2001-05-18 - 10:39 p.m.
I�m not much for ideologies of any kind these days. I tend to rank them according to the number of humorless dweebs they attract and stay as far away from the top of the list as I can. By that standard, objectivism is waaay up there--along with militant veganism, unreconstructed neo-Stalinism and anti-circumcisionism.
It all came back to me today after Blivet pointed me to this book review. Apparently Ayn Rand took a few lessons from L. Ron Hubbard and is still churning out verbiage 20 years after her death--either that, or the folks in charge of her estate know they�ve got a cash cow on their hands and that they could publish a book full of nothing but her grocery lists and hundreds of thousands of her followers would shell out big bucks for it. (Nah, that can�t be it--that would be irrational of them, and objectivists are all worshippers of Reason. Silly me.)
The review is funny as hell--particularly if you�ve spent any time at all around Randroids--but damn. Now I know what Vietnam veterans feel like. All these terrible memories came spewing out of whatever steel-reinforced mental lockbox I�d shut them up in years ago. There were people in some of my writing classes in college who�d have lapped up every word of that book. I remember one dude who used to shred everyone else�s story and then turned in one of his own consisting of nothing but long drawn-out speeches interspersed with Rush lyrics (honest to God). We were kinder than we could have been (well, the others in the class were--I myself laughed my ass off) but he still declared that we didn�t know True Genius when we saw it and that Ayn Rand said blah-blah-blah and yadda-yadda-yadda about fiction writing and that he was dropping the class.
Then there was the guy who picked an argument with me because I told him I liked Shakespeare, which he claimed was "anti-life." And another guy who said hiking in the woods for fun was degenerate.
Aieeee. The pain.
I admit, I flirted with objectivism once. Briefly. At the time I was looking around and seeing nothing but stanky hippies on my left (this was California, remember) and fire-breathing Moral Majoritarians on my right--Rand�s stuff seemed like a refreshing alternative to both. Plus, I was a teenager, and a great big geek with no social skills--prime Randroid material. So what kept me from turning into one?
Four reasons, as I recall.
For one thing, I was never a tight-ass, even then. For all their talk about how they were the only ones who knew how to live, the big-O objectivists I knew in college were no fun at all to be around. They had a very short list of Rand-approved activities--if it didn�t involve paving over unspoiled wilderness or rereading Atlas Shrugged for the fucktillionth time, they were against it.
I also insisted on holding Rand and her followers to their own standards. If you do that, you pretty much guarantee that you�ll never become a Randroid. Ironically, this ideology that supposedly exalts reason and independent thought is based entirely on received wisdom. If Ayn Rand said it, it must be true--and if she didn�t say it, you�re not supposed to think about it. Unless you�re one of her designated "intellectual heirs," although even then you spend most of your time attacking heretics and apostates within your own ranks (especially Nathaniel Branden, the objectivists� version of Lucifer). The real reason objectivists hate Christianity so much is that the Christian Bible is higher up on the bestseller list than their own.
Finally, like all utopian ideologies, objectivism presupposes that people will act against their natures to make the system work. Take socialism, for example (just to show I�m not anticapitalist--as fucked up as capitalism can be at times, socialism is about a hundred times worse, all the time). Socialists just sort of assume that, once the classless society is established, someone with talent and initiative will eagerly lend his skills to the glory of humanity even though he won�t be rewarded any more than the loser next door who sits on his ass all day. Likewise, objectivists believe that the poor will just go off into a corner and starve quietly while the Uebermenschen above them build railroads and have wild no-emotional-strings-attached sex with each other. In the real world, talented people flee socialist societies in droves, while John Galt, Hank Rearden, and Ayn Rand�s other fictional heroes would live about as long as Marie Antoinette or Czar Nicholas II.
Objectivists have been all over the news in California lately making wacky comments about the state�s power crisis--saying conservation is evil and whatnot (and conveniently not mentioning that it was the state�s profoundly idiotic attempt at utility deregulation that triggered all these rolling blackouts in the first place). On the one hand it�s funny--it gives us all a chance to forget our skyrocketing electric bills for a moment to point and laugh at the kooks on TV--but it also has me worried. Hasn�t Dick Cheney been saying the same things that they are? And lest you think Randroids don�t have any real power, two words: Alan Greenspan.
(Oh, yeah, the fourth reason I never became a Randroid: I got laid.)
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