Paul Ryan’s nasty ideal of self-reliance.

Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republic’s most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy.

MAL TIEMPO, BUENA CARA. Those words were attributed, in a wrenching story in The New York Times last winter, to Isabella Rivera, who is 86 years old and lives in Washington Heights. She exists on $688 a month in Social Security and $148 in Supplemental Security Income. When her apartment was destroyed in a fire, she had to continue paying her share of the maintenance fee during the long period of its repair, $153 a month, and another $150 a month for a room that some friends, also indigent, offered her in their home for the duration of her exile. Before the fire, Mrs. Rivera was attacked by a man with a knife. (“He twisted the knife inside my neck.”) After the fire, her son died of cancer. Another of her sons had died of a heart attack decades ago. And what Mrs. Rivera took away from her catastrophes was a kindly stoicism: mal tiempo, buena cara. In hard times, show a good face.

But perhaps it is inaccurate to say that her response to her tribulations, her gentle perdurability, was what Mrs. Rivera took away from them. Perhaps her particular inner preparedness, her precise manner of resilience, was what she brought to them. The notion of suffering as transfiguration is religious propaganda. People generally suffer, and respond to suffering, as themselves, as who they are. It is rare that they are transformed by devastation and loss. They are instead intensified by it, italicized by it: they become more like themselves, because their prior resources, their psychology and (for those who have one) their philosophy, are what they have when misfortune strikes, and all that they have to see them through. The remarkable fact about survival is the continuity of the self that is revealed in adversity, not the discontinuity: indeed, the preservation of the self is one of the measures of survival.

There are diverse methods for “coping,” and diverse interpretations that may be made of crisis and sorrow. In the aftermath of suffering, one’s understanding of the world may seem to have been altered or usurped by it, but that is a romantic mistake: most believers are not robbed of their belief, I mean their religious belief, by pain, even if some thinkers insist that their pain should count as a metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) argument against it, and very few doubters have found God in the absence of pain, or in pleasure. This is as it should be: conviction is not the mere child of circumstance. One’s own experience is not all one needs to know for formulating a view of the world. Those who did not share our experience certainly cannot adopt it as a validation of our view. Even survivors can be solipsists. There are many ways to meet, and to think about, misfortune.

According to the canonical version of his life, the death of his father when Paul Ryan was 16 taught him to despise “dependency” and to extol “self-reliance.” “It was just a big punch in the gut,” he told Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. “I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life.” He added that “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” One of the writers he got his hands on was Ayn Rand, and he fell under her foul spell. Her novels are certainly fit for adolescents; and ideology may be regarded as the intellectual equivalent of arrested adolescence. Atlas Shrugged might have been a sin of youth, like Siddhartha and Thus Spake Zarathustra, except that Ryan never repented the sin. He learned from Rand that the road to morality led through economics. (Earlier Marx had performed the same erroneous service for other young Americans, but for an antithetical end.) “The meaning” was to be found in capitalism. The market was an allegory for life. “The moral symbol of respect for human beings is the trader,” as John Galt instructs. Self-reliance, which Ryan falsely construed as the trader’s most essential characteristic, became Ryan’s supreme ideal. In one of the strident moralistic passages, called “Erosion of American Character,” in A Roadmap for America’s Future: Version 2.0, the budget plan that Ryan issued in 2010, and that established his prominence, he assails the “safety net” (the sardonic quotation marks are his) this way: “Dependency drains individual character, which in turn weakens American society. The process suffocates individual initiative and transforms self-reliance into a vice and government dependency into a virtue.”