Ayn Rand: How is She Still a Thing?
Snarky, Sophomoric, Straw Man Attacks on Ayn Rand
And a Better Perspective on the Significance of Her Work
by
Eric Paul Nolte
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver's TV show of political satire and comedy, they often air a segment mocking some individual or institution, called "How is This Still a Thing?" Recently, they aired a clip called, "Ayn Rand: How is She Still a Thing?"
A better question would be, "Ayn Rand: Why is She Still So Reviled?"
Now, John Oliver is a very clever English political satirist and stand-up comedian who often harvests ripe blowhards and other big jerks by using his knack for ironic juxtaposition and a sarcastic eye bent on comic effect.
For example, Oliver recently lampooned the blockhead leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman Al Zawahiri, after he was apparently provoked into a hissy fit upon realizing that his own murderous gang has been completely surpassed, in the number of beheadings and the creation of righteous mayhem, by the new dogs of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Another segment of Oliver's mocked the US State Department's production of a fake TV recruiting ad for the Islamic State, in which recruits are encouraged to come to Iraq where they can enjoy the pleasures of blowing up Shiite mosques and beheading Islamic apostates, Jews, and Christians (as if any candidate for ISIS recruitment might have the capacity for appreciating irony!) Then Oliver created a fake Nazi recruitment ad using 1930s stock footage from Hitler's Germany, with similarly comic effect.
So how is it that Ayn Rand shows up in the gunsights of a clever English laddie like John Oliver?
It's simple: we live in a world where from the farthest reaches of antiquity until today, here and everywhere, all the major systems of ethics and morality condemn self-interest as the very starting point of evil, and uphold self-sacrifice for the lives of others as the very essence of goodness. Another factor is that those who believe in self-sacrifice as the Good, tend to be among the world's worst victims of confirmation bias, meaning that they are entirely deaf and blind to any ideas that do not agreeably chime with their own.
(Footnote: of course we are all victims of confirmation bias, but the way out of this sort of secular Original Sin, is to open oneself to the ideas of those with whom we might disagree, and, granting them the assumption that they are well-intentioned people of good soul and mind, try to read their work while sympathetically imagining how such a person might come to hold such views. Over the decades, steering myself by this policy, I have actually come to change my mind on a few things, including a couple foundational views.)
Now, Ayn Rand is surely most famous for advocating an ethics of egoism, which is, duh, not an idea in harmony with the ethics of altruistic self-sacrifice, so we should not be surprised that Oliver and crew might be deaf and blind to Rand's significance.
But Rand's importance runs deeper than her formulation of a radical theory of ethics. Her theory of ethics is purveyed as just one aspect of her comprehensive philosophy, which she called Objectivism. The key point here is that Rand's philosophy got it right on the big issues she addressed, and did so with spectacular depth, clarity, and force.
Rand's philosophy picked up the most important and baffling conundrums in what Mortimer Adler called "the great conversation," the dialogue between succeeding generations of philosophers and other great thinkers, and she addressed and corrected many of these crippling errors in philosophy. She thereby transformed the conversation and profoundly carried it forward. One cannot overestimate the power and significance of her ideas.
Ayn Rand's creation of a comprehensive and subtly reasoned philosophy came at a time when such systematic thinking had been reeling under attack by centuries of post-enlightenment, modernist and postmodern philosophies. European philosophy went down this road in a mistaken effort to resolve the contradictions between the two major conflicting schools of thought, the rationalism of Descartes, and the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume. The thinker who supposedly resolved these conflicts was Immanuel Kant, who delivered us into the arms of a radical skepticism, this German Romantic Idealism, which ultimately led us down the path to a sort of stalemated intellectual trench warfare between what became this postmodern, nihilistic skepticism, and a reactionary religious absolutism that rose up to attack it.
Rand transformed the mainstream debate in morality by picking up and greatly advancing Aristotle's ethics with a fully fleshed-out theory of ethics as rational egoism.
