Why Everyone Hates Ayn Rand

Perhaps in the history of mankind, there has never been so enjoyable a teaching as Objectivism from so unlikeable a teacher as Ayn Rand. Jesus Christ was so magnetic that He spent His days ruining dinner parties and insulting His followers – and despite this, He was so fun that even the children loved Him. Joseph Smith was so popular with women that he felt forced to reintroduce polygamy to the Americas. Mohammed was so interesting that he was illiterate and still ended up with one of the most propagated books in all of human history. Ayn Rand's insults stung more than her teachings soothed. The men who should have naturally been her allies ended up becoming her enemies. William F. Buckley wrote in her eulogy not only of her infamous romantic split with fellow Objectivist Nathaniel Branden, but of her "incompatibility" with libertarians such as Henry Hazlitt and the almost incomparable genius known as Ludwig von Mises. Her first words to Buckley were that he was too intelligent to believe in God – which the conservative commentator Wilfrid Sheed sardonically referred to as certainly an ice-breaker. She was known for throwing fits when she couldn't get her way. She was (according to Slate Magazine) addicted to speed and uninterested in even keeping the pretenses of marital fidelity. The producer of The Godfather fell in love with Atlas Shrugged and wanted to film it, but she was so difficult that she forced him to drop it. In short, she was a woman who preached happiness and was almost incapable of showing it, and to those who knew her personally, she was incapable of sharing it. We can adore her because she had hated (and in some instances suffered) the worst things out of communist Russia. What's difficult to excuse is her not enjoying and loving the best men in America.

It seems almost natural that someone who titled her masterpiece The Virtue of Selfishness should herself be selfish to the point of being sociopathic. But the truth of the matter is that, as the balanced and sensible Epicureans were told they were interested in pleasure only because they said we ought to live pleasurably, the balanced and sensible Objectivist is interested not only in himself. In fact, it may safely be said (by Rand and anyone else with a brain) that in order to be interested in your happiness, you have to be interested in the happiness of others. Objectivism isn't a philosophy of loners and sociopaths. It's a reactionary backlash against the idea that you should live only for others – and even more important than this, a backlash against the idea that others will choose whom we are going to live for. In fairness to Rand, the idea that you ought to live for yourself is something that everyone already does and most are too fearful to admit. The reasons why we refuse to admit it are simple. First, it makes people wonder what exactly we are about to do. Second, at the bottom of our hearts lies the haunting understanding that when other people are living freely for their own happiness, we are going to be carefully evaluated. So everyone begins to wonder if what he's offering is really worth others' investment and whether others are sticking with him because they want to or because they ought to. It's the difference in many cases between having a wife and having a girlfriend. One relationship is ruled by duty; the other is ruled by pleasure. Objectivism challenges an entire series of duties and leaves everyone wondering whether we're pleasurable. Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself. Rand says if you love yourself, make your neighbor love you. In many respects, Rand's hatred of duty was deplorable, and a decline in a nation's sense of duty may be safely correlated with a decline in a nation's safety. But it is worth asking if the alternative is worse. An Objectivist is never essentially opposed to giving your life for your country. He is only asking whether your country is worth giving your life for, and he has the nasty tendency to ask the question about every other relationship as well. Rand never said that you had to lack a life-defying meaning. She merely said you had to mean it. Perhaps most unfairly on our part, Americans are quick to judge Rand for the one thing she was most likely to suffer – and that is her (ironically) being a product of Soviet Russia. Orlando Figes writes in his historical masterpiece A People's Tragedy that centuries of censorship had had an illiberal effect upon the Russians and that, like the sheltered Russian intelligentsia who'd discovered Hegelianism in the 1840s and Darwinism in the '60s and Marxism in the '90s and took them too seriously, a person who has never heard anything but an "official" philosophy is likely to take his next one religiously. And while we might wish she'd found her religion in something as temporizing as Buckley's or Chesterton's or Acton's liberal Catholicism, she found it instead in an unbalanced worship of capitalism. We often excuse foreigners for some of the backward things they do after coming from backward countries. Rand's unyielding dogmatism is a product of her intellectual starvation, and while we may laugh at her for saying Aristotle was the only good philosopher, we never considered that she might have thought so because in youth she was never introduced to Burke or Macaulay. Ayn Rand, of course, failed so miserably at being happy that she made it difficult to take her philosophy seriously. But she had purpose, and pleasure is very different from purpose. We might also say it is inferior to purpose. We might even say that if you want to have a really good time, you have got to have a gospel. And when we look at Rand's life and we see her falling in love with freedom while the free world was openly flirting with tyranny, and asserting the truth when so many Americans were toying with relativism, and holding so passionately to the things that a lazy and willfully ignorant society was taking for granted, we begin to see something more than just a frumpy, bigoted, implacable Jewish girl running from communist Russia. We see the dawn of classical liberalism happening in someone's soul, right as she was entering a civilization where classical liberalism was dying. As such, we appreciate her anger. We only wish that in her love of classical liberalism she had remembered her liberality, and that in her love of the abstract concept of capitalism she had remembered to love her fellow capitalists. Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the troublesome philosophical website known as Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.