RoR: Forum

The Only Path to Tomorrow

Click the title to read the full text of Rand's 1944 article.

Post 1

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 12:12pm

With industry nationalization and Wall Street reform on the front pages of all of the major newspapers, this has become an especially timely quote.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 9/20, 12:13pm)

Post 2

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 12:46pm

I found a copy of this issue of Reader's Digest on eBay and bought it. I also have the electronic download, but the magazine sits on my Ayn Rand shelf after The Fountainhead. For an essay on the ethics of business for a sociology class, I found Rand cited quite heavily in the late 1940s as a result of The Fountainhead. Rumors published in Fortune were that she was working on a new novel specifically about business.

Know your enemy is always good advice, but at root I question the value in studying totalitarianism. This comes up in a different way in numismatics. Some misguided people try to study fakes in order to know more about them supposedly to avoid buying them, though of course, they buy plenty of them as they build their so-called "black cabinets." You see, banks do not train tellers by showing them counterfeits, but by having them be familiar with genuine money. Anything not genuine is suspect. As a security guard in New Mexico, a common assignment was to work a bar -- hopefully not as a bouncer; bigger guys do that -- to check IDs. We did, indeed, see a few kinds of representative fakes in a training class, but over all, we focused on genuine identity cards: driver's licenses, military IDs, Mexican DLs, etc.

The point is that you only get so much out of studying errors.

Post 3

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 1:03pm

Michael,

In that article she didn't spend any time discussing the enemy that was separate from comparing it to the system we desire. Her point was that freedom's supporters must know what freedom is to be able to fight for it.

Post 4

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 6:34pm

Steve, I went back and actually re-read the thing, and, yes, as you say, she mostly contrasted totalitarianism with individualism. This was not Hannah Arendt. Nonetheless, Rand has a strong negativist component to her thought. She called Halley's Concerto of Deliverance a violent no thrown at the world. Francisco's speech about Money is mostly about what money is not. When she describes Roark's work, she first shows it by contrast, by what it is not before she describes it as if it were the first building built by the first man and then finally she gets around to little more than a verbal sketch. Atlas is all about what is wrong. The Fountainhead comes much closer to describing positive consequences of postive premises defining what is possible in the good life.

Aristotle's concept of "Eudaemonia" would seem to be a natural starting point for Rand. But she does little with it. I have recommended highly Don Asselin's Human Nature and 'Eudaimonia' in Aristotle. Don got his doctorate at Marquette and from that wrote this book. He taught at Hillsdale and then came to Eastern Michigan University. I never had him for class. I met him later. The point is that his book really builds on Aristotle for a general theory of happiness. Rand, by contrast, was not a happy person.

She makes the point in Atlas that John Galt certainly but also Francisco and Ragnar are not "supermen" but merely ordinary men who are unburdened from pain or guilt or fear. Who else is saved by the revelation? Eddie Willers? Tony the Wetnurse? Not even Quentin Daniels is one whit brighter about himself. I believe that the limitations in the characterizations stem from Rand's relationship with herself.

In Fahrenheit 451 Montag tries to explain books to his wife by saying that inside each one is the man who wrote it. That made an impact with me. I came to see fiction that way from that point on. I was less concerned with the "story" than with the "man" who wrote it. So, when looking at Rand, and Atlas and all the rest, I see a young girl who is very unhappy with her life and who is seeking some crack in the door light coming through that promises a better world. She seems never to have found it.

So, too, with the essay and quote under discussion. Rand does, indeed, contrast individualism against totalitarianism, however, the bottom line is that in her description, there could be no beauty but for the existence of ugliness to contrast it to. I found that lacking.

If you want to know what I find uplifiting, it's science fiction. Even The World of Null-A (barf) shows a future world in which limits are pushed back and achievements have succeeded in making life better for the characters than it was for the readers. So, too, with Asimov's "Spacer" novels, and Heinlein's "Future History" and the cyberpunk even that, yes, even that, and on and on and on, they all show a world of tomorrow in which achievement makes a difference. They paint a picture of consumated potentiality.

By contrast, the psychology of Atlas is only the prelude to Anthem.

