Common misunderstandings of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged. You either love her or hate her!

But I read Atlas Shrugged without knowing that you were supposed to love her or hate her. I just knew that it was a title that kept popping up here and there, in a number of different contexts, and so eventually, I felt I had to read that book that so many people seemed to be talking about!

And my reaction was:

'Wow!... I've never looked at it this way before!... This woman is bright!'

Afterwards, when talking about this book, I discovered the strong emotional reactions people have to her. I also discovered how - as can be expected when feelings run hot! - most people had a rather incorrect idea of what she had actually said, and what she actually believed.

One common misunderstanding of her that I came across was this one:

"She claimed that rich people are some kind of altruistic, highly talented, good-hearted super-humans that if left alone will never do anything bad, but only use their talents and riches to improve the world."

This is not what she said.

Ayn Rand said that there are exactly TWO ways to become rich in this world. No more and no less. The first one is to be pretty much what was described above: Talented and productive. You produce some kind of value that people are prepared to pay for, willingly! They buy whatever you are producing, and feel that they have made a good purchase; that they got good value for their money. You get rich and they get satisfied. Everybody wins.

The second way to get rich, also the last way, since there are only two, is to loot somebody else who is productive. There are no other ways, she said! The value has to come from somewhere - it doesn't just fall from the sky or spring out of thin air. And so if you are rich, then either you produced that value or you stole it.

She also said that it's not necessary that the person you loot be richer than you, or as rich as you. She said there is also the Indian Maharaja: The only rich person in a country of poor. Because no matter how poor a population is, there is always enough to loot for ONE person to be rich! And she said the problem in our societies is that too many people want to be that Indian Maharaja. You often find them in politics. They don't care about the prosperity of society! They don't care if society plummets into utter despair! So long as they can steal enough from it to be rich, themselves. And the problem with this, of course, is that there can be only one Maharaja... So the only thing they will succeed at is to make society poorer, to the detriment of all. Everybody loses.

“When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

 

 Another misunderstanding of Ayn Rand that I came across was this:

"She's such a hypocrite! She wrote 'The Virtue of Selfishness' only as a desperate attempt to justify why she didn't help her poor relatives back in Soviet, after she got rich in America."

Let me show you another quote from Atlas Shrugged:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on."

 Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Tell me: Can somebody who writes a quote like that be a hypocrite? No, I would say. Because a person who feels that a quote like that rings true wouldn't WANT to lie... It would be an act of self-abdication. Of making oneself the world's slave, condemned to trying to fake the kind of reality that the world approves of. Ayn Rand doesn't care what you approve of! She stands up for HER OWN beliefs.

The quote continues, in the book:

“There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

This reveals even clearer how very strongly she feels about any kind of dishonesty or of bending the truth. But I intentionally put this separate from the lines before it, because I don't feel it fits the context! The lines before are a cool, logical reasoning - this is a sudden outburst of emotion! And as Virginia Wolf writes, in A Room of One's Own: "An angry writer is a bad writer". Ayn Rand is often a bad writer, because of her anger seeping through. She was, after all, an illegal refugee from the Soviet Union, and she is angry with her motherland, oh how angry she is!...

And I believe this is why most people love her! Not because they understand what she really meant with her philosophy, but because they share her anger towards communism and socialism! Because the villains in Rand's books do come out as very Soviet communist-like... That was the face of evil, to her. But when American Christian right-wing politicians expressed love for her philosophy, she protested! They were far too limiting of people's freedom for her. For one thing, she was sex positive, perhaps even polyamorous in her ideology, although those terms didn't exist at the time. She was also a staunch atheist and advocated abortion rights. American Christian Conservatives were, of course, far from this! Had she grown up in the USA instead of the Soviet Union, perhaps they would have been the paint that she painted her villains with? Who knows.

And had that been the case, the left-wing would have been the ones who loved her! Now, sharing a common enemy with her.

Ironic, though. Isn't it?

I warmly recommend you read the book. Not as a novel! It's not a great novel (although the story is also captivating), and you would have to put up with her anger, which gets rather bitter, at times... But in her good moments, Ayn Rand is, indeed, a very bright woman. She has some very clear thoughts, well worth reading for oneself, rather than through the lens of somebody else who either loves her or hates her, probably for the wrong reasons... 😏

A small bubble of peace and harmony

A guy in Kenya once said to me:
"Over there in Sweden, everybody must be happy all the time!", and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry... How perplexed he looked when I told him about our suicide rates*, and about how many of us that are stressed out or more or less depressed!
"Why?!", he asked. But how should I know. I had never seen such happy and peaceful people before I came to this poor land, so I guess I had assumed that unhappiness was normal...!

But why? Why aren't we happy all the time? I don't know. But I'm now going to present a theory to you: I think it could have something to do with living inside a small bubble of peace and harmony, and outside that bubble is a cold, stormy ocean, where people perish in anguish, and we know it. And no decent human being can live with that knowledge, without it disturbing your peace of mind!

Moreover, the evil outside has tentacles into the bubble, so you can never forget! Every now and again we learn that the clothes we are wearing were sown by children who suffered in appalling conditions. That the cotton was sprayed with poison, which killed some people in India. The bananas claimed lives in Nicaragua. On TV we see commercial adds with smiling brown children being saved by the rich people's offerings. Saved from death and horrendous suffering, we must presume. And then there are refugees. More and more refugees come from the Land Outside and want in, inside our bubble, away from the anguish. But we send them back. Then they kill themselves, they faint, they collapse, the children fall into coma. But we have to, because we would never manage to take in everybody who wants to! The ocean of anguish is so huge, and our bubble so small. It would burst. And we would all plummet into the ocean.

I believe that much in our society can be derived from this world view, and from the fear born from it. The fear that your bubble will burst. Why don't we buy more fairtrade for example? Aren't we the world's wealthiest population, our consumption setting new records every year, it's not as if we can't afford it! But a fairtrade label guarantees that the laborers were fairly paid, a statement that presupposes that they were NOT fairly paid for all the other products that we buy. To shop fairtrade thus entails an acknowledgement of the Land Outside, the Ocean of Anguish, and our peace of mind depends on that we never think about this.

Or like this new party, the Swedendemocrats, say: "We have to take care of our own problems first! It's not right to the people who come here to let them in, when we are not able to offer them the service they deserve, since we have such severe economic problems ourselves!". Right. Poor us. Poor wealthiest population in the world for having such a shortage!... But they don't dare to look at it that way, don't dare to see how much, much better off we are than the refugees, because they are terrified that the bubble will burst! And that we'll end up like them!

Charity galas. The sale of indulgences. The purchase of some clean conscience for a small percent of your income, but as I wrote in Every note is a vote, we simultaneously uphold the suffering with the other 99 percent.



The worst thing is that we're wrong. The world view is incorrect. We SHOULD pity ourselves, the stressed out, unhappy and scared ones. The happy people are found in the Land Outside, among the poor ones. They suffer too, sure they do, but they are not as unhappy as we are. And so it is sad that we must uphold this unfair world order, through our consumption and our politics, when in fact we could solve everything, their problems and ours, by just shopping fairtrade! And in the meantime... In the meantime we ought to open up our borders. With this I mean: Free immigration. And nothing less.

------
*When I wrote the Swedish original of this text, Africa largely lacked suicide data, and those countries that had been mapped were in the lowest category. I now see that almost all countries have been mapped, and that Kenya is actually worse than Sweden in that respect!... They are in the highest category, while Sweden is in the second highest. I however don't wish to change my argument at this point, since I've understood that in Kenya people kill themselves out of economic despair rather than unhappiness. So.