Picture this, right? It's March 1982. We are
in New York City and we're at a funeral. But
it's not, you know, your standard somber affair.
Right. No quiet hymns or anything like that.
Exactly. No modest wreaths. Next to the casket
towering over all the mourners is this massive
six foot tall floral arrangement. And it's not
a cross or, I don't know, a heart. It's shaped
entirely like a giant dollar sign. Yeah, which
is just incredible. And the woman in that casket
was Ayn Rand. Yeah. Honestly, that massive floral
dollar sign, it just perfectly captures the uncompromising
and highly controversial empire she left behind.
It really does. So today we're doing a deep dive
into the historical records to figure out how
a young Russian refugee fleeing the Bolsheviks
basically willed an entirely new moral universe
into existence. We're pulling from a really comprehensive
Wikipedia article detailing her life, her works,
and her philosophy. And our mission today is
to unpack how she birthed a philosophical empire
that fundamentally reshaped American political
and economic thought. Which is a legacy that's
still intensely, I mean furiously debated today.
Oh, absolutely. And whether you are completely
new to her work, or you've spent hours arguing
about her ideas over the dinner table, understanding
Rand is just crucial. Because her ideas really
form the invisible architecture behind so much
of modern business and politics. You might not
even realize it, but you're navigating a world
that's profoundly shaped by the concepts she
championed. Yeah, it's everywhere. But to really
understand the philosophy, you have to look at
the intense childhood trauma that forged it.
Exactly. Because she wasn't born Ayn Rand, you
know, the American icon. She was born Elisa Rosenbaum
in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905. Right. And
she grew up in a relatively comfortable bourgeois
Jewish family. Yeah, and that comfort, it just
evaporated practically overnight. Just gone.
Right. I mean, she was only 12 years old when
the October Revolution hit. Yeah. The Bolsheviks
came to power under Lenin, and her family's life
was violently upended. It's hard to even imagine.
The state literally marched in and nationalized
her father's pharmacy. Just think about the psychological
shock of that for a 12 -year -old. Oh, yeah.
The sudden declaration that your family's property,
your entire livelihood, it no longer belongs
to you. It belongs to the people. The concept
of individual property just vanishes in an instant.
Oof. Oof. Gone. And it plunged her family into
desperate conditions. The sources show they fled
to Crimea, but eventually they had to return
to Petrograd, which is what St. Petersburg was
called then, and they were pushed to the brink
of actual starvation. It was brutal. And it didn't
even stop there. When she eventually got to university,
she was actually among the first women to enroll
at Petrograd State University. Wow. But then
she was purged, she was kicked out, not because
of her grades or anything she actually did, but
simply because of her bourgeois background. Yeah,
pure collective guilt. Exactly. The individual
just did not matter at all. Only the class category
mattered. and the trauma of having her family's
livelihood stolen in the name of the common good
and being punished simply for the group she belonged
to, it created this permanent visceral revulsion
to anything resembling collectivism. Okay, let's
unpack this for a second because it feels like,
well, it feels like Newton's third law applied
to ideology. Oh, that's a good way to put it.
Right, like the extreme forced collectivism she
suffered caused an equal and opposite reaction
of absolute uncompromising individuals. Would
you say her entire worldview was essentially
just a massive trauma response? I mean, you can
certainly trace a direct line between the two.
You see this literally dramatized in her 1938
novella Anthem. Oh, right. She created this dystopian
future where totalitarian collectivism has triumphed
so completely that the word I has actually been
eradicated from the human vocabulary. Wait, like
the word itself is gone. Gone. It's been replaced
entirely with we. The protagonists in the story
have to literally escape society and run into
the wilderness just to rediscover the concept
of the individual self. Which perfectly mirrors
her own escape. Exactly. Because in 1926, she
manages to get a visa to visit relatives in Chicago,
and she basically never looks back. No, she doesn't.
She learns English, moves to Hollywood, and she
has this wild chance encounter with the legendary
director Cecil B. DeMille. Yeah. Who gives her
work as an extra in his film The King. of Kings,
and she completely reinvents herself. She adopts
the name Anne Rand. Right. It's almost like she
was the first character she ever wrote. Oh, wow.
Yeah. She literally wrote the script for her
own life. She did. Yeah. And because her worldview
was so absolute, so fiercely individualistic,
she had to figure out a way to broadcast it to
the world. And she didn't do it by writing dense,
impenetrable academic papers that only a few
professors would read. She used fiction. The
ultimate Trojan horse. Exactly. She used blockbuster
melodramatic fiction to get her ideas directly
into the minds of the masses. And the backstory
of how she pulled that off is just incredible.
