Goldman, out and out anti-capitalist and anarchist. And you know, they’re not even contemporaries. I mean, there’s a generation between them. Goldman was born, as you can see, 36 years earlier, and she experiences only the dog days of the Czarist regime before she makes for the US. So she’s not there for the revolution. But just consider this, Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman both lived as in St. Petersburg in times of immense political upheaval. Goldman was born in Kovno, Kaunas in Lithuania as it is today. But the family moved to St. Petersburg when she was 12. And St. Petersburg then in the 1880s and '90s was a hotbed of revolutionary fervour.
And of course, this is where she was radicalised. Both Rand and Goldman have a visceral hatred of authoritarianism formed directly out of their own experiences. And this translates into a deep distrust of any kind of external authority. In Goldman’s case, she witnessed the brutality and antisemitism of the state firsthand, but she also of course experiences the heavy hand of authoritarianism closer to home. Her father would whip and beat her when she disobeyed him. And he didn’t think she should have had an education. He wanted to stop her education. Girls don’t have much to learn. He said, “All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare Gefilte fish and how to give a man plenty of children.” And she was made to work at a corset shop as a young woman where she was forever fending off Russian officers, another man, another man. And one man took her to a hotel room and violently raped her. And this episode scarred her for life. Goldman and Rand both flee Russia, and they make for America where they can be free to develop and spread their ideas. The difference is that Emma Goldman leaves in 1897, and of course this is a full 20 years before the October, 1917 revolution. So her idea of the revolution, Emma Goldman’s idea was still kind of pure and untainted while she was in America. Rand on the other hand, leaves in 1926, full nine years after the revolution. But she’s thoroughly disgusted by what she’s seen, by the communist experiment. And she’s convinced that the only antidote for humanity is capitalism in its purest and most selfish form. So what unites these two women is arguably as great as what divides them.
They both abhor the state, they distrust all forms of government, they both believe in total freedom and autonomy for the individual. And they believe that women should be accorded the same freedom as men. And Ayn Rand, she advocated that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion right up until the moment of birth. Emma Goldman, remarkable personality. And can I just say if you missed Trudy’s talk on her, which was in January, this was a talk on Emma Goldman and Golda Meir. If you missed it, I strongly advise that you watch it on the lockdown website. So let’s pick up Ayn Rand’s story again from where we left off. It’s now the late 1930s and she’s had some moderate success, remember as a writer, but nothing special. And now she has an idea, and it’s an idea for a novel about a visionary architect. And in order to do her research, she goes to work without pay as a typist at a renowned firm of architects in New York. And the novel she writes, is “The Fountainhead”, and it’s published in 1943. “The Fountainhead” tells the story of Howard Roark, proudly independent architect dedicated to the pursuit of his own vision. All around him, he sees mediocrities representing either the dead hand of the state, bureaucrat serving some notional collective good, or what he calls the second-handers, corporate parasites who profit from the work and vision of others.
So, I mean, I hope you get the picture. Howard Roark is for Rand a kind of Nietzschen superman. The book is a bestseller. It’s hugely successful, and it gets made into a movie. The film is directed by King Vidor, and its stars Patricia Neal, and Gary Cooper who plays Howard Roark. Just as an aside, Ayn Rand would’ve preferred Gregory Peck, but it’s Cooper who gets the part. And Patricia Neal for those of you who dunno, Patricia Neal, she was a prolific actress, and she eventually ends up marrying Roald Dahl. Anyway, what’s interesting about the movie is that Ayn Rand was asked to write the screenplay. Remember in that she’s grown up a screenwriter and so this isn’t alien territory for her. So she writes the first screenplay, but it does get changed along the way and tinkered with. So let’s have a look at the opening scene from the movie, and you’ll get a sense of what the book is about and what the movie’s about. Here we go.
You want to stand alone against the whole world? There’s no place for originality in architecture. Nobody can improve on the buildings of the past. One can only learn to copy them. We’ve tried to teach you the accepted historical styles. You refuse to learn. You won’t consider anybody’s judgement but your own. You insist on designing buildings that look like nothing ever built before. The school has no choice but to expel you. It’s my duty as your dean to say you’ll never become an architect.
You can’t hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. Now watch me in just a few short years, I’ll shoot to the top of the architectural profession 'cause I’m going to give the public what it wants. You’ll never get anywhere. So you want to work for Henry Cameron, huh? Oh, I know he was a great architect 30 years ago, but he fought for your modern architecture, and he’s done for now. What did you get out of it?
