Ayn Rand: World’s Greatest Philosopher, or Incompetent Jerk?

The title question reflects two common attitudes toward the controversial novelist/philosopher. Her followers (the “Objectivists”, or “Randroids”) often consider her a genius, the first human being to provide a completely rational philosophical foundation for everything. Her critics, however, find her a stupid jerk.

The truth is a little of both. Ayn Rand was an intelligent and innately talented individual who nevertheless wrote some crazy-ass nonsense. To me, she is sort of a tragic figure – someone who had some great successes which were marred by tragic intellectual and personality flaws.

Note: For my philosophical critiques of Rand’s mistakes, see “Why I Am Not an Objectivist” (http://www.owl232.net/papers/rand.htm) and “Critique of ‘The Objectivist Ethics’” (http://www.owl232.net/papers/rand5.htm), written a couple of decades ago. I will not repeat them here.

Ayn Rand the Writer

In my view, Ayn Rand was a brilliant novelist.

Most literature buffs disagree with this; indeed, most would probably say Rand was a terrible novelist. I think the reason for this is not that Rand was objectively terrible, but rather that the overwhelming majority of literature fans (especially, e.g., students and professors of literature) fall within a certain range of tastes, which are connected to their general personality traits. This is a selection effect, i.e., only people with a certain psychology choose to become literature experts.

Aside: Notice how literature people also tend to be rather overwhelmingly leftist and anti-capitalist. In this case, you can’t claim that this is because of their expertise, since expertise in literature has no evidential relevance to economic and political issues. It is, rather, because most people’s political orientation is dictated by their broader personality traits and emotional attitudes, and the traits and attitudes that lead people to want to be literature experts strongly overlap with those that lead people to hate capitalism. Some of these traits and attitudes also determine their taste in novels.

Rand intentionally wrote a particular kind of novel, which literature people happen not to like; thus, no matter how good the novels are within that category, most literature people will hate them.

And what category was that? You might call it “the propaganda novel” (where “propaganda” is of course used in a purely descriptive sense, not as a term of abuse). They are novels designed to advance a philosophical worldview, and to do so in a clear, forceful, and (to those who might be receptive to that worldview) inspiring manner. They are not subtle, nor are they supposed to be. They are supposed to dramatize Ayn Rand’s worldview.

Leaving aside (for now) the question of whether Rand’s worldview is right, is this a worthy goal for a novel? Well, consider all the novels whose central goal is to provoke a feeling of horror (horror novels), or wonder (science fiction and fantasy), or excitement (action novels). Communicating one’s philosophy is at least as worthwhile and reasonable as those goals. Whether this counts as “literature” or not is neither here nor there.

Given that this is in principle a worthwhile thing to do, and given that that is the type of novel Rand set out to write, her works have to be judged by the standards of that genre. By those standards, she succeeds about as well as anyone has ever done. Can you think of another novel that has created as many devoted followers of a philosophical movement as Atlas Shrugged?

Many people would like to do what Ayn Rand did -- many would like to communicate their ideas to people all over the world, and many would like to write bestsellers. Some of the world’s smartest people have tried to do those things. Almost none of them can do it. If you or I try to do what Rand did, we will not succeed. So let’s admit that Rand had an exceptional talent for that kind of writing.

That said, I understand very well what some people hate about her writing. It is very heavy handed, black-and-white, and often angry and deliberately insulting towards people with different ideas. These characteristics, however, are part of how Rand succeeded. If she had communicated her ideas in a manner that most literature fans would like, then you would have never heard of her and we wouldn’t be talking about her now.

Rand’s most subtle novel, by the way, was her first: We the Living. It is the only of her works that features a socialist character who has integrity. It’s also far less popular than her more propagandistic novels.

In sum: Ayn Rand set out to do something that is in principle worthwhile, that hardly anyone is capable of doing, and she succeeded better than just about anyone ever has. That requires enormous talent.

