Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
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But the conditioning did not end with the victims. The camp guards too “received a certain kind of ‘reinforcement’ or processing” that slowly eradicated their cognitive independence. They were part of a hierarchic system of military terror in which superiors inflicted capricious punishments on all their subordinates. The guards were “well-clothed, well-fed and ideologically trained” to “question nothing and carry out anything.” As prisoners learned to submit to power, the guards learned “to wield it, with everything this requires, and destroys, in the wielder.” With each atrocity they committed, the guards negated their own moral sense. Most of the executioners turned to alcoholism. Like their victims, they schooled themselves in non-awareness (Peikoff 1982, 268).
For Peikoff, the camps had frustrated “man’s most abstract, delicate, spiritual … philosophical requirements,” revealing “the need by means of starving it” (274). Yet, while the Holocaust has been viewed as an aberration, Branden (1983b) has argued that the abdication of personal responsibility and autonomy “is inherent in our methods of child-rearing and education.” Branden draws from the experiences of the celebrated Milgram experiment, in which an individual subject was prompted by a supervisor to administer electric shocks to a student for each incorrect answer to a question. Unbeknownst to the individual subject, the electric shocks were fake, and both the student and the supervisor were trained actors. And yet an alarming number of individual subjects administered increasing levels of shocks to their students when ordered to do so by the supervisor. Frequently, they pushed buttons marked as activating dangerous and life-threatening dosages of electricity, despite the screams of the student-actors.
Branden maintains: “Most of us have been trained to push those buttons since the day we were born.” The educational system often distorts the development of the individual’s moral autonomy. The individual is taught to follow rules, and “to respect the voice of others above the voice of self.” Virtue is equated with compliance, conformity, social adaptation, and obedience. The self is subordinated to the society or God (132–35). When a social system is established on the basis of such premises, it is ultimately inimical to the requirements of human life. Under such social conditions, “psychological and physical disaster” is the inevitable result.25 Branden adds: “It is not freedom but the lack of freedom—brought about by the rising tide of statism, by the expanding powers of the government and the increasing infringement of individual rights—that produces in man a sense of powerlessness and helplessness, the terrifying sense of being at the mercy of malevolent forces.”26
Both Rand and Branden recognized the systemic factors (Level 3) that provide the broad context for the master-slave duality, the sanction of the victim, and modern alienation (Level 1). But Rand argued that statism was both the outgrowth of and the basis for exploitative power relations. These relations embody and engender the very system within which they occur. They are manifested in both the psycho-epistemological and existential realms, in both the personal and the political dimensions of human life. They can even be found in the modes of communication and language (Level 2).
A LINGUISTIC TURN
To say that Rand’s critique takes a linguistic turn is not to imply that her approach is deconstructionist. The “linguistic left” takes its cue from Nietzsche, who saw grammar as restricting thought and genuinely radical alternatives.27 Such thinkers as Derrida and Foucault aim to deconstruct the structures of language and knowledge as a means of revealing their internalized power relations. Objectivists have generally criticized such approaches, which seem to postulate that no one controls language, but that language, in its culturally inherited forms, controls both communication and thought. Peikoff (1990T) has argued, for instance, that such a deconstructionist method makes the objective judgment of a text’s validity impossible.
And yet despite this antipathy toward the linguistic left, Objectivist critique suggests a similar concern for the power relations implicit in contemporary language usage. Rand was always suspicious of the linguistic biases in social dialogue. She challenged the distorted cultural constructions of such concepts as “selfishness” and “capitalism.” She sought to remove these concepts from their traditional context and to cast them in an entirely nondualistic light. She did not argue that oppression was rooted in language per se. But on Level 2 of her analysis, Rand recognized that language was an institution that perpetuated social exploitation especially in its modern anti-conceptual incarnations. Her discussion of such issues in public discourse exhibits a provocative similarity to the dialogical theories of Jürgen Habermas. This brief linguistic turn in Rand’s analysis was not fully developed. But it illustrates the profundity of Rand’s dialectical mode of inquiry while pointing to a thoroughly non-Marxist, radical resolution.
The Habermasian project grows out of the critical tradition of the Frankfurt school of sociology. Habermas integrates the contributions of Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics in a wide-ranging critique of contemporary social relations. He views all social systems “as networks of communicative actions” (Habermas [1976] 1979, 98). For Habermas, a society’s reified institutions of power are reflected in distorted patterns of communication. He aims for a condition in which political discourse is made intelligible by the progressive elimination of manipulative dialogical forms.28
Drawing from the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Habermas believes that mutual understanding cannot arise in the absence of an intersubjective “fusion of horizons.” Persons involved in social discourse bring with them certain constellations of expectations and norms. Genuine communication is not possible if the dialogical partners habitually engage in deceitful or distortive practices. The partners can become more competent at communication only if they learn to translate between their distinctive ways of viewing the world. In Habermas’s view, such a dialogue anticipates an “ideal speech situation,” a community in which distortion and manipulation is barred from human relationships.
