John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, has a number of conceptual problems. However, one major issue is the absolutism of individualism. You get quotes like: “No one provides unearned sustenance for another person.” There are a lot of conceptual problems with Objectivism. But today I want to think about two of them, that have leaked into the popular discourse, to ill-effect.
One, this philosophy is immediately incoherent in a world with children. It tends to devalue non-productive entities, like children, as they cannot earn their sustenance. In the case of an infant, it is even impossible. Yet the decision to not support children as a society leads to a number of poor outcomes, as the current people do not live forever. We get the modern idea of children as a luxury good, as opposed to a critical piece of the future. But societies that are undergoing demographic collapse end up regretting not supporting their future citizens. Ayn Rand's vision has a common problem of libertarian thought -- it talks about an end state without a process to get there. Noziak's method of claiming property is both impossible to implement (how do you make sure that nobody was worse off at the time of the property claim) and simply at odds with the history of how property emerges (a lot of territory has changed hands to the determinant of somebody, even if they are no longer around to protest). Similarly, the world of hyper-competent adults has to have started with some quite dependent infants.
Two, there is an odd idea in these works that the distribution of talent is oddly bimodal. You have the elite superstars and a bunch of others who are nowhere close. I don't want to say that there is nothing like this, but competitive human talents do not distribute this way on most areas I look at.
Sports: Just look at Olympic results with objective times. I picked 15 km men's skiing as an example. Look at the times for the top two (37:54.8, 38:18.0) -- there are another 11 players before you get more than 2 minutes behind this time on a 15 km trek. It is not at all like one or two supermen cross the line, and then we go get coffee before the rest arrive. This distribution doesn't look at all like supermen.
Academics: We used to have to rank order students for scholarships. Ranking ordering is hard. It is rarely obvious who is the very top and the order definitely has judgement in it. We also don't see academic departments collapse when the best researcher leaves or retires. Instead, you just see another person become prominent.
Business: Did microsoft collapse when Bill Gates left? Did Tesla collapse when Martin Eberhard stepped aside as CEO? Did Google fail without Larry Page? To ask the question is to answer it. There are some unique talents in business (Steve Jobs comes to mind, but he needed Wozniak or it would never have started) but companies can continue to be successful with these transitions. The graveyard is full of indispensable men.
The truth is that there are a lot of talented people in the world who would like to end up in important positions. It isn't that bad government cannot do grave harm to a country. But that the issue is not that the elite might cause problems. More often than not, the elite are the problem.
But the real insight here is that process is as important as outcome. There is a tendency to argue from current position, but everybody had a period of proving themselves in advance of being currently successful. One of the great flaws with Objectivism (I suspect that we'll get an editor's note as to how it is hard to just pick one), is that it both ignores process (infant -> child -> adult -> leader) and has a hopelessly naïve vision of how talent is distributed.
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