My Problem with Ayn Rand

I remember reading, and enjoying, Ayn Rand's novels when I was a teenager. As a creative genius myself, it was easy to identify with her creative genius characters. And, like them, I found it hard to fit in to a social environment that prized conformity.

However, some years later, I learned she was an idol of the Libertarians. I was deeply puzzled, since that movement strikes me as hopelessly muddled and unrealistic. Libertarians appear to believe that people, left to their own devices, will act out of enlightened self-interest and shape society into a utopia. And I found it difficult to understand the connection between the works that I had read and this reactionary, just-short-of-anarchist political philosophy.

This past week I was again subjected to a social situation that reminded me strongly of The Fountainhead. A group of community members are looking for a scapegoat, and as the strongest contributor in their domain of dissatisfaction, I'm directly in the cross-hairs. The other obvious scapegoat has departed the scene, leaving behind a vacuum that appears to have sucked me in.

Scapegoating is an inherently small-minded activity. It's an attempt to solve a problem through destruction, when (pretty much across the board) a constructive solution is what's actually needed. So it's incredibly easy, in this situation, to understand Ayn Rand's frustration with the way small-minded individuals band together to destroy anyone who's competent enough to step into a leadership role.

But I also gained some insight, this time around, into the discrepancy between Ayn Rand's writing and the Libertarian belief system.

In a third person novel, the author invites the reader to step into the shoes of her protagonist and identify with him. So Ayn Rand, in writing The Fountainhead, is inviting everyone who reads her to imagine themselves as a misunderstood and persecuted creative genius. In so doing, readers also imagine that the world would be dramatically improved if they were simply freed from the misguided constraints imposed on them by smaller-minded peers, and allowed to soar.

But there's a problem with that logic. One I hadn't noticed before, even though it's obvious in retrospect. And that problem is that creative geniuses are few and far between. I happen to be one of them in real life: I'm dramatically more competent than the vast majority of my peers at pretty much every intellectual task I tackle. And all my life I've been plagued by people who couldn't stand that fact about me, and who've tried to take me down in any way they could.

But Libertarians imagine that everyone is such a genius, and would rise to that zone of competence if left to their own devices. Which simply isn't true. The majority of humanity is capable of literacy at around an eighth grade level, and more than that is beyond their ability. Readers of Ayn Rand lie on the high side of average intelligence: The Fountainhead is, after all, a tome. But even most of them aren't capable of anything approaching the level of functioning her genius protagonists have mastered.

So what we're left with is a political philosophy that's based on a statistical fallacy. Which is, quite simply, a conflation of the average with the exception case that lies three standard deviations above it.

Humanity, left to its own devices without organizational structures, would not self-organize to a genius level of functioning. It would settle to the mean. And the mean are the exact same small-minded individuals Ayn Rand was warning us about.