I am tired of the followers of Ayn Rand using her so-called Objectivist philosophy to justify their being hateful, uncaring bastards to the rest of humanity. At a time like this, one must pullout the big guns to demonstrate how Un-American her philosophy is. In the Hagiology of American political thought, there is no bigger gun than Thomas Jefferson, although I admit it's like using a nuke to kill a gnat.

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Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Evil to Him That Thinks It)

By Richard Girard

"Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume14: page 140 ; 1904.

There are times when I get hold of a subject, and I simply cannot let go of it until I have said everything I can think of to say on the subject. And Ayn Rand's quasi-philosophy of Objectivism definitely has me in bulldog with bone mode.

The quote from Thomas Jefferson above is my starting point today. Our nation's third President was a true polymath: an expert on broad areas of knowledge from history to economics to botany to law to agronomy to politics to literature. JFK was correct when he stated at a dinner for Nobel laureates that it was the greatest collection of minds the White House had seen since Thomas Jefferson had dined alone. When Jefferson donated his library to the Library of Congress to help replace the one burned by the British in 1814, there were some 6200 volumes in that collection. And he had read them all.

"But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality."

Let us examine this statement and its implications.

Do human beings who are on their own have any rational system of morality to practice or maintain?

The answer to this is quite simple: no.

If they are completely on their own, human beings have one overriding purpose: survival. This is driven (according to neuroscience) by the reptilian amygdala, not by the rational forebrain. A single human being (for example, stranded on a desert isle) is not a human being: he is an animal, seeking to survive, by any means necessary.

If it is between two people, one hopes that the system is not of one dominating the other, but rather a system of equals with defined if not identical roles and responsibilities, where fairness and individual ability are taken into account. If it is a system of involuntary dominance, there is a very good chance that the dominating individual will wake up one morning alone or dead, since such relationships have a tendency to become abusive, or that in an act of anger the dominant will kill the submissive partner. Either way, we can see that in a system of dominance, what Jefferson would say today is that the boundaries of morality are broken, and this may have been where his own guilty conscience was at work at the thought of holding slaves. In Jefferson's defense, he never had the money to free his slaves, even his own illegitimate children. Under the laws of the Commonwealth, his former slaves would have had to leave Virginia immediately, as a condition of their manumission, or face torture as well as once again become slaves. Jefferson, a brilliant politician with a poor head for business, never had the money to pay for the resettlement of his freed slaves, as his fellow slave owner George Washington did in his will. Without resettlement money, any slave he freed would almost certainly have ended up slaves in another state sooner rather than later.

When we consider groups of three or more people, some sort of moral system becomes increasingly necessary (even inevitable), in direct proportion to the total number of people involved. The more rationally based and flexible a system is, and the more equitably that it is created, maintained, and enforced, the more likely that system will survive in the long term.

"Egoism, in a broader sense, has been... presented as the source of moral action. It has been said that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him on our own beast and bring him to the inn, because we receive ourselves pleasure from these acts... These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses... The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition; volume 14: page 141; 1904.

Scientists are just beginning to discover the inherent streak of democracy in many animals, carnivores and herbivores, which exist in a herd or pack structure. Historians and anthropologists are rediscovering the underlying democratic institutions of peoples as diverse as the Iroquois Confederacy, the Celts of pre-Roman Britain, and the Saxons.

Thom Hartmann in his book What Would Jefferson Do? looks at the Iroquois as well as the Celts of pre-Roman Britain and the Saxons of early England, and their democratic institutions, in Chapter 3, "People and Events That Influenced America's Founders." Using the Roman historian Tacitus, and the Eighteenth Century English historian Paul de Rapin Thoyras (who both Jefferson and Adams agreed was the source of English history most free of Royalist taint); Hartmann examines the balance of power that existed between the people and their leaders among the Celts and Saxons. He also looks at the influence the democratic Iroquois Confederacy had on our Constitution, most especially in the creation of three separate but equal branches of government.

In Chapter 7, "Democracy, Not Dominance, is the Way of Nature," Mr. Hartmann points out the increasing evidence that in herd and pack animals, decisions are made on a democratic basis by the pack or herd as a whole, not in a despotic fashion by the alpha animal.

