Rand, Ayn – Capitalism

It would never occur to a person of self-esteem and independent judgment that one’s “identity” is a thing to be gained from or determined by others. To a person untouched by self-doubt, the wails heard today about the anguish of modern man as he confronts the question “Who am I?” are incomprehensible. But in the light of the above, the wailing becomes more intelligible. It is the cry of social metaphysicians who no longer know which authorities to obey—and who are moaning that it is someone’s duty to herd them to a sense of self, that “The System” must provide them with self-esteem.

a The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1965.

This is the psychological root of the modern intellectuals’ mystique of the Middle Ages, of the dazed longing for that style of life—and of the massive evasion concerning the actual conditions of existence during that period. The Middle Ages represents the social metaphysician’s unconfessed dream: a system in which his dread of independence and self-responsibility is proclaimed to be a virtue and is made a social imperative.

When—in any age—a man attempts to evade the responsibility of intellectual independence, and to derive his sense of identity from “belonging,” he pays a deadly price in terms of the sabotaging of his mental processes thereafter. The degree to which a man substitutes the judgment of others for his own, failing to look at reality directly, is the degree to which his mental processes are alienated from reality. He functions not by means of concepts, but by means of memorized cue-words, i.e., learned sounds associated with certain contexts and situations, but lacking authentic cognitive content for their user. This is the unidentified, unrecognized phenomenon that prompts unthinking people today to grant validity to the charge that modern man lives “too abstractly,” “too intellectually,” and that he needs to “get back to nature.” They sense dimly that they are out of contact with reality, that something is wrong with their grasp of the world around them. But they accept an entirely fallacious interpretation of their problem. The truth is not that they are lost among “abstractions,” but that they have failed to discover the nature and proper use of abstractions; they are not lost among concepts, they are lost among cue-words. They are cut off from reality not because they attempt to grasp it too intellectually, but because they attempt to grasp it only as seen by others; they attempt to grasp it second-hand. And they move through an unreal world of verbal rituals, mouthing the slogans and phrases they hear repeated by others, falsely imagining that those empty words are concepts, and never apprehending the proper use of then- conceptual faculty, never learning what first-hand, conceptual knowledge consists of. Then they are ready for the Zen Buddhist who tells them that the solution to their alienation from reality is to empty their mind of all thought and sit for an hour, cross-legged, contemplating the pattern of veins on a leaf.

It is a well-known psychological fact that when men are neurotically anxious, when they suffer from feelings of dread for which they cannot account, they often attempt to make their plight more tolerable by directing their fear at some external object: they seek to persuade themselves that their fear is a rational response to the threat of germs, or the possible appearance of burglars, or the danger of lightning, or the brain-controlling radiations of Martians. The process by which men decide that the cause of their alienation is capitalism, is not dissimilar.

There are reasons, however, why capitalism is the target for their projection and rationalization.

The alienated man is fleeing from the responsibility of a volitional (i.e., self-directing) consciousness: the freedom to think or not to think, to initiate a process of reason or to evade it, is a burden he longs to escape. But since this freedom is inherent in his nature as man, there is no escape from it; hence his guilt and anxiety when he abandons reason and sight in favor of feelings and blindness. But there is another level on which man confronts the issue of freedom: the existential or social level—and here escape is possible. Political freedom is not a metaphysical given: it has to be achieved—hence it can be rejected. The psychological root of the revolt against freedom in one’s existence, is the revolt against freedom in one’s consciousness. The root of the revolt against self-responsibility in action is the revolt against self-direction in thought. The man who does not want to think, does not want to bear responsibility for the consequences of his actions nor for his own life.

It is appropriate, in this connection, to quote a passage from Who Is Ayn Rand? in which I discuss the similarity of the attacks against capitalism launched by nineteenth-century medievalists and socialists:

In the writings of both medievalists and socialists, one can observe the unmistakable longing for a society in which man’s existence will be automatically guaranteed to him—that is, in which man will not have to bear responsibility for his own survival. Both camps project their ideal society as one characterized by that which they call “harmony,” by freedom from rapid change or challenge or the exacting demands of competition; a society in which each must do his prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one will face the necessity of making choices and decisions that will crucially affect his life and future; in which the question of what one has or has hot earned, and does or does not deserve, will not come up; in which rewards will not be tied to achievement and in which someone’s benevolence will guarantee that one need never bear the consequences of one’s errors. The failure of capitalism to conform to what may be termed this pastoral view of existence, is essential to the medievalists’ and socialists’ indictment of a free society. It is not a Garden of Eden that capitalism offers men.82

Today, of course, capitalism has largely been abandoned in favor of a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of freedom and statism—moving steadily in the direction of increasing statism. Today, we are far closer to the “ideal society” of the socialists than when Marx first wrote of the worker’s “alienation.” Yet with every advance of collectivism, the cries concerning man’s alienation grow louder. The problem, we are told, is getting worse. In communist countries, when such criticisms are allowed to be voiced, some commentators are beginning to complain that the Marxist solution to the worker’s alienation has failed, that man under communism is still alienated, that the “new harmony” with nature and one’s fellow men has not come.

It didn’t come to the medieval serf or guildsman, either— the propaganda of commentators such as Erich Fromm notwithstanding.

Man cannot escape from his nature, and if he establishes a social system which is inimical to the requirements of his nature—a system which forbids him to function as a rational, independent being—psychological and physical disaster is the result

A free society, of course, cannot automatically guarantee the mental well-being of all its members. Freedom is not a sufficient condition to assure man’s proper fulfillment, but it is a necessary condition. And capitalism—laissez-faire capitalism—is the only system which provides that condition.

The problem of alienation is not metaphysical; it is not man’s natural fate, never to be escaped, like some sort of Original Sin; it is a disease. It is not the consequence of capitalism or industrialism or “bigness”—and it cannot be legislated out of existence by the abolition of property rights. The problem of alienation is psycho-epistemological: it pertains to how man chooses to use his own consciousness. It is the product of man’s revolt against thinking—which means: against reality.

If a man defaults on the responsibility of seeking knowledge, choosing values and setting goals—if this is the sphere he surrenders to the authority of others—how is he to escape the feeling that the universe is closed to him? It is. By his own choice.

■Branden, Who U Ayn Rand?, pp. 15-16.

The proper answer to the question—

And how am I to face the odds of man’s bedevilment and God’s? I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made

—is: Why didn’t you?

24. REQUIEM FOR MAN

BY AYN RAND

In advocating capitalism, I have said and stressed for years that capitalism is incompatible with altruism and mysticism. Those who chose to doubt that the issue is “either-or,” have now heard it from the highest authority of the opposite side: Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical “Populorum Progressio” (“On the Development of Peoples”) is an unusual document: it reads as if a long-repressed emotion broke out into the open, past the barrier of carefully measured, cautiously calculated sentences, with the hissing pressure of centuries of silence. The sentences are full of contradictions; the emotion is consistent

The encyclical is the manifesto of an impassioned hatred for capitalism; but its evil is much more profound and its target is more than mere politics. It is written in terms of a mystic-altruist “sense of life.” A sense of life is the subconscious equivalent of metaphysics: a pre-conceptual, emotionally integrated appraisal of man’s nature and of his relationship to existence. To a mystic-altruist sense of life, words are mere approximations; hence the encyclical’s tone of evasion. But what is eloquently revealing is the nature of that which is being evaded.

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