Ayn Rand’s Method for Slaying Monsters
Confronting Evil Through the Lens of Individualism and Rational Thought
Author’s note: I’ve omitted characters’ names and other information in the following excerpts and discussion of Ayn Rand’s novels to minimize spoilers. But if you are extremely sensitive to spoilers, I recommend reading Rand’s works before reading this article.
Happy Halloween! It’s a holiday for making light of evil and celebrating the good. But, given the inflatable ghosts on your neighbors’ lawns and the kids dressed as zombies and monsters—it’s also an opportunity to reflect on the basis and nature of evil. We can’t rely on garlic, decapitation, or sunlight to repel the noxious creatures that we do inevitably encounter in life. In order to fortify ourselves against evil, we have to understand it.
Toward this end, Ayn Rand is a tremendous help. “The motive and purpose of my writing,” she wrote in regard to her fiction, “is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”1 Rand threw her portrayals of moral ideals into high relief, revealing what makes some men virtuous and others vicious. Thus, among the treasure of intellectual and philosophical values her writing offers are refined illustrations and incisive analyses of evil, its motives, variations, manifestations, and essence. Fortunately, most of us will never deal directly with the worst kinds of villains that Rand depicts. Nonetheless, her crystal-clear distillations can help us identify and deal with vice and evil of any form or degree, including any unhealthy tendencies we may have, a family member’s psychological manipulation, a criminal’s attempt to swindle us, or worse.
To grapple with the full breadth and depth of Rand’s ideas on evil, readers should turn to her writing, specifically Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living. Here, I aim only to highlight and integrate a few key ideas drawn from her works. . . .
One of the most fundamental evils Rand identified is collectivism: the subjugation of the individual—his mind, judgment, values—to a group. The theme of Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, is “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.”2 In the book, Rand illustrates collectivist motives and premises and how they infect men’s thought and action in various personal and social situations.
One particularly pernicious consequence of collectivism is that those who accept it fully and consistently are incapable of having a self. Insofar as a person relinquishes his mind to others, he gives up his means of deciding what to value and what to do. To the extent that he abandons his independent judgment, he is primed to agree with any opinion and accept any idea—except his own, which don’t exist. The most consistent collectivists have no means of deciding on a career, a lover, a hobby, or a hairstyle, except by deferring to authorities, to others’ views or expectations, to any nonsense a friend or a stranger cares to offer. This is what Rand called “second-handedness,” and two examples of it in The Fountainhead stand out.