Adventures on Twitter: Objectionism

Yes, that's a pun, not a typo. I personally rate it as a two out of five at least, but it needed to be said.

So, don’t ask me why I do this to myself, but I got into a discussion on Objectivism the other day. It was a weird, winding conversation, but I don’t really care to rehash it. Instead, I wanted to talk about an article linked to me debunking Objectivism.

Now, for the record, I’m not an Objectivist. I find the ideas interesting, and most having at least some truth, but I don’t agree with the conclusions that Objectivism reaches. That said, I feel obligated at times to point out when an argument doesn’t add up, as most criticisms against Objectivism tend to do.

If you don’t believe me when I say I am not Objectivist, just take a look at my actual debunking of Objectivism, which I will probably release the same week as this blog.

But today, we are looking at the following article.

Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-this-is-what-happens-when-you-take-ayn-rand-seriously

Well, I struggle to take an article that doesn’t capitalize substantive words in its title seriously, but I’m open minded. Let’s see what razor sharp criticisms this article has to offer.

Now, I linked the article, so I’m not going to go line by line. I will maintain context of what I show to the best of my ability, but the full article is there to read for yourself if you like.

The core of Rand’s philosophy — which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels — is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. 

That’s a pretty decent summary of Objectivism. But the author proceeds to poison the well with an unrelated comment almost immediately.

By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” is a rape in which “she fought like an animal.”) 

Now, I haven’t read the Fountainhead. Perhaps this opinion will change after I do. But I find it rather unlikely that Rand supports non consensual rape as part of her removal of regulations. Considering she found imposing any sort of claim over any individual’s property an affront to individual rights suggests that maybe, just maybe, she actually considered rape to be bad, and having controversial and erotic scenes in her novels was a way to sell books and increase exposure. Call my a cynic if you like.

Moving on…

The fly in the ointment of Rand’s philosophical “objectivism” is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These “prosocial tendencies” were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against “natural” self-interest and therefore should not exist. 

No. Just… no. Cooperation is built on the bedrock of self interest. The whole point is that you can achieve things by working together otherwise not possible without cooperation, thus having a direct benefit. Rand has strong personalities in her stories by design, but I’ve yet to hear of one that is against any form of cooperative effort. Rather, the focus is on mutual exchange of value, in that everyone, from the CEO to lowest ranked employee, ultimately works for their own benefit. This is such a cartoonishly poor understanding of Objectivism, I could end this analysis right here by saying the author is not well versed on the subject.

But I’m sure there is some gold later on, so let’s continue…

To many of Rand’s readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. After all, others are simply pursuing their own self-interest as well. 

Wrong. Ayn Rand was against any sort of government control over producers. It is in the thief's self interest to steal as long as he can get away with it, but that does not mean Rand considers that moral. The impact of one’s actions is absolutely considered, especially in regards to other individuals, otherwise Rand would be saying that all actions are moral as long as they serve you in some way, which is not her stated belief.

Do not be misled by sloppy expressions such as “A murderer commits a crime against society.” It is not society that a murderer murders, but an individual man. It is not a social right that he breaks, but an individual right. He is not punished for hurting a collective—he has not hurt a whole collective—he has hurt one man. If a criminal robs ten men—it is still not “society” that he has robbed, but ten individuals. There are no “crimes against society”—all crimes are committed against specific men, against individuals. And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack—against force. 

Taken from The Ayn Rand Column, I guess. All I did was a single search for Ayn Rand’s take on theft, and that’s what I found. So, unlike what the article is trying to suggest, Rand actually doesn’t condone literally any action made in self interest.

It’s almost like this author got the gist of Ayn Rand, googled some quotes, and slapped them together into an article “debunking” Objectivism. It’s all just so pathetic.

Economists alternately find alarming and amusing a large body of results from experimental studies showing that people don’t behave according to the tenets of rational choice theory. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust than is predicted by the theory, and we retaliate vehemently when others behave selfishly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions. 

Oh… did… did the author just debunk their own premise?

With this in mind, does it not make the course of action for those most concerned with their own selfish interests… to treat others fairly, and cooperate with others when a common course of action is available? Does that not vindicate Objectivism rather than defeat it? Right here, we have the author saying that the market itself will systematically penalize bad actors, thus, despite the author's belief otherwise, making the most rational choices for anyone looking for the greatest amount of success to be bound under certain ethical standards?

If that is all true, not only does it reinforce Objectivist thought, it also reinforces the idea of free market capitalism. You don’t need to worry about rich people growing too influential, because they are bound by certain market responses that will penalize them once they break the market’s code of conduct. Holy crap, I can’t wait to see where else this article goes.

EDIT: I just realized this. John Galt reacted to the unfairness of an overly regulated system by spending years trying to destroy it. That was Atlas Shrugged's fundamental plot. The economic theory described in the above quote further rationalizes the motivations of those within the narrative it is trying to discredit as incorrect and misguided. That's hilarious.

Next, we get something touted as a case study of Objectivism.

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand’s principles.
Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits.

Suffice it to say, things did not go well.

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears’ own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears’ circulars…Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store. 

Now, at a glance, you might say this disproves Rand’s philosophy… only it does the exact opposite.

See, economies are not fundamentally built on income, they are built upon providing value. There are parts of companies that do not directly produce any sort of revenue, but are still important for the company’s success. For example, advertising costs money, and the return is only made through sales. The effectiveness of advertising is largely presumed, because you cannot exactly measure how much of the advertising cost was directly converted into sales. People might have bought a product because they saw an ad, or maybe a friend who already had a product informed them. It’s a very complex problem, trying to work out the best ways to spread visibility of a product, and at what point you will suffer diminishing returns.

