Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [198]
Perhaps the purest, least rhetorical, and hardest-hitting public statement of her views appeared in a March 1964 Playboy interview. With Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 would publish Future Shock, asking the questions, the text crackled with maverick intelligence. Explaining her choice of the dollar sign as an emblem in Atlas Shrugged and a trademark decoration on her person, she said, “As the symbol of the currency of a free country, [it] is the symbol of a free mind.” Asked whether she thought of the cross as a symbol of torture, as she had been quoted as saying, she replied, “I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. … That is torture.” Tacitly critiquing Nietzsche, she explained that Objectivist ethics required not only that a man not sacrifice himself to others but also, and equally importantly, that he not sacrifice others to himself. The interview, which, in a departure from usual magazine procedure, Rand was permitted to edit and rewrite, reached two and a half million people, mostly men, and brought countless new readers to her novels and nonfiction.
Her speeches and essays were eventually collected in half a dozen slim volumes that have never been out of print. In the spring of 1961, Cerf published the first of these, For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. The material wasn’t new: it was a collection of monologues from her four novels, including Kira’s speech to Andrei on the value of individual life in We the Living and John Galt’s radio address, along with a title essay based on the lecture she had given at Yale. The essay is a mixture of historical parable and madcap fairy tale. In it, she attributed the suffering of mankind to two eternally recurring archetypes she called Attila and the Witch Doctor. At different points in history, she wrote, a Witch Doctor might present himself as a shaman, a priest, a popular demagogue, a medicine man, a professor, or a self-serving literary critic who weakened a nation’s spirit by dispensing self-sacrificial bromides and promises of a better life to come. After the Witch Doctor had prepared the way with sermons, Attila, or the tyrant, swept in to pillage and enslave the faithful. And this had been the pattern in every age and culture until the establishment of the American Constitution. The essay announced her almost fanatical crusade against the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom for the rest of her life she blamed for the end of the Enlightenment and the triumph of moral relativism over reason. (Henceforth, she would refer to Kant as a monster and “the chief destroyer of the modern world.”)
To stop the nightmare, she offered a new morality, that of the “Producer,” and a “New Intellectual,” modeled on the philosophical businessmen she had tried and failed to mold in the post-Willkie 1940s. If only everyone would embrace reason, self-reliance, and unregulated markets, she implied, the West could usher in an age of freedom, individualism, productivity, wealth, and peace—and do so without relying on religious faith or the use of force except in self-defense, Rand’s basic formula for defeating tyranny.
By now, a new book by Ayn Rand, even a small book, created a stir. Newsweek sent a reporter to inform readers about a typical night at NBI. One hundred or so “new intellectuals stalked solemnly into [an assembly room at] the Hotel Roosevelt,” NBI’s new and larger New York meeting place, wrote the Newsweek reporter. These well-groomed men and women listened “raptly,” for three hours, to Branden “droning” on, before Rand arrived onstage to answer questions, when the energy level rose with a rush. She didn’t coddle the audience. When a brash young man asked a question the reporter couldn’t hear, she labeled him “a cheap fraud” and moved on. Her admirers remained calm, the reporter wrote, taking it for granted that anyone who misconstrued or disagreed with her ideas “must be motivated by villainy alone.” He likened her to the early twentieth-century preacher Aimee Semple McPherson in her