Ayn Rand for Pragmatists

Defending capitalism in a world enamored with collectivism

Note: This is the first article in a two-part series on the life and thought of Ayn Rand. To watch or listen to a discussion of her work I had with Alex Epstein, see here. For part two, see here.

From the time she published her novels, it has been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes are unrealistic. When the psychologist Albert Ellis made this point in a 1967 debate with the author, Rand responded, “Am I unreal? Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”

I love this exchange because it captures the boldness that made Rand a force of nature. Given her life story, it is easy to see how she could have come to see herself through a romantic lens. Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of 21, during a brief window of time when it was still possible for those living under communism to get visas to visit abroad. She ended up writing in her non-native language and becoming arguably the most influential novelist of her era, with a cult of followers who considered her an oracle with deep and penetrating insights into philosophy, science, economics, politics, and art.

Through her own life experiences and fiction, Rand taught the world to dream big. With a fury that could only have come from growing up as a unique talent stuck in a totalitarian nightmare, she told us that heroes could be real, and that the progress of civilization could be understood as a romantic struggle in which beauty, truth, and the rational faculty of man have triumphed over weakness, ugliness, and the bland hateful conformity of the mob. Not only that, but we still have a role to play in this one great historical drama, despite how boring policy differences might sometimes look on the surface.

Trying to find transcendental meaning through politics usually ends in disaster. But that’s because most people who take that route have false beliefs about the way the world works, and are therefore attracted to statist and authoritarian ideas. What Rand provided to the world was the joy of a Manichaean political movement – the moral certitude, the connection with others engaged in a sacred war, enemies to hate – married to the liberal ideals that have moved humanity forward. The tensions inherent in such a project worked themselves out in the incredible story of Rand’s personal life, which saw her become the leader of a movement that was riven with sex scandals, factional fighting, and the denunciation of heretics, eerily reminiscent of the social dynamics within communist movements that she spent her life denouncing.

Yet rather than seeing what happened to Rand’s immediate circle as discrediting her ideas, the better lesson is to understand that truth and what most people find satisfying to believe are often in conflict, so it is no wonder that one of the twentieth century’s most successful proponents of anti-totalitarian ideas ended up becoming in certain ways similar to her enemies. There seems to be a weak or even negative correlation between how good it feels to believe in a political idea and how connected to reality it is. One of my main missions in life is to find a way to address this unfortunate aspect of human nature, and it was Rand who originally provided insights into how this might be done. If it is true she ended up going too far in her dogmatism and intolerance of dissent, she still has much to teach us in a world where defenders of capitalism have almost universally not gone far enough in standing up for what they believe is true, to the detriment of the pro-liberty movement.

To say that friends of liberty have been moral squishes over the last century or more would be a radical understatement. I’ve seen this, having spent much of my life in academia. Of that time, attending the University of Chicago Law School was easily the most intellectually rewarding experience. At our 2010 orientation, Michael Schill, the then dean, told us that we were at a place where there was “no such thing as political correctness.” As he explained, there were probably more Democrats than Republicans on the faculty, but conservative ideas were still much more represented than they were elsewhere. There was a norm that if you had something to say, it’s fine, as long as you could defend it.

The idea that political correctness did not exist was an exaggeration, but pressure to conform to left-wing ideas and values, particularly on sensitive topics of race and sex, mostly came from the students rather than the faculty or administration. I’m not sure how much things have changed since; it became a news story when my old First Amendment professor Geoffrey Stone announced he would no longer say the n-word in 2019. But when I was there, a white professor could use whatever word he wanted in its proper context.

Beyond free-flowing racial slurs, the majority of our first-year curriculum was centered around Law and Economics, an intellectual movement that began as a critique of left-wing orthodoxy from a perspective that took markets seriously. We were constantly taught to think in terms of concepts like unintended consequences, moral hazard, and misaligned incentives. Seminars were taught by figures like Richard Posner, both a pioneer of the movement and the most cited judge in American history.

The economic perspective permeated all intellectual life throughout my time at Chicago. Commonly, lectures and class discussions would center around the question of “efficiency versus values.” Efficiency on any particular issue was usually synonymous with the laissez-faire position. Values meant something like racial equity or an unquantifiable concern like privacy. It sometimes meant individual liberty too, but never in the economic sense. So free speech and the right to a fair trial were values, but not necessarily the right to sell one’s own labor for below a wage set by the government or run a business according to one’s convictions and beliefs. We were taught there was a point in American history when judges did take economic rights as seriously as other rights, and that is referred to as the Lochner era. Some professors would give Straussian defenses of the doctrines of that time, but they were generally taught to be outdated.