Why do you want to work for me? You’re setting out to ruin yourself. You know that, don’t you? I ought to throw you out of here right now before it’s too late. I wish I’d done this at your age. Oh. Why did you have to come to me? I’m perfectly happy with the drooling dolts I’ve got. I don’t want any fool visionaries starving around here. You are an egotist. You are impertinent. You do serve yourself. 20 years ago, I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. You’re coming to work for me tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. Na na na na. Now leave these here. Now get out. Wait, what’s your name?
Howard Roark.
So as you can see, I mean right from the get go, you feel Ayn Rand’s utter disdain for those who get by on the basis of giving people what they want, who believe there’s no place for originality, who just want to follow the masses. In the film and in the book, Roark wins a commission to build his vision, which is a modernist skyscraper with uncompromising straight lines. But the so-called second-handers get hold of his design and they water it down. They start adding all kinds of features to soften it so that they avoid giving offence to the public by the building. And the building is built and Roark is so infuriated that his vision’s compromised, that he dynamites the building and blows it up. He’s charged and tried in court. And here’s the scene towards the end of the movie, at the end of the trial, where he speaks in his own defence. And as with all things to do with Ayn Rand monologues, it’s very, very long in seven minutes. And I’m only going to play you, you’ll be pleased to note, just a very short excerpt from his defence speech, just to give you a sense of what he’s saying.
Look at history. Everything we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from attempt to force men into a herd of brainless, soulless robots. Without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will hope or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name, the individual against the collective. Our country, the noblest country in the history of men was based on the principle of individualism, the principle of man’s inalienable rights. It was a country where a man was free to seek his own happiness, to gain and produce, not to give up and renounce, to prosper, not to starve, to achieve, not to plunder, to hold as his highest possession, a sense of his personal value. And as his highest virtue, his self respect, look at the results. That is what the collectivists are now asking you to destroy, as much of the earth has been destroyed.
So the jury, of course is deeply impressed by the speech and they acquit Roark. And the movie ends with Howard Roark completing a new building that is true to his vision, with no compromises. And this is one of the kind of the classic themes in Rand’s work. It’s the lonely, brilliant individualist pitted against the parasites of society, of government and the weak-minded masses. And you know, remember Ayn Rand, she sees herself as a philosopher, as an advocate of ideas. For her, the novel and the movie actually they’re useful forms in which she can convey her ideas. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever actually read an Ayn Rand novel. And what I would say is when she’s at her best, she does write beautifully. I mean she is talented, but the books really suffer from being used as a vehicle for her ideas. They’re full of these highly stylized characters. One critic memorably says, “The characters are either lonely heroes or greedy zeroes,” which are, I think sums it up brilliantly. And the other problem is the monologues. I mean the books are just full of these long monologues that just go on for pages and pages and pages. “The Fountainhead” is 750 pages in all, and I think it would’ve been an immeasurably better book if it had been half that length. And this brings us neatly to the Magnus opus, to Ayn Rand’s greatest work, which in all of its 1,200 pages is “Atlas Shrugged”. Again, in my view, would’ve been a better book if it had been half the length.
But still very interesting book. The book famously opens with a question, “Who is John Galt?” And it continues to tease us with the same question for the whole of the first half of the book. “Atlas Shrugged” presents a dystopian picture of modern American society as a country adrift. The USA of the novel has lost its way, fallen under the spell of big government as the solution to all of its woes. It’s ruled by a bloated collectivist regime. And the country has been reduced to a wasteland of closed factories, broken infrastructure, sponges, thieves, and a destitute citizenry. It’s only a small group of heroic millionaire industrialists who are keeping the whole nation aloft, just like Atlas held the world on his shoulders. Unable to bear life in such a world, our heroes decide to go on strike. They withdraw from society and they flee to a hidden valley in Colorado where they establish an exclusive community where money is king and the Cross is replaced by the dollar sign. The leader of this group, is none other than John Galt. And he tells everyone in his society that they must let the world outside fail before they can start again, rebuild the nation anew on principles of laissez-faire capitalism, individual rights, and it all has to start with the abolition of all income tax. So that is “Atlas Shrugged”, and if you haven’t read it, I hope I’ve saved you the trouble. Well, you can imagine what the reaction was to the novel when it was published in 1957. Needless to say, it attracted a number of extremely hostile reviews. Most of these came from those who were more inclined on the left.
