If you’re in the mood for something a little weightier than the ever-popular “righties stink,” check out this essay on Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes by Mary Midgley at The Guardian.

The basic theme is that both Hobbes and Rand wrote about the individual in relation to society, but came to opposite conclusions. Hobbes stressed the individual’s need for security, and he promoted the ideal of a strong commonwealth with a powerful sovereign at its head. Rand went in the other direction, warning of the evils of “collectivism” and promoting absolute individuality to the point of denouncing altruism as evil.

Hobbes’s ideas belonged to the age of the Sun-King, Midgley says, and Hobbes has little to say to us today about dealing with intolerable government. Rand, on the other hand, is still influencing politics. “Noam Chomsky has called her deeply evil,” Midgley writes. “This may seem like taking her too seriously, but we surely do need to take seriously the ideas that she stands for.”

This paragraph seems to me to be especially insightful:

What chiefly emerges here is surely how important it is, when we are confronted with these extreme and simple doctrines, to understand the guiding visions behind them and in particular, just what danger they aim to protect us against. Rand’s guiding vision is clearly what used to be called infantile omnipotence – the childish hope of total control – and her doctrines have great influence because that hope is still always strong in the depths of our hearts. The fear that haunts her is the fear of having to obey someone else. This fear, intelligently disciplined, does indeed lie at the root of our emphasis on liberty, but there is nothing to be said for erecting it on its own into a “heroic” stance of self-admiration.

I’ve long felt there was something both infantile and desperately fearful at the base of Randism. And for all their supposed admiration for rational thought, there is nothing rational about an ideology that denies the basic nature of humans and human civilization. We are social creatures who depend on each other and live for each other, whether we like it or not. Civilization may have come up with ways to make the interdependence impersonal, but we are still interdependent. Individual humans, isolated from other humans and from civilization, do not survive well.

So when a Randbot says, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” that’s both a scream of denial and a tantrum.