Habermas maintains that it is possible to achieve undistorted social communication through a process of rational reconstruction. Accepting Ryle and Polanyi’s distinction between articulate and tacit knowledge, Habermas recognizes that each speaker performs a variety of dialogical activities without grasping the explicit linguistic rules upon which such communication is based. A meaningful exchange of ideas can be achieved as each speaker draws from his or her articulate and tacit knowledge. Rational reconstruction requires that each speaker render explicit that which is implicit. Such a process requires adherence to the universal validity foundations of speech, which Habermas ([1976] 1979, 3–5) characterizes as “universal pragmatics.” It requires each speaker to select propositional content that reflects real facts and experiences; that expresses the meaning of his or her intentions accurately; that recognizes honesty and truthfulness in communication. The speech act is successful only if it is comprehensible to both speaker and hearer alike (2–3).
Comprehension is undermined by “strategic” forms of communication, such as lying, misleading, and manipulating one’s dialogical partner. Such exploitative forms are “parasitic,” for every attempt to distort or deceive must rely on the logic of ideal speech. Even “intentional deception” is ultimately oriented toward truth, since it is truth that it seeks to usurp (Habermas [1971] 1973, 17). For Habermas, “systematically distorted communication” is a negation of ideal speech. It results when the participants are engaged not only in interpersonal deception, but in self-deception as well. Such self-deception involves, at least partially, the obscuring of one’s own strategic behavior from oneself.29
In Habermas’s view, ideal speech is an achievement that demands increasing self-reflection on the part of each participant. Rational consequences cannot emerge unless the participants free themselves from distorting influences and self-deceptions that block genuine understanding. Habermas embraces a Freudian “depth hermeneutics” in which participants become more visible to themselves and to their dialogic
partners. It is a therapeutic process of translation in which one brings the unconscious into conscious awareness and reappropriates a lost portion of the self.30 Such self-reflection enables each partner to clarify misunderstandings within the context of accepted norms. The ideal speech situation is one in which each participant has an equal opportunity to engage in symmetrical, reciprocal, nonexploitative and comprehensible acts of communication. Such discourse “is intended to render inoperative all motives except solely that of a cooperative readiness to arrive at an understanding.”31
Although Rand would have vehemently rejected Habermas’s emphasis on “intersubjectivity” and the social consensus of norms, she fully understood the exploitative nature of “strategic” forms of communication. As we have seen in our discussion of Objectivist ethics, Rand viewed honesty as a contextual virtue dictated by the requirements of human survival. Honesty for her is not primarily a social relationship; it is a relationship between the mind and reality.32 Nevertheless, Rand understands that deceptive practices introduce elements of distortion into social relations. Dishonesty is a constituent of the master-slave duality. As Rearden states in Atlas Shrugged:
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie—the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.” (859)
In such circumstances, liars are not the masters of their fates, but slaves to unreality, and to those whom they attempt to dupe. They attain the status of social metaphysician, with a stake in the victim’s gullibility. They focus not on reality but on the consciousness of their victims. The victim’s consciousness as such is given primacy over objective reality (Branden [1969] 1979, 168).
Rand recognized that honesty is an essential component of rational human relations. In all forms of spiritual and material discourse, we count explicitly or implicitly on the rationality, honesty, and integrity of our partners.33 The purpose of all communicative exchange—in love, in art, or in trade—is to elicit a suitable response to the content communicated.34 Branden argues that in verbal exchange in particular, communication consists of far more than what a person says explicitly. Tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, and behavior will tend to support a person’s statements or undermine them (N. Branden and E. D. Branden 1983, 59–60). Honesty, then, involves an integrated response of articulate and tacit factors. Honest communication is a microcosm of genuinely human relationships which “have a mutually enhancing effect on feelings of self-worth” (N. Branden 1983b, 47). Peikoff (1980T, lecture 7) states further that such honest interpersonal communication will lead each participant to greater self-clarity and mutual understanding. By not entering into such a dialogical process, the participant is less likely to comprehend the implications of his or her own views.
But the Objectivists emphasize again that the primary issue is not the interpersonal character of the lie. Since honesty constitutes a relationship between the mind and reality, it is self-deception that is at root, the most distortive of an individual’s efficacy and communicative competence. Self-deception, however, is not necessarily the result of a conscious process of evasion. In fact, it is most often the result of a habitual, subconscious process of repression, which “forbids certain ideas, memories, identifications and evaluations to enter conscious awareness.” Branden ([1969] 1979) states further: “Repression is an automatized avoidance reaction, whereby a man’s focal awareness is involuntarily pulled away from any ‘forbidden’ material emerging from less conscious levels of his mind or from his subconscious” (78–79).