(Footnote: one could also say that Rand picked up many ideas in the Aristotelian stream of thought and carried these forward. Remember that this stream of thought comprises the intellectual roots of the European Enlightenment, which thereby gave us modern science and technology, the industrial revolution which dramatically transformed the quality of life, created the middle class, doubled human life expectancy over the course of the 19th century, and gave us the ideas which inspired the American founders to create the world's first country meant to be the political embodiment of natural human rights.)
Rand's philosophy makes it possible for the first time to identify objective facts of reality that allow us to make valid normative judgments. This is such an astonishing accomplishment that I feel compelled to elaborate on it because the conventional wisdom today holds that moral judgment is entirely subjective and tied to one's tribe, race, class, or gender. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that Rand's moral argument shows the way out of the woods of subjectivity here. This is a stunning accomplishment, not yet widely appreciated today, but it will come to be understood eventually.
Employing Rand's moral framework, we can objectively explain why it is not merely a civilized difference of opinion when we disagree with those jihadists who want to kill us in accordance with the Quran's many injunctions to kill the infidels.
We can now objectively and confidently explain why it is evil when jihadists joyfully send their children into restaurants and crowded busses in Tel Aviv to blow up random strangers. Granted, we may recoil emotionally at such an abomination, but finding and spelling out in words the actual intellectual grounds for a moral condemnation of this unspeakable cruelty is something the cultural relativists and multiculturalists are powerless to do today.
The Christian religious absolutists believe that they have objective grounds for condemning the jihadists. Never mind that this belief is cut off from any possibility of a valid idea of objectivity, the fact is that they believe they have objective grounds for their beliefs. The Christian absolutists hold that God said it, they believe it, and that's all there is to it. But so do the jihadists believe that God said it, they believe it, and nothing more remains to be said on the matter. These religious ideas contradict each other. Stalemate! But what these conflicts actually mean is that religious absolutes amount to a species of emotional subjectivism. Religious absolutes are known by faith, which denotes belief in the truth of a proposition without evidence, which offers no better grounds than any other subjective emotion, and is certainly no better than the angst-ridden wailing of pixilated, hand-wringing, secular, cultural relativists.
Religious absolutists are powerless either to endorse or to condemn such a horror without reference to the commandments of what they believe is the revealed wisdom from heavenly authorities whom nobody alive today has ever talked to.
Rand's grounds for condemning the jihadists are completely clear and unassailable to anybody with ears to hear and a brain not infected and rendered deaf and blind by the cockamamie intellectual virus which is belief in self-sacrifice as the essence of virtue and goodness.
Incidentally, I believe this debate over morality is part of an earth shaking paradigm shift, and this is how it goes with every shift of paradigm, from the first ancient person who came to understand that the earth is not flat, to the rather more recent debates in science over the existence of atoms and the puzzlements posed by relativity and the subatomic realm. I believe that eventually, the world will come to its senses and remove the blindfold that prevents people from seeing the truth about Rand's rational egoism.
Rand's accomplishments run still deeper. Her theory of concepts gives us the means by which to dismantle David Hume's problem of induction, which has been such a destructive minefield on the plains of epistemology and science. She wrestled to the mat Hume's problem with abstraction, and in the process came to explain Hume's problem with causality itself. Hume's troubled explanation of causality convinced the whole of his post-Enlightenment world that there was no good reason to justify even the belief that the sun would rise tomorrow (and these are Hume's very own words, written in about the same decade in which Edmund Halley was able to employ Newton's calculus and predict the reappearance of a comet unseen for 75 years.) Rand defused these intellectual bombs and those of Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and the whole crazy stream of German Romantic Idealists who followed, along with sundry positivists, and all the other postmodern fools right up to the present day.
In politics, Rand picked up and corrected the American founders' error in framing the origin of human rights. Where Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident," the fact is that these truths are not self-evident and require a vigorous, worldly, secular defense, which is precisely what Ayn Rand gave us.
These are some of the most important accomplishments of a genius whose significance may well be described as epochal.
Now, enter John Oliver, displaying the rarefied wit and scholarly knowledge he brings to his subtly crafted and deeply thoughtful piece on Ayn Rand.
In John Oliver's video, the narrator says, "Ayn Rand became famous for her philosophy of Objectivism, which is a nice way of saying, being a selfish asshole."
