Whaddaya mean “go wrong?”
Warlords and tribute go together like Adam and Eve, PB & J, or bacon & eggs.
Yeah, Randianism is an attractive philosophy for everyone who imagines that they too could be heroically competent, self-sufficient and high-achieving. It’s an American ideal going back at least as far as the hardy pioneer or the self-made man. And there really are a small percentage of people who could do that; but the vast majority of us limp along as best we can with substantial help, and an unfortunate few can’t even do that.
Here’s a cite to a short run of posts that might be of interest to the posters here:
Right. And everyone who also smugly imagines that most other people are just too stupid and inefficient and incompetent to be able to successfully impose their will on a heroically competent, self-sufficient and high-achieving person.
I don’t think we’ve yet seen the classic “Objectivist Jerky” quote applied in this thread, so here you go:
I’d argue there are none who can do that.
There is nobody who can be truly self-sufficient in the Randian mold. Anybody who manages to do something resembling self-sufficiency will be relying on either a minimal level of pre-existing support/capital or some minimal set of manufactured goods produced by somebody else (or produce their own from materials others have mined, grown, or gathered). Or they will be self-sufficiently scratching out a living literally from dirt while mostly naked.
To accomplish it, they would need serfs also of the Randian mold, i.e. the ones contentedly working the fields and factories to provide the acknowledged exalted ones with that minimal set of goods and services to achieve such “self” sufficiency. The idea that some high functioning individual can be set down in another country where they don’t even speak the language with $5 and the clothes on his back and through sheer gumption come out a millionaire in a few years has always been a fantasy.
Highly competent, highly intelligent, and highly motivated people do exist. The importance of such people in the larger economy is up for debate. What’s certain is that such people don’t care for being lectured by people like Ayn Rand about how they should think and act, and they don’t need philosophical excuses to do what they want.
Andrew Carnegie comes close. He literally was an immigrant coming from impoverished circumstances who started out doing pauper labor and ended up being one the richest people in history. Granted he both had advantages and lived in one of the few times and places where that sort of success story was even possible.
Sure, close but still does not match the stereotype. His family did well enough early in his life to be able to borrow money to cross the sea after they fell on hard times. Still needed somebody to help out.
Yes, highly competent and motivated people do exist (Carnegie as an example), but the Randian stereotype of such doesn’t. She dealt with archetypes. Worse, unrealistic archetypes that nonetheless many people with clear shortcomings who admire her writing somehow believe themselves to be exemplars of
But even he (who is definitely a rare example of a genuine “rags to riches” story) heavily depended on the government subsidies to get rich. The railroads he made his fortune in were massively supported by the government, they weren’t just plucky entrepreneurs making industry happen without evil government imposition.
He was also very, very lucky. For every Carnegie, there were at least 1,000 young men just as smart, talented and driven as he was who didn’t get rich. Many of them died young trying.
Yes; “no man is an island” and all that. Real people don’t prosper all on their own. They have help; friends, allies, benefactors and employees (note that the whole “self made man” stereotype completely ignores the contributions of employees). Carnegie didn’t build his business empire with nothing but his own two hands.
I’m reminded of how the late Tip O’Neill had a great rhetorical trick he used at speeches. He’d ask everyone who thought they were “self made” to stand up, then start naming government programs and telling anyone who benefited from them to sit back down. By the time he was done, there was never anyone still standing.
Yes. Thing is, nobody remembers the men who work hard, take risks then die poor which creates the illusion that hard work and risk taking are the path to success.
Not to attack you, but I spent much of my childhood in Zimbabwe, unsupervised, with perhaps a companion dog doing long distance hikes. I walked over 12km once, aged about 8, through rough bush, just because I felt like it. Ended up on the farm of of a friend of my mother, who immediately called my mum.
My mother, rightly, gave me hell about it.
I know that the limits you are referring to are broad society, and the limits I am referring to are “Mum’s rules”
My own kids also have some freedom, but “Mum’s rules” play heavily.
We’ve had a thread or three on the story of “The Giving Tree”, and how sheer masochistic self-sacrifice to selfish gits isn’t necessarily a good thing. So how do you find a healthy balance between screw-you-losers Randianism and The Giving Tree?
