Ayn Randed Part 5: Justifying Theft and Genocide

I originally believed that I could crystallize and share my thoughts about the limits of Ayn Rand's philosophy in four brief segments, each one focused on one particular aspect of its shortcomings, but in doing some elementary fact-checking for those pieces, I discovered a few additional truths about Ms. Rand that I hadn't previously known, and thus, I felt the need for one more round. What did I learn that I didn't know before? It came as news to me that AR openly voiced her approval for the savage genocide executed against the native people of the American continents by the European immigrants and settlers.

To put it mildly, reading Ms. Rand's quotes regarding native Americans made me angry. I have not yet read any historic accounts of the so-called savages attacking a white settlement and killing all inhabitants, including women, babies, and young children, by splitting their heads open with axes, as a group of white settlers did to a native American village in northern CA territory not long after the Gold Rush era. Whatever disagreements my grandfather and I might have had over the course of our lives, we had a life-long agreement about how badly our ancestors had wronged the native American people. On a visit to a reservation in Wisconsin during the summer before my final year of high school, I well remember him saying, "It's shameful the way this country treated the Indians." Around that time, he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I eventually got around to reading as well.

A little over a year after the visit to the reservation, during my first few days at Northwestern U., I watched a comedian performing the Firesign Theater bit about how the West (and more) was stolen, and it made me laugh, but I also understood the more serious deeper meanings behind that bit. Then, a couple of years later, on a visit to the Adirondacks with my parents, I ventured out alone one day on foot, and soon found myself stopping at a nearby drum shop. The drum maker welcomed me at the door, and he proceeded to fill me in on a number of details that I hadn't known, including the fact that every treaty between whites and native Americans was broken by whites. He challenged me to find a single instance to the contrary, and I've yet to do so, over 4 decades later. He also showed me a copy of one particular treaty, and reading it, my gut reaction was that the white people who crafted it obviously never meant to keep it.

Ms. Rand happily accepted Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans, and didn't care to look any deeper into the actual historical context. She blithely justified theft and genocide by asserting that the natives had no right to their land because they believed in collective ownership rather than individual rights. I would love to have gotten her answer regarding the Georgia Cherokees who had adopted individual rights and the European-based lifestyle of their white counterparts, even to the point of taking their case to the Supreme Court, but despite winning that case, still ended up on the Trail of Tears. That forced march to Oklahoma in some ways reminds me of a similar story I read about Poland and eastern Germany during the final months of WW2, and somehow I would guess that a woman born with the name Alisa Rosenbaum would not have been so forgiving to the Nazi regime as she seemingly would have been to the Andrew Jackson administration.

As a capper, I had concluded that someone who would reduce life's complexities into such a simplistic two-toned philosophy would not exactly qualify as a genius, but Ms. Rand wrote well, and expressed herself capably when conveying her ideas and principles. I did not expect to find in her biography a quote about how much she believed the darkest Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans -- I honestly didn't know she was that gullible. It makes me wonder if she believed that Tide really could make whites whiter. Even as a wide-eyed young elementary school kid, I figured out that you couldn't believe everything you saw on TV or in the movies. To begin with, two competing products couldn't possibly both be the best one -- that didn't make logical sense, even to a 5th grader. However, apparently AR believed those early TV cigarette ads that touted the health benefits of smoking, even though that also didn't make sense to my 5th grade self. Was Ayn Rand smarter than a 5th grader? Evidently not.

Ayn Randed Part 4: Substance Abuse

During the short space in my early 20s when I took Ayn Rand's philosophy seriously, it occurred to me more than once that perhaps I found it appealing because I could understand it. Kant? No, I can't, and never could. Maybe I could handle Martin Buber, but with Objectivism, I could grasp the whole thing quite easily, without feeling like any of it had slipped through my fingers. This appealing simplicity, however, soon enough unraveled in the face of life experiences and the company of people who didn't fit into the floor plan.

As my own particular philosophy expanded, I made room for the weaknesses and failings common to our species. I myself never developed any bad habits of substance abuse, I never smoked and I never consumed excessive amounts of alcohol, but once I got beyond my youthful flirtation with Objectivism and other similar nonsense, I didn't judge smokers and heavy drinkers that harshly either -- I didn't exactly know why they did what they did, but I also didn't care to dwell on it. I didn't feel like I had to have a nice, neatly-folded, simple little answer to explain what, in reality, may have been complex, multi-faceted personal issues. 

Having understood the Rand philosophy, I couldn't miss the obvious hypocrisy of the two Randians that I met in quick succession around the turn of the '90s, who both needed to regularly escape from the harsh objective realities of their own lives by finding refuge in large quantities of alcohol. I also later noted that same contradiction in the author herself, who fell under the constant pull of a drug stronger than alcohol that would end up giving her lung cancer. However, I would not have judged any of them as harshly as the Objectivist philosophy would have, despite whatever annoyance I might have endured during my personal interactions with the two drunks. Ms. Rand's psychopathic social Darwinism would condemn the weak -- including herself, apparently -- to a merciless and swift reckoning, but once I emerged from her orbit, I felt more inclined towards an attitude of mercy, and an open, helping hand, whenever I could reasonably offer it. I might not know how someone ended up as an addict, but I considered the possibility that rather than being superior, I had simply been luckier. Eventually, not so long ago, I finally saw a clear image of my own good fortune.

Around the time I met the two obnoxious Objectivists, I began spending more time with my original family circle. Step by step, circumstances forced me to confront my mother's schizophrenia, and also my older brother's mental issues. I struggled to make sense of it all, and along that road, I had other experiences dealing with people who had significant mental difficulties, so that slowly the puzzle pieces came together, and I began to see the whole picture much better, even before I had all of the pieces in place. After it all came together, I knew that I had drawn the lucky genetic hand, and my older brother had gotten the bad one. Smoking and an unhealthy diet, plus a lack of exercise, put him into an early grave, but the seeds of those bad behaviors came largely from his genetics, and not from some dark quality in his character. There but for the grace of fortunate genetics go I, and probably some obnoxious Objectivists as well.

In fact, with my newly-focused mental health telescope, I can look back and see quite distinctly that one of those Objectivist drunks was bipolar. Someone with bipolar disorder, when they've got that extra shot of dopamine running through the circuits, can certainly feel superior to all the rest of us, and on some level justifiably so, but that bipolar person will also inevitably crash into a deep depression somewhere along the line. I imagine the Objectivist bipolar guy in self-condemnation mode on that down side, and I can hear him pledging, once on the upper half of the sine curve, to never fall again, but severe mental conditions generally circle beyond the grasp of the sufferer. Ms. Rand's philosophy assumes that the circumstances of people's lives lie in their direct control, but the majority of people with mental difficulties do not even have control over their own mental processes. The need for self-medication drives addiction in most, if not all, cases, whether the substance is heroin, alcohol, nicotine or anything else. From a distance, I cannot analyze AR's mental state or her addiction, but I can tell that her own philosophy didn't make room for it. In the foreground of my own life, as it turned out, I didn't have to look any further than the immediate family circle that I grew up in, just to find people who didn't fit into Ayn Rand's simplistic, two-toned reduction of the world's complex realities.