The World is Wrong

Most of Ayn Rand’s modern-day fans, in reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem, seem to find most memorable and quotable the final two chapters of that work, in which the protagonist, Equality 7-2521, finally rediscovers the word “I” and is able to articulate the meaning of individuality and the wrongness of his collectivist society. This climax, Rand’s “anthem” to the ego, is powerful writing, to be sure:

I am. I think. I will.

My hands… My spirit… My sky… My forest… This earth of mine…

What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of  things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

Nonetheless, the parts of Anthem that I have always found to have the strongest emotional impact are the earlier chapters, when the protagonist is struggling to understand the world and express his confusion without having the words to do so—the passage in which he remembers witnessing the burning of an unrepentant Transgressor who had learned the forbidden Unspeakable Word, and longs to know what idea could be so powerful. Also powerful are the brief character sketches of other people responding to the trauma of life in that world:

All is not well with our brothers. There are Fraternity 2-5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9-6347, who are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in a voice which chills our bones, but the Doctors cannot cure Solidarity 9-6347.

It is worth noting that the idea of people screaming in the night is one of the few elements preserved from the longer play that Rand imagined while living in Russia that eventually became Anthem.

My reaction to Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged is similar. While the typical Rand reader sees it as the most important part of the novel, my impulse is to advise people to skip over it and come back later. Atlas, to me, is not about Galt’s speech or the specific politics of Objectivism—it is about Dagny’s desperation for competent co-creators and for an equal romantic partner, about Rearden’s struggle to understand and escape the abuse of his wife and mother, and about Eddie Willers’ lonely malaise and Cheryl Taggart’s panicked flight from the truth about her husband’s ethics.

Rand is at her best, I believe, when she writes about the sense of confusion, desperation, and loneliness her characters experience when living in a world at odds with their nature and values. That sense of anomie, of being trapped by internal and external power and value structures—that sense that the world is somehow tilted, askew, wrong in some fundamental and indefinable sense—is, to me, the essence of Rand. Probably the purest instance of that sense of existential wrongness is the ever-present and unanswerable question “Who is John Galt?”—a question whose hopelessness lies in the sheer scale and multiplicity of any possible answer, and the lack of any one set of words that can express the whole of the answer.

In a way, Rand does acknowledge the plurality of answers. In addition to the factual story about Galt, the inventor who left the Twentieth Century Motor Company in protest of its management and proceeded to persuade all the other important creative minds of the world to strike, Rand has Dagny encounter several metaphorical stories about Galt. John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind, and withdrew fire from the world until men withdrew their vultures. He is the explorer who discovered the fountain of youth at the top of the world’s tallest mountain, and found it could not be brought down and shared. He is the millionaire who caught a glimpse of Atlantis beneath the waves, and sunk his boat and his fortune to reach it. On some level, I think, Rand did see that the idea of John Galt is too large to be represented by any one man or any one definition, and can only be expressed with a multiplicity of stories.

It is somewhat ironic to me that Rand, who so prized clarity and precision in writing and believed in the objectivity of concepts, did what I consider to be some of her best writing in the language of myth and metaphor. The various Galt stories, and some other metaphorical imagery from Atlas like the image of the New York skyline disappearing into mist, are important examples. The whole of Anthem is obviously another. A lesser-known example is the story of Kira’s Viking, which was cut from the published version of We the Living but is reprinted in the compilation The Early Ayn Rand. I’d even go so far as to say that all of Atlas, with its highly stylized characters and its frequent use of mythic patterns and imagery, is best read as a long and highly detailed work of mythology.

Writers use myth to communicate ideas that transcend the limitations of the language in which they write. Many Randians undoubtedly object to the idea that language changes or limits people’s thinking, but Rand clearly understood that it does. Like Equality 7-2521, people struggle to communicate ideas for which there are no words, or for which what words exist are insufficient. Rand was faced with the problem of telling stories about the glory of the individual in a language which gave words like “self” and “ego” and “desire” very negative connotations. Before she could use use those words in a direct way in a philosophical or political essay, she first had to convince her readers of the goodness of the concepts behind them, and she did so by dramatizing them in the form of Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart.

