A Beginner's Guide to Hating Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905-1982): Not talented enough to be an artist, not rigorous enough to be a philosopher, cult figure of libertarians, fascists, and rationally self-interested white middle-class middleschoolers and insecure college students everywhere — is the most overrated pulp novelist in the history of intellectual sophistry and the biggest ***** since Cato to have an Institute named after her. - Somebody

Is selfishness "cool"?

Some years ago, I got over Ayn Rand and discovered that I really love others.

We find it so pleasing to see an honest smile, and feel even more so when we return it. Nothing in the world can parallel the joy of helping a less-fortunate fellow human cross a crazy highway. You would get me right had you ever renounced a seat for a stooping grandma while traveling or bothered to share your food with a child whose hunger-filled eyes beseeched your mercy. The simplest yet most important argument that would go in favor of being selfless therefore is that it, just in contrast to the general perception, is what comes natural to us. If you feel itchy being called selfish, there should be some problem with selfishness; that's plain and simple. As Einstein puts it :

There is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

Now, all these arguments are quite obvious and to a very great extent, clichéd. They have been soft targets of a section of polemic intellectuals; the ideology of the love-thy-neighbor keep getting drowned in the opulence of philosophical or logical radicalism trumpeted by fervent supporters of “constructive selfishness”.

It is not as difficult to moralize the virtue of selfishness as we think it to be. Ayn Rand is the best example; she is darling of millions of respectable men and women across the glob, thanks to the fact that Selfist ideologies such as Objectivism are mesmerizing, motivating celebration of self-worth and it can resonate well with anyone who take himself or herself so seriously. Just that the relatively recent ones among them are sugar-coated quite a bit to not look repulsive.

For instance, ideas of Rand are greatly indebted to Nietzsche's. We see flashes of all Randian heroes in Nietzsche's conception of a certain 'great individual': an abysmally narcissistic, savagely megalomaniacal, manifestly unrealistic, implausible super human. Nietzsche was, however, hopelessly blunt and arrogant in his views. He was categorical in proclaiming that the despair of society is far less significant than the suffering of the 'great individual':

The misfortune of all these small folks do not together constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men

Well - that is so unkind of Nietzsche, to say it soft. Ayn Rand is polemic, radical and aggressive, but less merciless. But I find "five v's" to be common in all expositions of selfish doctrine: volume, vehemence, vengeance, vanity and volatility.

These are symptoms, and wait - I will tell you of what. What do the rather composed ones among us do with an idea? We conceive it, we ponder over or sleep over it, we make a choice on the mode of its ex-pression, we sound it out as sensibly and powerfully as we can, get due feedbacks and retreat. But what if we have an agenda rather than an idea? We get suddenly conscious as well as rhetorical. We use one mishmash of words after another, take a look at that from a distance, come back to rehash what we wrote in order to “better convey” the meaning. We get voluminous, vehement, vengeful, conceited and volatile. Selfish ideologies are in general plagued by these off-putting traits, but are simple ' very simple- in essence.

The much-known virtuous selfishness can be summed up as in these two arguments:

(1) Being selfish is and should be all about fulfillment of a set of actual, objective needs, and therefore, natural and desirable. All human beings have objective biological and psychological needs, and one’s actual interests are identified by reference to these needs.

(2) If everyone looks after himself or herself, world as a whole would sooner or later turn out to be a better place to live in. There is no moral obligation per se to do things for the sake of others.

How well-founded are these arguments? Let us try examining the logical validity of each:

Fallacy of 'Needs Theory'

The first argument - being selfish is and should be all about fulfillment of certain actual, objective needs, and therefore, natural and desirable - characterized by Rand’s objectivist approach of life, is more complex the other one and is more susceptible to interpretations that are at odds with each other. But we would rather go by its obvious substance.

Rand in her philosophical treatises on virtue of selfishness sort of preempts asking the question as to who benefits from a particular act by constraining her reader to look straight at the cherries she picked from her objectivist garden. She puts a hard-stop to this basic and most important question presumably for that it possesses huge potential to upset her applecart of objectivist philosophy of selfishness at its most basic level. Let us not omit the question in our analysis though, as we would not like to see a ’subjective omission’ when analyzing selfishness championed by objectivist philosophy.

