Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (58 page)

But the Objectivists emphasize again that the primary issue is not the interpersonal character of the lie. Since
honesty
constitutes a
relationship
between the mind and reality, it is
self
-deception that is at root, the most distortive of an individual’s efficacy and communicative competence. Self-deception, however, is not necessarily the result of a
conscious
process of
evasion
. In fact, it is most often the result of a habitual, subconscious process of
repression
, which “forbids certain ideas, memories, identifications and evaluations to enter conscious awareness.” Branden ([1969] 1979) states further: “Repression is an
automatized avoidance reaction
, whereby a man’s focal awareness is involuntarily pulled away from any ‘forbidden’ material emerging from less conscious levels of his mind or from his subconscious” (78–79).

The repressed individual may show emotional constraint or whimsical self-indulgence, but in reality, these extremes “are merely two sides of the same coin.” Disconnected from the reality of his or her inner experience, the repressed individual ultimately undercuts “the clarity and efficiency of his [or her] thinking” (87, 93). Such individuals can restore themselves to “biologically appropriate functioning” through a therapeutic process of derepression,
³⁵
the Objectivist equivalent of a “
depth hermeneutics
.” Mental health is constituted by an “
unobstructed capacity for reality-bound cognitive functioning.
” The individual consciousness is healthy to the extent that it is “unobstructed” and “integrated,” unencumbered by fear, guilt, depression, pathological anxiety, neurosis, or pain (N. Branden [1969] 1979, 99–100).

Branden’s therapeutic methods are not the subject of the current study, but they center on a “sentence-completion” technique of “directed association.” Though Branden relies on a host of complementary methods, he seeks to engage the patient in a process that draws “upon implicit meanings for explicit statements.” Patients are given sentence stems that they complete spontaneously. Stem-completions enable individuals to meditate on their conclusions, not to rationalize them, but to “allow subconscious understandings to find their way into articulate speech.” By disclosing “unrecognized attitudes and patterns,” the sustained technique of directed association engenders a process of self-healing and self-clarification that aims for integration on both a conscious and subconscious level.
³⁶

This emphasis on communicative truthfulness, self-awareness, and “de-repression” is as crucial to the Randian project as it is to Habermasian discourse theory. Rand grasped that many of the distortions in communicative interaction can be traced to a systematic attack on the integrity of
concepts
and
language
launched by intellectuals who consciously or tacitly serve the modern predatory
state
. Rand argued that such intellectuals have confounded social discourse by “the destruction of language—and,
therefore, of thought and, therefore, of communication—by means of
anti-concepts
.”
³⁷

The “anti-concept” is but one symptom of a modern social formation that is steeped in negation. Rand describes the culture as “anti-reason,” “anti-mind,” “anti-man,” and “anti-life.” Its art is “anti-art,” its ideology is “anti-ideology.” Its “mixed” economy constitutes an “anti-system.” Its hegemony is bolstered by a proliferation of “anti-conceptual” social practices and institutions. Rand’s study of such negation is a crucial component of her radical critique.
³⁸

Rand defines an “anti-concept” as “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.” Just as, in contemporary literature, the antihero is a creation designed to eradicate heroes, and the antinovel is intended to destroy the novel form, so “anti-concepts” are formulated to annihilate real concepts. While rational concept formation renders explicit the meaning of an existential referent, “the use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of
approximate
understanding.”
³⁹
An anti-concept sounds like a real concept, but it is formed illegitimately. It is constructed not through a process of abstraction and integration, but through a process of “
package-dealing
,” in which “disparate, incongruous, [and] contradictory elements [are] taken out of any logical conceptual order or context,” and united by a nonessential characteristic. The use of anti-concepts undermines the speaker’s and the listener’s conceptual clarity and precision, making social discourse unintelligible.
⁴⁰
The anti-concept comes to have any number of contradictory meanings, depending on who uses it. Frequently, it serves as a euphemistic device, sanitizing an offensive condition or action. Or it may serve as an “anti-euphemism” to denigrate a “great and noble” fact.
⁴¹
The purpose of such linguistic obfuscation is ideological rationalization.

Rand does not suggest that anti-concepts are deliberately designed by a
power
elite and foisted on an unsuspecting populace. Indeed, the use and acceptance of anti-concepts is often tacit. For Rand, what is supremely significant is the tendency for anti-concepts to proliferate in a statist culture of unreason, distorting or obscuring the real nature of power relationships.

Rand analyzed several instances of the use of anti-concepts in contemporary discourse. In the 1960s and early 1970s, in the midst of the
Vietnam war
and growing political corruption, there was much focus on the “credibility gap” in U.S. politics. In the face of protests and civil unrest, a premium was placed on the value of social unity. Establishment policymakers criticized intellectual “
polarization
” as detrimental to the formation of a social consensus. They bandied about disingenuous assertions that individuals had a “
duty
” to serve the “common good.” Such terms had an
“elastic, undefinable, mystical character” that obscured the reality of a foreign policy that drafted young men to die in a war in which no compelling national interest was at stake.
⁴²
The paean to the “public interest” was a cover-up for political conditions that favored the interests of some groups to the detriment of others.
⁴³

“Duty” was, in Rand’s view, “one of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy.”
⁴⁴
In its religious, psychological, and political usages, it destroyed legitimate concepts of morality. Indeed, the concept was a pure “product of mysticism,” since it projected categorical imperatives without regard to context. It sanctioned obedience to authority and severed the connection between values and choice, thus crippling the individual’s ability for self-directed moral action.

