The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [25]
Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth. No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns. No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.7
Nevertheless, any discussion of Rand’s followers or her salacious personal life must carry this disclaimer: Criticism of the founder of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy. By most accounts, Sir Isaac Newton was a narcissistic, misogynistic, egocentric curmudgeon, and yet his theories about light, gravity, and the structure of the cosmos stand on their own and would be no more or less true if he were a saintly gentleman. Rand’s critique of communism may have been energized and animated by the horrific experiences she and her family endured under the brutal Communist regime in Russia (including the confiscation of her father’s business), but her criticisms of communism would be just as true or false (they’re true) had she been raised a farm girl in Iowa.
Most of what Rand taught either gelled with what I already believed or reinforced the belief pathway I had already started down, so I have no problem identifying myself as a fan of Ayn Rand and a proponent of her work, as long as it is clear that where scientific data conflict with political and economic philosophy, I am going with the data. For example, I am most troubled by Rand’s theory of human nature as wholly selfish and competitive, defined in Atlas through the famous “oath” pronounced by the novel’s heroes: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have now demonstrated unequivocally that humans have a dual nature of being selfish, competitive, and greedy as well as altruistic, cooperative and charitable. And in The Science of Good and Evil and The Mind of the Market, I built a case for evolutionary ethics and evolutionary economics that most Randians would find quite palatable with free market economics. Reading Rand, and absorbing the logic of her case for economic freedom and political liberty—she referred to herself as a “radical for capitalism”—led me to the extensive body of work on the science of markets and economies and the philosophy of liberty and freedom, all of which resonated deeply with my personality and temperament. I am a radical for liberty.
One source of influence on my political and economic thought was a retired physicist named Andrew Galambos, who taught private courses through his own Free Enterprise Institute. He called his field volitional science, and I took the introductory course, V-50. It was a combination of philosophy of science, economics, politics, and history, the likes of which I never heard in college. This was free market capitalism on performance-enhancing drugs. It was also a very black-and-white worldview in which Adam Smith is good, Karl Marx is bad; individualism is good, collectivism is bad; free economies are good, mixed economies are bad. Rand advocated limited government, but even that was too much for Galambos, whose theory outlined a society in which everything would be privatized until the government simply withers away. How could this work? It is based on Galambos’s definition of freedom as “the societal condition that exists when every individual has full (i.e. 100%) control over his own property.” Thus, a free society is one where “anyone may do anything that he pleases—with no exceptions—so long as his actions affect only his own property; he may do nothing which affects the property of another without obtaining consent of its owner.” Galambos identified three types of property: primordial (one’s life),