She was variously described as elitist, fascist, uncaring, inhumane. But interestingly, she was also attacked from the right. There is a very strong strand of the right, the intellectual right, led by William Buckley, who are appalled by her atheism, and feel that she has no room on the right, and Buckley made it his lifelong mission to lambast her ideas. None of these reviews though, had much impact on sales because the book was an international publishing sensation. And to date it’s sold over 20 million copies, which is extraordinary. And what’s amazing is the number of Americans who say that next to the Bible, it’s their favourite book. Around a third of Americans were polled 10 years ago. And that was the result. Amazing. Dunno how many of them have actually read it, but it’s still their favourite book. Ayn Rand continued to publish books and articles for the rest of her life, but nothing she ever wrote subsequently came anywhere near to the success that she achieved with “Atlas Shrugged”. So it wouldn’t surprise me if some of you who have been very patient listening are just thinking, “Well, that’s all very well. But she wrote this book 70 years ago, another place, another time. Why should this matter today?” Well, for good or for bad, Ayn Rand still does matter today. First of all, she attracted a number of highly influential acolytes. They called themselves, The Collective, which was their little joke given how Ayn Rand railed against collectivism. And here is the inner core. So they’re all gathered here. This is a picture at someone’s wedding.
And you can see, here’s Ayn Rand, here’s Frank, her husband, over here is Leonard Peikoff, he’s a Canadian American, became a philosopher of her ideas and preached her ideas and still does. Bless him, he’s just turned 90. And this is probably her greatest fan here. This is Nathan Brandon, married to Barbara here, Barbara Brandon, and Nathaniel Brandon, who started life as Nathan Blumenthal, but changed his name, and he created his own institute to promote her ideas, and also to promote the belief that she was the greatest thinker who has ever lived. Ayn Rand and Nathan had a long-term affair. She bullied both her husband Frank, and Brandon’s poor wife, Barbara, into accepting it. And when Barbara had a breakdown, Ayn Rand sat her down and accused her of quote “Emotionism”. Okay, so this gives you a sense of the fact that when Ayn Rand wants something, Ayn Rand gets it, and she won’t let anyone stand in her way. Brandon meanwhile, a few years later, has a second affair behind Ayn Rand’s back. And when she finds out, of course, what does she do? She expels him from the entourage, and she disowns his institute and his ideas. Now, there’s one person I haven’t introduced you to. Take a good look at this gentleman here, the one who’s tall, standing on the left, and you can see he’s got dark framed glasses. I wonder if anyone recognises who this is.
Let me put you out of your misery, because this is the disciple who’s had the most influence on American life. It’s Alan Greenspan. Yes, the same Alan Greenspan, who has arguably been the most influential chairman of the US Federal Reserve, certainly in modern times and possibly ever. Greenspan, was part of Ayn Rand’s circle for 30 years from the 1950s until her death in 1982. And interestingly, his tenure of office at the Fed was of course marked by a vigorous promotion of laissez faire capitalism and deregulation of markets. He was still chairing the Fed in 2007, 2008 when the great crash came. So, as I say, her influence very much lives on today. And what’s extraordinary about Ayn Rand’s influence is that even though some of her positions are anathema to American conservatism, I mean real anathema, the atheism, you know, American conservatism is so linked to religion that her atheism doesn’t fit in anywhere. Not only that, but her stance on abortion also it doesn’t fit in at all. But what’s amazing is that she still continues to be effectively the poster girl of the right to this day. Her fiction particularly appeals to young people and her biographer, Jennifer Burns brilliantly describes Ayn Rand’s novels as quote, “The gateway drug for life on the right.” You know what a great expression. These are a few images from Tea party rallies. You remember the Tea Party in the days before Donald Trump and TP folk used to love her because of her warnings about big government taxes and her defence of individual freedom.
And apparently you couldn’t go to a tea party rally without seeing someone holding up a banner saying, “Who is John Galt?” Some of her fans today, Donald Trump is a big fan of “The Fountainhead”. Standing to his left is Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House, huge fan. He once told an interviewer that he used to read “Atlas Shrugged” to his children at bedtime. Pity those poor children. And at the top, there’s Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, who’s been known to invite his clerks over to his house to watch the movie version of “The Fountainhead”. And finally, George W. Bush, who claims his favourite novel of all time is, yes, “Atlas Shrugged”. Did he read all 1200 pages? I don’t know, you tell me. So it’s easy, I think, to dismiss Ayn Rand as a, you know, slightly deranged, swivel eyed, right wing nut job. But what makes her still relevant in my view to the debate we have today about freedom in the western world is the extreme clarity of her vision. Ayn Rand effectively says that we have two choices in society, we can pursue freedom from, or freedom to. Freedom from means that we pursue and focus on freedom from poverty, from sickness, from hunger. Rand believes that if we do that, if we put all society’s efforts into freedom from, we end up with an unsustainable burden of regulation, of prohibition, welfare, taxes, and we disincentivize the individual creators. This is what Gordon Gecko, if you remember, called Survival of the Unfittest. Freedom to, on the other hand, means the freedom to create, to build, to progress.