While I was glad to be in an academic environment where pro-market ideas got a fair hearing, the efficiency versus values framing always left me unsettled. Here we had capitalism, a system that both gives primacy to the rights of the individual and also produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead of being celebrated and championed, facilitating and allowing free markets was treated as a kind of dirty task society must perform in order to achieve outcomes we want. Business and the operation of markets were like cleaning toilets. Everyone likes the end result, but the process of how you get there is unpleasant, unromantic if not embarrassing.

I came to realize that this efficiency versus values dialectic exists outside of the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago Law School. In the world of empirical reality, the pro-market position continues to win. East and West Germany, North and South Korea have provided our most famous natural experiments. But even in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve seen the success of America over Europe, population and capital flowing from blue to red states within the US, and the UAE establishing the closest thing the world has to a utopia based on the free flow of goods and labor. There is no evidence that we are anywhere near the optimum amount of economic freedom anywhere in the world. Housing, the major market that has failed most in first world nations, is clearly dysfunctional due to too much government regulations.

And yet, economic collectivism not only survives in the United States and across the world, but is in certain ways growing stronger. We are told by populists on both sides of the political spectrum that neoliberalism has failed and is the cause of all our problems, from the degradation of the environment to low birth rates. Such arguments are made without much in the way of reasonable comparisons to any possible alternative. There is nothing new in calls for, say, more restrictions on free trade. Such ideas have been tried, they’ve failed, and their contemporary proponents have not made any theoretical breakthroughs or pointed to compelling empirical data that can explain why we should accept them now. Populist arguments are heavy on emotion and appeals to solidarity based on identity, whether we are talking about wokeness on the left or demagogic populism on the right.

Capitalism has theory and reality on its side, but has failed in the war for hearts and minds. David Broockman reports that when you get a focus group together, they’ll agree on the need for new housing but reconsider when they find out that someone might actually make money in the process of getting there. Private property and economic liberty remain respected mostly due to the inertia of our institutions, and a realization among elites that indulging too much in anti-market bias is bound to lead to disastrous results. Markets discipline politicians. Yet, if humanity is going to reach its full potential, or even avoid always being one crisis or blow of the intellectual winds away from disastrous policies, we are going to need to move beyond a grudging semi-acceptance of capitalism.

In looking for a figure to help with this project, a natural place to start is Ayn Rand, arguably the most prominent defender of free markets since Adam Smith. In a 1991 survey of Americans asking which books had changed their lives, Atlas Shrugged (1957) came in second only to the Bible. A different survey seven years later ranked that novel and The Fountainhead (1943) numbers one and two. Atlas Shrugged has sold over ten million copies, which includes hundreds of thousands a year throughout the 2010s. Rand continues to have devoted acolytes, most notably at the Ayn Rand Institute, which looks after her legacy and promotes her work.

Over the last few months, I’ve become intimately familiar with Rand’s thought. This has involved reading, and in the case of the last one rereading, all four of her published works of fiction: We the Living (1936), Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. I’ve also read all of her published nonfiction books and studied her life story. This essay is the first in a two-part series explaining what we can take away from Rand’s life and work.

Here, I start with what I think is her most important philosophical contribution, which was a desperately needed moral defense of capitalism, in addition to her views on selfishness and altruism. The second part will be on the teachings of Ayn Rand as a source of self-help and human flourishing at the individual level, which encompasses her attitudes towards relationships and sex. Academic philosophers have been able to find a good number of epistemological leaps and unwarranted assumptions in her work. Here’s a critique by Robert Nozick if you’re into that sort of thing. Nonetheless, I’d argue that she in the end provides a useful framework both to think clearly about moral and political issues, and also to live a psychologically healthy life.

Capitalism Needs a Moral Defense

Rand’s case for capitalism begins with a focus on individual rights. She rejects the notion that these rights are endowed by a creator or government. The only legitimate role of the state is to protect them, which includes having police forces and a military to defend against threats from abroad. The following passage from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged reflects both her thought and style of argumentation.

You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim — the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A — and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work.

As a note: while you usually wouldn’t rely on what is said by fictional characters to explain an author’s philosophy, in Rand’s case she explicitly says that these figures are meant to embody her ideas. She even put together a book called For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, which was composed of one essay and excerpts from her fiction. An aspect of Rand’s political and philosophical writing that I find charming is that she often quotes her fictional characters as authorities, though this obviously wouldn’t pass muster in an academic philosophy journal.