Clips of the elderly Rand are shown, some of them from her last interview, weeks before her death, looking feeble and slow of mind and speech. Her comments are artfully lifted wholly out of context in a patchy, mendacious editing. She is sarcastically attacked for several things that are quoted here so out of context that the meaning is viciously twisted to make her appear to be saying things she never believed.
The narrator of Oliver's video says, "Rand illustrated her beliefs in novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, stories of raping heroes who complain that nobody appreciates their true genius."
They show a clip of Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark in the film The Fountainhead, leaning over the table at the board meeting where Roark is turning down his first really big commission because the board is demanding that Roark abandon the integrity of his work, and Roark significantly and passionately says, "My work, done my way. Nothing else matters!" Oliver's little snippet of film was lifted out of context to give the appearance of some cranky old guy who is huffing petulantly over not getting his way.
The narrator says, "And if that reminds you of someone, it's probably of somebody like this..." at which point they trot out a little video parade of rich, whining, spoiled young brats, evidently intended to make the viewer believe that they are the embodiment of Rand's ethics.
"Ayn Rand has always been popular with teenagers, but it's something you're supposed to grow out of, like ska music, or hand jobs. But, curiously she remains popular among a certain type of adult."
There follow some accolades for Rand from famous people whom liberals believe to be villainous.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the HD TV network, is asked how many times he has read The Fountainhead. "Three complete times... You know it's funny, I'll pick it up for motivation and then I'll read too far and get too much motivation and I get too jittery and have to put it down." This fan of Rand was probably selected for how inarticulate, vapid and shallow he appears.
"Yes, unbelievably," continues the narrator, "Mark Cuban's favorite book is about a misunderstood visionary who blows things up when he doesn't get his way. Cuban even named his 287 foot yacht, Fountainhead, because sometimes even having a 287 foot yacht just isn't enough to warn people you're a douche bag."
Then the narrator says, "Rand's influence extends even farther," and trots out a number of conservative Republican politicians, most of whom are associated with the Tea Party, which has apparently become the lowest and most vile pejorative that a liberal or progressive can hurl at an opponent. Paul Ryan says that "Rand did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism" (and I suspect that John Oliver believes that it is hilariously ironic to link the ideas of morality and capitalism in the same phrase.) Rand Paul says of Ayn Rand, "I am a big fan... I've read all of her novels...." Ted Cruz, on the floor of the Senate, says, "And let me encourage any of you who have not read Atlas Shrugged, to go, tomorrow, buy Atlas Shrugged and read it."
The narrator then points out that Ayn Rand is an unlikely hero for conservatives because she was in favor of women's right to abortion, she was an atheist, and she thought ill of that conservative icon, Ronald Reagan.
"But," the narrator continues, "in case these ideas are making you start to fall for her, take a listen to her views on native Americans: 'I do not think that they have any right to live in any country merely because they were born here, and then acted like savages.'"
Oliver seems to think that this remark is as self-evidently incendiary as if she had given a glowing endorsement of the Nazi holocaust.
But her remark is lifted out of context from a long answer she gave to a student's question after her lecture at the 1974 West Point graduation. There is much more to be said on the matter.
Now it seems to me that Oliver takes this remark to be so devastating to Rand that there can remain nothing more to say on her behalf. Bingo! Game over! Ding dong, the Witch is dead!
So I am going to address the matter a little more fully because I do not believe the matter is as clear as Oliver makes it out to be.
Let's take Rand's incendiary sentence as Oliver quotes her, clause by clause, which deal the two matters of whether one has a right to live in a country as a matter of birth, and then the description of the Amerindians as "savages."
Let's grant that the Amerindians immigrated to the Americas across the Bering straights about 10,000 years before the Europeans came here. They were here first. Common sense would grant that of course they are entitled to be here.
There were waves of immigrants in these Amerindian migrations. Did the earlier waves enjoy a right to be here that trumped the rights of the later ones?
It is impossible to sort out such questions without an understanding of the nature of rights more generally.
