The Ayn Rand Institute Has Discovered the Joys of Socialism
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but you can get a free copy of Atlas Shrugged.
There’s no doubt that the Ayn Rand Institute is in the Grifter Hall of Fame.
It was a Grift Superstar from the start; the whole concept of creating a nonprofit organization to solicit donations is anathema to everything Rand ever wrote. Somehow, the Institute cons $10 million per year from galaxy brain donors who think funding the Ayn Rand Institute will somehow “spearhead a cultural renaissance”, as their mission statement writes.
Aside from the fact that any self-respecting Rand acolyte would view “donations” as heretical, the Ayn Rand Institute has consciously adopted socialist and collectivist methods in its operations. I’m not even talking about the $1 million PPP loan that the Institute accepted earlier this year due to “hardships from the pandemic”, an act that surely made Ayn Rand spin in her grave. No, I’m just referring to their regular campaigns to educate the masses, which all fall under my definition of “the opposite of what Ayn Rand wrote about”.
A quick primer on Ayn Rand: she wrote a bunch of doorstoppers that argued unfettered capitalism was the only way forward and subsequently influenced decades of “small government” jerks.
For students active during the early 21st-century, the Ayn Rand Institute is best known for spamming students with an essay competition for scholarship money. Yes, the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit designed around an author who loathed university elites and helping people, yearly sent thousands of dollars to students so they could defray the cost of higher education. To access this scholarship, students had to read an Ayn Rand book and compose a lengthy essay about how her lessons resonated in their lives. This is not a unique idea – I’ve heard reports of Congresspeople and Titans of Industry (aka your local car dealership owner) offering scholarships for similar Ayn Rand essays. Nonetheless, they do offer about $30,000 to students per year (some of which will be funded indirectly by the U.S. Government in 2020). From the way most scholarship applications go, students are happy to take the money and write whatever bullshit they can to win the scholarship sweepstakes so they can avoid even more crushing student debt in this dystopia. This, at least, is some real Objectivist ultra-capitalism.
I am a Low-Tier Grifter. If the Ayn Rand Institute is the blue whale of Grift, I am an insignificant krill. Because of this, I decided to apply to this scholarship a few hours before the deadline even though Ayn Rand’s ideas are personally abhorrent and logically inane. Yes, the price of sacrificing my ideals is anything over $50. I raced to the library in a pouring rainstorm to find a copy of the book (a big mistake, as Ayn Rand probably thought libraries were evil).
I couldn’t even get a copy of the book (a clever Northwestern student had already rented it from the library before I got there), so I was left to write an awful essay on Atlas Shrugged using pirated online excerpts. I was not aware that the smart Ayn Rand Scholars had already taken advantage of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Free Book Program (yes, the foundation in memory of the woman who treated capitalism as religion is handing out books for free) and registered to receive free Ayn Rand books in the mail.
Needless to say, I failed to win any amount of money, as my essay about Atlas Shrugged pivoted into an incoherent rant about legislation and cross-country running. Well, screw you Ayn Rand Institute, you can’t stop me from independently pursuing my goals, see how that works? As a consolation prize, they shipped me a copy of The Fountainhead because the Grift never stops.
Aside from shipping out thousands of free books, The Ayn Rand Institute has continued its program to educate the masses by sending out thousands of books and lesson plans to high school teachers. This DIRECTLY conflicts with point four of Matt Taibbi’s excellent summation of Ayn Rand’s thought in his book Griftopia:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
Thus, the Ayn Rand Institute has taken the socialist approach of collectivizing the value of education and distributing it to anyone who asks. Not to mention that the whole program is based on building out a base in public schools, the Randian bugaboo. This all gives the Ayn Rand Institute the air of a cult that hands out brochures like your local Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It’s worth noting that none of this is working.
The political influence of Rand’s thought in the Republican Party has been chewed up and spat out by the Trump cult – stumping for Objectivism means stumping for atheism and pro-choice – leaving Ayn Rand fans with little recourse outside of angrily spouting their ideas online to a dwindling readership and trying to defy mask mandates. Of course, these fools can’t sign up for the liberals either, leaving them despised and disliked crackpots, which is probably where they deserve to be.
The thing about unfettered capitalism and resulting oligarchy (by the way, Plato predicted this in his cycle of government with timocracy leading to aristocracy) is that it can always fall victim to its own unpopularity among the masses. Ayn Rand is, by design, inherently elitist – she practically worshipped them and demanded that everyone figure out the great mysteries of the world by themselves…I mean, the whole plot of The Fountainhead is creating an elite, SEELE-esque group to save the world. This misanthropic Social Darwinism is just not a very popular concept. Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who hated “statism” and being told what to do just as much as Rand did, figured out this problem by advocating collectivization and actually sharing value rather than hoarding it. Or, to use another relevant metaphor, sharing in the burdens to save lives from the pandemic is more useful than selfishly reopening to sacrifice grandma at the altar of Capital.
For better or for worse, it is Bakunin’s anti-globalist, anti-elitist strain that runs through the conservative movement now, however delusional they are about who they support, not the Objectivist capital-worshippers. And obviously, the left hates Ayn Rand’s guts, so there’s no support there. Furthermore, during a global pandemic, being “individualist” is even more stupid and difficult than usual. As a result, now we have this bizarre situation where socialist Bernie Sanders and proto-Erdogan conservative Josh Hawley are both supporting $1,200 pandemic stimulus checks to spit on Rand’s grave and just give state money to people. Checkmate, Paul Ryan.
Thus, the Ayn Rand Institue’s only solution to this problem is to hypocritically debase themselves by sending out free literature and trying to gain popularity among angsty teens. Perhaps choosing a turgid writer with books that are only appealing to Federalist Society crooks and 60-year-old white salesmen wasn’t the best use of your donation money.
Meanwhile, I have lived the true spirit of Ayn Rand and sold my free copy of The Fountainhead on eBay for $1. I’m sure she’d be proud of my decision to ignore the BS “NOT FOR RESALE” label on the back of the book to make a quick buck.