So man by his rational nature uses reason, works, and produces. He has the right to keep what he has created, and enter into whatever kinds of relationships he wants as long as he does not violate the rights, similarly narrowly defined, of others.

Rand correctly understood that there is an intimate relationship between man’s nature and the superior outcomes produced by capitalism relative to any other system. Scholars and intellectuals who take evolution seriously have often quipped that the theory of Marxism is correct, it just applies to the wrong species. If we were ants, it might work. From a Randian perspective, it would be absurd to damn humanity for not living by a moral code more suited for certain species of insects. There is no such thing as “right theory, wrong species,” since a theory can only be true or false in relation to the form of life to which it is meant to apply.

Rand criticizes conservatives who point to man’s supposed depravity in order to argue in favor of capitalism, noting that their logic implies that people are simply not good enough for dictatorship. The corollary of this view is that it is moral to enslave the virtuous, but not scoundrels. Since this is obviously absurd, we would be better off doing away with such arguments, and unapologetically championing the right of man to use his mind and better himself, if he does so in a way that respects the rights of others.

Rand argues that 1) capitalism is the morally correct method of social organization; and 2) capitalism leads to the greatest good for the greatest number. However, she repeatedly and vehemently rejects the idea that we should defend capitalism on the basis of (2), and stresses that (1) is what really matters. Her heroes, mostly businessmen and inventors, are consistently and proudly indifferent to the impact their actions will have on their wider society. In Atlas Shrugged, railroad executive Dagny Taggert is interviewing a young scientist named Quentin Daniels. The exchange proceeds as follows.

“So you’re doing research work of your own?”

“That’s right.”

“For what purpose?”

“For my own pleasure.”

“What do you intend to do, if you discover something of scientific importance or commercial value? Do you intend to put it to some public use?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Haven’t you any desire to be of service to humanity?”

“I don’t talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don’t think you do, either.”

She laughed. “I think we’ll get along together, you and I.”

Defenders of capitalism usually want the world to know that it lifts all boats and is ultimately responsible for human progress. Rand agrees that this is true, but demands no one stress these points, except as an afterthought. As she writes in her essay “The Obliteration of Capitalism,”

There are the businessmen who spend fortunes on ideological ads, allegedly in defense of capitalism, which assure the public that all but a tiny fraction of an industry’s income goes to labor (wages), to government (taxes), etc., with these shares represented as big chunks in full-color process, and, lost among them, an apologetic little sliver is marked “2½ percent” and labeled “profits.”

There is the display of charts and models, in a hallway of the New York Stock Exchange, presenting the achievements of free enterprise and captioned: “The People’s Capitalism.”

Since none of these attempts can succeed in disguising the nature of capitalism nor in degrading it to the level of an altruistic stockyard, their sole result is to convince the public that capitalism hides some evil secret which imbues its alleged defenders with such an aura of abject guilt and hypocrisy. But, in fact, the secret they are struggling to hide is capitalism’s essence and greatest virtue: that it is a system based on the recognition of individual rights— on man’s right to exist (and to work) for his own sake — not on the altruistic view of man as a sacrificial animal. Thus it is capitalism’s virtue that the public is urged — by such defenders — to regard as evil, and it is altruism that all their efforts help to reinforce and reaffirm as the standard of the good.

The same point is made by steel magnate Hank Rearden when he is brought before a tribunal for being too good at business and not going along with the plans of statists.

I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work — my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good— that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices — that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation — as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own — I would refuse. [Emphasis added] I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

So capitalism is the best system, and the one you should adopt even if you’re a utilitarian, but you definitely should not be a utilitarian, so the point is moot. Despite Rand’s contention that we should judge the morality of capitalism exclusively by starting with the observation that man’s nature is to engage in rational thought and then go through a process of inductive reasoning, she doesn’t seem to take her own advice. One of the most important goals of Atlas Shrugged is to illustrate the catastrophic results of statism. When government officials try to interfere in the market, they create perverse incentives, oppress the productive for the benefit of the connected and incompetent, and ultimately destroy the ability of individuals to create wealth. She also wrote numerous articles arguing for the free market position in largely practical terms on topics such as the distribution of radio airwaves and antitrust law.

