Ayn Rand’s Totalitarian Sense of Life

The Problem

The slaughters committed by twentieth-​century governments are unique.

In Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection (published in 1899; Book III, Chapters 12–15), the Marxist Novodvoroff “liked only those who bowed down before him.” The non-​Marxist political prisoners tell him that his doctrinal absolutism will lead to “the same type of despotism that produced the Inquisition and the crimes of the French Revolution.” 

The total number of political deaths during the French Revolution, including inmates who died in prison, was at most 40,000. The Spanish Inquisition operated everywhere in the Spanish Empire, from Chile to the Philippines. During its entire duration (1478–1834), it murdered between 3,000 and 5,000 people. 

Yet, Tolstoy, a keen student of history, regarded the Inquisition and crimes of the French Revolution as the most horrible atrocities ever committed, and he could not imagine anything worse in the future, not even by someone as evil as the Marxist Novodvoroff. Nearly all Tolstoy’s contemporaries probably shared his views on the past and future, with one exception.

Ayn Rand (1975: 43, 114) praised Dostoevsky’s “merciless dissection of the psychology of evil” and observed, “no one equaled him in the psychological depth of his images of human evil.” But she was unaware of the most spectacular example of Dostoevsky’s insight into evil: his depiction (Demons, published in 1871–2; Part II, Chapter 7, Section 2; and Chapter 8) of a Marxist cell deciding that to bring their ideal to fruition, they should murder a hundred million people, a prediction that proved to be uncannily accurate for the number of Marxists’ victims in the twentieth century.¹

What is the sense of life that caused these horrors? First, let us consider its opposite: the capitalist sense of life.

The Sense of Life of Capitalism (Catallaxy)² 

In the beginning of Julius Caesar’s history of his conquest of Gaul (roughly modern France and Belgium), he observed that of the peoples of Gaul, the Belgae were the most distant from the humanitas and cultus of the Roman Empire, and that they were the Gallic people to whom merchants come least often “bringing imports that soften character (ad effeminandos animos).” Mores refers to the character of individuals and societies. Humanitas and cultus distinguish civilized mores from barbarous mores. Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 50) pointed out the same process in pre-​Islamic Arabia: “The spirit of rapine and revenge was attempered [sic] by the milder spirit of trade and literature [i.e., literacy] … The merchant is the friend of mankind; and the annual caravans imported the first seeds of knowledge and politeness.” (In the eighteenth century, “politeness” had roughly the same meaning as the Latin cultus and humanitas.) Montesquieu (The Sprit of the Laws, Book XX) observed this general tendency: “Commerce cures destructive prejudices … wherever lifestyles [moeurs: cf., Latin mores] are gentle [douces], there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, lifestyles are gentle.”

The dean of social historians Fernand Braudel observed (1984: 30-31) that the commercial and financial centers of Europe—Venice in the sixteenth century, the Dutch republic in the seventeenth century, and Britain in the eighteenth century—were remarkable for their religious tolerance. He explained (1984: 185), “It is hard … to imagine the center of a world-​economy as anything but tolerant; it was compelled to be tolerant.” The eminent economic historian Carlo Cipolla (1994: 210) pointed out that “a telling symptom of the European ‘capitalist spirit’ … was the fact that [in the fifteenth century] Venetians manufactured mosque lamps for the Near Eastern market and decorated them with … pious koranic [sic] inscriptions.” Voltaire (Letter 6 of Letters Concerning the English Nation) wrote, “Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London … where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohametan [sic], and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d [sic] the same religion.”³

That is why Dr. Johnson observed, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.⁴ The wisdom of this observation is much more apparent now than when Johnson said it in 1775. How much suffering would have been avoided if Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung had devoted their lives to making money!

The Totalitarian Sense of Life

Ayn Rand’s novels and plays provide an excellent illustration of the totalitarian sense of life. 

At the beginning of Part II of We the Living, Rand explained why she admired the city of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). In her description, she merged “a man” (Peter the Great) into the abstract noun “man,” a word to which she attached reverential importance. She said, “If you would put a title over everything I have written, it would be, ‘To the Glory of Man’” (Branden 1999: 46).

Her praise of Petrograd and Peter the Great was absolute:

Yes, she really wrote that; Ayn Rand condemned Communism for being too compassionate! In fact, from the beginning of their rule, the Soviet Communists praised Peter the Great as “the first Bolshevik” (i.e., Communist) and regarded him as a model.⁵ 

Rand ended her foreword to the 1959 edition of We the Living by stating, “The specific events of Kira’s life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are.” In Part I, Chapter 3, Rand outlines Kira’s character: “The only hero she had known was a Viking … whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword.” What Vikings did with their swords is illustrated by an Icelandic saga, in which a Viking was surnamed “the children’s man” because he did not impale children on his lance, “as was the custom among his companions” (Bloch 1962: 19).

