Penguin Pete wrote a blog about two weeks ago in which he states that the philosophies of Nietzsche and Rand are poison to geeks.
He also gives some very good reasons for this suggestion – but in my mind he misses the single most important thing. I’ll be focusing on Rand here but the same applies to Nietzsche. The simple reason: Rand got it dead wrong.
Objectivism isn’t just poison to geeks because it makes the outcast excellent feel a sense of superiority and a belief that they can do the world better, and somehow exist independent of their communities, this is true and does happen sometimes – but there is a much bigger problem with Rand’s philosophy – she fundamentally misunderstood the concept of creativity and the process of innovation.
Rand’s ideology is common among a certain type of person – they want full and exclusive credit for their achievements as a justification for not sharing the benefits of those achievements with society as a whole, the reality though is that the independent creator, Rand’s “captains of industry” is an outright myth born of arrogant greed – there is no such thing.
Sure there are people who are smarter, who come up with great ideas – but none of them have ever done it alone. Some like Newton recognize that what they achieved was fundamentally enabled by the contributions of others, some try to pretend they were somehow special and saw what nobody else ever could.
History teaches us however, that the great do not carry the world as Rand thinks – if anything, the world has a habit of carrying the great (which is why we see a world degenerating into the celebration of mediocrity – too many times the excellent have exploited their position, now nobody wants to honor even the good ones).
Let’s take a typical example. Everybody knows that James Watt had a flash of inspiration when he saw a kettle boiling and then invented the steam engine. The perfect example of Objectivist greatness…. except the story is a complete fabrication and never happened. The truth is that steam power has been around since ancient Greek times. It was not harnessed well and was generally used only as a sort of theologians toy but the discovery was ancient.
By Watt’s time, several larger steam engine technologies were on the market already, used for various simple-industry tasks. Watt’s contribution was too see a link with a piece of science rather than technology: Pascal’s law
Now Pascal lived a good two centuries before Watt – he was the one who discovered the mathematical principles that determine the pressure a force will exert over a surface, his law forms the basis of all hydrological systems.
So what Watt realized was that by pressure controlling a steam engine, and hooking it up to hydrological cranks… you could harness the power much more efficiently.
The point isn’t that Watt didn’t make a great contribution to technology, he did. The point is that Watt could not have done it without building on the technology and science already available – without, in other words, the contributions of others. The other point is that if Watt had not done it, somebody else almost certainly would have.
You do get rare cases of discovery that takes very long to replicate. We know today that Da Vinci had discovered Cholesterol as a cause of heart disease, but his work was censored and it took the world 200 years to rediscover it. The lesson here is not however that Da Vinci should be treated like a God ! It’s not that his creation should have been patented and kept only to his own benefit !
The lesson is in fact the opposite: we didn’t rediscover it for 200 years because his work was hidden, and others prevented from doing similar research. The Vatican’s censorship had an effect very similar to most copyright and patent abuses today: and shows why they are greatly harmful to our society and humanity.
Nobody could build on Da Vinci’s anatomical discovery, because nobody could study it further.
In other words: the value our contributions to society have today (Da Vinci discovered Cholesterol but had no idea what caused it or how it could be slowed down), is insignificant compared to the value they will come to have as the basis for other people’s work.
We need to recognize the dependence of our creations on the works of others, and then recognize that we are duty bound to sacrifice them back into the pool for our own successors, not only because we are indebted to the society from which we took – but also because what we refuse to contribute as knowledge (not just closed-box product) – dooms our descendants.
Objectivism got one thing right: individualism and questioning of authority are crucial aspects to independent thinking and growth, but to imagine that they alone are the building blocks of discovery, that a select few are capable of them and therefore carry the world on their discoveries… that is not merely arrogant, but outright wrong.
When Lawrence Lessig was fighting to try and keep copyright term sane… it was the Ayn Rand institute who lobbied most actively to prevent his success. Rand’s ideology is completely incompatible with the idea that knowledge should come to benefit society.
Which is the crucial paradox in objectivism. Rand teaches that those with great ideas should cash in on them in any way short of actively harming others, without caring to share the benefit. Yet at the same time, Rand claims that those who act in such a selfish way are somehow carrying the world on their backs ?
Only, perhaps, if you confuse carrying with enslaving. That is what labor without due reward is after all: slavery.
The ultimate sacrifice, the very thing Rand claims to oppose.
In short: Objectivism is poison for the world, because it’s just plain and simply wrong. It is the fundamental excuse for the worst crimes against humanity of our times, including the Iraq War.
What is the answer? I am not entirely sure, unlike Rand I’m not arrogant enough to imagine I can cure the planet, but I do know that the answer lies in working as a community. I’ll put my labour with free software, free culture, free sharing of knowledge – not with the selfish and te self-serving.
Communism failed because it underestimated the selfishness of humanity (implemented as laziness), we are watching Capitalism fail because it underestimated he selfishness of humanity (implemented as greed).
Do not fool yourself into thinking Ayn Rand’s excuse is a good one, it’s not even a true one.
If you want to find philosophies you can perhaps build a better society out off, I would suggest reading Neil Stephenson rather than Ayn Rand any day of the week.
