The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [24]
It was in this state of economic preparedness that I first encountered Atlas Shrugged by the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand when I was a senior at Pepperdine University. I was unfamiliar with the book and the author, and I was not a big reader of fiction, but I managed to drag myself through the first hundred pages until I was finally hooked. Millions of readers have managed the hurdle themselves, and her followers boast that a survey of books that “made a difference in readers’ lives” in 1991 conducted by the Library of Congress and Book of the Month Club found that Atlas Shrugged was rated second only to the Bible (although it appears that the “survey” was more of a promotional campaign to entice readers to purchase copies of books carried by the Book of the Month Club).4 Rand’s popularity and influence continue to this day. In 2009, on the heels of the trillion-dollar bailout with its accompanying program of government intervention into the free market that could have been ripped from the pages of Atlas, readers turned to Rand as never before. Tea parties posterized Atlas with such memorable Randenalia as “Atlas is Shrugging” “Who is John Galt?” and the über-cool “The Name is Galt. John Galt.” Sales of Atlas approached half a million copies that year alone, putting it in competition for sales with the top new novels of the year—not bad for a half-century-old thousand-plus-page novel chockablock with lengthy speeches about philosophy, metaphysics, economics, politics, and even sex and money.5
What is the appeal of Rand’s characters and her plotlines that makes people want to read her books and inveigle others to do so as well? It is, I suspect, because in this postmodern age of moral relativism Ayn Rand stood for something clearly, unequivocally, unreservedly, and with passion. Her characters are Homo economicus on steroids: ultra-rational, utility-maximizing, freely choosing übermensches. According to Rand’s recent biographer Jennifer Burns in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, the ultimate appeal of Rand is her almost messianic vision of the world: “Rand intended her books to be a sort of scripture, and for all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that make them timeless.”6 Indeed, even though Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, which she said is grounded in four central tenets—objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism—the pull of her gravity comes out of her passion for life and values.
Of course, the shortcomings of Rand and her movement were not lost to my skeptical scrutiny. In my 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I devoted a chapter to the cultlike following that developed around Rand (“The Unlikeliest Cult in History,” I called it), in an attempt to show that extremism of any kind, even the sort that eschews cultish behavior, can become irrational. Many of the characteristics of a cult, in fact, seemed to fit what the followers of Objectivism believed, most notably veneration of the leader, belief in the inerrancy and omniscience of the leader, and commitment to the absolute truth and absolute morality as defined by the belief system. To wit, I cited the description of Rand’s inner circle by Nathaniel Branden—Rand’s chosen intellectual heir—in which he listed the other central tenets (besides the four above) to which followers