Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged

[This is part 1 of a planned 3 part series on the philosophy of Ayn Rand and its influence on my life. This first part serves as an introduction to Ayn Rand and her philosophy and the context within which I first learned of her work.]

Like religious belief, the late Ayn Rand is not a subject for polite conversation. She evokes such extremes of emotion in those who know of her that it’s almost impossible to have any rational discussion about her or the philosophical movement she inspired. Coupled with the fact that Ayn Rand’s ideas have had an immeasurably profound influence on me, this makes the present essay the most intensely personal and hence most difficult to write of anything in the entire site thus far.

That Rand exercised and continues to exercise tremendous influence over 60 years after the publication of her first bestselling novel, The Fountainhead, is not in doubt. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was a member of Rand’s inner circle who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. Other prominent people who have been inspired by Rand and her objectivist movement include Clarence Thomas, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice since 1991; Steve Ditko, a comic book artist and writer who co-created Spiderman and also created a character The Question as a superhero-adherent of objectivism; and Jimmy Wales, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. As The Economist noted in a 1999 article, the phrase “Ayn Rand changed my life,” comes up again and again.

Like those many other people, Ayn Rand did indeed change my life. Reading The Fountainhead for the first time was, as Kelley L. Ross describes, very much like a religious conversion experience for me. So much alike in fact, that I wouldn’t hesitate to use Biblical metaphors: it was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I learned to question facts that I’d always thought were self-evidently true. Facts such as selfishness is always bad, that helping the poor is inherently noble and that true heroism comes from altruism. More importantly, it taught me that if even these tenets could be questioned and overthrown, then anything could, and started me down the path of learning to critically think for myself.

Thinking back, it’s embarrassing to note just how heavily popular entertainment weighed on my world view as I was growing up. I was unconscious to it most of the time, but it’s undeniable that my system of moral values was shaped by shows like The A-Team (modern day version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men), Knight Rider (chivalrous knight with a talking car instead of a horse) and even Star Trek, which although intelligent at times, comes with its own intellectual and ideological baggage, best explained in Ross’ essay on the subject. For my generation at least, the show that best represents this is perhaps Beverly Hills, 90210, with its insistence on political correctness and a consistent emphasis on left-leaning values while portraying a comfortable, even glamorous, lifestyle.

So I left high-school with a vague set of values that I suspect I shared with anyone who was intellectually inclined: communism is an ideal though impractical utopia (a view further reinforced by reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed); the strong and the rich have an active moral duty to aid the poor and the weak; greed and the profit-seeking motive are things to be suspicious of and so forth. I was never religious in the traditional sense of course. I have always been strongly repulsed by the authoritarian streak in religion, its demand for strict and unquestioning obeisance and the way it discouraged free inquiry and innovation. But the truth of the moral values I had been taught went unquestioned. It was the way that things simply were, or so I thought, not understanding the Judeo-Christian-Islamic basis for many of those values.

It’s difficult for me to say when exactly I started to really challenge this established view. I noticed while studying in France that my classmates were much more socialist than I was. I’ve always had a deep appreciation for hard work and believed in a meritocratic society. But my time in university coincided with the 1995 strikes when the government of Alain Juppé was forced to retreat from planned welfare cutbacks due to the biggest protests in France since 1968. Even the students in my class voted to go on strike to demonstrate solidarity with the protesters. I was bemused by the pointlessness of my classmates’ decision but was uncomfortable with the unstated implications of the strikers’ demands: that they had an inherent right to a comfortable life simply by being citizens of France and that it was the responsibility of society to provide it for them.

Through it all, though I had convictions and beliefs, there was a formlessness and lack of structure to them. I chose to study journalism with the vague hope of doing some good for society but as I grew older it became more difficult to say what good meant. The Fountainhead provided this structure and overturned many of my former convictions. From the opening pages, it was apparent that Rand saw the world in an entirely different way. Nature was to be shaped and used as Man saw fit, a far cry from the feel-good environmentalism of the 1980s that school had drummed into me. The protagonist Howard Roark was by any traditional standard a monster: completely self-possessed and uncaring of the opinions and feelings of other people, single-minded and uncompromising in his singular vision of what what good and right and always acting only in own personal interest. It was exhilarating, it was revolutionary and most of all, it made perfect sense.

Rand’s philosophy inverses the values of traditional morality, putting the self as the first priority and highest moral authority, hence the Virtue of Selfishness. Good means to act only in accordance with one’s own interest in the pursuit of one’s own happiness and satisfaction. From there, it follows that all individuals must be free to pursue their own interests, so long as it does not interfere with others, and the role of government is strictly limited to protecting such freedom. This is of course, the classical liberalism of philosophers like John Locke, to whom Rand acknowledges inspiration. Evil means to be completely selfless, to live without concern for one’s own self. To Rand, a person who lives selflessly not only destroys himself, as she demonstrates with the characters of Peter Keating and Catherine Halsey in The Fountainhead who continually deny the very things that make them happiest, but destroys society as well, as she demonstrates in Atlas Shrugged.

Esthetically, the starkest contrast in Rand’s thought with traditional religion lies in her perception of what it means to be heroic. As the episode of the Stoddard Temple in The Fountainhead shows, places of worship like churches and mosques are traditionally built to be grand and awe-inspiring, the better to demonstrate the grandeur of God and the insignificance of Man in the midst of God’s work. Tall and majestic spires and minarets serve to remind Man of his smallness and to teach him humility. Roark’s temple however symbolizes the opposite: that Man is great and noble and Man should be defiantly proud of what he is and what he can do. As she writes, the skyscrapers of Manhattan do not show the smallness of Man, rather, they show his greatness, for it is the mind of Man who conceived them and it is the hand of Man who built them.

Reason, as the quote from Rand above states, is what makes Man what he is. The ability to think is Man’s greatest asset and ought to be valued as such. It is our only means of obtaining true knowledge of the world and therefore ought to be the only basis for all of our actions and decisions. Reason, of course, also tempers our self-interest, for we ought to act in our rational long-term interest. Short-term greed is bad, not because it is immoral, but because it is irrational for not considering the long-term implications of our actions. Rand also actively attacks the irrationality and superstition of religion, arguing that it is a vehicle with which the weak use to control the strong.

It’s hard for me to convey just how just and right it felt to me when I first read all this. Rand’s writing is of course a key part of it. The passion of her convictions is terrifying. Line after line of diatribes against traditional morality, against religion, against the second-handers who live for other people instead of themselves, leap off the book with frenetic energy. I can appreciate how its self-righteousness and sheer arrogance can be off-putting to many, but to me at that time, trying to find my own way through life and trying to work out how the world really works, it was the perfect wake up call. I’d read philosophies of morality before, James Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism for example being particularly persuasive to me at one time, but there were always aspects that I disliked about them, most often a tendency to downplay the individual and emphasize the collective. Rand’s philosophy not only celebrated individualism, it taught that good could come only by giving individuals the freedom to flourish in whatever ways they wished. More than anything else, I felt that while other philosophies of morality tried to deny the impulses and nature of Man, Rand’s vision called only for Man to be what he always and naturally is.

Discovering Ayn Rand led me down a long path that included investigating what religions really are, taking philosophy more seriously and thinking harder about what makes a good society. This will be explored in Parts 2 and 3, beginning with a brief look at Rand’s early life and a more complete presentation of her philosophy.