From Chapter 2 of “Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America” by Matt Taibbi
Greenspan left NYU to pursue a doctorate in economics at Columbia University, where one of his professors was economist Arthur Burns, a fixture in Republican administrations after World War II who in 1970 became chief of the Federal Reserve. Burns would be Greenspan’s entrée into several professional arenas, most notably among the Beltway elite.
Remarkably, Greenspan’s other great career rabbi was the objectivist novelist Ayn Rand, an antigovernment zealot who was nearly the exact ideological opposite of a career bureaucrat like Burns.
Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded intellectual jerk-offs who called themselves by the ridiculous name the “Collective” and who provided Greenspan the desired forum for social ascent.
These meetings of the “Collective” would have an enormous impact on American culture by birthing a crackpot antitheology dedicated to legitimizing relentless self-interest—a grotesquerie called objectivism that hit the Upper East Side cocktail party circuit hard in the fifties and sixties.
It is important to spend some time on the seriously demented early history of objectivism, because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in its sleep decades ago would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan, to provide virtually the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early twenty-first century.
Rand, the Soviet refugee who became the archpriestess of the movement, was first of all a perfect ancillary character in the black comedy that is Greenspan’s life—a bloviating, arbitrary, self-important pseudo-intellectual who recalls the gibberish-spewing academic twits in Woody Allen spoofs like “No Kaddish for Weinstein” and “My Speech to the Graduates.” In fact, some of Rand’s quirks seemed to have been pulled more or less directly from Allen’s movies; her dictatorial stance on facial hair (“She … regarded anyone with a beard or a mustache as inherently immoral,” recalled one Rand friend) could have fit quite easily in the mouth of the Latin despot Vargas in Bananas, who demanded that his subjects change their underwear once an hour.
A typical meeting of Rand’s Collective would involve its members challenging one another to prove they exist. “How do you explain the fact that you’re here?” one Collective member recalls asking Greenspan. “Do you require anything besides the proof of your own senses?”
Greenspan played along with this horseshit and in that instance reportedly offered a typically hedging answer. “I think that I exist. But I don’t know for sure,” he reportedly said. “Actually, I can’t say for sure that anything exists.” (The Woody Allen version would have read, “I can’t say for sure that I exist, but I do know that I have to call two weeks in advance to get a table at Sardi’s.”)
One of the defining characteristics of Rand’s clique was its absolutist ideas about good and evil, expressed in a wildly off-putting, uncompromisingly bombastic rhetoric that almost certainly bled downward to the group ranks from its Russian émigré leader, who might have been one of the most humor-deprived people ever to walk the earth.
Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, for instance, remains a towering monument to humanity’s capacity for unrestrained self-pity—it’s a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian supermen decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia, and naturally the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude.
The book fairly gushes with the resentment these poor “Atlases” (they are shouldering the burdens of the whole world!) feel toward those who try to use “moral guilt” to make them share their wealth. In the climactic scene the Randian hero John Galt sounds off in defense of self-interest and attacks the notion of self-sacrifice as a worthy human ideal in a speech that lasts seventy-five pages.
It goes without saying that only a person possessing a mathematically inexpressible level of humorless self-importance would subject anyone to a seventy-five-page speech about anything. Hell, even Jesus Christ barely cracked two pages with the Sermon on the Mount. Rand/Galt manages it, however, and this speech lays the foundation of objectivism, a term that was probably chosen because “greedism” isn’t catchy enough.
Rand’s rhetorical strategy was to create the impression of depth through overwhelming verbal quantity, battering the reader with a relentless barrage of meaningless literary curlicues. Take this bit from Galt’s famous speech in Atlas Shrugged:
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.
A real page-turner. Anyway, Alan Greenspan would later regularly employ a strikingly similar strategy of voluminous obliqueness in his public appearances and testimony before Congress. And rhetorical strategy aside, he would forever more cling on some level to the basic substance of objectivism, expressed here in one of the few relatively clear passages in Atlas Shrugged:
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind …
Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
This is pure social Darwinism: self-interest is moral, interference (particularly governmental interference) with self-interest is evil, a fancy version of the Gordon Gekko pabulum that “greed is good.” When you dig deeper into Rand’s philosophy, you keep coming up with more of the same.
