In the last of his three-part series, Lars Seier Christensen focuses on the broader relevance of Ayn Rand in society today after the practical example covered in part two. You can read part two here and part one here.
First and foremost, Ayn Rand remains among the few that recognises with crystal clarity, that we will not win the battle through just proving that freedom and capitalism works. It has already been proven beyond discussion. Nevertheless, we are still facing new attacks on freedom every day.
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume that rationality will prevail, that just through superior economic performance, freedom will capture enough peoples' hearts in a democracy to win the day. This creates a major problem for those of us that like to argue rationally, rather than emotionally.
It creates a major opportunity for politicians that intuitively know that in a rational world, there would be little demand for their services. Only in an irrational, emotional universe, where opportunists can gain access to media and visibility to express “feelings” and try to take the moral high ground, no matter how unfounded in reality it is — only in such an environment can you survive without having to produce practical, productive results, and instead prosper and benefit from empty talk and third-rate acting performances.
This tendency, unfortunately, has only strengthened during the recent crisis. There is often a complete disconnect between the reality and the words used to describe it, the actions pretending to deal with it. In particular, this is very noticeable in the Eurozone these days.
Secondly, Ayn Rand has gained renewed relevance and attention, because her predictions have been fulfilled in many different areas. This of course pleases and reconfirms long-standing admirers, but also bring many new supporters to the scene, looking for answers to the crisis we are in.
To name but a few predictions, clearly the dynamics of democracy and interfering politicians are very well described in Atlas Shrugged, where constant intrusive corrective attempts to fix a given problem leads to new, unforeseen problems that need additional correction. This triggers an endless series of correcting moves, where only two things are certain.
First, the politicians assign ever greater powers to themselves, as they manage to convince the citizens of the need for even more interference, although the problems are created by interference in the first place.
There are endless examples of this in both the US and the Eurozone, where one mistake invariably leads to call for even more powers, leading to new mistakes. The EU's standard answer to any of its own failures is that had it just had even greater powers, things would have been much better. The real question to ask here is not why it claims this, what else could it really do, if the only alternative is to admit incompetence and failure?
