BOOKS

Would Atlas Shrug at Corporate Misdeeds?

By Nan Goldberg

Bernie Ebbers, the former CEO of Worldcom, was sentenced this past summer for defrauding the company of $11 billion, and I thought about John Galt again.

“Who is John Galt?” You must remember that famous, oft-repeated line from Ayn Rand’s masterful philosophical thriller Atlas Shrugged (1957). It was a verbal shrug, meant to convey the futility of fighting back – in fact, the futility of everything – and its derivation was supposed to be unknown.

But John Galt, it turned out later in the book, was a real person, a brilliant scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who, in his youth, had looked around and understood the world to be in a decisive struggle over the fundamental question of what constituted good and evil, with evil winning, and he had vowed “to stop the motor of the world” by going on strike – that is, by taking himself out of the work force, along with everyone else whose minds and hearts were still pure and principled. The band of intrepid strikers – industrialists, inventors, composers, actors, scientists, office managers, financiers, engineers – planned to return, in the aftermath of the economic breakdown Galt predicted, to rebuild society based on a philosophy of reason.

I read Atlas Shrugged in high school, right after I read Rand’s earlier novel The Fountainhead. I read them in college too. I read them after college, numerous times. I read The Fountainhead to my elder daughter, Jordan, who then read Atlas Shrugged on her own. (My younger daughter, named Dagny for the main character in Atlas Shrugged, refused to let me read either book to her, but did read them later and is less bitter about the subject than she used to be.)

I am 52 years old now and the fact is I have no idea who I’d be if I hadn’t read Rand’s books all those years ago.

It all seemed so simple, so self-evident to me. Rand was an ardent advocate of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights, and free-market capitalism. Her philosophy defined “man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Now, this could – if you let it – be embarrassing. Generally, when you try to discuss Ayn Rand’s philosophy, you get a lot of eye-rolling, and certain labels start flying around, like “Fascist,” “Republican mouthpiece,” “capitalist pig,” “totalitarian,” “heartless,” “pseudo-intellectual,” and “out of her depth.” The mildest epithets you’re likely to hear are “impractical” and “sophomoric.”

What’s bizarre about this is that she is so universally denigrated while at the same time so widely read. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985, total sales of Rand's fiction and nonfiction now exceed 23 million copies.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is, as far as I know, the only philosopher who wrote popular fiction – thus, the only philosopher whose work is available for mass consumption, directly from the philosopher herself. You don’t see people on the subway reading Plato’s Republic, or Spinoza’s Ethics, or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; on the other hand, people who’d read Atlas Shrugged 30 years ago can still tell you exactly what principle Dagny Taggart was demonstrating by wearing a crude chain-link bracelet made of the newly invented Reardon Metal along with her diamonds and other priceless jewelry.

In particular, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (Signet; $8.99 each), which continue to sell about 400,000 copies every year, are meticulous dramatizations of Rand’s philosophy, in which each character embodies one or some of her principles, or the opposite of those principles.

What were those principles? Essentially, her philosophy, objectivism, was a fierce individualism: ethical, political, and economic. The objectivist ethics were Reason, Purpose, and Self-Esteem. And Rand believed the only system that could make those values possible in practice was capitalism.

Rand’s capitalism was a social/political framework that respected as sacred the rights to life and property but set no other limits on freedom of trade. "When I say 'capitalism,'” she wrote, “I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism – with a separation of economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as a separation of state and church.”

That last definition comes from her book, The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, $7.99). “Selfishness” is “the rational concern with one’s own interests.” Selfishness is moral – the “good” that John Galt went on strike to protect, against the immorality of altruism, or selflessness, which had not only turned mankind’s value system upside-down but made it impracticable as well. Who among us can truly claim to be selfless?

And here is where the confusion begins, or at least where I like to think it begins. Rand was nothing if not provocative, and most of the time that served her well. As a rhetorical tool, provocation can startle people into thinking in new ways, out of the narrow tracks their minds are accustomed to running along in. But sometimes it can backfire. When Rand described objectivism as a philosophy of “selfishness” (rather than using the more neutral term “self-interest”), I think she invited people to link her with Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers, John Rigas of Adelphia Communications, and various other indicted, unindicted, and convicted cheaters at corporations including AOL Time Warner, Arthur Andersen, Enron, Global Crossing, Rite Aid, and Tyco International.

