...but I have read all of her novels (well,
almost all -- I made several attempts at getting through
Atlas before giving up in disgust), as well as
For the New Intellectual and
The Virtue of Selfishness...all this the byproduct of having an Objectivist girlfriend in college. So, I think I know something beyond the cartoon versions you speak of.
She proposed the first system of moral philosophy founded upon the premise that man had a moral and ethical right to his own life.
Uh...no. Although Rand prided herself on being the first to solve the "is-ought" problem, her "solution," as detailed in the first chapter of
TVOS, is fatally flawed by the fact that she chooses (whether through an innocent failure to fully critique her own ideas or sheer intellectual dishonesty, I can't tell) to switch the terms of "life" from "life
as physical existence" to "life
as is proper for a human being" midway through her argument. This then allows her to arbitrarily choose a quite broad Aristotelian definition ("man is a rational animal") of the latter, and, going from there, to bring in a laundry list of her own
a priori notions about what is "proper" for a "rational animal" via that Aristotelian definition. Thus, she argues one point, then shifts the terms so that her argument in favor of point 1 is assumed to have automatically established point 2, when, in fact, it does not.
The Objectivism embraced by Republicans is absolutely and diametrically the opposite of what Rand suggested. She would have been horrified to see her work twisted in this way, and used as a propoganda tool to prop up the system of government she considered the most evil and destructive possible -- corporatism.
Ironically, when I read this passage, what I was reminded of were the protests from devout Marxists back in the '60s and '70s: that Communism hadn't
really failed, but that Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the like had all hopelessly corrupted Marx's thought, and the resulting totalitarian systems shouldn't be considered "true Communism," which had never been attempted anywhere on earth in its pure form. And maybe they were right...in the abstract. However, in the here-and-now, we can only look at what has happened when a given theoretical system is repeatedly tried in practice, with the same results each time. If those failures are always the same, and always the result of "corrupted" versions of the theory, might it be reasonable to conclude that those corruptions are an inevitable byproduct of any attempt to impose that theory on real life? Objectivism, like Communism, is a utopian*, theoretical system for which the proof of the pudding has to be what happens when its ideas are tried in real life. And, while I will grant that there has never been an
explicitly-spelled-out attempt to impose Objectivism in name on a real-world socio-political system (although the current attempt by Republicans such as Rand Paul and Paul Ryan may at least come close to doing so), there have been a number of effects to remake the American economy according to the principles of
laissez-faire capitalism, rejection of government control over business, every-man-for himself individualism, and survival-of-the-fittest "Social Darwinism" that are the essences of Objectivist philosophy as enacted in the economic realm, and each has resulted in the same phenomena: increased stratification of wealth and opportunity, a relatively-quick collapse of many small businesses into a handful of large near-monopolies, and the end result of...corporatism. Rand may or may not have been opposed to corporatism (although the fact that so many of the heroes of
Atlas Shrugged were precisely corporation-leading "titans" would seem to give the lie to that claim), but, when the adoption of the bedrock economic principles of Objectivism lead time and time again to corporatism, one has to seriously suspect that such corporatism is the inevitable result of enacting those principles. One may claim otherwise, just as one can claim that Communism doesn't inevitably lead to secret police and gulags, but, with each passing attempt leading to just that in the real world, it becomes harder and harder for those claims to hold water.
*Especially when its main expression is spelled-out in the fictional world of novels, where the author can manipulate reality to have it work out whichever way he or she wants. And, on that subject, isn't it ironic that so much of the general premise of
Atlas Shrugged is directly lifted from James Hilton's
Lost Horizon, a fable trumpeting the eventual triumph of a philosophy of Christian altruism diametrically opposed to Rand's thought? It would appear that, whatever the utopian theory, the ability to create a fictional world where said theory emerges triumphant remains the same. Of course,
Lost Horizon differs from
Atlas Shrugged in being the basis for a much better movie...but I guess that just speaks to the difference between Frank Capra and Ronald Coleman on one hand and Paul Johansson and Taylor Schilling on the other.
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