The Sandbox

I think everyone who has ever been seduced by the childish pleasures of Ayn Rand should, when they are old enough to understand it, read “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett. The book is hilarious, light-hearted, and a complete indictment of the Atlas Shrugged fantasy.

The Ayn Rand hero is a classic re-write of the Nietzchian Uber-man, fettered by society.  But, in the fashion of the time, natural selection has become the religion that validates her uber-capitalist.  Her conclusion is in contrast to the real lessons of natural selection, of course.  The idea that there is a pure, competitve field in which the Uber-man thrives is an edenic fantasy.  Humankind rose out of its natural eco-niche primarily as a result of cooperation and society.  Otherwise we’d be a bunch of big-headed tool-making snacks for the much bigger, faster predators that would continue to dominate.  But we cooperate, share knowledge, protect and educate the young.  Thus we’ve spread over the world and flattened landscapes.  Ayn Rand’s Uber-man might resent the rest of us, but he’d get eaten by something, sooner or later, if we didn’t exist.

“It’s simply a chair” she said. She was thin, kind of an angry hippy, but clean-skinned and sharp-eyed. Wearing a headband. But her philosophy was Ayn Rand, an appaling mix of pop psychology, social darwinism, and “greed is good” evangelicalism. What did it mean that “our philosophy is that this table, it’s really just a table?”

It means, I guess, that the obvious is the obvious, and that if something seems true to me, it must be true. Such a philosophy, if it had been enforced more thoroughly, would have prevented almost every scientific and social discovery in the history of mankind. Which, arguably, could be a good thing.