My OperaTHE UNQUIET EYES OF AYN RAND
Sunday, June 5, 2011 3:29:40 PM
I used to despise Ayn Rand. Not anymore. The first time I heard about Ayn Rand was when I read Iluminatus!, by Robert Anton Wilson. One of the characters in that book was an American writer Atlanta Hope, who had written a monstrous piece about a country (USA) brought down to disaster by statism and redeemed by a bunch of Nietszchean businessmen-heroes. Such book was called Telemachus Sneezed, and was linked in the book to Ayn Rand's famous novel Atlas Shrugged in the sentence "If Atlas can shrug and Telemachus can Sneeze, why can't Satan repent?". Robert Anton Wilson can be counted as an Anarchist, and even as some kind of libertarian, save for his non-trivial ideas about individual identity and property, so he did not plainly reject Ayn Rand's ideology, but he did depict her as some kind of sex-crazied lunatic.
Libertarianism, on the other hand, was at first a word in the cover of a sci-fi Mexican comic magazine I used to read when I was a teenager, that was poor as sci-fi but generous in the depiction of poorly covered attractive girls. Later on, it got a new meaning assigned, mainly through episodes of the kind "someone is wrong in the Internet". Years of discussion were not able to convince me that property and freedom are compatible, let alone identical. The parade of characters more bound on defending militarist states and state-like corporations than honouring their proclaimed love for freedom made me very suspicious of anything libertarian, and when word came around about libertarians having a grand foundational novel, I was already very biased against it.
I missed the chance to read it at the Free Hetherington, an anarchistic-inclined student occupation where someone donated it as an ironic gesture. By that time, my energy was completely needed for things other than getting to know well a cornerstone of an ideology I despise.
But now, as I see this documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I am confronted with the unquiet eyes of Ayn Rand. She is being interviewed, and her precise, convinced and very quick answers are delivered while her eyes move in complex patterns, as those of someone looking an imaginary representation of a very complex problem. She looks like she is thinking things thoroughly, in both all detail and depth, only at a dazzling speed. And I, for one, think she was. She was probably an exceptionally intelligent person.
For me, Ayn Rand is accursed with a poisonous cocktail: a very gifted mind and a fixed idea. A great intelligence is merely a means, it can be used for make sense of a chaotic reality, or to cleverly impose an arbitrary sense to it. I think the rejection of the concept and value of altruism made her waste her great mind in the creation of a monstrous morality whose main victim was herself.
After knowing how her sad existence was, I can only feel compassion for her. She used to say that only virtuous people was worth of being loved, and she was indeed extremely virtuous in her own sense, but that precluded all possibilities for her to be loved and happy. Ayn Rand was not evil. Her morality, however, was, inasmuch as it made herself miserable.
