Ayn Rand and Her Work

(1983 article, 2d edition) by Diana Avery Amsden, Ph.D.

Note:  Part 1 is a highly personal account of my response to Ayn Rand and her work.  Part II, a relatively impersonal analysis of them, discusses the woman Ayn Rand most admired, my areas of disagreement with Ayn Rand, and her fiction as a self-portrait as seen through a kaleidoscope.

Part I

I discovered Ayn Rand by accident the summer of 1968 when I was living in Albuquerque.  Late one evening, bored, I flipped on the TV––and caught the tail end of a movie starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey.  Never had I seen such inspiring characters, saying such perfect things to each other!  The name of the movie was not announced at the end, so I asked around, learned the name of the movie (The Fountainhead) and the writer, and started reading everything by Ayn Rand on which I could lay my hands.  It was as if, philosophically speaking, I had been at sea all my life in the days when that meant scurvy.

Discovering Ayn Rand was like being presented with a crate of fresh oranges; I just couldn’t get enough!

She taught me the one thing I desperately needed to know:  that I can trust my own mind.  Yes, I can make mistakes––but I can also correct them.  I studied an old-fashioned logic text, and was appalled that logic had not been part of the required curriculum.  That I could graduate summa cum laude in a field like anthropology, taught by top professors––without having been given the philosophical tools for analyzing and judging ideas––reveals the deplorable condition of American education.  I felt as if I had a Chinese lilyfoot in my head, as if my capacity to reason had been bound, never allowed to develop.  Indeed, most of education consists of being taught what to think––and even what to like––which teaches you, by implication, that you are incapable of determining these things for yourself.

Learning to think, to make connections, to form causal chains backward and forward, was heady, it was exhilarating––and it was agonizing––I had to face the fact that some of my most crucial life decisions had been mistakes.

Although I had not been reared to be religious, the Puritan/Presbyterian and Mennonite/Amish values in my heritage had come through strongly, and I had succumbed to religion in my late teens.  Religious tolerance, ecumenicism, and attending “the church of your choice” were the religious values taught in my era.

John Galt’s scathing denunciation of mysticism (Atlas Shrugged, p. 1026) is no exaggeration––but how could Ayn Rand have known these things?  She was never religious!  An omniscient, omnipotent being who permitted some of the things that happen in this world would not deserve to be worshiped.

At first, assuming “Ayn” to be a man’s name, a variant of “Ian,” I thought, “What a man!  Would I like to meet him!”  When I discovered Ayn Rand was a woman, I was not disappointed; she and her heroines were the first women I had come across who gave me the feeling of “Wow, there’s someone worth being like!”
Young men growing up are offered many heroes to emulate, but who was offered to girls of my generation?  Those who suffer and serve––Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Longing for the companionship of others who enjoyed and admired Ayn Rand, I wrote the readers’ inquiry column in the Albuquerque paper, and was put in touch with a man who planned to start a group of Students of Objectivism.  Our group met at the University of New Mexico, and we had a delightful variety: a real estate agent, a pilot, a jewelry-maker, a law student, a printer, an insurance underwriter, a mobile-home dealer, a haberdashery clerk, a hospital orderly, an engineer, a draftsman, and me.  Being a member of this group is one of my happiest memories.  We thought so much alike that whenever we did anything, we moved like one animal.  This is what distinguishes a team from a committee!

Then the Libertarian Party started, and several of us enthusiastically drove up to Denver for the first national convention.  We envisioned the party as a means for bringing Ayn Rand’s kind of world into existence.

In Denver, I learned that Ayn Rand was opposed to the Party, which baffled me, for I knew she had once been active in the Republican Party, and our party’s philosophy was like her own.  If there is anything Ayn Rand taught me, it is not to put anything above my own mind.  This necessarily includes even her own opinion!  I became involved with the Party to the extent of becoming its first national secretary.

Six months later, I was called on, as a member of the Party’s executive committee, to help decide which of two warring factions should rule the California Party.  Already, the craving for power was corrupting us!
A short time later I left the party in disgust, and have never regretted my decision.  I had discovered that the only way a freedom-loving person can achieve anything in politics is to compromise, that is, to sell out his reasons for being there in the first place.  (Of course, if your purpose is to coerce, politics is the place to be).