What Rand would probably not accept is the possibility that there might be ideas that transcend any possible words in any language. The idea of the ineffability of the divine—that the Tao that can be seen or named cannot be the true Tao—is generally associated with premodern or postmodern thinking and would have been soundly rejected by Rand as irrational mysticism. Yet, in my view, one can arrive at a much deeper understanding of Rand by recognizing that her ideas, like the question of John Galt, do have something of a transcendent quality to them, and are larger than any one story or ideology can express. Rand’s association of collectivism and altruism with socialism and liberalism, and her resultant embrace of conservative politics and her rejection of taxes and government regulation were the conclusion of her personal experience of collectivism, beginning with her life in Soviet Russia, but they can hardly be said to be the only way in which a person can possibly experience or conceptualize collectivism.

Something very like the Randian sense of anomie is, in fact, is a defining element of many liberal writings. One notable example is the fact that Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, much like Rand’s ideas, begins with the sense that people are alienated from their essential nature as humans when they are required by the ruling social paradigm to work for the enrichment of others rather than for their own values and desires. Of course, Rand and Marx radically diverge from there, with Rand identifying the parasites who benefit from this work as altruistic activists wielding the power of government, and Marx identifying them as idle capitalists wielding the power of stolen wealth; and their corresponding political ideologies diverge accordingly. But I do believe a case can be made that, when you strip away the particulars of their politics and the contexts in which their ideas develop, the same fundamental transcendent idea—the same moving spirit—can be found in Randian and Marxist thought, and in other liberal ideologies as well.

There is therefore, I think, something fundamentally paradoxical about Rand, and about the Libertarians and Tea Partiers who find their inspiration in her. Her sense of life—the desire to escape dehumanizing and alienating norms and live a liberated existence—has an essentially liberal quality to it, but the political ideology she develops to promote that desire aligns with that of conservatism, which regards social norms as necessary and inevitable and the desire to escape them as dangerously adolescent and at odds with reality. The ideology of John Galt, which would smash those alienating structures and build a new world in the mountains of Colorado, is paradoxically quoted by conservatives in defense of the status quo. This explains, I think, why many more liberal individuals are initially drawn to the unbroken spirit of Howard Roark, but are driven away from him when they see his name used by conservatives to defend the Peter Keatings and Jim Taggarts of the real world.

Where Rand fails as a thinker is in her belief that there can be that moment when John Galt’s voice suddenly comes on the radio, immediately driving away all the existential confusion anyone has ever felt and revealing the whole of the truth in one speech. The idea that, in understanding Soviet communism, a person can have understood the whole of what collectivism means is a fallacy. Collectivism, I argue, is a transcendent concept, and no one person—not John Galt, not Ayn Rand—can ever experience or understand the whole of it. It is there in the petty bureaucrats of Atlas Shrugged and was there in the Politburo of the Soviet Union, and likely was there in some of the liberal politicians of the mid-20th century. But that cannot be taken to mean that it is always present in every politician of every time, or that it is always absent from every corporate boardroom or every private fortune. Collectivism, even in Rand’s own conception of it, has many faces and takes many forms, for its very nature is to be without definite face or form—and in standing against it in all its forms, how can the human spirit fail to be equally diverse in its expressions?

Theologians, in trying to conceptualize the ineffable nature of God, sometimes speak in terms of “negative theology,” or the idea that because God transcends all human concepts, one cannot speak of what God “is,” but only that God is not. If one views collectivism as a similarly transcendent idea, then perhaps it can be understood by similar means. One might not be able to say that collectivism “is” socialism, or collectivism “is” income taxes. But one can say what collectivism is not. Collectivism is not Howard Roark. Collectivism is not the creative utopia of Galt’s Gulch. Collectivism is not the Unspeakable Word which affirms the value of the thoughts of one man alone. Collectivism is not Kira’s Viking, denying King and Priest alike and conquering the unconquerable in the name of a life which is a reason unto itself. It is denied in a thousand stories long before Rand and long after, and in a million tiny ways by the living individuals who read them. It is denied by the woman who flees the patriarchy of the Church into the forest, where she learns the nature-worshipping ways of her ancestors. It is denied by the Wal-Mart worker who joins a union organizing drive to force her employer to recognize her dignity as an individual. It is denied by the poor man who, having been told all his life that his race is biologically predisposed to underachievement, at last casts a vote for a person who looks like him for President of his country. And those who fail to recognize all of these tiny acts of resistance for what they are do a disservice to the spirit of Howard Roark that they embody.