Let's look at The Fountainhead, which came out
in 1943. OK. It was not an easy sell. 12 different
publishers rejected the manuscript. 12? Yeah.
It only saw the light of day because an editor
at Bob's Merrell named Archibald Ogden literally
threatened to quit his job if his employer didn't
publish it. Talk about putting it all on the
line. Right. He put his entire career on the
line for this one book. And it introduces Howard
Roark, this heroic, uncompromising architect
who absolutely refuses to bend his vision to
the masses. And Rourke is the ultimate Randian
ideal. He is constantly battling what she calls
second -handers. Second -handers, yeah. And a
second -hander, in her view, isn't just someone
who copies work. It's someone who has no internal
compass. They don't think for themselves. They
seek approval. They live through the expectations
of others. Right. And they place the opinions
of society above their own rational judgment.
And then she followed that up in 1957 with her
massive magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, where she
asks this terrifying question. What if the motor
of the world, like the creators, the industrialists,
the scientists, what if they just stopped? They
go on strike. Yeah, they retreat to a hidden
valley to protest a welfare state that leeches
off their genius. And the hero, John Galt, literally
gives a multi -page monologue laying out her
entire philosophy. It was such an unprecedented
way to deliver a philosophical treatise. But,
you know, to generate that kind of massive literary
output, she pushed herself to extreme limits.
Okay, right. And that brings up a specific detail
from the sources that really caught my eye. What's
that? While she was rushing to meet her deadlines
for the Fountainhead, she was actually prescribed
benzadrine. Right, and amphetamine. Yeah, to
fight fatigue. And she ended up using it for
roughly three decades. The records suggest this
habit heavily contributed to severe mood swings
and outbursts later in life. Yeah, it took a
toll. So I have to ask, how does a philosophy
that champions pure unadulterated square with
a writing process fueled for decades by mind
-altering chemicals. It's a striking juxtaposition,
isn't it? Yeah, totally. On one hand, you have
a philosophy demanding absolute cognitive clarity.
Right. And on the other, this physical reliance
on amphetamines, just to push the human body
past its natural limits. Right. But in a strange
way, it kind of ties into her specific literary
approach, which she called romantic realism.
Meaning what, exactly? Meaning she wasn't trying
to depict the gritty, flawed, exhausting reality
of human limitation. She explicitly stated she
wanted to show the world not as it is, but as
it could and should be. Oh, okay. So her heroes
were hyper -competent, flawless, attractive,
unyielding, and practically immune to fatigue.
Almost ascetic in their discipline. Precisely.
And the irony here is incredibly rich. How so?
Well, she vehemently disliked most Russian literature,
viewing it as deeply pessimistic. Yet scholars
note that her uncompromising, heroic individualists
were heavily influenced by 19th century Russian
writers. Wait, really? Yeah. Specifically, Nikolai
Khrunichevsky and his 1863 novel, What Is To
Be Done? His main character was this ascetic,
disciplined revolutionary, and that character
served as a literal template for Rand's capitalist
heroes. That is wild. She took the psychological
mold of the Russian revolutionary and just filled
it with Liz's warfare capitalism. Wow. And because
her novels depicted these incredibly competent
heroes, her readers didn't just want sequels,
they wanted a user manual. They wanted to know
how to actually live like Howard Roark. And that
public demand forced her to pivot from being
just a novelist to becoming a formal philosopher,
which leads to the birth of objectivism. Right.
She transitioned into a popular philosopher with
very clear, rigid core tenets. Objectivism champions
rational egoism, it declared. as laissez -faire
capitalism as the only moral social system, because
it's the only system that protects individual
rights. And crucially, it actively and aggressively
rejects altruism. She didn't just disagree with
altruism, she condemned it as an evil. She certainly
was not shy about where she ranked herself in
the pantheon of thinkers either. Not at all.
The sources mention she famously claimed she
only owed a philosophical debt to Aristotle.
She called it the three A's. Aristotle Aquinas
and Anne Rand. Talk about confidence. Meanwhile,
she named Immanuel Kant the most evil man in
history. Yeah, she didn't hold back. But here's
where it gets really interesting. I want to push
back on this core concept of egoism because she
wrote a book literally titled The Virtue of Selfishness.
Right. But in everyday life, for you and me,
selfish means like cutting in line or eating
the last slice of pizza without asking. How on
earth did she justify selfishness as a virtue?