Rand looking fabulous in 1943

How does one reconcile the idea that capitalism should not be defended on practical grounds, with her obvious interest in doing just that? I think if Rand were here, she would say there is something in the essence of the nature of man that creates harmony between self-interest and the common good, or at least the common good as measured by the ultimate well-being of rational and honorable men, who are the only ones we should really care about. When man lives in harmony with his own innate character, he puts his mind towards conquering nature and engaging in voluntary transactions rather than dominating others. This means that we get as a byproduct a system in which most can flourish. When Rand plays the role of economic historian and public policy analyst, then, she is only demonstrating the soundness of her epistemological and moral outlook.

The specter of complete collapse runs through much of Rand’s work, both fiction and non-fiction. But her numerous declarations that a mixed economy could not survive indefinitely and would eventually tip one way or the other have not held up well. A muddled middle in which businessmen create amazing products and services and gripe about taxes, when they’re not virtue signalling by giving their wealth away, is apparently sustainable over the long run. Her tendency to go overboard in absolutist thinking on this, and with regards to other ideas, is obvious in retrospect. The need to defend capitalism remains, but the issue is one of degrees, not about getting on one road or another that will inevitably lead to either previously unimagined glories or a complete collapse.

At the same time, major events that have essentially validated her worldview have been much more numerous over the last half century or so: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the catch up growth of many of the formerly enslaved parts of that empire and its satellites; increasing living standards in China and much of the rest of the third world when they have turned away from central planning; the continuing failures of socialism essentially everywhere it has been tried; the strength of the United States, particularly in economically freer red states; and the success of what can be considered radical capitalist experiments in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Gulf Arab states. Rand was particularly far sighted on environmentalism, which already in 1971 she saw as an anti-human movement advocating in essence deindustrialization. She also correctly pointed out the environment was becoming an excuse to stamp out economic freedom just as the old justification for central planning, that it would make people wealthier, had been discredited.

The way I’ve tended to think about the issue of how capitalism relates to morality is to take what might be considered the opposite of Rand’s approach. Start with the vision of what kind of society we want. Overwhelming evidence suggests that free markets are the way to achieve prosperity, which practically all humans claim to be in favor of. Given this, we can work backwards and champion the values that give capitalism a sound grounding in our culture. Rather than beginning with a discussion of the nature of man and what rights he has and then deriving the best economic system from there, we learn from theory and data and with that perspective construct the ways in which we should talk about morality. The fact that we cannot live up to the ideals of the more social insects should not be treated as a moral failure on the part of humanity.

Morality is a tool for man to live well and flourish, and the system of ethics that is consistent with capitalist values — rather than rivals like nationalism, religious piety, small-minded bigotry, and egalitarianism — is the one we should adopt. The concept of human nature is malleable enough to encompass the way of life of both the trader who wants to be left alone and the hunter-gatherer who looks with a suspicious eye towards any member of his band who accumulates too many resources. The values of the former, however, built the modern world, and provide the best hope for civilization to reach new heights. Egalitarian instincts are arguably just as much part of human nature as the tendency to work and trade. But so is rape, yet society doesn’t care how badly you want to force women to have sex with you against their will. The desire for a more equal distribution of income for its own sake even when getting to that point restricts freedom and makes everyone worse off should be treated similarly.

I feel that if Ayn Rand were sitting over my shoulder reading this, she would yell at me and say that I was being a psycho-epistemological coward. And this scares me a bit, because she had a hypnotic intensity that exercised a remarkable control over her followers when she was alive, and that continues to have an influence on people across the world from beyond the grave. For me, it’s impossible to spend time reading Rand and not hear her thick Russian accent, harsh and seductive, constantly judging me throughout the day.

Still, take the last sentence in the Galt passage above. I don’t know how the premise “if man is to live on earth,” leads to the statements about what it is right to do. One could just as easily say “if man is to live on earth, he must care for his fellow man.” This doesn’t sound any more true or false to me. When I hear someone talk in the language of individual rights, however, I know that he shares my moral commitments and ideas about how to improve the world. That’s good enough for me to declare that what he is saying is morally correct. But I still have the same trouble with Rand that I have with all proponents of natural rights, in that while I’m more than willing to use the language of morality in everyday life, I cannot grant moral truths the same status as provable empirical claims.

Randian Heroes and Villains are Both Fake, But the Villains Are More Useful

Despite declaring to Albert Ellis that she was herself a Randian hero, in The Romantic Manifesto, Rand explicitly rejects the idea that art needs to be realistic. Any work is by necessity selective about what parts of reality it portrays in its pedagogical function. It can be judged by the degree to which it calls forth what is noble in man, or alternatively degrades him. A picture of an attractive woman with a prominent mole, for example, is telling you that beauty is an illusion and perhaps not worth aspiring towards, a message that Rand disapproves of.

