Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (66 page)

These two figures … are philosophical
archetypes
, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason. (
New Intellectual
, 14)

Drawing from a designation made initially by Nathaniel Branden, Rand identified these archetypes as Attila and the Witch Doctor.
²
Attila rules by brute, physical force, whereas the Witch Doctor rules by mysticism. Like other dualities, these archetypes “appear to be opposites,” but they are united by a pronounced hostility to the conceptual level of consciousness.

Attilas seek to achieve physical domination by ruling the bodies of their subjects and seizing their material products. They regard people “as others regard fruit trees or farm animals.” They exhibit a “
perceptual
mentality,” which is as close to “an animal ‘epistemology’ … as a human consciousness can come.” Attilas are the anti-conceptual mentality incarnate. They do not understand the cognitive roots of production. They see no need to comprehend “
how
men manage to produce the things [they covet]” (
New Intellectual
, 14–16). In modern social science, Atillas contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge and the compartmentalization of the disciplines. They view the problems of social life in a piecemeal, concrete-bound fashion, rejecting all forms of “system-building” as “irrational, mystical and unscientific” (43–44).

In the face of such anti-conceptualism, it is little wonder that people are drawn psychologically to the Witch Doctor. Rand argues that human efficacy requires a comprehensive view of the world. The Witch Doctor attempts to fulfill this need. But the Witch Doctor’s attempt at comprehensiveness is saturated with mysticism. By manipulating floating abstractions, the Witch Doctor “seeks to rule … men’s souls.” A Witch Doctor views his or her own consciousness as an “irreducible primary,” obliterating “the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and
the perceived.” The Witch Doctor damns the material world, the body, and the self as evil, asserts an ineffable grasp of a higher reality and proposes to lead people to paradise. The Witch Doctor achieves spiritual domination through the “lethal opposition of the
moral
and the
practical
,” reducing people to sacrificial animals by attacking their self-esteem (16–18).

Thus, whereas Attilas prey on peoples’ bodies, Witch Doctors prey on their souls. Whereas Attilas focus on “concretes unintegrated by abstractions,” Witch Doctors accept “floating abstractions unrelated to concretes.” Both of these figures “are incomplete parts of a human being who seek completion in each other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist without
mind
” (19). Their historical opposition—and alliance—is “based on mutual fear and mutual contempt” (20). It is a synthesis of apparent opposites brought about by the poverty of each.

Rand argued that the dominance of Attila and the Witch Doctor was fundamentally challenged from the beginning of Western civilization by the genesis of
philosophy
. From the time of ancient Greece, as people were provided with a modicum of political freedom, the first rumblings of a rational view of reality were felt. Though Witch Doctor metaphysics were reproduced in the works of most of the early Greek philosophers, including Plato, it was Aristotle who became “the world’s first
intellectual
, in the purest and noblest sense of that word” (22). By providing human beings with an objective view of reality, and by articulating the laws of logic, Aristotle challenged the mystic creeds of his day. For Rand, the
history
of philosophy was largely a duel between the secular rationality of Aristotelianism and the mysticism of Plato. Despite the achievements of Greek culture, early Western civilization was dominated by the predatory rule of statist empires and feudal tribalists. The Attilas often aligned themselves with Witch Doctors, who provided their rule with mystical, ideological legitimation. But after centuries of brutality, the reign of Attila and the Witch Doctor was fundamentally undermined by the rebirth of secular philosophy. The reintroduction of the Aristotelian worldview into Western culture, via Thomas Aquinas, was the philosophic precursor that made possible the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and
capitalism
. Though it took nearly four hundred years to secularize the Western mind, the release of body and soul from the domination of Attila and the Witch Doctor led to a burst of scientific discovery and invention, material production and creativity (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 12).

These
historical
developments brought forth thinking and acting men and women, demonstrating in a definitive manner the efficacy of the mind in the production of goods and services for human survival on earth. The newly emergent, though “mixed,” capitalist systems “wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit,” and introduced two new historical archetypes: “the
producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—
the businessman and the intellectual
” who flourished in their respective marketplaces of goods and ideas (
New Intellectual
,
25).
The businessman is the conduit of science, translating technological discoveries into material products for human consumption. The intellectual is the conduit of philosophy, translating philosophic abstractions into ideational products for human consumption (26–27).

Like Marx before her, Rand saw the professional businessman and the professional intellectual “as brothers born of the industrial revolution” (13).
³
But even as the Attilas and the Witch Doctors were kept at bay, they were not completely eliminated as historical forces. The Attilas began to use ever more sophisticated methods of predation to feast on the enormous productive power unleashed by the
reasoning
mind. The Witch Doctors began to infiltrate secular philosophy and to undercut the efficacy of reason by couching their mysticism in technical and scientific verbiage. The great philosophical turning point was achieved by Kant, who formalized
dualism
, pitting mind against body, reason against reality, morality against practicality. Nearly every major modern school of philosophy derived from this Kantian irrationality (
New Intellectual
, 30–34).