And that is how you get misinterpretations that bypass the comical and go straight to the absurd: witness the scene in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing when the young, idealistic protagonist, Baby, tries to talk Robby, a college student summering as a waiter at a Catskill mountain resort, into paying for an abortion for the young staffer he’s impregnated:

Baby: “You can’t just leave her …”

Robby: “You’ve got to learn that some people count and some people don’t. [He takes a copy of The Fountainhead from his back pocket and hands it to her.] Read it. It’s a book you’ll enjoy. But make sure you return it. I have notes in the margins.”

So who was Ayn Rand? Did she really think, like Robby (and apparently Worldcom’s Mr. Ebbers) that “some people count and some people don’t”? By “free and unregulated capitalism,” did she mean the ends justified any means?

There are very few certainties I can say I’ve maintained consistently since adolescence, but Rand’s ethics have been an anchor for me. Her heroes were and are my models (though I was inconsolable when Dagny ended up with the too-perfect John Galt instead of the much more lovable Hank Reardon). And yet I often hear Rand’s philosophy of “selfishness” used to explain the worst abuses of man by man or by corporate entity.

Rand died in 1982, but she left behind a philosophical movement and a designated “philosophical heir” (who is also her literary executor), Dr. Leonard Peikoff. I called him and asked him to clarify Rand’s thinking about the term “selfishness.”

Peikoff, now in his late 70s, has been studying and teaching objectivism for upwards of 50 years and had a lot to say:

“Selfishness is living by your own mind and for your own sake, neither sacrificing yourself to others nor others to yourself,” he said. “So, if you take that step by step: ‘By your own mind’ means you live by your own productive work, you support yourself, you come to your own conclusions by your own independent judgment. That is your tool of gaining values: your own mind.

“This happens on the emotional as well as the physical level,” Peikoff said. “Love is selfish; love is gaining your pleasure from being with the other person because of the values they represent to you. And it has to be your values and your pleasure in order to be your love.

“The same principle would apply to everyone. You can deal with others and should deal with them when there is mutual consent and by process of trade. You want something from them, they want something from you; you agree voluntarily: that’s perfectly selfish.

“On the other hand, if you steal from him or he from you, that violates the principle of self-sustaining independence; it violates the principles of selfishness.”
Then a purely “selfish” corporation or CEO, I suggested to Peikoff, would never lie, cheat, or steal. Rand’s capitalism was about trading value for value. It was never about getting something for nothing.

“Right,” Peikoff said, adding that in the view of objectivists, pure capitalism has never actually existed in this country – or anywhere else, for that matter. “People don’t understand that we do not have capitalism now. We have a bastard mixture: some market controls, some total control, some fascist controls where you have the pretense of private property – we have the whole bastardized stew.”

Peikoff maintains that it is actually government regulations – or what he calls “statist controls” – that open the door to corruption. But the greatest threat to this society, he insisted, is not and has never been the large corporations. It is big government with its ever-increasing regulations, particularly as it becomes ever more entangled with big religion.

“For a long time the trend of America has been toward increasing statism, increasing big government. Now the question is: Who is going to rule that big state? At one point in the 20th century people were afraid it would be communism. But the collapse of communism [and other secular totalitarianisms] has shown its bankruptcy.

“On the other hand, there is one powerful force that is becoming ascendant now, that says in answer to the skeptics, ‘We know the answers, we know the ethics, we know where to go,’ and that’s the fundamentalist Christ-ians, who clearly want their religion to be the decisive factor in the running of this country.”

Given Peikoff’s views, I asked him which political party he feels most aligned with.

“Speaking for myself only, if I had to choose I would always choose a Democrat over a Republican,” because, he said, it is in the Republican Party that fundamentalist Christians have found a home. The Democrats “stand for nothing; they don’t do anything when they get in office. Whereas when the Republicans get in office it’s always a disaster.”