With that in mind, here she is describing the childhood of Francisco d’Anconia, one of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged.

Dagny and Eddie spent their winters trying to master some new skill, in order to astonish Francisco and beat him, for once. They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, “I think I get the idea. Let me try.” He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field…

It was when he inspected a complex system of pulleys which Francisco, aged twelve, had erected to make an elevator to the top of a rock; he was teaching Dagny and Eddie to dive from the rock into the Hudson. Francisco’s notes of calculations were still scattered about on the ground; her father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, “Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?” “Two years.” “Who taught you to do this?” “Oh, that’s just something I figured out.” She did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation.

He was both Babe Ruth and Isaac Newton! Ok, now this is funny.

Rand is even more entertaining in painting unflattering portraits of collectivists. Take this excerpt from The Fountainhead, where an intellectual named Ellsworth Toohey explains his philosophy in a speech that is my favorite from all of her works.

I’ll have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good. Peter, my poor old friend, I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known. I have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your soul. You’ve used people at least for the sake of what you could get from them for yourself, I want nothing for myself. I use people for the sake of what I can do to them. It’s my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery — without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle — and a total equality. The world of the future.

Rand understood that vivid heroes and villains help make lessons memorable. The last few centuries have shown that capitalism must compete in the marketplace of ideas primarily with economic leftism and nationalism. If supporters of free markets and classical liberalism are not going to be stomped under their feet, they must similarly give the world a compelling moral vision. I’ve argued that when we say people need meaning, what we primarily mean is that they need an enemy, and this is what Rand gives us perhaps more than anything else.

Peter Thiel famously said that “her villains were real, but her heroes were fake.” This aphorism has become a staple of right-wing Silicon Valley discourse. To me, both her villains and heroes are radically unrealistic, but the popularity of this quote demonstrates that people find it much easier to take political action based on a vision of fighting absolute depravity than standing up for unadulterated heroism. Even Rand herself found a lot more Tooheys than Reardens when she set out to apply her philosophy to the real world.

I’m not free of this vice. I think about Jeff Bezos’ remarkable revolution in logistics and how it has made humanity better off, and I can only appreciate that accomplishment in the abstract. It doesn’t fill me with overflowing joy. But when I think about Josh Hawley’s sneering face harassing airline executives for having limits on carry-on luggage, I feel like I could effortlessly write ten thousand words on how this kind of demagoguery must be destroyed. I’m not different than most people interested in politics in this respect, but my virtue is that I hate the right things: economic collectivists and other opponents of individual liberty, not foreigners, people who happen to have the wrong party affiliation, or successful businessmen.

No one is going to charge the barricades in order to fight for price theory, the law of unintended consequences, and public choice insights into regulatory capture. They will go to war against an Ellsworth Toohey, rubbing his hands together and dreaming of bringing down all that is beautiful and good. They’d also march under the banner of Hank Rearden if he actually existed, but I don’t think we can get him in a free society. In Rand’s novels, the heroes are individuals who are at the same time the smartest, best looking, most talented, hardest working, and most psychologically healthy. They also have the highest sense of personal honor and the soundest philosophies. Yet while I don’t doubt that there are positive correlations between many if not all of these traits, even the most impressive people I’ve known or read about have had glaring deficiencies in one or more of the areas that we care about.

When considering villains, surely there is some part of the left that hates success for its own sake. In the early 2000s, it was trendy to advocate to stop Walmart stores from opening, and today Amazon has emerged as a major villain for pulling off the miracle of logistics where the company can get almost any item in the world to your doorstep the next day at the push of a button. These are businesses that have by any reasonable measure made humanity better off. They have nonetheless been blamed for mistreating or underpaying their employees, yet they work for these firms voluntarily, meaning that the companies made them the best offer they could have gotten anywhere. If you feel bad for an Amazon employee, realize that if you were going to make a list of everyone in the world who might be to blame for their situation, Jeff Bezos should literally be the last person on it. In Matt Stoller’s BIG, the most important book of the modern antitrust movement, practically every business innovation that serves the public better than what came before, made by corporations that individuals are free to deal with or not, is treated as a moral crime if it puts less efficient firms out of business. This is as close to “good things are bad and bad things are good” as a philosophy that one is going to get.

