Does Ayn Rand actually matter?

More than you might think, and enough to worry about

(I started this piece prior to ICE murdering an innocent woman. I’m going to finish and publish it because I think it remains important, if not quite essential. My tone might be a little different than I originally intended, however.)

I wouldn’t blame you for wondering why I spend so much time talking about Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. After all, Rand has been dead for over 40 years, and she’s rather widely dismissed as a hack writer and an amateurish philosopher. Objectivism isn’t taken seriously by the vast majority of philosophers, and few Objectivists hold tenured positions in college philosophy departments. Obviously, the philosophy isn’t taking over the field.

And Objectivism has little visibility in the cultural mainstream. It’s been a while since I can remember an Objectivist intellectual speaking to anything approaching a national audience. The last time I can remember, in fact, was Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s “intellectual heir,” sounding a little batshit crazy talking to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News back in 2008:

I already wrote about Objectivism’s position on killing innocent people, so I won’t cover that again. But it’s no surprise that Peikoff sounds thoroughly unhinged here — the usual Objectivist argument on this topic is unhinged, and he’s just repeating it with the typical Objectivist “moral clarity” (that is, highly emotional dogmatic rationalism).

If you know of an example of a prominent Objectivist speaking to a national audience since the clip above, please let me know. But my point is that Objectivism is rather irrelevant in the mainstream.

It doesn’t help that they spend an inordinate amount of time morally judging each other in one ridiculous schism after another. Today, it’s the pro-Trump Objectivists versus the anti-Trump Objectivists. They even have pet names for each other: “MAGAjectivists” versus “Obleftivists.” Both sides are convinced that the other side isn’t Objectivist enough, and both claim Rand as their own.

And those schisms go way back, starting with Rand’s breakup with her lover Nathanial Branden in 1968 (following an open sexual relationship that both of their spouses knew about). It’s a rather sordid tale, and so I won’t bother recounting it. But Nathanial Branden was once intended to be Rand’s “intellectual heir,” a title that, as I noted above, passed to Leonard Peikoff when Branden was excommunicated post-schism. There have been several others, including one between Objectivist intellectual David Kelley and Peikoff that led to a bifurcation of the movement into the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) and what eventually became The Atlas Society (TAS).

Today, members and followers of both organizations basically despise each other. ARI is the more “official” of the two organizations, but interestingly, TAS has almost twice the presence on X. That’s no surprise to me, given that TAS is more friendly toward techno-fascist figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

So, given all this, why am I concerned about countering Ayn Rand and her ideas? After all, it might seem like some other movements — MAGA, the techno-fascists, white Christian nationalism, which I’ve also written about — are a lot more important.

In part, I suppose it’s because Rand’s philosophy appears more generally palatable. With only a passing knowledge of Rand’s ideas, it’s easy enough to conclude that she stood for some good things like individualism, reason, freedom — positive values that a great many people will find attractive.

Sky Clearly put it quite succinctly in her piece about the importance of not ignoring Rand:

With ideals of happiness, hard work and heroic individualism – beside a 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal based on her novel The Fountainhead(1943) – it’s perhaps no wonder that she caught the attention and imagination of the US.

The devil is in the details, though, which is why many people — or more likely, the vast majority — would never want to live in an ideal Objectivist society.

Whatever the reason, Rand continues to have a popular impact on the culture even if it’s more behind the scenes. Here is a short list of some of their impact:

• Her novel Atlas Shrugged continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Sales jump during periods of crisis, such as during the 2008 financial meltdown. People see parallels between Rand’s dystopia and contemporary culture, and that’s particularly dangerous given that Rand’s proposed solution would fix nothing and would make a great many things even worse.

• Public figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — two of the most evil people outside of the American government — credit her for their intellectual development. You’ll find the same among several Republican figures (famously, including Paul Ryan and Clarence Thomas), both MAGA and old-school conservatives. Rand is the guru of capitalism, after all, whether those people who admire her know her strict definition of it or not.

• ARI has a program focused on spreading her ideas among high school teachers and students, boasting “Our free books programs have put Rand’s novels into the hands of more than 5.2 educators and students, and our essay contests have incentivized more than 460,000 students to engage deeply with the ideas therein.” They plan to ramp up that program going forward.

• ARI is building a new Ayn Rand Center (ARC) in Austin, Texas, and they’re creating an Intellectual Incubator program that will “train the most promising young Objectivists and amplify their impact on the culture.” There’s real money being spent on spreading Objectivism, and an organized effort behind it.

• TAS has actively supported MAGA organizations like TPUSA. As mentioned above, TAS has engaged directly with Peter Thiel. Generally, TAS has programs similar to ARI that are aimed at students.

The bottom line is that Rand continues to influence American society, even if that influence is more pernicious and hidden (albeit not secret) than loudly out in the open. Most dangerously, her ideas serve as a sort of pseudo-intellectual scaffolding to lend credence to the very people who today are destroying the American republic. That’s particularly true when you consider that so many people — including many Objectivists — pick and choose whatever ideas uphold a particular narrative.

And most disturbingly for me, as someone who only recently rejected Objectivism as my own philosophy and who knows how easy it is to short-circuit your way into a ready-made philosophy, Rand is particularly influential among young people. Her words appeal to them as they search for an identity, seek independence from parents and teachers, and look for self-assurance and moral clarity. Her two most philosophical novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are simplistic enough to appeal to developing minds and emotional enough to hook them. They present idealistically heroic figures who are easily contrasted with her cartoon villains. Want to be a great person? Just mimic John Galt, even if living up to his ideal is literally impossible in reality — and you wouldn’t really want to, anyway.

Many people grow out of their Rand phase, recognizing that her philosophy is woefully oversimplified and based on views of human nature that don’t hold up in the real world. It might have sadly taken me 40 years to go through that phase, but once I saw how bad Objectivism really is, I couldn’t unsee it. Others never do, holding onto the philosophy essentially by ensconcing themselves in a false reality where Rand’s ideas can make sense. Such people can be successful in business and other careers, but they produce very rationalistic and self-serving ethical and political perspectives.

So, for whatever it’s worth, I’m going to spend some time doing what I can to uncover Rand’s errors and identify them. I don’t know how much impact I can have in blunting her influence, but I think there’s some value in the attempt.