Ayn Rand: The New Messiah
MANUS, WILLARD
Fall Book Issue Ayn Rand: The New Messiah By Willard Manns WE HAVE A new Messiah in our midst. She is Ayn Rand, whose last novel. Atlas Shrugged, though scoffed at by the critics, is now being...
...During the midway break I heard the girl sitting in front of me say to her friend, "I loaned my copy of Atlas Shrugged to a friend a few days ago...
...In order to teach all of them a lesson, a handful of America's greatest minds—several industrialists, a composer, a philosopher—quit the scene and retire to a private Utopia of their own, a valley where there "is only one word that is forbidden: the word give...
...Once their influence is destroyed, says Rand, we shall all know "immense deliverance"—courtesy of a few Industrialist Gods who will rule with a free hand and untaxed incomes...
...Life in those days, Ayn Rand tells us in Atlas Shrugged, wasn't befouled by the "parasites of the subsidized classrooms . . . mystic moochers . . . who believe there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind...
...Galt and his other unsacrificing God-buddies return to the world, their world, and declare the millenium...
...Its machinery fails, its fuses blow, its farmers revolt and plunder, its intellectuals panic...
...There are some legitimate aspects to this argument: everyone is concerned about such contemporary catchwords as authoritarian bureaucracy, organization men, thermonuclear weapons, absence of personal responsibility, psychoanalytic jargon, moral crisis, etc...
...But where LaPiere...
...This is the essential theme of Atlas Shrugged, the Book of Books of the Objectivists (it is only a scant 200 pages shorter than the combined Old and New Testaments...
...Their first act after assuming power is to "cross out some contradictions" in the Constitution and add a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
...is devoted entirely to the presentation and propagation of the ideas contained in Atlas Shrugged and is now functioning in at least half a dozen major cities, with more to come...
...In the sky shines the symbol of free trade and free minds—a dollar sign, "three feet tall, made of solid gold...
...A lecture bureau, run by Nathaniel Branden...
...American hearts...
...At the three-quarter mark, a side door opened and Ayn Rand, the life-giving sun herself, entered...
...To begin with, it appeals to the wish-fantasies of those who are power- and money-hungry and also to the nostalgic love of the past that lives in many WILLARD MANUS is fiction editor of Venture, a literary quarterly, and is the author of a novel, The Fixers...
...It is too late for us to save ourselves...
...The next turn at bat in the National Review went to Garry Wills, who took swings at both Chambers and Root, and one at Rand too, for being, surprise of all surprises, a Liberal masked as Conservative...
...His lectures are directed exclusively at "people who have accepted the essentials of the philosophy of Atlas Shrugged and seek an amplification of its ideas...
...after accusing Freudianism of having led to subliminal advertising, political maternalism, progressive education and American cowardice on the battlefield, finally settles for a traditional defense of conservatism, Ayn Rand goes all the way and tries to break with history—and mankind— entirely...
...Confronted as we are by immensity and complexity it is no wonder that the historical pendulum is swinging backward...
...When Rand asserts the immediate perfectibility of man . . . she is working from the first principle of historical Liberalism," he wrote...
...There was a noticeable stir in the audience...
...the conquerors of matter . . . produced all the wonders of humanity's brief summer...
...a handful of supermen must do it for us...
...Ninety-one pages later...
...He blasted her as being "ruthless, fanatic and humorless and asked that she be fought with "a Johnsonian humor, reason and human balance...
...It is set in the future: Europe has gone Communist and America is in the grip of the above-mentioned mystic moochers, enlightened businessmen, sentimentalists and all-around grubby types who spout various "collectivist" slogans...
...Objectivism would return us all to the late 19th century, to the early days of the Industrial Revolution when "the industrialists...
...Ayn Rand's superman comes from the same source as the Liberal's perfect society...
...Ludwig Von Mises' Socialism ("a devastating critique of collectivism, but reflects some Kantian views...
...Deprived of its rational intelligence, the "motor" force of the world, America goes all to pieces...
...Root, who is down as a professor of English at Earlham College, stated first of all that her creative powers as an artist are surpassed only by Taylor Caldwell, and then opined that Rand was a really Good Christian anyway...
...First, who but madmen are most likely to succeed in a mad world...
...The crowd was for the most part young, well-dressed and terribly enthused about Objectivism...
...NOT ONE OF these attributes was in evidence on the night I attended a lecture on Objectivism given by Nathaniel Branden, whom Ayn Rand describes as "my intellectual heir...