I have serious objections to accepting the 'objective-needs' theory as something that naturally implies the virtue of selfishness. Here is why:

(i) Every human has needs and their existence and interests are to be driven by these needs. But how are the needs met ? In all systems and structures of human existence known, almost every human need can be satisfied only by means of direct or indirect efforts of a collective of some kind. Food is a need , but I can help myself in meeting it only to the extend of serving the end-product in my platter and all the acts that precedes mine are executed graciously by multitudes of human collectives. Same is the case with all other needs for my survival. The human collectives might not have me in their minds when they were doing their job, but that doesn’t mean they were doing their work all for themselves. Granted, the workers have motives in doing their duty in term of compensation, but they appreciate the fact that they are not the beneficiary of their work. So , in essence, the fact that a service provided by a human individual or collective is compensated doesn’t logically imply that the service is done for selfish reasons , as, for that to be entirely selfish, the service should benefit and only benefit the self of the worker. As a result, it is absurd to assert that any need-fulfilling service is provided with selfish motives.

(ii) An objective need to which a human being is a beneficiary can only be of two types (1) he/she is the sole beneficiary of the fulfillment of a need (2) he/she is one among a group of beneficiaries that share the welfare caused by fulfillment of a need. The latter case is an obvious departure from the pro-selfish arguments that proclaim individualistic need-fulfillment to be the driving force behind all human activities.

Think of this : I need a bridge across the canal in my town to drive and get to the other side, but the need is not mine alone as I am not the lone beneficiary. If the provider and receiver of a service that enables need-fulfillment are explicitly mindful of the fact that none of them is the exclusive beneficiary of the need-fulfillment, it is logical fallacy to assert the service has been received on selfish grounds.

(iii) Now, let’s consider the former case of this last classification of objective needs. There are indeed individual needs that address exclusively a singular human being, but are objective, as they are applicable to all humans. Again, let’s take our example of food - the most important one of primary needs. It’s a need that satisfies my hunger and mine alone. We may thus be quick to add it to the kitty of ‘objective’ actual needs that are guided by natural, inherent ego-centric human drives.

But is it really my need alone that I need to eat?

The answer is no! I, as an ingredient of a human composition, have to stay alive and healthy to be able to contribute to the constitution of the collective social machinery that has nothing in particular to do with my own self- interests. It is not entirely my need that gets satisfied when I eat, but also your need of having me work for you. In that way, there is no real “need” may be subjective, but none of them is purely individualistic either. There is no reason to believe that a human-being do what they ever do solely for himself or herself. And as we are talking about ‘objective’ needs, again, it’s absurd to think of subjective thought process that underlies as the motivation to do the work.

From this standpoint, both longing and fulfillment of all human needs- objective, actual or otherwise- are therefore social and selfless in nature and are way off the bounds of individual interests.

Note that I haven’t ascribed any negative or sinister dimension to the ’selfishness’ linguistic throughout the analysis; we use the word ’selfish’ in pretty much the same way Ayn Rand and other champions of ‘virtuous selfishness’ love to see it.

Why is it not enough to look after just you?

Let’s now go over the second argument which is more powerful, prevalent and imposing: If everyone takes good care of himself or herself, world eventually would turn into a better place to live.

This statement is more or less equivalent to remarking that letting an individual focus on his or her interests would translate into meeting social interests at length. Is this correct?

I would like to start tackling this point with an interesting analogy once made by Bertrand Russell in another context. If you are firing at a target, even if you are a bad shot, you are more likely to hit the bull’s eye than any other equal area. But if you are firing at something else, the chances of hitting the bull’s eye would be exponentially lower, and would depend entirely on some weird luck. If you address individual problem at an individual level, you are most likely resolve the individual’s issues than any social issues. If you, on the other hand, would try to address the social issues directly, it’s more likely that the issue gets resolved than it does when you address individual ones. So it’s sheer common sense that addressing social issues straight -regardless of disparate individual interests- can benefit society and humanity than doing it in any other way.

