Here
I’m republishing my 2014 article because, these days, beyond the
manipulation of people and agendas, a few questions are still burned on
the sky:
What is freedom?
What is freedom for?
What is justice?
These are not questions for people who believe they already know everything worth knowing.
“Why
carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand behind
it and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way
into the future of your most profound vision? Why bother? And why,
therefore, allow others to do so for themselves and cause disordered,
disharmonious ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them
down. Make them equal. Make them empty.” (my notes for The Underground)
The
one glaring problem in Ayn Rand’s work is the overall effect of her
hammering mercilessly on behalf of freedom and the individual---after
400 pages, her prose takes on a programmatic aspect. It grips the reader
with iron. The moral imperative to be free replaces the exhilaration of
being free.
On
the other hand, she obviously wrote her two great novels in the middle
of a feverish exaltation. Every page burned. Most characters went down
in flames. A few rose into the sky. She knew she was up against the most
powerful forces of society, and she was not going to compromise or
relent one inch. She fully intended to destroy collectivism at its
root. On the basis of that decision, she refused to suspend her attack,
even for a moment.
Most
people who brush up against her work can’t stop to consider the depth
of her admiration for the independent and powerful and creative
individual, or the nature of her aversion to the collectivist who can
only borrow from such individuals, and then distort and undermine what
they have misappropriated.
She
means to be extreme. It is no accident. With no apologies, she splits
the world down the middle. In her own way, she is an ultimate riverboat
gambler. She shoves in all her chips on the self-appointed task of
illuminating the great dichotomy of human history and modern life: the I
versus the WE.
On
a personal level, she possessed enormous ambition, and she wrote her
two novels to achieve deserved recognition. Again, no apologies. She
knew she and her work would be attacked by numerous critics who didn’t
themselves own a tiny fragment of her talent. So be it.
To
say she revealed “a thorny personality” in her relationships would
constitute a vast understatement. In her later years, she no doubt
contributed to bringing the house down on her head. But by then, her
work was over. She stood behind it. She had achieved what she set out to
create.
And every cultural messenger of her time reviled her.
“...nearly perfect in its immorality.”
Gore Vidal, reviewing Rand's Atlas Shrugged
“...shot through with hatred.”
The Saturday Review, on Atlas Shrugged
“...can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”
The National Review, on Atlas Shrugged
But then: “[The] creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.”
Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead
When
people perceive their society is being infiltrated and taken over by
collectivism, how should they respond? What is their ultimate fuel in
the battle for liberty?
What do they resurrect as the ideal that is being scorched by collectivism?
Yes
the Constitution, yes the Bill of Rights, yes the Republic. But what
were those documents and that form of government there for in the first
place? What WAS the great ideal that lay behind them?
And if very few people can recall the ideal or understand it, what then?
The ideal was and is THE INDIVIDUAL.
But not just the individual.
The FREE INDIVIDUAL.
But not just the free individual.
The FREE AND POWERFUL INDIVIDUAL.
Which is why I'm writing about Ayn Rand.
To
grasp her Promethean effort and accomplishment, you have to read her
books at least several times, because your own reactions and responses
will change. She was attempting to dig a whole civilization out from its
smug certainty about the limits of freedom, from its compulsion to
borrow and steal worn-out ideas.
I
write this because the matrix of modern life has no solution without a
frontal exposure of the meaning and reality and sensation and emotion
and mind and imagination of INDIVIDUAL POWER.
Ayn
Rand, in her unique way, climbed the mountain of power and told about
the vista that was then in her sights. She exercised no caution. She
knew the consequences would be extraordinary.
The characters she creates who embody power are electric. You experience them beyond mere fiddle-faddle with symbols.
Rand wrote two novels that still reverberate in the minds of millions of people: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
The books have inspired unalloyed adoration and hatred. They are received as a magnificent tonic or a dose of poison.
Readers who hate Rand's work hate her for daring to present the power of an individual in full force.
Rand's
major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt, are artists. Creators. They
bow before no one and nothing. They imagine. They invent. They
decide. They refuse to compromise. They leave the group and the
committee and the bureaucracy and the collective behind them in the
dust.
Society
is ever more, over time, a mass concept. Society's leaders, through
illegal dictum, deception, and force, define a space in which all life
is supposed to occur. That is the “safe zone.” Within it, a person may
act with impunity. Outside that space, protection is removed. The
protection racket no long applies.
Once
a controller owns a space in which others live, he can alter it. He can
make it smaller and smaller. He can flood it with caterwauling about
“the greatest good for the greatest number,” the slogan of the mob. He
can pretend to elevate the mob to the status of a legitimate “democratic
majority” who are running things. He can con whole populations.
On
the other hand, we are supposed to believe that individual power is a
taboo because men like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Attila, and Alexander
once lived. That is the proof. We are supposed to believe individual
power is always and everywhere the expression of dominance over others
and nothing more.
If we only take into consideration “what is best for everybody,” we will see our way out of the morass. That's what we're told.