Yet if I was trying to be as objective as possible and come up with a social science theory explaining why economic statism persists, I would put very little weight on the existence of Ellsworth Tooheys. People support big government primarily out of ignorance and misaligned incentives, in the sense that having views that sound socially desirable is more individually adaptive than having an accurate model of how the economy works, since one person’s preferences alone generally don’t matter in determining policy outcomes. And Toohey himself is, as I think Rand would admit, an exaggeration. The person among prominent politicians who comes closest to fitting the looter prototype is perhaps Elizabeth Warren, yet although I believe she is driven by hate and a desire to destroy, even in her worst moments I don’t think that she sits around thinking about her ultimate goal of creating a world of universal slavery.

But if the villains of today don’t rise to that level, it’s bad enough that they step into the public arena and make loud pronouncements about the way the world works based on nothing more than a desire to appeal to the mob. I recently saw an ad for a politician running in the next NYC mayoral race in which the candidate calls for rent control. There is no excuse for anyone in 2025 to believe that this is a rational way to deal with the problem of expensive housing. To assume such a person dreams of universal slavery is probably giving them too much credit. There more likely isn’t even the integrity of a coherent vision or the will to power that such a thing entails. Just the quest for status and a worldview that can only exist by relying on ignorant emotionality as a substitute for rational thought. If you want an example of similarly contemptible views on the right, behold the Nietzschean chuds.

Maybe this is an odd quirk of my personality, but I find Toohey and the other villains in Rand’s novels usually more sympathetic than many real life politicians. I suspect this is because I’ve tweaked my sense of hatred to be directed at the characteristics of economic leftists as they actually exist.

While Rand’s villains have the capacity to inspire, I think attempts to find real world equivalents of John Galt are bound to lead to disappointment. Outside of fiction, the only way to create the image of a hero worth dying for today is through a totalitarian system that exercises control over the flow of information. If Elon Musk was born two hundred years ago, perhaps all we would know about his life would be his amazing technological accomplishments and he’d be seen as a demigod. But today we’ve all scrolled his X account.

When it comes to villains, Josh Hawley seems closer to Ellsworth Toohey than any industrialist is to Francisco d’Anconia. Perhaps it helps to build up an Elon Musk — or even a Donald Trump — as a symbol to rally around, as long as the more intelligent among us remain realistic about such individuals. And we can certainly see Rand’s heroes as ideals to aspire towards, which also increases our capacity to appreciate what is great in other people. There are no Galts, but there are certainly individuals with Galt-like qualities.

Still, Rand’s modern acolytes are like most people who spend a lot of time thinking about politics in that the fuel that drives them is primarily the depravity of their enemies. Minds more enlightened than mine can perhaps forgo such indulgences and be motivated to do good out of a sense of universal benevolence alone. But the rest of us need to be taught who to hate.

Selfishness and Altruism as Word Games

In Rand’s defense of capitalism and her philosophy more generally, “selfishness” is good and “altruism” is bad. This might sound confusing, as it is clear that she doesn’t exactly use these terms in the same ways that most people do.

Luckily, in 1964 she published The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays that explain in great detail exactly what she means. If you’re like me, the first question you have upon noticing how Rand conceives of selfishness and altruism is whether you should lie, cheat, and steal whenever it is convenient. The answer is no. As she writes in the introduction to the book, what she means by selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests.”

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life — and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims.

So man can only be selfish if he acts within a code of morality. If he doesn’t, he is not selfish. In fact, if he follows Nietzsche, he’s just practicing another form of altruistic morality. This is a strange way to describe the life of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun! Sometimes she implies that actually, if you live by hurting others, it will only lead to your own demise.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them — so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.

This would imply that no dictator or criminal feels psychological contentment and dies happy. Indeed, in Rand’s novels, the heroes are living thrilling and ultimately satisfying lives, while the bad guys are constantly suffering from psychological anguish, with Toohey an arguable exception. It would be nice to think so, but I would guess most dictators are pretty happy, perhaps more so on average than the real life equivalents of Rand’s capitalist superheroes.

The idea that self-interest should drive people and they should not care about others is often proclaimed, but then somewhat walked back. At the beginning of the scene featuring the tribunal gathered to judge Hank Rearden mentioned above, there is the following exchange.

The eldest judge leaned forward across the table and his voice became suavely derisive: “You speak as if you were fighting for some sort of principle, Mr. Rearden, but what you’re actually fighting for is only your property, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course. I am fighting for my property. Do you know the kind of principle that represents?”

“You pose as a champion of freedom, but it’s only the freedom to make money that you’re after.”

“Yes, of course. All I want is the freedom to make money. Do you know what that freedom implies?”

