On the 15th of April 2011, the movie Atlas Shrugged Part 1 was released in a limited number of theaters. Atlas Shrugged is the first part in a purported trilogy of forthcoming movies based on novelist Ayn Rand’s book of the same name. Part 2 and 3 are still stated to be in production and will see release sometime in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The movie Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is the brainchild of John Aglialoro, a self-proclaimed follower of Rand’s philosophy: objectivism. Mr. Aglialoro, CEO of Cybex International and a self-made millionaire, optioned Mrs. Rand’s magnus opus for $1 million in 1992 and launched its development independently. (Timpane, 2011) Believing it was necessary to get Mrs. Rand’s message out to a new generation of individuals and also achieving a personal goal of visualizing a movie of one of his favorite books, Mr. Aglialoro was arguably obsessive with his movie’s inception. What would or could cause a man to devote 19 years of his life and an exorbitant amount of money into a project adapting a novel from 1957? Is he mad or is there a sane reason behind such devotion? What is objectivism and is it relevant today?
To begin to talk about objectivism one must first start on its creator: Ayn Rand. Mrs. Rand was born as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia to a bourgeois family of non-practicing Jews. Her father was a successful pharmacist that ran his own business. During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he saw the entirety of his professional accomplishments confiscated by the state. This caused Ayn’s family to move to the Crimea, where Ayn finished high school. They returned to Saint Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, where due to the revolution women and Jews were allowed to enter the state university. She enrolled in Petrograd State University, majoring in history. Shortly before graduating, Rand was purged from the university along with 4,000 other bourgeois students. When a group of visiting Western scientists took notice and complained to the Communists, Ayn and other third year students were allowed to be reinstated. She graduated from Petrograd State University in October 1924. A year later, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, Illinois. Due to tightening US immigration laws, Rand had to convince the US embassy that she would not abuse her visa and stay in America. She stated to them that she was engaged to a Russian man, loved him deeply and would return to marry him. In reality, she decided never to return to Russia and even planned going into Mexico or Canada to await permanent status when her visa expired. Her mother Anna is said to have sold the last of the family jewelry to fund Ayn‘s trip, most of which was long ago bartered for food during years of communist-induced famine. Ayn traveled by ship to America. She stayed with her extended family in Chicago for six months, one relative of whom owned a movie theater. Through a film distributor, that relative was able to secure a letter of introduction for Ayn and her extended family raised $100 to pay for Ayn’s trip to Hollywood. Ayn’s goal in Hollywood was to become a screenwriter. Letter of introduction in hand, she was turned away at Paramount Pictures, the employment office telling her no screenwriting jobs were available. Allegedly, while waiting at the Paramount front gate Rand had a chance encounter with Cecil B. DeMille. When asked what she was doing here, Rand told DeMille her story and the director invited her to a backstage tour of his movie set. This tour lasted for a week and culminated in a job as an extra and eventually a place to stay at the Hollywood Studio Club, where DeMille’s wife sat on the board of directors. Ayn changed from being an extra to a script reader. Rand married an actor, Frank O’Connor, in 1929 and tried to get work as a writer. Her big break came in 1932 when she sold her first screenplay “Red Pawn” to Universal Pictures. She also had a stage play “Night of January 16th” produced in Hollywood and Broadway that same year. She published “We the Living” and the novella “Anthem”, before hitting her first major success with “The Fountainhead” in 1943. The Fountainhead introduced some of the concepts that would later become her philosophy of objectivism. While working in Hollywood on a screen adaptation of The Fountainhead, Rand began writing what would become her greatest achievement in fiction “Atlas Shrugged”. Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. (A Brief Boigraphy of Ayn Rand) It was a best-seller for seven months and ended up selling more than a million copies after five years. It ensured Rand’s financial security and established her next role as a public philosopher. After Atlas Shrugged, Rand mainly worked on books espousing her objectivism and conducted many speaking engagements across the country. With her husband’s death on Nov 9, 1979 (my birthday coincidentally), Ayn began to become somewhat depressed. Her last work before passing away in March 1982 was an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged into a screenplay for a television miniseries. At her funeral, many of her old colleagues were present, including Alan Greenspan. A floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign, much like her favorite lapel pin, was present as well. (Ayn Rand) She was 77.