Civilizations
are being made more puerile because it is children who are most
vulnerable to the “greatest good for all” maxim. It is children who can
be suckered into that ideal overnight. And those adults who buy the
maxim do, in fact, revert back in the direction of being children.
At
this late date, significant numbers of people are waking up to the fact
that “greatest good” is being managed and manipulated by new Stalins
and Hitlers, who care about humanity in the same way that a bulldozer
cares about the side of a building.
Ayn
Rand, after growing up in the USSR, knew something about the paradise
of the common man. She saw it play out. She could eventually look back
and see, with certainty, that writing her two novels in the Soviet Union
would have cost her her life.
She
was acutely aware of the nature of compromisers. Such characters,
brilliantly and mercilessly drawn, are there in her novels, in the full
bloom of decay. Peter Keating, the pathetic and agonized architect-hack;
Guy Francon, Keating's boss, a socially connected panderer and promoter
of hacks; Jim Taggart, moral coward in extremis; Ellsworth Toohey,
prime philosopher of the mob impulse; Robert Sadler, the scientist who
sold his soul.
Around
us today, we see growing numbers of these very types, peddling their
phony idealism over and over. Among them, Barack Obama, promoting class
warfare, dependence on government as the source of survival, generalized
pretended hatred of the rich, and a phony empty “we are all together”
sing-song collective mysticism.
Again,
keep in mind that Rand's two major heroes, Howard Roark and John Galt,
were artists. This was no accident. This was the thrust of her main
assault. The artist is always, by example, showing the lie of the
collective. The artist begins with the assumption that consensus reality
is not final. The artist is not satisfied to accommodate himself to
What Already Exists.
The
dark opposite of that was once told to me by a retired propaganda
operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), who freelanced for several elite
non-profit foundations:
“What
do you think my colleagues and I were doing all those years? What was
our purpose? To repudiate the singular in favor of the general. And what
does that boil down to? Eradicating the concept of the individual human
being. Replacing it with the mass. The mass doesn't think. There is no
such thing as mass thought. There is only mass impulse. And we could
administer that. We could move it around like a piece on a board. You
see, you don't hypnotize a person into some deeper region of
himself. You hypnotize him OUT of himself into a fiction called The
Group...”
Rand
was attacking a mass and a collective that had burrowed its way into
every corner of life on the planet. If you were going to go to war
against THAT, you needed to be fully armed. And she was.
Rand
was also prepared to elucidate the physical, mental, and emotional
DEPTH of her heroes' commitment to their own choices, their own work,
their own creations. She wasn't merely dipping her toe in the water of
that ocean.
Howard Roark, her protagonist of The Fountainhead, remarks:
“And
here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two
ways---by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by
the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows...”
Parasites
don't want anyone to stand out from the group, the swamp. The presence
of someone who is so separate from them could trigger alarm bells and
confirm their deepest fear:
An individual with power and his own singular creative vision can exist.
Parasites
want you to believe you're just a drop of water in the great ocean, and
once you attain “higher consciousness” you'll give in and float in the
sea, and you'll offload that oh-so primitive concept of yourself as
Self. You'll be One with all the other undifferentiated drops of water.
In their ritual of joining, people are awarded a mantrum: “I'M NOT VERY MUCH.”
Just that little phrase can open the door into the collective.
In The Fountainhead, architect Peter Keating utilized a second assertion as well:
“I AM GREAT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE THINK SO.”
Keating,
the social grasper, finds acceptance from people of influence. They
welcome him and reward him with architectural commissions because, well,
they think they are supposed to; after all, his name has been bandied
about by “those who should know Quality.”
It's a world in which no standards apply except the opinions of people who carry weight.
And
Peter is conventionally handsome, he's the golden boy, he's quick, he
can design buildings that look like other buildings, he can work with
others, he can look like he's enjoying life, he's good at meetings, he's
congenial.
On what other basis should rewards be handed out? What else exists?
Unfortunately
and fatally, Keating knows the real answer to that question, since he's
the boyhood friend of Howard Roark, the architect who does have a
singular and astonishing vision, who stands beyond the crowd without
trying.
Keating
returns to Roark time after time; to insult Roark, to beg him for help,
to be in the presence of a Force and breathe clean air.
Not
determined enough to be himself, but still possessed of a shred of
conscience, Keating is caught in the middle, between the man of vision
and power (Roark) and new friends who offer him “the glittering
world”---and the grips of this vise are unrelenting.
Adulation, money, success, fame, acceptance...Keating is given all these things, and still he destroys himself.
Here
is why The Fountainhead provoked such rage from the self-styled elite:
they're committed to live on an insider's rotting feast of mutual
admiration and support, and in Keating they see themselves reflected
with a clarity they'd assumed was impossible to construct. But there it
is.
The
very people who launched attack after attack at Rand, for “pawning off
such preposterous characters as real,” were boiling inside, as they
viewed themselves on the screen of her imagination: characters riddled
with compromise, bloated with pretension, bereft of integrity.
