In some cases, very seriously. A Russian-born writer who moved to the United States in , Rand promoted a philosophy of egoism that she called Objectivism. The encounter is clearly nonconsensual — Francon genuinely resists and Roark unmistakably forces himself upon her — and yet Rand implies that rape survivors, not the rapists, are responsible. It would not be stretching a point to say that her philosophy has encouraged some politicians to ignore and blame the poor and powerless for their condition.
In Atlas Shrugged , the mysterious cult-like leader and Objectivist spokesperson John Galt and his clique run away to establish a colony off the grid, free from government interference, and free to create their own rules. Yet imagine the reality of a world without regulations such as those of an environmental protection agency. Yet Galt rejects any duty towards others, and expects none from others.
She ignores the fact that we share the Earth — we breathe the same air, swim in the same ocean, and drink from shared water sources. The problem is not only the complexity of calculating how much government support one could rightly collect back from taxes paid — since, presumably, she also used roads, tap water, police protection, and a myriad of other things that the government provides. The answer, I believe, lies in her belief that altruism of necessity leads to exploitation and ultimately the destruction of the self:.
As to altruism — it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it… Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.
These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice — which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction — which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as the standard of the good. Rand was not alone in her concern about the risk for exploitation inherent in altruism. Evolutionary biologists grappled with the problem as well.
Altruism was problematic for evolutionary biologists precisely because it seems to hamper individual survival. Altruism means benefiting the survival and reproductive success of another individual while imposing a cost on your own. Altruism could survive when conferred on genetic relatives because your shared genes would benefit from your altruistic investment.
But your genes receive no benefit from altruism invested in unrelated individuals and may in fact hamper your own survival. Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, carefully investigated and mathematically modeled the conditions under which altruism works and when it fails. For unrelated individuals, the most influential theory is that of reciprocal altruism, proposed by influential evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract.
The problem is that while a given individual can benefit from cooperating, he or she can usually do better by reneging. In that case, the recipient gets all the benefits, while the altruist suffers all the costs. The end result is that altruists go extinct. But Trivers showed that altruists can survive if one simple condition is satisfied: Those who fail to reciprocate must be punished through exclusion from subsequent cooperative ventures.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. In contrast, Rand believed that the primary role of government was to arbitrate and enforce such contracts. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other… This leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.
In other words, Rand clearly expected government to play a role in maintaining fairness in market transactions, a cornerstone of laissez-faire capitalism:. Does laissez-faire work? The American and global economies are still reeling from one of its greatest failures: the economic meltdown. His is disdain for regulation is frequently cited as one of the major causes of the junk mortgage crisis, which in , brought about the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
In a congressional hearing, he admitted that he had made a mistake in assuming that financial firms could regulate themselves. Critics of laissez-faire emerged from the beginning, and included such luminaries as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, Clarence E. Ayres and John Maynard Keynes of the 19th and 20th centuries. In , economists opposed to laissez-faire formed the American Economics Association. Critics of laissez-faire argue that it creates poverty traps that cannot be escaped through free choice, monopoly power that emerges naturally in the market and allows businesses to exploit consumers and exploitation of the working class that pushes wages down to subsistence and compels laborers to work in harsh and unsafe conditions.
These conditions are very much on the public mind today, as is apparent from the strong showing Senator Bernie Sanders is enjoying in the Presidential primary elections with his decidedly socialist political platform.
Yet incarnations of John Galt continue to dominate economic policy. Like Galt, he appears to believe that workers need people like him more than people like him need workers. Back in , Senator Elizabeth Warren eloquently countered such sentiments :.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody… You built a factory out there — good for you. Oh, and then there are Charles and David Koch. You could very well spend your days with very little contact with war-mongering neoconservatives. Libertarians, by contrast, are everywhere. Go on Facebook, and some former friend from childhood is lecturing you about the free market.
As the GOP, Wall Street, the intellectual plutocracy of think tanks and foundations, and Silicon Valley grow in coming years, expect to see the influence of this group and its ideas grow and stretch. Despite numerous parallels with Scientology, Objectivism is not just sitting still, getting weirder while remaining confined to a few thousand worshippers.
We have not yet reached Peak Libertarian. So where do these goofy ideas come from, and what effect might they have? A partial answer — both rigorously told and incomplete — comes from a recent book, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World , by Wellesley College comp-lit professor Adam Weiner.
Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject.
0コメント