Rand and Chambers

Big Brother? Not just certain passages, but every scene, practically ever paragraph, image, and metaphor in the book is drive with single-minded fanaticism toward the overthrow of elites and the abolition of bureaus: every legal and social barrier to the free exercise of the creative genius that Rand admires above all else, she says, must be eliminated. The only laws morally permitted are those, where, like a night watchman, the state acts as the agent for the persons it defends, and uses no more force than the private person would have right to do, defending from invasion his right to life, liberty, property. The state can pass no laws governing the public decency, regulating the economy, outlawing victimless crimes, standardizing marriage and inheritance, levying or collecting taxes. If this is not anarchy, it is as minimal a government as any theory yet has named. This is surely the smallest Big Brother of all the leviathans ever dreamed.    

Elite? Ayn Rand’s supreme Hero, John Galt, is a self-made man, whereas Francisco D’Anconia is a wealth scion of a well-connected family: the point is made within the text, more than one place, that it is individual ability, not birth, which defines a man’s role in life.

Bureau? The concept that Ayn Rand was urging the creation of a government bureau to create her policies is one which is explicitly raised and rejected in the text, in the scene where the Head of State offers John Galt exactly that position: economy czar. he rejects it with derision, and gives a philosophical argument to show its innate illogic. One cannot mandate freedom by regulation. 

How can he read the founding text of the Libertarian movement in this country as a call for dictatorship? No one makes an innocent mistake of this magnitude: Mr. Chambers’ hostility is primarily emotional and illogical, although he expresses it in dispassionate terms.

In the next sentence he confesses he is making up objections from his own imagination.

 “She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections.  But, in sum, that is just what she means.  For that is what, in reality, it works out to.  And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be).”

Pure hogwash. Nowhere does she express the idea of ANYTHING being beyond good and evil. This is the most moralistic writer of the last two centuries. Even innocent and neutral topics such as bus driving and symphony-writing Rand explicitly casts in moral terms. To say that she is supporting a dictatorship that should be “beyond good and evil”, and that she feels opposition to a dictatorship would be criminal and sinful, when she made ALL HER MAIN CHARACTERS rebels against creeping dictatorship is not just an untruth, it is the diametric opposite of truth. As if Chambers were to condemn Marx on the grounds that Marx was too laissez-faire in his pro-Capitalism.

Certain criticisms are so far off the mark that one cannot take them seriously.

“Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing.  The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar.  For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left.  The question becomes chiefly:  who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?”

There is no way an honest man could read ATLAS SHRUGGED and reach this conclusion that this was her intent. Rand’s book has the simplest, cleanest, most shrill, more oft repeated message of any book in modern literature. How can you miss the meaning of a message written in letters the size of skyscrapers?

Rand, at least, had no trouble in seeing the similarity between Nazism and Communism: her philosophy is one of the few where the brotherhood of all collectivists, whether collectivists of race or of economic class, is taken as given.

Ayn Rand deals with the question of who is to run the world and in whose interests by saying, over and over and over again: only a cannibal, a moocher, or a looting thug could ask this question phrased this way. Rational men do not seek such advantages of rulership over each other, and do not seek to rule rather than persuade. Her philosophy does not admit of conflicts of interests between rational men–so for her the question of whose interests are the be sacrificed to whose is not merely a moot point, but an abomination.

“From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding:  “To a gas chamber–go!””

I can think of many objections one might raise to ATLAS SHRUGGED. But this is not even remotely in the realm of an honest difference of opinion or interpretation. This is the woman, keep in mind, who is practically an anarchist–and his criticism is that she wants a Nazi regime?

At this point, I must depart from a counterargument and degenerate into invective. Chambers is a liar. Chambers is beyond being merely ridiculous here: the man is a liar, and is telling an outrageous lie. The only question left is, what makes him think he can get away with it? What is he counting on?

How in the world could he miss the point? I will tell you how: he himself, Mr. Chambers, is perhaps one of those Ayn Rand villains whose portrayal he regards as so simplistic. And yet, here he is, and coming out of his pen are the exact same words and phrases she puts in the mouths of her cardboard villains—the insistence on “humor” (as if not taking something seriously were a merit in a serious work) the insistence on the complexity of life (as if any complexity can be analyzed without analyzing it into simpler components). His counter-argument is one of the least effective I can imagine, and the most dishonest. It is that same sort of sly, winking, sneering innuendo, fact-free and argument-free screed which figures in the Ayn Rand book only in the mouths of the psychology she criticizes.  

Indeed, judging from an objective point of view, when a book describes a critic with bull’s-eye accuracy, and a critic describes a book with no accuracy at all, my faith in the judgment of the writer of the book is increased, and my faith in the critic evaporates. I don’t believe the critics means to be taken seriously. 

  <>If his objection is that she has written a shrill and moralistic Jeremiad, and his logic is that anyone who is shrill and moralistic is a Nazi at heart, my response is to ask whether Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE was Nazi at heart? Or the Book of Jeremiah? Come now, let him expound on how the tale of the Children of Light versus the Children of Darkness is always a tyrannical mass-murdering message at heart, and then let him explain the Book of Revelations. Or any other serious, humorless, moralistic work?