Fifty Years of Moral Illiteracy
About halfway through college, I concluded that pretty much anyone who recommended The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged was probably crackers. My first direct experience with Ayn Rand’s prose came when a fellow English major offered me his copy of Atlas Shrugged with John Galt’s unreadable, 70-page radio address helpfully marked with a paperclip and what I continue to hope were mere coffee stains. I lasted about five pages before deciding that John Galt was the libertarian equivalent of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, if only JLS had spent his time trying to have sex with the other seagulls while kicking their nests to splinters and trampling on their eggs. Years later, it didn’t surprise me to learn that Rand had croaked on the 125th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision.
So with all that as prologue, you can probably guess my reaction to The NY Times‘ survey of Rand’s corporate mouseketeers, who are currently frosting the cake for John Galt’s 50th birthday. Not impressed, was I. There are plenty of golden moments in the piece — including the obligatory reminders that Alan Greenspan thought she was just dreamy — but this one really stood out as a good example of how reading Ayn Rand actually makes a person stupid:
“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”
Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”
Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”
Um. No. No it isn’t. Indeed, I can’t think of anything more contrary to Buddhism than “the virtue of selfishness.” Then again, maybe I’ve missed out on all those Buddhist defenses of “selfishness” that also celebrate the liquidation of American Indian land and identity, as Rand did quite joyfully at West Point in 1974:
They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.
That ought to please the shareholders!