It comes down to the old question:  does the end justify the means?  The answer is, means create their own ends.  Means and ends are merely the volitional subset of the larger class, cause and effect.  No one asks, does the effect justify the cause; it would be senseless.  It isn’t up to you.

Because government is the institutionalization of coercion, to engage in politics is to sanction coercion.  It is also to support your destroyers.  It is also to try to win at a game where they are setting the rules.  It is also to help them fake reality.  This is why governments degenerate, step by step, into tyrannies, as even the Greeks knew (Plato’s Republic, Bk.9, Aristotle’s Politics).  The academic battle to keep the classics in the required curriculum was lost before World War I.  Observe the consequences.
Later I found a statement by Ayn Rand in her January 1964 Objectivist Newsletter article, “The Anatomy of Compromise.”  Read her second principle, concerning the results of collaboration between those with different principles.  The worst man wins.

Also, consider Mr. Thompson’s question to the captured John Galt, why doesn’t Galt pretend to join, take control, and outsmart Thompson? (Atlas Shrugged, p. 1104).  Galt replies that he doesn’t for the same reason Thompson offers it:  they’d win.  This is why we are urged to work within the system to change it.  Ayn Rand must have discovered this in her brief experience in politics:  the political process is a one-way process, toward ever greater tyranny.

Also consider:  John Galt refused political power even under torture!
Our Students of Objectivism group degenerated into the New Mexico Libertarian Party, for which I must blame myself.

Part II

The Woman Ayn Rand Most Admired

In 1973 and 1977 I heard Ayn Rand speak at the Ford Hall Forum.  In 1977, there was also a luncheon in her honor.  Afterward, I made my way through the crowd to her table, and over the din shouted that she was the woman I most admired.  She shouted back “Joan of Arc.”   She thought I was asking her what woman she most admired!

Why Joan of Arc?  At first blush, a Catholic saint who heard voices seems a curious choice of heroine for a rational atheist to have!  However, consider:  Joan of Arc put nothing above her own mind.  She was capable of being a minority of one.  She did what she knew was hers to do, however dangerous, however unlikely to succeed, however unprecedented.  Under the pressure of interrogators’ attempts to trick her into self-betrayal, she answered with words whose grace and wisdom can only win our admiration when we read the transcripts of her trial today, over five hundred years later!  In the short term, she was burnt at the stake––but in the long term, she was vindicated.  She was vindicated!

Sainthood, i.e., devotion to one’s convictions even to the death, is a theme running through all Ayn Rand’s works.  Consider Kira’s death in We the Living.  In The Fountainhead, Roark’s second sentence at his trial refers to the person who discovered fire being burnt at the stake.  Anthem refers to a person who was burnt at the stake for speaking truth.  Consider Cherryl’s death in Atlas Shrugged.

Areas of Disagreement

On the few issues on which I disagree with Ayn Rand, my grounds for disagreement are her own premises––the most satisfying grounds on which to disagree with a person.

Arab character:  In 1973 at the Ford Hall Forum, Ayn Rand said the Arabs had always been savages.  Her identification with Israel was natural, as was her emotion.  I have no doubt that if asked explicitly, she would have acknowledged Arab achievements––such as during Europe’s Dark Ages.

Cigarette-smoking:  I disagree with her high valuation of cigarette-smoking.  However, I recognize that in her bleak youth in Russia, cigarettes were no doubt, like the skyline of New York and gay music, precious symbols of a better world.

The Space Program:  I don’t share her enthusiasm for the space program––how did it differ in principle from Dr. Robert Stadler’s State Science Institute?  Both are science financed with loot and controlled by looters.

