AYN RAND & THE PROPHECY OF ATLAS SHRUGGED - Official Film Trailer

Ayn Rand came of age during the Russian Revolution. At age 12, she saw her father’s business taken from him, and I am sure this profoundly shaped her worldview.

I grew up in West Virginia. It would not be unfair to describe the history of West Virginia as a tragedy. Back when the Communists were taking everything Rand’s family had away from them, many of the people of West Virginia were being exploited by the owners and operators of coal mines. Miners worked long hours for little money in dangerous conditions, and because they were so poor, the coal companies were the only ones who would give them credit, so the miners ended up renting their homes from the company, and buying their food and supplies from the company store. Because living expenses exceeded what most of the miners earned, many of the miners were deeply in debt to the companies they worked for. And some of the coal companies didn’t even pay real money. They paid the miners something called script. You could only use the script issued by a coal company to buy goods and services offered by that coal company.

Before miners were unionized and before laws were put into place to protect the workers, the coal companies basically owned their employees. Even to this day, you can go to West Virginia and see the effects this had on the culture and people of that state. Poor living conditions and a lack of hope that gets past on from one generation to the next has drained entire families of ambition and even the simple desire to get ahead. Many of the kids of these poor families don’t try very hard in school, and their parents don’t push them to try because they don’t see the point of it. They don’t try to better themselves because they don’t believe they will be allowed to succeed. There is a kind of pained weariness in the eyes of many people in West Virginia. For them, even dreams are too expensive. And they know that hard work is not always rewarded. You can kill yourself with hard work and still end up without a penny to your name. Around every corner you’ll find poverty and fatalism. And you’ll also find a great deal of Christian fundamentalism, too.

I was a gay boy who grew up in this environment. So like Rand, I am interested in protecting and promoting individuality. I think people should be free to be who they are and to pursue their individual dreams. But unlike Rand, I don’t think the only thing standing in the way of the individual is big government. That is way too simplistic, and she ignores what happens when the rich are allowed to treat their employees as they please. And most people who are rich were born rich. Many don’t produce anything. And many rich people who do work and earn money started off on third base. The idea that many or most who have money earned it fair and square with hard work is infuriatingly dumb. And the idea that regulation only serves to hamper these heroic figures from going out and making their dreams comes true is dumb.

Conservatives like to wave Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged around. Some of them thump on it like Christianists thump on the Bible. I’d take their claim that they’re all for the individual more seriously if they didn’t get into bed with the Christianists. Like I said, I grew up gay in West Virginia, a place where you’ll find a lot of fundamentalism, so I know those people do not champion the individual. They want to control every aspect of a persons life, not just how they run their business. So I’ll take the “collectivism” of the so-called socialists any day of the week, and twice on Sunday, over the “collectivism” of the religious right.

Conservatives want to get big government out of my way so I can be free? What a joke that is. I would laugh if it wasn’t so contemptible and insulting. Ayn Rand’s silly novel is just another book used and cherry picked by those who want to walk all over people like me. Those who go around spitting out the dogma they found in Atlas Shrugged are pimping out Rand like their Bible-thumping brethren in the Republican party pimp out Jesus.

There were actually Rand enthusiasts in this documentary who blamed the meltdown of the financial system and the housing market on regulation. I don’t know exactly what regulations they were complaining about, but, in any event, regulations are not all equal. There are some good ones and some bad ones, and you have to constantly monitor them to see which ones are working, which ones aren’t, and which ones aren’t working anymore due to changing conditions. And I also know that banks wouldn’t have made the kind of loans they were a few years ago if the regulations that were in place when my father was a banker thirty years ago still applied. So it was primarily deregulation of the industry that lead to the meltdown, and that’s some really fancy footwork to try to get people to believe that if only Uncle Sam had stopped hanging over the shoulders of all those poor, put upon bankers, they wouldn’t have made all those crazy loans, and then traded them with other banks, and insured them multiple times so that they’d actually make money if the borrower defaulted, which only gave them incentive to make bad loans. Too much regulation did that? Please. It was a crash that someone should have seen coming, such as federal bank examiners, but they had been kicked out of the room. This is what you get when you deregulate.

I remember seeing Rand a few times on Phil Donahue’s show. She was always supper arrogant and condescending. And there was a clip in the documentary that showed her remarking on how smart she thought she was. But I don’t think being a pigheaded extremist who takes a simple idea and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity, and dismisses any and all evidence that might soften your beliefs is all that smart.

She talked about peoples' “rational self-interest”, but she ignores the fact that if this country became the dog-eat-dog society that she advocated, it would create the exact same conditions that lead to the Russian Revolution and to the financial ruin of her family. The Russian people who joined the Communists were acting in their “rational self-interest.” They knew they were getting screwed, and they went out and tried to do something about it. If everyone had a nice, middle class life like Rand’s family, they wouldn’t have bothered. But Rand’s philosophy seems to be based on the idea that the revolutionaries were just a bunch of layabouts who wanted something for nothing.

A lot of these Rand people say that if you’re down on your luck, you should simply rely on private charity or churches, and if people didn’t have to pay so much of their income in taxes, they would have more to give. I can just imagine how that would work. In many cases, you’d have to ingratiate yourself to the givers in some way. And many would be kicked aside like an old shoe.

Thankfully I didn’t have to rely on private charity when I had my head surgeries. The two of them together cost nearly $100,000. (It’d probably cost twice that now.) I was an unemployed gay man with post traumatic stress disorder and social phobia who was just diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the Rand folks think I should have went around with a cup in hand to all the fundamentalist churches and asked for donations. The horrors. I can only imagine what my “rational self-interest” would have led me to do in that situation.