About Egoism, Selfishness, and Capitalism

One thing that can surely be said about Ayn Rand's writing is that it fills your head when you are reading it, and for a long time after you have finished. Her characters are strong and black and white. She writes lengthily, repeatedly and forcefully through the book on the distinction between the two distinct sets of characters in her stories: the creators and the second-handers. Even if you are quite numb or immune to getting affected through rhetoric, Rand just keeps saying it again and again. Eventually, for at least a few moments, for at least a few pages, you would want to liken yourself to John Galt or Howard Roark, and would like distinguish yourself from James Taggart or Elsworth Toohey.

I read Atlas Shrugged 15 years ago. In that highly impressionable phase of my life, the spell casted by the book lasted probably nearly an year after having finished reading it. I was then convinced that I belonged to the league of the creative people destined to changed the world. Ego, individualism, reason and selfishness mingled freely with my existing code. But, I couldn't get capitalism to fit anywhere. I really loved the book. To that extent that I remember myself having imitated the heroes of that story in certain aspects of my life for sometime. A fitting thing for a youngster to do who couldn't find his heroes on the bollywood screen or cricket fields.

I finished Fountainhead recently. I don't see any spell to speak of now. Only a revision of thoughts that have time and again visited me over these one and half decades about the contents and import of Rand's writing. Unlike 15 years ago, I don't any more consider myself a creative genius of any sort. I have got a sufficiently big collection of defeats and failures in my kitty to have no such illusions about myself. I am surely no Roark or Galt. But I don't see why that would automatically put me in the category of Toohey or Taggart. I belong to a large group of characters, a third group of characters, which doesn't have any place in Rand's books. Had she given some space to this third kind of characters, she wouldn't have found it so easy to give her stories such a taut shape. Good guys. Bad guys. Bad guys wage a war on the good guys. But the good eventually prevails. They would get all gooey and shapeless with people like us.

What is this third type of people Ayn Rand never speaks about? They are people who aren't creative geniuses, nor do they wish to destroy the creative geniuses. They are neither driven by their ego, nor are committing charity to fill their spiritual void. This third type is the normal human being. The person who is working hard. Sometimes for money, sometimes for happiness, sometimes for something he isn't sure about. This third type doesn't create creative marvels out of habit. But he is often creative, is capable of doing things which change the world in little ways. And he does so without attaching too much importance to it. In us normal people, the realisation of what creative fulfilment is and the jealousy and appreciation for our superiors exist healthily side by side.

The trick of trying to divide the people along the dimension of their capabilities and ineptitude into two distinct immiscible masses is the epitome of Rand's oversimplification of the world. She conveniently makes creative people the heroes and the incapable ones the villains. Her creative achievement lies in constructing the counter intuitive scenario where the incapable ones are able to take over the world in some sense by bullying over the creative guys. I suspect that it's a completely imaginary contraption of Rand, making it possible for such stories to be written. The counter-intuitiveness of the scenario is the prime claim of the idea that there's something evil and insidious going on in this world as a conspiracy against creators. There's no way to verify all this.

Rand throws a model of creativity at her reader which links it inseparably with the ability to create. That seems to miss the main point about creativity. Creativity is an urge, not a capability. We all have this urge in us in varying quantities. Some are more capable, some are less. And that eventually decides what and how much we create. But the presence of that urge decides whether one creates or not. The part of our lives when we are deriving happiness from creating, however lofty, however humble, are moments when we are the Galts and Roarks. In other moments, we are something else. Not Toohey or Taggart. Because the characters of the villains, particularly Toohey, doesn't sound realistic to me. Toohey comes across as an extremely capable character himself. Going by Rand's thesis, he didn't need to do all that crap he does.

Rand seems to bring in the issue of capitalism again as a reinforcement of her arguments that it's all about capability. Money isn't equivalent of value, whatever she may say or do. And capitalism is about money, not value. I can't understand why I would like to keep working for money when I know it can't get me any of things I really want beyond a point. Similarly, if an act gets me what I wish to get without the way of money, why can't I just do it, even if it's charity or altruism or whatever? Why do I care?

Speaking of Fountainhead in particular, I couldn't comprehend several things. Wynand's character could never take the shape that 700 pages allow you to give it. Only making a character intense doesn't make it well-defined. Rand seems to depend too much on the reader being fully convinced. Periodically, she adds passages so that there's sufficient sense of scandal associated with not agreeing with her. As if not agreeing immediately drops you off the list of her audience. Roark does something outrageous towards the end, and gets away with it rather inexplicably. After having written 700 pages, Rand had no reason to hurry up the end without explaining things. Unless of course if she didn't have any explanations. Rand continuously demonstrates an intolerance for mediocrity. Nothing except the most superior qualities are of any consequence to her. Two things: firstly, being able to write long books doesn't gain her a fellowship among her heroes. Secondly, when you compare the writing of Ayn Rand with that of those authors who are known to write books of comparable length -- Tolstoy, Dickens, Hardy -- you will be forced to give her the title she spends all her words to despise: mediocre.

Fountainhead sprawls over 700 long, dense pages. Atlast Shrugged just falls short of 1500. Being so verbose, Ayn Rand was definitely not one of the people she presents as her heroes and heroines. They are terse, concise, and they don't give a damn. Ayn Rand is verbose, condescending, and seems to care too much that people agree with her. She uses every conceivable trick of argumentation, emotional blackmail, sensationalisation and scadalisation to keep the reader wanting to be on her side. While reading it, I often felt the book was the prime antithesis of what Rand tries to propose.

