Ayn Randed Part 3: The Hypocrites

Just as you don't have to look too hard to find, or come in contact with, religious hypocrites (and I don't say this as any kind of comment on religion), you also don't have to spend much time searching for Objectivist hypocrites, if you understand the basic philosophy well enough. In my case, the Objectivist hypocrites came to me. How did I get so lucky? Perhaps it was just the karma I accrued from having accepted the philosophy for a brief time in my younger years.

So what makes an Objectivist a hypocrite? 

As I outlined in Part 2 from last week, Ayn Rand's core philosophical principle is that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created by weak-minded people in order to avoid the harsh objective reality of seeing their own mortality too clearly. Therefore, the number one sin under Objectivism is choosing to avoid reality. So, as I found out soon enough, the two Objectivists that I met in quick succession from different social circles, back around the turn of the '90s, had one thing in common -- they both got drunk a lot. They didn't readily admit this to me, but I picked it up from casual conversation with mutual friends at moments when they weren't around.

I had concluded, many years before meeting these two, that any time someone felt a strong need to share their philosophy or religious beliefs with me, I could take it as a sign of their own insecurity in that belief system. Knowing this, I expected to encounter some form of hypocrisy not long after I met them and I recognized the Rand bait. Familiar with the lures, I managed to avoid the hook with one of them. With the other one, though, the logical contradictions of his arguments twice annoyed me to such an extent that I had to point them out, and both conversations ended exactly as I knew they would, with him angry at me for doing so. I didn't change his mind in either case, even though we both knew he had no logical answers to my questions, and so on those two occasions he left the room clinging to his nonsense, without giving my assertions any serious thought.

While Randians may try to pose as intellectuals, I've generally found them to be the type naturally drawn to a concept like The Virtue of Selfishness but uninterested in actually studying and understanding the foundations of that concept. In other words, they latch onto a belief system that tells them their selfishness is a good thing, and they just want to get the basics of the system. Neither of these two AR disciples cared to see the obvious contradiction between their stated beliefs and their constant need to find comfort in alcohol. As a peek into what might lurk beneath the cloak of an Objectivist's intellectual pretensions, I'll just mention that one of these two told me, flat out, without hesitation, and totally unrelated to anything else, that he thought the story about the hole in the ozone layer was a myth -- he wanted me to know that he didn't believe it.

To make one final note about seeking comfort in substances, can you name a common one that's as addictive as heroin, and that can be found in any convenience store in the U.S.? Next, can you guess the pen name of a certain female author, named Alisa Rosenbaum at birth, who indulged heavily in that drug over decades, and contracted lung cancer as a result? If you can answer these two simple questions, then you may have concluded, just as I have, that when a philosopher can't live up to her own ideals, you don't need to give her philosophy much serious consideration, as it doesn't actually make sense for real human beings living in the real world.

Ayn Randed, Part 2: Subjective Objectivism

So Ayn Rand built a whole philosophy, and a literary career, around the cold-heartedness that comes naturally to a sociopath/psychopath, redefining this lack of feeling as a character strength worthy of praise and emulation. She called her philosophy Objectivism -- why?

AR based her Objectivist philosophy on her assertion that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created out of each individual's desperate need to avoid facing the objective reality of their own mortality. When I say all human subjectivity, I mean all. You might think, if you only know Ms. Rand's work tangentially, that I've chosen to simplify her concept for the sake of brevity and blog necessity, but not so -- her entire philosophy flows from this very simple fountainhead.

Along her philosophic journey, AR asserts that the enemy of every belief system is the true believer, because only a true believer will actually care enough to uncover and reveal the flaws of that system, and I agree with her on that --  in the few months when I circled her star, I began to feel more and more the pull of the gravity of reality, as the complexities of life moved me beyond her simplistic orbit. If a few short months I concluded that life was actually about 90% objective and 90% subjective, by which, I explained in answer to the quizzical looks, I meant that each quality occupies a 10% area at opposite ends of the spectrum and shares an 80% zone in the middle.

