Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (69 page)

Finally, Rand linked each of these levels with the others in an organic unity such that “
intellectual
freedom cannot exist without
political
freedom; political freedom cannot exist without
economic
freedom;
a free mind and a free market are corollaries
” (
New Intellectual
, 25).

Thus, self-responsible, free-thinking individuals would rise from all social groups and “initiate a process, not of chaining one another, but of trading de-control for de-control.”
⁴⁰
Statism, with its intrusive regulatory, warfare, and welfare machinery, would be replaced by the rule of
objective
law
. The deregulation of economic and social life could not be accomplished overnight (Rand [1964] 1993cT). Nor could it be realized within the current constitutional context. Rand envisioned a legal system in which the government is severely limited to the protection of individual rights through the
police, an all-volunteer army, and the courts. The state’s power of eminent domain and its authority to regulate interstate commerce would be eliminated. All
property
—the roads, the airwaves, the forests, the oceans, even outer space—would be homesteaded and privatized.
⁴¹
As the state is separated from the banking industry, and as a strict gold standard is introduced, the boom-bust cycle would come to an end. Structural and economic dislocation would be a thing of the past. Peace and prosperity would ensue. The welfare bureaucracy would be dismantled gradually, and state intervention would end in religious, educational, scientific, and aesthetic affairs.

As a final reform, in the very distant future, Rand advocated the abolition of
taxation
. With minimal government services, payment for their provision would be voluntary. Citizens in a fully free
society
“would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.” Rand suggested several possible alternatives, including a government lottery, and the payment of fees to the government as a means of enforcing contractual agreements. Such voluntary financing would be progressively “proportionate to the scale of an individual’s economic activity,” with “those on the lowest economic levels … virtually exempt.”
⁴²

GOD-BUILDER?

In her introduction to
The Romantic Manifesto
, Rand wondered if she would live to see an aesthetic renaissance in her time. She added: “What I do know is this: anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today” (
Romantic Manifesto
, viii). Rand’s statement has significance for her
philosophic
project as well.

Those who fight for the future must understand and integrate its guiding precepts into their everyday lives with full knowledge of the implications of their beliefs and the consequences of their actions. Those who fight for a future society in which fully integrated people interact with one another freely, must aim for that
integration
in their own lives
now.
The leaders of the renaissance will be the
New Intellectuals
, people who “discard the basic premise … [of] the soul-body dichotomy.” The New Intellectual “will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind
versus
heart, thought
versus
action, reality
versus
desire, the practical
versus
the moral. He will be an
integrated man
, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal” (
New Intellectual
, 51).

The
New Intellectuals
conquer
dualism
and reunite the prodigal sons of
capitalism
: the intellectual and the businessman. In the realm of the
intellect, they will be practical thinkers. In the material realm, they will be philosophical business leaders. Whatever their areas of specialization, New Intellectuals will be
radical
“in the literal and reputable sense of the word”; they will grasp the fundamental philosophic roots of the current crisis as a means to its transcendence. Rand declared: “Let those who do care about the future … realize that the new
radicals
are the fighters for capitalism” (51–54).
⁴³

Rand’s concept of the New Intellectual is the historical counterpart of her fictional
ideal man
. It must be remembered that Rand’s major literary goal was the projection of this
human
ideal. John Galt in
Atlas Shrugged
was perfection incarnate, because he was simultaneously “a philosopher and inventor … a thinker and a man of action.” Rand described him as “the
perfect
man, the perfectly integrated being.”
⁴⁴
It was toward this aesthetic end that Rand defined the social conditions within which ideal people would live and flourish. Her concept of the free society is a convergence of psychology, ethics, and politics.
⁴⁵
Aesthetic ideal is wedded to psychological independence, ethical egoism, and political libertarianism. Ultimately, as
Alvin Toffler
(in Rand 1964b) observes, Rand offered “radical proposals for changing not merely the shape of society, but the very way in which most men work, think and love” (16).

Since Rand used the novel form as a vehicle for the presentation of her ideal, many critics have assumed that Objectivist society would require everyone to attain the heights of a John Galt or a Howard Roark.
Barry
(1986) asserts that Rand’s

Aristotelian version of liberalism depends almost entirely on a level of human excellence that it may well be impossible for men as we know them to achieve.… There is no reason why capitalistic institutions—private property, money, and the market—may not themselves be regarded as permanent threats to the full flowering of the human personality, just as Rand regards socialist ones to be. (15–16)

Indeed, the Russian Marxists saw
communism
, not capitalism, as providing the necessary social context for the full actualization of the human potential.
Trotsky
([1924] 1960) maintained that under communism, human beings would transcend all forms of dualism. They would be fully efficacious, self-worthy, self-respecting, autonomous, and cultured:

Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest.… He will try to master first the semi-conscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism.… Man will make it his purpose to
master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of
consciousness
, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.… Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become especially dynamic. The average
human
type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise. (254–56)

