The Mistake of All Mistakes
On Tuesday, March 19, I’ll be hosting a webinar for Ayn Rand fans on “5 Mistakes Even Long-time Objectivists Make.” I hope you’ll register and join me. But rather than try to sell you on the webinar, I wanted to bring you back behind the curtain and tell you the story of why I decided to create this event.
Last week I mentioned that I was introduced to Ayn Rand through the books of Robert Ringer. But the odd thing is that the main passage where Ringer directly discusses Rand is not complimentary. In his book Million Dollar Habits Ringer says:
The reality is that it’s an anti-Ayn Rand world. . . . After years of being certain that every word Ayn Rand wrote was unequivocally right, I woke up one morning and realized that I was covered in bumps and bruises. Why? Because I had been living through something called real life. Repeatedly I would go back and reread Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to try to figure out what was wrong, until one day I finally said to myself, “Hey, this is great stuff! And if I ever move to another planet that’s full of Henry Reardens and Howard Roarks and Dagny Taggarts (fictional characters from Ayn Rand’s novels), it’s going to be fantastic. But the problem is, I’m not on another planet right now! This is planet Earth, and there are no Dagny Taggarts or Howard Roarks on this planet. The closest we ever came was Gary Cooper.” (Million Dollar Habits, 154-155.)
I really wish I could remember what made me read these words at age 14 and think, “I have to read this Ayn Rand woman.” But thankfully I did, and in the quarter century or so since, I’ve seen a lot of people come to the same conclusion Ringer did: that the ideals of Effective Egoism, and Objectivism more broadly, are impractical—at least in a world where most people don’t share those ideals.
Some of those people follow Ringer in concluding that Rand got something deeply wrong. But there is another variant of the same error that’s more tragic: they maintain that Rand’s ideals are right but they just aren’t good enough to live up to them. They simply don’t have the strength or courage to hold fast to their ideals in an irrational world.
Whether you blame the world, your ideals, or yourself, it’s the same mistake: the deadly, soul-killing mistake of surrendering your idealism.
The Burden of Idealism
I caught my first glimpse of how this process plays out when I convinced my favorite uncle to read Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. We were driving back to his house after making a grocery store run and I could tell he was reticent as he told me he had finished the book. “I didn’t like it,” he finally admitted.
“Oh?” I said. “Why not?”
“You have to compromise,” he said. “I’ve had to compromise so much in my life.”
At first I thought he just misunderstood the point. I explained to him the difference between compromising on concrete issues and compromising on principles. If you want a big house and your wife wants a small house, it’s fine to compromise on medium sized house. What The Fountainhead is about is the importance of not surrendering your principles: your convictions regarding what’s true and what’s good.
I could tell my explanation did not land. And it was obvious why. My uncle understood the point I was making perfectly well, but the reality is he had compromised on his basic principles. I knew he had spent his life doing work he hated because it paid the bills, and there were probably countless other deep compromises I knew nothing about. Reading The Fountainhead didn’t inspire him—it traumatized him. The message he heard was, “You sold out your life and you were wrong to do it.”
By the time we start thinking about morality in explicit terms, we have already made important choices and usually have our share of regrets. But our character has not yet solidified, and the story of our life feels like it’s just getting started. We sense that, regardless of where we are, we still have the time and the freedom to realize our highest vision of what’s possible in life.
But time passes, our commitments increase, more of our crucial choices lie in the past rather than the future. Our vision of what’s possible narrows. This is the point at which most people lose the idealism of their youth.
How to Sell Your Soul
“Congratulations. I always wanted to be a writer. I guess it just never happened.”
It was 2006 and I had just told my boss that I was leaving the tech company I was working at to accept a job with the Ayn Rand Institute.
My boss was a good guy. Quiet. Friendly. Not all that much older than I was at the time—maybe mid-thirties. And yet he spoke of his life as if it had already passed him by.
As I drove from Virginia to California to accept my dream job, I remember feeling a cold sense of terror. Because I could see clearly how my boss had let his own dreams slip away—and I realized how easily the same thing might have happened to me.
Here’s the pattern. You start out with big plans. You finish college and decide, hey, I’ll take a job to pay the bills while I build my writing career. Then you meet a girl and decide to get married and start a family. You get a few promotions, buy a house, a couple nice cars. Life is getting busy and you have a lot of obligations. You can’t make the time to write, and you definitely can’t afford to take a job with fewer responsibilities—not with your mortgage. Suddenly you see age forty coming up quickly and you admit to yourself: the writing thing is never going to happen.