Capitalism
as a social formation was made possible by the rebirth of reason. But just as reason made political freedom possible, it required political freedom for its sustenance. Capitalism “was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence.” Before it reached structural maturity, it was undercut by a resurgent tide of mysticism in a culture that had never totally abandoned the mind-body distinction and the tribal premise. In the absence of an articulated moral base, capitalism remained stillborn, forever an unknown ideal.
⁴

Under capitalism, the businessman and the intellectual were archetypically involved in a process of free trade and free expression. But as the
state
came to dominate social life, most businessmen became modern-day Attilas, just as most intellectuals became modern-day Witch Doctors. Businessmen turned to the state to achieve consolidation and expansion. They typically scorned the realm of ideas as idealistic, impractical, and inconsequential. The intellectuals by contrast scorned the realm of production as materialistic and greedy. They provided the ideological rationale for the very predatory practices they often condemned. Their explicit and implicit attacks on rationality and freedom ideologically bolstered the power of the state. Frequently, they too depended on the state for material support of their research.

Capitalism
did not make this dualism possible; it had inherited it. Capitalism had challenged dualism
radically
, but its revolution remained
unconsummated. Whereas the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had made capitalism possible, modern
philosophy
made the death of capitalism inevitable. It could not survive in a
culture
so thoroughly committed to the obliteration of the mind. Rand believed that it was a “tragic irony” that businessmen and intellectuals, “the sons of capitalism,” were perishing in a struggle of mutual contempt. She argued: “If they perish, they will perish together.” But for Rand, “the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual” (
New Intellectual
, 13).

THE PRIMACY OF PHILOSOPHY

Rand’s contention that the major share of the guilt would belong to the intellectual requires detailed explanation. Recall the “tier” in Diagram 2 of
Chapter 11
. I have recast that figure here with interconnecting arrows to emphasize the point that there is no one-way causality between any two tiers (Diagram 3).

As Diagram 3 shows, Tier 1 does not
lead to
Tier 2, and Tier 2 does not
lead to
Tier 3. Rather, each tier is a precondition and context for the other two. The political and economic systems of a given society cannot be abstracted from the culture, nor can these be abstracted from the “
lifestyle
” of the majority of people. Hence, it is illegitimate to discuss “capitalist” political and economic institutions as external to the culture within which they reside. Unlike Marx, Rand did not see culture as a “superstructure” of capitalist relations. Closer to the
Weberian
paradigm, she saw culture as a “base” that provides the broad context for political and economic relations. For example, Rand would have rejected the postcommunist Russian attempt to graft capitalist institutions onto an indigenous noncapitalist base. Russian culture lacked sufficient commitment to individualism and reason. Even if Russia rejected
communism
, its culture was constituted
historically
by a profound mysticism and tribalism that would necessarily undercut the effective achievement of even a Western-style mixed economy,
⁵
much less a purely capitalist one.

Because most people have tacitly absorbed the values of their age, Rand recognized that, in the United States, the last remnants of an Aristotelian
sense of life
were being eradicated under the weight of systemic irrationality. The essence of the “mixed” economy was not merely its structural mixture of the principles of capitalism and
statism
but its corresponding mixture in each person’s soul, what Rand called “the ‘mixed economies’ of the spirit.”
⁶
There were conflicting philosophic cross-currents in U.S. culture and social psychology. After two hundred years of retrenchment, secular Aristotelianism, in Rand’s view, had been relegated to the cultural unconscious, as expressed in the predominating lifestyle of the American people (Tier 1). Explicit culture (Tier 2) was dominated by antirational practices, values, and ideas.

How were such antirational practices, values, and ideas transmitted culturally? Let us examine the constituent human components of Tier 2 (Diagram 4).

In Rand’s view, the “philosophic system-builders” set the ultimate trends of an age or a nation’s culture.
⁷
The ideas of the system-builder filter through the culture as the adherents to the
philosophy
begin to derive implications from the innovator’s teachings. Rand used military terminology to describe the crucial role of the intellectuals in this regard; the intellectual is “the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the
philosopher
” (
New Intellectual
, 26–27). The intellectual proceeds to apply the system-builder’s principles to a variety of subdisciplines. The central tenets are transmitted through the
educational
establishment to those who will become scientists,
businessmen, workers, politicians, journalists, and so on. These practitioners further transmit ideas through the communications media, art, literature, and music,
⁸
As Kelley (1990, 28) suggests, in time, such ideas become “an element in the dominant psychology of an age, predisposing people to accept the kinds of art, behavior, and institutions that are consistent with the idea.”