This fact was first asserted by University of Sussex Professors Roper and Conradt in their paper "Group Decision-Making in Animals," published in the January 9, 2003 edition of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Subsequent studies are throwing more and more evidence behind their conclusions.

Let me add my two cents worth here. Anyone who has seen a flock of geese take off from a lake in a non-emergency situation can confirm Professor Roper and Conradt's hypothesis. First, four or five geese take off in one direction, then a few minutes later they come back from a different direction (having gained altitude), and they are joined by four or five more geese from the flock. This is repeated several times until the "scout geese" are headed in a direction that the rest of the flock agrees with, and then the rest of the flock takes off after them, and the flock "disappears" in that direction.

Sounds like democracy to me.

Certain groups of libertarians are strongly anti-democratic, stating that democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. This demonstrates either a profound ignorance of modern democracy on their parts, or a brazen attempt to mislead others with a faulty analogy.

First, a modern democracy--whether a parliamentary or federal system like our own--more closely resemble the best form of government of which Aristotle wrote in his Politics (Book 4: Chapter 11), than the "democracy" that he spent so much time inveighing against in the rest of his Politics. That "democracy" was, if you read carefully, rule by a nation's poorest citizens (mob rule). Only oligarchy by the plutocrats and tyranny by a usurper were held in greater contempt by the tutor of Alexander of Macedonia. What Aristotle stated he preferred was a constitutionally limited government, dominated by a large and thriving middle class, who could (by themselves) keep the smaller groups of poor and wealthy citizens in check when they proposed their most extreme programs. Some translators call this form of government a polity; the Romans called it a res publica or republic.

Second, in a modern democracy, there is a presumption of some degree of equality between the individual citizens within the nation-state. Two wolves and a sheep could hardly be called equal under the majority of circumstances. And in a practical sense, if the only carnivorous repast in the locality is that one sheep, the wolves would be much better off in the long term asking the sheep how to become vegetarians.

No, equality would be three wolves sitting there deciding which of them will become dinner for the other two. And once again, that is a short term, and highly irrational solution. No matter what, at some point in the future, you are going to have one hungry, living wolf, and two wolves dead and eaten, unless they change the carnivore paradigm under which they are operating.

The "Republics" of which so many of these libertarians claim they are enamored are ambiguous creatures. Historically many "republics" have, even to this very day, been governmental systems that have institutionalized the cultivation of sheep for their society's wolves. Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, is a striking example of this phenomenon. Mexico has millions of dirt poor peons, supporting a minuscule elite whose outsized wealth is barely taxed by the government, and a small, insular middle class consisting of government officials, doctors, engineers, professors, lawyers, and other professionals. The only sure way into the wealthy elite for Mexico's peons is through its insanely powerful drug cartels. These cartels today rival both Mexico's Federal and State governments in terms of power. Let us hope that Mexico has no Lucky Luciano to bring peace and cohesion to the cartels, as Luciano did to organized crime in this country in the 1930's, or we all might be in trouble.

In Mark Ames' February 26, 2010 AlterNet article, "Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer," we discover in part where so many libertarians learn their disdain for democracy and democratic institutions:

"As much as Ayn Rand detested human 'parasites,' there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her supermen--the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: 'If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.'

Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, 'Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.' Indeed. Except that Rand also despised democracy, writing that, 'Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy [for Rand] is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.'"

Bertrand Russell described in his 1928 collection Sceptical Essays , in the chapter "Freedom in Society," the form of freedom Madam Rand is writing of; "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."

Mark Ames continued to describe this sociopathic phenomenon perfectly in his AlterNet article from February 26, 2010:

"The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. This aptly describes Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for 'Supermen' like [serial killer William] Hickman. Rand's philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even 'moral cannibalism,' to use her words. To her, those who aren't like-minded sociopaths are 'parasites,' 'lice' and 'looters.'

But with Rand, there's something more pathological at work. She's out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the 'weak,' whom Rand despised.

Rand and her followers clearly got off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak. This is exactly the sort of sadism that Rand's hero, Hickman, would have appreciated."

