Randian Objectivism – The Crack Cocaine of Egotism
November 18, 2008 by Bill Kumpe
Filed under News and Opinion
A couple of years ago, I attended a political rally in of all places a church dining room. The room was packed. The candidate made a somewhat halting testimony of his recent conversion to Christianity but a few moments later said, “I am a Randian Objectivist.” It was a strange statement to make in the context. The words went over me like an electric shock. I quickly looked around the room and saw that virtually no one understood what they had just heard.
My first thought was, “My God, don’t these people know what this guy just said?” Randianism means that the person is a follower of Ayn Rand, a Russian immigrant Hollywood screenwriter turned philosopher who formed a whole philosophical movement around the virtues of selfishness. Objectivism is a philosophy grounded in the work of William James which holds that the the truth of a statement is determined by its utility to the individual. So, what the guy was actually saying was, “In my world, selfishness is the supreme virtue and the truth of what I say and I what I hear you say will always be measured by its pragmatic usefulness in the furtherance of my own interests.”
Randian Objectivism and Evangelical Christianity are completely antithetical. Evangelical Christians believe that salvation is granted by a totally sovereign, omniscient God when the human being surrenders control of their life to Him through saving grace provided by the sacrifice of God the Son, Jesus Christ. Christians are then commanded to live similar lives of self sacrifice. The philosophy of Ayn Rand holds:
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it. (Atlas Shrugged) AND NOW I SEE THE FACE OF GOD, AND I RAISE THIS GOD OVER THE EARTH, THIS GOD WHOM MEN HAVE SOUGHT SINCE MEN CAME INTO BEING, THIS GOD WHO WILL GRANT THEM JOY AND PEACE AND PRIDE. THIS GOD, THIS ONE WORD “I.” (Anthem, pg. 97)
You don’t have to be a theologian to find the origins of Randianism. Isaiah 14:13,14 is probably the earliest recorded statement of the underlying spirit of Randianism and identification of its author Satan:
“13For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”
Renowned Christian writer the Rev. John Piper admits to having gone through an Ayn Rand “phase” as a young professor and being brought up short about it after an older professors saw him reading Atlas Shrugged and warned, “That stuff is incredibly dangerous.” In his article The Ethics of Ayn Rand, Piper now agrees, stating, “He was right. For a certain mindset, she is addicting and remarkably compelling in her atheistic rationalism.”
Randianism is the crack cocaine of egotism. It legitimizes man’s basest motives and provides an acceptable philosophical framework for not only practicing selfishness but celebrating it. It replaces God with the individual ego and lets man worship himself instead of his Creator. Randian Objectivism, like crack cocaine, is incredibly addictive and is to be avoided at all costs.
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Bill Kumpe’s association of Rand with W.James’ view that “the truth of a statement is determined by its utility to the individual” —besides being execrably wrong— demonstrates how little he knows of her philosophy, and particularly of her ethics..
In her philosophy, Truth is the recognition of the inescapable facts of Reality.
Disregarding this, Kempe has taken excerpts from her works that suit his agenda, without bothering to pursue the full meaning of the statements he has, in effect, stolen.
A number of accurate statements on her view of truth can be seen here
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/truth.html.
Rand was not an advocate of egotism (with a ‘t’), she advocated egoism —the support of one’s own life through the *rational* pursuit of *rational* values. First and foremost, that means one must recognize the true nature of oneself as a living being as having a certain biological and intellectual nature. It means recognizing the human conceptual mind as man’s primary tool of survival, the primary purpose of which is grasping the truth of one’s nature as a human. This necessarily includes recognizing the truth of natural laws, the true nature of individual people, and the true nature of social practices such as various economic and political principles.
Rand’s egoism shows that one cannot live by sacrificing themselves to others, but **nor can one live by sacrificing others to oneself**!! Social interactions are based on the mutual exchange of material and spiritual (not in the mystical sense) values.
One of the most common ways used by those seeking to discredit Rand’s work is to presume that she is promoting egotism: the view that others exist to be used and then discarded. That misrepresentation is echoed and/or dishonestly promoted so as to turn others away from the truly benign philosophy she discovered.
Her detractors do this in order to protect their own agenda for malicious and false ideas that drive their own, various, philosophies, including the irrational and self-sacrificial ideas of religion. These latter ideas *require* that one give up one’s judgment (one’s mind) to obey the claims of religious leaders which they, of course, attribute to some God. Thus leaving the congregation more subservient to the *leaders* than to any god.