Take, for example, the matter of room temperature, and the difference between how I feel it and how a certain female acquaintance feels it: I tolerate warm temperatures quite well, and she does not. Certainly, as the Objectivist in the room will tell you, there is an objective reality to the temperature, and that reality is knowable, but so what? Knowing the Fahrenheit number will probably not make me more uncomfortable, and it certainly won't make her less uncomfortable. So, according to the Objectivist idea, has one of us created a purely-subjective reality out of the need to do so? Is the woman's sensitivity to the heat actually a sign of weakness of character, and my lack of it an objective sign of my superior personal character?

Well, before I get too comfortable in my objective superiority, we need to have tea together on a cooler afternoon. I might tolerate the slight chill a bit better than my female friend, but when the hot tea arrives, she can drink it down right away, and it gives her some welcome relief from the cold. I, however, have to let that cup sit still in front of me for a good ten minutes or more before I dare to sip it, or else it'll burn my tongue. So, once again, there is an objective reality to the temperature of the hot tea, and the woman seems to objectively tolerate it pretty well, but have I constructed a subjective tea reality out of my need to avoid seeing my own mortality too clearly?

Contrary to Ms. Rand's philosophy, what about the possibility of two different people naturally experiencing the same objective reality in subjectively very different ways? I have noticed the woman's father also showing signs of discomfort in the heat, and I well remember my mother having a sensitivity to hot and cold foods very much like my own, so those observations tell me that our subjective responses to room and food temperatures come as a result of our different genetics, rather than from some murky, primal fear of death. These subjective temperature realities have provided me with a concise example of how Objectivism quickly falls apart in the face of life's complexities, if you study it and try to apply it to the world that turns us all around every day. Not that long after I had dropped into Atlas Shrugged, I crawled out, concluding, in a vaguely-Shakespearean way, that there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Ayn Randed, Part 1

"I've been Ayn Randed and nearly branded a Communist because I'm left-handed" -Paul Simon. I learned that lyric very well as a teenager, listening to Simon and Garfunkel's A Simple Desultory Philippic, but I didn't know how it really felt until nearly a decade later, when, in my early 20s, I swallowed all of Atlas Shrugged, along with a few other Ayn Rand appetizers. At first I felt quite full, but not long after, I started noticing a bitter taste in my mouth that didn't quite fit with my own personal attraction to kisses and other sweets.

Over a few months, conversations with friends began to reveal some flawed logic and loose ends, and when I learned from The Valachi Papers that Cosa Nostra members would refer to law-abiding citizens as the weak, the implications of that phrase sounded oddly similar, in a troubling way, to Ms. Rand's basic ethic that interprets empathy and concern for fellow human beings as a sign of weakness. In fairness to AR, she advocates indifference to others rather than criminality, and indeed, she also focuses on the importance of essential honesty to oneself and others as the foundation of self-respect, recognizing the importance of this concept as a necessary element of a healthy human psychology. Criminals hunger for self-respect, as she pointed out, with a hunger that can never find satisfaction, and on reading that, I soon confirmed it with observed reality.

Ultimately, for me, the objectivist philosophy fell apart due to its simplistic construction. For a few months, I could believe that it offered a reasonable outlook on life, but soon enough, experience taught me otherwise. Ms. Rand would have everyone believe, as she clearly did, that the drowning man got into the water as a result of his own actions, and therefore no one needs to feel any obligation to throw him a rope, or to try to swim out to him and bring him to shore.

Some of us, when we see someone in trouble, instinctively feel the urge to want to offer help, if we can. Others, such as the objectivists, and the Cosa Nostra bunch, don't feel anything at all (or, with the Costra Nostra gang, might even feel pleasure). Ayn Rand turned that emotional vacuum into a complete philosophy which assumes, among other things, that those of us who have altruistic urges don't actually feel something genuine for our fellow human beings -- we're just pretending, and/or fooling ourselves and others. Her philosophy tells us that we're acting out of societal expectations that have trained us to work against our own best self-interests, but the Randians don't know me and what I feel -- what I hear from the objectivists tells me more about them than it does about me.

I had learned the phrase Do unto others as you would have them do unto you at an early age, and while I moved away from the religious context in young adulthood, after a few years, I came back around to that same moral compass. I may or may not know how the drowning man got there, but if I can reasonably do something to help him, I will. When I feel the urge to help someone in need, I recognize that feeling as being genuine, no matter what objectivism might try to tell me.