Ayn Rand the Philosopher

As a philosopher, however, Ayn Rand pretty much failed. I don’t just mean that she failed to figure out the objectively correct answers to lots of philosophical questions. After all, all or nearly all philosophers have failed by that standard. I mean that she failed to significantly advance the discussion. Most of her works are not intellectually interesting to professional philosophers, and this, I believe, is not merely because of philosophers’ peculiar tastes, but because of intellectual flaws in Rand’s philosophical work.

Again, I’m not going to detail Rand’s philosophical mistakes here. I’m just going to diagnose in a general way what I think went wrong.

People who are familiar with contemporary philosophy, when they look at Rand’s work, typically describe it as simplistic and poorly reasoned. That is because it is in fact simplistic and poorly reasoned. She neglects to support key assumptions that need justification. She does not anticipate objections that smart people would raise. When she talks about other philosophers, besides insulting them, she evinces minimal understanding of their ideas, like a student trying to write an essay on a book without ever opening the book, just based on looking at the front cover. Sometimes, she makes absurdly false generalizations about intellectual history that leave you wondering what planet she is referring to (e.g., when she describes the history of ethics as consisting of attempts to relegate ethics to the province of the irrational).

Why did this happen? Is it because she was stupid, or irrational, or mean?

Not really. I think she had one core intellectual flaw: she had no faith in other human beings’ cognitive capacities. She assumed that she had nothing to learn from other people, so she did not try to learn anything from them. This may be because while growing up in communist Russia, she was smarter and/or more rational than all the people around her, even the adults. It may also be partly a matter of laziness, since understanding other people’s ideas requires work.

Why is this a mistake? One would be correct to assume that most human beings are stupid or irrational when it comes to philosophy. If you’re a kid who has met all of 200 adults, it can easily happen that not one of them has had anything worthwhile to say about philosophy.

But what is true of a random group of people you run into in some random town is very different from what is true if you select the top people in a given field in the entire world. In the latter case, you’re going to find some amazingly talented and interesting people. Note also that contemporary thinkers are often much more sophisticated than those of the past, so you would also get a false impression of what there is to learn from other people if you just looked at the “great” philosophers of the past. (See https://fakenous.net/?p=1754, https://fakenous.net/?p=1168.)

For reflection: If you don't learn anything from other thinkers, even the best thinkers in the world, what is more likely: that none of them have anything to teach, or that you're a bad learner?

So Rand thinks other humans are stupid. So she doesn’t bother to look into what they have to say. She never seriously studies philosophy (outside of her own ideas), but she opines about it anyway. When you do this, you make errors that look silly to people who have trained for years. This would happen to anyone, however smart they are. (Analogy: if someone teaches himself to play chess, without ever consulting any books or any theory developed by other people, then, however smart that person may be, any decent tournament player will walk all over him in a match.) The basic reason for all this is that the truth about the world is complicated and subtle. So much so that it has to be progressively uncovered over the course of generations.

There is a chapter in Anthem in which the protagonist reinvents the light bulb, by himself, in a world in which all modern technology has been forgotten. Yeah, no. The most brilliant human being who ever lived could not do that. Inventing a piece of modern technology like a light bulb requires building on discoveries of many people over a long period of time.

Granted, philosophy is not as developed as the sciences, but contributing usefully to it still requires learning some background.

This mistake is related to why she is such a literary jerk. She is constantly insulting people in the most angry and colorful ways, in part because she assumes most thinkers are evil idiots for believing the simple-minded nonsense that she assumes they believe. She assumes they believe these things because she doesn't read them, and she doesn't read them because she takes them to be evil idiots who are not worth reading.

When she hears something that someone else says, she makes no effort to understand it charitably because her default assumption is that people are idiots.

Rand was able to persist in this opinion, probably because she didn't spend a lot of time talking to any high-powered intellectuals. Instead, she spent her time talking to sycophantic followers. That was probably all she had to talk to, once she had driven away all smart, independent-thinking individuals by constantly insulting everyone who didn't completely agree with her.