Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [154]
Reminiscing years later, Reisman, by then a distinguished economist at Pepperdine University, recalled that his hero Rothbard sat silently and appeared amused as the younger man experienced what the older one had undergone two years earlier: the grim impossibility of winning an argument with Ayn Rand. As the novelist’s delighted admirers looked on, Reisman attempted to defend the Misesean proposition that people’s values—meaning their judgments and choices—are necessarily subjective, changeable, and often arbitrary. Rand would have none of it. She lured him into admitting the objective fact of his own existence—as Branden had tried to do with Alan Greenspan—then pointed out that human life requires definite, particular resources and actions to keep it going. Those were values. From there, she captured all the points. “No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t budge her,” Reisman recalled when he was in his seventies. “She had an answer and an explanation for everything, including a preference for vanilla ice cream over chocolate ice cream.” He never forgot her method of arguing. With irrefutable logic, she transformed what he thought were self-evident propositions into absurdities. Adding to the impression made by her logic was the sheer force of her personality. At some junctures, he became so “frightened of her driving me into some other position I did not want to take that I did not even allow myself to recognize what I really believed.” When the discussion took a detour into physics, Reisman hypothesized that, since no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, there must be empty pockets of space, or voids, when objects move from one position to another. That was “worse than anything a Communist could have said!” she thundered. Later, he understood her to have meant that the “existence of nonexistence” was the kind of conceptual gibberish that historically set the stage for priests and tyrants to brainwash people. At the time, however, debating with her was “comparable to being in the presence of the voice of Judgment on Judgment Day.” For Reisman, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but that didn’t keep him from becoming one of her loyal lieutenants after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
The party broke up at five thirty in the morning. The next week, other members of the Circle Bastiat came along to support their friends in open competition. The evening ended in defeat, and, for Rothbard, in deflation. After that, he decided it was best to keep his distance from the first lady of reason. In a letter to his friend Richard Cornuelle, he reflected on her blind spots and also her charisma. She offered a brilliant argument for the importance of ethics in a time and place that badly underrated them, he noted, and communicated “great truths that we have literally never heard in the classroom.” But she was also humorless, puritanical, and gave herself far too much credit for the originality of her ideas. “While I agreed (or thought I agreed) mainly with her position, I found myself rooting like hell for George [Reisman], who found himself under a typical Randian barrage, according to which anyone who is not now or soon will be a one-hundred-percent Randian Rationalist is an ‘enemy’ and an ‘objective believer in death and destruction’ as well as crazy.” In a leap of logic and intuition, Rothbard divined a flaw in her approach that others wouldn’t discover for a decade, if at all: the one-party nature of her philosophical system. The famous individualist “actually denies all individuality whatsoever!” he exclaimed to Cornuelle. Given her rejection of the relevance of family background, temperament, and personal preference in the formation of values and ideas, a Randian utopia “would be a place where all men are identical, in their souls if not in their personal appearance.” This was an eerily precise forecast of the busy uniformity of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged, where everyone agrees