Ayn Rand’s Continued Influence Adds a Bizarre Twist to Conservative Politics | Alternet
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October 3, 2014 |
Start-ups and People as Corporations
None should be surprised that Wall Street investors seized upon Rand’s muscular view of capitalism as a sort of intellectual codex to Gordon Gecko-ism. Rand fetishized greed, né self-interest, as not only a beneficent aspect of human nature but a catalyzing moral force. If you weren’t reading carefully—and accounts of the derivative markets and bank leveraging suggests nobody was doing anything carefully—you could easily take from Rand’s works a near-religious imperative to grab as much money as possible without regard to consequences.
But Rand resonated even more deeply among a different style of businessmen. Oliver’s show chose early dot-com mogul Marc Cuban as the modern Randian; counted with him are tech figures and venture capitalists like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, and more.
Start-up figures wear their libertarianism like their hoodies, but there’s a reason they hat-tip Rand above anybody. Here Jennifer Burns’ biography Goddess of the Market is instructive in its reading of Atlas Shrugged. Burns distinguished in Rand’s view the capitalist—who could be as bland a conformist as could a Bolshevik—from the entrepreneur, who was creativity incarnate. Never an economist, Rand developed instead a metaphysical theory of capitalism in which industry became the incorporated expression of the individual will. Objectivism was less about the rational distribution of resources or allocation of profits than it was a vision of how the economy and the human will realized each other.
The belief that entrepreneurs are a fusion of personal and economic invention is not an idea exclusive to Rand, though she certainly invoked Edison and the Wright brothers as examples of her self-made, and self-making, supermen; it was Rand’s elaboration of the corporation as a cathectic object, through which the energy of the individual is projected and embodied, that made it hers.
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