Meanwhile, a similar pattern is playing out in your persona life. You’re not so happy in your marriage, but you don’t want to rock the boat. Besides, it’s not like you and your spouse fight all that often. You’re just not happy, and who gets divorced simply because they’re unhappy? Maybe your youthful romanticism was silly. A marriage isn’t supposed to be filled with passion. That’s a Hollywood fantasy. You lower your sights and learn to expect less from life.
And what about your convictions? You became an atheist in college, convinced there was no evidence for God. But you live in a small town where everyone goes to church and prays at meal time. You try to avoid the issue at first, but eventually someone asks you what church you go to, and you say something vague about not finding a place you like. You feel like a coward but decide: no, you’re just being practical. There’s no use arguing with people about religion, and no reason to lose friends or even job opportunities by stating your views openly. You used to be passionately interested in ideas, but now when you walk past the philosophy section at Barnes and Noble you feel uneasy and tell yourself ideas are fine for teenagers, but eventually a man’s gotta learn to live in the real world.
Idealism is the commitment to achieving the best in all things, but it is a commitment that we can lose without realizing what we’ve lost. We lose it through seemingly small choices and trivial compromises. And all along the way, we tell ourselves: I’m not giving in, I’m being practical.
How to Save Your Soul
There is an element of cowardice involved in selling out your ideals. But cowardice isn’t the whole story, and often it’s not even the dominant factor. If your ideals aren’t rational, then they won’t be practical.
It is obvious why someone who holds essentially irrational ideals will experience a conflict between their ideals and reality. If you accept altruism, you will by definition experience a conflict between the moral and the practical.
But even someone whose ideals are essentially rational can experience a conflict between their ideals and reality if they don’t fully understand their ideals and know how to apply them in practice.
For example, does integrity demand refusing to participate in DEI training at work? Does honesty demand telling your wife that, yes, she looks fat in that dress? Does justice demand cutting off relationships with your family because they voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
Even if you know what your ideals demand, it’s not always obvious how to bring them into reality. How do you create your ideal career? How do you find the right romantic partner and build a fulfilling relationship? How do you improve your moral character?
The reason so many people who encounter Ayn Rand end up following some version of Robert Ringer’s path is precisely because they could not answer these questions. They did not fully grasp the meaning of the ideals they embraced and they could not effectively apply them to their lives in a way that was both principled and practical.
That is a tragedy. It’s why I’m giving my webinar on “5 Mistakes Even Long-time Objectivists Make.” And it’s why I tell everyone interested in the ideas I discuss in this newsletter that they owe it to themselves to go really deep and study with us at Ayn Rand University, which is the best way to achieve genuine mastery over Ayn Rand’s ideas.
Effective Egoism 101
The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:
Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand
Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand
The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand
And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
I have seen the same mistake, “the deadly, soul-killing mistake of surrendering your idealism”, in similar ways as you describe in others, and at times have felt the pressure to do so myself. It does seem to be the most fundamental mistake. As I anticipate what the other four will be, here are four that occur to me:
- Giving up the values you held before discovering Objectivism, or that are still operative in the present, when now well-read in Objectivism, too easily. (Music, literature, movies, books, friends, activities, such as sports, etc.)
- Not learning how to introspect or not taking enough time to introspect.
- Reading too much Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff (et al.), (without a clear and viable purpose), but also not reading with enough structure and not on a schedule.
- Sorrow about the state of the culture and the people around you, fear, anger or hostility, leading to an avoidance of most social relationships, too much solitude turning to loneliness, partly due to social-psychological factors, partly due to ineffective powers of persuasion.
Don, I recently stumbled upon a similar phenomenon similar to Ringer’s experience with Ayn Rand, and maybe even like your uncle’s.
I recently borrowed a fascinating book that I hoped would help me better avoid long longwindedness, because I value brevity, essentialization, unit-economy, and the art of the aphorism. It is a 2005 book by James Geary called The World in a Phrase, where he discusses the nature of the aphorism and those who have used it well. Very early in Chapter One, soon after he relates a sweet and charming story of how he first wooed his wife with an aphorism, I encountered the following:
“In the beginning, it wasn't immediately clear to me how to collect aphorisms. You either have to have a very good memory or make some note of the sayings as you read them. I opted for the latter method. I took down the poster of George Harrison on my wall- … flipped it around, hung it back up, and started writing the aphorisms on the back… The George Harrison poster, for example, has lots of extracts from books by Ayn Rand, J. D.
Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry David Thoreau. This was my alien-hermit phase … Some of these aphorisms seem a little shallow now. Ayn Rand's exhortations about the virtues of selfishness, for example, no longer move me.”
I had to return the book but it will also return to me. This quotation snubbing Ayn Rand has not dissuaded me from having faith that there will be intellectual and literary value in the subsequent parts of the book.