Rand also criticized the Establishment for using the term “polarization” derisively in hopes of quelling public debate on important issues of policy and deflecting or preventing any discussion or definition of fundamental principles. Whether they attacked the
Goldwater
Right or the New Left, they characterized the political pursuit of unequivocal principles as inflexible and impractical. They sought to bar such “extremism” from public life. Rand argued that in conforming to an artificial social consensus, each public speaker or writer

struggles to hide his meaning (if any) under coils of meaningless generalities and safely popular bromides. Regardless of whether his message is good or bad, true or false, he cannot state it openly, but must
smuggle
it into his audience’s subconscious by means of the same unfocused, deceptive, evasive verbiage. He must strive to be
misunderstood
in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people: this is the only way to keep up the pretense of unity.
⁴⁵

The dominant trend in the culture of consensus is anti-
ideology
.
⁴⁶
Whereas a genuine political ideology projects a program of long-term action guided by fundamental principles, anti-ideology shrinks “men’s minds to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory.” The anti-ideologists, the pseudo-intellectuals and lobbyists, claim to have no attachment to “inflexible” principles, but they nonetheless rely on spurious principles of their own. They disarm their opposition by switching the terms of the debate whenever it is expedient. In this manner, they distort public discourse to suit the strategic purposes of the pressure groups in whose interests they serve.
⁴⁷

If people do not explicitly define the nature of the debate, or the nature of their goals, Rand asked, how can genuine social unity ever be achieved?
Since efficacious action is not possible in the absence of principles, how can public debate encourage rational negotiation and compromise when “the intentions of the various men or groups involved are not revealed?” How can anyone ascertain the desirability of any political deal without reference to the explicit principles at work?

Under such conditions of public discourse, “men begin to regard social relationships not as a matter of dealing with one another, but of putting something over on one another.” By assaulting “the precision—of public communication (and its precondition: the freedom of public information),” the system necessarily breeds an atmosphere of mistrust and bitterness. Fostering an illusory intellectual unity, the system engenders the growth “of divisiveness or
existential
polarization
” through the mass proliferation of conflicting pressure groups. Each group unites not by loyalty to an idea, but on the basis of race, age, sex, religious creed, or common hatred of another group. The unity within each group is motivated “not by choice, but by terror.”
⁴⁸
And just as the Establishment uses anti-concepts to legitimate its own foreign and domestic initiatives, so each group uses anti-concepts in its quest for political power. For Rand, “any ideological product of the mixed economy … is a vague, indefinable, approximation and, therefore an instrument of pressure group warfare.”
⁴⁹
Rand asked: “What sort of unity can one establish between victims and executioners?”
⁵⁰

In abandoning the necessity of clearly defined principles, people are unable to plan for the long term or engage in comprehensible social discourse. The absence of principles obscures any understanding of “the context, causes, consequences or solutions” of any given social problem. The “brute physical force” of the state becomes the “ultimate arbiter of disputes.”
⁵¹

Like
Habermas
, Rand envisioned a genuine, truthful, public discourse. She favored real intellectual “polarization” in which dialogical participants enter into constructive debate, bringing to the “cultural atmosphere an all-but-forgotten quality:
honesty
with its corollary, clarity.” The unintelligible would be transcended as rational people grasped “their own stand and that of their adversaries.” Out of this dialogue would emerge a genuine social unity, a unity that would be “a consequence, not a primary,” one based on the triumph of “fundamental principles, rationally validated, clearly understood and voluntarily accepted” (4).

But unlike Habermas, Rand defended capitalism, “the unknown ideal,” as the only social system capable of establishing the necessary conditions for free human discourse.
⁵²
Unlike any other radical theorist of her generation, Rand linked a multilevel, dialectical analysis to a libertarian politics.

THE ANTIRATIONAL CULTURE

Rand recognized that radical
social
change could not emerge solely on the basis of an honest public dialogue. In Rand’s view, such honesty is anathema to
statist
society
. The existing
culture
and the political system were, she thought, profoundly “antirational.”
⁵³
As she saw it, the system itself expressed and perpetuated a fundamental
irrationality
that punished virtue and rewarded vice. To this end, culture and politics were “two mutually reinforcing manifestations of the same philosophy.”
⁵⁴

Before examining the dimensions of cultural irrationality that Rand condemned, it is important to grasp what she meant by “culture.” Rand interpreted the social sphere in a manner that reflected her own view of the individual sphere. Every society, like every individual, acts on the basis of a certain articulated or tacit philosophic view of the world. Our survival as
human
beings, the integrated direction of our lives, and the efficacy of our chosen courses of action ultimately depend on the principles we accept, either consciously or tacitly. Likewise, a society’s economic, political, and cultural trends are ultimately set by its implicit, dominant philosophical premises. (Whether Rand’s theory of history borders on a kind of philosophical determinism is a contention I explore later.)

What must be emphasized at this juncture is Rand’s view of society as an
organic
totality. Rand refused to see the social whole as a hodgepodge of unrelated tendencies. These tendencies form a
system
, for better or for worse. The system shapes each of its constituent parts. And the parts both generate and reflect the system they jointly constitute.

Rand proposed an equivalence between social and individual structures. She sees a basic correspondence on three tiers (Diagram 2).

The vertical links between these three tiers are not what interests us here. For Rand, the factors within the vertical
relationship
of each sphere can both mutually support and undermine one another. Moreover, she sees a one-to-one horizontal correspondence between the respective social and individual spheres.

Vertically, in the social sphere, a nation’s politico-economic trends and policies (Tier 3) cannot be abstracted from its cultural forms and practices (Tier 2), or from the
sense of life
of its people as expressed in their predominating social practices and attitudes, loosely defined as their “
lifestyle
” (Tier l).
⁵⁵
Culture (Tier 2) is explicitly manifested in the works of intellectuals and artists in such areas as letters, manners, painting, sculpture, music, and science (Peikoff 1991b, 129). Taken collectively, such cultural forms express the dominant ideas, values, and attitudes of a given age.