Does anyone have a right to live in a country merely because one was born there? It so happens that the US grants citizenship to babies born on American soil, but this has been true only since the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Moreover, among all the countries of the world, the US is virtually alone in granting citizenship as a matter of birth on a country's soil. If your pregnant American parents were visiting Germany (or had even been US soldiers serving many years on German soil) your birth on German soil would not have conferred German citizenship on you.
As for living like "savages," when Rand grew up the term "savage" was used even by scholarly cultural anthropologists, who used the word as an entirely neutral descriptive, without any hint of pejorative intent.
Now, back to the wider point of the nature of rights here, Rand was describing primitive peoples who lived largely as nomadic hunter gatherers, had no concept of property rights, and practiced slavery and servitude among themselves, and mass murder between warring tribes. These are not dirt simple matters. These are troubling questions woven into the fabric of a long history. These are questions that turn on the concept of rights.
The fundamental issue here is the matter of rights. If one wants to know the full context of Rand's thought on this issue of native Americans, one will have to examine her thoughts on human rights.
The way the various Amerindian groups sorted out their own disagreements among themselves before the arrival of the Europeans did not include the idea of rights, and often entailed war between these tribes.
So what are rights? The different formulations of rights are a boiling cauldron of contradictions, if you listen to the political debates today. The answer to this confused discussion is one of the most important contributions Rand gave us.
Rights, as Rand pointed out, are conditions of survival for a human being in a social context. Rand wrote (in her essay, "Man's Rights") "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action--which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life." The right to life means only the right to one's freedom of action, and not to any goods produced by others and taken by force for redistribution as welfare or political favors.
This topic is throughly convoluted and confused in today's warring political debates between left and right. There is no general agreement among the polity. There are instead two broad streams of thought.
On the one hand are welfare rights, which are positive claims of entitlement to goods and services, typically defined by whatever some special interest group is able to wrest from other groups, who are unable to fend off these attacks.
On the other hand are liberty rights, the entitlement to one's own life, liberty, and property.
Notice that these positive rights are claims to goods and services produced by other people, who thereby have an unchosen obligation to cough up the goods. These claims are enforced by the police power.
Welfare rights destroy liberty rights. Welfare rights and liberty rights are mutually exclusive and contradictory, they are claims which are doomed to be forever at war with each other.
While I am persuaded that Rand's formulation of rights is clear and correct, I am also certain that she will never be heard clearly by people who are untroubled by the idea that they are entitled to a piece of their neighbors' hides, which is another way of characterizing the idea of welfare rights.
All right, now suppose that Rand was mistaken to believe that the primitive peoples of America were not entitled to be left alone, or that the land on which they lived could rightly have been settled by the Europeans. Suppose she was mistaken. Suppose that the European occupation of America was as bad as the practice of slavery. Now what? Should we have something like slave reparations to right these long ago wrongs? Make the descendants of white Union soldiers, who died in the war to end slavery, pay the black children of Jamaican immigrants who just came to America last year?
Slavery was evil. So how do we right the wrong that was slavery?
Today, how do we right the wrongs that were visited on the native Americans? Think of the horrible trail of tears visited on Amerindians by the US government. This is surely as horrible a story as that of the Bataan death march in the Philippines, caused by the invading Imperial Japanese army.
R. J. Rummel, perhaps the preeminent scholar of these matters, coined a term, "democide," to denote the murder of a multitude of people by their government. The concept includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder. In his book, Death by Government, his studies lead him to write that, "judging by the bloody history of this period of colonization throughout the Americas, a democide of 2 million would seem a rough minimum and 15 million a maximum. Even if these figures are remotely true, this subjugation of the Americas is a still one of the bloodier of the centuries-long, democides in world history."
While it is true that many times more Indians died as a result of alien diseases unwittingly brought to them by Europeans than were killed by the European immigrants, it is still true that the Europeans displayed cruelty towards the natives.
One wonders if Rand ever knew of such evils. She certainly condemned all the murderous actions of government. I believe that if Rand were rightly apprised of the facts of the matter that she might have given us a more subtle evaluation of the issue of Amerindians. As it is, she did not leave us a well thought out essay on the matter.
Let us acknowledge that evils were visited on the Amerindians by the Europeans.
We cannot go back in time. The evils were done. That time is water over the dam and we can do nothing more than to move forward from here.