Mysticism vs. Religion:  She does not explicitly distinguish mysticism from experiences that could be called “religious” in a positive sense.  However, she does implicitly acknowledge such experiences, as when Taganov calls Kira his “highest reverence” (We the Living, Pt. 1, chap. 7), as when Roark realizes he is a “profoundly religious man” in his “own way” (The Fountainhead, Pt. 2, chap. 10), in his Temple of the Human Spirit, during his trial speech when he exalts “the highest religious abstraction,” and in young Dagny’s and Eddie’s approval of the minister’s admonition to “reach for the best within us” (Atlas Shrugged, chap. 1).  It might also be pointed out that Joan of Arc’s convictions were based on firsthand religious experiences.  If you want to be scientific, the one thing you dare not discard is your own experience; all else is hearsay, and requires corroboration.

“Rape” as a Stolen Concept:  She misuses the word “rape” by defining it by a nonessential––the use of physical force––thereby implicitly denying rape’s single most important distinguishing characteristic:  the fact it is against a woman’s will.

A particular woman might, on a particular occasion, welcome a particular man’s use of his physical strength––but this, by definition, would not be against her will––and therefore should not be called “rape.” I find the “rape” in both The Fountainhead and Night of January 16th disturbingly ambiguous, too easily confused with the dangerous male myth that women “want to be raped.”  A person cannot, by definition, want what is against her will.

The problem may be that we are dealing with two concepts––but that the English language has words for only one of them.  Perhaps the Russian language does have a word for the other concept, and Ayn Rand was merely using the best English equivalent she could find.

Women’s Lib vs. justice for women:  Although I concur with her stand against the Women’s Lib movement per se, discrimination against women is ubiquitous, and I favor justice for women.

Ayn Rand chose a profession in which a woman is at less of a disadvantage compared with a man than she is in most fields.  More significant, it is a field in which a woman can disguise her gender with a pen name.

Ayn Rand’s heroines do not compete with men.  No man wanted Dominique’s job on The Banner––it was a rich girl’s hobby.  James Taggart never wanted to be Operating Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental––nor did any other man.  Dominique and Dagny may have deserved their prestigious jobs, and may have done them well––but they had those jobs only because of their relationships to financially successful male forebears:  Guy Francon and Nat Taggart!  Ayn Rand’s heroines start out wealthy; they don’t have to start at the bottom and climb up the business or academic or professional ladder––only her heroes do!

The Women’s Lib movement cleverly sets it up so that if you favor justice for women, you favor Women’s Lib, and if you oppose Women’s Lib, you oppose justice for women.  Ayn Rand apparently did not detect this false either/or choice, or perhaps her experiences were not such as to expose her to gender discrimination.  The fact women have genuine grievances has been exploited for political ends that are no more to women’s benefit than to men’s.

The fact is, females in virtually all human societies (and even primate social groups) are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis males.  Woman’s status during the first 99 percent of human history was low, judging by this and by contemporary hunting-gathering societies, which have such customs as wife-lending and universal prescribed marriage, i.e., institutionalized rape.  Gang-rape is institutionalized in some societies.

One of our prehistoric foremothers made the mistake of spilling the beans to men about biological paternity, with the result that woman’s status plummeted to that of privately owned, jealously guarded incubator.  Hence footbinding, purdah, harems, cloisters, child marriage, droit du seigneur (jus primae noctis), chastity belts, life-and-death power of the pater familias, initiation ceremonies that can cripple or kill, the death penalty for adulteresses, and infibulation (a surgical version of the chastity belt, performed without benefit of antisepsis or anesthesia).  Archaeology shows that even in prehistory, some men took their female property with them after death; suttee is an historic example.

Thanks to capitalism, the above customs have largely disappeared.

It is acknowledged that polygyny (plural wives) is degrading to women.  Polyandry (plural husbands) is even worse.  This latter, fortunately rare, marriage form occurs when several men too poor to afford a bride-price pool their funds and purchase a wife to share.  But is monogamy any better?  It originated in prehistory, probably as equitable distribution of female booty among victors after battle––as in Euripides’ The Trojan Women.  Monogamy could be regarded as socialism of women, one to a customer.

I have always known I would rather be one of several “wives” of the man I liked best than the only wife of a man I liked less.  Exclusivity is not important to me; freedom of choice is.  Freedom of choice has been rare in the female experience, but it has generally been taken for granted by men.