The
Keatings of this world carry water for their masters, who in turn find
bigger and better manipulators to serve. It's a cacophony of madness,
envy, and immolation posing as success.
The
world does not want to watch itself through the eyes of Ayn Rand. It
does not want to see the juggernaut of the drama playing out, because,
as with Keating, it is too revealing. And yet Rand has been accused,
over and over, of being an author of cartoon personae!
She
elevates characters and destroys other characters. She picks and
chooses according to her own standards and ideals. She never wavers. She
passes judgment. She differentiates vividly between the forces and
decisions that advance life and those that squash it.
Again and again, she comes back to the fulcrum: the featureless consensus versus unique individual creative power.
Creative
power isn't a shared or borrowed quality. One person doesn't live in
the shadow of another. The creator finds his own way, and if that
weren't the case, there would be no exultant basis for life.
We
are supposed to think existence by committee is a viable concept. This
is a surpassing fairy tale that assumes the proportions of a cosmic
joke.
For
those whose minds are already weak, in disarray, unformed, the
substitution of the collective for the individual is acceptable. It's,
in fact, rather interesting. It has the kick of novelty. And the
strength of hypnotic trance.
The
strategy is obliquely described in The Fountainhead by Ellsworth
Toohey, a newspaper columnist and philosopher of the collective, a
little man who is covertly and diabolically assembling a massive
following:
“…if
I sold them the idea that you [an ordinary playwright] are just as
great as Ibsen---pretty soon they wouldn't be able to tell the
difference...then it wouldn't matter what they went to see at all. Then
nothing would matter---neither the writers nor those for whom they
write.”
Reduction to absurdity. An overall grayness called equality.
If
the public is told the owner of a business didn't create that business,
but instead the public sector, the collective did, and if this theme is
pushed and emphasized by others, eventually the absurd notion will take
hold. Then it won't matter what is done to the independent individual,
because he was never really there at all in the first place. He was just
an invisible nonentity.
Contrast
this treatment of the individual with the stand that Howard Roark takes
during his climactic courtroom trial, at the end of The Fountainhead:
“But
the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a
collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.”
“We
inherit the products of the thoughts of other men. We inherit the
wheel. We make the cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile
becomes an airplane...The moving force is the creative faculty which
takes product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This
creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It
belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property
of the creator.”
“Yet
we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has
not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.”
We are now in an age where EVERYTHING BELONGS TO EVERYBODY.
Obama
is the latest in a line of demagogues who fully intend to reverse the
course of history. That timeline shows us the heroic struggle to replace
WE with I.
From
the earliest days of our planet, since its habitation by humans, the
tribe and the clan and the priest class and the monarchy, all claiming
divine right, have enforced the WE. Finally, the I, which was always
there, emerged fully enough to overthrow criminals and murderers who
were restraining the individual.
But
now we are being pulled back into the primitive swamp of the past,
through the systematic application of a pseudo-philosophy. The I is
turning back into the WE.
To
people who carry advanced technological devices around with them
wherever they go, which give them the capability to communicate
instantaneously with anyone on the planet, this prospect seems harmless
or ridiculous or irrelevant or comfortable.
The “I turning back into WE” is happening because IDEAS are slipping away as useful and necessary instruments of survival.
New
generations are being raised and schooled in a sulfurous atmosphere of
slogans designed to dead-end in a foggy “share and care” terminal, where
“everything for everybody” and other so-called humanitarian banners
wave in the rafters above secular leaders, who speak like priests and
assure us that, very soon, the world will be a better place because we,
as individuals, are absolving ourselves of the need to think of
ourselves as individuals.
O
yes, thank God, we are melting down. We are becoming One with All. Why
carry the burden of creating something and then having to stand for it
and be proud of it? Why think and imagine and create your own way into
the future of your best and most profound vision? Why bother? And why,
therefore, allow others to do so and cause disordered, disharmonious
ripples in the great silent lake of humanity? Pull them down. Make them
equal. Make them empty.
Let
us, as ancient Greek vandals once did, chop away our most sacred
statues, the ones that represent the I, and then let us watch as WE is
reinstalled at the entrance to every public building.
Within
the WE, individuals can hide and escape and postpone and delay, and
imbibe the drug of forgetfulness, and listen to the chimes of paradise.
Roark
continues to mount his courtroom speech: “An architect uses steel,
glass, and concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just
so much steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does
with them is his individual product and his individual property.”
Obama: “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “Rulers
of men...create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of
others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.”
Obama: “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander invented altruism.”
Obama: “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Roark: “The
love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve
it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential.”
Obama: “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Ayn
Rand could be viewed as a tragic figure, but she would deny it, even in
her darkest hour, just as her character, Howard Roark, would deny it.
She
not only knew where she stood, she fleshed out, to an extraordinary
degree, that position, in two astonishing and unique novels. Bolts from
the blue.
She and her books were hated and adored, as no other author and no other works of the 20th century.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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