Pessimism or Confidence in Others

[Charles R. Anderson]

In my senior year of high school, I read The Fountainhead after one of my best friends recommended it and said I would like it. Then I read Atlas Shrugged and I really loved it. So, I set myself the task of getting and reading all the past issues of The Objectivist Newsletter and all of Ayn Rand's published non-fiction, Anthem, and We the Living. By about mid-Summer, based on my very critical evaluation of Objectivism, I decided that I was an Objectivist. This decision was much more than "I need a philosophy and this is the best one I have yet encountered." It was a decision that the philosophy was consistent with all I knew and had experienced and that each of its essential principals was right and consistent with other parts of the philosophy. This decision always maintained the viewpoint that my mind would decide what was worthwhile in Objectivism and what was not. I would use what was good and I would reject anything which was not. It was a very pleasant result to find that I had little to reject, though I thought her For the New Intellectual essay was a bit naive and a bit overwrought.

With time, I found more things that I disagreed with Ayn Rand about. Probably the most important was when she endorsed a plan to force the media to give equal time to other viewpoints on political issues. She clearly did this reluctantly because she understood that this created some serious freedom of speech issues. But she did it because she really feared that the ideas of the left, so dominant in the media, were likely to destroy capitalism and freedom in America if opposing ideas were not given more air time. I believed that she saw freedom in America as being more fragile than it was, that she had too little confidence in Americans who were not intellectuals, and too little appreciation for how resourceful Americans were in maintaining their values. These very same differences were also apparent to me when she would sometimes predict extreme doom when some bad economic or regulatory policy was implemented. In fact, Americans would commonly find some other way, with remarkable resourcefulness, to get the job done whenever Washington put a roadblock in their way. She was too pessimistic and had too little confidence in the non-intellectual American. Being a thinking man, I had every confidence in my mind's assessment, just as she did in her own assessments.

These differences came to mind again when I read Robert Trucinski's What Went Right?. In this series of articles, Trucinski writes about the excessive gloom and doom mentality he finds many Objectivists to have. In some important ways, this is a result of their having accepted Ayn Rand's own pessimism in assessing other Americans. Trucinski does not address Rand's role in this, but he recognizes that non-Objectivists do have some rational strengths and do create good values. They even create good ideas, which I also agree with. Basically, he and I agree that it is simply not the case that bad ideas produced by philosophers or college professors, must propagate throughout a society and destroy it. For instance, a very stabilizing rational force exists among professionals in the technology, science, and engineering fields. These people are playing a greater and greater role in societies and this is very good because they must be more reality-oriented than college professors.

That this reality-orientation exists among Americans and more and more among Asians is of immense importance. Yet, this fact is often a difficult one for professional intellectuals to grasp and assess. They live in a hothouse atmosphere and too often only talk to one another.

In the latter part of the 1970s, I stopped paying attention to the Objectivist movement. Not only had the ex-communications worn on me, but so had the pessimism of the movement. This pessimism was a natural result of having disdain for all non-Objectivists and it was that disdain that also implied that any bad idea was imbued with a terrifying power to destroy. I could not see justification for living in such a state of terror of bad ideas. They were simply to be fought and life was to be lived. If I were to fear these ideas to the point that they seriously diminished my joy in life, then they won. It was not lost on me that most Americans actually paid little attention to the many bad ideas, because they were too busy living their lives and trying to enjoy their lives.

Of course, that they did not take ideas more seriously was and is a problem. But much of the reason they did not take ideas more seriously was because they had been exposed to so many ideas that did not enable their lives and their pursuit of happiness, that many Americans have a significant disdain for ideas. This robs those ideas that are bad of some of their power to destroy, as Trucinski noted. Of course, when ideas are bad, they can work behind the scenes and cause a lot of mischief. But at some point, life-living people, such as most Americans, wake up and take some corrective measure. This conflict between ideas and living is exactly the conflict that Objectivism exists to eliminate, but it will not be accepted if it cannot project itself as being optimistic about life and those who wish to live it and if it acts as though it is terrified of the opposition. Optimism and confidence are seen as pro-life, while pessimism and the constant fear that one will be overwhelmed are not.