The way to move forward must include a proper understanding of the very thing that makes slavery evil, namely, the crucial nature of human rights, and I believe that Ayn Rand got this issue right.
The Amerindians are human beings like any other, and the answer to what we should do today is to affirm that all of us should now respect the rights of every individual, red, black, yellow, white, and any rainbow combination in between, to life, liberty, and property, and that the purpose of government should be to protect those rights.
Now, back to John Oliver's lambasting Ayn Rand on her opinion of the Amerindian problem.
Oliver's narrator shows Rand making her remarks on native Americans and concludes, "Why would conservatives hold up as their idol someone who says things like that, especially when there are so many advocates of selfishness they could choose?"
So, using ironic juxtaposition, Donald Trump is trotted out, interviewed in one of his corporate jets. Trump tells the interviewer, "Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich...."
Then a rapper named Drake is shown performing with his artfully crafted attention to the beauty of language, "Gonna worry 'bout me, give a f..k about you!"
A bevy of beauties on the Bravo channel is then shown, all shouting shallow but murderous threats and obscenities at each other.
"All of which is enough to make you wonder," concludes the narrator, "Ayn Rand: how is it that she is still a thing?"
* * *
Now, the John Oliver video often employs classic straw man arguments, in attributing to Rand beliefs she never said, and in trotting out villainous characters with whom Rand is falsely compared. These are logical fallacies of a mean-spirited nature.
The attacks are snarky because the author so clearly despises Rand and thinks his idea of morality is superior to hers. The attacks are sophomoric because John Oliver knows nothing essential about Rand's work.
So what else is new? Ayn Rand is among the most widely and fervently reviled thinkers who ever lived.
* * *
I want to conclude here with some thoughts on how shocked and bewildered I myself felt when I encountered Ayn Rand's ideas for the first time, and thereby make my way to offering a few more thoughts on the importance of Ayn Rand's accomplishments.
Intuition tells me that John Oliver may have felt similarly shocked and bewildered by his first encounter with Ayn Rand, except that as a grown man of settled beliefs, he may have felt confident in his condemnation of ideas which he likely found completely alien.
Now, as a teenager reading Rand for the first time, I had echoes ringing in my mind of the moral preachings of two widely disparate groups. On the one hand there were the ideas of my father, the communist. On the other hand was my maternal grandmother, the southern fundamentalist Baptist. As I read Rand, I found it amazing that anybody could have the outright chutzpah to say all these outrageous things out loud! She blasted conventional moral taboos with the precision of a laser-guided missile! I had never heard anybody challenge these sacred cows that prohibited one from claiming any deep and principled concern with one's own self-interest and happiness. This was selfish! Therefore bad! Wicked!
Into this world that universally condemns self-interest and celebrates self-sacrifice, Ayn Rand showed up on the world's stage as the strongest, most passionate, and most articulate voice ever to assert the moral goodness of holding your own life as your most sacred possession.
Rand astonished me by the power of the logic that demonstrates how, if morality condemns self-interest and upholds self-sacrifice as the essence of everything good, then these altruistic beliefs turn us into sacrificial animals on the alter of the lives of others.
Now, I hasten to add that there is a huge difference between self-sacrifice and benevolence, or charity freely offered by one's own lights.
A sacrifice, by definition, means giving up something more valuable in exchange for something less valuable. Charitably giving money one can afford to a friend is not a sacrifice. Even losing one's life while fighting in a war against a foreign invader would not be a sacrifice, if one believes that living as the slave of a foreign invader would be intolerable. If the soldier dies in a failed effort to protect his highest values, he does not intend to die, he dies in combat because he values his own freedom higher than life as a slave. The same principle applies to fire-fighters, namely, that they would never intend to sacrifice themselves while fighting the blazes they put out!
(Footnote: Speaking of a soldier who dies fighting a foreign invader, I am reminded of a political slogan that was popular during the Cold War of my youth which said, "Better dead than red." This slogan affirms that everywhere on the earth, red has always been the color of the lefties, at least until recent liberal political pollsters hopelessly confused the matter when they began to call lefties Blue and conservatives Red...)