If you think otherwise, read The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel.

Post 5

Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 8:55pm

Michael,

I enjoy realistic Sci-Fi. But Rand went far beyond where any other writers have gone. She created in fiction an entire philosophy and put it in a time-less 'present' - not the future. She wasn't waiting for some future age - she believed that Objectivism was real and suitable for here and now, nor was she in need of advanced technologies or fictional gimmicks in far flung galaxies. Sci-Fi is safer. It is less threatening on an existential level to put ones beliefs and visions of how things should be way out there. If you put them here, and now, there is the implication that one might need to do something, or to be different in some way. She was not only unafraid to envision her beliefs here in the present, but to discover their opponents and to battle them. You see an unhappy girl, I see an extraordinary hero.

She had to grapple with the nature of evil and to paint accurate pictures of it - just as a surgeon has to know what a tumor looks like. You have been here at ROR for a long time and you are well read. I can understand someone saying that for whatever reason, they aren't as thrilled by Atlas Shrugged or somehow the literary chemistry just isn't right, but you should have a better appreciation of what she accomplished. You talk about "limitations of characterizations" and I just shake my head. I know Hank Reardon like I know the hand at the end of my arm. Maybe because I've known men like him in real life.

There is a level of awareness of the existence of issues and their dimensions that none of us would even be aware of but for her mind having gone there before.

If you look at the youtube video where Barbara Branden speaks about Ayn Rand, at the 50 year celebration of Atlas Shrugged, you do hear how deeply sad she became for a considerable period after the publication - and why. But you also hear about a woman who was intensely happy for many periods of her life. And she experienced her passion in creation - would she have been "happier" in any meaningful way if she had given up on ideas or writing things she felt passionate about and chosen some "happy" middle of the road job as a manager, or ghost writer?

I see her, and her fiction, much, much differently than you. If the worlds of Asimov, or Heinlein were to be consummated in reality, they would need a philosophy that worked. Those heroes of a distant future would have to do what she has already done. Those Sci-Fi worlds only work because they are fiction, cast in a distant future, cleverly written, usually brilliant in one area or another, but they rest upon unstated premises and coast by unanswered questions, guided successfully to conclusion because they are fiction. To me, the level of imagination and genius needed to write Atlas Shrugged makes the best of the Sci-Fi writers look like pale under-achievers happy to have only one foot in reality.

Post 6

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 6:20am

Steve,

That was a beautiful rejoinder to Mike's criticism. And I mean beautiful in the classical, literal sense of being the marriage of the True with the Good.

Ed

Post 7

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 8:10am

Well, yes, Ed, it was nice and I sanctioned it because I do not see a contradiction between his post and mine. A three-dimensional writing medium would be useful. Both are true. My perception that Rand's "psychological set point" was negative and Steve's observation that in the course of her life she was both happy and disappointed are not mutually exclusive. Both are true.

The philosophy supporting Atlas is certainly a great invention, perhaps the last and greatest, of the industrial age[1].

The fact remains that the book is about the decline and destruction of civilization and ends with a darkened planet and John Galt making a mystical sign over it. Considering that the book took 12 years to write -- again, there were rumors about it in Fortune c. 1947 -- that Atlas evolved as Rand's life changed is obvious in retrospect.

I found curious these words from Steve: "nor was she in need of advanced technologies or fictional gimmicks in far flung galaxies." But, of course, Atlas would have been a different book without Galt's motor and the fields it generated -- nominal "invisiblity" (by refraction) for one, but also the damping of the magnetos in Dagny's airplane. Remember the scene where Ragnar gives Hank the bar of gold? The one cop says that they found a battered wreck of a car with a million dollar motor. What was that? Rearden Metal, of course and Dr. Hendricks' portable x-ray machine are there as well. I believe that Rand was indeed influenced by science fiction in ways that she may not have considered. Has anyone else seen Things to Come?

Rand suffered post-partem depression after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. That was normal and to have been expected by a trained psychologist, if only one had been around (ahem). But Atlas Shrugged (and Objectivism) enjoyed immediate and sustained success for the rest of her life, as witnessed no less, by Steve Wolfer himself who was in the audience at her last public presentation.

