Ayn Rand was and is widely hated for her egoistic, love-lust capitalistic and atheistic doctrines and her narcissistic attitudes which she reified as doctrine. Mention of her name is likely to trigger the kind of knee-jerk revulsion the “N-word” evokes. But there is a quiet secret – and for her detractors (I am knowing their minds) an ugly embedded secret – that has rarely been given voice. It is a feeling of exaltation, of arrival – pure, yet real, but transcendental – of beauty and strength and supreme health that we first feel when we read the lives and loves, dangers and convictions of her astounding heroes. Rand had an ultra-worldly, Olympian god-like view of happiness, actually ecstasy, that could only exist in the individual, the individual person’s joy and diamond-hard assertion of his right to be, to live his life as he desires.
There is something primordial, possibly indescribable, in the brilliant poignancy of emotion one feels when the inventor Equality 7-2521, Anthem, discovers the word “I” in ancient, forsaken books. Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart’s waking, after her plane crash, to see the face of the incandescent polymath Galt, and their moment on the mountain when he says “The road is cleared. We are going back to the world.” Roark, at the top of the Wynand Building skyscraper, symbol of his struggle to victory at the end of The Fountainhead. We know this intoxication, possibly from our first bedtime adventure stories, possibly from some gift given us at the universe’s Big Bang that is immanent in our proto-genes. It’s an emotion that is better than, righter than life.
The fatal problem with this feeling is that it cannot live in oxygen, in our real world, where capitalists may be driven by sociopathy not philosophy; where individualism may be xenophobia; where the human core is the ambiguous not the noble. And yet it may be the most real archetype in the “collective unconscious” that I can imagine, Jung to the contrary notwithstanding. It is a feeling that can only exist in a parallel world created by a different, more robust God, where all human beings have the nature of joy and love of the world, and can manifest it in effort or in reality. In that world, helping another person would be to help her be her heroic potential. Providing food for her family would be considered a crisis of no meaning, one that a Randian personage would answer in a hale but perfunctory spirit. Behind the act there would be no philosophy of giving, no imperative of brotherhood.
In this world, we see, with some brownish shame, that the transcendental feeling can’t exist in the other-centered person, the person whose most noble thought is “do for others.” There would seem something unnatural about that, something sick.
I was wondering today, Christmas, if for honest believers Jesus is like this pinnacle emotion, or a divergent or even opposite one. If that, could there be two antipodal sublime feelings dwelling in good people’s hearts? The love of Jesus Christ and humanity, the bowed humble head; the love of freedom and the individual’s heroic nature, head raised high? Could there be two transcendencies?
Rand, Russian
Jew, found her emotional philosophy of “human perfection”* and individualism in childhood stories,
and tinted it darker in the climate of anti-Semitism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Its primary color, though, the radiation that strikes the reader before
darkness intrudes, remains the feeling of sun brightness, of ecstasy. Christmas,
too, is a feeling. Jesus is the hero, whose name is humanity. But could He
live in the oxygen of our world? Where people’s hearts expand only so far,
where we can’t love billions of people, day after day? Where, counterpart to
Rand’s defect, we are not all the same spirit, as each person wants,
first-most, to live his own life in his own space, not join a universal bond, to
relish his indulgences, to prefer himself and his family. It seems to me these complementary failures of purity show a fundamental bond between the most egoistic of
all teachers and the most selfless: They are avatars of the dichotomy of
consciousness, which must be itself, yet can’t remain alone. Either facet, either ideal is no ideal, and can only be reached in stories.
Praise the creator.
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* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/. Introduction, subsection 1.1.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.