And that’s not all. There is yet another reason to believe social existence is not as simple as objectivits and selfists understand it. Individual and social issues lie in separate plains and they seldom converge. Social issues result from problems that are mainly collaborative and synergistic, and not many of them could be resolved by a reductionist approach. Individuals are mere ‘nodes’ in the vast social fabric, and the characteristics that a collective framework possesses vanish once we treat the system after breaking it down to its elementary units. And this last set of characteristics of the collective would not only favor a harmonious social existence, but are highly essential for an optimal individual existence. Also, the probability of the welfare of my society fueling my well-being is far more than my well-being helping my society’s welfare. All these can mean only one thing : when somebody fine- tunes their life to best address one’s own interests alone, it hardly helps himself or the community he lives in. As the greatest of all social scientists, Adam Smith puts it across:

Restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections to constitute the perfection of human nature.

Thirdly, If your interests constantly militate against those of people around you and you have no sufficient faculty to assess if yours are actual, objective interests, your judgments may fall apart yielding unacceptable acts, and you will keep getting alienated from the rest. Irrespective of the loftiness your goals and virtues of your motives (if any), you will never be reciprocated with anything good by the world around you .Results? - Personal declension and social disintegration.

Darwinian Traps

As we saw at the outset, one of the major arguments for selfishness and against altruism is a variation of Darwinian principle of Survival of the Fittest. The "fittest", as far as this brand of argument goes, should be selfish enough to enforce their interest on the weaker ones. Again as per our good old Nietzsche, the "fittest" (he terms them the "noble class") must create their own definitions of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, honor and disgrace. They are not obliged to align themselves with weaker class morality or social framework, as they "spontaneously create values" for humanity. (Sounds familiar? Yes ' The more you study Ayn Rand, the more willing you would be to call her a whiskerless Nietzsche.)

Similar to any other shallow theory that has its roots in Social Darwinism, Selfism /objectivism too take evolutionary principles too literally, unmindful of the huge incongruity in employing a biological theory in understanding a social framework. Social Darwinists tend to draw direct parallels between complex, statistically driven process of Natural Selection and simpler, lawfully regulated human choices for assimilation, collaboration and inheritance. It was not uncommon, until mid 20^th century, to find strong Darwinian influence in most social theories. How many of us are actually know that it was Herbert Spencer, arguably yet another ideological ancestor of Ayn Rand, who coined the phrase Survival of The Fittest ' which has almost become synonymous with Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution.

Spencer, Nietzsche , Ernst Haeckel and Rand were all making a serious mistake : the term "fittest" in the evolutionary biology doesn't have, in reality, anything to do with the "fittest" in a sociological context. In biology, an organism is fittest when it has an ability to reproduce most to proliferate their kind. The "fittest" to a Social Darwinist is someone like Ayn Rand's John Galt or Nietzsche's Super Human. It's preposterous to "naturalize" the hysteric self-importance that Rand's characters demonstrate by instancing the selfishness that the genes exhibit in the process of evolution. Even life sciences, for that matter, don't suggest an innate selfish drive of any kind for humankind. As Richard Dawkins, author of the phenomenal book "The Selfish Gene", have clarified:

Some critics say that I was saying [in my book] that selfishness and other nasty ways are an inescapable part of our nature. This error is easy to fall into, if you think genetic determination is absolute and irreversible. In fact, genes determine behavior only in statistical sense.

However, it was puzzling initially for Darwin to see altruism prevail in varying degree across the species. The explanation was quite difficult, as natural selection theorizes that altruistic members are always at a ’selective disadvantage’ relative to their selfish buddies. Then why are certain members, or some communities, exhibit unmistakable altruistic traits? The answer is simple: communities constituted only or mainly of selfish organisms would go extinct for a variety of reasons. Darwin himself was highly aware of this fact, as much as other big names in evolutionary biology. One of his famous quotes goes:

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed

Collaboration does not entirely reflect altruism or complete lack of selfishness, but the importance that Darwin attributes to collaborative subsistence categorically establishes the need to “look around” in order for humans to successfully survive and evolve. A human being is dissimilar to any other species in almost every way. We have a history; we have a certain cumulative wisdom; we have collective subconscious. All these dictate a certain pattern in the way we behave, and this pattern doesn’t always align with individual-interests. In different degrees, this pattern gets reflected in our social existence - be it in the form of etiquettes, civility, concern for others and downright altruism. For this very reason, we can’t address individual conducts, rights and interests in isolation; no analysis is complete without accommodating our collective, non-biological yet integral human traits. A 'fully selfish human' is, if anything, an oxymoron.