“Surely, Mr. Rearden, you wouldn’t want your attitude to be misunderstood. You wouldn’t want to give support to the widespread impression that you are a man devoid of social conscience, who feels no concern for the welfare of his fellows and works for nothing but his own profit.”

“I work for nothing but my own profit. I earn it.”

So far Rearden seems like a socialist caricature of a selfish businessman. But then he goes on to explain that he actually has a code that he lives by.

I work for nothing but my own profit — which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage—and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with — the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and do it well.

So, to Rand, a capitalist is behaving selfishly and therefore virtuously when he engages in a normal market transaction, but not when he refuses to pay a worker the wage he agreed to or sells a diluted version of the product he is advertising.

In “The Ethics of Emergencies,” Rand explains that, why yes, you can inconvenience yourself to save a drowning man, and denounces the “psychopaths” who proclaim “that they are totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver (who is usually one of their own kind).” If a man pays to save his wife from a dangerous illness, his concern is “a rational part of one’s selfish interests.” So you should invest little in terms of time, money, or energy to help strangers, a lot to help those you love.

This fits well with most people’s understanding of common sense morality. Yet the one thing that distinguishes Rand is that while most people would probably be inclined to say that it’s actually admirable to, for example, donate all your money to starving children in Africa even if you’re not obliged to, she would denounce this as self-sacrifice. Rand would absolutely hate Effective Altruists.

What is the point of using “selfishness” and “altruism” in these ways? I talked about this with Don Watkins, a Rand expert, and he tells me that her point is that language needs to make a distinction between a man helping those he cares about, and him helping strangers or humanity in general. We use the words “altruism” and “sacrifice” in both situations, and Rand thinks it is important to distinguish between them. Saving a partner or raising a child she would call a “gain” or “investment.” I think here of evolutionary theorists, who use “altruism” in this broad sense to basically mean everything that involves helping another individual, regardless of whether they are a partner, kin, or complete stranger.

The more I think about it, the more sense this makes. We really don’t have terms that easily distinguish these different kinds of actions. We may say “sacrifice for kin” or “sacrifice for strangers,” but it’s still the same word, just with different modifiers. Imagine that there are three people.

1. Genghis Khan

2. Guy who does things for his children, family, and friends, but doesn’t help strangers

3. An Effective Altruist

In common, everyday language, we say (1) is selfish; and (2) and (3) are altruistic. Rand would say that only (2) is selfish, and (1) and (3) are engaging in different kinds of altruism. Both of these perspectives seem wrong to me. Ideally, language would distinguish between all three of these categories, because they differ in significant ways. Perhaps we can call (2) parochial altruism and (3) universalist altruism, but we’re still forced into using the same word in both cases. Yet to call both (1) and (3) altruism, as Rand does, seems to me even more confusing than not adequately distinguishing (2) and (3).

Moreover, Rand herself dedicated her life to spreading her ideas. I’m sure she’d say she was behaving selfishly because she was trying to help create the kind of world she wanted to live in, just as she told cadets at West Point that they were in her sense behaving selfishly when they signed up to fight for a free country. Yet similar things could be said of socialists! Rand simply liked people who fight for freedom and capitalism, and disliked those who dedicate their lives to other causes. This is fine with me, but one has to engage in mental gymnastics to say one category of activism is “selfish” and the other is “altruistic.”

We use language to create mental categories that help clarify the essence of important distinctions. There’s a recurring debate on whether Nazis should be considered “right” or “left,” which reflects a misunderstanding of the entire point of political labels. They’re not useful as part of a project to find out how various ideologies relate to some Platonic ideal. If you were going to make a Venn diagram with liberalism, Marxism, and fascism, you’d be able to find characteristics that any two of the three share. How an individual decides to classify the three ideologies depends on what exactly they are trying to understand or communicate about the world. As someone with liberal leanings, I would be inclined to emphasize what makes Nazism and communism both bad, which is their focus on the collective rather than the rights of the individual. If you’re a white nationalist, you’ll place communism and liberalism together in order to denounce them for not considering the importance of race. Neither of these perspectives is more correct than the other, though we could say that someone is factually mistaken about, say, the degree to which National Socialism was hostile to private property, or how much of the world can be understood as a zero sum struggle between social classes or races.