That’s what we’re all working on, isn’t it? More or less winging it as we go along. Some people claim to know they have THE solution but it has yet to actually appear in any human society of size.
And that’s the key part. Many, if not most, -isms work with a sufficiently small group of people. We’re still essentially tribalistic monkeys and can figure out how to live together as long as there aren’t too many of us. Dunbar’s number (whether 150 or somewhat smaller/larger) describes us surprisingly well. No political philosophy has ever really successfully scaled to billions of people, though some have been better than others. One thing is true - objectivism is certainly not one of the better attempts
Also, enthusiasm is important. Many attempts at creating small political or religious with oddball systems have worked short term, because people can make almost any system work if they try hard enough*. Thing is, if they get bigger or last long enough for children to grow up, they inevitably end up with a growing population of people who aren’t True Believers and therefore aren’t strongly motivated to paper over the flaws in the system. That weeds out a lot of them, as many such experimental communities just quietly disintegrate at that point.
- Which IMHO is why Randism/libertarianism doesn’t succeed even in small communities, because people who think absolute selfishness is a virtue are rotten at cooperation. They aren’t even going to seriously try to make it work, because that would mean caring for something larger than themselves.
But yes; functioning real world societies always end up as an ad-hoc mishmash, not some pure instantiation of an ideology. People keep trying to build such “pure” societies to be sure, but they either soon collapse (one of the classic failure modes of revolutions) or their leaders break down and start changing things away from the purity of their founder’s vision just to keep things running. Communist China for example is still going strong, but it doesn’t look that much like what Mao had in mind.
So I think the more I read this comments, the more I think that people don’t really understand Ayn Rand, or maybe my interpretation is wrong.
-
Rand’s philosophy does not require everyone to be “self sufficient” or “self made”. At least several of the major characters in Atlas Shrugged were born into wealthy families.
-
The core tenet of her philosophy seems to be more about maximizing freedom and personal choice rather than maximizing wealth. Ideally maximizing freedom would result in greater prosperity as the free market tends to build wealth faster than centralized planning.
-
No one said everyone will get rich in a Randian society. The guy sweeping Hank Reardon’s steel mill doesn’t contribute as much as the engineers so he doesn’t get paid as much. If he wants to get paid more, learn more lucrative skills, start a factory sweeping business, invent a more efficient broom, see if a competitor will pay more, buy some shares in Reardon Steel or whatever. But he has no inherent right to say “your business is doing well, give me more money.”
This is where her philosophy really breaks down. Her definition of “freedom” is to leave the people who already have it alone and not help those born in circumstances that don’t give them much freedom and it rejects out of hand the idea that the government can help level the playing field to try and give more people access to freedom and prosperity. If you’re born black in America, or have disability, sucks to be you. This is a person who hated the idea of buses being wheelchair accessible.
Except that there’s no connection between how well people are paid and how much they contribute; it’s close to the opposite in fact, the people who contribute the least get paid the most.
And to be blunt? If compassion and fairness aren’t valid concerns, then that guy also has no particular reason to not force those wealthier than they are to hand over their money, at gunpoint if necessary.
Randism tries to have it both ways, it dismisses the foundations of morality as unimportant, while expecting people to still adhere to one specific moral tenet; “don’t touch the money of your betters”. But it’s foolish to expect that you can convince people to abandon compassion and fairness, then not try to prey upon you for whatever they can get.
A society composed of nothing but Randians would eat itself, probably literally.
Nobody who promotes this concept for the real world thinks they’ll be the sweeper. They think they’ll start the business, invent a new broom, or some other way to stop being the sweeper who makes virtually nothing.
The dirty trick of the world is… someone is going to be the sweeper. Someone is going to scrub the toilets, empty the fryer, put boxes in a truck, we can’t all be the entrepreneur, the inventor, or the magnate. For the millions of people who will absolutely be in this position, Rand’s freedom is worthless.
I’m reminded of one of George Orwell’s essays, “Down The Mine”. A committed socialist, Orwell wrote that it disturbed him that even in a socialist workers’ utopia, somebody would still have to mine coal– a job that Orwell admitted would flat-out kill him if he had to do it.