Well, to understand Ran, you have to realize
she completely redefined the word. OK. To her,
selfishness did not mean petty, malicious behavior.
It meant rational self -interest. It meant doing
what is required for man's survival qua man.
Wait, qua -man. For those of us who aren't reading
Latin on the woodpans, what does qua actually
mean in this context? Yeah, fair question. It
basically just means in the capacity of or as.
So man's survival as man. She meant that you
shouldn't just survive like an animal. You must
survive in a way that aligns with your nature
as a rational human being. Using your mind. Exactly.
Using your rational mind to produce and create
while never initiating force against others.
And just to pause here for a second, we have
an impartiality rule check. Yes, very important.
We need to explicitly remind you, the listener,
that we are not taking sides here. Right, we're
just looking at the text. Exactly. The source
material features heavy criticism from the political
left who blame her ideas for extreme neoliberal
greed and from the religious right who vehemently
oppose her atheism and her rejection of altruism.
We are simply conveying her ideas as written
not endorsing them. Absolutely. We're looking
at the mechanics of the philosophy because the
reality is the turbulence wasn't just in the
broader culture. It was intensely present in
her own inner circle. If you take these pristine
logical rules off the page and try to apply them
to actual human beings, it gets remarkably messy.
Messy is an understatement. Let's talk about
the Nathaniel Brandon Institute, or the NBI.
This was established by fans to study her work.
And then there's this historical anecdote that
just... blows my mind. The affair. Yes. Rand,
who is married, and Nathaniel Brandon, who is
also married, decide they're going to initiate
a romantic affair. And how do they handle it?
They literally sit their spouses down and spin
out a deductive chain of logic, explaining why
this affair is the only rational outcome of their
shared philosophical values. It is stunning.
They presented a syllogism. They basically argued,
we are the two highest embodiments of objectivist
virtues. Therefore, it is only logical that we
must be romantically involved. They tried to
math equation human desire. It really did. And
while the spouses reportedly gave verbal assent,
historians note that Rand's husband, Frank O
'Connor, was likely deeply hurt by this. It's
a recurring theme. Trying to force the messy
reality of human emotion into the unyielding
framework of pure reason. So what does this all
mean? We have a philosophy entirely based on
independent thought and rejecting authority.
Yet critics described her movement as a cult.
Followers mimicked her clothing, her furniture,
even her cigarette smoking. It's the ultimate
paradox. a collective forming around the ultimate
anti -collectivist. And it leads directly into
the tragedy of her later years. Because it all
fell apart. It did. She famously broke with Brandon
over his affair with another woman, one he hid
from her. The logic didn't quite hold up that
time. No, it didn't. She shut down the FBI. And
despite her massive success, she was deeply depressed
by the intellectual rejection of her work. Oh,
right. The Whittaker Chambers Review. Yes. He
wrote a savage review of Atlas Shrugged, claiming
a voice could be heard of the book commanding
to a gas chamber go. Just brutal. It devastated
her. And then there's the final contradiction.
The ultimate anti -statist eventually enrolled
in Medicare and Social Security under her married
name. It's so human. But looking at her unlikely
legacy, while academic philosophers mostly dismissed
her and her movement splintered, her ideas somehow
conquered massive swaths of the real world. Over
37 million books sold. She became the novelist
laureate of the Reagan administration. And a
massive influence on the Libertarian Party, which
is ironic because she hated Libertarians. She
considered them anarchists. Right. But look at
the 2008 financial crisis. You had Tea Party
protesters carrying signs asking, who is John
Gall? You had major figures like Alan Greenspan,
the former Fed chair, heavily influenced by her.
She is really the ultimate gateway drug to right
wing politics. And you, the listener, just look
around today. Whether you're walking through
Silicon Valley or listening to a political debate,
the DNA of Rand's heroic creator is everywhere.
Academics might ignore her, but you can't ignore
a writer whose book was voted the second most
influential book in readers' lives, right after
the Bible. in a Library of Congress survey. It's
an incredible journey from a starving girl in
Soviet Russia to an American icon who tried to
build an entire moral universe out of pure logic
and self -interest. It really is. And I want
to leave you with a final thought to ponder.
Rand believed that art was a selective recreation
of reality. So looking at the intense political
and economic divides of our modern world today.
Are we living in the reality that Ayn Rand selectively
created through her fiction? Or were her novels
just a perfectly angled mirror reflecting the
inevitable uncompromising extremes of human nature?
That is a fascinating thought to Tuan. Keep questioning
the architecture around you and we'll catch you
on the next Deep Dive.