What Rand did not achieve -- what was metaphysically impossible -- was to remake the world by convincing everyone that she was right. Atlas has been published. Millions of copies of that and all the other works have been sold and read. What's up with Bill Gates, Martha Stuart, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump.... I mean there are, indeed, Jimmy Wales, Ed Snider, T.J. Rodgers and a few others, but, basically, the objective reality of human nature is that no one can be rationally argued out of an opinion that they were not rationally argued into in the first place.

And yet, as a result of Atlas -- just as a consequence of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television -- the world has changed. The voices of reason do speak up and are heard, if only to encourage each other. That, to me, was the singular benefit of Rand's works: the realization that standing alone does not mean being alone.

I like Steve, no matter how snide his humor about my political opinions. It would take a lot to change that.

[1] Even the computer and the spaceship are extensions of 19th century technology and certainly remain industrial machinery. The software of computing is the origin of the information age, because at root, there is no difference between code and data.

Post 8

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 8:30am

Mike,

Real good retort. I can't blame you for not being as inspired by Rand as myself or Steve. That's a sense of life thing. I could blame you for spreading cynicism, but you are so enigmatic that I can't achieve conclusive evidence that you are doing that. In the meantime, all I can say is that you write well and that you care about ideas -- which are both compliments.

Ed

Post 9

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 11:30am

Michael,

I had to laugh (at myself) that I'd forgotten Galt's engine, Readon's metal, the "invisibility" shield, etc. But, in my defense, I want to point out that they are not what the book is about, nor required to make it work - they are just the concretes that happen to satisfy her theme and storyline about men of the mind (they had to have done something with their minds!). They are minor in relation to the philosophy and the plot.

As to Rand's depression, I have a theory that extends what she and others close to her have already said. Anyone that has been a practicing therapist long enough has probably heard of the depression that medical doctors so often experience a while after entering private practice. To get into medical school requires an intense 4 to 5 years of dedication - because of the competition for the limited seats. Then comes medical school itself, and that is followed by internship which is a lot like Hell, and, as if that weren't enough, there is the residency. This is a very long period of time for someone of that age to sustain such an intense dedication - one that involves giving up a lot of the peer activities and socializing and just plain kicking back and relaxing that everyone else is doing. It can only be done by building up the intensity of their inner vision of what success will be. There is this creation of an emotionally charged sense of what it will feel like to finally win. This fantasy has to be the emotional background that is there for them every single day to balance the intensity of the work and the single-minded refusal to let up for even a few hours. Then going into a private practice usually involves taking on massive debt on top of the debt for undergraduate and med school loans. What happens is that they find themselves decompressing from that intensity after they have mastered the newness of daily practice in their office, of being a manager and business person to find themselves finally looking at their life in the present - they come in every day, put on their white coats, deal with business concerns and see people with coughs and hemmeroids, while looking at decades of debts. They go through a depression - think of it as a liquidation of inflated expectations. And they come out much stronger and deeply satisfied - mostly as a psychological product of practicing virtues while experiencing success in personal challenges met.

Ayn Rand knew at an early age that she would have very important things to say and that she would be doing them in fiction. As this sense of who she would be became more and more focused, she became more and more focused. From the college girl studying history and philosophy, to the young woman struggling to write in a new language, you can see the intensity of her effort redoubling. She knew that even though Fountainhead was to be a novel complete in itself, that its place in her life was to be the practice for writing about man as he should be. That it took 12 years to write Atlas Shrugged and that it took 2 years to write Galt's speech tells us about the intensity of her drive and therefore the intensity of whatever she envisioned her success to feel like - to sustain herself.