Perhaps an even better example is customer service. Most companies have this to some extent, and it is usually free for those who already bought the product. The company does not make any income on helping customers resolve their issues, but not offering any customer service will hurt future sales. That is why most companies will offer this for previous customers; to protect the brand, and encourage consumer confidence in their product.

The situation being described is something I’ve seen personally. Poor quality management. By distorting priorities on what behaviors are actually valuable to the company, they created an artificial and unnecessary scarcity of trust within their own ranks. Capitalism itself is built on the trust that the dollar you just earned can be used to purchase something else, thus giving you value. But if you can’t trust that the local store will be accepting that dollar tomorrow, you won’t continue working for them, because the uncertainty of their value is too high. It leads to resource hoarding and a stunted economy.

It’s almost like Rand wrote extensively on how the government taking money from free enterprises and attempting to pick winners and losers stifled trust that people could actually earn their way, and thus such intervention usually hurt economies rather than helped them. It’s almost like the market corrects for dumb decisions by causing a loss of profit when the ones in charge start making such dumb decisions. It’s almost like the author in this article thinks they are seeing a problem with free enterprise, and not actually a problem with disconnected executives making poorly conceived rules for producers under their control, similar in the way government intervention in an economy warps incentive structures and causes problems instead of solving them.

Of course, the author does not have the self awareness to consider any of this, instead using this quote.

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself. 

They actually think the competition is what destroyed the company. No, it’s because they started rationing resources and established the rule that someone else succeeding in another unit was interpreted as your failure. They created a zero sum game where one didn’t actually exist. If government controlled all businesses and distributed their budgets, you would very likely get this exact situation, because that would be a similar scheme.

Next, and I wish I was only joking… the author brings up a story where the newly formed government after a successful coup assisted the wealthy in shutting other people out of the economy and securing their place at the top, despite providing little in terms of value to the population, as evidence that capitalism free from control of the government is not viable, as Rand suggests. Yeah, they use an example of government colluding with private business causing problems as evidence that less government involvement is the problem.

The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws — the ZEDE comes in this context — and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich. 

Hey, idiot. Rand wants the government OUT of the economy. Atlas Shrugged was all about the terrible trend of corporations either becoming incestuous government organizations that no longer had to make a profit to exist, or bankrupted by those government co-opted organizations and other government institutions. The government is meant to be the government, and private enterprise is meant to be private enterprise. But let’s ignore that as we continue listening to this nonsense.

As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. 

Cool, so corporations began governing. Y’know, like Rand said. Companies should literally act as the government. Oh wait, she said the EXACT OPPOSITE, and said the government DOES have a role, and we SHOULD NOT only be ruled by private industry. Here, I’ll even provide a quote.

Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: . . . a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government. 

That’s from the Nature of Government, I guess. Again, all I did was a single search for Ayn Rand’s take on anarchism, and that’s what I found. I wonder why the author didn’t include this while conflating Anarcho Capitalism with Objectivism? They might be similar in certain respects, but disagree entirely on the subject of government.

Ugh. Continuing…

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. A resident “pointed out a place for a new airport that could be the biggest in Central America, if only it could get built, but there is no private sector upside.” 

Oh, of course. There’s an open field over there, if only a bunch of people could cooperate and build it. Yeah, that was definitely caused by no regulations on free enterprise. If the government reigned in the greedy corporations, they would totally just build a freakin’ airport right there, because I know that there is a ton of demand for it, that the spot over there is perfect, and it would be the biggest in Central America.

Do I even need to say why that’s ludicrous? It’s the easiest thing in the world to say a large undertaking like building an airport would work. It’s another thing entirely to actually do it. If they restricted free market capitalism, I very much doubt that there would suddenly be an airport, functioning with no problems, and the entire region would stop being so impoverished.

We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist.  Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard. 

Now, I’m no expert on international politics. I’m also currently assuming this article has remotely accurate information, even though they seem to have a complete lack of understanding on Objectivism. But if you ask me, the bigger problem in this region seems to be civil unrest. As stated in quote about Anarchy from Rand, a base level of implicit civility is necessary to allow free trade to work.

I’m not sure you can even accurately call Ayn Rand a libertarian, as Libertarianism and Objectivism are distinct ideologies, but assuming that’s remotely accurate, libertarians don’t believe in no government either, where all protection must be paid for individually. I’m not a libertarian myself, but I think one solution they would propose is a community requiring a fee be paid for a general police force, potentially also made up of some volunteers from that same community. That’s quite a bit different than personal security, and is not functionally much different from paying for police with taxation.

Libertarians are less concerned with police that are stopping muggings, and more concerned with totalitarian police penalizing you for not getting a license to do mundane things like selling lemonade or smoking a cigarette. But this is getting off topic…

This is the inevitable outcome of unbridled self-interest set loose in unregulated markets.
Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

It is within the interest of those playing a sport that everyone is held accountable to the rules. This person is making a marginal case against pure anarchy at best, but seems to have fully missed the mark on even mildly critiquing Rand. Heck, the informed reader would have their faith bolstered in Rand by reading this, as bad arguments tend to entrench people in their position when recognized, implicitly suggesting valid criticism is not possible, and thus critics require a straw man to fight against instead of the real thing.

Seriously, for those unaware... Libertarianism, Anarch-Capitalism, and Objectivism are all very separate things. If you want to discuss any of them, at least attempt to learn what their principles actually are.

Now, I had a another article linked in relation to this conversation, but I’ll leave that for a different blog. This has already gone longer than I thought it would.