I think Rand’s approach to talking about selfishness and altruism is rooted in having a strong gut reaction to the assumptions, language, and logic that lead to Bolshevism or the New Deal – the product of a life spent escaping Soviet Russia by the skin of her teeth and then watching the rise of statism in her adopted homeland. People naturally do things for those they love; we don’t need to rely on a language that stresses altruism to get them to do so. Once you hear a politician talking about self-sacrifice and the greater good, however, it’s usually a pretty safe bet that he has a flawed understanding of human nature and will implement disastrous policies. By adopting a language of selfishness, we immunize ourselves against nationalism, socialism, and other schools of thought that stress individual sacrifice for the collective good, and which never even achieve the collective good as well as philosophies that stress the rights of individuals anyway.

This is demonstrated most clearly in Rand’s semi-autobiographical We the Living. The heroes of the novel, which takes place in the early years of the Soviet Union, crave the ability to control their own time and property. They seek liberation from not only the threat of prison camps, but the drudgery of poverty and the obligations imposed by a totalitarian government. These include waiting in line for bread and forced study sessions that are required in order to keep one’s job. The protagonists end up allergic to all talk of sacrificing their dreams or time on this earth for strangers. It’s similar to how a man living under a theocracy might become a militant atheist, when he perhaps would have had a laid-back attitude towards religion if he grew up in a country with the separation of church and state.

I’m generally sympathetic to this project. But Rand appears to have in effect recreated virtue ethics, demanding people live up to certain moral standards while rejecting both naive utilitarianism and Nietzschean egoism. Had she been writing in the mid-nineteenth century, there would have been no need to place so much emphasis on selfishness as a virtue. It was the rise of economic and national collectivism that called for an aesthetic that places the concerns and rights of the individual back on center stage.

The Last Enlightenment Philosopher

One clue indicating that this is the way to understand Rand’s philosophy is that she constantly praises the American Founding Fathers, while using a completely different moral language. In Atlas Shrugged, most if not all of the other countries of the world have succumbed to some form of socialism, while the United States remains the one nation for which there is any hope at all. As Francisco d’Anconia declares in his famous money speech,

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.

Yet the American Founders would undoubtably have been repulsed by the language Rand uses in discussing morality. To take one example, in The Federalist No. 20, Madison and Hamilton point to “selfish passions” as “responsible for the calamities brought on mankind.” The Founders on numerous occasions praised a “disinterested” concern for the common good.

To get at the difference, imagine a judge is hearing a dispute between two businessmen. He uses objective principles and a logic based on individual rights to reach a decision. Both Rand and the American Founders would agree he acted morally. But the Founders would say he acted in a virtuous and disinterested way, while Rand would insist that he was being rationally self-interested. If the judge took a bribe, Rand would deny he was acting selfishly, while the Founders, like practically all speakers of the English language of any era, would say that he did.

One might be tempted to dismiss Rand on these grounds, and look for defenses of individual rights that are not marred by language that can so easily lead to confusion. Yet I think we have to take seriously Rand’s success in propagating her views, and accept the fact that how ideas are sold and what ends up convincing people depends on the larger intellectual environment. A difference between Rand and intellectuals of the early Enlightenment is that while they both took on collectivism and government power, the nature of the enemy in each case was different. The American Founders came of age in an era where princes ruled through appeals to divinely anointed status, and fought wars with one another over slighted honor.

Enlightenment-era philosophers were motivated by the need to construct a moral basis for individuals coming together to resist savagery, whether in the form of Indian raiders or rapacious foreign powers, and also aristocrats who sought to maintain unearned privileges at the expense of the many. Today, absolutist dictators that justify their rule through brute strength pose little direct threat to the citizens of the most advanced countries of the world, and we are so obsessed with wiping out unearned privilege that this cause has distorted the missions of many if not most of our important institutions. The dangers to further progress come not from aristocrats or Indian raiders, but in the forms of faceless bureaucrats, demagogic politicians, lazy thinking, and an effeminate aversion to risk and change.

The underlying principles in favor of liberty might be the same, but it makes sense to adopt a different language and approach depending on whether one is facing off against the great Mohawk political leader Thayendanegea or Elizabeth Warren, who pretends to be an Indian for the affirmative action benefits.

Just as how a book must be translated into languages that potential readers can understand, ideas need to sometimes be repackaged in order to remain effective. Ayn Rand asks us to return to the principles of virtue ethics, individual liberty, and free markets. I’m sure that she would hate the idea of her work as a call to go back to Enlightenment values, without one accepting it as a brand new philosophy that is both objectively correct and the only hope for saving capitalism from its critics. If Ayn Rand were here today, she might hate me for not adopting every facet of her thought in its entirety, but would still grant me the freedom to take what I will as inspiration in the still continuing war against the same enemy.