Silent Letter 3 - I talk to Ayn Rand

What hath Atheism wrought?

Dear Ms. Rand

It’s been forty years since I read Atlas Shrugged. Someone close handed me a copy when I was a teenager in the early 1980’s and that was it; I was an Egoist for the next several years. I read it twice, and for years afterward a shade of disembodied Rational Objectivism lingered in my background like radiation poisoning.

I later discovered it is actually not unheard of for Americanized cohorts to go through a teenage asshole Ayn Rand phase. The lucky ones, we the living, grow out of it.

But while I became antagonistic to your pro-oligarchy ideals, it must be acknowledged that your work moves people. It has real power. A significant number of people, some of them US Congress members, say your book is one of the most meaningful influences in their lives, second only to the Bible. That’s quite an accomplishment for an Objectivist Egoist Atheist!

Atlas Shrugged is certainly epic. The breathtaking sweep of your ambition lives on every page. Even though I find the themes reductive, binary and forced, I’d still rather read it than any escapist bestseller. At least you’re saying something.

Your characters are two-dimensional cut-outs though. The industrialists are pure, noble and virtuous, never motivated by greed, vanity, narcissism or worse. None of them has an inner life or the slightest doubt about their belief system. The Greek Gods of Olympus are more human than your heroes.

It’s said that your novel embodies ideals and does not intend to describe the world as it is. That’s fair for a novel but not for a philosophy. Your devotees glide past the sleights-of-hand in your plot devices, which seem contrived to make your ideals stick to the wall of the world as it is. With a wave of the godlike author’s wand, the question “What about the millions of workers and trades who grow food, manufacture goods, and construct and maintain infrastructure?” vanishes in a puff of indifference.

The sleight-of-hand that allows the motor of the few to keep running, even after the workers are dispensed with, is an electrostatic energy device. As much as I admire Nikola Tesla’s unparalleled genius, who no doubt you were nodding to, no such device exists within the physics of this particular universe. This matters, because without the perpetual energy machine, literally a deus ex machina, the entire philosophical superstructure of your argument falls apart.

Who will grow food for the few? Who will manufacture farm equipment and replacement parts? If your electrostatic energy device has no moving parts, which nonetheless must provide sufficient power to drive tractors if you want to do away with the little people, then it’s even more fantastical. I can’t help but think that if novelists had existed in ancient Athens then Plato would have applied his harsh words concerning poets to you too. The ability to make black appear white, to make the false appear true, is a dangerous power. (Not advocating Plato’s treatment of poets, but sophistry does exist.)

Who is John Galt? is the famous catch phrase for your heroic great man of history. He is the noble striker, the one who removes superior talent from society so that the “moochers” and “takers” will have no one to mooch and take from. But in our fallen, corrupt world who is John Galt really? Jeffrey Epstein is John Galt, but instead of leading our elite into noble sacrifice his job is to secure kompromat and compliance. Your story is heavy-handed: all the corruption comes from below while the elite are wholesome and morally superior. This wouldn’t matter if your novel wasn’t so influential among hollow men and stuffed shirts, flattered by your characterization of them as superior beings.

Do you know what Galt’s Gulch looks like today? Every tech billionaire fancies himself a John Galt with a luxury bunker to ride out the coming collapse. (If you want to argue no such collapse is coming, then why are they building the bunkers?) But, leaving aside the maddening boredom and existential ennui, it’s comically delusional to think their posh lifestyles could last more than a few decades because they don’t have your perpetual energy device. Electrical generators, photocells, wind turbines and the like all have limited useful life. They require complex diesel-fuel economies to mine materials and manufacture replacement parts to extend their useful lives a bit longer. The modern style of materialism, reductionism, rationalism and scientism, all of which your philosophy celebrates, has led our elite into a dead end of narrow view abstractionism and narrow view time sense.

But even without all that, which not everyone will take at face value, here is the kicker. You blame the celebration of mediocrity and contempt for superior talent on communism, but the reality is even worse than you think. Groupthink and sheepish mediocrity is a feature of bureaucracy equally manifest under capitalism as communism. (Anticipating your objection: it is permissible to excel at excelling in the bureaucracy, however what that means is keeping your head down and your contrary opionions to yourself, even if you’re CEO.) Bureaucracy doesn’t just attract moral cowardice; it bends behaviour toward it with the implicit primordial terror of social banishment. Indeed, this is the case under any conceivable ‘ism’ involving unrelated persons pursuing narrow goals in large, impersonal bureaucracies.

Either/or thinking is at the root of your philosophy. Either capitalism is all that is good, holy and true or else communism must be. There is no room for nuance in your Objectivism, no ability to reckon that capitalism and communism are more alike than different – two different flavours of materialism, reductionism, scientism and rationalism. Your truths are not the eternal kind, they’re a product of your time and the water you swam in – Anglo-American Techno-Optimism.

Victorian era reductionism held that living creatures were nothing but machines. You have a character in Atlas Shrugged say we are nothing but a collection of chemicals. Today a famous biologist puts forth that we are nothing but our selfish genes. The nothing-buttery gets more complex as the truth discoverable by science advances, but the reductive Narrative fiction remains the same.

It will take some time, but this view is falling away. Did you know that every cell in your body has its own agency and can make effective decisions for which evolution or experience could not possibly have prepared them? Did you know that cells are not actually tiny factories with a nucleus in charge and hierarchical subsystems working under? Did you know that genes contain too little information to explain most of what life is, or even how a body part gets its shape? The rational view is blinkered and blind, as was well understood by every culture on earth until we came along.

Atlas Shrugged is epic, and entirely false. One of only a handful of books I read twice, it’s the only one I regret doing so.

Sincerely, Jeff V