My application was accepted. My membership is official. I was assigned an alphanumeric ID and instructed not to lose it. I may commit it as a tattoo. I’ll need it for the rest of my life. I’ve been ensnared in the Safety Net. Made party to the Social Contract. It’s the feeling of being annexed, like Greenland. I also feel a bit like an apostate. I will explain.
Over thirty years ago I was dogearing the pages of von Mises’ Socialism. Highlighting whole paragraphs of Road To Serfdom. Reading and re-reading Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I gorged on all of it, and a lot more. More than I now can recall, short of taking inventory of the many books archived on my shelves, sagging beneath their weight. It felt to me at the time I couldn’t read enough. I would stand inside bookstores and experience anxiety, flummoxed by all those titles staring back at me, overwhelmed to the point of not knowing where to begin. I was wide-eyed and young. Someone online – and here I’m talking early 90s online, when going online was preceded by that burst of blinking lights and carnival sounds, a prescient alert to the user that you are about to enter a realm where not everything you read is necessarily true – got me jump-started to reading Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical. Most people first discover Rand in high school. I’d never heard of her. Not surprising, I suppose, given I’d attended a religious high school where the assignment to write a report on a book written by an atheist would have been anathema to the Christian curriculum. I was probably thirty-five when I devoured The Virtues of Selfishness on a beach in Kona. Finally, I thought, someone gets me! I don’t recall it as a religious-adjacent experience or anything like that, it was more an ah-ha moment for me, an epiphany without the supernatural baggage. As if I had just learned something true about the real world I had never known before, never been exposed to before. I subsequently slogged my way through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (AS). Hard to explain, but the books humbled me in a way. True, I thought, I was no Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart, but then again who was? And Who is John Galt? For anyone who’s read AS, that was the one true mystery in the novel, posited in the very first sentence, revealed at the end of the novel by way of a prolix soliloquy by The Mystery himself. For starters, John was no Republican, certainly not a Democrat. Because it is of course impossible to read Rand and not intuit the political implications of her ethical prescription for an individual to lead a virtuous life, which is really what those two books are about. AS and Fountainhead are not economic treatises pandering to capitalism, even as Rand left no doubt in the reader’s mind that she despises socialism and communism. To get to the United States, she had to sneak out of Russia in the dark of night by bribing a Lithuanian border guard. When she eventually arrived in New York (ninety-nine years ago now), a beacon in the west, it must of felt to her like she’d just entered a candy store. The answer to the mystery then, Who is John Galt?, is not, He was a Capitalist. No, John Galt was Rand’s ethical avatar, the apotheosis of the virtuous man. As was the more down-to-earth architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. At least that was my take, and in that way, as I had tirelessly argued in those 90’s online forums devoted to Rand’s philosophy (Objectivisim), AS is an allegory. Just as Animal Farm was an allegory, except John Galt was human (a gifted engineer). Allegory or not, though, it all made sense to me, the message got through: Man good, Government bad. Although to be fair, Rand would concede in her non-fiction that a proper Government was an inescapable necessity to protect even rational and virtuous men when and where their better angels failed them. Rand was no Utopian; she was also not an Anarchist. But just to be sure, at some point I read Nozick’s tome: Anarchy, State and Utopia. It must have left a mark on me because sometime later a close friend remarked to me during a night of carousing, “You are too much of an anarchist to get married again.” All these books I’d read, they were published decades earlier. Why weren’t people convinced by them as I was? Was I getting sucked into a cult of crackpot beliefs? I concluded I wasn’t. I wasn’t in need of an intervention. This wasn’t philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo I was reading. It wasn’t new age woo-woo either, certainly not a self-help handbook. I wasn’t in need of psychological help, I certainly didn’t need to be fixed in any sense. Rand’s arguments for Rational Egoism were unassailable – an ethical prescription for a real person living in the real world. A kind of over-the-counter medicine for anyone who wanted to live a virtuous and happy life, period. Plus her arguments had the feature of parsimony, in that they were derived from just a few self-evident truths about our nature as human beings. One or two genetic determinists I argued with way back then claimed Rand didn’t understand biology, therefore her premise that a man’s ultimate purpose in life is survival, was wrong. As any biologist knows, they claimed, reproductive success, not survival, is Man’s ultimate purpose in life. Just as it is for every other living organism on earth. And so all her arguments downstream of that premise were flawed as well, they claimed. So much for their counterfactual, we now know DNA influences but does not determine human behavior. Rand’s premise is safe. Here. A man’s purpose in life is not to be found in the genome. In any case, ever since Rand, the negative connotations of selfishness (all there were at the time) would need to step aside and make room for virtue. And, without a great deal of arm-waving involved, the advocacy to lead a rationally selfish individual life could scale nicely to a society of millions of individuals, with the addition of one simple maxim: Your natural rights end where my virtuous nose begins. What more to it was there than that?
Quite a lot it turns out. The messiness of the real world has a way of defeating the idealized notions of how its inhabitants ought to behave. In all that time that I was reading, my pay-stubs showed a deduction that went to the government to pay for the Social Safety Net. What a positively unselfish program! And coercive to boot. I have a very dim memory of placing a call to the payroll department where I worked at the time, demanding they stop this larceny at once. Uh huh. Thank for your concern, employee. Now move along.
Years passed. Attitudes softened. The safety net extended. Acquiescence happened. Nowadays, when I go online I no longer care to debate or argue with people over the virtue of selfishness. It almost seems like a quaint notion to me now. What’s the point in shaking your fist at the rain? Maybe it Ought not be raining, but it Is raining; suck it up, Boomer. Living selfishly may be a virtue, but it sure ain’t practical, not in the real world we live in. C’est la vie.
Why, even The Russian Radical herself was eventually enrolled in medicare. Talk about your apostasy!