The repressed individual may show emotional constraint or whimsical self-indulgence, but in reality, these extremes “are merely two sides of the same coin.” Disconnected from the reality of his or her inner experience, the repressed individual ultimately undercuts “the clarity and efficiency of his [or her] thinking” (87, 93). Such individuals can restore themselves to “biologically appropriate functioning” through a therapeutic process of derepression,35 the Objectivist equivalent of a “depth hermeneutics.” Mental health is constituted by an “unobstructed capacity for reality-bound cognitive functioning.” The individual consciousness is healthy to the extent that it is “unobstructed” and “integrated,” unencumbered by fear, guilt, depression, pathological anxiety, neurosis, or pain (N. Branden [1969] 1979, 99–100).
Branden’s therapeutic methods are not the subject of the current study, but they center on a “sentence-completion” technique of “directed association.” Though Branden relies on a host of complementary methods, he seeks to engage the patient in a process that draws “upon implicit meanings for explicit statements.” Patients are given sentence stems that they complete spontaneously. Stem-completions enable individuals to meditate on their conclusions, not to rationalize them, but to “allow subconscious understandings to find their way into articulate speech.” By disclosing “unrecognized attitudes and patterns,” the sustained technique of directed association engenders a process of self-healing and self-clarification that aims for integration on both a conscious and subconscious level.36
This emphasis on communicative truthfulness, self-awareness, and “de-repression” is as crucial to the Randian project as it is to Habermasian discourse theory. Rand grasped that many of the distortions in communicative interaction can be traced to a systematic attack on the integrity of concepts and language launched by intellectuals who consciously or tacitly serve the modern predatory state. Rand argued that such intellectuals have confounded social discourse by “the destruction of language—and, therefore, of thought and, therefore, of communication—by means of anti-concepts.”37
The “anti-concept” is but one symptom of a modern social formation that is steeped in negation. Rand describes the culture as “anti-reason,” “anti-mind,” “anti-man,” and “anti-life.” Its art is “anti-art,” its ideology is “anti-ideology.” Its “mixed” economy constitutes an “anti-system.” Its hegemony is bolstered by a proliferation of “anti-conceptual” social practices and institutions. Rand’s study of such negation is a crucial component of her radical critique.38
Rand defines an “anti-concept” as “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.” Just as, in contemporary literature, the antihero is a creation designed to eradicate heroes, and the antinovel is intended to destroy the novel form, so “anti-concepts” are formulated to annihilate real concepts. While rational concept formation renders explicit the meaning of an existential referent, “the use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding.”39 An anti-concept sounds like a real concept, but it is formed illegitimately. It is constructed not through a process of abstraction and integration, but through a process of “package-dealing,” in which “disparate, incongruous, [and] contradictory elements [are] taken out of any logical conceptual order or context,” and united by a nonessential characteristic. The use of anti-concepts undermines the speaker’s and the listener’s conceptual clarity and precision, making social discourse unintelligible.40 The anti-concept comes to have any number of contradictory meanings, depending on who uses it. Frequently, it serves as a euphemistic device, sanitizing an offensive condition or action. Or it may serve as an “anti-euphemism” to denigrate a “great and noble” fact.41 The purpose of such linguistic obfuscation is ideological rationalization.
Rand does not suggest that anti-concepts are deliberately designed by a power elite and foisted on an unsuspecting populace. Indeed, the use and acceptance of anti-concepts is often tacit. For Rand, what is supremely significant is the tendency for anti-concepts to proliferate in a statist culture of unrea
son, distorting or obscuring the real nature of power relationships.
Rand analyzed several instances of the use of anti-concepts in contemporary discourse. In the 1960s and early 1970s, in the midst of the Vietnam war and growing political corruption, there was much focus on the “credibility gap” in U.S. politics. In the face of protests and civil unrest, a premium was placed on the value of social unity. Establishment policymakers criticized intellectual “polarization” as detrimental to the formation of a social consensus. They bandied about disingenuous assertions that individuals had a “duty” to serve the “common good.” Such terms had an “elastic, undefinable, mystical character” that obscured the reality of a foreign policy that drafted young men to die in a war in which no compelling national interest was at stake.42 The paean to the “public interest” was a cover-up for political conditions that favored the interests of some groups to the detriment of others.43
“Duty” was, in Rand’s view, “one of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy.”44 In its religious, psychological, and political usages, it destroyed legitimate concepts of morality. Indeed, the concept was a pure “product of mysticism,” since it projected categorical imperatives without regard to context. It sanctioned obedience to authority and severed the connection between values and choice, thus crippling the individual’s ability for self-directed moral action.
Rand also criticized the Establishment for using the term “polarization” derisively in hopes of quelling public debate on important issues of policy and deflecting or preventing any discussion or definition of fundamental principles. Whether they attacked the Goldwater Right or the New Left, they characterized the political pursuit of unequivocal principles as inflexible and impractical. They sought to bar such “extremism” from public life. Rand argued that in conforming to an artificial social consensus, each public speaker or writer