Pure individualism, pure capitalism, this is Rand’s vision. “Just think,” she says, “what the release of all that creative energy can achieve.” But we’ve been there before and we’ve seen where Ayn Rand’s version of freedom ends up. The haves and the have nots. Those of us born into fortunate positions and those caught in the trap of intergenerational poverty, society divided, and people left behind. So we do the best we can to muddle our way through, don’t we? We value freedom, but we put limits on it. We try to create opportunity for those who can, and provide a safety net for those who struggle. Many years ago when I was at university, I used to have a friend who called himself a narco syndicalist. I still dunno what it means. And he liked to criticise me for being too middle of the road. Problem with standing in the middle of the road, he said is that you’re constantly dodging and weaving to avoid getting knocked down. Well, he may have had a point, but I realised that the only alternative is to inhabit the gutter on either side of the road. And you know what? I think that given the choice, most of us would sooner take our chances in the middle. Thank you for listening, and let’s have a look at some of the questions. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people have said. I can’t predict at all what you would’ve thought of that.
Q&A and Comments:
Audrey says, ah, I like this, “Wishing everyone a happy and meaningful Passover.” Thank you, Audrey. That’s a really positive start.
Q: Romaine, “Do you think she was fanatical?”
A: I think she absolutely believed every word that she said. She was a myth maker and she believed her own myths. And so from that point of view, I think she was fanatical in the sense that she had an extreme point of view and she absolutely believed it.
Q: “What was her given name?” Aubrey asks.
A: It was Alisa Rosenbaum.
Q: “How do we know the details of her Russian life?”
A: She was interviewed many, many times. I mean, in the '60s and '70s, she was something of a celebrity. You know, she was often on the Johnny Carson show. She was a regular on TV, and she wrote prodigiously. So she wrote a lot about her life. And when her family were still in Russia, and she tried at one point to get her parents out and failed. And then in the 1980s when things got a bit easier, her sister Nora came to the US to stay with her. And she was desperate for Nora to love America as she loved America. But Nora didn’t like America, didn’t like the lifestyle, and wanted to go back. And the two of them argued the whole time and they fell out. So it’s quite sad really. She just really lost touch with her family.
Q: Carol asks, “In the photo of the three sisters, Alisa is on the left standing on the block, making her the tallest. The sister on the right of the photo is taller. Is Alisa really the oldest?”
A: Yes, she was. She was the oldest of the three.
Q: Shelly asks, “What happened to her parents and sisters still in the Soviet Union?”
A: I’ve just answered that one. Rita has very helpfully given us, the web address for the Ayn Rand organisation. I mean, you know, there’s an Ayn Rand Institute, big one in the US, there’s a small one in the UK. There’s quite an active one in Israel, would you believe? There’s an Israeli politician, I think Ayelet Shaked who founded it, who’s a big believer in her. So she does get about.
Q: Caroline. Very good question. “How did she feel about charity, helping others? Did she ever help her sisters or parents?”
A: Well, I think very naively, she felt that there should be no such thing as the state helping people. It should all be charity. And she said that charity had to be completely voluntary. So I think she was putting a huge amount of pressure on individual millionaires and billionaires being philanthropic, and to actually sort out the world’s problems. And did she ever help her sisters or parents? A little. She stopped writing to them in the '30s because she felt that her letters would be intercepted by the NKVD, as they were. But her family never realised that’s why she stopped. So by all accounts, they were very upset that they didn’t hear much of her.
Judith says, “I read her novels as an adolescent.” Yes, well, and it’s interesting, most people do. You know, a bit like “Catcher in the Rye”, when you are of that age, where these kind of novels make a big impression, Judith says, “Loved them.” So, you know, it’s really, really interesting. I wonder, Judith, if you looked at them now, I wonder what what you’d think of them. I’d be very interested.
Rhonda says, “Philip, you took me down memory lane. I read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged around 50 years ago. My friend Rona’s mom shared the books with me. I was travelling through Europe in the mid '70s and they were the most widely recommended by my fellow travellers that I met.” I mean, isn’t that interesting? I mean, it just shows, it just shows the power of these things. And let’s have one more.
Ruthie says, “Ayn Rand has always and will always be brilliant in her foresight, and there is something quite magnetic about her letting the reader become totally immersed and consumed by her writing. Time for me to read her books again and hopefully find the films on YouTube. Peaceful remaining Passover.” Ruthie, thank you very much and Peaceful remaining Passover to everyone else.
And until the next time, goodbye.