The Betrayal of Ayn Rand

The Betrayal of Ayn Rand
An Open Letter to Objectivists

June 15, 2009

By Rick Koerber
Founder of the Free Capitalist Project

Long after her death, it’s sad to see so many Objectivists losing sight of Ayn Rand’s personal mission. Talking like an Objectivist, referencing the characters in her books, and using the vocabulary of her movement—are all poor substitutes for acting in accordance with the ideas of an Objectivist and working to usher forth the moral revolution she so passionately advocated.

While there are notable and significant exceptions too many Objectivists that I come across on a regular basis seem to be using their intransigent atheism to justify abandoning the actual hard work of BEING real radicals for capitalism. I’m writing this criticism, not to be sensational or to attack, but to rattle a few rusty mental cages among a crowd I consider to be my friends—friends however, who seem to have succumbed to what Ms. Rand regularly described as the ‘sluggish inertia of unfocused minds.’

Before I go any further let me also offer two very distinct caveats at the outset. Number one, I am not an expert on Objectivism—though I do consider myself a diligent student. Number two; I do not mean to suggest that most Objectivists are not thinking. I mean instead to suggest that a large number of so-called Objectivists seem to be entertained and satisfied by their own thinking—in some queer sort of intellectual masturbation—rather than translating their ideas into marketable, articulated tools for ‘building a new culture on a new moral foundation.’

Somehow, almost three decades after her death, a large body of self-proclaimed followers seems to be attempting, and in large measure successfully, a tragic historical revision; namely, equating the title Objectivist (and the less used phrase ‘radical for capitalism’) with the much less diligent pursuits of being an isolated, libertarian leaning atheist. This intellectual abdication is no simple error in judgment. It is the hallmark of second-handers and amounts to nothing less than a betrayal of Ayn Rand and her philosophy. Even worse, this betrayal is being perpetrated by a significant portion of those very people who claim to be her advocates and defenders.

Alright. If I’ve gotten the attention of my desired audience, so far my remarks have been the equivalent of taking a stick and poking it violently into a previously docile beehive. Before I’m overcome with a multitude of now irritated bees intent on me as their new target—let me back up and create some context.

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time perhaps five years ago. So, in the world of Ayn Rand fans and students, I’m certainly not an old timer. I did, however, find Atlas Shrugged to be, quite simply, earth shaking. I literally fell in love with the characters. It wasn’t because I was enjoying the fiction. I often found the reading long and arduous. Instead, I found in Atlas Shrugged, a systematic articulation of the main conflict facing the modern world, in a way that I had only been struggling to come to terms with previously.

Nevertheless, when I finished reading the book I found myself in a sort of depression. I had grown so accustomed to coming home from the office and sitting down to spend a few hours with Dagny, Reardon, Francisco and John Galt—eagerly plowing through pages to learn how they were dealing with the moochers and looters, that when the story ended, it was like saying goodbye to new friends. I actually experienced a real feeling of emptiness and withdrawal for the first few weeks after finishing the book.

It didn’t take long however, for me to realize that it was not her characters that I had actually fallen in love with, it was Ms. Rand herself–the mind behind the characters. This realization sent me on my own personal odyssey. Soon I was reading the Fountainhead and not long after I had ordered every book I could find online, authored by Ayn Rand. I read everything. I read Objectivist Epistemology, the Night of January 16th, the Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and on and on. I was like a starving man who had been invited to a banquet feast.

Oddly, while I was certain I had never read anything like Ayn Rand’s works, the material seemed somehow familiar. My own ideas were becoming more clear, and new related ideas were not hard to grasp at all. Ironically, I was so new to reading Ms. Rand that virtually no one around me knew enough to correct me when I would refer to her as “Ann Rand” rather than Ayn.

It didn’t take long before essentially every one of my seminars, every daily radio program, and every class that I was teaching had some reference to Ayn Rand or her books. For example, my recently completed four-hundred and forty-seven page student manual for my “13 Principles of Prosperity” course, contained forty-seven direct references and over one-hundred indirect references to Ms. Rand and her works. Some days I would talk about Comprachicos on the radio, during others I’d simply be quoting John Galt to one of my students. The bottom line is—I became a very sincere and diligent student of Ms. Rand and Objectivism.