Through most of history, women has generally had to choose among choiceless marriage, prostitution, and poverty combined with celibacy––and they often didn’t have even that many choices.

Suppose the anti-Semitism industry were as prevalent as the pornography industry, an anti-Semitic shop or theater in every rundown neighborhood, and suppose there were as many crimes against Jews qua Jews as there are against females qua females––who would pretend there was no connection?

Few men are so tactless as to tell jokes at the expense of an ethnic group in the presence of members of that group––and they certainly wouldn’t expect their audience to be “good sports”––but some men still tell jokes at the expense of women in the presence of women, and do expect their audience to sanction being publicly insulted.
We’ve come a long way, baby, and we have a long way to go.

Fiction as a Self-Portrait

In 1978 I started writing fiction, and thereby discovered something about the  psychological processes involved in creating a story.  Generalizing from these discoveries gives me insights into other writers of fiction.  In my novel (The Stained Glass Woman), a character says “practically everything a person does is a self-portrait or autobiographical sketch to one who has eyes to see.”  This principle goes beyond the notoriously autobiographical first novel.

Being a writer, Ayn Rand was an introvert.  Whereas an extrovert knows many people superficially, an introvert knows a few persons deeply.  I noticed that certain individuals kept reappearing in her novels, in new guises:

WE THE LIVING     THE FOUNTAINHEAD     ATLAS SHRUGGED
1.    Kira Argounova    Dominique Francon     Dagny Taggart
2.    Irina Dunaeva     Catherine Halsey      Cherryl Brooks
3.    Leo Kovalensky    Peter Keating         Francisco d’Anconia
4.    Andrei Taganov    Gail Wynand           Hank Rearden

The first character is obvious, and Ayn Rand acknowledged that these represented aspects of herself or of her life.
Irina, Katy, and Cherryl I suspect are based on a young woman in Russia whose fate haunted Ayn Rand.  Each is young, fragile, ignorant of the enormity of evil––and each is tragically destroyed in body or spirit because of the man she loves.
Leo, Peter Keating, and Francisco:  each is dark, handsome, starts out as a decent enough man, and at first glance would seem to have everything going for him––Leo as an aristocrat, Keating as the darling of the architectural establishment, and Francisco because of his illustrious lineage and wealth.  However, each man is weak, and becomes corrupt, betraying himself and therefore the woman he loves and who loves him.  I suspect these characters are based on a young man in Russia with whose memory Ayn Rand kept trying to come to grips.  Keating is the most bitter portrait of him; as Francisco, he is finally redeemed: the weaknesses and corruption were only apparent.

Taganov, Wynand, and Rearden: each begins in poverty, each achieves his career goal because of his ability and single-minded dedication, and each possesses the woman he loves––but each loses both his achievement and the woman because he discovers too late that he has held a tragically false premise.

Ayn Rand’s Unacknowledged Philosophical Reversal

Have you ever noticed the startling philosophical contrast between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged?  In The Fountainhead, Dominique wants Roark to drop out because she believes he cannot win against the world.  He persists, and proves her wrong.  In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny believes she can win against the world, so she perseveres.  Galt has dropped out and wants her to––and he is proven right!

I have never heard anyone mention this reversal.  Surely I was not the first to notice it in the early 1980s.  Was Ayn Rand aware of it?  In her introduction to The Fountainhead, she says that one evening during its writing she felt so indignant at the world that she stopped.  Her husband’s encouragement enabled her to continue.  Was Roark speaking for her when he said at his trial, “I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built.  We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live”?  At the Ford Hall Forum in 1977, in reply to a query on the progress of another novel, she said she had stopped writing it due to discouragement over the world.  Had she had enough?  Did she go on strike like her heroes in Atlas Shrugged?

Conclusion

Many of the insights I describe make my heart go out to Ayn Rand.  I love her.  I am grateful to her.  She is the woman I most admire, for her genius, her courage, her independence of mind, and her powerful, spare, lucid writing.  I wish she were with us––and happy.