In the same chapter, Rand compares Kira with her contemptible, soft-​hearted sister Lydia. She describes their reactions to a “play depicting the sorrow of the serfs.” “Lydia sobbed over the plight of the humble, kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy [italics added] watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.”

Rand repeatedly used the whip to define her heroes. Just before this passage, she says that Kira “strode down the streets swinging a twig like a whip.” In Part I, Chapter 11, she describes Kira’s lover Leo as having “a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry.”⁶ 

In The Fountainhead (Part II, Chapter 1), Dominique Francon asks the superintendent of the quarry in which Howard Roark works if Roark has a prison record. “She hoped he had. She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did.”

In her introduction to the 1968 publication of her play The Night of January 16th, Rand said that it is a “sense-​of-​life play” and Bjorn Faulkner is its hero. In the beginning of the play, District Attorney Flint introduces Faulkner to the audience: “A great man unwilling to bend … young, tall, with an arrogant smile, with kingdoms and nations in the palm of one hand—and a whip in the other.” Later (still in Act I), Police Inspector Sweeney reads Faulkner’s suicide note: “I found only two enjoyable things on this earth … my whip over the world and Karen Andre.”

Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s only fictional defense of capitalism. In it, she has Ragnar Danneskjöld (Part II, Chapter 7), John Galt (Part III, Chapter 7), and Francisco d’Anconia (Part II, Chapter 2) mention the whip, correctly, as a symbol of the antithesis of capitalism. In the last two paragraphs of Francisco’s long speech on the nature of money (Part II, Chapter 2), he says, “the looters’ credo has brought you to regard … your magnificent factories as the product [of] … the labor of whip-​driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt … Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.”

These passages show that Rand knew intellectually that capitalism and brutality are antithetical. But the association of whips with heroes was so strong in her sense of life that she had Rearden say to Francisco (Part I, Chapter 6), “A battle? What battle? I hold the whip hand.” There can be no more vicious misrepresentation of business success than to describe it as a whip. (Nor has any battle ever been fought with whips.) Even in Francisco’s speech on the nature of money, he says, “The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.” Rotters are so subhuman that they have animal hides instead of human skin. In fact, Ragnar Danneskjöld calls them “subhuman creatures” (Part II, Chapter 7). Francisco tells Dagny (Part III, Chapter 2) that he could not bear to continue seeing her as “the means for the subhuman.” In Part III, Chapter 9, Dagny “grasped that the objects [i.e., people] she had thought to be human were not … [they were] subhuman.” But even “subhuman” is too generous a characterization: “Wesley Mouch and Directive 10-289 and sub-​animal creatures who crawl on their bellies” (Part III, Chapter 1).

Who are these sub-​animal creatures? In We the Living, Andrei Taganov is a militant Communist, who learns the tragic mistake he has made. But the villains in Atlas Shrugged support the private enterprise system. Sub-​animals are everyone who wants government intervention in privately-​owned businesses. Francisco tells Rearden that the definition of “whining rotters” is “any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man’s effort” (Part II, Chapter 3).⁷ 

This assertion betrays two of the many glaring inconsistencies in Rand’s thought. First, when John Galt explains Objectivism to the nation (Part III, Chapter 7), he says, “The vilest form of self-​abasement and self-​destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another.” However, if someone thinks independently and comes to a conclusion that differs from Rand’s conclusions to the slightest degree, by supporting a government program that takes a single penny of another man’s effort, he is a sub-​animal creature who deserves to be whipped. In fact, he deserves even worse.

All the men and women on the train that is blown up at the end of Part II, Chapter 7 deserved to die because they espoused ideas that differed from Rand’s. “There were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them … There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of these ideas.” In addition to the adult passengers, who were responsible for their deaths, Rand gratuitously added children:

At least Rand allowed the villains on the train and their children to die painlessly. Dr. Robert Stadler suffers a horribly agonizing death as his just punishment (Part III, Chapter 9). When the nefarious Project X (Thompson Harmonizer) explodes, it obliterates everything within a hundred-​mile radius; but incredibly, Stadler, at the center of the explosion, remains alive “for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain.”

So, Ayn Rand, like Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot felt that agonizing death is an appropriate punishment for incorrect ideas.

I will discuss one more death. Rand’s conclusion of the narrative of Atlas Shrugged proper (before the strikers return) illustrates her mastery of plot construction. It ends as it began, with Eddie Willers, who represents common, decent people, who need productive superstars to survive. Before that, we see representatives of all three types of archvillains—the bureaucrat who intervenes in private business (Mouch), the businessman who seeks government aid (Taggart), and the scientist who serves the state (Ferris)—exit the novel in terror when they realize that they need the help of creative, productive people, even to torture them. One of the most basic motifs of Atlas Shrugged, that evil on its own is powerless; it needs the sanction of the victim, has been illustrated so dramatically and concretely that even the villains can no longer evade it.