Being a Mormon, and therefore a member of the larger “Christian” community, one of the most obvious contradictions in my new intellectual landscape was that Ms. Rand was an unapologetic, unwavering atheist. As time passed two related problems emerged. My religious friends and associates began regularly expressing concern about my unflinching advocacy of Ms. Rand’s ideas and at the same time so-called Objectivists would summarily dismiss me, my arguments, my ideas, and the movement I was building, because, in their words, I was a “God-believer.”

Nevertheless, I continued studying Ms. Rand and have also worked diligently to cultivate relationships and opportunities with people from all walks of life, including Objectivists. For example, a few years ago I was extremely excited to travel with an associate to southern California to meet Yaron Brook and a few of his colleagues at the Ayn Rand Institute. They represent, generally speaking, some of the exceptions that I mentioned earlier on.

Over time I’ve learned that while there exists an unfortunate camp of so-called Christians who just can’t stomach the idea that Ayn Rand, an unapologetic atheist might have known something worth studying—even more oddly and surprisingly, there exists a camp of so-called Objectivists who can’t seem to think past the possibility that there might be some of us “God-believers” whose beliefs do not necessarily clash with reason.

In 1963 Ms. Rand, in a letter to US Congressman Bruce Alger wrote:

In accordance with the principles of America and of capitalism, I recognize your right to hold any beliefs you choose—and, on the same grounds, you have to recognize my right to hold any convictions I choose. I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion—I am fighting for reason. When faith and reason clash, it is up to the religious people to decide how they choose to reconcile the conflict. As far as I am concerned, I have no terms of communication and no means to deal with people, except through reason. If you find that your beliefs do not clash with reason and that your political views are rational—then that is the area in which we can communicate. I sincerely hope that we can.

I think it might do my Objectivist friends well to consider a few points drawn out by this quotation from Ms. Rand.

1) There is a difference in fighting for reason and fighting against religion. Ms. Rand’s mission was the former.

2) It’s possible for a religious person and an Objectivist to communicate and cooperate when they both agree that reason is the standard in any mutual communication or endeavor.

Much more could be said about brain-off tribalists, who are eager to exclude ‘outsiders’ as a means of self-preservation. But, relevant point to these considerations is that as ‘a radical for capitalism’ myself, I’m at a loss to explain why so many Ayn Rand followers evidently think such titles are merely a slogan or private label social tattoo of sorts. Or to put the matter even more succinctly, these days it’s hard to sort out the Objectivists who are fighting for reason from those who are simply fighting against religion. In my own experience, Objectivists have twice in this past month told me that they could not assist my Free Capitalist Project since we do not disallow religious beliefs as a standard of our membership. How irrational!

In the early 1960’s Ms. Rand wrote to Senator Barry Goldwater saying,

I regard you as the only hope of the anticollectivist side on today’s political scene, and I have defended your position at every opportunity…I am not suggesting that you should take a stand against religion. I am saying that Capitalism and religion are two separate issues, which should not be united into one “package deal” or one common cause. This does not mean that religious persons cannot crusade for Capitalism; but it does mean that nonreligious persons, like myself, cannot crusade for religion.

Ms. Rand’s willingness to have hope and confidence in someone, despite their differences in belief and opinion on a subject as significant as the existence of God—is far afield of the contemporary banter spewed forth by a large group of her followers today. Consider, I was just reading Jared Seehafer’s March 17, 2009 piece entitled, “Jesus Christ or John Galt? The Republican Party’s Identity Crisis” published by Capitalism Magazine (http://www.capmag.com), and thinking to myself—“He’s not advocating for reason, he’s fighting against religion.” It was this realization that caused me to go and dig up the two quotes used above from Letters of Ayn Rand.

In his essay Mr. Seehafer concludes,

Republicans who support capitalism need to understand that those who combine religion with politics are their enemies, and must be ostracized from the party. In order to be successful, they need to defend capitalism on ethical grounds, which means recognizing that their best pitchman is not Jesus Christ, but John Galt.

