A short excerpt from Ayn Rand:

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.

This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.”
— Ayn Rand  in The Soul of An Individualist

My Comment

To forestall the superficial and misleading view that Rand was advocating  Gordon Gekko style greed (she wasn’t) or crude selfishness (she wasn’t),  read through this extended criticism of those readings of Rand.

Rand is Nietzschean. She gets a number of things wrong, yes.  But to believe that her rewriting of morality, her overturning of Christian ethics was on behalf of enslavement to the vices, is, I think wrong, although it’s a widespread error.

Like Nietzsche, but less successfully (in my opinion) Rand was really trying to envision a new morality.  Actually, I would say it’s not really a new morality.  It’s a return to an old pagan one – of  virtu rather than virtue  –  a return to techne (meaning excellence, skill, self-transcendence, or mastery) as the moral center of a being, an inward-directed moral center.

This she contrasts with what she, like Nietzsche, calls the slave mentality, the other directed mentality of Christianity.

As anyone formulating a new turn and a break from so powerful a forebear, Rand overstates her case and is sometimes ungenerous to her predecessor. But it’s wrong, I think, to call her an advocate of  “selfishness” of the Wall Street bankster variety.

My favorite Beatle, George Harrison, playing one of my favorite pop classics, My Sweet Lord. George  always seemed to me to have more musical talent than Paul, and more intellectual and spiritual depth than the rather self-preoccupied John. Here’s a Spanish version I found as well.

The lyrics include the following lines in Sanskrit:

Gurur Brahma, gurur Vishnu, gurur devo Mahesvarah

gurus saksat param Brahma, tasmai sri gurave namah

(The teacher is Brahma, the teacher is Visnu, the teacher is the Lord Mahesvara, Verily the teacher is the supreme Brahman, to that respected teacher I bow down)

What an amazing devotional feeling the music has. And what incredibly open souls these working class boys from Liverpool had that they could go across the globe and create something so different from what they grew up in.

I guess to many people in the West, it brings up negative images of “hippies,” “drop-outs,” Hare Krishna cultists, and so on. An image that is completely counter-cultural (in a negative sense) and Luddite. But that may be the result of speaking only one cultural language.  As an observer with a foot in the east and west (and in a few other places as well), I can feel, almost immediately, the very traditional aspect of this so-called counter-culture – the longing for community, for self-transcendence, for self-discipline,  for rootedness, for leadership based in hierarchy and particularity – everything, which, in a perverted form, ends up making people vulnerable to the mass spectacles of the state, but, in its natural form, makes possible the inward life that the individual and the community both need in order to exist.

Actually, it was ordinary suburban post-WW II culture, shaped by the military, the state, and the CIA, that was anti-traditional, even though it might have worn the outward trappings of family values and religious tradition. It was ultimately only a  whited sepulchre (Matthew 23:27).  There was, in  many cases, nothing inside.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The Beatles and everyone after them began to fill the vacuum from sources (Eastern, mystical, ‘primitive,’ psychedelic, folk) that somehow connected them more intensely to history and tradition than their own dominant culture, from which, therefore, they felt they had to escape.

Wordsworth captured something of the same feeling when he wrote about a very similar move at the turn of the nineteenth-century, from rococo brittleness to the psychological depth of Romanticism. Thus,  in The World Is Too Much With Us:

I ‘d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I,
standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less
forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton
blow his wreathed horn.”

On a different level but in the same vein as Harrison’s popular hit, here’s a lesser known masterpiece of devotional feeling,  written by jazz legend JohnMcLaughlin — Lotus Feet of the Lord, played here by Domenico Lafasciano.

I’d like to find a link to the original Mahavishnu version, but here’s another beautiful version, by flamenco virtuoso Paco di Lucia and McLaughlin.

I’ve been playing a lot of these classics, because I’ve been wondering how all that spiritual ferment was sucked out and siphoned off. Where did it go to, that tremendous fusion of eastern and western sensibility, of subconscious and conscious impulses, spiritual and emotional intuitions, social and individual struggles?

I don’t mean artistically….. because it bore plenty of artistic fruit.

But socially…politically…

“This term “intellectual” having being identified with “liberal”  it scarcely is surprising  that Lionel Trilling discovered no conservative intellectuals; one might as well have sought for carnivorous vegetarians. But actually the man of intellectual strength  need not be alienated from his cultural patrimony  and his society; he may be a member of what Coleridge called the clerisy….

“Because it flourishes upon rootlessness among the masses, the total state  detests and endeavors to obliterate  knowledge of the past. ” A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future… Hence the relentless effort by totalitarian governments to destroy memory…”

— Excerpted, with a long elision, from pages 485-487 of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

You’ll find essentially the same argument in The Language of Empire where I argue that commercial news media, advertising, and entertainment (from soap dramas and sports to court-room dramas and pornography) all combine in various ways to fragment and destroy memory, making it easier to impose state propaganda onto public consciousness.  The erasure and manipulation of memory was precisely what was at work in the Abu Ghraib torture – the effacing of cultural identity and sexual identity.