The leaders, who may be writers like Kempe or actual clergymen like Piper, have a lot to lose were people to think for themselves —as Rand advocates!
Any with an ounce of intellectual independence should read Rand, and do so with more care and more honesty than have Kempe, Piper and their ilk.
RnBram, what you have written here has affirmed, rather than refuted Bill Kumpe’s point.
It also confirms a theory I’ve always had that there is no such thing as a true atheist – we all need a “god,” and many in our society today worship humanity – their religion is objectivism, and its prophet is Ayn Rand.
Basicaly, it’s no different from most other religions. Its main difference from Christianity is the lack of accountability to a Creator.
Randianism is a logical extension of some of the hard-hearted thinking of John Calvin.
John Calvin?! Rand was a Russian atheist. Calvin was a French Christian. I don’t follow the “logical extension.”
um … maybe i overstated it a bit … (mea culpa) but Calvin’s thinking was partially responsible for unleashing unbridled capitalism on the world, just as Rand’s has been responsible for glorifying it.
Jean Sierra,
1) what particular point of Krumpe’s do my comments affirm. Perhaps you did not notice the distinction I drew between egoism and the egoTism in Krumpe’s title. So much for reason’s requirements for properly understanding concepts, even when explained explicitly, people still do not bother to think them through. That is one of the consequences I mentioned in my comment: a mind that subordinates itself to unreason, will not reason on the issues it is told not to, and has accepted it should not, reason about.
2) How does my comment, in any way, confirm YOUR theory that, if someone believes something different from you, their belief must be held through the same mental practices as you? That is, apparently (from your wording), through blind faith. The term ‘blind’ is not some accident of diction.
Who made the Creator? If the creator is eternal, why cannot the Universe be eternal. If nothing existed prior to the ‘creator’, what was there to make him, besides nothing?
If words are to have meaning, then Nothing means N-O-T-H–I-N-G and nothing can be done with it. Similarly, Universe means “One Everything”, so if some incredible being had some power to create the suns and planets, then he is a part of the Universe, period. All your whims, wishes, prayers, and hopes for something to be beholden to, to worship, to guide you, to save you or destroy you (always wondrously) cannot put that being outside of the Universe, nor create Him out of nothing.
If words do not have meaning, then thinking and speaking and ALL thought and communication become “anything goes”, in the ultimate Babel story. Thus the Universe is not Everything, God is in and outside of that everything, a Conscious creator is required for the Universe but NOT for a God, Life after Death, and a congeries of ‘miracles’.
Miracles mostly related by word of mouth among primitive illiterate peoples (Semites) who happened to be from the lands east of the Mediterranean. Then they were hand written by only slightly more intellectually developed individuals, and were subsequently edited for hundreds of years until they were ‘canonized’ as God’s(????) Word. Why not heel to the gods of N.American Indians, or the early Chinese, or the early Scandinavians, or Aztecs or Incas or …???
Then, some 1700 years later, when MAN has developed incredible modern agricultural techniques, developed the internal combustion engine, grasped the age of the Earth and the Evolution of life on Earth, developed modern medicine, eliminated or suppressed all kinds of diseases, developed faster than sound passenger planes, walked on the moon, developed nuclear power and now the Internet!
Yet, while using all these absolutely brilliant Creations of Men, the Internet in particular, you heel to the profoundly edited and manipulated word-of-mouth blatherings of one small tribe thousands of years ago!
Thanks for the clarification, Mark.
RnBram – Your choice of the term “blatherings,” to describe the writings revered by those of the Judeo-Christian faith is an unfortunately ironic conclusion to your diatribe on the virtues of godlessness.
Just for future reference – using the maximum number of words to express yourself does not lend credibility to your argument, but, in fact, guarantees that virtually no one will take the time to read it.
I love this…
“We may occassionally approve a comment with an obvious lefty-slant so that we can amuse ourselves by making fun of it, but most will be deleted. (Why? Because we’re busy, we have lives, and when we want to talk to you we’ll go visit you on Digg or the Daily KOS.) ”
I DO pardon the double ’s’ in occasionally. But professionally, it is a bit weird.