Think about this: given that life is a property of individuals, the idea of individual sacrifice as the essence of the Good therefore means that individuals should sacrifice their lives, which means, in other words, that they should give up their lives. Give up their lives?
What is the state of being that results from giving up one's life?
Is it not true that giving up one's life is the same thing as death?
No? You still say that self-sacrifice is good?
Well, if you give up your life, by definition, this means you are dead.
So, in this formulation, self-sacrifice, carried to its logical end, must lead to death, and therefore: death is the basis of morality.
The ethics of self-sacrifice is therefore a morality of death as the highest ideal. That would be your death, and that of everybody else, as the heart of goodness.
Altruists do not usually make a point of drawing this conclusion, but the logic of this conclusion is undeniable.
To the reflexive objection, "Oh, we don't have to go that far," I would point out that the moralists themselves do indeed go that far, if we will but look into their writings.
Consider the Catholic volume, The Lives of Saints, which lists a long catalog of heroes whose heroism is defined by the degree to which they deny, renounce, and reject the pleasures of the earth by such actions as drinking laundry water and sheep's gall, and by such actions as those of Saint Francis, who was known to throw himself into a snowbank when he felt lustful.
Consider the biblical injunction that condemns the selfishness of being rich when it says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter to gates of heaven
(Footnote: and while I'm on the topic, think about how ridiculous it is to condemn wealth as such, with no consideration of how one achieves one's wealth! By this measure there is no difference between Bernie Madoff and the Wright brothers or Steve Jobs. Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi-scheming hedge fund manager who ripped off his clientele for the whole of his career never did anything that was genuinely in his self-interest. Madoff was a miserable jerk whose whole life was wasted in anxious anticipation of the day he would get caught in the act of abusing and stealing from his best friends and customers, and whose predatory behavior landed him in jail, destroyed his family, and in part inspired his son to commit suicide. How was any of this for Madoff's own benefit?)
Consider Kant's duty-based morality, in which any personal benefit from acting rightly is said to negate the goodness of one's actions.
Consider how Mother Teresa is held to be the essence of goodness, she whose work was made possible entirely by the charity she received from others who produced the wealth to support her. Yet the wealth producers themselves are condemned, except to the degree they "redeem" themselves by giving their money away.
Think of all the pious references to self-sacrifice as a moral ideal in all the speeches and movies and books we've read. This ideal is ubiquitous.
To my own reflexive objection, when I read Rand as a young man, that it was selfish and therefore bad to be so concerned with oneself, Rand offered the observation that the world's moral systems offer us a false alternative between the ideal of self-sacrifice and the evil of predatory self-interest (no other idea of selfishness was available.) How so? Here's how:
The religious absolutists uphold the Good as self-sacrifice for God and His revealed commandments, and furthermore say that your life belongs to your religious tribe.
And on the other hand, the secular progressives, liberals, and socialists uphold the Good as self-sacrifice for the benefit of society, "society" being essentially everybody but the faintest ghost of you, yourself. Moreover, they believe that your life really belongs to society, not to you.
So, these far extremes are both upholding some kind of self-sacrifice as the moral ideal.
These are false alternative because, as Rand pointed out, "nobody came to tell you that your life belongs to you, and that the Good is to live your life and enjoy it!"
The true alternative to these traditional moralities begins with understanding that it is not true that a concern with your own self-interest means a predatory, grasping exploitation and abuse of others against their will in order to get your way.
Until Ayn Rand, we never had a fully developed theory of ethics and morality as anything but some flavor of self-sacrifice, sacrifice for one's religion, or tribe, or country, or even for the earth itself.
But there is an ethics of rational egoism, which Rand formulated and defended at length, in which it is demonstrated that one's true self-interest lies in the lifelong focus on peacefully cooperating with others through trade, namely, the exchange with others of valuable goods and services to mutual advantage. Rational selfishness is not predatory, it consists of entering win-win situations with others, it lies in the creation of relationships of mutual benefit where everyone comes away feeling better off for having engaged each other.