However, at the beginning of the final chapter, Rand inserts an incongruous, Mickey Spillanesque episode, which begins with Dagny encountering a guard who cannot decide whether to let her enter. “Calmly and impersonally, she [Dagny], who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.” According to Rand a person who cannot make a decision in a few seconds during a crisis deserves immediate execution.⁸ 

The second related inconsistency in Atlas Shrugged is that Rand constantly emphasizes the importance of teachers of correct moral conduct, such as Hugh Akston (i.e., Ayn Rand). Her educational philosophy is based on the most fundamental principle of Objectivist psychology: “Man’s character is a product of his premises” (Introduction to the 1968 edition of The Fountainhead). “At birth man’s mind is tabula rasa … Persons suffering from a neurosis—from anxiety, compulsions, masochism, homosexuality … need to learn that the cause lies in conscious or unconscious premises that those premises were acquired, not innate; and … irrational or mistaken premises can be corrected.“⁹

Then why did Rand have her heroes say that anyone who believes in the slightest government economic intervention is a sub-​animal? In fact, in Atlas Shrugged, Rand seemed to go out of her way to emphasize that good and evil are completely innate in a person’s character. Hank Rearden and his brother Philip were raised in the same family and so were exposed to the same ideas. James Taggart, Dagny Taggart, and Eddie Willers were raised together and are exactly the same types of people as adults as they were as children. Cherryl Brooks was raised by bums. She was never exposed to any correct teaching. Yet, she knew with certainty that the people around her were rotten, that the person who built the John Galt Line was a hero, and that Simon Pritchett was “a mean, scared old phony” (Part III, Chapter 4). On the other hand, the brilliant Robert Stadler was Akston’s colleague for years, and he knew that Pritchett was a “disreputable mediocrity” (Part II, Chapter 1). But this knowledge did not improve him. In fact, in the penultimate chapter, James Taggart finally realizes that the motive of all his actions was “in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil [italics added].”¹⁰

Ayn Rand’s Naked Soul

Nathaniel Branden (1999: 307) recorded how seriously Rand took this precept: “If someone failed to enjoy Victor Hugo, or Dostoevsky, or even Mickey Spillane, that person would be watched carefully [by Rand] for other signs of deficiency.”

So, let us look at Rand’s naked soul, as revealed by her response to art. In her introduction to the Bantam Book edition of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-​Three, which she reprinted in The Romantic Manifesto (1975: 153–61), she writes, “Victor Hugo is the greatest novelist in world literature.” His characters are “a race of giants … [who] are heroic, noble, intelligent, beautiful.”

Hugo’s Ninety-​Three takes place in 1793 amidst the royalist-​clerical revolt in the Vendée (a region on the Atlantic coast of France) against the French revolutionary-​republican government. The novel’s two protagonists are the leader of the anti-​republican revolt and the leader of the republican forces that are sent to crush the revolt. Both are passionately dedicated to their cause.

Rand writes, “The theme of Ninety-​Three … is: man’s loyalty to values [Rand’s italics] … The emphasis [Hugo] projects is not: ‘What great values men are fighting for!’ but: ‘What greatness men are capable of when they fight for their values!’” She observed that because of this emphasis, even though Hugo sided with the republicans, he drew the anti-​republican leader as an equal to the republican leader “in spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication to his cause.”

In fact, both the characters Rand extolled are mass-​murderers. Ninety-​Three begins by describing the landing of the royalist leader, the Marquis de Lantenac, on the coast of the Vendée. He comes upon a band of royalists who have just defeated a republican battalion. They immediately acknowledge him as their leader. His first order to them (Part I, Book IV, Chapter 6) is to burn the hamlet where they encountered the republican battalion. The man who led the royalist band asks, “What is to be done with the wounded?” The Marquis answers, “Put an end to them.” The former leader asks, “What is to be done with the prisoners?” The Marquis answers, “Shoot them.” The former leader points out, “There are about eighty.” The Marquis says, “Shoot them all.” The former leader says, “There are two women.” The Marquis says, “Shoot them also.” (I will add that one of the two women is a poor, ignorant peasant woman whom the republican battalion found wandering in the forest with her three small children and compassionately took under its protection.) This is the character whom Rand so admired for his “spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication to his cause.”

The Marquis’ antagonist, Cimourdain, is the leader of the republican forces in the Vendée. When he is put in charge (Part II, Book II, Chapter 3), he is told that the present republican commander “has distinguished himself by his bravery and intelligence … but [he has] one fault:” “After he wins a victory, he protects religious people and nuns, saves the wives and daughters of the aristocrats, releases prisoners.” Cimourdain replies that this is a “serious fault [grave faute].”