So what exactly is objectivism? Simply put, objectivism is the promotion of individualism over collectivism. When explaining her philosophy to a group of Random House salesman prior to the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, one salesman asked Rand if she could explain her philosophy while standing on one foot. Rand stood on one leg and stated, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: capitalism.” (Heller, 2009) Rand posits the only moral purpose in one’s life should be rational self-interest. The ability of a man to do and become whatever he can in life on his own means without conflict from the collective: communism, fascism and socialism. She believed the only true free government was the one created in the United States, but expressed further that the only moral government is one that includes a laissez-faire economy, the complete and utter separation of the government and economy. The rights of the individual and the limit of that government are held above all else. Moreover, her objectivism is an all-inclusive philosophy that has a basis in ideas that are somewhat noble at first but in practice and at least in Rand’s very own fiction are heartless. Case in point, Rand abhorred the classical character of Robin Hood. Anyone stealing from another individual that worked hard to achieve all his material wealth was considered by Rand as morally evil. She took it further though to imply spreading that wealth to the “moochers” is also morally evil. Her character in Atlas Shrugged, the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold, is the polar opposite of Robin Hood. He seizes relief ships sent from the United States to Europe with the intent of giving back payments of gold to the creative people it was taken from. He steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Altruism, Rand thought, was akin to suicide.
Recently a resurgence has occurred in the popularity of Ayn Rand’s writings. Atlas Shrugged stills sells 150,000 copies annually, it sold 500,000 in 2009, and it is currently number 50 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Its ideas have struck a chord with an audience today. Pushed by deposed Fox News television icon Glenn Beck in June 2010, it has become a favorite must-read novel of the Tea Party and political libertarians. Signs stating “I am John Galt” or “Who is John Galt”, a main protagonist in Atlas Shrugged, are known to show up at Tea Party meetings and rallies. In a nation split into those wanting more federal regulation of Wall Street and those that wish to keep federal interaction with the economy minute in scope, the scenarios put forth by Rand could be construed as a reality that is just around the corner. Will the government reach a point of social economic control? Is socialized medicine the end of the American way of life as we know it? Will we become France? These are the types of questions that way heavily on the mind of people that want smaller government.
So does the present-day world have any current underpinnings of Rand’s dystopian novel? The answer I believe is no. Not just to take out an easy target, but to iterate the irrelevance of a philosophy so far removed from the socio-economic landscape of the modern world; Rand’s philosophy is dangerously stuck in the past. The money that is made nowadays is far from what even the richest of individuals were making in the decades of her life. CEO pay, for instance, has increased from a ratio of 42 to 1 of the average worker salary to 300 to 1 in 2004. The middle class continues to dwindle and the gap between rich and poor grows wider. The old adage is true, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” To ally oneself to a wholly ethnocentric view of “moochers and looters” versus us, breaks the totatlity of our economic system into a black and white world. This is absolutely untrue. There are shades of grey everywhere. Objectivism and moreover the situation in Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is nothing more than masturbatory fantasy for a select group of selfish intellectuals. Who in their right mind, believes that they are so important to this world that they can never be replaced? If all of the nation’s most industrious minds refused to continue to innovate would our world stop? The answer again is no. There are too many talented workers and lower level individuals that I believe would step up to the challenge; people that would never have the opportunity to do so normally. Anybody thinking they wouldn’t be easily replaced is wallowing in their own arrogance. There will always be somebody willing to do the work you refuse to do. I believe objectivism was created by a heavy-handed and disassociated person living in her own little bubble. Much like the creation of Fox News in a sea of liberal news channels, objectivism is the eventual antithesis of Rand’s childhood growing up in a communist world. For those that enjoy analogies: objectivism is to communism as Fox News is to MSNBC. They are extremes at both ends of the social spectrum and in my eyes any extreme is dangerous. One of the most important flaws of objectivism is the inability to take the simple human behavior of greed into account. The same greed that causes any economic bubble to burst and the same one that caused our Great Recession. In no way, can the primary goal of acquiring wealth be separated from the baseline of greed it implies. And while Rand never states acquiring wealth as a goal in objectivism, the warping of her philosophy have led many of her followers to believe it is the only goal to strive for.
Compassion above all else is the most important moral one should have and hold high. Compassion upon looking at one’s fellow man not as a looter or moocher but as a human being. A human being with aspirations and dreams just like yourself. Altruism in and of itself is not suicide. President Obama once said that it was our capability to have compassion for one another that defined us as human beings. I believe in this thought. I must maintain my faith in humanity. The soulless pursuit of money cannot be looked to as a moral standard. If everyone cared for only themselves, doctors would stop saving people’s lives, police officers would not answer 911 calls, firefighters would not save people from burning buildings. Extended families, relatives and legendary directors would not have the compassion in their hearts to help an immigrant in her time of need; to provide her the chance of a lifetime and become somebody that eventually considered those types of altruistic acts of kindness as morally evil.
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