If there is one word that invalidates Ayn Rand’s blubbering worship of solitary individual achievement, it would be “exposure”.
It is a term used in the investment and finance worlds, describing the vulnerability a portfolio, institution or industry can endure in times of uncertainty. It conveys a relative link between two parties that can chain react adversely throughout entire industries, even economies.
It wields no stoic or heroic connotation — unlike the feigned bravado of Ayn Rand’s discourse.
How ironic that it is a word used or applied by her most influential, most well-known acolyte: former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He used the term whenever updating the US government on the state of the economy.
Pointedly, he plied it when making the case to bail out hedge fund Long Term Capital Markets back in Sept. 1998. Failure to prop it up would have caused the collapse of several sovereign economies. That is interdependence at work.
Day in and day out, the market — that oracle of capitalist virtue and wisdom — bears this out. Trouble in Iran sends oil futures through the roof, spiking the price of gas; Greek debt turbulence reverberates throughout the bond market.
Think of the mortgage securities meltdown of 2008: if those toxic investments had stayed with the originator of the loan, the damage would have remained localized to a region, even possibly within a few industries. That wasn’t the case, as it turns out. The banks who over-leveraged on the poisonous debt teetered on the brink of collapse.
Said debt securities were sold to pension funds, mutual funds and various other institutional investors who watched their asset values circle the drain. This explains why lots of individual 401ks took such a devastating hit: because of their exposure to the high-risk mortgage assets.
Consider reality at the interpersonal level — there are any number of factors that shape how much success an individual can achieve: personal aptitude, financial status, quality of education, social mobility, economic environment are just a few. Because some have achieved much, working against the greatest odds, it is deeply naive to argue that all can — and stupid to call lazy, those who can’t.
Rand’s writings appeal to the worst instincts of the American psyche: perhaps illustrating the toxic legacies of Manifest Destiny and Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches mythologies. Worse yet, the conviction that those who struggled to survive — the poor, the indigent — deserved their destiny.
Former President Barack Obama was right to give the business world a reality check — no, you didn’t build that (on your own) — as was then-candidate for US Senate, Elizabeth Warren, when she spoke of a social contract businesses enter when launching and operating.
They benefit from an infrastructure and labor pool all citizens and businesses support through taxes. Former President Bill Clinton, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte in 2012, made the case for cooperation far more succinctly: we’re in this together if the whole country is to succeed again.
Leaders like former House of Representatives Speaker and Republican VP nominee, Paul Ryan, should take responsibility for arguing otherwise: you’re on your own (words, by the way, never uttered to corporate welfare recipients like fossil fuel and defense industries). They have no interest in the whole country succeeding. Like Ayn Rand, they’re caught up in the adolescent fantasy of living in a world that bends to the force of their individual wills.
Looking at Ayn Rand’s past (having been born and come of age in the Soviet Union) it stands to reason how she might have developed a revulsion to collectivism, especially a sharing society that was reinforced by totalitarian violence and repression.
However, her knee-jerk reaction to Bolshevik atrocities effectively hoisted the human individual above the needs and well-being of the group. As an avowed atheist, Ayn Rand succumbed to the revolutionary fallacy of lifting up a new god in place of a deposed deity.
Her autodidactic philosophy, objectivism, could have stood a chance of taking a significant market share in the arena of ideas — if it hadn’t been invented by a self-aggrandizing hack writer; what is otherwise an unforgivably human being.
In Ayn Rand’s view, the individual is a heroic figure and happiness is the moral purpose of life; productive achievement stands as the noblest purpose and individual reason is the only moral absolute. It remains no surprise that the founder of the modern Church of Satan, Anton LeVey, described his religion as “Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ritual and ceremony added.”
The influence of such thinking is found reiterated in politics, specifically talking points that privilege “job creators” over the employee class. The term “job creators” is a way of referring to business interests in order to defend them from any suggestion that they should contribute a fairer share of their gains to the common good.
Had Abraham Lincoln been alive in the early 21st century, he would have embarrassed the business class with his opposing perspective.
In a speech addressed to Congress in December 1861, President Lincoln discussed the Civil War, but took a subtle detour from the internal conflict to talk about labor’s relationship to capital. It’s a lengthy quote, but worth the read given the assumptions that he skewers; ideas that prevail to this very day.
It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.
If capital is the fruit of labor, the surplus value made possible by work, then how could the business class get so much mileage from the pretense of capital’s superiority to labor?
It’s this very pretense with which Ayn Rand stages her novel Atlas Shrugged, imagining that the entrepreneur class (“job creators” in our world) could organize a ‘strike’ and cause society to teeter in the balance.
On so many levels it’s a laughable scenario — primarily because the business class’s attachment to mammon is so binding, that withholding production poses a deprivation they cannot bear to fathom.
What I consider unfathomable is the respect and consideration Ayn Rand’s thinking still enjoys after decades of repudiation by an economic system that grows increasingly at odds with accountability. Freedom means little without the gravity of responsibility.
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Previously Published on Medium
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