While Rand's idea of the virtue of selfishness was shocking to me, when I first read it as a young man, it was equally shocking to read Rand's statement that this trading to mutual advantage is the very basis of human action in the free market. Such trading is the underlying dynamic of true capitalism, and is also the essence of laissez-faire, which is nothing more or less than the actions of grownups making their own arrangements with each other for mutual benefit. All of these are simply another way of pointing to the nature of the free market, of people dealing with each other voluntarily, peacefully, and unhampered by the meddling of government intervention.
(Footnote: I didn't realize it when I first read Rand, but she got her powerful insight into this aspect of human action in the arena of markets and government intervention from the economics of this subject's best thinkers on the planet, who are the Austrians in the stream of Carl Menger, including especially my hero, Ludwig von Mises and his students, such as George Reisman, who, by the way, was also a student of Ayn Rand.)
Before Ayn Rand, there was Aristotle, whose ethics of eudaimonia upheld the idea of lifelong personal development for the purpose of achieving happiness on earth. But the justification of Aristotle's ethics was never advanced as a matter of defensible theory, but only as an opinion based on Aristotle's subjective observation and approval of outstanding individuals whom he judged to be men of "great soul."
Ayn Rand was the first thinker to make a comprehensive case for the ethics of rational self-interest, a case that was rooted in facts of reality that are observable by any normally healthy person here on earth. Nobody argued more effectively than she for the idea that you should devote yourself to unfolding your gifts in the world for the purpose of achieving your own happiness. Nobody who ever lived before her showed up as such a skilled and principled defender of the idea that the purpose of morality, as she put it, is to teach you, not how to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. While John Locke made a case for the natural rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property, the moral case for rights was not advanced as a justified theory in the time of the American founders. This ideal of natural rights was not spelled out in logic, it was said merely to be "self-evident," as Jefferson framed the matter in the American Declaration of Independence. As I mentioned above, Rand fleshed out what I believe may be the first truly worldly validation of these rights.
Ayn Rand advanced the case for individual rights in the context of a morality of rational self-interest.
I set out to prove Ayn Rand's case for the freedom of individuals.
Here is the crux of the matter: Rand grounded this idea of the goodness of rational self-interest in these objective facts of reality:
1. The concept of value means a thing that inspires one to work at acquiring it. "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep," wrote Rand.
2. The very possibility of assigning value to anything begins with an individual's possession of life, and the necessity of making choices about what actions to take in order to preserve one's life.
3. These starting points, and their subsequent implications, are available to all persons who would open their eyes and give these matters some thought.
4. If you want to live, you have to learn what survival requires of you, and this knowledge can only be acquired by employing the uniquely human tool of reason, which means using logic applied to the evidence of experience.
The rest of her argument for rational self-interest follows by implication, is spelled out at length in her work, and can be grasped by anyone who gives these matters some real thought.
Giving these matters some real thought is clearly what snarky, sophomoric, socialist John Oliver has never done.
Given the fact that everywhere socialism has actually come to take the levers of power, it has resulted in death camps and wars with mass murder on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world, how is it that socialism is still a thing?
Ayn Rand had an answer to this question: socialism appeals to the ethics of self-sacrifice for the lives of others, and appeals more deeply in this way than any other ideology.
Now, unless we count the ancient traditions of the Christian crusades and the jihadist carriage of Islam into the world by the sword, if we measure the matter by the sheer depth of the oceans of blood spilled in the name of these causes, the religions pale by comparison with the body count of the various flavors of socialism, as practiced in the last century ... unless we are counting dead bodies as a percentage of the population, in which case Christianity surely takes the cake: consider, for just one example, that in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century, something like a third of the population, including every man, woman, and child, was murdered by Protestants fighting Catholics, all in the name of self-sacrifice for the greater glory of God.
Where individuals are upheld as sacrificial animals on the alter of the lives of others, there will be blood collected by self-appointed authorities eager to collect sacrificial offerings.
If happiness on earth is our ideal, then it is past time to abandon this crazy idea that the moral ideal is self-sacrifice for the lives of others, and embrace the crucial virtue of rational egoism.
Acquiring the ability to understand and validate this moral ideal of rational egoism and the happiness on earth it can bring, is why Ayn Rand "is still a thing."
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