In Klein’s  Shock Doctrine, this argument is appropriated and reversed, and torture becomes the logical outcome of  capitalist profit-seeking, instead of statist power-seeking.

(I’ll be going through the book and compiling the many points of resemblance between her argument and mine, as well as hers and Peter Linebaugh’s and others whom she doesn’t cite).

Again (without making any allegations), I note the following resemblances:

(1) Kubark manual and its connection to Abu Ghraib

(2)  Erasure of memory through terror (shock) in the  population in order to create and impose a new reality. She says the new reality is the capitalist market economy; I argue it’s the propaganda of the state; analysis of the term “rapid dominance”

(3)  Connecting terrorist attacks on New York to terror bombing in Iraq to the shock of torture.

(4) Connecting apocalyptic terror in some forms of Christianity to  emphasis on “terror” in the Promethean (neoconservative) ideology of the Bush administration. She changes my indictment of  neo-conservatism to an indictment of capitalism.

(5) I blame neoconservative ideology and trace its roots to Leninism and to an ideology of power, to Machiavellianism. She blames capitalism and traces its roots to Milton Friedman and Hayek.

(6) In articles preceding my book, I charge that the Asian tsunami might be connected to nuclear testing and state weapons research and allege pre-knowledge and failure to assist on the part of the state.  She connects the tsunami to corporate profiteering.

(7) In an article published before my book, I connect Katrina to the failure of the federal government and the state’s forced gentrification program through housing. She connects Katrina to capitalist profiteering.

(8) I mention Ewan Cameron at a central part of the book. She does too. I connect it to state behavioral modification research. She connects it to the Chicago School of Economics.

(9) I show the similarity of CIA torture techniques to Nazi and to Soviet techniques and to their mind-control programs. She does not mention the Soviets (who were actually ahead of the US on several counts). I need to double check this more carefully.

(10) I notice a repetitive symbolism of towers, which I use to draw attention to a non-monolithic, fragmented reality which the state wishes to  erase  but which resurfaces nonetheless as a “real” of history (drawing on my studies of the writing of Deleuze, a post-structuralist thinker whose work is compatible with individualist and anti-state thinking and with chaos theory and complexity).

I reference Deleuze sub-textually in my first book.

I use a similar technique in “Mobs” – of subtextual linking through imagery.

My book (being my first) had to be written within a word count given to me by my publisher, and it was written as a media text, since they and I did not have the resources/name that would allow me to undertake a larger project. The arguments, though complex and I think convincing, had to be fitted into a shorter  length and into a more academic frame-work. Still, you’ll see all Klein’s main points made in my book, in relation to the state.

Considering that the manuscript and several closely related articles were published in December 2004 – 2005, and given that the book was sent to every major liberal-left opinion journal and outlet, and that Klein began writing her book only in 2004 and published it only in 2007, it’s hard for me to believe that she didn’t see any of it.

I was writing quite a bit for Dissident Voice and Counterpunch then, and she cites Counterpunch on other things.

Check out the dates of my pieces on this site, the number of hits they got, and the reprints. and you’ll see it’s hard to believe a serious researcher on the subject could’ve have missed them.

Another coincidence: the GetAbstract business award which “Mobs” won  in 2008 was previously awarded to Benoit Mandelbrot, who was the father of modern complexity theory, as well as to Nicholas Taleb (2007), whose work also draws on complexity theory. Taleb and Mandelbrot are in fact collaborating on new work.

Now, Klein’s book was recently awarded a newly-created Warwick Prize under the theme “complexity”. The prize was awarded just this year, 2009. Could this be a way to counter the identification of complexity theory with market-based “spontaneous order”?

I have no way of knowing and I’m making no allegations. Merely noting the points of coincidence and wondering aloud….

To be fair, people can arrive at similar ideas and even imagery simultaneously without reading or being influenced directly by each other. And I have a lot of respect for Klein’s antiwar reporting in the Guardian. Hers was a much needed voice. To the extent that Shock Doctrine draws attention to the negative impact of globalization and points out how free trade is “managed” – that’s a very good thing and deserves the widest hearing.

Also, at first glance, the Cato Institute critique which I referenced earlier,  doesn’t seem fair to the book in calling it poorly researched. It seems well-documented, from the number of citations. Of course, I haven’t followed through and pinpointed whether they actually support her text, but there are  plenty of them and of good quality.

There’s also the possibility that she lumped together various people out of pure ignorance (though it’s hard to believe that). It’s quite possible she really doesn’t know the difference between the old right and the new right,  between Friedman, the Austrians, Sachs and Rubin…or perhaps doesn’t think the differences are important enough to matter.

But that would be rather shoddy (and frightening) given that she’s trying to critique capitalism. You’d think it would be a good thing to know what it was first.

“I feel that capitalism has a very bad press with the pseudo-leftists who clog our best college campuses and that in point of fact capitalism has produced modern individualism and feminism. Modern capitalism has allowed the birth of the independent woman who is no longer economically dependent on her husband. I despise the sneering that our liberal humanists do about capitalism even while they enjoy all of its pleasures and conveniences. I just despise it.”

—  Camille Paglia