Ayn Rand the Sociologist

[David McDivitt]

On 3/18/2011 10:59 PM, Daniel Davis wrote:
> With the Atlas Shrugged movie coming out, I've been reading Atlas Shrugged
> again. I made a strange discovery.
>
> Rand had fairly accurately anticipated the results of a sociological study in
> the 1980s, published in a fairly famous book titled Moral Mazes, where a
> socliologist spent years living with the savages of corporate bureaucracy,
> learning their customs, behaviors, and morals. The irrelevancy of truth, the
> shifting of blame, the feudal relationship to those higher up, the obligation to
> keep knowledge from your bosses so that they could avoid responsibility, the
> situational ethics totally contradicting everything they otherwise profess in
> life - all of it there, and fully documented in the study,
>
> I read the study a year or so ago, but only made the connection while rereading
> Atlas Shrugged today, when, with a bit of a shock, I realized that what seemed a
> bit cartoonish and over the top in the novel was largely just what the study had
> found.

Rand was a moralist with little view of the individual. She was about 
society and Galt's Gulch represents her perfect, idealistic view of 
society no differently than a social progressive. This is not 
immediately obvious. She's credited with egoism and self, but these are 
not egoism and self of the individual, but egoism and self within the 
umbrella of her idealistic society. Egoism and self supposedly lead to, 
and equate with, her society, but with her focus on society she works 
backwards constructing an egoism and self which supports that. Her 
characters do favors for each other. Why is it OK for her characters to 
commit the unpardonable sin of altruism? It's an inconsistency that 
makes no sense. Rand spent a lot of time going through the English 
language giving words a proper definition, not unlike Aristotle, the 
only philosopher she ever read and liked according to her. Rewriting 
language was the way she played the game of moral oneupmanship, as any 
moralist tends to do, and the altruism of her characters was explained 
with long technical explanations using her own definitions.

To a true egoist and self focused person, what is right? It's whatever I 
want to do. The fact I want to do it makes it right. Justification of my 
actions rests merely in my desire to do those actions. As we've debated 
many times with moralists, this does not imply I will do anything bad or 
anyone should be afraid of me. It simply means I am aware of my 
responsibility of my own actions. It means what I think and do must 
ultimately be reconciled in my own mind. Does Rand say anything like 
that? No! Any mention of freedom and true individualism precipitates an 
immediate argument with objectivists, putting them in their moral game 
mode, when they begin spewing Randian terms and meanings to control the 
conversation by establishing definitions. It's all very intellectual.

The human race has been engaging in business for thousands of years. So 
what if people in a company exhibit survival skills? There is no 
authority to enforce standards in this regard and I'm happy about that.

Admittedly I was stuck on Rand for awhile. I was intensely curious about 
what she was saying. Though I didn't agree with objectivism completely I 
felt it had a degree of merit. What bothered me most was the sucking 
cult feeling it gave me. Debating a few objectivists allowed me to 
follow the train of thought all the way through and understand what's 
wrong with it. Now I laugh about contemporary objectivist subjects such 
as "induction" and "creation". What a joke.

I look forward to seeing the movie and what ramifications may happen in 
society. Atlas was a good work and should be acknowledged as that. 
Unfortunately, the only way moralism is defeated it seems is by way of 
competing moralism, and during a brief time of transition freedom seems 
to be on everyone's mind. The movie comes along at a good time to help 
change current moral trends.

-- 
yes, I dare to be subjective!