I would like to point out that I am neither Left Statist nor Right Statist. The same is true of Objectivism and Ayn Rand, we reject Statist at the outset and we know why. Little is worse than the Right attempting to oppose the Left by defending Capitalist ideas from a religious point of view. Capitalism (first coined by Marx
RnBram said “Bill Kumpe’s association of Rand with W.James’ view that “the truth of a statement is determined by its utility to the individual” —besides being execrably wrong— demonstrates how little he knows of her philosophy, and particularly of her ethics..”
I’m rather surprised that no one has jumped specifically on this statement. My reading of the post does not associate Rand with James. Mark was referring to someone who called himself a randian objectivist and proceeded to explain what that meant. He decidedly did NOT equate randianism with objectivism nor did he equate Ayn Rand with William James.
You may well disagree with Mark’s view of Rand but you have completely mischaracterized what he actually said. Nice job of twisting someone else’s words to promote your own view. As for the rest of your comments, they are amazingly naive and ignorant. You’ve made no argument at all against Christianity or religion. You’ve merely said that you don’t believe it in a rather verbose manner. You made various unsupported assertions that even average historians universally reject. I presume there are plenty of people available to you who eat your nonsense up. Have fun with it.
As a committed evangelical Christian I don’t quite agree with Mark’s view of capitalism. I generally see capitalism as a good thing. In my view it has raised the standard of living of all people in its sphere more than any other economic system to date. That’s not to say capitalism is all good, it clearly has its problems. That’s why antitrust law, for example, is necessary to ensure competition and prevent monopolies. But I am not aware of a better economic system to date. Christianity is, of course, not an economic system.
And Mark, nice job stimulating a discussion! We need more of that.
I totally agree that capitalism is the best thing around, but also agree that it is far from perfect. It is the only thing that works and gives the most respect for the freedom of the individual, BUT is also results in such garbage as “Dancing With The Stars”, “The Bachelor”, “Big Brother”, “toaster strudel”, “diet coke” (and pepsi, etc) … capitalism will produce what the masses will buy (and/or can be persuaded to buy through appeal to ignorance or emotion) … and while the “invisible hand” is the ideal, in practice it’s about profits with regard to the effect on society – think tobacco, W.R. Grace, melamine in China, etc.
correction: “… in practice it’s about profits WITHOUT regard to the effect on society – think tobacco, W.R. Grace, melamine in China, etc.”
Sounds to me like the original poster meant exactly what he was saying. The Merriam Webster online dictionary defines EGOTISM as an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Ayn Rand declared herself to be GOD. Given that, in the context of this discussion, any arguments about the differences between egotism and egoism are not just semantics, they’re sophistries.
Referring to Bill Krumpe’s association of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism with the philosophy of William James, Ron writes,
“My reading of the post does not associate Rand with James. Mark was referring to someone who called himself a randian objectivist and proceeded to explain what that meant. He decidedly did NOT equate randianism with objectivism nor did he equate Ayn Rand with William James.”
Huh? Krumpe wrote:
“Objectivism is a philosophy grounded in the work of William James which holds that the the truth of a statement is determined by its utility to the individual.”
How is this not equating “randianism with objectivism” or equating Ayn Rand with William James? How is that “mischaracterizing” or “twisting” Krumpe’s words?
Furthermore, Ron writes:
“As for the rest of your comments, they are amazingly naive and ignorant. You’ve made no argument at all against Christianity or religion. You’ve merely said that you don’t believe it in a rather verbose manner. You made various unsupported assertions that even average historians universally reject.”
RnBram decidedly DID make an argument against religion and Christianity. Ron may not agree with it, but it is absurd and dishonest to write that it is no argument.
Hey, I’m an atheist and I’ve never read Ayn Rand. Go figure.
Arrogance and ignorance do go hand in hand and this is more true with those who virtually misinterpret Ayn Rand’s books and writings. Rand’s writings were ahead of their time and what a lot of her fans found refreshing about the philosophy she founded is that it wasn’t built on any parasitical foundation or cornerstone like what the communists, humanists or religionists are doing. Right wingers and left wingers fall all over themselves with contradictions yet it cannot be denied that it is Objectivism with its emphasis on economic and individual freedom coupled with ethics that has truly contributed to the advancement of the world and it is blind faith and “good feelings” like what the communists and Christians are doing that is contributing to its destruction.