Mr. Seehafer, like many “quick-to-the-punch” atheists, evidently does not see the contradiction of his own position. He indicts Republicans for mixing religion and politics and yet he himself brings the two together in his self-created, albeit artificial and irrational dichotomy of Jesus Christ vs. John Galt. His, ‘purge through ostracization’ is the same conservative approach taken by Republicans against Objectivists over the last five decades. Perhaps even more ironically, Ms. Rand, the creator of John Galt’s character, has actually said that,

Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism—the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal…

I suppose that Mr. Seehafer and my other friends like him would not want to throw out the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson was a “God-believer” and the document itself (being political) references “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and “the Supreme Judge of the world.” I suppose also that Mr. Seehafer is not interested in throwing out the Constitution of the United States simply because so many of its drafters were “God-believers” who invoked his name during the convention. Ms. Rand argues instead that;

The Founding Fathers were America’s first intellectuals, so far, her last. It is their basic political line that the New Intellectuals have to continue. Today, that line is lost under layer upon layer of evasions, equivocations and plain falsehood; today’s Witch Doctors claim that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was faith and uncritical compliance with tradition; today’s Attila-ists claim that the basic premise was the subordination of the individual to the collective and his sacrifice to the public good. The New Intellectuals must remind the world that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. The moral premises implicit in the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, in the social system they established and in the economics of capitalism, must now be recognized and accepted in the form of an explicit moral philosophy…The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution.

The point, being missed by Mr. Seehafer and so many of my Objectivist friends, is that the question of God and issues of religion have become their knee-jerk excuse for idleness, laziness, crassness and disengagement. The mission we have before us, all of us who love our lives, is to advocate for this moral revolution. The only required foundation for that, according to Ms. Rand, is a shared commitment to two essential principles: a) emotions are not tools of cognition; b) no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. All other philosophical contradictions—including issues surrounding God and religion—will be resolved, in time, by a group of reasonable and thinking people.

Why is it that such a large number of so-called Objectivists like to write or speak, but few can demonstrate that they’ve devoted any significant thought whatsoever or any meaningful, sustained action to bringing about a veritable, tangible movement as described by Ms. Rand?

It was several years ago, after picking up a copy of For the New Intellectual for the first time, that I boarded an airplane and felt the challenge I’m attempting to convey today. I’m certain that I must have read the majority of that essay with my jaw literally gaping open. It’s probably the only flight in my life that I don’t remember uttering a single word to any other passenger. For the New Intellectual, is the most comprehensive and detailed call-to-action for those of us who value truth and love our lives – more than anything I’ve ever come across.

We reformed businessmen could benefit from the efforts of Objectivist intellectuals who can free themselves from their own irrational mental indulgences. Yet, I regularly meet so-called Objectivists who can quote or paraphrase—nothing—from that essay. How is this possible? How is it possible to be an Objectivist, or anything close, and not be committed to the revolution advocated by Ms. Rand?

Long before I had started reading Atlas Shrugged I was engaged in an effort to organize at least 300,000 members into a “free capitalist” cause. My organization, the Free Capitalist Project, advocates for capitalism as the foundation of a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the Founders. I wonder how many so-called Objectivists even recognize that language.

The second-hander’s dream of tribal prestige is no substitute for getting on with the business of this revolution. This is no theoretical project and no amount of theoretical posturing will do.

In one of the most poignant sections of his radio address, John Galt challenges:

If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence…raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason. Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity—act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind’s rebirth.”

I am a radical for capitalism. While there exists any number of different groups who could use a healthy criticism, today, I’m challenging my Objectivist friends who have become complacent and disinterested. The hollow, righteous sounding bromides so often uttered by feigned intellectuals so lucidly able to describe our culture’s impending doom—is no substitute for a deliberate, strategic and organized effort put forth in defense of Ms. Rand, Objectivism, and capitalism.

This criticism is an open invitation from some of us, who like you, have stepped out of that dismal gray vacuum of a bankrupt culture and are committed to ushering forth the producer revolution advocated consistently by Ms. Rand.

We, who are NOT about to die, salute you.

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