...Second, Objectivism, unlike most other past and present right-wing movements in this country, has more of an intellectual than an emotional appeal and is consequently attracting educated young people to its ranks...
...people want an easy way out...
...Ayn Rand and her votaries—they call themselves Objectivists and often wear a little silver dollar sign as their coat of arms—are desperately serious about changing the world...
...These mystics and parasites include, by the way, Freudian psychologists, social workers, trade unionists, socialists, most businessmen and farmers, ministers, philosophy teachers, writers in general, non-objective painters, humanitarians and, presumably, those who wrote our child labor laws...
...She shed a handsome mink coat, sat down in an isolated seat stage right, put a cigarette in a white bone holder, lit it, and listened...
...Then John Galt, the Atlas who has assumed the weight of the world on his metallic shoulders ("his body had the hardness, the gaunt tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting"), takes to the airwaves and delivers a 57-page lecture to the bewildered and warring nation below, telling everyone how and why he did this awful thing to them, and also informing them how they can rectify their dirty ways: "It requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of the past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others...
...Branden concluded with a list of recommended reading: Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson ("the stuff on economics is fine, but the author is a hedonist pragmatist...
...Whittaker Chambers, writing in the National Review, recoiled from this kind of paranoiac nonsense...
...The crowd, many of whom sat clutching copies of Atlas Shrugged to their bosoms, hung on his every word, even chuckled right on cue when he attempted his only humorous sally of the night in scoring the Determinist's view of man as a "prisoner of his genes, toilet training and cultural background...
...All of these books are available from the Foundation for Economic Education, which is supported by free enterprise forces...
...so much so that, like the Malthusian heroes of Atlas Shrugged, they would happily see it destroyed in the process...
...The lecture, part of a 20-week course, cost $3.50 to attend and lasted a good two-and-a-half hours...
...Atlas Shrugged itself, though a failure in hard cover, is now in its fourth edition as a 95-cent paperback, which means it has reached at least half a million people...
...His big complaint against Rand, though, was that she was "atheistic, materialistic, ridiculous in her attempt to supersede the Cross with the Dollar...
...Atlas Shrugged, though scoffed at by the critics, is now being sanstified by a rapidly swelling number of people with such fanatic right-wing ideas that they even give fright to the National Review...
...He's going to return it, but I tell you, Sheila, I just felt so awful without it that I went out and bought it in paperback just to have it around the house...
...Mises also came in for two more plugs: the Anti-Capitalist Mentality and Omnipotent Government...
...Groups of Objectivists (or "Randians") can now be found meeting weekly on many college campuses across America: Ayn Rand draws 400-500 students when she talks at a college and reaches an even larger, more highbrow audience when she speaks over FM radio (her last topic was "America's Bankrupt Culture...
...An incredible novel, it reads as if it had been written by a Nietzschean gone mad, with a polish job by Henry Ford and Daddy Warbucks...
...All this undoubtedly makes them sound ruthless and more than a little mad, which is true, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them merely as paid-up members of the lunatic fringe...
...Avn Rand, he declared, should be acclaimed by all conservatives as "the artist-philosopher of sanity . . . the life-giving sun among her planets...
...only she didn't know it: "She reverences the attributes that stem from and that lead to God" (his italics...
...There were perhaps 150 other people with me in the Vanderbilt Room of the Hotel Roosevelt, listening intently as Branden—a self-assured, pink-faced man in his early 30s—expounded on "The Meaning and Nature of Volition: The fallacy of psychological determinism—Free Will as the choice to think or not to think...
...This prompted another conservative, E. Merrill Root, to move to her defense...
...Such fanatic concentration on one kind of earthly achievement is the sure sign of the breakdown of Western civilization...
...Objectivism is being sold to them as "a philosophy of reason that can lead to an intellectual Renaissance...
...The reasons are many...
...They also nodded sagely when Branden, in making the point that good thinking is man's greatest and most difficult task, described Albert Einstein as a man who used "volitional consciousness" as a physicist but "let his focus go when he turned to politics and social attitudes, and thereby lapsed into a semidetached funk...
...Such yearning toward the past is always accompanied by an evasion and distortion of reality, another example of which can be found in such a book as Richard LaPiere's recent The Freudian Ethic—"an analysis of the subversion of the American character...
...Obviously, then, Objectivism is catching on...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