Ayn Rand had to be doing something in her mind to sustain the intense effort needed to not let up, to not settle for second best, to not take an easier path - she had to not just understand philosophy but to rewrite it - in order to put forth her vision. I suspect that she had a sense of intelligent people around the world being excited and empowered by Atlas Shrugged and in this fantasy they became visible and she felt a deep satisfaction - a powerful sense of being right and being psychologically visible. I use the word "fantasy" not in a negative way as relates to false knowledge, but as to the emotional context - to the somewhat arbitrary concretes assigned to symbolize the imagined feelings of exhilaration one imagines feeling at some future success. It is kind of like bringing to the present a taste of what that success will feel like so as to keep one hungry enough to keep working. I'm not sure that it is possible to drive oneself that hard without acquiring that kind of debt to be paid. It may be behind what the depression often associated with genius - then there is the aloneness of major genius, but that's a different issue.

I still don't see the darkness or depressed aspects that you do in Atlas Shrugged - and her depression followed the publication and wasn't there when she was writing.

Michael, as to my "snide" remarks about your political positions... I will only plead honesty there. Anarchy is beneath someone of your intelligence.

Post 10

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 1:26pm

Until one can honestly explain the morality of one being ordered by another [coerced], that is, being ruled, as not - in practice - a form of "existing for the sake of another", there will always be those who reject the view of servitude as being moral, in any way, shape or otherwise... Never mind the theories - those are but academic exercises... in practice, in fact, governments exist because some consider others need to be told what to do, by force - and the converse, that there are those who crave being told what to do... [for their own good, of course]

There is nothing of lesser intelligence about this...

(Edited by robert malcom on 9/21, 1:28pm)

Post 11

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 1:53pm

Robert,

I've never seen you agitated to the point of massive underlining before! If you have mentioned that you are an anarchist, I'd forgotten it.

Here is the one argument that separates out all the others in the area of anarchy. The claim that a free market will provide for justice such that it is not only NOT necessary to have a limited government but actually preferable NOT to have one. But, there can NOT be a free market until there is a mechanism in place that mandates a single set of laws for a given jurisdiction and those laws arise from individual rights. No anarchist has ever given a rational explanation of how competition works when the initiation of violence is as open to use as voluntary agreements.

You say, "Never mind the theories - those are but academic exercises... " But there have been nothing but empty theories and foolish academic exercises to support the absurd claim that anarchy could ever work.

On the other hand, government is already working, and working extremely well in every area where it is aligned with individual rights. Go out and buy something - an ink cartridge for the computer printer, for example. Look at the chain of transactions protected by courts, laws, legislature, law enforcement, etc., that define the terms of valid contracts, property rights, and outlaw the fraud or initiation of force, or theft that could interfere with that.

You can point out all the things that are wrong, like the taxes, or a limitation on importation, or requirements for a business license - and we would agree. But each of these can be diminished to the vanishing point until there is no complaint left except a claim that government itself is bad even if it no longer does ANYTHING bad. And there is nothing sensible in that!

As to being ordered about.... I don't care if people don't like being ordered about if the orders are to not initiate or threaten to initiate violence, engage in fraud or theft.
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 9/21, 1:56pm)

Post 12

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 5:30pm

"But each of these can be diminished to the vanishing point until there is no complaint left ..."

And there lies the rub - for all the cries of how government is supposed to be 'for the protection of individual rights', it never heads that direction, always the other way - for as power corrupts, so it corrupts further, and further, and further by the shortsighted who, in their charismatic confluences manage to keep pushing the mantra that 'some need to be ruled - and I'm here to do it for you...' or some such similarity...

Except for the marketplace, where innovations keep flowing, where those with vision work around the restrictions, where self-defense operates in an ever increasing counterpoint to those 'elites', those 'self-anointed' harlots of powerlusting...

I make no pretense that a ruleless society is viable in today's world - civilization is still in the adolescent stage, as it were, in terms of grasping the nature of so many things such as understanding full self-responsibility , so ruling is as it always has been the 'way of the world'... but that does not mean it is moral...

Post 13

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 7:54pm

Robert,

You have always shown a keen awareness of the long view of history.... You more than anyone here grasps the nature of Jane Jacobs descriptions of the naturally evolving systems of moral precepts. Government itself, as a concept is evolving. Look at what a landmark in this evolution our founding fathers brought forth. No question that things went much further down-hill than up since then, but this is still the small to medium squiggle on history's progress chart - a chart whose major trend line is up. And that is before the release of the ideas of Rand. Saying that it "never heads that way" just isn't right - our country is proof to the contrary.

