Objectively Wrong

A bus stop advertisement for New York University once read: "I am the CEO of Me, Inc." This little slogan perfectly illustrates society's total capitulation to the neoliberal ideology. You're not part of a society, you are your own CEO, a mini-corporation competing on the free market of corporations. And the poor are not a class but instead they are merely a collection of failed mini-corporations...

If you want to understand the world today, there's no better introduction than Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". And if you want to understand what the results are of building a world on Rand's ideology, just read George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". The ideology behind Ayn Rand's magnum opus is called "objectivism", which she described as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". Now let me be clear from the get-go: objectivism, as well as Rand's novel are a collection of despicable principles and ideas based on the notion that human history is exclusively driven by exceptional men, and that they have no obligation whatsoever to share the fruits of their genius with the rest of society.

"Atlas Shrugged" basically tells the story of a few of those exceptional men, and how they are tired of being repressed by the looters and losers in society. The looters are the government who rob the noble entrepreneurs of their hard earned riches to redistribute among the poor, the losers. In the novel these rich Great Men decide to teach society a lesson and escape, under the leadership of the illustrious John Galt, to a capitalist Utopia with the expressed aim to destroy the economy and let the looters and losers suffocate in their own ineptitude. They want them dead, and in the novel they succeed. Yes, in the novel these unscrupulous billionaires are the heroes who wage a bloody war against the rest of society, which they look down upon. It'll be no surprise to hear that Rand's objectivism has influenced all modern right wing ideologies, including anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism and neo-liberalism, and having read "Atlas Shrugged" is often seen as a rite of passage to be counted among their numbers.

Although the objectivist prides himself on being rational, the idea that society can't survive without the CEO's, without the capitalists, the owner class, is completely irrational and ludicrous. If tomorrow all the CEO's of the world were spirited away, society would just keep functioning as normal and with any luck the workers would take over to run the corporations based on democracy. If all the workers would suddenly disappear however, society would immediately grind to a halt. The neo-liberal ruling class has admitted as much in their rhetoric during the pandemic, inventing new terms like "essential workers" and "front-line workers". CEO's aren't the irreplaceable gems of society they believe themselves to be. And the rebellion of CEO's in Rand's novel with the consequent downfall of society is pure science-fiction. But the neo-liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have taken this fictional story seriously and it's what shapes modern political and economical reality worldwide. And if you think that our real world billionaires can't ever be as unscrupulous as the ones depicted in Rand's book, think again. I'll now quote from an article by journalist and writer Douglas Rushkoff who in 2018 got invited to give a speech to a handful of investment bankers and hedge fund managers. He was asked to speak about "the future of technology", but after a short while this meeting transformed into a Q and A session where the attendees wanted the answer to one question: how to survive and safeguard their wealth during and after the complete breakdown of the neo-liberal world order. This inevitable breakdown they called "The Event":

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
_{source: Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, July 5, 2018}

So, I'll leave you with a debate between leftist Vaush and objectivist Yaron Brook; the latter even mentions "Atlas Shrugged" in his closing statement, too late unfortunately for Vaush to react. But watch the debate to see just how much mr. Brook idolizes the Elon Musks of our world and how he thinks we should all fall down on our knees and thank them for the opportunity they grant us to work for sub-sustenance level wages at their production facilities. The truth of the matter is that "Atlas Shrugged" is in fact a fascist propaganda piece; you can watch the above linked book-review, but the mere fact that objectivism is largely based on the absolute supremacy of a small group against the absolute inferiority of the "looters and losers", should already give you a hint as to the truth of that statement. Regardless: I highly recommend you watch it, as it'll save you the trouble and torture of reading that terrible book...

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