An ape cannot stare into a mirror, and a sage stare out. As I stated in my article "Contra Rand" (OpEdNews May 6, 2011), it is self-evident that Rand's knowledge of Nietzsche is at best superficial. She "cherry picked" the parts that she liked and ignored what she found no use for, including the following:

"It would be completely unworthy of a more profound spirit to consider mediocrity as such an exception"When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself or his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart--it is simply his duty." (The Antichrist, No. 57; The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. )

But Jefferson had already foreseen the advent of individuals like Ayn Rand, her Objectivist followers, and the anarcho-capitalists who took her philosophy to its obvious, reductio ad absurdum conclusion. More than a century before The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, he demonstrated how well he understood the motivations of humankind, its imperfections, and its profound need for a moral compass greater than simple self-interest:

"The want or imperfection of the moral sense in some men, like the want or imperfection of the senses of sight and hearing in others, is no proof that it is a general characteristic of the species."--Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition; volume 14: page 142; 1904.

This first statement clearly echoes the theories of Dr. Martha Stout, a former clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, in her 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door. Dr. Stout declares (on the jacket of her book) that "1 in 25 ordinary Americans secretly has no conscience." Thomas Jefferson never did a statistical analysis of his statement, but I do not believe that he would have been surprised by Dr. Stout's contention and for this reason alone, he would have made the following statement:

"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society."--Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition; volume 16: page 263; 1904.

Madame Rand's Objectivist philosophy is tailor-made for those one-in-twenty-five Americans without conscience, and is all that they require to justify their most reprehensible actions. The total lack of consideration for unintended consequences in her philosophy is the reason that pro-Rand businesses like BB&T of Winston-Salem, NC (a bank holding company) have to have their charities pay $2 million for Objectivist chairs in philosophy at places like the University of Texas (Rand to the Rescue; ourfuture.org , April 14, 2008). It should be noted that in Western Europe, both Ayn Rand and Objectivism are generally ridiculed and ignored.

One of the most foolish premises of Madam Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the idea that a group of millionaire entrepreneurs can retreat to Galt's Gulch in order to disrupt the world's economy just to show the rest of us how important they are in the scheme of things.

This premise reminds me of Robert Downey, Jr's. Tony Stark character in the first Iron Man movie. Stark's belief that just because he wants to change the direction of his company, Stark Enterprises, from a weapons making leviathan to an institution whose resources are used solely for peaceful purposes, is at best naïve , and at worst, delusional. As he discovers when Jeff Bridge's character Obadiah Stane, tells him that his board of directors has replaced him as CEO, upon the basis of mental incapacity and fiscal irresponsibility.

If Ayn Rand had been more aware of American History, she would have known that one of the real people most like John Galt , Henry Ford Sr., had been hoisted upon the petard of fiscal irresponsibility in 1919, in the Michigan Supreme Court decision in Dodge v. Ford Motor Company.

In 1916, the Dodge Brothers took Henry Ford to court because Ford wished to withhold the Ford Motor Company's "special" dividends to expand and make improvements in his car manufacturing factories for his company. Mr. Ford thought, as holder of the majority of stock in the Ford Motor Company, he could do so without seeking the actual approval of the Board of Directors, or the company's shareholders.

Henry Ford, Sr. discovered he was mistaken, at least under the rules of American jurisprudence as they exist then and now. John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge (who held 10% of Ford Motor Company stock) took Henry Ford to court, and in 1919 the Michigan Supreme Court was not bashful in telling Ford he was wrong. To quote from Wikipedia's article on the case:

"The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders, as opposed to the community or its employees. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto.

Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19 million."

Ayn Rand's characters in Galt's Gulch would have found themselves in a nearly identical predicament. Having left their enterprises untended, their board of directors would have gone to court to declare John Galt and the rest incompetent to run their business by reason of their continued absence, taken control of their companies, and asked the government to freeze Mr. Galt's and his friends' assets to prevent any further harm to those companies. If their product was as good, as innovative, as Madame Rand posits in Atlas Shrugged, their companies would still have made money without the "strikers." Mr. Galt and the other denizens of Galt's Gulch would have had a hard fight on their hands to regain control of their corporations, having clearly demonstrated their lack of fiscal responsibility to their shareholders and bankers.