In this passage, Trotsky, the supreme Russian Marxist, internalizes Nietzschean imagery in his characterization of the new communist “superman.” But the similarity to the Randian project is startling. The new communist man, like the New Intellectual, triumphs over dualism. Thus for Trotsky, “man” will “master … the semi-conscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism.” He will “master his own feelings.” For Rand, this mastery entails the rational articulation of the cognitive roots of emotion and the tacit dimensions of the subconscious mind, including “sense of life” and “psycho-epistemology.” Also, for Trotsky, “man” will “raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness.” From her earliest philosophical reflections, Rand too, refused to accept the view that human “instincts”—and she uses this word—are beyond rational control.
⁴⁶
Ultimately, she saw emotions, feelings, and “instincts” as components of the conceptual faculty. Like Trotsky, Rand projected the extension of reason into the “hidden recesses” of the mind as a means toward a fully integrated consciousness. And while Rand abandoned the Nietzschean notion of the “superman,” her own concept of the ideal man poses as an equivalent Objectivist formulation. Also, for Trotsky, “man will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical.” Can there be any doubt that Rand’s ideal man possesses such harmony and grace? In her descriptions of Howard Roark and John Galt, Rand projected an image that combines consummate will with physical strength, passionate sensuality with the ease of movement.
⁴⁷

The major difference between Rand’s and Trotsky’s vision is that she does not assume that all people “will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.” Rand respected the creators as unique and uncommon. She emphatically denied the “Marxist” and “utopian” proposition that everyone in the ideal
society
would have to be supremely rational and moral. The formation of rational character is not guaranteed by an
Objectivist
social order (Rand [1964] 1993bT). Rand respected the infinite variety of
humanity
, and expected fully that her society would benefit the average and the superior, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Yet this qualification
does not in any way, shape, or form pertain to the fictional utopia of Galt’s Gulch, where the rule of mediocrity is transcended, and each individual is of great talent and excellence.

None of these parallels is meant to imply that Rand simply transferred Nietzschean, Marxian, or Trotskyian concepts to her own
philosophic
context. But it must be remembered that Trotsky himself was influenced by the Nietzschean themes of the
Silver Age
. The Nietzschean Marxists, the so-called
God
-builders, deified human strength and potentialities. They argued that under
socialism
, each individual would be the master of his or her destiny. Rand was exposed to these very themes from a fairly young age. Her literary and philosophic representations of the ideal man—or the New Intellectual—were comparable in tone. Such an integrated conception of human being was central to the Randian project because it signified the triumph over dualism. The “God-builders” sought a similar dialectical
unity
, even if they embraced a political ideal that ultimately undermined their goals.

THE COMMUNITARIAN IMPULSE

In Rand’s view, however, the political ideal of the Russian synthesis was to be rejected in both its mystic and statist incarnations. The Nietzschean Symbolists and the Idealists of the Russian religious renaissance sought to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal through a conflict-free mystical union. Rand’s teacher, Lossky, summarized the essence of this mystical conception in the Russian concept of
sobornost
’. It is worthwhile to look at this ideal once again:

The world of harmony is a perfect creation of God.… Plurality in this Kingdom is conditioned only by the ideal distinctions between its members, i.e. by individualizing opposition without any conflicting opposition and consequently without hostility of one being to another. There is no selfish isolation there, no mutual exclusion. Each part of this Kingdom exists for the whole, and the whole exists for each part. Moreover, owing to a complete interpenetration of all by all, the distinction between part and whole disappears: every part is a whole. The principles of organic structure are realized in the completest way possible. It is a wholly perfect
organism
. (Lossky [1917] 1928, 81)

Russian religious thinkers of that time viewed this organic whole as One with the mystic body of Christ, a freedom-in-unity and a unity-in-freedom.
The Russian
Marxists
rejected this
mysticism
and secularized the concept of
sobornost
’. In the words of
Bogdanov
, the individual “man was organically fused with the whole, with the group or commune, as cells are fused together in living tissue.” In such a social order, the state would wither away and “coerceive norms which regulate the conflict of those ends will become superfluous” (Kline 1969, 179).

In essence, Rand rejected such
sobornost
’ as a vestige of mystical, organic collectivism and statism. But several critics have charged that Rand’s wish to remake the social totality amounted to another form of
totalitarianism
.
Kingsley Widmer
(1981) sees Randian individualism as “patently narrow in its puritanical and rationalistic constructivism” (13), while Norman
Barry
believes that Rand’s emphasis on objective
morality
is a pretext for the authoritarian inculcation of virtue. On this basis, Barry fears that Rand’s social
philosophy
will gradually disintegrate “into a certain kind of statism.”
⁴⁸
And though
Milton Friedman
credits Rand for developing a popular libertarian following, he too believes that Rand’s “utopian” moral streak is “productive of intolerance.”
⁴⁹

As I have suggested, there is evidence that such intolerance was endemic to the organized Objectivist movement. In a bizarre twist, many “students of
Objectivism
” deified their charismatic leader and embraced a messianic cultism not much different from that exhibited by the extremist Russian cultural and political movements of Rand’s youth. Moreover, Rand and many of her followers allegedly engaged in destructive moralizing and
psychologizing
. Some observers have remarked that it was a great irony that a so-called individualist philosophy had driven many of its followers into despair and emotional repression.
⁵⁰
At least one book has been written about the tyranny of an “Objectivist” psychotherapist who attempted to assist one of his patients in her struggle for greater autonomy—only to intimidate and sexually abuse the woman in the process (Plasil 1985). This is especially significant even if the psychotherapist himself was not actually a genuine Objectivist. Since the uprooting of “bad” premises requires a psychotherapeutic process in Rand’s approach, it is easy to imagine how an emphasis on philosophical reeducation, emotional articulation, and derepression could dissolve into an authoritarian nightmare.
Ellis
argues that under such circumstances, Objectivist ideological “training” would be insufficient. Ellis (1968, 16) believes that the unobstructed consciousness of the New Intellectual is an illusory notion requiring the “biological reconstruction” of the human species.