Man's nature contains the engine of innovation and his means of survival and ability to adapt and cooperate which make trade possible. Look at how these have taken us to this global economy and the degree of peace that exists - especially when constant vicious preying upon one group by any and all neighbors used to be the norm.

It is a long race, but those of us who understand the power of ideas and of choice and grasp the importance of Objectivism's explanation of the important equations of life need to keep fighting, even during the down-turns. I fully expect that there will be another dark age on us before the next major up-turn. But anarchy has no value to offer - it is a retreat pretending to be an answer and it partners you with a few people who are as unlike you as can be - people who like anarchy as an ideological cover for pretending that what they do isn't just throwing feces.

Post 14

Monday, September 22, 2008 - 7:08am

Saying that it "never heads that way" just isn't right - our country is proof to the contrary.

You are quite right - I was in a bad mood... it should had been "...never voluntarily heads that way"... the creation of a country, fresh start so to speak, is a far different proposition than reversing the accmulation of despotic mentalities [however 'benign' their intentions]... indeed, the latter almost needs reach the 'Mugabe point' before such a change has the chance of taking place...

As for the word itself - 'an-archo' merely means 'without, or not rulers', in the same manner as 'a-theos' means 'without, or not gods'... the point being that there is nothing moral about ruling others - that it is proscribed on the basis of it considered practicality, and thus so-called necessity, nothing more.. the negative response of this word is emotional, not cognitive, in the same manner as 'self-interest' or 'selfishness'.. to tar and feather one on such a basis does no service to understanding... I quite agree it often appears that the proponants are overaged brats seeking excuses for having no responsibility - but to me, the issue in that regards is moot, for the concept of not being ruled is as derivative as the concept of no supernaturalness, with regards to rational self-interest... it is as such a consequence, a small issue to living my life - I am not a militant atheist, and for the same reason am not a militant anarchist - I am a rational self-interested being living benevolently among other individuals and seeing the world thru that vista, as an aggregate of individuals, and to the extent possible spread the word of self-responsibility and its implications, and the glory of potentials possible in the world thru the voluntary exchange of value for value...

As you've said, I hold to a 'long view of history', and as such know one can only add lights to the road ahead [for better to light a candle than to curse the darkness; better to blaze lights to see further down the road if it is possible]... you've pointed out the evolving nature of government - so true, and where that will end is yet to be reckened, for it is contectual, requiring intellectual understanding and acceptance that is only dimly seen today... we can only live in the times we live in - to wish for another is to refuse to accept the reality of being - but we, each of us, can seek to flourish, as humans ought and needs to do, and in so doing, each in our own manner, flame the coals that push back the dark...

As John Sherman wrote many yeares ago -

Generation Gap

Along the wall of Time appeared
A singular niche: the space of a minute.
Trowel of skill,
Mortar of will,
This appropriate brick I placed within it.

Post 15

Monday, September 22, 2008 - 9:24am

Robert,

Often, as a matter of fact, most of the time, I feel that our government is a ruler - in the ugly sense of the word - and I have to remind myself that it is mixed and that a substantial part of that mixture is good. Our philosophy gives us such a clear view of collectivist evils that it would be hard not to focus too exclusively on what it wrong in our government.

At my emotional center, I feel as if the proper government is my servant - hired help who has been with me for a long time - a fellow that maintains this minimal structure which concretizes the defense of individual rights. Like the dog catcher, he is called out when an individual acts more like an animal rather than a human, and he is like a wise old lawyer to help settle disputes. Like a master gardener, he continues to manicure the set of laws, trimming off the bits that are starting to go their own way. The point being that I don't have that ugly feeling I would if I saw that proper government as my ruler, not even close.

Post 16

Monday, September 22, 2008 - 9:50am

Actually, nor do I - I ignore it, for the most part, living my life of freedom in an unfree world, and considering it as part of the background, as a grizzly... the last thing I would want would be seeing it as a 'constant gardener'...

Post 17

Monday, September 22, 2008 - 9:54am