Objectivists don’t always vote “pro-business” Republican, then?

“The Institute is not allowed to take a political stance because it’s a non-profit institution. So I can only speak for myself. But I may say there were a lot of objectivists who voted for Bush, which I consider disgraceful. I considered that a total betrayal of their alleged philosophy.”

Dr. Peikoff’s views on all subjects, like Rand’s, were extreme, uncompromising, and that’s as it should be, because Rand believed that one never compromised one’s convictions. There were areas we discussed in which I have little expertise, but I know that I read Ayn Rand right the first time when I understood John Galt and Rand’s other heroes as the arch-enemies of the likes of Bernie Ebbers. And I believe Rand would have embraced the sentence my daughter read to me, when I called to ask her how Rand had affected her life. Jordan, now 26, did not choose a sentence from The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, which she had not reread for several years; what came to her mind was a quote from Martin Luther King that she’d seen on the Internet earlier that day: "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’ "

“Exactly,” I said to Jordan (of whom I was especially proud at that moment). “And if you are a CEO of Worldcom, then you take care of that organization as if you were Michelangelo and that organization is the Sistine Chapel, and it will last forever, and it will honor you and everyone in it forever. And if you do that, there will be no dishonor to it, and it will do no harm, and that corporation will be a work of art.”

“Yes, if people behave that way,” Jordan said. “You can apply that to your own life, and it makes a difference, even if it makes only a little bit of a difference. Because when I go to work, I am a very competent person in my work, and it does make a difference.”

***

Nan Goldberg has written about books and authors for the New York Observer, Salon.com, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, Book magazine, the New York Post, the Newark Star-Ledger, and other publications. She recently moved to Saco, Maine, where she is working on a novel.

RECOMMENDED READING:

FICTION:

Beat Generation, a play by Jack Kerouac; Thunder’s Mouth Press, 112 pp., $18: There’s a great story attached to the publication of this previously undiscovered drama: The only copy in existence was found earlier this year in a warehouse in New Jersey, 36 years after the death of Kerouac, by Kerouac’s agent Sterling Lord. Is it any good? I dunno. If you love Kerouac you’ll love it; if you don’t you won’t. But in the literary world, when a find like this occurs, it hardly matters if it’s any good. It’s like an archeologist finding a shard of pottery. Who cares if it’s beautiful? It’s authentic.

The March, by E.L. Doctorow; Random House, 384 pp., $25.95: Doctorow, author of The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and World’s Fair, leaves his beloved New York for this fictional retelling of Sherman’s brutal pillaging of Georgia and the Carolinas at the end of the Civil War.

Crawl Space, by Edie Meidav; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 445 pp., $26: A French Nazi collaborator escapes just before his sentencing, only to encounter another form of justice.

The Wake, by Margo Glantz; Curbstone Press; 123 pp., $14 (paperback original): Nora Garcia, a cellist, returns to the Mexican village she has not visited in many years to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, a famous pianist.

The Amphora Project, by William Kotzwinkle; Grove/Atlantic, 352 pp., $23: The outrageously imaginative author of E.T., The Midnight Examiner, and Fata Morgana has written a sort of space opera about an intergalactic race to unlock the hidden secret of immortality.

NON-FICTION:

Beethoven: The Universal Composer, by Edmund Morris; HarperCollins, 256 pp., $21.95: As difficult a man as he was brilliant a composer, Beethoven is brought to life by Morris, the author of three presidential biographies.

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pp., $26: A fascinating blend of journalism and analysis, first of what led to the war in Iraq, then eyewitness descriptions of the consequences on the ground, by the brilliant New Yorker writer.

A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, edited by Thomas Cushman; University of Calif. Press, 372 pp., $21.95: The title speaks for itself; it contains essays by Christopher Hitchens, Adam Michnik, Paul Berman, Ian Buruma, and others. I recommend you read this and The Assassins’ Gate for a full perspective on Iraq.

***

Home

Written permission of the publisher must be obtainedbefore any of the contents of this newspaper, in whole or in part, can be reproduced or redistributed.