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Posted September 25, 2002
Ayn Rand's moral-political fables have always struck me as just a little bit off the beam. The Fountainhead, in many ways an impressive book, is also more than a little goofy. Rand paints a picture of society quite at variance with the one in which we live. In it, architecture becomes the rightful domain of lone geniuses expressing their artistic integrity.
Architects in the real world, of course, design to the demand and specifications of clients both fickle and indulgent. Blowing up a building one has made is not the act a reasonable man. Roark's speech at the end of the book, aiming to demonstrate his fearsome integrity, has little or nothing to do with the law, or with ordinary morality. It is not reasonable. It would move no sensible jury to aquit.
And after reading the book, questions haunted me: Why did Howard Roark laugh when naked at the edge of the cliff? Did he crack a smile the rest of the book? What does this say about Rand's philosophy of humor, and her deep suspsicion of people (such as her evil Elsworth Toohey) who like to make light of things? I'd have to reread the book to answer the questions to my satisfaction.
Some questions must remain unanswered.
At this point, I should write something about
but I've never been able to read these tomes. I've heard a lot about them from friends, but nothing they've said inspires me to read books that strike me as
respectively. Furthermore, Rand's philosophy, as dished out in her several nonfiction books, warned me off the fiction. I've already read enough John Galt speeches, thank you. And Rand's gross misinterpretations of altruists, hippies, anarchists, and anyone who dared disagree with her often bordered on the lunatic. Spending a lot of time on her long melodramas does not seem like a good use of my time. I'd rather read Anthony Trollope. Or George Meredith. Or if Russian-American novelists are the order of the day, the great Vladimir Nabokov.
Still, a lot of people find inspiration in her peculiar fables. My question is: do they do so for sensible reasons?
Not usually. And, alas, not recently. There's just too much foolishness surrounding the ideas and fictions of Ayn Rand.
A good case in point can be found in a recent USA Today article. The whole thing is risible, really, and I found myself siding with the anti-Randian business guru quoted in the article, not with any of the more libertarian Rand fans.
But ignore, if you can, the bulk of the article. Let's cut to the final section, wherein Del Jones, the article's author, hopes to set this Atlas Shrugged obsession in the best possible light. Unlike earlier in the article, no contrary opinion gets play. So the reader must provide it:
Atlas Shrugged devotees say America's wealth builders will never go on strike the way Rand described, but they say a quasistrike is underway.It's not organized, but it's happening,Joyce says.
For example, since the Enron scandal, CEOs are refusing to sit on boards of other companies, thereby withholding their business savvy from the market. About 60% of executives are turning down offers to serve on boards vs. 25% a year ago, Christian says.
Outplacement firms Challenger Gray & Christmas and Drake Beam Morin have released fresh studies showing that CEOs are resigning and retiring as never before.
Well, is this a quasistrike,
or crooked businessmen seeing that the jig is up?
Surely the most obvious interpretation for this change of business habit is not a noble bowing out, an Atlas-worthy quasistrike.
It is the crooked running scared.
And perhaps good men are running scared, too. They would not unreasonably fear being associated with shady business practices that, as mere board members, they would be unlikely to have much control over.
Why is this? From what I can tell, board membership rarely entails much actual work. A company gets good publicity for having a respected member of the community on its board. The board member gets more than a few bones thrown in his or her direction. But most board members have less-than-intimate working relationships with the companies they oversee.
Not a few are simply looking for the best deals, which in this context means getting as much monetary reward while investing as little thought and study into the business savvy
they provide.
But now the tide has turned. Now, with awesome revelations of corporate chicanery, and with board members proven to be working in collusion with thieves, prosecution of board members is not out of the question. And even barring prosecution, the reputation of said board members can go down the toilet pretty fast.
So of course some of these corporate-board whores (often on the boards of dozens of enterprises) decide to aspire to a little more virtue than
before. To maximize their profit, they have to limit their exposure to risk — that is, to what most of us call getting caught.
And once again the political fables of Ayn Rand have proven poor instruction, leaving her readers at sea when interpreting events in the real world.
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