Rand’s belief system is typically broken down into four parts: metaphysics (objective reality), epistemology (reason), ethics (self-interest), and politics (capitalism). The first two parts are basically pure bullshit and fluff. According to objectivists, the belief in “objective reality” means that “facts are facts” and “wishing” won’t make facts change. What it actually means is “When I’m right, I’m right” and “My facts are facts and your facts are not facts.”
This belief in “objective reality” is what gives objectivists their characteristic dickish attitude: since they don’t really believe that facts look different from different points of view, they don’t feel the need to question themselves or look at things through the eyes of others. Since being in tune with how things look to other people is a big part of that magical unspoken connection many people share called a sense of humor, the “metaphysics” of objectivism go a long way toward explaining why there has never in history been a funny objectivist.
The real meat of Randian thought (and why all this comes back to Greenspan) comes in their belief in self-interest as an ethical ideal and pure capitalism as the model for society’s political structure. Regarding the latter, Randians believe government has absolutely no role in economic affairs; in particular, government should never use “force” except against such people as criminals and foreign invaders. This means no taxes and no regulation.
To sum it all up, the Rand belief system looks like this:
Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
Charity is immoral.
Pay for your own fucking schools.
Rand, like all great con artists, was exceedingly clever in the way she treated the question of how her ideas would be employed. She used a strategic vagueness that allowed her to paper over certain uncomfortable contradictions. For instance, she denounced tax collection as a use of “force” but also quietly admitted the need for armies and law enforcement, which of course had to be paid for somehow. She denounced the very idea of government interference in economic affairs but also here and there conceded that fraud and breach of contract were crimes of “force” that required government intervention.
She admitted all of this, but her trick was one of emphasis. Even as she might quietly admit to the need for some economic regulation, for the most part when she talked about “crime” and “force” she either meant (a) armed robbers or pickpockets or (b) governments demanding taxes to pay for social services:
Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: “Your money or your life,” or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: “Your children’s education or your life,” the meaning of that ultimatum is: “Your mind or your life.”
A conspicuous feature of Rand’s politics is that they make absolutely perfect sense to someone whose needs are limited to keeping burglars and foreign communists from trespassing on their Newport manses, but none at all to people who might want different returns for their tax dollar. Obviously it’s true that a Randian self-made millionaire can spend money on private guards to protect his mansion from B-and-E artists. But exactly where do the rest of us look in the Yellow Pages to hire private protection against insider trading? Against price-fixing in the corn and gasoline markets? Is each individual family supposed to hire Pinkertons to keep the local factory from dumping dioxin in the county reservoir?
Rand’s answer to all of these questions was to ignore them. There were no two-headed thalidomide flipper-babies in Rand’s novels, no Madoff scandals, no oil bubbles. There were, however, a lot of lazy-ass poor people demanding welfare checks and school taxes. It was belief in this simplistic black-and-white world of pure commerce and bloodsucking parasites that allowed Rand’s adherents to present themselves as absolutists, against all taxes, all regulation, and all government interference in private affairs—despite the fact that all of these ideological absolutes quietly collapsed whenever pragmatic necessity required it. In other words, it was incoherent and entirely subjective. Its rhetoric flattered its followers as Atlases with bottomless integrity, but the fine print allowed them to do whatever they wanted.
This slippery, self-serving idea ended up being enormously influential in mainstream American politics later on. There would be constant propaganda against taxes and spending and regulation as inherent evils, only these ideas would often end up being quietly ignored when there was a need for increased military spending, bans on foreign drug reimportation, FHA backing for mortgage lenders, Overseas Private Investment Corporation loans, or other forms of government largess or interference for the right people. American politicians reflexively act as perfectly Randian free-market, antitax purists (no politician beyond the occasional Kucinich will admit to any other belief system) except when, quietly and behind the scenes, they don’t.
Back then in early teens it wasn't uncommon to see businesslike people ostentatiously reading Rand on airplanes, even in coach.
Sublime Taibbi. Thanks for the excerpt.