In a 1964 interview in Playboy magazine, Ayn Rand was asked the following question and made the following statement:

PLAYBOY: And how would you define altruism?

RAND: It is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships. In capitalism, men need a nonmystical, nonaltruistic, rational code of ethics--a morality which holds that man is not a sacrificial to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor others to himself. In other words, what is desperately needed is Objectivism. [Emphasis added]

The two sentences that I underlined above are nothing new in the thinking of laissez-faire capitalists. It is nothing more than a recapitulation of Adam Smith's most famous statement, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest," (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 2, p. 23). As I pointed out in "The Four Horsemen of Calumny" (OpEdNews May 18, 2011), this statement represents the failure of Smith, the moral philosopher, to establish a moral basis for the economic system he is espousing. Jefferson saw the corruption inherent in this British system, even if the Scottish professor did not:

"[We] should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this as in the country from which we derive our origin will have seized the heads of government and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic and will be alike influenced by the same causes."--Thomas Jefferson; Notes on Virginia Q.XIII, 1782. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson ; Memorial Edition; volume 2: page 164; 1904.

Madame Rand, like most sociopaths, both misunderstands and misstates in absolutist terms the interrelatedness of humanity as regards the individual and the community.

I have demonstrated elsewhere ("Illuminating Dichotomies," OpEdNews September 19, 2008; "The Four Horsemen of Calumny," OpEdNews May 18, 2011) that altruism is not the opposite of selfishness, but its inversion. The true opposite of selfishness is fairness. As Kenneth Lux pointed out in his book Adam Smith's Mistake, the founder of the dismal science of economics mistake was to not include the word "only" in the quote above. If it read, "It is not only from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest," then it is not an absolutist black/white statement, and its morality is restored.

The first part of Ayn Rand's statement above has a similar problem, regarding the relationships of human beings with each other. Part of the difficulty is her incorrect assumption that altruism and selfishness are opposites of one another, rather than each other's inverse. "[Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue."

When you finally understand that fairness, not altruism, is the true opposite of selfishness, then you realize that Madame Rand's statement is completely nonsensical. Her moral imperative can only make moral sense if it is rewritten: "Fairness is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist solely for his own sake, and that service to all of humanity--including taking care of himself so he may continue in this service--is his highest moral duty, value and virtue."

This is not collectivism; this is community.

And community is the most democratic of all institutions, in that it does not ignore the needs of the many for the few, or the one for the many. It does its best to see that everyone's basic needs are met, and then helps to ensure the distribution of the remaining resources to fulfill community members' wants in a fair manner. It is inherently a republic, which as Jefferson stated to Isaac H. Tiffany in its purest form is a democracy; simply not a practicable one above the level of a township. Later in that same letter, Jefferson revealed his vision for America's future:

"The full experiment of a government democratical, but representative, was and is still reserved for us. The idea... has been carried by us more or less into all our legislative and executive departments; but it has not yet, by any of us, been pushed into all the ramifications of the system, so far as to leave no authority existing not responsible to the people; whose rights, however, to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods... My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual."--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1816. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition; volume 15: page 65; 1904.

Beaten and battered, the experimental system of which Thomas Jefferson dreamed 195 years ago still has the potential to be realized by his spiritual political heirs. We must break the corporatist oligarchy which threatens our freedom, and seek a return to those economic policies and protections that were so callously discarded by Ronald Reagan thirty years ago. We must see to: the overturning of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, even if Congress must invoke Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution to do so; the elimination of corporate personhood and the two tier system of justice it embodies; the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Anti-Labor Act in order to reestablish labor unions and the middle class they engender; renewed enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act as amended to return real competition to the American marketplace; prosecution of government officials for wrongdoing including war crimes, violation of human rights both at home and abroad, and bribery in the form of campaign contributions and jobs once they leave government service.

This is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote of "My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise," in his letter to Mr. Tiffany in 1816. Our politicians and pseudo-aristocracy seem to have forgotten that in this nation, no one is above the law.

And Evil to Him Who Thinks It. (Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.)

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'