Invasion of the Ayn Rand zombies

Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2011 9:16 pm

John Seven

Everything I needed to know about politics I learned from old Captain America comics. This has helped a lot in regard to the Tea Party. Captain America would always have to fight some inconsequential villain like the evil French acrobat The Tumbler. He would then discover The Tumbler was just a front guy for the giant-headed villain Modok.

In turn, Modok would be revealed as the tool of the German bad guy with no eyeholes in his mask, Baron Zemo. Behind Zemo, always, stood the mastermind of the plot, The Red Skull, the last surviving member of the Third Reich. His ideas were never his own, though. They could always be traced back to that ultimate evil-doer, Hitler.

In real life, the final evil standing behind all the stooges is paranoid crank Ayn Rand, spiritual guide of the Tea Party. For those unfamiliar with Rand, she is the creator of objectivism, which she espoused through a series of soap opera novels like "The Fountainhead."

The gist of objectivism -- once you wade through a bunch of mumbo jumbo -- is that mankind consists of heroic beings whose moral purpose is the pursuit of happiness, which is contingent on "rational self-interest" and a focus on individual rights over anything and anyone else.

When I was a kid, they called people who thought this way "selfish." It doesn’t help my perception that Randians typically do not see altruism as a good thing.

Rand’s theories have a direct relationship with something that no longer exists, a world so antiquated that when the individual takes action in the modern era, they just seem misplaced and frankly bizarre. Rand’s work is a reaction -- and an unhinged personal one, at that -- against Soviet Russia and the madness of Stalinist communism.

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At some point, high-profile free-market conservatives like Paul Ryan embraced Rand’s ideas -- they could not find a better justification for out-and-out selfishness. Patient Zero in this philosophical virus seem to be Allan Greenspan, an old disciple of Rand -- he hung out with her in the old days -- who systematically destroyed our economy while winning enthusiastic raves by just about everyone in our government.

The Tea Party, and people like Ron Paul -- who named his son after her -- have taken it as a rallying call against so-called socialism. Somewhere in that current mix exists libertarianism -- more pure form of political Randism that Rand herself disavowed -- and Conservative Christianity.

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This is actually the funniest addition, Rand being a pretty outspoken pro-choice atheist who rejected Christianity and all organized religion. I wonder what Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the rest of the Evangelicals embracing these Randian principles via the Tea Party think about Rand’s assertion that Christianity turns a person into an "abject zombie."

"Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought," Rand said.

For some reason, though, it doesn’t seem to bother Tea Party elite, happy to twist whatever horrible philosophy into their political and social justifications. Because of this strange convergence of evils, we are now stricken with the plague of the Tea Party, which will not be happy until the American system is torn down in reaction against a evil that hasn’t existed for over two decades -- more, if you consider the evil to be Joseph Stalin and not Soviet Russia in general.

I’m unclear that everyday Tea Party types really understand what they want anymore than those embracing the likes of Ayn Rand as their patron saint. They don’t want socialism, but they do want services. The Randians endorse privatizing everything, but I don’t think the typical Tea Partier really understands what it means to have government services -- law enforcement, fire departments, road maintenance, etc. -- go private.

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If the aim of capitalism is to make a profit, and a common way to make a profit is to cut costs, what does that mean for our general safety and well-being? We’ve already dealt with private companies making decisions about our lives -- it’s called health insurance. Is that really the ideal situation?

According to Randian philosophy, no one cares whether it is or not. Not in regard to you, anyhow.

Selfishness as a political ideal has worked for some movements in the short term, but they peter out once the rank and file realize they are among the victims of it. I think many Tea Partiers like the movement because they see it as an effective, organized way to insult the Left -- it’s the latest conservative thing. They don’t know who in the world Ayn Rand was -- and if they did, they’d hate her.

But the old-school Ayn Rand supporters don’t seem to get it either. Like so many conservatives and libertarians, their high-brow objections do not include themselves. How else can the Ayn Rand Center For Individual Rights, an organization opposed to altruism, explain that they accept contributions and gifts?

This altruism towards evil hints at the Alice in Wonderland absurdity we have unleashed upon ourselves -- and it should remind us that there is another famous Tea Party beyond the Boston one, and it involved a Mad Hatter, who may yet prove to be the real final evil behind the line of goons.

John Seven is the North Adams Transcript’s arts and entertainment editor.