Yet, Rand's books are a good read, if you have the time. Because they talk about topics which are eminently important and relevant, not necessarily because they do these topics any great justice.

An Ode to Mediocrity

Consider any quality: Physical, intellectual, emotional, economic, social, spiritual. Create any grading scale of that quality that you feel suitable. Start placing the members of the human population at various grades. You are well likely to end up with a bell-curve. And where will you find yourself? Well, if you are somewhat like me, I'm sure it will be somewhere close that crowded median. Repeat the exercise with another virtue. Again, most likely, you will be loafing around close to the median.

Again, if you are like me and every other mediocre person, every single day or your life, you aspire – no, agonise – to break free of your mediocrity. You too, at least sometimes, dream of being a star.

Stars are those who once, at least once, become the best in something. Their glitter may fade after a period – brief or long. Rajesh Khanna was a star. He shone bright for a while, and faded away into oblivion, to come back briefly once more to the limelight when he died. But we have others like Gandhi, Einstein, Vinci, Tolstoy etc. whom people will probably never tire of talking about. Their stardom may go. With time, they may even get surpassed by someone else in their achievements. But the stories of their achievements endure well beyond the relatively brief period of their stardom. These are legends.

Legends are legends because they somehow end up doing something which changes the world. But you don't need to change the world to be a star. You don't need to invent a medicine for AIDS. You don't need to sacrifice your life for the freedom of your nation. You don't need to reveal to the world the metaphysical secret behind their living and dying. You just need to take something – however trivial, however insignificant, however irrelevant to the current concerns of people – and become good at it. You have to be so good that you become a benchmark in that. The importance of your achievement isn't in the choice of what you have done, but to what extent you went in perfecting your ability to do it. A person who has trained himself all his life to swim as fast as anyone can – which will hardly ever mean anything for the alleviation of one man's misery – becomes a Michael Phelps. Someone specialising in painting horses, naked dieties, and erotic scenes involving them becomes a reverred as well as controversial artist. There seem to be seemingly an infinite number of things to choose from to achieve your stardom.

And yet, stars would probably make a meagre 0.00000001% (I typed a string of zeros that just looked long enough; don't read too much into it) of the population. Legends make up a vanishingly tinier fraction of that. Rest of populations constitutes of wannabes and losers.

Then why on Earth, like me, does every mediocre person perhaps wants to become a star, knowing full well that, by the very definition of the term, stars will always constitute a minuscule part of the population? Logically speaking, the probability of success in becoming one is that much small for all of us. But still we keep trying and trying and trying.

Trying endlessly is one thing. But we go beyond that. We hate ourselves, our lives, everything until we get stardom in at least something. We call ourselves mediocres, losers. The wish to be a star has probably brought out the best in a bunch of people. But for the remaining teeming millions, it makes life a hellish business.

The world is fully justified in celebrating its stars, in worshipping its heroes. Because heroes line the limits to which humans are capable of going in the infinite space of activities. But it's a sheer tragedy that the remaining population, which does the very important task of filling up the space in between these boundaries, frets and whines about getting there at the boundary at least once, to get a photo taken of themselves in that moment of stardom, and to think of that brief moment as the summary of their life. How much more stupid could humanity get?!

How can 70-80 years of living be about vying for a moment of glory that mostly doesn't come? And even if it does, what value does it really have if earned through mere suffering, not just of the self, but of innumerable others trying uselessly to clinche that moment. That moment becomes precious, often not by its intrinsic value, but by the very fact that most won't get it. Just as gold is considered more valuable than iron because very few have it. I don't fully understand the logic behind considering something valuable merely because it's rare. And yet, I know, that's what we humans keep doing.

Tell me, isn't it a huge, colossal mistake? I know, humanity has been committing it since ever, and is probably cursed genetically to continue committing it forever. Yet, I don't think Phelps could have made it if swimming hadn't given him a day to day sense of well-being. I can't imagine M. F. Hussain churning out so many paintings till the last day of his long life without each painting giving him the pleasure of having said something of his own. Phelps' best laps can't be his medal-winning ones. Hussain's best paintings may never have been sold.

Feeling of worth is a very private feeling. Experience of beauty is a very solitary experience. It doesn't get displayed to a clapping audience; it can't be auctioned to rich bidders. And those moments of beauty are the blessings we all humans have got, whether we are stars or mediocres. The privilege to create is afforded to every one of us. That privilege is available each and every moment of our life. The principle output of that creation is the experience of creating. Not how it changes the world, or how people clap, or how much it is sold for. The reason for an act of creation is fulfilled much before it ever comes before any audience, at the very moment of its happening. And that fulfilment doesn't depend on whether you are a star or a mediocre. It just asks you: did you feel the joy? Did you feel it enough?

The thought of being mediocre is a liberating one in a sense. It frees you from the pressure of trying to be the best, the first, the quickest. We know that the burden of changing the world is not on our shoulders. Being mediocre, you can just focus on what you like doing, and enjoy yourself. What the world wants to make out of your work is purely their worry. From your perspective, it's at best a side effect of your actions. Beyond the condition where the world perceives it practically worth their while to let you exist, I don't think you owe anything to it. Your life is yours to live. Your strengths are yours to use; your frailties are yours to fight.

Also, every one of us isn't born to paint a Mona Lisa, to discover the laws of motion. OK, if fixing that broken tap in your house is the best thing you can do at the moment, why not do it and feel as happy? That's your contribution to making the world a better place (and for sure, for your wife this contribution will count more than Newton's laws of motion). So, why be judgemental?

In short: you think you are a mediocre? Good! Happy Independence Day!

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