Rand exposed her “naked soul” by her response to these exemplars of “a race of giants … [who] are heroic, noble, intelligent, beautiful.”

The Sense of Life of Capitalism (Catallaxy), Again

Rand’s glorification of Lantenac and Cimourdain further illuminates her own characters’ sense of life. For example, in We the Living, when Kira first meets her future lover Leo (I.4), she is immediately and irresistibly attracted to him by the only facial features Rand chooses to mention: “His mouth … was that of an ancient chieftain who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it.” However, Leo says to Kira, with bitter humor, “I’m nothing like what you think I am. I’ve always wanted to be a Soviet clerk who sells soap and smiles at customers.”

Typically, Rand reversed the sense of life of Communism and capitalism. Political leaders who order men to die and watch their death calmly characterize Communism. Smiling clerks who sell unimpressive products characterize capitalism. When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow, it had to train counter clerks to smile at customers and speak politely to them. Their training was so successful that customers could not believe that the clerks were Soviet-​raised Russians (Blackman 1990; Goldman 1991: 166–7).

Again, Ayn Rand’s totalitarian sense of life highlights the wonderful social and psychological benefits of its opposite: the pacific, tolerant, and conciliatory capitalist sense of life.

Palinode

Ayn Rand was one of the greatest benefactors the human race has ever had. She bequeathed to humanity two marvelous gifts.

First, she added to the corpus of world literature three of the greatest works of narrative fiction ever composed. Their plot structures are entirely different from each other. Yet, each plot is brilliantly developed and leads to a stunning climax. They achieve the seemingly impossible combination of building and maintaining suspense while illuminating a wide range of conflicting, crucially important ideas.

Equally miraculous are her characters. They are fascinating and memorable, while bringing to life basic ideas, values, and goals and implanting them vividly in readers’ memories. She was also a master of mood and atmosphere. That is most apparent in We the Living, in which she uses mood to show how the “stifling, sordid ugliness of Soviet Russia” (Rand 1975: 160) gradually wears down the spirit of anyone who wants a life of joy, love, integrity, and achievement.

At the other extreme, she wrote passages of pulse-​throbbing exhilaration. When Bennett Cerf, one of the foremost publishers of the twentieth century, read Dagny’s ride on the John Galt Line (Part I, Chapter 8), he ran out of his office, down the hall, waving the typescript, shouting, “It’s magnificent” (Branden 1986: 288).

Rand even occasionally excelled in the two attributes she is usually regarded as lacking: psychological insight and humor.¹¹ 

Most importantly, her novels transcend the ultimate criterion of great literature: they force us to question assumptions we have taken for granted, and they change our perception of ourselves, the people around us, and society.

Ayn Rand’s second marvelous contribution to humanity is that she undoubtedly converted more people to free-​market capitalism than anyone else in history. In doing so, she had to overcome capitalism’s total lack of emotional appeal.

There have been innumerable political parties called “Socialist.” In the history of the world, there has never been a single political party called “Capitalist.” There is not even a name for a supporter of capitalism. A democrat champions democracy; a socialist champions socialism; a monarchist champions monarchy. But a capitalist is someone who owns and manipulates capital.

As David Hume observed (“Of the Original Contract,” 1748):

From our earliest records, in the third millennium BC, rulers have boasted about caring for the poor and preventing the rich from “oppressing” them (Fenshaw 1962, Patterson 1973). Shakespeare’s Mark Antony knew how to arouse emotions when he said, “When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.” 

By contrast, the proposition that excessive government regulation and expenditure stifle economic progress or that secure property rights are basic to a prosperous and humane society have no emotional appeal; and they are far from obvious. Even less obvious is the social usefulness of distinctive capitalist property, like future contracts and put and call options, or of the one and a half trillion dollars that corporations worldwide spend each year to buy back their own stocks.¹² 

Consequently, conservatives divert attention to religion and nationalism, which have immediate emotional appeal and do not need logical explanation. Conservatives ignore the incompatibility of religion and nationalism with capitalism because it is un-​capitalist ethos of religion and nationalism that satisfies the innate human craving for community and idealism.¹³

Ayn Rand tried to infuse into capitalism a different type of anti-​capitalist idealism: heroism.

For most of Ayn Rand’s readers, the initial mesmerizing enchantment wears off. However, they are left with an appreciation for technological progress, capitalism, and businesspeople that the Milton Friedmans, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayeks cannot possibly create. Rand’s readers are also left with a lifetime of grappling with fundamental questions of economics, ethics, politics, and psychology, as well as the excitement of having engaged with an extraordinarily powerful, creative, and passionate intelligence.

I pity people who have not engaged with Ayn Rand’s works. They do not know what they are missing.