On Monday, anti-capitalist radio talker Thom Hartmann was on another one of his Paul Ryan Is a Sociopath benders again, hosting radical U.K. Guardian columnist George Monbiot so they could both compare Ayn Rand’s libertarianism to Soviet communism – as if they were similar political ideologies.
He began by saying to Monbiot, “This piece you’ve written about how Ayn Rand has become to the libertarians and the Objectivists in the United States, and many members of the U.S. Congress, Paul Ryan requires all his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged, for example, and he’s one of many – has become basically what Karl Marx was to the Soviet Union. You know, it’s the marching orders in the Little Red Book.”
On his website Monbiot.com, his article is headlined “A Manifesto for Psychopaths.” Stalinism? Maoism? Neither of those compare to Objectivism as the ugliest philosophy on the globe after World War II:
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the post-war world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
On the Hartmann show, they thought it was all a capitalist plot for the super-rich to "parasitize" the rest of society:
MONBIOT: It is the most misanthropic worldview I've ever come across. It's the ugliest philosophy that --
HARTMANN: And yet this is an animating notion for the core of the Republican party, certainly for those in the United States Congress, in the House of Representatives and the Senate, who bow to the campaign contributions of billionaires like the Koch brothers, and the Koch brothers themselves promote this stuff.
The two expressed amusement that Rand used Social Security and Medicare before her death in 1982 when she should have died according to her libertarian beliefs. Hartmann turned to old interviews:
HARTMANN: In another interview, she said, somebody asked her about death, because she was famously an atheist, and she said ‘When I die, it’s not me that ends, the world ends.”And that’s the worldview of a sociopath....Do you think that Ayn Rand was a sociopath, and are you concerned about if so, a sociopathic story infecting the body politic?
MONBIOT: Well, I’m not qualified to judge her psychology, but what I can say is that if a psychopath were to write a philosophy, this would be the philosophy that he or she would write, and if you were to write a philosophy to appeal to psychopaths, this is the philosophy that you would write.
Rand's interview was with Tom Snyder, and at the very end of this YouTube clip, she suggested our consciousness is who we are, not our bodies:
SNYDER: I kind of think of this as ongoing, that there is an eternity, and that we are going to be a part of that eternity, that we aren’t just corpses in graves when we die
RAND: But we are not corpses in graves. We are not there. Don’t you understand that when this life is finished, you’re not there to say “Oh how terrible that I’m a corpse”...What I’ve always thought is a sentence from a Greek philosopher, I don’t remember, unfortunately, who it was, that I read at 16, and it’s affected me all my life. “I will not die. It’s the world that will end.”
PS: Some philosophers have seen philosophical connections between Rand and Marx in their secular humanism and materialism, but libertarianism and communism cannot be matched like twins in the policy salons as economic and political systems.
